King nodded and smiled. He was not given to many words, grown taciturn as are mountaineers inevitably, trained in long habit to approve in silence of that which pleased him most. So, while Gloria's eager tongue tripped along as busily as the brooks they forded, he was for the most part silent. An extended arm to point out a big snow-plant, blood-red against a little heap of snow, was as eloquent as the spoken word. Thus he indicated much that might have passed unnoticed by Gloria, keenly enjoying her lively admiration.
To-day he chose always the easier trails, since with the good horses under them they had ample time to come to Loony Honeycutt's place well before midday. Also they stopped frequently, King making an excuse of showing her points of interest; the tiny valley where one could be sure of a glimpse of a brown bear, the grazing-lands of mountain deer, the pass into the cliff-bound hiding-place of the picturesque highwaymen of an earlier day whence they drove stolen horses into Nevada, where they secreted other horses stolen in Nevada and to be disposed of down in the Sacramento Valley. There lasted until this very day the ruins of their rock house, snuggled into the mountains under their lookout-point.
"It would be fun," said Gloria, the spell of the wilderness mysteries upon her, her eyes half wistful and altogether serious, "to be lost out here. Just to get far, far away from people and ever so close to the big old mountains. Wouldn't it?" And a few minutes later she drew in her horse and cried out softly: "Listen!" She herself was listening breathlessly. "It sounds like the ocean ever so far off. Or—or like shouting voices a million miles away. Or like the mountains themselves whispering. It is hard to believe, isn't it? that it is just the wind in the pines."
Another time, while, under the pretext of letting their horses blow, King had suggested a short halt to give the girl a chance to rest, she said with abruptness:
"What do you think of Mr. Gratton?"
Already she knew Mark King well enough to realize that he would either refuse to answer or would speak his mind without beating about the bush.
"I don't like him," said King.
Gloria looked thoughtful.
"Neither do I," she said. "Not up here in the mountains. And down in San Francisco I thought him rather splendid. What is more, if we were whisked back to San Francisco this minute, I'd probably think him fine again."
She appeared interested in the consideration, and when they rode on was silent, obviously turning the matter over and over in mind.
* * * * *
To-day were three mysteries tremblingly close to revealing themselves one to another: the great green mystery of the woodlands; the mystery of a man clothed in his masculinity as in an outer garment; the tender mystery of a young girl athrill with romance, effervescent with youth, her own thoughts half veiled from herself, her instincts alive and urgent, and often all in confusion. How could a man like Mark King quite understand a girl like Gloria? How could a girl like Gloria, with all of her surety of her own decisions, understand a man like King? Each glimpsed that day much of the other's true character, and yet all the while the mainsprings were just out of sight, unguessed, undreamed of.
At Gloria's age, if one be a girl and very pretty and made much of by adoring parents and a host of boys and men, the world is an extremely nice place inhabited exclusively by individuals pressing forward to do her reverence. She is beautiful, she is vivacious, filled with delight; she is a sparkling fountainhead of joy. She is so superabundantly supplied with eager happiness that she radiates happiness. If she thinks a very great deal of herself, so for that matter does every other individual in the world; it is merely that with all of her sophistication she remains much more naive than she would ever believe; she is a coquette because she is female; she is pleased with herself and with the high excuse that every one else is pleased with her. Hence she demands adoration as a right. If she rides on a street-car she fully expects that the conductor will regard her admiringly and that the motorman will turn his head after her. She doesn't expect to marry either of these gentlemen; she does not particularly require their flattering attentions…. Gloria did not expect to marry Archie or Teddy or Mr. Gratton; she had no thought of being any one's wife; that term, after all, at Gloria's age, is a drab and humdrum thing. She did not dream of Mark King as a possible husband; another unromantic title. She merely hungered for male admiration. It was the wine of life, the breath in her nostrils. As it happens to be to some countless millions of other girls…. All of which is so clearly a pretty nearly universal condition that it would seem that if Mark King had had his wits about him he must have realized it. And yet had he glimpsed that which should have been so obvious he would have been startled, somewhat shocked, and would have grieved over his friend's empty-headed daughter, holding her unmaidenly—when she was but dallying with dreams which mean so much to all maidens.
But Gloria did not say to him: "Mark King, I am determined that you shall adore me, pretty face, pretty figure, pretty ways and all." Nor yet to herself did she put things so baldly. She did, however, yield herself luxuriously to the springtime, the romance of the hour, the appeal of her latest cavalier, and preen herself like a mating bird. King saw, admired, and in his own fashion played his own part. It was not clear to him that there had been a new pleasure in his own strength when he had lifted her into her saddle, and yet her little breathless laugh had rung musically in his ears. Had a man arisen to announce, jibingly, that Mark King was "showing off" before a girl like a boy of ten, though within bounds, he would have called the man a liar and forthwith have kicked him out of the landscape … They rode on, side by side, each content with seeing only that which lay on the surface—both of his companion and of himself. In a word, they were living life naturally, without demanding of the great theatrical manager to know exactly what parts they were to play in the human comedy. Externals sufficed just now; the fragrant still forests, the pulse-stirring sunshine, the warm, fruitful earth below and the blue sky above.
From the first he called her Gloria quite naturally; to her he was Mr. King. But the "Mark" slipped out before they came into sight of the roofs of picturesque Coloma.
Chapter VI
"You are sure you won't be gone more than an hour?" Gloria asked.
Never, it seemed to her, had she seen a lonelier-looking place than old Coloma drowsing on the fringe of the wilderness. The street into which they had ridden was deserted save for a couple of dogs making each other's acquaintance suspiciously. Why was it more lonesome here than it had been back there in the mountains? she wondered.
"Less than an hour," he assured her. "What business I have can be done in fifteen minutes if it can be done at all. But, in the meantime, what will you do?"
"Oh," said Gloria, "I'll just poke around. It will be fun to see what kind of people live here."
He put the horses in the stable, watered and fed them himself, and came back to her outside the front double doors. She had dropped down on a box in the sun; he thought that there was a little droop to her shoulders. And small wonder, he admitted, with a tardy sense of guilt. All these hours in the saddle——
"Tired much?" he asked solicitously.
The shoulders straightened like a soldier's; she jumped up and whirled smilingly.
"Not a bit tired," she told him brightly.
"That's good. But I could get a room for you at the hotel; you could lie down and rest a couple of hours——"
Gloria would not hear to it; if she did want to lie down she'd go out under one of the trees and rest there. She trudged along with him to the post-office; she watched as Mark called for and got a registered parcel. Further, she marked that the postmaster appeared curious about the package so heavily insured until over Mark's shoulder he caught a glimpse of her, and that thereafter, craning his neck as they went out, he evidenced a greater interest in her than in a bundle insured for three thousand dollars. She was smiling brightly when Mark King hurried off to his meeting with old Loony Honeycutt.
