The Sky Line of Spruce by Edison Marshall

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She nodded. In that eerie moment of suspense she knew she must hear what
he had to tell her.

"Don't wait to see what happens to me," he went on. "I'll either go out
or I'll live--you really can't help me any. Where's the rifle?"

"The rifle was broken--when the tree fell."

"I knew it would be. I saw it coming." He rested, waiting for further
breath. "Beatrice--please, please don't stay here, trying to save me."

"Do you think I would go?" she cried.

"You must. The food--is about gone. Just enough to last one person
through to the Yuga cabins--with berries, roots. Take the pistol.
There's six shots or so--in the box. Make every one tell. Take the dead
grouse too. The rifle's broken and we can't get meat. It's
just--death--if you wait. You can just make it through now."

"And leave you here to die, as long as there's a chance to save you?"
the girl answered. "You couldn't get up to get water--or build a fire--"

He listened patiently, but shook his head at the end. "No, Bee--please
don't make me talk any more. It's just death for both of us if you stay.
The food is gone--the rifle broken. Your father's gang'll be here sooner
or later--and they'd smash me, anyway. I could hardly fight 'em off with
those few pistol shells--but by God I'd like to try--"

He struggled for breath, and she thought he had slipped back into
unconsciousness. But in a moment the faltering current of his speech
began again.

"Take the pistol--and go," he told her. "You showed me to-day how to
give up--and I don't want to kill--your father--any more. I renounce it
all! Ezram--forgive me--old Ez that lay dead in the leaves." He smiled
at the girl again. "So don't mind leaving me. Life work's all
spent--given over. Please, Beatrice--you'd just kill yourself without
aiding me. Wait till the sun comes up--then follow up the river--"

Unconsciousness welled high above him, and the lids dropped over his
eyes. The gloom still pressed about the cavern, yet a sun no less
effulgent than that of which he had spoken had risen for Ben. It was his
moment of renunciation, glorious past any moment of his life. He had
renounced his last, little fighting chance that the girl might live. And
Ezram, watching high and afar, and with infinite serenity knowing at
last the true balance of all things one with another, gave him his full
forgiveness.

The girl began to strip the wet clothes from his injured body.

XXXVI

The trail was long and steep into Back There for Jeffery Neilson and his
men. Day after day they traveled with their train of pack horses,
pushing deeper into the wilds, fording mighty rivers, traversing silent
and majestic mountain ranges, climbing slopes so steep that the packs
had to be lightened to half before the gasping animals could reach the
crest. They could go only at a snail's pace,--even in the best day's
travel only ten miles, and often a single mile was a hard, exhausting
day's work.

Of course there was no kind of a trail for them to follow. As far as
possible they followed the winding pathways of big game--as long as
these led them in their general direction--but often they were obliged
to cut their way through the underbrush. Time after time they
encountered impassable cliffs or rivers from which they were obliged to
turn back and seek new routes; they found marshes that they could not
penetrate; ranges they could not climb; wastes of slide rock where they
could make headway only at a creeping pace and with hourly risk of their
lives.

They had counted on slow travel, but the weeks grew into the months
before they even neared the obscure heart of Back There where they
thought Ben and Beatrice might be hidden. The way was hard as they had
never dreamed. Every day, it seemed to them, brought its fresh tragedy:
a long back-trailing to avoid some impassable place, a fatiguing
digression, perhaps several hours of grinding work with the axe in order
to cut a trail. Sometimes the harness broke, requiring long stops on
the trail to repair it, the packs slipped continually from the hard
going; and they found it increasingly difficult to secure horse feed for
the animals.

Even Indian ponies cannot keep fat on such grass as grows in the deep
shade of the spruce. They need the rich growths of the open park lands
to stiffen them for the grinding toil; and even with good feeding,
foresters know that pack animals must not be kept on the trail for too
many days in succession. Jeffery Neilson and his men disregarded both
these facts, with the result that the animals lost flesh and strength,
cutting down the speed of their advance. Oaths and shouts were
unavailing now: only cruel blows could drive them forward at all.

