The Sky Line of Spruce by Edison Marshall

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Neilson straightened, his eyes steely and bright under his grizzled
brows. Only too well he knew that this was the test. Affairs were at
their crisis at last. But in this final moment his love for his daughter
swept back to him in all its unmeasured fullness,--and when all was said
and done it was the first, the mightiest impulse in his life. Ben had
been kind to her, and she loved him; and all at once he knew that he
could not yield him or her to the mercy of this black-hearted man before
him.

He had lived an iniquitous life; he was inured to all except the worst
forms of wickedness; but for the moment--in love of his daughter--he
stood redeemed. He was on the right side at last. His hand drew back,
and his face was like iron.

"Shut that foul mouth!" he cautioned, with a curious, deadly evenness of
tone. "I haven't surrendered yet to you two wolves. If one of you dares
to lay a hand on Beatrice, I'll kill him where he stands."

Even as he spoke his thought went to his rifle, leaning against a dead
log ten feet away. This was the moment of test: the jealousy and rivalry
and hatred between himself and Ray had reached the crisis. And the
spirit of murder, terrible past any demon of the Pit, came stalking from
the savage forest into the ruddy firelight.

Ray leered, his muscles bunching. "And I say to you, you're a dirty
traitor too," he answered. "She ain't your daughter any more. She's Ben
Darby's squaw. She's not fit for a white man to touch any more, for all
her lies. You say one word and you'll get it too."

And at that instant the speeding pace of time seemed to halt, showing
this accursed scene, so savage and terrible in the eerie light of the
camp fire, at the edge of the haunted, breathless darkness, in vivid and
ghastly detail. Neilson leaped forward with all his power; and if his
blow had gone home, Ray would have been shattered beneath it like a tree
in the lightning blast. But Ray's arms were incredibly swift, and his
rifle leaped in his hands.

The barrel gleamed. The roar reechoed in the silence. Neilson's head
bowed strangely; and for a moment he stood swaying, a ghastly blankness
on his face; then pitched forward in the dew-wet grass.

Beatrice's last defense had fallen, seriously wounded; and Ray's arm
seized her as, screaming, she tried to flee.

XL

The shot that wounded Jeffery Neilson carried far through the forest
aisles, reechoing against the hills, and arresting, for one breathless
moment, all the business of the wilderness. The feeding caribou swung
his horns and tried to catch the scent; the moose, grubbing for water
roots in the lake bottom, lifted his grotesque head and stood like a
form in black iron. It came clear as a voice to the cavern where Ben
lay.

The man started violently in his cot. His entire nervous system seemed
to react. Then there ensued a curious state in which his physical
functions seemed to cease,--his heart motionless in his breast, his body
tensely rigid, his breath held. There was an infinite straining and
travail in his mind.

The truth was that the sound acted much as a powerful stimulant to his
retarded nervous forces. It was the one thing his resting nerve-system
needed; it was as if chemicals were in suspension in a crucible, and at
a slight jar of the glass they made mysterious union and expelled a
precipitation. Almost instantly he recognized the sound that had reached
him, with a clear and unmistakable recognition such as he had not
experienced since the night of the accident, as the report of a rifle.
His mind gave a great leap and remembered its familiar world.

A rifle--probably discharged by Beatrice in a hunt after big game. It
was true that their meat supply was low; he remembered now. Yet it was
curious that she should be hunting after dark. The gloom was deep at
the cavern mouth. Besides, he had always kept his rifle from her,
fearing that she might turn it against him. He looked about him, trying
to locate the source of the flood of light on the cavern floor. It was
the moon, and it showed that the girl was gone. He started to sit up.

But his left arm did not react just properly to the command of his
brain. It impeded him, and its old strength was impaired. For a moment
more he lay quiet, deep in thought. Of course--he had been injured by
the falling tree. He remembered clearly, now. And the rifle had been
broken.

The only possible explanation for the shot was that a rifle had been
fired by some invader in their valley--in all probability Neilson or one
of his men. Beatrice's absence would also indicate this fact: perhaps
she had already joined her father and was on her way back to Snowy Gulch
with him. In that case, why had he himself been spared?

He looked out of the door of the cavern, trying to get some idea of the
lateness of the hour. The very quality of the darkness indicated that
the night was far advanced. Neilson would not be hunting game at this
hour. Was his own war--planned long ago--even now being waged in ways
beyond his ken?

His old concern for Beatrice swept through him. With considerable
difficulty he got to his feet, then holding on to the wail, guided
himself to the shelf where they ordinarily kept their little store of
matches. He scratched one of them against the wall.

In the flaring light his eyes made a swift but careful appraisal of his
surroundings. The girl's cot had not been slept in; and to his great
amazement he saw that their food supplies were spent. Still holding to
the wall he walked to the cave mouth.

Instantly his keen eyes saw the far-off gleam of the camp fire on the
distant margin of the lake. For all that the hour was late, it burned
high and bright. He watched it, vaguely conscious of the insidious
advance of a ghastly fear. Beatrice was his ally now--if these weeks had
sent home one fact to him it was this--and her absence might easily
indicate that she was helpless in the enemy's hands. The thing suggested
ugly possibilities. Yet he could not aid her. He could scarcely walk;
even the knife that he wore at his belt was missing, probably carried by
Beatrice when she gathered roots in the woods.