Honeycutt's shanty, ancient, twisted, warped, and ugly like himself, stood well apart from the flock of houses, as though, like himself even in this, it were suspicious and meant to keep its own business to itself. Only one other building had approached it in neighbourly fashion, and this originally had been Honeycutt's barn. Now it had a couple of crazy windows cut crookedly into its sides and a stovepipe thrust up, also crookedly, through the shake roof, and was known as the McQuarry place. Here one might count on finding Swen Brodie at such times as he favoured Coloma with his hulking presence; here foregathered his hangers-on. An idle crowd for the most part, save when the devil found mischief for them to do, they might be expected to be represented by one or two of their number loafing about headquarters, and King realized that his visit to Loony Honeycutt was not likely to pass unnoticed. What he had not counted on was finding Swen Brodie himself before him in Honeycutt's shanty.
King, seeing no one, walked through the weeds to Honeycutt's door. The door was closed, the windows down—dirty windows, every corner of every pane with its dirty cobweb trap and skeletons of flies. As he lifted his foot to the first of the three front steps he heard voices. Nor would any man who had once listened to the deep, sullen bass of Swen Brodie have forgotten or have failed now in quick recognition. Brodie's mouth, when he spoke, dripped the vilest of vocabularies that had ever been known in these mountains, very much as old Honeycutt's toothless mouth, ever screwed up in rotary chewing and sucking movements, drooled tobacco juice upon his unclean shirt. Brodie at moments when he desired to be utterly inoffensive could not purge his utterance of oaths; he was one of those men who could not remark that it was a fine morning without first damning the thing, qualifying it with an epithet of vileness, and turning it out of his big, loose mouth sullied with syllables which do not get themselves into print.
What King heard, as though Brodie had held his speech for the moment and hurled it like a challenge to the man he did not know had come, was, when stripped of its cargo of verbal filth:
"You old fool, you're dying right now. It's for me or Mark King to get it, and it ain't going to be King."
Honeycutt all the time was whining like a feeble spirit in pain, his utterances like the final dwindlings of a mean-spirited dog. King had never heard him whine like that; Honeycutt was more given to chucklings and clackings of defiance and derision. Perhaps Brodie as the ultimate argument had manhandled him. King threw open the door.
There stood old Honeycutt, tremblingly upheld upon his sawed-off broom-handle. Beyond him, facing the door, was Swen Brodie, his immense body towering over Honeycutt's spindling one, his bestial face hideous in its contortions as at once he gloated and threatened. In Brodie's hands, which were twice the size of an ordinary man's, was a little wooden box, to which Honeycutt's rheumy eyes were glued with frantic despair. Evidently the box had only now been taken from its hiding-place under a loose board in the floor; the board lay tossed to one side, and Brodie's legs straddled the opening.
Honeycutt did not know immediately that any one had entered; either his old ears had not heard, or his excited mind was concentrated so excludingly on Brodie that he had no thought of aught else. Brodie, however, turned his small, restless eyes, that were like two shiny bright-blue buttons, upon the intruder. His great mouth stood open showing his teeth. On that lower, deformed, undershot jaw of Swen Brodie were those monstrous teeth which were his pride, a misshapen double row which he kept clean while his body went unwashed, and between which the man could bend a nail.
Swen Brodie was the biggest man who had ever come to the mountains, men said, unless that honour went to one of the Seven who more than a half-century ago had perished with Gus Ingle. And even so Brodie kept the honour in his own blood, boasting that Ingle's giant companion, the worst of a bad lot, was his own father's father. The elder Brodie had come from Iceland, had lived with a squaw, had sired the first "Swen" Brodie. And this last scion of a house of outlawry and depravity, the Blue Devil, as many called him, stood six or eight clear inches above Mark King, who was well above six feet. Whatever pride was in him went first to his teeth, next to his enormous stature; he denied that his father had been so big a man; he flew into a towering rage at the suggestion; he cursed his father's memory as a fabric of lies. His head was all face, flattening off an inch above the hairless brows; his face was all enormous, double-toothed mouth.
Slowly the big mouth closed. The shiny blue eyes narrowed and glinted; the coarse face reddened. Brodie's throat corded, the Adam's apple moved repeatedly up and down as he swallowed inarticulately. This old Honeycutt saw. He jerked about and quick lights sprang up in his despairing eyes. He began to sputter but Brodie's loud voice had come back to him and drowned out the old man's shrillings. Brodie ripped out a string of oaths, demanding:
"Who toldyouto come in? You—you——"
"He was aiming to kill me," cried old Honeycutt, dragging and pulling atKing's sleeve. "He was for doin' for me—like that!"
He pointed to the floor. There lay a heavy iron poker bent double.
"He done it. Brodie done it. He was for doin' me——"
"You old fool, I'll do you yet," growled Brodie. "And you, King, what are you after?"
Always truculent, to-day Brodie was plainly spoiling for trouble. King had stepped in at a moment when Brodie was in no mood to brook any interruption or interference.
"I came for a word with Honeycutt, not with you," King flashed back at him. "And from the look of things Honeycutt is thanking his stars that I did come."
"If you mean anything by that," shouted Brodie threateningly, "put a name to it."
"If it's a fight you want," said King sharply, "I'm ready to take you on, any time, and without a lot of palaver."
Old Honeycutt began sidling off toward the back door, neither of his two visitors noticing him now as their eyes clashed.
"What I come for I'm going to have," announced Brodie. "It's mine, anyhow, more than any other man's; I could prove it by law if I gave the snap of a finger for what the law deals out, hit or miss. Was there a King with Gus Ingle's crowd? Or a Honeycutt? No, but there was a Brodie! And I'm his heir, by thunder. It's mine more'n any man's."
King laughed at him.
"Since when have you been studying law, Brodie? Since you got back this last trip, figuring you might have a word with the sheriff?"
"Sheriff? What do you mean, sheriff?"
"I happened to see you and Andy Parker standing together on the cliffs. I saw Andy go overboard. What is more, I had a talk with him before I buried him."
Again Brodie's big mouth dropped open; his little blue eyes rounded, and he put one hand at his throat nervously.
"Andy's a liar; always a liar," he said thickly. But he seemed annoyed.Then his face cleared, and he too laughed, derision in his tone."Anyway, he's dead and can't lie no more, and your word against mineain't more'n an even break. So if your nosing sheriff gets gay with meI'll twist his cursed neck for him."
"Suit yourself. I've told you already I came for a talk with Honeycutt and not with you."
"Then you'll wait until I'm done with him," roared Brodie, all of his first baffled rage sweeping back through his blood. "And now you'll clear out!"
King stooped forward just a little, gathering himself and ready as he saw Brodie crouch for a spring. It was just then that both remembered old Honeycutt. For the old man, tottering in the opening of the rear door, was muttering in a wicked sort of glee:
"Up with them hands of your'n, Swen Brodie. High up an' right quick, orI'll blow your ugly head off'n your shoulders!"
In his trembling hands was a double-barrelled shotgun, sawed off and doubtless loaded to the muzzle with buckshot. Though the thing wavered considerably, its end was not six feet from Brodie's head, and both hammers were back, while the ancient nervous fingers were playing as with palsy about the triggers. King expected the discharge each second.
Brodie whirled and drew back, his face turning grey.
"Put it down, you old fool; put it down!" he cried raspingly. "I'll go."
The old man cackled in his delight.
