SON OF THE WIND
CHAPTER I
THE MAN ON THE ROAD
I DON'T know anything about it," the man stubbornly insisted. His glance ran over the whole white-and black-spotted cañon, over the ardent blue horizon, over the buttes in front, swinging back like gates to show where the mountains began, and returned defiantly to Carron's face. "Don't even know there is such a thing," he concluded.
Carron couldn't help smiling. "You were very sure there was only a little while ago." He paused interrogatively, peering from the hood of the runabout. "Well, say you did overstate the facts, suppose you haven't seen it yourself—sure you don't know some one else who has seen it?"
"No, I don't!" he said loudly and sullenly. He gave the speaker a rapid, furtive glance. "I don't, and what's more, I tell you if I did I wouldn't let you know it—not if you gave me a thousand dollars!" He was working himself into a passion. Carron stretched his neck a little more eagerly, and his incredulous smile quickened with excitement. He looked straight through the resistance, the denials. For a moment he absorbed the aspect of that figure planted there in the white road; then risked the reins and got out of the runabout.
The fellow seemed ready either to strike him or to dart away, but Carron stood quite still. "Look here," he said persuasively, "we both talked a good deal last night, but you seem to think you said too much, and you think I want to take advantage of it. Well, I do. What you told me has taken my fancy, but I want to be on the square about it. Of course, I know you are not going to give information you are not supposed to give; but where's the harm in telling me who your friends are? Then, if they don't want to talk, let them say so, and that will be the end of it."
While he was speaking he had been walking leisurely forward, until, as he ended, he stopped just in front of his antagonist. He reached, took, and grasped the limp left hand, drawing it forward in front of him, by the warmth and energy of his own, forcing a nervous involuntary pressure from it. He released it, and it stayed as if hypnotized out-stretched, palm up, with a gold piece of twenty dollars in it.
The recipient of this equivocal coin looked at it nervelessly. His face had the overwhelmed expression of one who finds he has been led far when he thought himself standing firm. Then, as if in involuntary repudiation, his palm stiffened, his fingers spread, the money glimmered at the point of sliding through them—but Carron, with a clutch of his own, doubled the fingers to a fist.
"Hang on to it," he said reassuringly. "It's what we agreed on, isn't it? It hardly pays you for your trouble." Seeing his argument still hung fire he ended, "I'm afraid it's going to be a dry winter."
The man looked up at the sky, the light of which seemed to whiten the whole landscape, then downward at his worn shoes, then at his hand closed like a fist. Some reaction, physical as well as mental, had begun. His legs, planted in the posture of firmness, trembled, his eyelids twitched; when he spoke his voice sounded uncertain. "Try Rader's," he muttered without raising his eyes, "first turn to the left as you go ahead."
"Rader's, first turn to the left as you go ahead," Carron repeated, and felt amused. It was like a village direction. Here, where long distances led between mountains and immense sky, it sounded too scant. He hesitated, foot on the buggy step, but the aspect of the man on the road warned that further asking here would be useless. "Much obliged," he said, and got in. The sight of the forlorn figure in the uninhabited landscape gave him pause. "Can't I give you a lift a little farther along the road?"
Without raising his eyes the man violently shook his head.
"Well," Carron said cheerfully, "I suppose you know which way you're going." The reins tightened, the mare stepped out.
The man spoke behind him. "Remember, I haven't heard anything; I didn't say they'd seen it. I don't even know how much they know about it."
"I understand," Carron called back. "No one there is going to hear your name mentioned."
If he had felt the whiplash the fellow couldn't have flashed into keener anger. His face, already heavily flushed, took on a purplish, unhealthy color. As if it were a thing that could be hurt, with a violent gesture he threw the money from him. It shone and sank in deep dust.
Carron, with the reins taut in his hands, while the mare sped, stared back in astonishment. He wanted to laugh, yet he felt concerned. "Damn it all," he thought, "what sent him off at half-cock again? What did I say? What a fool! Hey, Hey!" he muttered encouragingly to the mare that, hot and fretted with delay, was dancing delicately sidewise; "why the devil do I always have creatures on my hands that are flying to pieces?"
