The Snowshoe Trail

The Snowshoe Trail.

by Edison Marshall.

I

It was not the first time that people of the forest had paused on the hill at twilight to look down on Bradleyburg. The sight always seemed to intrigue and mystify the wild folk,--the shadowed street, the spire of the moldering church ghostly in the half-light, the long row of unpainted shacks, and the dim, pale gleam of an occasional lighted window. The old bull moose, in rutting days, was wont to pause and call, listen an instant for such answer as the twilight city might give him, then push on through the spruce forests; and often the coyotes gathered in a ring and wailed out their cries over the rooftops. More than once the wolf pack had halted here for a fleeting instant; but they were never people to linger in the vicinity of men.

But to-night it was not one of these four-footed wild folk--this tall form--that emerged from the dark fringe of the spruce forest to gaze down at the town. But he was none the less of the forest. Its mark was upon him; in the silence of his tread, the sinuous strength of his motions; perhaps it lay even in a certain dimness and obscurity of outline, framed by the thickets as he was, that was particularly characteristic of the wild denizens of the woods. But even in the heavy shadows his ident.i.ty was clear at once. He was simply a woodsman,--and he held his horse by the bridle rein.

The long file of pack horses behind him halted, waiting for their master to go on. He stood musing, held by the darkened scene below him. Hard to read, in the deepening shadows, was the expression on his bronzed face. It revealed relief, of course, simple and heartfelt joy at the sight of his destination. Men do not wander over the blazed trails of the North Woods and not feel relief at the journey"s end. There was a hint of fatigue in his posture, the horses" heads were low; and the shacks below meant food and rest. But there was also a pensiveness, a dreamy quietude in his dark eyes that revealed the greater sweep of his thoughts.

He had looked down on Bradleyburg on many previous occasions, but the scene had never impressed him in quite this way before. Already the shadows had crept out from the dark forests that enclosed the little city and had enfolded it in gloom: the buildings were obscured and the street was lost, and there was little left to tell that here was the abode of men. A dim light, faint as the glowing eyes of the wild creatures in the darkness, burned here and there from the window of a house: except for this the wilderness would have seemed unbroken.

"It"s getting you down," the man muttered. "It"s closing you in and smothering you--just as it has me."

Perhaps, had his words carried far enough in the silence, the townspeople in the houses below wouldn"t have understood. His horses, sniffing at his knees, did not seem to hear. But the woodsman could not have made himself any clearer. Words never come easy to those that dwell in the silences of the North. To him it seemed that the twilight was symbolic of the wilderness,--stealing forth with slow encroachments until all of the little town was enfolded within itself.

It was a twilight city, the little cl.u.s.ter of frame shacks below him.

It could be brave and gay enough in the daylight, a few children could play in its streets and women could call from door to door, but the falling darkness revealed it as it was,--simply a fragment that the dark forests were about to claim. The day was done in Bradleyburg; as in the case of many of the gold camps of the North the wilderness was about to take back its own.

It had had a glorious past, this little city lost in the northern reaches of the Selkirks. In the man"s own boyhood it had been one of the flourishing gold camps of the North; and miners had come from all over the continent to wash the gravel of its streams. In all directions up the hillside the tents and shacks had stretched, dance halls were gay, freighters plied along the winding road to the south. The man"s mother had been one of the first women in the camp; and one of the last to go. The mines were fabulously rich; tens of thousands in dust were often taken in a single day by a lone miner, fortunes were made and lost at the gambling tables, and even the terrible winters could not triumph over the gold seekers. But in a little while the mines gave out, one terrible winter night the whole town was destroyed by fire, and now that the miners were drifting to other camps, few of the shacks were rebuilt.

Of the six thousand that had been, scarcely threescore remained. A few trappers ran their lines out from the town, a few men had placer claims in the old diggings, two or three woodsmen made precarious livings as guides for such wealthy men as came to hunt moose and caribou, and Bradleyburg"s course was run. The winter cold had triumphed at last, and its curse was over the city from October till June. The spruce forest, cleared away to make room for the cabins, had sprung up again and was steadily marching toward the main street of the town.

But the man on the hilltop felt no regret. Except for a few memories of his young days he had no particular fondness for the little cl.u.s.ter of shacks. Long ago the wilderness had claimed him for its own; his home was the dark forest from which even now he was emerging. Bradleyburg was simply his source of supplies and his post office, the market for his furs. He had reached back and stroked the warm nose of his horse.

"Another half mile, old fellow," he said gently. "Then oats--rice and meat for me at Johnson"s--and oats--honest-to-goodness oats--for you. What you think about that, eh, Mulvaney? Then show a little speed this last half-mile."

The man swung on his horse, and even the cattlemen of the plains would have found something to admire in the ease and grace with which his body slipped down into the saddle. The horse moved forward, the pack animals pushed on behind him. A few minutes later they had swung down into the still street of the town. Tired as he was, his hands were swift and strong as he unpacked the animals and tied them in the bar back of Johnson"s,--the little frontier inn. As always, after the supper hour, a group of the townsmen were gathered about the hotel stove; and all of them spoke to him as he entered. He stood among them an instant, warming his hands.