"I'll put nothin' down," he announced triumphantly. "You set down that box."
Hastily Brodie put it on the table. He drew further away, backing toward the front door.
"Git!" cried old Honeycutt.
They could hear the air rushing back into Brodie's lungs as he came to the door and his fear left him.
"I'll be back, Honeycutt, don't you fear," he growled savagely. "As for you, King, you and me ain't done. I'll get you where there's no old fool to butt in, and I'll break every bone in your body."
"I'll be ready, Brodie," said King. He watched the great hulking figure as it went out; two hundred and fifty pounds of brawn there, every ounce of it packed with power and the cunning of brutish battle. If he ever fought Swen Brodie, just man to man, with only the weapons nature gave them, what would the end be?
But Brodie was gone, his shadow withdrawn from the doorstep, and he had his business with Honeycutt. He left the door wide open so that no one might come suddenly upon them and turned to the old man.
"Put your gun down, Honeycutt," he said quietly. "I want to talk with you."
"I got the big stiff on the run!" mumbled the old man. "He cain't come an' bulldoze me. Not me, he cain't. No, nor if Swen Brodie cain't git the best of me, no other man can," he added meaningly, glaring at King.
"There's that box on the table," said King. "Maybe you'll want to put it away before he makes you another visit."
Honeycutt hastily set his gun down, leaning it against the wall with both hammers still back, and shambled to the table. He caught the box up and hugged it to his thin old breast, breathing hard.
"If there's money in it——" said King, knowing well that the old miser had money secreted somewhere.
"Who said there was money? Who said so?"
He went to his tumbled bunk in a corner, sat down on it, thrusting the box out of sight under the untidy heap of dirty bedding.
"I ain't talkin'," he said. He glanced at his gun. "Yougit, too."
King felt that he could not have selected a more inopportune moment for his visit, and already began to fear that he would have no success to-day. But it began to look as though it were a question of now or never; Brodie would return despite the shotgun, and Brodie might now be looked to for rough-shod methods. So, in face of the bristling hostility, he was set in his determination to see the thing through to one end or another. To catch an interest which he knew was always readily awakened, he said:
"Brodie and Parker were on Lookout Ridge day before yesterday. Brodie shoved Parker over.At Lookout Ridge, Honeycutt." He stressed the words significantly while keenly watching for the gleam of interest in the faded eyes. It came; Honeycutt jerked his head up.
"I wish I'd of shot him," he wailed. "I wish to God I'd of blowed his ugly head off."
"It might have saved trouble," admitted King coolly. "Also, it might have been the job to hang you, Honeycutt. Better leave well enough alone. But listen to me: Brodie told you, and he meant it, that it was going to be Brodie or King who got away with this deal."
"He lied! Like you lie!" Here was Honeycutt probed in his tenderest spot. "It'll be me! Me, I tell you. I'm the only man that knows, I'm the only man that's got the right—"
"Brodie spoke of right. No one has a right more than any other man. It's treasure-trove, Honeycutt; it's the man's who can find it and bring it in."
"That'll be me. You'll see. Think I'm old, do you?" He spoke jeeringly and clenched a pair of palsied fists. "I'm feelin' right peart this spring; by summer I'll be strong as a young feller again."
"By summer will be too late. Don't I tell you that already Brodie has gone as far as Lookout Ridge? That means he's getting hot on the trail of it, doesn't it? As hot as I am."
"Then what are you comin' pesterin' me for? If you know where it is?"
"I don't know." Honeycutt cackled and rubbed his hands at the admission. "But I'm going to find out. So, probably, is Brodie. Now, look here, Honeycutt; I haven't come to browbeat you as Brodie did. I am for making you a straight business proposition. If you know anything, I stand ready to buy your knowledge. In cold, hard cash."
"No man ain't got the money—not enough—not any Morgan orRock'feller——"
King began opening the parcel he had brought from the post-office. As he cut the heavy cord with his pocket-knife Honeycutt looked on curiously. King stepped to the table, standing so that out of the corners of his eyes he commanded both doors, and stripped off the wrapping-paper.
"Look sharp, Honeycutt," he commanded. "Here's money enough to last you as long as you live. All yours if you can tell me what I want to know."
A golden twenty-dollar coin rolled free, shone with its virgin newness and lay on the table-top, gleaming its lure into the covetous old eyes. Another followed it and another. King regretted that there were not more, that the parcel contained banknotes for the most part. He began counting it out.
"There's one thousand dollars. Right in that pile," he said. "One thousand dollars."
"One thousand dollars. An' some of it gold. New-lookin', ain't it, Mark?Let me have the feel of one of them twenties."
King tossed it; it fell upon the bedding, and Honeycutt's fingers dived after it and held it tight. He began rubbing it, caressing it.
King went on counting.
"One more thousand in this pile," he said. "That's two thousand,Honeycutt!"
"Two thousand," repeated Honeycutt, nodding. He was sucking at his lips, his mouth puckered, his cheeks sunken in. He got up and shambled on his cane close to the table, leaning against it, thrusting his peering eyes down.
King counted out the last crisp note.
"Three thousand dollars." He stepped back a pace.
"Three thousand dollars! That's a might of money, Mark. Three thousand dollars all on my table." His thin voice was a hushed whisper now. "I never seen that much money, not all at once and spread out."
"It's likely that you'll never see that much again. Unless you and I do business."
Honeycutt did not answer, perhaps had not heard. His emaciated arms were uplifted; he had let his cane go, supporting himself by leaning hard against the table; his arms curved inward, his fingers were like claws, standing apart. Slowly the hands descended; the fingers began gathering the few gold pieces, stacking them, lingering with each separate one, smoothing at it. Gold spoke directly and eloquently to what stood for a soul in Loony Honeycutt; banknotes had a voice which he understood but which could never move him, thrill him, lift him to ecstatic heights, as pure musical, beautiful gold could.
"It's a sight of money, Mark," he whispered "It's a sight of money."
King held his silence. His whole argument was on the table.
* * * * *
Only now and then did King catch a glimpse of Honeycutt's eyes, for the most part hidden by his lowered lids and bent head. At such times, though he had counted on having to do with cupidity, he was startled by the look he saw Here was the expression of the one emotion which dwelt on in the withered, time-beaten body; here waslovein one of its ten thousand forms. Love that is burning desire, that quenches all other spark of the spirit, that is boundless; love of a hideously grotesque and deformed sort; love defiled, twisted, misshapen as though Eros had become an ugly, malformed, leering monstrosity. That love which is the expression of the last degree of selfish greed, since it demands all and gives nothing; that love which is like a rank weed, choking tenderer growths; or more like a poisonous snake. Now it dominated the old man utterly; the world beyond the rectangular top of the table did not exist; now its elixir poured through his arteries so that for the first time in months there came pinkish spots upon the withered cheeks, showing through the scattering soiled grey hairs of his beard.
