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

with Bo and Las Vegas, whose riding resembled

their happiness.

 

Dale read Helen’s mind, or else his own thoughts were in

harmony with hers, for he always seemed to speak what she

was thinking. And as they rode homeward he asked her in his

quiet way if they could not spare a few days to visit his

old camp.

 

“And take Bo — and Tom? Oh, of all things I’d like to’” she

replied.

 

“Yes — an’ Roy, too,” added Dale, significantly.

 

“Of course,” said Helen, lightly, as if she had not caught

his meaning. But she turned her eyes away, while her heart

thumped disgracefully and all her body was aglow. “Will Tom

and Bo go?”

 

“It was Tom who got me to ask you,” replied Dale. “John an’

Hal can look after the men while we’re gone.”

 

“Oh — so Tom put it in your head? I guess — maybe — I

won’t go.”

 

“It is always in my mind, Nell,” he said, with his slow

seriousness. “I’m goin’ to work all my life for you. But

I’ll want to an’ need to go back to the woods often… .

An’ if you ever stoop to marry me — an’ make me the richest

of men — you’ll have to marry me up there where I fell in

love with you.”

 

“Ah! Did Las Vegas Tom Carmichael say that, too?” inquired

Helen, softly.

 

“Nell, do you want to know what Las Vegas said?”

 

“By all means.”

 

“He said this — an’ not an hour ago. ‘Milt, old hoss, let

me give you a hunch. I’m a man of family now — an’ I’ve

been a devil with the wimmen in my day. I can see through

‘em. Don’t marry Nell Rayner in or near the house where I

killed Beasley. She’d remember. An’ don’t let her remember

thet day. Go off into the woods. Paradise Park! Bo an’ me

will go with you.”

 

Helen gave him her hand, while they walked the horses

homeward in the long sunset shadows. In the fullness of that

happy hour she had time for a grateful wonder at the keen

penetration of the cowboy Carmichael. Dale had saved her

life, but it was Las Vegas who had saved her happiness.

 

Not many days later, when again the afternoon shadows were

slanting low, Helen rode out upon the promontory where the

dim trail zigzagged far above Paradise Park.

 

Roy was singing as he drove the pack-burros down the slope;

Bo and Las Vegas were trying to ride the trail two abreast,

so they could hold hands; Dale had dismounted to stand

beside Helen’s horse, as she gazed down the shaggy black

slopes to the beautiful wild park with its gray meadows and

shining ribbons of brooks.

 

It was July, and there were no golden-red glorious flames

and blazes of color such as lingered in Helen’s memory.

Black spruce slopes and green pines and white streaks of

aspens and lacy waterfall of foam and dark outcroppings of

rock—these colors and forms greeted her gaze with all the

old enchantment. Wildness, beauty, and loneliness were

there, the same as ever, immutable, like the spirit of those

heights.

 

Helen would fain have lingered longer, but the others

called, and Ranger impatiently snorted his sense of the

grass and water far below. And she knew that when she

climbed there again to the wide outlook she would be another

woman.

 

“Nell, come on,” said Dale, as he led on. “It’s better to

look up.”

 

The sun had just sunk behind the ragged fringe of

mountain-rim when those three strong and efficient men of

the open had pitched camp and had prepared a bountiful

supper. Then Roy Beeman took out the little worn Bible which

Helen had given him to use when he married Bo, and as he

opened it a light changed his dark face.

 

“Come, Helen an’ Dale,” he said.

 

They arose to stand before him. And he married them there

under the great, stately pines, with the fragrant blue smoke

curling upward, and the wind singing through the branches,

while the waterfall murmured its low, soft, dreamy music,

and from the dark slope came the wild, lonely cry of a wolf,

full of the hunger for life and a mate.

 

“Let us pray,” said Roy, as he closed the Bible, and knelt

with them.

 

“There is only one God, an’ Him I beseech in my humble

office for the woman an’ man I have just wedded in holy

bonds. Bless them an’ watch them an’ keep them through all

the comin’ years. Bless the sons of this strong man of the

woods an’ make them like him, with love an’ understandin’ of

the source from which life comes. Bless the daughters of

this woman an’ send with them more of her love an’ soul,

which must be the softenin’ an’ the salvation of the hard

West. O Lord, blaze the dim, dark trail for them through the

unknown forest of life! O Lord, lead the way across the

naked range of the future no mortal knows! We ask in Thy

name! Amen.”

 

When the preacher stood up again and raised the couple from

their kneeling posture, it seemed that a grave and solemn

personage had left him. This young man was again the

dark-faced, clear-eyed Roy, droll and dry, with the

enigmatic smile on his lips.

 

“Mrs. Dale,” he said, taking her hands, “I wish you joy… .

An’ now, after this here, my crownin’ service in your

behalf — I reckon I’ll claim a reward.”

 

Then he kissed her. Bo came next with her warm and loving

felicitations, and the cowboy, with characteristic action,

also made at Helen.

 

“Nell, shore it’s the only chance I’ll ever have to kiss

you,” he drawled. “Because when this heah big Indian once

finds out what kissin’ is —!”

