Cabin Gulch (6 page)

The scene of her isolation had a curious fascination for her. Something—and she shuddered—was to happen to her here in this lonely silent gorge. There were some flat stones made into a rude seat under the balsam tree, and a swift yard-wide stream of clear water ran by. Observing something white against the tree, Joan went closer. A card, the ace of hearts, had been pinned to the bark by a small cluster of bullet holes, every one of which touched the red heart, and one of them had obliterated it. Below the circle of bullet holes, scrawled in rude letters with a lead pencil was the name: Gulden. How little, a few nights back, when Jim Cleve had menaced Joan with names of Kells and Gulden, had she imagined they were actual
men she was to meet and fear! And here she was the prisoner of one of them. She would ask Kells who and what this Gulden was. The log cabin was merely a shed, without fireplace or window, and the floor was a covering of balsam boughs, long dried out and withered. A dim trail led away from it down the cañon. If Joan was any judge of trails, this one had not seen the imprint of a horse track for many months. Kells had indeed brought her to a hiding place, one of those, perhaps, that camp gossip said was inaccessible to any save a border hawk. Joan knew that only an Indian could follow the tortuous and rocky trail by which Kells had brought her in. She would never be tracked there by her own people.

The long ride had left her hot, dusty, scratched, with tangled hair and torn habit. She went over to her saddle, which Kells had removed from her pony, and, opening the saddlebag, she took inventory of her possessions. They were few enough, but now, in view of an unexpected and enforced sojourn in the wilds, beyond all calculation of value. They included towel, soap, toothbrush, a mirror and comb and brush, a red scarf, and gloves. It occurred to her how seldom she carried that bag on her saddle and, thinking back, referred the fact to accident, and then with honest amusement owned that the motive might have been also a little vanity. Taking the bag, she went to a flat stone by the brook and, rolling up her sleeves, proceeded to improve her appearance. With deft fingers she re-braided her hair and arranged it as she had worn it when only sixteen. Then resolutely she got up and crossed over to where Kells was unpacking.

“I'll help you get supper,” she said.

He was on his knees in the midst of a jumble of camp duffle that had been hastily thrown together.
He looked up at her—from her shapely strong brown arms to the face she had rubbed rosy.

“Say, but you're a pretty girl!”

He said it enthusiastically, in unstinted admiration, without the slightest subtlety or suggestion, and, if he had been the devil himself, it would have been no less a compliment, given spontaneously to youth and beauty.

“I'm glad if it's so, but please don't tell me,” she rejoined simply.

Then with swift and business-like movements she set to helping him with the mess the inexperienced pack horse had made of that particular pack. When that was straightened out, she began with the biscuit dough while he lighted a fire. It appeared to be her skill, rather than her willingness, that he yielded to. He said very little, but he looked at her often. And he had little periods of abstraction. The situation was novel, strange to him. Sometimes Joan read his mind and sometimes he was an enigma. But she divined when he was thinking what a picture she looked there, on her knees before the bread pan, with flour on her arms—of the difference a girl brought into any place—of how strange it seemed that this girl, instead of lying, a limp and disheveled rag under a tree, weeping and praying for home, made the best of a bad situation and improved it wonderfully by being a thoroughbred.

Presently they sat down, crossed-legged, one on each side of the tarpaulin, and began the meal. That was the strangest supper Joan ever sat down to; it was like a dream where there was danger that tortured her, but she knew she was dreaming and would soon wake up. Kells was almost imperceptibly changing. The amiability of his face seemed to have stiffened.
The only time he addressed her was when he offered to help her to more meat or bread or coffee. After the meal was finished, he would not let her wash the pans and pots, and attended to that himself.

Joan went to the seat by the tree, near the campfire. A purple twilight was shadowing the cañon. Far above on the bold peak the last warmth of the afterglow was fading. There was no wind, no sound, no movement. Joan wondered where Jim Cleve was then. They had often sat in the twilight. She felt an unreasonable resentment toward him, knowing she was to blame, but blaming him for her plight. Then suddenly she thought of her uncle—of home—of her kindly old aunt who always worried so about her. Indeed, there was cause to worry. She felt sorrier for them than for herself, and that broke her spirit momentarily. Forlorn, and with a wave of sudden sorrow and dread and hopelessness, she dropped her head upon her knees and covered her face. Tears were a relief. She forgot Kells and the part she must play. But she remembered swiftly—at the rude touch of his hand.