He was irritated that money he had given should be thrown away, yet he felt pity, and a sort of responsibility for the man on the road, as he was inclined to feel for all beings weaker than himself. He drew the mare in to a slow undulating pace and looked behind him.
Dust, many times dry, stood up in a cloud, and in that haze he could make out something which a few minutes before might have been an upright human figure, but now had become more like an animal nosing for a scent, crouching close to the ground, making quick darts uncertainly here and there in the road. Carron watched with dubious amusement. "He'll not find it again—that's sure; as well hunt in a pit of ashes. Might go back and give him another." He consulted his watch, and his pockets. "No," he determined, "I'm too close nipped as it is—and besides, if he has misdirected me, as for all I know he probably has, he's only got what's coming to him."
But this last conclusion was put forth for comfort. He didn't believe it. He felt as certain that the fellow had spoken the truth then, as he had been sure, before, that he had lied. Those violent denials, the brazen way he had stood ready to eat his words—they had been but so many reassurances that the thing was real. And then, that last, scant direction—three words fairly squeezed out of his throat! Carron had the unusual sensation of seeing his chimera, his gauzy fable, which all day had led him like a mirage threatening each moment to melt into air, now suddenly grown possible to the imagination, palpable, almost solid.
A light and irresponsible pleasure quickened in his veins. The world had one more adventure left, dangerous enough, but not too serious. The figure of the man on the road, unpaid by his own act and vainly searching, receded from his mind. He was leaving it behind with the dusty high valley, the thin trees and the traveled roads. He was entering upon the unexpected and the unwanted. White grass was giving place to growth of pine, filling the sharpening cañon. Now he was plunged into trees; again, he emerged among strewn boulders with a sudden little lake like a burning-glass on the one hand. In the bright eye of this he saw himself and his fretful beast reflected, little creatures in a great landscape, creeping on a road which clung to the foot of the cliffs. Tremendous heat of mid-afternoon hung in the cañon, a white and sparkling light growing ghostly with distance. Straight before him, as if at the end of his journey, he saw the two rocks like gates flung open into some garden of mountains beyond, and from there, as from afar off, he heard the voice of an exhausted river. There was no other sound except the intermittent rattle of his guns in the wagon body, and the knocking of his horse’s hoofs on the road. Not a cloud, not a bird’s wing, nothing moved except his own shadow, black and little, at his feet. He welcomed the magnificent absence of his kind. It was solitude, but it was not desolation. The air was stimulating and vital. The cañon was peopled with curious forms of rock and tree—round towers, banners, and figures which, when confronted, were not figures. Yet at the first glimpse, to his fancy, they took always one shape. Twisted pine, sandstone, shard, the image in his mind flashed into the senseless stuff, animated it and melted. The procession of cliffs separated into high, round hills. Without his realizing, without his seeing how, before his eyes the trick was done. Above these nearer smaller eminences, higher, rockier crests multiplied. Faces of the half-gods in sandstone looked on him humorously from the sky; and far in front between the open gates appeared pale summits and divides, and highest of all, a peak like a little cloud.
It glimmered before him, scarcely seen before it was being shut away. The gates seemed closing upon it. The flank of a hill was gliding across his vision. The road had been endlessly turning around a great base of rock, and now he was aware that the cañon which had led straight before him, was dropping away to the right. This road of man, as if it dared not follow the highway of the gods, was perversely turning aside between the close, round slopes of two "sugar-loafs." Carron should have been ready for this. But he had been rather in the clouds. Now, he had to remember that unless Rader was the "old man of the mountains" himself he could not be found in that citadel of high peaks. It was in reason that the road would change, yet, in spite of reason, he felt put off from the main object of his quest, and he looked at the fresh prospect with suspicion.