They seemed to sense a great hopelessness in their undertaking. Usually
well-trained pack horses will follow their leader without question, walk
almost in his tracks, and the rider in front only has to show the way.
After the first few days of grinding toil, the morale of the entire
outfit began to break. The horses broke away into thickets on each side;
and time after time, one hour upon another, the horsemen had to round
them up again. When they came to the great rivers--wild tributaries of
the Yuga--they had to follow up the streams for days in search of a
place to ford. Then they were obliged to carry the packs across in small
loads, making trip after trip with the utmost patience and toil. The
horses, broken in spirit, took the wild waters just as they climbed the
steep slopes, with little care whether they lived or died.

The days passed, June and July. Ever they moved at a slower pace. One of
the horses, giving up on a steep pitch and frenzied by Ray's cruel,
lashing blows, fell off the edge of the trail and shot down like a
plummet two hundred feet into the canyon below--and thereupon it became
necessary not only to spend the rest of the day in retrieving and
repairing the supplies that had fallen with him, but also to heap bigger
loads on the backs of the remaining horses. And always they were faced
by the cruel possibility that this whole, mighty labor was in
vain,--that Ben and Beatrice might have gone to their deaths in the
rapids, weeks before.

The food stores brought for the journey were rapidly depleted. The
result was that they had to depend more and more upon a diet of meat.
Men can hold up fairly well on meat alone, particularly if it has a fair
amount of fat, but the effort of hunting and drying the flesh into jerky
served to cut down their speed.

The constant delays, the grinding, blasting toil of the day's march, and
particularly the ever-recurring crises of ford and steep, made serious
inroads on the morale of the three men. Just the work of urging on the
exhausted horses drained their nervous energy in a frightful stream: the
uncertainty of their quest, the danger, the scarcity of any food but
meat, and most of all the burning hatred in their hearts for the man who
had forced the expedition upon them combined to torment them; even now,
Ben Darby had received no little measure of vengeance.

No experience of their individual lives had ever presented such a daily
ordeal of physical distress; none had ever been so devastating to hope
and spirit. There was not one moment of pleasure, one instant of relief
from the day's beginning to its end. At night they went to sleep on
hastily made beds, cursing at all things in heaven and earth; they
blasphemed with growing savagery all that men hold holy and true; and
degeneracy grew upon them very swiftly. They quarreled over their
tasks, and they hated each other with a hatred only second to that they
bore Darby himself. All three had always been reckless, wicked, brutal
men; but now, particularly in the case of Ray and Chan, the ordeal
brought out and augmented the latent abnormalities that made them
criminals in the beginning, developing those odd quirks in human minds
that make toward perversion and the most fiendish crime.

Jeffery Neilson had almost forgotten the issue of the claim by now. He
had told the truth, those weary weeks before, when he had wished he had
never seen it. His only thought was of his daughter, the captive of a
relentless, merciless man in these far wilds. Never the moon rose or the
sun declined but that he was sick with haunting fear for her. Had she
gone down to her death in the rapids? This was Neilson's fondest wish:
the enfolding oblivion of wild waters would be infinitely better than
the fate Ben had hinted at in his letter. Yet he dared not turn back.
She might yet live, held prisoner in some far-off cave.

At first all three agreed on this point: that they must not turn back
until either Ben was crushed under their heels or they had made sure of
his death. Ray had not forgotten that Ben alone stood between him and
the wealth and power he had always craved. He dreamed, at first, that
the deadly hardships of the journey could be atoned for by years of
luxury and ease. His mind was also haunted with dark conjectures as to
the fate of Beatrice, but jealousy, rather than concern for her, was the
moving impulse.

Neilson knew his young partner now. He saw clearly at last that Ray was
not and had never been a faithful confederate, but indeed a malicious
and bitter enemy, only waiting his chance to overthrow his leader. They
were still partners in their effort to rescue the girl and slay her
abductor; otherwise they were at swords' points. And there would be
something more than plain, swift slaying, now. If Neilson could read
aright, the actual, physical change that had been wrought in Ray's face
foretold no ordinary end for Ben. His features were curiously drawn; and
his eyes had a fixed, magnetic, evil light. Occasionally in his darker
hours Neilson foresaw even more sinister possibilities in this change in
Ray: the abnormal intensity manifest in every look and word, the weird,
evil preoccupation that seemed ever upon him. There was not only the
fate of Ben to consider, but that of Beatrice too, out in these desolate
forests. But surely Ray's degenerate impulses could be mastered. Neilson
need not fear this, at least.