… Suddenly King went to the door, standing in the sunshine, filling his lungs with the outside air. The sight of the gloating miser sickened him. More than that. It sickened his fancies so that for a minute he asked himself what he and Brodie were doing! The lure of gold. The thing had hypnotized him; he wished that he were out in the mountains riding among the pines and cedars; listening to the voice of the wilderness. It was clean out there. Listening to Gloria's happy voice. Living in tune with the springtime, thinking a man's thoughts, dreaming a man's dreams, doing a man's work. And all for something other than just gold at the end of it.
But the emotion, like a vertigo, passed as swiftly as it had come. For he knew within himself that never had that twisted travesty of love stirred within him; that though he had travelled on many a golden trail it was clean-heartedly; that it was the game itself that counted ever with him and no such poisonous emotions as grew within the wretched breast of Loony Honeycutt. And these golden trails, though inevitably they brought him trail fellows like Honeycutt, like Swen Brodie, were none the less paths in which a man's feet might tread without shame and in which the mire might be left to one side.
He turned back to the room. Honeycutt was near the bunk, groping for his shotgun. He started guiltily, veiled his eyes, and returned empty-handed to the table.
"If it was all in gold, now," said Honeycutt hurriedly.
King made no reference to Honeycutt's murderous intent.
"That paper is the same thing as gold," he said. "The government backs it up."
"I know, I know. But what's a gove'ment? They go busted, don't they, sometimes? Same as folks? Gold don't go busted. There ain't nothin' else like gold. You can tie to it. It won't burn on you an' it won't rust." He shook his head stubbornly. "There ain't nothin' like gold. If that was all in twenty-dollar gold pieces, now——"
"I'll get a car here," said King. "We'll drive down to Auburn and take a train to San Francisco. And there I'll undertake to get you the whole thing in gold. Three thousand dollars. That is one hundred and fifty twenty-dollar pieces."
But old Honeycutt, sucking and mouthing, shook his head.
"I couldn't leave here, an' you know it. I—I got things here," he said with a look of great cunning, "I wouldn't go away from. Not if horses was pullin' me."
"You can bring those things along——"
Honeycutt cried out sharply at that.
"You know I wouldn't durst! With the world full of robbers that would be after me like hounds runnin' down a rabbit. I won't go; you cain't make me. No man cain't."
King's patience deserted him.
"I am not going to make you do anything. Further, I am not going to put in any more time on you. I have offered to pay you three thousand dollars for what you know—and there is the very strong likelihood that you don't know a bit more than I do——"
"Don't know!" shrieked Honeycutt. "Wasn't I a boy grown when the dyin', delerious man stumbled in on the camp? Didn't I hear him talk an' didn't I see what he had in his fist? Wasn't I settin' right side by side with Gus Ingle when that happened? Wouldn't I of been one to go, if it hadn't of been that I had a big knife-cut in my side you could of shoved a cat in—give to me by a slant-eyed cuss name of Baldy Winch. Didn't I watch 'em go, the whole seven of 'em, Baldy Winch, rot him, jeerin' at me an' me swearin' I'd get him yet, him an' Gus Ingle an' Preacher Ellson an' the first Brodie an' Jimmy Kelp an' Manny Howard an' the Italian? Wasn't I there?" He was almost incoherent.
"Were you?" said King. "And Baldy Winch, the one who knifed you——?"
The sucking old mouth emitted a dry chuckle.
"An' didn't I keep my promise? That very winter after Baldy was the only man to git back. With my side just healin' didn't I make my way through the snow out to where he was——"
"His cabin on Lookout?"
"With an axe I got there! An' him havin' a gun an' pistol an' knife. Phoo! What good did it do him? An' didn't I square with him by takin' what I wanted?"
"Gold?"
The old dry cackle answered the question; the bleary eyes were bright with cunning.
"If I don't know nothin'," jibed Honeycutt, "what're you askin' me for?"
King had learned little that he did not already know. He came back to the table and began gathering up the money.
"Wait a minute, Mark," pleaded the old man, restless as he understood that the glittering coins were to be taken away. "Let's talk a while. You an' me ain't had a good chat like this for a year."
"I'm going," retorted King. "But I'll make you one last proposition." He thrust into his pocket everything excepting five twenty-dollar gold pieces. These he left standing in a little pile. "I'll give you just exactly one hundred dollars for a look at what is in that box of yours."
In sudden alarm the old man shambled back to his bunk, his hands on the bedding over the box.
"You'd grab it an' run," he clacked. "You'd rob me. You're worse thanBrodie——"
"You know better than that," King told him sternly. "If I wanted to rob you I'd do it without all this monkey business."
In his suspicious old heart Honeycutt knew that. He battled with himself, his toothless old mouth tight clamped.
"I'll go you!" he said abruptly. "Stand back. An' give me the money first."
King gave him the money and drew back some three or four paces. Honeycutt drew out the box, held it lingeringly, fought his battle all over again, and again went down before the hundred dollars. He opened the box upon a hinged lid; he made a smooth place in the covers; he poured out the contents.
What King saw, three articles only, were these: an old leather pouch, bulging, probably with coins; a parcel; and a burnished gold nugget. The nugget, he estimated roughly, would be worth five hundred dollars were it all that it looked from a dozen feet away. The parcel, since it was enwrapped in a piece of cloth, might have been anything. It was shaped like a flat box, the size of an octavo volume.
Honeycutt leered.
"If Swen Brodie had of knowed what he had right in his hands," he gloated, "he'd never of let go! Not even for a shotgun at his head!"
"Brodie hasn't gone far. He'll come back. You have your last chance to talk business with me, Honeycutt. Brodie will get it next time."
"Ho! Will he? Not where I'm goin' to hide it, Mark King. I got another place; a better place; a place the old hell-sarpint himself couldn't find."
* * * * *
King left him gloating and placing his treasures back in his box. In his heart he knew that Brodie would come again. Soon. It began to look as though Brodie had the bulge on the situation. For that which Mark King could not come at by fair means Brodie meant to have by foul. For he had little faith in the new "hidin'-place."
But on a near-by knoll, where she sat with her back to a tree, was Gloria. He turned toward her; she waved. He saw that Brodie and two men with him were looking out of a window of the old Honeycutt barn; he heard one of them laughing. They were looking at Gloria——
King quickened his step to come to her, his blood ruffled by a new anger which he did not stop to reason over. He could imagine the look in Swen Brodie's evil little eyes.
Chapter VII
Gloria was genuinely glad to see King returning to her. She came to meet him, smiling her glad welcome.
"It seemed that you were gonehours," she explained. "I never saw such a dreary, lonesome place as this sleepy little town. It gives me the fidgets," she concluded laughingly.
"These old mining camps have atmospheres all their own," he admitted understandingly. "Once they were the busiest, most frantic spots of the whole West; thousands of men hurrying up and down, all full of great, big, golden hopes. They're gone, but I sometimes half believe their ghosts hang on; the air is full of that sort of thing. A dead town turned into a ghost town. It gets on your nerves."
She nodded soberly.
"That's what I felt, though I didn't reason it all out." Her quick smile came back as she looked up into his face and confessed: "My, it's good to have you back."
"Come," he said. "We'll go and have lunch. You've no idea how much gayer things will look then."