But presently all questions as to his course were settled for him. His
straining ear caught the faintest, almost imperceptible vibration in the
air--a soundwave so dim and obscure that it seemed impossible that the
human mind could interpret it--but Ben recognized it in a flash. In some
great trouble and horror, in the sullen light of that distant camp fire,
Beatrice had screamed for aid.

Only by the grace of the Red Gods had he heard the sound at all. Except
for the fact that the half-mile intervening was as still as death, and
that half the way the sound sped over water, he couldn't have hoped to
perceive it. If the wind had blown elsewhere than straight toward him
from the enemy camp, or if his marvelous sense of hearing had been less
acute, the result would have been the same; and there could have been no
answer from this dark man at the cave mouth who stood so tense and
still. Finally, by instinct as much as by conscious intelligence, he
identified the sound, marked it as a reality rather than a fancy, and
read the tragic need behind it. Swiftly he started down the glade toward
her.

Yet in a moment he knew that unless he conserved his strength he could
not hope to make a fourth of the distance. At the first steps he swayed,
half staggering. He had paid the price for his weeks of illness and his
injuries. If he had been in a sick room, under a physician's care, he
would have believed it impossible to walk unsupported across the room.
But need is the mother of strength, and this was the test. Besides, he
had had several days of convalescence that had put back into his sinews
a measure of his mighty strength. Mostly he progressed by holding on to
the trees, pulling himself forward step by step.

Likely he would come too late to change the girl's fate. Yet even now he
knew he must not turn back. If the penalty were death, there must be no
hesitancy in him; he must not withhold one step.

But it was a losing fight. The hill itself seemed endless; a hundred
cruel yards of marsh must be traversed before ever he reached the
nearest point by the lake. The enemy camp from where Beatrice had called
to him lay on the far side of the lake, a distance of a full mile if he
followed around the curving shore. And black and bitter self-hatred
swept like fire through him when he realized that he could not possibly
keep on his feet for so long a way.

Was this all he had fought for--surging upward through these long, weary
weeks out of the shadow of death--only to fall dead on the trail in the
moment of Beatrice's need? Instantly he knew that nothing in his life,
no other desire or dream, had ever meant as much to him as this: that he
might reach her side in time. Even his desire for vengeance, in that
twilight madness, like Roland's, that had shaped his destiny, had been
wavering and feeble compared to this. And no moment of his existence had
ever been so dark, so bereft of the last, dim star of hope that lights
men's way in the deep night of despair.

He gave no thought to the fact of his own helplessness against three
armed men in case he did succeed in reaching their camp. The point could
not possibly be considered. The imperious instincts that forced him on
simply could not take it into reckoning. He knew only he must reach her
side and put in her service all that he had.

He fell again and again as he tried to make headway in the marsh. But
always he forced himself up and on. Only too plain he saw that the time
was even now upon him when he could no longer keep his feet at all. But
still he plunged on, and with tragically slow encroachments the shore
line drew up to him.

But he could not go on. The fire itself was hardly a quarter of a mile
distant, directly across the lake, but to follow the long shore was an
insuperable mile. Already his leg muscles were failing him, refusing to
the respond to the impulse of his nerves. Yet it might be that if he
could make himself heard his enemies would leave the girl for a moment,
at least--give her an instant's respite--while they came and dispatched
his own life. Whatever they were doing to her, there in that ring of
firelight, might be stayed for a moment, at least.

But at that instant he remembered the canoe. He had always kept it
hidden in a little thicket of tall reeds,--if only the girl had not
removed it from its place in his weeks of sickness! He plunged down into
the tall tules. Yes, the boat was still in place.

It took all the strength of his weakened body to push it out from the
reeds into the water. Then he seized the long pole they had sometimes
used to propel themselves over the lake. Except for his injured arm,
the paddle would have been better--he could have made better time and
escaped the danger of being stranded in deep water--but he doubted that
he could handle it with his faltering arm. He pushed off, putting most
of the strain on his uninjured right arm.

The canoe was strongly but lightly made, so that it could be portaged
with greatest possible ease; and his strokes, though feeble, propelled
it slowly through the water. The great, white full moon, beloved of long
ago, looked down from above the tall, dark heads of the spruce and
changed the little water-body into a miracle of burnished silver. In its
light Ben's face showed pale, but with a curious, calm strength.

The lake seemed untouched by the faint breath of wind that blew from the
distant shore. The waters lay quiet, and the trout beneath saw the black
shadow of the canoe as it passed. A cow moose and her calf sprang up the
bank with a splash, frightened by the poling figure in the stern. And on
the far shore, clear where the lake had its outlet in a small river,
even more keen wilderness eyes might have beheld the black, moving dot
that was the craft. But the distance was too far and the wind was wrong
for the keen mind behind the eyes to make any sort of an interpretation.