Chan Heminway, also, had developed marvelously in the journey. He also
was more assertive, less the underling he had been. He had developed a
brutality that, though it contained nothing of the exquisite fineness of
cruelty of which Ray's diseased thought might conceive, was nevertheless
the full expression of his depraved nature. He no longer cowered in fear
of Neilson. Rather he looked to Ray as his leader, took him as his
example, tried to imitate him, and at last really began to share in his
mood. In cruelty to the horses he was particularly adept; but he was
also given to strange, savage bursts of insane fury.

"We must be close on them now," Neilson said one morning when they had
left the main gorge of the Yuga far behind them. "If they're not dead
we're bound to find trace of 'em in a few days."

The hope seemed well-founded. It is impossible for even most of the wild
creatures--furtive as twilight shadows--to journey through wood spaces
without leaving trace of their goings and comings: much less clumsy
human beings. Ultimately the searchers would find their tracks in the
soft earth, the ashes of a camp fire, or a charred cooking rack.

"And when we get 'em, we can wait and live on meat until the river goes
up in fall--then float on down to the Indian villages in their canoe,"
Chan answered. "It will carry four of us, all right."

Ray, Chan, Neilson and Neilson's daughter--these made four. What
remained of Ben when Ray was through could be left, silent upon some
hushed hillside, to the mercy of the wild creatures and the elements.

Surely they were in the enemy-country now; and now a fresh fear began to
oppress them. They might expect an attack from their implacable foe at
any moment. It did not make for ease of mind to know that any brush
clump might be their enemy's ambush; that any instant a concealed rifle
might speak death to them in the silence. Ben would have every advantage
of fortress and ambush. They had not thought greatly of this matter at
first; but now the fear increased with the passing days. Even Neilson
was not wholly exempt from it. It seemed a hideous, deadly thing,
incompatible with life and hope, that they should be plunging deeper,
farther into helplessness and peril.

If mental distress and physical discomfort can constitute vengeance Ben
was already avenged. Now that they were in the hill-lands, out from the
gorge and into a region of yellow beaver meadows lying between gently
sloping hills, their apprehension turned to veritable terror. A blind
man could see how small was their fighting chance against a hidden foe
who had prepared for their coming. The skin twitched and crept when a
twig cracked about their camp at night, and a cold like death crept
over the frame when the thickets crashed under a leaping moose.

Ray found himself regretting, for the first time, that murderous crime
of his of months before. Even riches might not pay for these days of
dread and nights of terror: the recovery of the girl from Ben's arms
could not begin to recompense. Indeed, the girl's memory was
increasingly hard to call up. The mind was kept busy elsewhere.

"We're walking right into a death trap," he told Neilson one morning.
"If he is here, what chance have we got; he'd have weeks to explore the
country and lay an ambush for us. Besides, I believe he's dead. I don't
believe a human being could have got down this far, alive."

Chan too had found himself inclining toward this latter belief; without
Ray's energy and ambition he had less to keep him fronted to the chase.
Neilson, however, was not yet ready to turn back. He too feared Ben's
attack, but already in the twilight of advancing years, he did not
regard physical danger in the same light as these two younger men.
Besides, he was made of different stuff. The safety of his daughter was
the one remaining impulse in his life.

And more and more, in the chill August nights, the talk about the camp
fire took this trend: the folly of pushing on. It was better to turn
back and wait his chances to strike again, Ray argued, than to walk
bald-faced into death. Sometime Ben must return to the claim: a chance
might come to lay him low. Besides, ever it seemed more probable that
the river had claimed him.

One rainy, disagreeable morning, as they camped beside the river near
the mouth of a small creek, affairs reached their crisis. They had
caught and saddled the horses; Ray was pulling tight the last hitch.
Chan stood beside him, speaking in an undertone. When he had finished
Ray cursed explosively in the silence.

Neilson turned. He seemed to sense impending developments. "What now?"
he asked.

"I'm not going on, that's what it is," Ray replied. "Neilson, it's two
against one--if you want to go on you can--but Ray and I are going back.
That devil's dead. Beatrice is, too--sure as hell. If they ain't dead,
he'll get us. I was a fool ever to start out. And that's final."

"You're going back, eh--scared out!" Neilson commented coldly.

"I'm going back--and don't say too much about being scared out, either."

"And you too, Chan? You're against me, too?"

Chan cursed. "I'd gone a week ago if it'd been me. We knew the way
home, at least."