"We're not going to eathere," she announced, already gay. "I stopped in at a little funny store and ordered some things. Let's start back, take them with us, and picnic in the first pretty spot out of sight of old houses."
As side by side they went along through the sunshine King noted how Brodie and a couple of men came out to look after them. He heard the low, sullen bass of the unforgettable voice; saw that Brodie had left his companions and was going straight to old Honeycutt's shanty. King frowned and for an instant hung on his heel, drawing Gloria's curious look.
"You don't like that big man with the big voice," said Gloria.
"No," he said tersely.
"It is Swen Brodie?"
"Yes. But how do you know?"
"Oh, I know lots of things people don't think I know! All girls do.Girls are rather knowing creatures; I wonder if you realize that?"
"I don't know much about girls," he smiled at her.
She pondered the matter for a dozen steps, swinging her hat at her side and looking away across the housetops to the mountains. She did not know any other man who would have said that in just that way. The words were frank; all sincerity; that is, nothing lay behind them. Archie and Teddy, any of her boy friends in town—they knew all about girls! Or thought that they did. Mr. Gratton with his smooth way; he led her to suppose that he had been giving girls a great deal of studious thought for many years, and that only after this thorough investigation did he feel in a position to declare herself to be the most wonderful of her sex.
"Don't you like girls?" she asked. For once she wasn't "fishing"; she wanted to know.
"Of course I do," he told her heartily. "As well as a man can—under the circumstances."
"You mean not knowing them better?" When he nodded she looked up at him again, hesitated, and then demanded: "You like me, don't you?"
As the question popped out she understood even more clearly than before that Mark King was utterly different from her various "men friends." She had never asked a man that before; she was not accustomed to employing either that direct method or matter-of-fact tone. Just now there was no hint of the coquette in her; she was just a very grave-eyed girl, as serious in hertête-á-têtewith an interesting male as she could have been were she sixty years old. And she was concerned with his answer; already she knew that he had a way of being very direct and straight from the shoulder.
"Of course I do," he said heartily, a little surprised by the abruptness of the question and yet without hesitation. "Very much."
She flushed prettily; she, Gloria Gaynor, flushed up because Mark King said in blunt, unvarnished fashion: "I like you very much." The grave sobriety went out of her eyes; they shone happily. When they reached the "funny little store" she was humming a snatch of a bright little waltz tune. And she was thinking, without putting the thought into words: "And I like you very much. You are quite the most splendid man I ever saw."
King laughed over Gloria's order. Some bars of sweetened chocolate, a bag of cookies with stale frosting in pink and white, a diminutive tin of sardines, and two bottles of soda-water.
"Fine," he chuckled, "as far as it goes. Now we'll complete the larder. A small coffee-pot, handful of coffee, a tin of condensed milk, a dime's worth of sugar, can of corned beef, block of butter, loaf of bread, two tin cups. Your marketing," he grinned at her, "we'll have for dessert."
"I didn't know," countered Gloria, making a face at him, "that I was entertaining a starved wild man for lunch."
"You'll eat your half, I'll bet, and be ready for more a long time before we get home."
Gloria, impatient to be on the homeward trail, assumed command in a way which delighted King; he glimpsed the fact that she had always had her way and was thoroughly accustomed to the issuance of orders which were to be obeyed; further, he found her little way of Princess Gloria entirely captivating: already she was bullying him as all of her life she had bullied his old friend Ben.
"I'll get all of the parcels together," was what she said, "while you go for the horses. And you'll hurry, won't you, Mark?"
"On the run, Your Majesty," he laughed.
When he had saddled and returned to her Gloria was waiting with the various purchases in a barley-sack; she made a great pretence of being weighted down by the great bulk of provisions demanded by man's appetite. He took the bag from her, lifted her into her saddle, and they rode away. Gloria flicked her horse lightly with her whip and galloped ahead; as King followed he turned in the saddle and looked back toward Honeycutt's cabin. He was pulled two ways: by the girlish figure ahead, which he must follow, since it was his responsibility to bring her back to his friend Ben; by what he fancied happening between Brodie and Honeycutt. Brodie had been in ugly mood all along; he would be in uglier mood now after King's interruption and the shotgun episode. Nor could King forget what he had seen on Lookout Ridge. If Swen Brodie were sure enough of what he was about to rid himself of Andy Parker, what would he not do with old Honeycutt?
"I ought to go back," was what King said over and over to himself as he rode steadily on after Gloria. The last roof lost to sight as they turned into the mouth of a cañon, he shook off all thought of returning, overtook Gloria, and determined to forget both Honeycutt and Brodie for the rest of the day. To-morrow would be another day.
"There are hundreds of pretty places to picnic," said Gloria. "But it is so much jollier by running water."
"If you can fight down that hunger of yours for a few miles," he told her, "I'll show you the prettiest picnic spot you ever saw. And one, by the way, that precious few folks know about. It's tucked away as if the mountains had the notion to hide it from all invaders."
She was immediately all eagerness to come to it. But she was quick to see that, though King laughed with her, he retained certain serious thoughts of his own. Thoughts which, of course, had to do with his errand to-day. She wondered what had happened at Honeycutt's; if King had had any words with Swen Brodie. She had been wondering that ever since he rejoined her under the tree. But now, as then, she held back her question, since she was also wondering something else—if he would tell her without being asked.
When they came to a spring freshet which they had crossed this morning King turned off to the right, riding up-stream, his horse's hoofs splashing mightily in the water. Gloria, looking on ahead, saw only rock-bound cañon walls on either hand and a tangle of alder-bushes across the creek.
"Come on," called King. "Keep your horse right in the water and in two shakes I'll show you my Hidden Place. You are going to like it."
Though she was little impressed by what she could see, she followed. Now and then an alder brushed against her; once King waited, holding back a green barrier which he had thrust to one side. The shrubbery thickened; in five minutes she could catch but broken glimpses of the slopes rising to right and left. Their horses splashed through a deep pool, and King told Gloria to let her animal have his head so that he could pick his way among submerged boulders. There came a spot where the banks sloped gently again, and here he rode out upon a bit of springy sward, ringed with alder and willow. As he dismounted Gloria looked uncertainly about her. Damp underfoot and a paradise for mosquitoes, was her thought. He caught her look and laughed.
"We get down here and leave the horses," he informed her. "They can top off their grain and hay with grass while we dine. We go only about fifty steps further but we go on foot."
She came down lightly, again all eager curiosity. King carrying their provision-bag went ahead breaking aside the shrubbery for Gloria close at his heels. They ploughed through what looked to her like an impenetrable thicket; they forded the stream where it widened out placidly, stepping on boulders. Always King went ahead, holding out his hand to her. Once she slipped, but before her boot had broken the surface of the water his arm was about her. He caught her up, holding her an instant. Gloria began to laugh. Then, as she regarded it, a thoroughly astonishing thing happened; she felt her face flushing, hotter and hotter, until it burned. She laughed again, a trifle uncertainly, and jumped unaided to the next boulder and across to the pebbly shallows, wading out through six inches of water.
"Little fool!" she chided herself, hot with vexation. "What in the world did you want to blush like that for? He will think you are about ten years old."