It was a narrow glimpse, a mere passageway through into a different country, of lower sky-line and thicker, greater companies of trees; and square at the end of it, so close it seemed to close the gap, making a cul-de-sac, was a low, round eminence—hill rather than mountain—clothed complete in dusky green. He had scarcely time to see it, to note the distinctive air it had among the rougher outlines around it, like a personage in a crowd, before it was shut from sight in thickening branches, and the landscape became a soft, mysterious thing of forest. Olive-green and gray were on either side of him, brown underfoot. There was a diminishing of angles to curves, of cliffs to gradual rises. The road was ascending, not abruptly, but with the long, scarcely discernible slope which indicates the general trend of the country. At intervals there was a look of openness among the trees, giving him fugitive expectations that the truthfulness of the man on the road was about to be vindicated. But the way led gradually up for an eternity without so much as a rabbit trail to interrupt the monotony of it; it looked more lonely and far less suggestive of life than the cañon, and the idea intruded more and more upon his mind that, after all, the fellow had misdirected him. The thought of a night under the open sky did not trouble him; but the thought that he had been mistaken in his man made him chafe. He had felt so sure, yet now he had to admit that his informer must have had every practical reason in the world for wanting to lead him astray. He remarked that the occasional shafts of sun which found him were changing from white to yellow; then that there was no longer any sun at all. A great shadow lay over everything, and the heat was changing to freshness. He took off his hat the better to feel the fine breath of the air.
Presently the monotonous climb was interrupted by an unexpected descent into a gully, or little cañon. He could see pools of water standing in an expanse of boulders, and connected by a slow, creeping thread of water.
If he must camp, he thought, this was the best place, water, and safe ground for a fire. But camp, or go back, or go on? He put his hand into his pocket, regretting that there were not three sides to a penny, and peered forward between the tree trunks at the other side of the bank to see in which direction his road led. At first it seemed to him that it cut away to the right, then that it led straight on before him. Then that it led two ways. He was rather afraid of being disappointed, but actually there was no doubt about it.
The other side of the creek gave him a clearer prospect. The road he had followed skirted around the base of a hill, the same hill, no doubt, that he had seen from afar, set castle-like across his path, but the first turn to the left, which he now turned into out of the wider track, addressed itself direct to the ascent, winding, narrow, steep and dim in the tunneled trees. Carron kept glancing from side to side of it, as if what he was searching for might at any moment start out on him through the flow of leaves. He was poised, ready for the next thing to happen, alert against surprise, though the trail of events he was following should double upon him as unexpectedly as the road, which, after plunging him around mountains and into cañons, was finally leading him up into the high, glimmering twilight of a pine forest. Successive chambers of yellow light and bluish shadow opened before him. The dimensions of his surroundings were decreasing. Trees became smaller; distances briefer down forest aisles; the sky, with its diminished blue, seemed closer to his head, and the silence was the only thing that opened more profoundly around him.
His mind, like a ready general, scouted over the probabilities of who and what in the shape of "Rader's" might be awaiting him, perhaps around the next turn of the track—a woodcutter’s shack, or possibly a hunter’s encampment. In spite of his readiness for anything, Carron experienced a lively sense of astonishment when, after a half mile of unbroken tree and shadow, he saw in front of him two gaunt, white gate-posts. To say there was a gate there would have been inexact. Whatever had swung between them once, only the rusty hinges of it remained, and, at one side on the ground, half buried in pine-needles, lay an arch-shaped piece of wood. Traces of whitewash showed upon it, and traces of what once might have been black lettering. The thing had an air of decaying sophistication, grotesque, melancholy, absurd, cast away here in the flourishing forest. The idea occurred to him that, instead of a woodman's shanty, he might be approaching some old, neglected country seat.
