Part 37

Gene looked at every considerable tree, every little gulley, and every rise in the ground with the eye of an old friend. In a mile or so, at a place marked in no way that Garth could see, he abruptly turned out of the trail; and led them with an air of certainty through the apparently trackless woods. The trees ended at the steep rise that marked the bottom of the northern bank; and thereafter they climbed the grass.

By a devious route known to himself Gene led them through many little grassy ravines, and over ridges, gradually upward. There was no sense or order in the arrangement of the knolls and terraces and spurs of turf--the ground seemed to be pushed up anyhow, like bubbles on the surface of yeasty dough. For a while they would be swallowed in a cup-like hollow; then, surmounting a ridge, they would have a brief glimpse of the distant river behind. It was only when they reached the top that, looking back over the turbulent rounded masses of earth, they were able to comprehend the great height to which they had climbed.

Reaching level ground, Gene with a shout set off at a lope in a bee line across the prairie; and Garth bringing up the packhorses in the rear, caused the sedate Emmy to put her best foot foremost. Meanwhile, with pocket-compass and memorandum book, he made notes of the route they took; and when opportunity offered tied a strip of white cotton to a bush. It was his intention to dismiss Gene before coming to Mabyn's hut; and he wished to be sure of the way back. The guide, comprehending what he was doing, gave him to understand that Emmy could bring them back over their own tracks--unless snow should fall. But Garth was neglecting no precautions.

Garth and Natalie deplored to each other the inadequacy of their means of communication with their guide. The bright-eyed Gene had a hundred things to point out to them on the prairie, most of which they could only guess at. For one thing, he made them understand he was following in the tracks of two cayuses that had gone that way three days before. One was lame, he said, and the other dragged a travoise. All this he learned from certain marks in the grass, which the other two could not see at all. In all ways Gene proved himself a very pearl among guides. Garth, merely from watching him, learned as much trail-craft these two days as he had picked up during the weeks preceding; and Natalie confessed that his cooking put her utterly to shame.

Such was the energy of their pace that they reached the last waterhole before coming to Clearwater Lake early next afternoon. Here Garth decided to camp; for he had determined with Natalie to time their arrival at Mabyn's hut for the morning; so that after the briefest stay, they could immediately start back. Clearwater Lake was only three miles distant; and Gene was able to point out a poplar bluff marking the rise behind which it lay.

Neither Garth nor Natalie obtained much sleep that night; only Gene, wrapped in his rabbit-skin robe beyond the fire, slept the sleep of the savage or the child. They were all astir at dawn; and after eating, they parted; Gene careering south without a care on his mind; while Garth and Natalie turned their apprehensive faces toward the lake. What they were to find there they did not know; but intuition warned them it would be sufficiently painful.

When they reached the brow of the last hill, and the lake stretched vividly below them, they had no eyes for the loveliness of the prospect. The little hut at the head of the water far to the left was the first thing they saw; and it was charged with a significance that obliterated everything else. Facing the early sunlight it stood revealed with startling distinctness; and even at the distance had a ghastly look; gray, artificial and decayed in the midst of the mellow autumn loveliness.

"I will picket the packhorses down at the edge of the water," Garth said; "and we'll ride on without them. It will provide us with an obvious excuse to return immediately."

Natalie scarcely heard. Her eyes were fixed on the distant shack. "What do you suppose it hides from us?" she whispered. "Death, misery, or disgrace?"

Garth could scarcely forbear groaning in the pain of his solicitude for her. "Oh, Natalie!" he said hoarsely, "I haven't done right to expose you to this!"

"I made you!" she said quickly. "Besides, it's not a question of right or wrong. As you said we would, we have only done the best we could, under the circumstances that arose."

"At least let me ride on ahead a little," he begged. "You stay with the outfit. I will hurry back."

She shook her head. "I couldn't stand the suspense," she said simply. "Do not be afraid on my account," she added; "merely looking with my outward eyes at something that always faces me within won't hurt me. Come on!"

But presently she reined up her pony again, and turning a pair of brimming eyes on him, extended her hand. "Garth!" she murmured, "I--I would like to thank you--but I can't!"

"Oh, don't!" he begged.

"Whatever we find down there," she said wistfully, "it can't make any difference, can it? We will still be the same partners of the trail?"

Garth went pale to his lips--but he contrived to smile at her. He took her hand and looked at her full. "Until death," he said quietly.

She drew her hand away, with a deep breath. "Come on," she said. "We've got to face it!"

THE MEETING

The spot of the lake shore where Garth picketed the two horses was something under two miles from Mabyn's hut. The way led among the trees which filled this part of the valley of the lake; and underfoot they could distinguish traces of an old trail. The growth ended abruptly at the edge of a small, dry watercourse, which came down to the lake; and issuing into the open here, the riders beheld the dreaded goal of their long journey immediately before them.

As they crossed the stones, they were ready to fancy they could hear, each the beating of the other's heart; and the scene before them was bitten into their brains, to endure hideously vivid and minute while life endured. The shack presented a three-quarter view, front and side. It topped a gentle, uneven acclivity of grass, rising from the watercourse at its side; while in front, the ground extended level a hundred feet to the edge of a cut-bank. This bank rose out of the lake sheer and loamy, to the height of a cottage roof; and over the edge hung a tangled fringe of grass-roots.

Desolation was the cry of it all; winters upon winters had bleached the logs of the shack silvery like old hair; the chimney had fallen; and all four quarters of glass in the single window were out. At one time the slope between the hut and the bed of the stream had evidently been a theatre of industry; for the ground was pitted and hummocked and rutted; but long ago the grass had indifferently muffled it over, like graves in an old cemetery. In the centre of this waste stood, the picture of dejection, an Indian-bred cayuse, miserable burlesque of the equine species, no bigger than a donkey, and incredibly hairy and misshapen. His back was galled; and one leg, which he painfully favoured, puffed to treble its size at the hock. Even the great cottonwood trees springing beyond the hut, with their shattered branches, and blotched and greenish trunks, breathed decay. An ancient dugout, lying at the mouth of the watercourse, was, like everything else, rotting and seamed.

And on the bench at the door of the hut sat the evil genius of the scene; a man with his legs sprawling in front of him, and his head fallen over and back against the wall. He made no move at their approach; and when they came close, they saw that he slept. Pitilessly revealed in the strong sunlight, he made a spectacle at which the most indifferent stranger would have shuddered and sickened--and it was reserved for the woman who had exalted him in her maiden's heart, to see him then. His mouth hung open; he breathed stertorously; and the flies, buzzing in and out of the open door beside him, crawled at will over his ashen face. That his chin was freshly shaven, and his hair brushed, added to the ghastliness. The whole picture was horribly vivid; the littlest details of it struck on the retinas of the two observers like blows--the oblong patch of sunlight cleaving the gloom of the shack inside the door; six muskrat pelts above the man's head, tacked to the logs to dry; an old foul pipe with a silver mounting, half fallen from his relaxed fingers and spilling ashes on the bench; his old-fashioned rifle leaning against the door-frame. Garth could have furnished the size, the style and the make of that gun.

Natalie turned a stony face to Garth. "It is he," she whispered.

Garth thought of an old photograph she had shown him of a dark-haired youth sitting on a horse, with a charming, imperious grace of body and feature, in which there was something godlike and unanswerable; and looking at this wreck of a man, toothless, bald and livid, he was struck with awe.

"You have seen," he whispered to Natalie. "Let us ride back."

She shook her head. "I must say what I came for," she said.

"Will you dismount?" he asked.