The Man of the Forest by Zane Grey (fb2 epub reader .txt) 📕

CHAPTER II

Milt Dale quietly sat up to gaze, with thoughtful eyes, into

the gloom.

 

He was thirty years old. As a boy of fourteen he had run off

from his school and home in Iowa and, joining a wagon-train

of pioneers, he was one of the first to see log cabins built

on the slopes of the White Mountains. But he had not taken

kindly to farming or sheep-raising or monotonous home toil,

and for twelve years he had lived in the forest, with only

infrequent visits to Pine and Show Down and Snowdrop. This

wandering forest life of his did not indicate that he did

not care for the villagers, for he did care, and he was

welcome everywhere, but that he loved wild life and solitude

and beauty with the primitive instinctive force of a savage.

 

And on this night he had stumbled upon a dark plot against

the only one of all the honest white people in that region

whom he could not call a friend.

 

“That man Beasley!” he soliloquized. “Beasley — in cahoots

with Snake Anson! … Well, he was right. Al Auchincloss

is on his last legs. Poor old man! When I tell him he’ll

never believe ME, that’s sure!”

 

Discovery of the plot meant to Dale that he must hurry down

to Pine.

 

“A girl — Helen Rayner — twenty years old,” he mused.

“Beasley wants her made off with… . That means — worse

than killed!”

 

Dale accepted facts of life with that equanimity and

fatality acquired by one long versed in the cruel annals of

forest lore. Bad men worked their evil just as savage wolves

relayed a deer. He had shot wolves for that trick. With men,

good or bad, he had not clashed. Old women and children

appealed to him, but he had never had any interest in girls.

The image, then, of this Helen Rayner came strangely to

Dale; and he suddenly realized that he had meant somehow to

circumvent Beasley, not to befriend old Al Auchincloss, but

for the sake of the girl. Probably she was already on her

way West, alone, eager, hopeful of a future home. How little

people guessed what awaited them at a journey’s end! Many

trails ended abruptly in the forest — and only trained

woodsmen could read the tragedy.

 

“Strange how I cut across country to-day from Spruce Swamp,”

reflected Dale. Circumstances, movements, usually were not

strange to him. His methods and habits were seldom changed

by chance. The matter, then, of his turning off a course out

of his way for no apparent reason, and of his having

overheard a plot singularly involving a young girl, was

indeed an adventure to provoke thought. It provoked more,

for Dale grew conscious of an unfamiliar smoldering heat

along his veins. He who had little to do with the strife of

men, and nothing to do with anger, felt his blood grow hot

at the cowardly trap laid for an innocent girl.

 

“Old Al won’t listen to me,” pondered Dale. “An’ even if he

did, he wouldn’t believe me. Maybe nobody will… . All

the same, Snake Anson won’t get that girl.”

 

With these last words Dale satisfied himself of his own

position, and his pondering ceased. Taking his rifle, he

descended from the loft and peered out of the door. The

night had grown darker, windier, cooler; broken clouds were

scudding across the sky; only a few stars showed; fine rain

was blowing from the northwest; and the forest seemed full

of a low, dull roar.

 

“Reckon I’d better hang up here,” he said, and turned to the

fire. The coals were red now. From the depths of his

hunting-coat he procured a little bag of salt and some

strips of dried meat. These strips he laid for a moment on

the hot embers, until they began to sizzle and curl; then

with a sharpened stick he removed them and ate like a hungry

hunter grateful for little.

 

He sat on a block of wood with his palms spread to the dying

warmth of the fire and his eyes fixed upon the changing,

glowing, golden embers. Outside, the wind continued to rise

and the moan of the forest increased to a roar. Dale felt

the comfortable warmth stealing over him, drowsily lulling;

and he heard the storm-wind in the trees, now like a

waterfall, and anon like a retreating army, and again low

and sad; and he saw pictures in the glowing embers, strange

as dreams.

 

Presently he rose and, climbing to the loft, he stretched

himself out, and soon fell asleep.

 

When the gray dawn broke he was on his way, ‘cross-country,

to the village of Pine.

 

During the night the wind had shifted and the rain had

ceased. A suspicion of frost shone on the grass in open

places. All was gray — the parks, the glades — and deeper,

darker gray marked the aisles of the forest. Shadows lurked

under the trees and the silence seemed consistent with

spectral forms. Then the east kindled, the gray lightened,

the dreaming woodland awoke to the far-reaching rays of a

bursting red sun.

 

This was always the happiest moment of Dale’s lonely days,

as sunset was his saddest. He responded, and there was

something in his blood that answered the whistle of a stag

from a near-by ridge. His strides were long, noiseless, and

they left dark trace where his feet brushed the dew-laden

grass.

 

Dale pursued a zigzag course over the ridges to escape the

hardest climbing, but the “senacas” — those parklike

meadows so named by Mexican sheep-herders — were as round

and level as if they had been made by man in beautiful

contrast to the dark-green, rough, and rugged ridges. Both

open senaca and dense wooded ridge showed to his quick eye

an abundance of game. The cracking of twigs and disappearing

flash of gray among the spruces, a round black lumbering

object, a twittering in the brush, and stealthy steps, were

all easy signs for Dale to read. Once, as he noiselessly

emerged into a little glade, he espied a red fox stalking

some quarry, which, as he advanced, proved to be a flock of

partridges. They whirred up, brushing the branches, and the

fox trotted away. In every senaca Dale encountered wild

turkeys feeding on the seeds of the high grass.

 

It had always been his custom, on his visits to Pine, to

kill and pack fresh meat down to several old friends, who

were glad to give him lodging. And, hurried though he was

now, he did not intend to make an exception of this trip.

 

At length he got down into the pine belt, where the great,

gnarled, yellow trees soared aloft, stately, and aloof from

one another, and the ground was a brown, odorous, springy

mat of pine-needles, level as a floor. Squirrels watched him

from all around, scurrying away at his near approach —

tiny, brown, light-striped squirrels, and larger ones,

russet-colored, and the splendid dark-grays with their white

bushy tails and plumed ears.

 

This belt of pine ended abruptly upon wide, gray, rolling,

open land, almost like a prairie, with foot-hills lifting

near and far, and the red-gold blaze of aspen thickets

catching the morning sun. Here Dale flushed a flock of wild

turkeys, upward of forty in number, and their subdued color

of gray flecked with white, and graceful, sleek build,

showed them to be hens. There was not a gobbler in the

flock. They began to run pell-mell out into the grass, until

only their heads appeared bobbing along, and finally

disappeared. Dale caught a glimpse of skulking coyotes that

evidently had been stalking the turkeys, and as they saw him

and darted into the timber he took a quick shot at the

hindmost. His bullet struck low, as he had meant it to, but