A flattening of the ascent into the almost level and a slight widening of the road ahead warned his eyes. At the far end of it he saw what seemed to be the loop of a drive. The pines thinned, and between their boughs he had glimpses of a house. The trees stopped at an abrupt clearing and immediately it was all before him—long, pale façade, long, naked piazza, and long, straight rows of windows, an austere, sharp-angled mass in the dark circle of the forest. Before he realized what it was, he knew it was nothing that he had expected. It was large, but not imposing, spacious but spare, like a place flung together for the merest utility of housing room. If that wing of the building extending to the left suggested in its proportions and weather-worn whitewash some kinship to the gate-posts, the main body of the house declared itself unhesitatingly new. After a moment’s looking he recognized what it must be: one of those lesser hotels so frequent in the redwoods of the coast mountains, but here in this high isolation, as improbable as a pony cart or a tennis racket. He was astonished to find it existing here in the middle of this lopped-off clearing, with its drive made broad for the whirl of many wheels, unused, its long verandas empty, the shades of all the upper windows drawn. What sort of life went on in such places out of season he had never before reflected; but that there was living of some sort was now before him, for the house was far from shut up, and wide-flung doors and windows of the lower story vigorously breathed of agitated dust.
While he looked a tall woman with a white cloth over her head and a broom in her hand came out on the piazza. Seeing Carron, she put her hand to the cloth with involuntary deprecation. There was surprise in the gesture, but no confusion at the sight of a stranger. Something in her way of looking at him suggested that strangers were more usual with her than friends. He took the half turn of the drive and drew up at the steps.
"Did you want to see—" she began, but her faded voice left the question hanging in the air, as if there was more than one person he might have wanted.
"Mr. Rader," he finished for her; and, at that, a fresh surprise was added to her query. He saw her look him over from his bare head to his boots; from the horse between the shafts to the rifles in the body of the runabout; knew she was classing him; knew, too, that this was something he couldn't do with her. He guessed she was the proprietor of this establishment, but this failed to class her among hotel keepers. She eluded him, even while he saw her adding up his sum.
"Do you mind telling me what you want to see Mr. Rader about?" she said at last.
He had been expecting this, and was ready for it. "I am after deer," he explained. "I missed my guide at Beckwith—left word for him to join me at Mohawk, and came along. But I got on the wrong road somehow, and a chap I met a few miles below here told me that Raders might take me in over-night, and put me on the right road back in the morning."
She came forward to the edge of the porch and stood, leaning on her broom like a wand of office. She looked weary and scarcely interested. "We've closed for the season," she said. "Why don't you go down to Ferriers'? It's only half a mile along on the main road."
"But my mare is almost done, I shouldn't like to take her any farther to-night. Would Mr. Rader object to an informal boarder, even if it is a little out of season?"
"Oh, he!" she exclaimed, as if Mr. Rader were not at all the question. "But the house is so upset, and I don't keep any dining-room girl in the winter," she hesitated.
"I'm not a fellow who is much trouble," Carron urged. He looked up like a begging boy who feels that his plea is already half won.
She hesitated, but her quick eyes continued shrewdly to consider him.
His black hair was powdered gray as a wig with dust. Dust clung to his thick eyebrows, and dust and sweat of many miles was on his face, but the fact that it was an attractive face was not obscured. The eyes were frank and persuasive; the mouth was cautious; the neck sat squarely on the shoulders, firm as if riveted there. Body and head alike bore a suggestion of the Greek—not of the splendid statued heroes, but of the light lads of the Parthenon frieze, astride of horses, and inviting fate with brave, objective eyes.
That disarming youthfulness, that outward gaze which seemed so sure of triumphs, were making inroads upon the resolution of the woman with the broom. She hovered at the cross-road of decision, while a sort of unready sweetness struggled through her formal expression. "I am going to like her," Carron thought, and thinking, involuntarily smiled at her.
"Well, I suppose you can stay," she said reluctantly, as though the smile had somehow clenched the matter to her mind.
He was out of the buggy before she could have time to regret her decision. "You are very kind to take me in," he said gratefully, "and my mare, too. She would be worse off at night in the open than I. If you will tell me where the stable is, I will get her under cover immediately. She's too hot to stand."
