The Lookout Man, B. M. Bower [free ebooks for android .TXT] 📗

flung clouds of snow into her face so that she was half blinded. She turned her back upon it, blinked rapidly until her vision cleared again, and stood there panting, tempted to turn back. No one would be crazy enough to venture out today. They would wait until the storm cleared.

She looked back down the trail she had followed. Wherever the wind had a clean sweep her tracks were filling already with snow. If she did not wait, and if Jack got away now, they couldn't track him at all. She really owed him that much of a chance to beat them. She put up her muff, shielded her face from the sting of frozen snowflakes, and went on, buffeted down the steep slope where Kate had sprained her ankle, and thinking that she must be careful where she set her feet, because it would be frightful if she had such an accident herself.

She did not expect to meet Jack on the farther edge of the gulch, but she stood a minute beside the great pine, looking at the trampled snow and thinking of Hank Brown's leering insinuations. Whatever had started the fellow to suspecting such things? Uneasily she followed Hank's cunning reasoning: Because Jack had never once gone in to Quincy, except to settle with the Forest Service for his summer's work; because Jack had not filed upon any claim in the mountains, yet stayed there apart from his kind; because he avoided people—such little things they were that made up the sum of Hank's suspicions! Well, she was to blame for this present emergency, at any rate. If she had not told Kate something she had no right to tell, she would not have quite so much to worry about.

She turned and began to climb again, making her way through the thicket that fringed the long ridge beyond; like a great, swollen tongue reaching out toward the valley was this ridge, and she followed it in spite of the tangled masses of young trees and bushes which she must fight through to reach the more open timber. At least the danger of falling trees and branches was not so great here, and the wind was not quite so keen.

Behind her Mike followed doggedly, trailing her like a hound. Days spent in watching, nights spent crouched and waiting had brought him to the high pitch of desperation, that would stop at nothing which seemed to his crazed brain necessary to save his life and his freedom. Even the disdainful Murphy would have known the man was insane; but Murphy was sitting warm and snug beside a small table with a glass ready to his right hand, and Murphy was not worrying about Mike's sanity, but about the next card that would fall before him. Murphy thought how lucky he was to be in Quincy during this storm, instead of cooped up in the little cabin with Mike, who would sit all day and mumble, and never say anything worth listening to. So Mike kept to the hunt—like a gentle-natured dog gone mad and dangerous and taking the man-trail unhindered and unsuspected.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

 

GOLD OF REPENTANCE, SUNLIGHT OF LOVE AND A MAN GONE MAD

 

Marion was up at the foot of the last grilling climb, the steep acclivity where manzanita shrubs locked arms and laughed at the climber. Fearful of a sprained ankle like Kate's, she had watched carefully where she set down her feet and had not considered that it would be wise to choose just as carefully the route she should follow to gain the top; so long as she was climbing in that general direction she felt no uneasiness, because Taylor Rock topped it all, and she was bound to come out somewhere close to the point at which she was aiming.

But the wall of manzanita stopped her before she had penetrated a rod into it. One solid mass blanketed with snow it looked to be when she stepped carefully upon a rock and surveyed the slope. She had borne too far to the right, away from the staggering rush of wind. She hated to turn now and face the storm while she made her way around to the line of timber, but she had no choice. So she retreated from the manzanita and fought her way around it—finding it farther than she had dreamed; finding, too, that the storm was a desperate thing, if one had to face it for long in the open.

She made the timber, and stood leaning against the sheltered side of a dark-trunked spruce whose branches were thick and wide-spread enough to shield her. The physical labor of fighting her way thus far, and the high altitude to which she had attained, made her pant like a runner just after the race. She held her muff to her face again for the sense of warmth and well-being its soft fur gave to her cheeks. Certainly, no one else would be fool enough to come out on such a day, she thought. And what a surprise to Jack, seeing her come puffing into his cave! She had not been there since the snow fell, just before Thanksgiving. Now it was nearly Christmas—a month of solitary grandeur Jack had endured.

She glanced up at the tossing boughs above her; felt the great tree trunk quiver when a fresh blast swept the top; looked out at the misty whiteness of the storm, clouded with swaying pine branches. What a world it was! But she was not afraid of it; somehow she felt its big, rough friendliness even now. It did not occur to her that the mountains could work her ill, though she reminded herself that standing still was not the best way to keep warm on such a day.

She started up again, ignorantly keeping among the trees, that a mountaineer would have shunned. But straightway she stopped and looked around her puzzled. Surely she had not come down this way when she skirted the manzanita. She remembered coming in among the trees from the right. She turned and went that way, saw her filling footprints in the snow, and plodded back. There were tracks coming down the hill, and she had not made them. They must surely be Jack's.

With the new wisdom of having tramped nearly every day through snow, she studied these new tracks and her own where she had come to the spruce tree. These other tracks, she decided, had been made lately—she must have missed by minutes seeing him pass before her. Perhaps she could overtake him. So she faced the wind and ran gasping down the slope, following the tracks. She nearly caught Mike unaware, but she did not know it. She hurried unsuspectingly past the tree where he was hiding, his rifle held ready to fire if she looked his way. He was hesitating, mumbling there with his finger on the trigger when she went out of sight around a bush, still following where the tracks led. Mike stepped out from behind the tree and came bowlegging after her, walking with that peculiar, flat-footed gait of the mountain trained man.

Luck was with her. Jack had gone down a gully rim, thinking to cross it farther on, ran into rocks and a precipitous bank, and was coming back upon his trail. He met Marion face to face. She gave a cry that had in it both tears and laughter, and stood looking at him big-eyed over her muff.

"Well, forevermore! I thought I never