They had few words at first. The lesson of silence is taught deeply and sure in the North. The hostess went to her kitchen to order the man"s supper, the townsmen drew at their pipes.

"Well, Bill," one of them asked at last, "how"s everything with you?"

It was not the usual how-d"ye-do of greeting. The words were spoken in actual question, as if they had special significance.

The man straightened, turning sober eyes. "Nothing startling yet," he replied.

"In after supplies?"

"Yes--and my mail."

There was a long pause. The conversation was apparently ended. Bill turned to go. A stranger spoke from the other side of the fire.

"How"s Grizzly River?" he asked. Bill turned to him with a smile.

"Getting higher and higher. All the streams are up. You know that bald-faced bay of Fargo"s?"

Fargo was the Bradleyburg merchant, and the stranger knew the horse,--one of the little band that, after the frontier custom, Fargo kept to rent. "Yes, I remember him."

"Well, I"ve got him this fall. You know he"s a yellow cuss."

The stranger nodded. In this little community the dumb brutes were almost as well known as the human inhabitants. The meaning was wholly plain to him too, and the term did not apply to the horse"s color.

Yellow, on the frontier, means just one thing: the most d.a.m.ning and unforgivable thing of all. When one is yellow he gives up easily, he dares not lift his arms to fight, and the wilderness claims him quickly.

"There"s a little creek with a bad mudhole just this side of the ford,"

Bill went on. "All the horses got through but Baldy, and he could have made it easy if he"d tried. But what did he do but just sit back on his haunches in the mud, like an old man in a chair, his head up and his front legs in his lap, and just give up? Quite a sight--that horse sitting in the mud. I had to snag him out."

The others smiled, but none of them with the brilliance of the story-teller himself. The wilderness picture--with the cowardly horse sitting in the mud--was again before his eyes; and none of the hardship of the journey could cost him his joy in it. Bill Bronson was no longer just a dim form on the twilight hilltop. The lamplight showed him plain. In this circle of townspeople he was a man to notice twice.

The forests had done well by him. Like the spruce themselves he had grown straight and tall, but his form was st.u.r.dy too. There was a lithe strength about him that suggested the larger felines; the hard trails of the forest had left not a spare ounce of flesh on his powerful frame. His mold, except for a vague and indistinct refinement in his long-fingered and strong hands, was simply that of a woodsman,--st.u.r.dy, muscular, untiring. His speech was not greatly different from that of others: the woodspeople, spending many of the long winter days in reading, are usually careless in speech but rarely ungrammatical. His clothes were homely and worn. He wore a blue mackinaw over a flannel shirt, dark trousers and rubber boots: garments that were suited to his life.

But it was true that men looked twice into Bill Bronson"s face. His features were rugged, now his mouth and jowls were dark with beard, yet written all over his sunburned face was a kindliness and gentleness that could not be denied. There was strength and good humor in plenty; and it was hard to reconcile these qualities with an unquestioned wistfulness and boyishness in his eyes. They were dark eyes, the eyes of a man of action who could also dream, kindly, thoughtful eyes which even the deep shadows of the forest had not blinded to beauty.

As he waited for his meal he crossed the dark road to the little frontier post office, there to be given his two months" acc.u.mulation of letters. He looked them over with significant anxiety. There were the usual forders from fur buyers, a few advertis.e.m.e.nts and circulars, and a small batch of business mail. The smile died from his eyes as he read one of these communications after another. Their context was usually the same,--that his proposition did not look good, and no investment would be made in a plan as vague as his. The correspondents understood that he had been grubstaked before without result. They remained, however, his respectfully,--and Bill"s great hand crumpled each in turn.

Only one letter remained, written in an unknown hand from a far-off city; and it dropped, for the moment, unnoticed into his lap. His eyes were brooding and lifeless as he stared out the hotel window into the darkened street. There was no use of appealing again to the business folk of the provincial towns; the tone of their letters was all too decisive. The great plans he had made would come to nothing after all.

His proposition simply did not hold water.

He had been seeking a "grubstake,"--some one to finance another expedition into the virgin Clearwater for half of such gains as he should make. In a few weeks more the winter would close down; the horses, essential to such a trip as this, had to be driven down to the gate of the Outside,--three hundred miles to the bank of a great river. He had time for one more dash for the rainbow"s end, and no one could stake him for it. He had some food supplies, but the horse-rent was an unsolved problem. He could see no ray of hope as he picked up, half-heartedly, the last letter of the pile.

