The Lookout Man by B. M. Bower (electronic reader txt) 📕

"Jack Corey, you tell me one thing. Don't you—want me to—marry you? Don't you care—?"

"Listen here, honey, I'll get sore in a minute if you go talking that way!" He took her in his arms, all snow as she was, and kissed her with boyish energy. "You know well enough that I'm crazy about you. Of course I want you! But look at the fix I'm in: with just about a hundred dollars to my name—"

"I've got money in my muff to buy a license, if you'll pay the preacher, Jack. We'll go fifty-fifty on the cost—"

"And a darned good chance of being sent up for that deal the boys pulled off—"

"Oh, well, I can wait till you get out again. Say, I just love you with that little lump between your eyebrows when you scowl! Go on, Jack; I'm cold. My gracious, what a storm! It's getting worse, don't you think? When does that train go down, Jack? We'll have to be at the station before dark, or we might get lost and miss the train, and then we would be in a fix! I wish to goodness I'd thought to put on my blue velvet suit—but then, how was I going to know that I'd need it to get married in?"

Jack stopped on the very edge of the bank, and held back the snow-laden branches for her to pass. "You're the limit for having your own way," he grinned. "I can see who's going to be boss of the camp, all right. Come on—the sooner we get down into lower country, the less chance we'll have of freezing. We'll cross here, and get down in that thick timber below. The wind won't catch us quite so hard, and if a tree don't fall on us we'll work our way down to the trail. Give me a kiss. This is a toll gate, and you've got to pay—"

Standing so, with one arm flung straight out against the thick boughs of a young spruce, he made a fair target for Mike back there among the trees. Mike was clean over the edge now of sanity. The two spies had come together—two against one, and searching for him to kill him, as he firmly believed. When they had stood under the cedar he thought that they were hiding there, waiting for him to walk into the trap they had set. He would have shot them, but the branches were too thick. When they moved out along the gulch, Mike ran crouching after, his rifle cocked and ready for aim. You would have thought that the man was stalking a deer. When Jack stopped and turned, with his arm flung back against the spruce, he seemed to be looking straight at Mike.

Mike aimed carefully, for he was shaking with terror and the cold of those heights. The sharp pow-w of his rifle crashed through the whispery roar of the pines, and the hills flung back muffled echoes. Marion screamed, saw Jack sag down beside the spruce, clutched at him wildly, hampered by her muff. Saw him go sliding down over the bank, into the gulch, screamed again and went sliding after him.

Afterwards she remembered a vague impression she had had, of hearing some one go crashing away down the gully, breaking the bushes that impeded his flight.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

 

THE MISERERE OF MOTHERHOOD

 

The up-train came shrieking out of the last tunnel in Feather River Canyon, churned around a curve, struck a hollow roar from the trestle that bridges the mouth of Toll-Gate creek, shrieked again when it saw, down the white trail of its headlight, the whirling snow that swept down the canyon, and churned up the stiff grade that would carry it around through the Pocket at the head of the canyon and to the little yellow station just beyond. A fight it would have to top the summit of the Sierras and slip down into the desert beyond, but it climbed the grade with a vicious kind of energy, twisted around the point of the hill where the Crystal Lake trail crossed and climbed higher, and with a last scream at the station lights it slewed past the curve, clicked over a switch or two and stood panting there in the storm, waiting to see whether it might go on and get the ordeal over with at once, or whether it must wait until the down train passed.

A thin, yellow slip ordered it to wait, since it was ten minutes behind time. The down train was just then screaming into Spring Garden and would come straight on. So the up train stood there puffing like the giant thing it was, while the funny little train from Quincy fussed back upon a different siding and tried its best to puff as loud as its big, important neighbor while it waited, too, for the down train.

Two men and a woman plowed through the wind and the snow and mounted wearily the steps of the little coach which comprised the branch line's passenger service. The two men took it all as a matter of course—the bare little coach with plush seats and an air of transient discomfort. They were used to it, and they did not mind.

The woman, however, halted inside the door and glanced around her with incredulous disdain. She seemed upon the point of refusing to ride in so crude a conveyance; seemed about to complain to the conductor and to demand something better. She went forward under protest and drew her gloved fingers across the plush back of a seat, looked at her fingers and said, "Hmh!" as though her worst fears were confirmed. She looked at one of the men and spoke as she would speak to a servant.

"Is there no other coach on this train?"

"No, ma'am!" the man said, accenting the first word as though he wished to prevent argument. "It's this or walk."

"Hmh!" said the lady, and spread a discarded newspaper upon the seat, and sat down. "Thank you," she added perfunctorily, and looked out of the window at what she could see of the storm.

The down train thundered in, just then, and with a squealing of brakes stopped so that its chair car blotted her dismal view of the close hillside. Between the two trains the snow sifted continuously, coming out of the gray wall above, falling into the black shadows beneath. Two or three bundled passengers with snow packed in the wrinkles of their clothing went down the aisle of the chair-car, looking for seats.

It was all very depressing, wearisome in the extreme. The lady settled herself deeper into her furs and sighed.

She continued to sigh at intervals during the remainder of the trip. The last and the heaviest sigh of all she heaved when she settled down to sleep in a hotel bedroom and thought miserably of a certain lovable, if somewhat headstrong, young man who was out somewhere in these terrible mountains in the storm, hiding away from the world and perhaps suffering cold and hunger.

Thoughts of that kind are not the best medicine for sleeplessness, and it was long after midnight before Mrs. Singleton Corey drifted insensibly from heartsick reflections