“Here! Are you crying?” he asked roughly.

“Do you think I'm laughing?” Joan retorted. Her wet eyes, as she raised them, were proof enough.

“Stop it.”

“I can't help . . . but cry . . . a little. I was th-thinking of home . . . of those who've been father and mother to me . . . since I was a baby. I wasn't crying . . . for myself. But they . . . they'll be so miserable. They loved me so.”

“It won't help matters to cry.”

Joan stood up then, no longer sincere and forgetful, but the girl with her deep and cunning game. She leaned close to him in the twilight.

“Did you ever love anyone? Did you ever have a sister . . . a girl like me?”

Kells stalked away into the gloom.

Joan was left alone. She did not know whether to interpret his abstraction, his temper, and his action as favorable to her or not. Still she hoped and prayed they meant that he had some good in him. If she could only hide her terror—her abhorrence—her knowledge of him and his motive! She built up a bright campfire. There was an abundance of wood. She dreaded the darkness and the night. Besides, the air was growing chilly. So, arranging her saddle and blankets near the fire, she composed herself in a comfortable seat to await Kells's return and developments. It struck her forcibly that she had lost some of her fear of Kells and she did not know why. She ought to fear him more every hour—every minute. Presently she heard his step brushing the grass, and then he emerged out of the gloom. He had a load of firewood on his shoulder.

“Did you get over your grief?” he asked, glancing down upon her.

“Yes,” she replied.

Kells stooped for a red ember, with which he lighted his pipe, and then he seated himself a little back from the fire. The blaze threw a bright glare over him, and in it he looked neither formidable nor vicious or ruthless. He asked her where she was born, and, upon receiving an answer, he followed that up with another question. He kept this up until Joan divined that he was not so much interested in what he apparently wished to learn as he was in her presence, her voice, her personality. She sensed in him loneliness, hunger for the sound of a voice. She had heard her uncle speak of the loneliness of lonely campfires and how all men working or hiding or lost in the wilderness would see sweet faces in the embers and be haunted by soft voices. After all, Kells was human.
And she talked as never before in her life—brightly, willingly, eloquently, telling the facts of her eventful youth and girlhood—the sorrow and the joy and some of the dreams up to the time she had come to Camp Hoadley.

“Did you leave any sweethearts over there at Hoadley?” he asked after a silence.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“A whole camp full,” she replied with a laugh, “but admirers is a better name for them.”

“Then there's no one fellow?”

“Hardly . . . yet.”

“How would you like being kept here in this lonesome place for . . . well, say forever?”

“I wouldn't like that,” replied Joan. “I'd like this . . . camping out like this now . . . if my folks only knew I am alive and well and safe. I love lonely dreary places. I've dreamed of being in just such a one as this. It seems so far away here . . . so shut in by the walls and the blackness. So silent and sweet. I love the stars. They speak to me. And the wind in the spruces. Hear it? Very low, mournful. That whispers to me. And I dare say, in the daytime . . . tomorrow I'd like it here, if I had no worry. I've never grown up yet. I explore and climb trees and hunt for little birds and rabbits . . . young things just born, all fuzzy and sweet . . . frightened . . . piping or squealing for their mothers. But I won't touch one for worlds. I simply can't hurt anything. I can't spur my horse or beat him. Oh, I
hate
pain!”

“You're a strange girl to live out here on this border,” he said.

“I'm no different from other girls. You don't know girls.”

“I know one pretty well. She put a rope around my neck,” he replied grimly.

“A rope?”

“Yes, I mean a halter, a hangman's noose. But I balked her.”

“Oh. A good girl?”

“Bad! Bad to the core of her damned black heart . . . bad as I am!” he exclaimed with fierce, low passion.

Joan trembled. The man, in an instant, seemed transformed, somber as death. She could not look at him, but she must keep on talking.