The old man looked a long time into the river depths. Only too well he
realized that their decision was final. But there was no answer, in the
swirling depths, to the question that wracked his heart: whether or not
in these spruce-clad hills his daughter still lived. It could only
murmur and roar, without shaping words that human ears could grasp,
never relieving the dreadful uncertainty that would be his life's curse
from henceforth. He sighed, and the lines across his brow were dark and
deep.

"Then turn the horses around, you cowards," he answered. "I can't go on
alone."

For once neither Ray nor Chan had outward resentment for the epithet.
Secretly they realized that old Neilson was to the wall at last, and
like a grizzly at bay, it was safer not to molest him. Chan went down
to the edge of the creek to water his saddle horse.

But presently they heard him curse, in inordinate and startled
amazement, as he gazed at some imprint in the mud of the shore. They saw
the color sweep from his face. In an instant his two companions were
beside him.

Clear and unmistakable in the mud they saw the stale imprint of Ben's
canoe as they had landed, and the tracks of both the man and the girl as
they had turned into the forest.

XXXVII

The dawn that crept so gray and mysterious over the frosty green of
spruce brought no hope to Beatrice, sitting beside the unconscious form
of Ben in the cave fronting the glade. Rather it only brought the tragic
truth home more clearly. Her love for him had manifested itself too late
to give happiness to either of them: even now his life seemed to be
stealing from her, into the valley of the shadow.

She had watched beside him the whole night; and now she beheld a
sinister change in his condition. He was still unconscious, but he no
longer drew his breath at long intervals, softly and quietly. He was
breathing in short, troubled gasps, and an ominous red glow was in his
cheeks. She touched his brow, only to find it burning with fever.

The fact was not hard to understand. The downpour of cold rain in which
he had lain, wounded, for so many hours had drawn the life heat out of
him, and some organic malady had combined with his bodily injuries to
strike out his life. Her predicament was one of absolute helplessness.
She was hundreds of miles--weary weeks of march--from medical attention,
and she could neither leave him nor carry him. The wilderness forces,
resenting the intrusion into their secret depths, had seemingly taken
full vengeance at last. They had seemingly closed all gates to life and
safety. They had set the trap with care; and the cruel jaws had sprung.

She sat dry-eyed, incoherent prayers at her trembling lips. Mostly she
did not touch the man, only sat at his bedside in the crude chair Ben
had fashioned for her while the minutes rolled into hours and the hours
sped the night away,--in tireless vigil, watching with lightless eyes.
Once she bent and touched her lips to his.

They were not cold now. They were warm with fever. But in the strange
twilight-world of unconsciousness he could neither know of nor respond
to her kiss. She patted down his covering and sometimes held his hard
hands warm between hers, as if she could thus keep death from seizing
them and leading him away. But her courage did not break again.

The wan light showed her his drawn face; and just for an instant her
arms pressed about it. "I won't give up, Ben," she promised. "I'll keep
on fighting--to the last minute. And maybe I can pull you through."

Beatrice meant exactly what she said: to the last minute. That did not
mean to the gray hour when, by all dictate of common sense, further
fight is useless. She meant that she would battle tirelessly as long as
one pale spark glowed in his spirit, as long as his breath could cloud a
glass. The best thing for her now, however, was rest. She was exhausted
by the strain of the night; and she must save herself for the crisis
that was sure to come. Ben was sleeping easily now; the instant when his
life hung in the balance still impended.

She built up the fire, put on water to heat, covered the man with added
blankets, then lay down on Ben's cot. Soon she drifted into uneasy
slumber, waking at intervals to serve her patient.

The hours dragged by, the night sloped down to the forest; and the dawn
followed the night. Ben's life still flickered, like a flame in the
wind, in the twilight land between life and death.

Yet little could she do for him these first few days, except, in her
simple faith, to pray. Never an hour passed but that prayers were at her
lips, childlike, direct, entreating prayers from her woman's heart. Of
all her offices these were first: she had no doubt but that they counted
most. She sat by his bedside, kept him covered with the warmest robes,
hewed wood for the fire; but as yet he had never fully emerged from his
unconsciousness. Would he slip away in the night without ever wakening?

But in the morning of the fourth day he opened his eyes vividly,
muttered, and fell immediately to sleep. He woke again at evening; and
his moving lips conveyed a message. In response she brought him steaming
grouse broth, administering it a spoonful at a time until he fell to
sleep again.