The woman looked apologetic. "I hate to have you go yourself, but there is no one here now that knows much about horses."
Carron permitted himself a moment's wonder. What about Rader?
She lifted her voice to a penetrative note, calling "Ge—o—o—rge."
A half-grown boy looked out at the door. He had a singularly vacant face. A quantity of dirty clothes were in his hand, an apron was tied around his waist. His occupation had perhaps been that of cleaning windows.
Mrs. Rader went close to him, put her hand on his shoulder and spoke into his eyes as if he had been a deaf person. "George, I want you to show this gentleman over to the barn, wait there, and get him anything he wants.—If you go quite close, and take hold of him, and look at him when you talk," she explained to Carron aside, "he always understands. He knows where everything is."
Preceded by this guide, who, unlike the natural boy, seemed unembarrassed by his feminine garment, and walked boldly with apron strings fluttering, Carron led the chestnut around the drive past the greater entrance and, swinging into the angle of the left wing, past its worn, white front, with painted decorations of wood above the windows and steps going up to a little door retired under the roof of the porch; past these and, just beyond, turned aside down a wagon track which branched and descended at the left of the house. The barn stood in a clearing close-clipped by trees with brown sift of pine-needles upon its roof. It was large, but of an appearance as dilapidated as the gate-posts, and Carron thought anxiously of the chestnut’s welfare. The boy led straight through the door, the lintel of which sagged alarmingly, through a very cavern of ancient odors, cobwebs and echoes, slid another door and emerged upon quite a different place, smaller, well-kept, altogether more modern—evidently an addition built upon the greater stable. There was no vehicle in the carriage house, no carriage harness; a few bridles hung on pegs. The only saddle was a side-saddle. There were three stalls, one occupied by a mustang, with an ugly head and prettily built legs, two empty. In the first of these the boy strewed straw and shook down hay. The last, evidently habitually occupied, just now was empty.
Carron wondered as he made ready the irritable chestnut for her night's lodging, whether that last stall belonged to Rader's horse. The thought made him anxious. "Is the horse that belongs in that stall coming back to-night?" he asked the boy who had come out of the harness room with a blanket over his arm.
The strange creature only stared.
Mindful of Mrs. Rader's advice, Carron went close to him, but some lack in the face made it repugnant. He could not bring himself to touch the fellow. He raised his voice and pointed behind him. "Is the horse that belongs there, in that stall, coming back to-night?"
The boy's gaze intensified, seemed to concentrate, and, if the face had not been so blank, Carron would have fancied a pale glare of hostility in the eyes; but the lips, showing a faint gleam of teeth behind their relaxed line, remained unmoved.
Carron took the blanket and went into the stall. He felt uncomfortable out of reason. While he settled the covering over the chestnut's pettish shoulders and fastened her, he had an uneasy consciousness of the boy's eyes, like an observing animal's, following every movement. He took off his duster, flicked off his boots, shook the worst dust from his hair, gathered up the gun cases in the back of the runabout and turned to go. The boy was standing motionless with his arm slightly crooked just as the blanket had been taken from it; but when Carron turned, he slipped rapidly ahead of him and disappeared in the darkness of the old stable. A flight of ghostly little echoes announced his passing through. Carron waited several moments before he could overcome his instinct to go out by another way.
"Queer business," he thought, as he walked back along the wagon track. "More deaf in his mind than in his ears, I should say. I wonder if he understood me! Ugh!" Moral obliquity he could meet with untroubled nerves, but deformity in body or brains disturbed his very flesh. He glimpsed the white, turbaned head of the proprietress peering for him from the porch, and that brought back his more important perplexity. "How in the deuce am I to get at this Rader?" he pondered. "I shall have to persuade that good soul to keep me another night.". Lacking a hat, he raised his hand in salute as she caught sight of him.
"Your room is ready," she said. "I have had to put you in the old wing where we live in the winters. I hope you don't mind."