“Bad? You don't seem bad to me . . . only violent, perhaps, or wild. Tell me about yourself.”

She had stirred him. His neglected pipe fell from his hand. In the gloom of the campfire he must have seen faces as ghosts of his past.

“Why not?” he queried strangely. “Why not do what's been impossible for years . . . open my life. It'll not matter . . . to a girl who can never tell. Have I forgotten? God, I have not! Listen so that you'll
know
that I'm bad. My name's not Kells. I was born in the East, and went to school there, till I ran away. I was young, ambitious, wild. I stole. I ran away . . . came West in 'fifty-one . . . to the gold fields in California. There I became prospector, miner, gambler, robber . . . and road agent. I had evil in me, as all men have, and those wild years brought it out. I had no chance. Evil and gold and blood, they were all one and the same thing. I committed every crime till no place, bad as it might be, was safe for me. Driven and hunted and shot and starved . . . almost hanged! And now I'm twenty-nine. Kells of that outcast crew you named the Border Legion . . . every black crime but one . . . the blackest . . . and that, by God, haunting me, itching my hands tonight.”

“Oh, you speak so . . . so dreadfully!” cried Joan. “What can I say? I'm sorry for you. I don't believe it all. What . . . what black crime haunts you? Oh, what could be possible tonight . . . here in this lonely cañon . . . with only me?”

Dark and terrible, the man arose. “Girl,” he said hoarsely, “tonight . . . tonight . . . I'll . . . what have you done to me? One more day . . . and I'll be mad to do right by you . . . instead of wrong! Do you understand that?”

Joan leaned forward in the campfire light, with outstretched hands and quivering lips, as overcome by his halting confession of one lost remnant of honor as she was by the dark hint of his passion.

“No . . . no . . . I don't understand . . . nor believe!” she cried. “But you frighten me . . . so! I am all . . . all alone with you here. You said I'd be safe. Don't . . . don't . . .”

Her voice broke then, and she sank back exhausted in her seat. Probably Kells had heard only the first words of her appeal, for he took to striding back and forth in the circle of campfire light. The scabbard with the big gun swung against his leg. It grew to be a dark and monstrous thing in Joan's sight. A marvelous intuition born of that hour warned her of Kells's subjection of the beast in him, even while with all the manhood left to him he still battled against it. Her girlish sweetness and innocence had availed nothing, except to mock him with the ghost of dead memories. He could not be won or foiled. She must get her hands on that gun—kill him—or? The alternative was death for herself. She leaned there, slowly gathering all the unconquerable and unquenchable forces of a woman's nature, waiting to make one desperate, supreme, and final effort.

Kells strode there, a black silent shadow, plodding with bent head, as if all about and above him were demons and furies.

Joan's perceptions of him, of the night, of the inanimate and impondering black walls, and of herself were exquisitely and abnormally keen. She saw him there, bowed under his burden, gloomy and wroth and sick with himself because the man in him despised the coward. Men of his stamp were seldom or never cowards. Their life did not breed cowardice or baseness. Joan knew the burning in her breast—that thing which influenced, and swept through her like a wind of fire, was hate. Yet her heart held a grain of pity for him. She measured his forbearance, his struggle, against the monstrous cruelty and passion engendered by a wild life among wild men at a wild time. And, considering his opportunities of the long hours and lonely miles, she was grateful, and did not in the least underestimate what it cost him; how different from Bill or Halloway he had been. But all this
was nothing, and her thinking of it useless, unless he conquered himself. She only waited, holding on to that steel-like control of her nerves, motionless and silent.

She leaned back against her saddle, a blanket covering her, with wide-open eyes, and, despite the presence of that stalking figure and the fact of her mind being locked around one terrible and inevitable thought, she saw the changing beautiful glow of the fire logs and the cold pitiless stars and the mustering shadows under the walls. She heard, too, the low rising sigh of the wind in the balsam and the silvery tinkle of the brook, and sounds only imagined, or nameless. Yet a stern and insupportable silence weighed her down. This dark cañon seemed at the end of the earth. She felt encompassed by illimitable and stupendous upflung mountains, insulated in a vast dark silent tomb.