In the days that followed he was conscious to the degree that he could
drink broth, yet never recognizing Beatrice nor seeming to know where he
was. His fever still lingered, raging; yet in these days she began to
notice a slow improvement in his condition. The healing agents of his
body were hard at work; and doubt was removed that he had received
mortal internal injuries. She had set his broken arm the best she could,
holding the bones in place with splints; but in all likelihood it would
have to be broken and set again when he reached the settlements. She
began to notice the first cessation of his fever; although weeks of
sickness yet remained, she believed that the crisis was past. Yet in
spite of these hopeful signs, she was face to face with the most tragic
situation of all. Their food was almost gone.

It would be long weeks before Ben could hope for sufficient strength to
start the journey down to the settlements, even if the way were open. As
it was their only chance lay in the fall rains that would flood the
Yuga and enable them to journey down to the native villages in their
canoe. These rains would not fall till October. For all that she had
hoarded their supplies to the last morsel, eating barely enough herself
to sustain life in her body, the dread spectre of starvation waited just
without the cave. She had realized perfectly that Ben could not hope to
throw off the malady without nutritious food and she had not stinted
with him; and now, just when she had begun to hope for his recovery, she
shook the last precious cup of flour from the sack.

The rice and sugar were gone, long since. The honey she had hoarded to
give Ben--knowing its warming, nutritive value--not tasting a drop
herself. Of all their stores only a few pieces of jerked caribou
remained; she had used the rest to make rich broth for Ben, and there
was no way under heaven whereby they might procure more.

The rifle was broken. The last of the pistol shots was fired the day she
had prepared the poisoned cup for Ben.

Yet she still waged the fight, struggling with high courage and tireless
resolution against the frightful odds that opposed her. Her faith was as
of that nameless daughter of the Gileadite; and she could not yield. Not
ambition, not hatred--not even such fire of fury as had been wakened in
Wolf Darby's heart that first frenzied night on the hillside--could have
been the impulse for such fortitude and sacrifice as hers. It was not
one of these base passions--known in the full category to her rescuers
who were even now bearing down upon her valley--that kept the steel in
her thews and the steadfastness in her heart. She loved this man; her
love for him was as wholesome and as steadfast as her own self; and the
law of that love was to give him all she had.

There were few witnesses to this infinite giving of hers. Ben himself
still lingered in a strange stupor, remembering nothing, knowing neither
the girl nor himself. Perhaps the wild things saw her desperate efforts
to find food in the wilderness,--the long hours of weary searching for a
handful of berries that gave such little nourishment to his weakened
body, or for a few acorns stored for winter by bird or rodent. Sometimes
a great-antlered moose--an easy trophy if the rifle had been
unbroken--saw her searching for wocus like a lost thing in the tenacious
mud of the marshes; and almost nightly a silent wolf, pausing in his
hunting, gazed uneasily through the cavern maw. But mostly her long
hours of service in the cave, the chill nights that she sat beside Ben's
cot, the dreary mornings when she cooked her own scanty breakfast and
took her uneasy rest, the endless labor of fire-mending so that the cave
could be kept at an even heat went unobserved by mortal eyes. The
healing forces of his body called for warmth and nourishment; but for
all the might of her efforts she waged a losing fight.

What little wocus she was able to find she made into bread for Ben; yet
it was never enough to satisfy his body's craving. The only meat she had
herself was the vapid flesh that had been previously boiled for Ben's
broth; and now only a few pieces of the jerked meat remained. She
herself tried to live on such plants as the wilderness yielded, and she
soon began to notice the tragic loss of her own strength. Her eyes were
hollow, preternaturally large; she experienced a strange, floating
sensation, as if spirit and flesh were disassociated.

Still Ben lingered in his mysterious stupor, unaware of what went on
about him; but his fever was almost gone by now, and the first
beginnings of strength returned to his thews. His mind had begun to
grope vaguely for the key that would open the doors of his memory and
remind him again of some great, half-forgotten task that still
confronted him, some duty unperformed. Yet he could not quite seize it.
The girl who worked about his cot was without his bourne of knowledge;
her voice reached him as if from an infinite distance, and her words
penetrated only to the outer edges of his consciousness. It was not
strictly, however, a return of his amnesia. It was simply an outgrowth
of delirium caused by his sickness and injuries, to be wholly dispelled
as soon as he was wholly well.

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