For his part King stood stock-still a moment, regarding the water rushing about him. He had caught her to save her from falling, he had held her for something less than a round second. And yet something of her pervaded his senses, it had been a second fraught with intimacy, her hair had blown across his face, she had thrilled through him like a sudden burst of music … When he jerked his head up and looked at her he could not see her face; she was very busy with a white pebble she had picked up. He jumped across to land and went on, and the incident sank away into silence.
He was glad to come to what he called the door to the Hidden Place. He opened it for her; that is, he shoved aside a mass of leaves, holding the branches back with his body. Gloria went through the opening thus afforded, climbed a long, slanting whitish granite slab, and cried out ecstatically at the beauty of the spot. Before her was a tiny meadow, as green and smooth as velvet, thick with white and yellow violets. About it, rimming it in clean lines which did not invade the sward, were pines, and beyond the pines, to be seen in broken glimpses among their sturdy straight trunks, were the cliffs shutting all in. Through one of these vistas she saw a white waterfall, its wide-flung drops of spray all the colours of the rainbow as the sun caught them. The water fell into a green pool, spilled over, flowed through a rock channel of its own ancient carving, and curved away through the meadow. On the edge of this granite basin, with showers of spray breaking over it, a little bird bobbed and dipped and, lifting its head with its own inimitably bright gesture, broke into a sweet singing as liquidly musical as the falling water.
"The Water-Ouzel!" cried Gloria. "See, I remembered his name. And he is here to welcome us."
Under the pines, where the ground was dry, King made their camp-fire, a small blaze of dry twigs between two flat stones. Gloria was every bit as exultantly delighted with the moment as she could have been were she really "about ten years old."
"I want to help. What can I do? Tell me, Mark, what can I do? Oh, the coffee; you can't make coffee without water, can you?" She caught up the new tin coffee-pot and ran across the meadow to the creek. The little bird had given over singing and watched her; when she was mindful of his previous rights and did not come too near his waterfall, he gave over any foolish notion he may have had of flight and cocked his eye again at the pool. Perhaps the coffee-pot put him in mind of his own dinner. Gloria, kneeling at her task, watched him. He seemed to reflect a moment; then with a sudden flirt and flutter he had broken the surface of the water and was gone out of sight. She gasped; he had gone right under the waterfall, a little bundle of feathers no bigger than her clenched hand. She knelt with one knee getting wet and never knowing it; she began to feel positive that the hardy, headlong little fellow surely must be battered to death and drowned. Then with the abruptness of a flash of light there he was again, on the surface now, driving himself forward toward the bank. And there he sat again on his rock, the water flung from him to flash and mingle with the falling spray, his head back, his throbbing little throat pouring out his fluent melody. Gloria laughed happily and went back to King and the fire with her pot of water.
* * * * *
"I love this!" said Gloria softly.
She was drinking a tin cup of strong cheap coffee cooled with condensed milk; in her other hand was a thick man-made sandwich of bread, butter, and corned beef. King laughed.
"What?" he demanded. "What particular article of my daintily served luncheon has made the great hit with you? Is it, perhaps, the rancid butter that you adore?"
"You know. I love this." Her look embraced the universe—began with the dying fire, swept on beyond the tree-tops against the deep blue of sky. "I don't know why people live in cities, with all of this shut out."
"The call of the wild!" He spoke lightly and yet he glimpsed a soul really stirred; saw that for the moment, if for no longer, the great solitudes held her enthralled. More seriously he added: "It's the blood of your ancestors. It is just getting a chance to make itself heard. The racket of Market Street drowns it out."
She nodded thoughtfully. They did full justice to their lunch, finished with her purchases for dessert, quite as he had prophesied, and lazed through the nooning hour. Gloria lay on a yielding mat of pine-needles, her eyes grave as her spirit within her was grave, moved by influences at once vague, restless, and tremendous. This was not her first day in the woods, and yet she felt strangely that it was. He had spoken of her "ancestors." She knew little of her mother's and her father's forbears; she had never been greatly concerned with individuals whom she had never known. In a way she had been led to think, by her own mother, however so innocently, that she was "living them down." They had been of a ruder race that had lived in a ruder day. In San Francisco, to Miss Gloria Gaynor in a pretty new gown, one of a cluster of dainty girls, those grandparents had seemed further away than the one step of removal between them and her nearer blood. To-day they came near her, very near, indeed, for the hour that she lay looking up at the sky. Not many words passed between her and King; he sat, back to tree, and smoked his pipe and was quite content with the silence.
She started out of a reverie to find King standing up, his body rigid as he stood in the attitude of one who listens, his head a little to one side, his eyes narrowed.
"Wait for me," he said. "I'll be back in just a minute."
She sat up and watched him. He went back to the sloping granite slab, over it, down among the alders, and out of sight. For a moment she heard him among the bushes; then as all sound made by him died away there was only the purl of the creek and the eternal murmur of the pines. Now it seemed to her more silent than before, even when King had sat wordlessly near her. And yet, incongruously, whereas the silence was deepened by utter solitude, the voices of running water and stirring trees rose clearer, louder, more insistent. A falling pine-needle, striking all but noiselessly at her side, made her turn swiftly.
Only now did she hear that other sound, which King had detected. It was the thud of horses' hoofs; with it came men's voices faintly. King had gone that way, Gloria stood up, smothered under a sense of aloneness She resented his going; she was on the verge of calling to him; her heart began to beat faster. She wasn't afraid … she didn't think she was afraid….
When he came up over the rock again, gone but a few moments, true to his word, she ran to meet him. She had not been afraid, but engulfed by an emotion which had seemed not born within her but a mighty emanation of the woods themselves, and which in its effect was not unlike fear. An emotion which, now that King was here, was lifted out of her and blown away like a whiff of smoke before the mountain winds. She looked at him with new curiosity, wondering at herself, wondering at him that his presence or absence could make all this world of difference. She saw him in a new, bright light, as one may see for the first time a stranger on whom much depends. He was strong, she thought; strong of body, of mind, of heart. He was like the mountains, which were not complete without him. His eyes were frank and clear and honest; and yet they were, for her, filled with mystery. For he was man, and his physical manhood was splendidly, vigorously vital. She had danced with men and boys, flirted with them, made friends of a sort with them. Yet none of them had set her wondering as King did. The repressed curl of his short, crisp hair, the warm tan of his face and hands and exposed throat, the very gleam of his perfect teeth, and the flow of the muscles under his shirt—these things by the sheer trick of opposites sent her fancies scurrying. To Gratton. How unlike the two men were. And how glad she was that now it was King coming up over the rock to her…. It had been to Gratton that she had said: "He is every inch a man!" She stopped abruptly and waited for him to come to her side.
"We must be going," he said. "You have rested?"
She nodded, and he began gathering up coffee-pot, cups, scraps of paper; bits of food he left for bird and chipmunk, but the tin cans were dropped behind an old log and covered over with leaves. She would not have thought of that; she understood the reason and was glad that their own arrival here had not been spoiled for them by finding a litter of other campers' leavings. He stamped out the few embers of their fire, and, not entirely satisfied, though there was but little danger of forest fires here in green young June, nevertheless went to the creek for water and doused the one or two black charred sticks which still emitted thin wisps of smoke.