But at once his interest returned. It had been mailed in a far distant city in the United States, and the fine, clear handwriting was obviously feminine. He didn"t have to rub the paper between his thumb and forefinger to mark its rich, heavy quality and its beauty,--the stationery of an aristocrat. The message was singularly terse:

My Dear Mr. Bronson:

I am informed, by the head of your provincial game commission, that you can be employed to guide for hunting parties wishing to hunt in the Clearwater, north of Bradleyburg. I do not wish to hunt game, but I do wish to penetrate that country in search of my fiance, Mr. Harold Lounsbury, of whom doubtless you have heard, and who disappeared in the Clearwater district six years ago. I will be accompanied by Mr.

Lounsbury"s uncle, Kenly Lounsbury, and I wish you to secure the outfit and a man to cook at once. You will be paid the usual outfitter"s rates for thirty days. We will arrive in Bradleyburg September twentieth by stage. Yours sincerely, Virginia Tremont.

Bill finished the note, pocketed it carefully, and a boyish light was in his eyes as he shook fragrant tobacco into his pipe. "The way out," he told himself. "She won"t care if I do my prospecting the same time."

His thought swung back to a scene of many Septembers before, of a camp he had made beside a distant stream and of a wayfarer who had eaten of his bread and journeyed on,--never to pa.s.s that way again. There had been one curious circ.u.mstance connected with the meeting, otherwise it might not have lingered so clearly in Bill"s memory. It had seemed to him, at the time, that he had encountered the stranger on some previous occasion. There was a haunting familiarity in his face, a fleeting memory that he could not trace or identify. Yet nothing in the stranger"s past life had offered an explanation. He was a newcomer, he said,--on his first trip north. Bill, on the other hand, had never gone south. It had been but a trick of the imagination, after all. And Bill did not doubt that he was the man for whom the girl sought.

The little lines seemed to draw and deepen about the man"s eyes. "Six years--but six years is too long, for Clearwater," he murmured. "Men either come out by then, or it gets "em. I"m afraid she"ll never find her lover."

He went to make arrangements with Fargo, the merchant, about supplies.

At midnight he sat alone in the little lobby of the inn; all the other townsmen had gone. The fire was nearly out; a single lamp threw a doubtful glow on the woodsman"s face. His thoughts had been tireless to-night. He couldn"t have told why. Evidently some little event of the evening, some word that he had not consciously noticed had been the impulse for a flood of memories. They haunted him and held him, and he couldn"t escape from them.

His thought moved in great circles, always returning to the same starting point,--the tragedy and mystery of his own boyhood. He knew perfectly that there was neither pleasure nor profit in dwelling upon this subject. In the years that he had had his full manhood he had tried to force the matter from his thoughts, and mostly he had succeeded. Self-mastery was his first law, the code by which he lived; and mostly the blue devils had lifted their curse from him. But they were shrieking from the gloom at him to-night. In the late years some of the great tranquility of the forest had reposed in him and the bitter hours of brooding came ever at longer intervals. But to-night they held him in bondage.

It was twenty-five years past and he had been only a child when the thing had happened. He had been but seven years old,--more of a baby than a child. He smiled grimly as the thought went home to him that childhood, in its true sense, was one stage of life that he had missed.

He had been cheated of it by a remorseless destiny; he had been a baby, and then he had been a man. There were no joyous gradations between.

The sober little boy had sensed at once that the responsibilities of manhood had been thrust upon him, and he must make good. After all, that was the code of his life,--to take what destiny gave and stand up under it.

If the event had occurred anywhere but in the North, the outcome might have been wholly different. Life was easy and gentle in the river bottoms of the United States. Women could make a brave fight unaided; even fatherless boys were not entirely cheated of their youth. Besides, in these desolate wastes the code of life is a personal code, primitive emotions have full sway, and men to not change their dreams from day to day. Constancy and steadfastness are the first impulses of their lives; neither Bill nor his mother had been able to forget or to forgive. Here was an undying ignominy and hatred; besides--for the North is a far-famed keeper of secrets--the mystery and the dreadful uncertainty, haunting like a ghost. As a little boy he had tried to comfort his mother with his high plans for revenge; and she had whispered to him, and cried over him, and pressed him hard against her; and he had promised, over and over again, that when manhood came to him he would right her wrongs and his own. He remembered his pathetic efforts to comfort her, and it had never occurred to him that he had been in need of comforting himself. He had been a sober, wistful-eyed little boy, bearing bravely the whole tragic weight upon his own small shoulders.

The story was very simple and short,--nothing particularly unusual in the North. His father had come early to the gold fields of Bradleyburg, and he had been one of few that was accompanied by his wife,--a tender creature, scarcely molded for life in the northern gold camps. Then there had been Rutheford, his father"s partner, a man whom neither Bill nor his mother liked or trusted, but to whom the elder Bronson gave full trust. Somewhere beyond far Grizzly River, in the Clearwater, Bronson had made a wonderful strike,--a fabulous mine where the gravel was simply laden with the yellow dust; and because they had prospected together in times past, Bronson gave his partner a share in it.

They had worked for months at their mine, in secret, and then Rutheford had come with pack horses into Bradleyburg, ostensibly for supplies. He had been a guest at the Bronson cabin and had reported that all was well with his generous partner. And the next night he had disappeared.