 

Las Vegas then proved how swift and hearty he could be upon

occasions. All this left Helen red and confused and

unutterably happy. She appreciated Dale’s state. His eyes

reflected the precious treasure which manifestly he saw, but

realization of ownership had not yet become demonstrable.

 

Then with gay speech and happy laugh and silent look these

five partook of the supper. When it was finished Roy made

known his intention to leave. They all protested and coaxed,

but to no avail. He only laughed and went on saddling his

horse.

 

“Roy, please stay,” implored Helen. “The day’s almost ended.

You’re tired.”

 

“Nope. I’ll never be no third party when there’s only two.”

 

“But there are four of us.”

 

“Didn’t I just make you an’ Dale one? … An’, Mrs. Dale,

you forget I’ve been married more ‘n once.”

 

Helen found herself confronted by an unanswerable side of

the argument. Las Vegas rolled on the grass in his mirth.

Dale looked strange.

 

“Roy, then that’s why you’re so nice,” said Bo, with a

little devil in her eyes. “Do you know I had my mind made up

if Tom hadn’t come around I was going to make up to you,

Roy… . I sure was. What number wife would I have been?”

 

It always took Bo to turn the tables on anybody. Roy looked

mightily embarrassed. And the laugh was on him. He did not

face them again until he had mounted.

 

“Las Vegas, I’ve done my best for you — hitched you to thet

blue-eyed girl the best I know how,” he declared. “But I

shore ain’t guaranteein’ nothin’. You’d better build a

corral for her.”

 

“Why, Roy, you shore don’t savvy the way to break these wild

ones,” drawled Las Vegas. “Bo will be eatin’ out of my hand

in about a week.”

 

Bo’s blue eyes expressed an eloquent doubt as to this

extraordinary claim.

 

“Good-by, friends,” said Roy, and rode away to disappear in

the spruces.

 

Thereupon Bo and Las Vegas forgot Roy, and Dale and Helen,

the camp chores to be done, and everything else except

themselves. Helen’s first wifely duty was to insist that she

should and could and would help her husband with the work of

cleaning up after the sumptuous supper. Before they had

finished a sound startled them. It came from Roy, evidently

high on the darkening slope, and was a long, mellow pealing

halloo, that rang on the cool air, burst the dreamy silence,

and rapped across from slope to slope and cliff to cliff, to

lose its power and die away hauntingly in the distant

recesses.

 

Dale shook his head as if he did not care to attempt a reply

to that beautiful call. Silence once again enfolded the

park, and twilight seemed to be born of the air, drifting

downward.

 

“Nell, do you miss anythin’?” asked Dale.

 

“No. Nothing in all the world,” she murmured. “I am happier

than I ever dared pray to be.”

 

“I don’t mean people or things. I mean my pets.”

 

“Ah! I had forgotten… . Milt, where are they?”

 

“Gone back to the wild,” he said. “They had to live in my

absence. An’ I’ve been away long.”

 

Just then the brooding silence, with its soft murmur of

falling water and faint sigh of wind in the pines, was

broken by a piercing scream, high, quivering, like that of a

woman in exquisite agony.

 

“That’s Tom!” exclaimed Dale.

 

“Oh — I was so — so frightened!” whispered Helen.

 

Bo came running, with Las Vegas at her heels.

 

“Milt, that was your tame cougar,” cried Bo, excitedly. “Oh,

I’ll never forget him! I’ll hear those cries in my dreams!”

 

“Yes, it was Tom,” said Dale, thoughtfully. “But I never

heard him cry just like that.”

 

“Oh, call him in!”

 

Dale whistled and called, but Tom did not come. Then the

hunter stalked off in the gloom to call from different

points under the slope. After a while he returned without

the cougar. And at that moment, from far up the dark ravine,

drifted down the same wild cry, only changed by distance,

strange and tragic in its meaning.

 

“He scented us. He remembers. But he’ll never come back,”

said Dale.

 

Helen felt stirred anew with the convictions of Dale’s deep

knowledge of life and nature. And her imagination seemed to

have wings. How full and perfect her trust, her happiness in

the realization that her love and her future, her children,

and perhaps grandchildren, would come under the guidance of

such a man! Only a little had she begun to comprehend the

secrets of good and ill in their relation to the laws of

nature. Ages before men had lived on the earth there had

been the creatures of the wilderness, and the holes of the

rocks, and the nests of the trees, and rain, frost, heat,

dew, sunlight and night, storm and calm, the honey of the

wildflower and the instinct of the bee — all the beautiful

and multiple forms of life with their inscrutable design. To

know something of them and to love them was to be close to

the kingdom of earth — perhaps to the greater kingdom of

heaven. For whatever breathed and moved was a part of that

creation. The coo of the dove, the lichen on the mossy rock,

the mourn of a hunting wolf, and the murmur of the

waterfall, the evergreen and growing tips of the spruces,

and the thunderbolts along the battlements of the heights —

these one and all must be actuated by the great spirit —

that incalculable thing in the universe which had produced

man and soul.

 

And there in the starlight, under the wide-gnarled pines,

sighing low with the wind, Helen sat with