"Those men?" queried Gloria when it was clear that he would require prompting. "Who were they?"
"Some chaps from Coloma, packing off into the woods."
"Swen Brodie?" she demanded.
"Yes. Swen Brodie and half a dozen of his ilk."
"We will overtake them? Is that why you are in a hurry now?"
"No. We won't see anything of them. That's what I went to find out. We are within a few hundred yards of the fork in the trail; they turned off to the right, as I thought they would."
"You would like to follow after them?" She gathered that from a vague something in his voice and from a look, not so vague, in his eyes. "If I were not along you would go the way they have gone?"
"Yes," he admitted. "But you are along, you know! What is more,"—as he realized that she might fear he resented her being with him,—"I am glad that you are. And now shall we start? We've a long ride ahead of us yet."
She followed him down through the alders; at the pool where she had slipped before, and he had held her in his arms, she was very careful not to slip now. Nor did they look at each other while she lightly touched his hand and they crossed over. For an hour, until the wilderness worked its green magic upon them again, they were a very silent man and girl, he pondering on Brodie and his men pushing on into the solitudes, she wondering many things about her companion—and about herself.
Chapter VIII
Through the long shadows of evening they rode back to the log house. While King unsaddled, Gloria stood watching him; her eyes shone softly through the dusk.
"It has been a truly wonderful day," she said simply.
"It is you who have been wonderful," he answered stoutly. "I know you are not used to long rides like ours to-day; I know you are tired out. And you never gave a sign."
"The blood of my ancestors," she laughed happily.
In the house Gratton looked at them sharply and suspiciously; Archie and Teddy saw only Gloria through sorrowful eyes. King, with a nod to the various guests and a few words with Mrs. Gaynor, entirely given to warm praise of her daughter, drew Ben aside for a discussion of conditions as he had found them and left them to-day. He was dead sure that Brodie had gone back to Honeycutt, had gotten what he wanted, and was off in a bee-line to put to the proof the old man's tale.
Gloria was off to bed early, saying "good-night everybody" rather absently. She climbed up the stairs wearily. When her mother slipped away from the others, having started the victrola and urged them to dancing, she found Gloria ready for bed but standing before her window, looking out at the first stars. Mrs. Gaynor discovered in her little daughter a new, grave-eyed uncommunicativeness. Gloria usually had so many bright, gushing things to say after a day of pleasure, but to-night she appeared oddly preoccupied.
"Oh, I'm dead tired, mamma," she said impatiently. "Nothing happened.I'll tell you to-morrow—anything I can think of. And now, good-night;I'm so sleepy." She kissed her mother and added: "I didn't tell Markgood-night—"
"Mark? Already, my dear?"
"He was outside with papa," said Gloria, slipping into bed. "Will you tell him good-night for me?"
"He's gone," retorted her mother, with a certain relish.
"Gone!" Gloria sat up, a very pretty picture of consternation. "Where?"
"Back into the woods. Where he came from, of course. I actually think," and she laughed deprecatingly though with a shrewd watchful look to mark her daughter's quick play of expression, "that that man couldn't sleep two consecutive nights under a roof. His clothes smell like a pine-tree. He wouldn't understand us any more than we could understand him, I suppose."
Gloria was silent and thoughtful. Then, "Good-night, mamma," she offered again, her cheek snuggled against her pillow. "And put out the light as you go, please."
Mrs. Gaynor, accepting her dismissal though reluctantly, sighed and went out. As the door closed Gloria tossed back the covers and sprang out of bed, going again to her window. She watched the mountain ridges turn blacker and blacker; saw a second star and another and suddenly the heavens filled with a softly glimmering spray of twinkling lights; she heard the night wind rustling, tender with vague voices. A tiny shiver shook the white shoulders, a shiver not from cold, since not yet had the air chilled. Through her mind swept a dozen vivid pictures, all of King, most of them of him out there, alone with the night and the mountains. But she saw him also as she had seen him to-day; riding before her, breaking the alders aside, catching her as she fell. All day she had thrilled to him. Now, more than ever, she thrilled. She imagined she saw him striding along through the big boles of the pines; passing swiftly, silent and stern, through a faint patch of light; standing in the shadows, listening, his keen eyes drilling the obscurity; passing on again, vigorous, forceful, determined, and "splendid." She wondered if he would come up with Swen Brodie; most of all she wondered when she would see him again.
In all likelihood Miss Gloria, healthy, tired young animal, would have slept until noon next day had she been left to her own devices. But at nine o'clock her mother came up with a breakfast-tray. Gloria regarded it sleepily.
"I would have let you sleep, my dear," said Mrs. Gaynor, "but there are your guests, you know——"
"Hang my guests," was Gloria's morning greeting. "Just because I invited them up here do I have to give up every shred of my independence?" She was lying in identically the same position in which she had dropped off to sleep the night before; now she turned and emitted a sudden "Ouch!" Not only was she stiff from head to foot; her whole body ached as though it were nothing but bruises.
So began Gloria's day after her picnicking with Mark King. And in very much the same way her day continued. Long before the sun set she had quarrelled with Georgia, turned up her nose at Teddy, laughed derisively at poor Archie's dog-like devotion, and considerably perplexed and worried Mr. Gratton, who was astute enough to keep tactfully in the background, hurt her mother's feelings, and alarmed her father by a wild and for the instant perfectly heartfelt determination to go and be a "movie" actress. There was no dancing that night. Gloria, when they thought her upstairs, sat alone out in the gloaming, a wistful, drooping little girl surrendering sweepingly to youthful melancholia. She didn't know just what the matter was; she didn't seek for reasons and explanations; she merely stared at the far-off stars which swam in a blue blur, and felt miserable.
But morning came again, as bright as that first day in Eden; the birds sang and the air was crisp, and young blood ran pleasantly. She came down early, all radiant smiles; she kissed her mother on both cheeks and the lips, rumpled her father's hair affectionately, went for a stroll with Mr. Gratton before breakfast, craved Georgia's pardon abjectly, and made the world an abiding-place of joy for the college boys.
Gloria was mildly surprised that Gratton did not appear in the least to resent her day of adventuring with King. He was interested; he did shake his head with one of his suave smiles and murmur "Lucky dog!" when King was referred to. But his interest seemed to be chiefly in "that quaint little relic of past, turbulent days, Coloma." He had her tell him all about it; of the deserted houses, the store, everything. Hence his curiosity in Honeycutt and Brodie, and just what happened between King and them, did not stand out alone and made no impression on Gloria. Long ago Gratton had had from her lips what rumours had been repeated by her father to her mother and then relayed on to her own ears. Down in San Francisco, busied with her own youthful joys, this quest of Ben Gaynor and Mark King had had no serious import to the girl; she had merely chatted of it because of its colourful phases. Naturally, had she thought a great deal of it, she would have supposed that Gratton, in nowise concerned, was even more superficially interested than herself.