"I shall like it above all things—better, I am sure, than the new part," Carron declared, and was diverted to see her glance at him as if she suspected he must be joking.
He followed her across the piazza and down a wide, dust-disturbed hall, from which gaping doors gave on wide, dust-disturbed, dismantled drawing-rooms; across a high and glaring dining-room, with turrets of chairs tottering on the glassy tables, and out into a hall, dark after the long spaces of white, pine walls and glistening floors, narrow, used and old, with windows looking direct into the trees, and an unruffled air smelling faintly of the forest. Several doors opened from here, some white, worn almost to the wood, others freshly painted, but all of the same design, rather low, narrow-paneled and with eyebrows of cut woodwork. A staircase clambered between two walls, and up this the proprietress led him, across another hall, and with the flinging open of a door, he found himself presented to a large room, with windows thinly veiled in muslin, and looking abruptly into the pines. The light which sifted through their branches came pale and greenish like light through water. The yellow reflection of a wood fire darted along the floor.
"There's a bath-room through that door, the one on the right," his conductress said, indicating with a wave of her hand; "and if you will leave your boots and things outside I'll see they are cleaned and brushed. It's a very dusty trip up here. I will tell you when dinner is ready." She gave him a long, doubtful look in which she somehow expressed a wish that he had not persuaded her to entertain him, then turned away, softly shutting the door.
Left alone, Carron let his gun cases slip to the floor. "Of all extraordinary places!" he thought, but then he looked around the room and smiled. It was of a piece with a little hall below. He suspected. its kinship to the gaunt, white gate-posts. It was naïve, ornate, somewhat worn, yet with an amusing air of being grand. He felt a charm in it in spite of the jig-saw carvings—or possibly because of them. His eyes lingered at the mantelpiece, of most astonishing flourishes, appreciated the landscape painted on the foot of the bed, moved with quickness across the light, blank walls, and inadvertently caught sight of himself in a mirror.
He thought he could understand his landlady's hesitation now. "Takes me for a burglar rather poorly disguised," he reflected. In the excitement of his arrival he had forgotten his appearance as well as his fatigue. Now he abandoned his outer garments to the banisters of the hall, and in a few minutes rolled into cold water as a fish to its native element. The weariness of twenty-four hours' activity, the exhaustion of body, of brain and of a will which, all day, had exerted pressure on a will in revolt—slipped from him, absorbed by the icy stimulant. Even while he wallowed there, his fancy, refreshed, took time to speculate on what sort of mind the fellow must have had who had conceived the remarkable decoration of the bathroom ceiling. Hard-rubbed, reclothed, with an agreeable consciousness of quicker blood in his veins and a brain fully ready again not only to make light, but to make capital of his difficulties, he reentered the bedroom.
He saw first his gun cases on the floor. He gathered them up, and carefully drew out one of the rifles. The bright firelight showed an unscratched barrel and lighted a stock that had never lain on the ground, never perhaps even felt the pressure of a shoulder. He turned it. His eye caught sight of a tiny green oval of paper pasted on the under side of the stock. He raised his eyebrows, and scratched the green paper delicately off. "I ought to have fired those things a few times on the way up," he thought. Still it won't do any harm to let them suppose I am a green hunter." He laid both rifles on the bed, put his hands in his pockets and strolled across to a window. It faced on the clearing. At his left he could see, projecting, the façade of the newer house, and directly beneath him the steps leading up to the side entrance. He glanced at the other windows of the room, which looked into the trees, and was caught by the fact that one of them was a door. It was the upper half of glass that had been misleading. He opened it. The sweet breath of the pines rushed upon him. He was looking from a narrow balcony down a flight of outside stairs to the floor of the forest. Above him the pale color of sunset was in the sky.
"Very pleasant," he murmured, and stood softly whistling, surveying it. His eyes were half closed, and he appeared to be dreamily speculating on the charming twilight around him. In fact he did not see it. His thoughts were turned inward. He was speculating, with intensest concentration, upon Rader.