By the end of the week her guests began taking their leaves. Georgia and Connie Grayson were off to foregather with a crowd of friends at the Lake Tahoe "Tavern"; Evelyn returned to her mother in Oakland; Archie departed importantly to aid his father "in the business"; Teddy went away regretfully. Even Mr. Gratton, having lingered longest of all, went back to his city affairs, promising to run up again when he could, prophesying smilingly that he would see both Gloria and her mother in town within ten days. Ben, leaving his oldest and most dependable timber-jack to look out for the womenfolk, hastened back to the lumber-camp, where he returned like a fish to water to his old pipe and old clothes and roomy boots. And Gloria was plunged deep into loneliness.
She would walk up the creek back of the house, sit by the hour near the pool where the water came slithering down over a green and grey boulder, watching for the water-ouzel, entertained in an absent sort of way by his bobbings and flirtings and snatches of song. She dreamed day-dreams; she started expectantly every time a chipmunk made a scurrying racket in dead leaves. She made a hundred romantic conclusions to the story, just begun, by Mark King going in the night into the mountains where Brodie was. Her mind was rife with speculation, having ample food for thought in all the information she had extracted from her father. Thus, she knew of Andy Parker's death; of old Honeycutt's box; of Honeycutt's boastings of a wild youth; of Brodie's threats and King's interference and the old man's shotgun. If she could onlyknowwhat was happening now out there beyond those silent blue barriers! Night after night she stood at her window, swayed through many swift moods by her live fancies.
She grew wildly homesick for town. A theatre, dance, a ride through the park. Activity. And people. It was for her mother that she consented to remain here another week. Mrs. Gaynor declared that she must have a few more days of rest; she was worn out from a year of going eternally, entertaining or being entertained. Gloria, yielding, plunged into an orgy of letter-writing. She answered letters weeks old; she scribbled countless bright and unnecessary notes. Also she succeeded in getting her mother to drive with her frequently to Tahoe, to call on those of their friends there who had come to the mountains so early in the season. Several times they remained overnight at the Tavern.
It was after one of these absences that Jim Spalding, the old timber-jack, told Mrs. Gaynor in his abashed stammer that Mark King had showed up while they were gone. Gloria, on her way to her room, whirled and came back, and extracted the tale in its entirety, pumping it out of the brief, few-worded old Spalding in jerky details. King had appeared late yesterday afternoon, coming out of the woods. Looked like he'd been roughin' it an' goin' it hard, at that. Had told Jim he wanted to telephone. Had stuck around for a while gettin' his call through; had eaten supper with Jim; had gone back into the woods just about dark. That was all Jim knowed about it.
Rather, that was all that he supposed he knew until Miss Gloria was done with him. She dragged other bits of information to the surface. King had phoned her father; they had talked ten minutes; Mr. Gaynor was to telephone to the log house again to-morrow or next day. There would be a message for King; mos' likely from Coloma. King wanted to know something; Ben was to find out; King would turn up within a few days for the message.
Mrs. Gaynor that same day said to her daughter in a way so casual thatGloria immediately was on the alert:
"You've been very sweet to stay up here in this lonely place with me, dear. I am ready to go at any time now. Shall we go to-morrow?"
"Mother thinks she is so deep!" was Gloria's unspoken comment.
"We've such a lot of packing to do," said Gloria, with an assumption of carelessness far more artistic than her mother's. "And I'm as sleepy and lazy as an owl after being up so late last night." Her yawn, softly patted by four pink-and-white fingers, was as ingenuous as a kitten's. "I'm really in no hurry, mamma. To-morrow, if we're ready. Or next day."
They were still in the log house when, twenty-four hours later, the telephone rang, and Gloria, quick to forestall her mother, heard the operator saying: "Coloma calling Ben Gaynor's residence."
"Coloma!" thought Gloria with a quickened heartbeat. Then it wouldn't be her father, after all; it would be Mark King——
But her father it was, and she was disappointed. The message, however, was for King.
"Mark will show up in a day or so," he said. "Tell him that I did as he asked; that Brodie is in and out from here, the Lord knows what about; that old Honeycutt boasts that what he has hidden nobody is going to find. I think if he ever talks to anybody it will be to me, and I'll run in and see him whenever I get a chance to get over here. And tell King that—that——Oh, I guess that's all; better let me have a word with your mother."
Ben Gaynor was never the man for successful subterfuge, especially with his daughter; she could read every look in his eye, every twitch of his mouth, and now, over many miles of country telephone lines, she knew that her beloved old humbug of a male parent was "holding out on her." Her first impulse was to face him down and demand to be told the rest. But realizing that a father at the end of a long-distance line was possessed of a certain strategic advantage presenting more difficulties than a mother at hand, she said lightly:
"All right, papa. I'll call her. Be sure you take good care of yourself. Bydie." She relinquished the telephone instrument to her mother and stood waiting.
She could hear the buzzing of her father's voice but no distinct word. Her mother said "Yes?" and "Yes," and "Yes, Ben." And then: "Oh,Ben! I don't understand." And then her mother's voice sharpened, and she cut into something Gaynor was saying: "I can't say anything likethat! It is as though we suspected him of being underhanded. And——"
Such scraps of talk were baffling, and Gloria, with scant patience for the baffling, moved up and down restlessly. When her mother had clicked up the receiver, Gloria followed her and demanded to be told. Mrs. Gaynor looked worried; said it was nothing, and refused to talk. But in five minutes her daughter knew everything Gaynor had said. King was to be told that Gratton, instead of going straight to San Francisco, had gone down to Placerville, and next had turned up at Coloma; that he had spent three days there; that he had gone several times to Honeycutt's shanty, and had been seen, more than once, with Swen Brodie.
"It's an outrage," cried Mrs. Gaynor, "to retail all that to Mark King. What business of his is it if Mr. Gratton does go to Coloma, or anywhere else?"
"That's for you and papa to argue out," said Gloria serenely.
"We are going back to San Francisco to-morrow!"
"I'm not. You know I'm not ready to go yet."
"That is very undutiful, Gloria," said her mother anxiously. "When your own mother——"
"Oh, let's not get tragic! And, anyway, papa wanted us to stay until Mr.King came, so that we could tell him."
"Jim Spalding will be here; he can tell——"
"Why, mamma! After papa has trusted tousto see that his message is delivered!" Gloria looked shocked, incredulous. "Surely——"
So they waited for Mark King to come again out of the forest. All the next day Gloria, dressed very daintily and looking so lovely in her expectancy that even old Jim Spalding's eyes followed her everywhere, watched from the porch or a window or her place by the creek. She was sure that he would step out of the shadows into the sun with that familiar appearance of having just materialized from among the tree trunks; over and over she was prepared, with prettily simulated surprise, to greet his coming. But the day passed, night drove them indoors to a cosy fireplace and lights and fragments of music which Gloria played wistfully or crashingly in bursts of impatience, and still he did not come. Mrs. Gaynor went off to bed at nine o'clock; Gloria, suddenly absorbed in a book, elected to sit up and finish her chapter. She outwatched the log fire; at eleven o'clock the air was chill, and Gloria as she went upstairs shivered a little and felt tired and vaguely sad.