It might have been that Fenris the wolf, running with a female and two
younger males that he had mastered that long-ago night on the ridge,
paused in his hunting to watch and wonder. But his wild brute thoughts
were not under the bondage of memory to-night; his savage heart was
thrilled and full; and more than likely he did not even turn his head.

Ray and Chan, standing beside their prisoner in their grisly camp on the
opposite shore, might have beheld Ben's approach if weightier matters
had not occupied their minds. They had only to walk to the edge of the
firelight and stare down through a rift in the trees to see him. But
they stood with the angry glare revealing a strange and sinister
intentness in their drawn faces and ominous speculations in their evil
eyes.

XLI

It was a wilderness moon that rose over the spruce to-night,--white as
new silver, incredibly large, inscrutably mysterious. The winds had
whisked away the last pale cloud that might have dimmed its glory, and
its light poured down with equal bounty on peak and hill, forest and
yellow marsh. The heavy woods partook most deeply of its enchantment:
tall, stately trees pale and nebulous as if with silver frost, each
little stream dancing and shimmering in its light, every glade laid with
a fairy tapestry, every shadow dreadful and black in contrast. The
wilderness breathed and shivered as if swept with passion.

The wilderness moon is the moon of desire; and all this great space of
silence seemed to respond. It seemed to throb, like one living entity,
as if in longing for something lost long ago--a half-forgotten
happiness, a glory and a triumph that were gone never to return. No
creatures that followed the woods trails were dull and flat to-night.
They were all swept with mystery, knowing vague longings or fierce
desires. It was the harvest moon; but here it did not light the fields
so that men might harvest grain. Rather it illumined the hunting trails
so that the beasts of prey might find relief from the wild lusts and
seething ferment that was in their veins. But mostly the forest mood was
disconsolate, rather than savage, to-night. The wild geese on the lake
called their weird and plaintive cries, their strange complaints that no
man understands; the loons laughed in insane despair; and the coyotes
on the ridge wailed out the pain of living and the vague longings of
their wild hearts.

In the glory of that moon Fenris the wolf knew the same, resistless
longings that so many times before had turned him from the game trails.
There was something here that was unutterably dear to him,--something
that drew him, called him like a voice, and he could not turn aside.
Because he was a beast, he likely did not know the force that was
drawing him again along the lake shore. Yet the souls of the lower
creatures no man knows; and perhaps he had conscious longings,
profoundly intense, for a moment's touch of a strong hand on his
shoulder,--one never-to-be-forgotten caress from a certain god that had
gone to a cave to live. It was true that his wild instincts, ever more
in dominance these past weeks, would likely halt him at the cavern maw,
permitting no intimacy other than to ascertain that all was well. They
were too strong ever to brook man's control again. The moon was a moon
of desire, but only because it was also the moon of memory,--and perhaps
memories, stirring and exalting, were sweeping through him. Straight as
an arrow he turned toward the cave.

His followers--the gaunt female and two younger males, the structure
about which the winter pack would form--hesitated at first. They had no
commanding memories of the cavern on the far side of the lake. Yet
Fenris was their leader; by the deep-lying laws of the pack they must
follow where he led. They could not decoy him into the trails of game.
As ever they sped swiftly, silently after him.

In this forest of desires Ben knew but one,--that he might yet be of aid
to Beatrice. But he knew in his heart that it was a vain hope. He was
within a hundred yards of Ray's camp now, but the struggle to reach the
lake and the poling across its waters had brought him seemingly to the
absolute limit of his strength, clear to the brink of utter exhaustion.
Never in his life before had he known the full meaning of
fatigue,--fatigue that was like a paralysis, blunting the mechanism of
the brain, burning like a slow fire in his muscles, poisoning the vital
fluids of his nerves. Stroke after stroke, never ceasing!--The flame was
high, crackling--just before him. Through a rift in the trees he could
see the outline of two men and the slim form of the girl. Just a few
yards more.

But of all the desires that the moon invoked in the woods people there
were none so unredeemed, so wicked and cruel as this that slowly wakened
in the evil hearts of these two degenerate men, Beatrice's captors. She
sensed it only vaguely at first. All the disasters that had fallen upon
her had not taught her to accept such a thing as this: surely this would
be spared her, at least. There is a kindly blind spot in the brain that
often will not let the ugly truth go home.

For a strange, still moment Ray's face seemed devoid of all expression.
It was flat and lifeless as dark clay. Then Beatrice felt the insult of
his quickening gaze.

"Put a rope around her wrists, Chan," he said. "We don't want to take
chances on her getting away."

He spoke slowly, rather flatly. There was nothing that her senses could
seize upon--either in his face or voice to justify the swift,
strangling, killing horror that came upon her. He stood simply gazing,
and as she met his gaze her lips parted and drew back in a grimace of
terror; thus they stood until the blood began to leap fast in Chan's
veins. She needed no further disillusionment. Chan spoke behind her, a
startled oath cut off short, and she felt him moving swiftly toward her.
It was her last instant of respite; and her muscle set and drew for a
final, desperate attempt at self-defense.

She wore Ben's knife at her belt, and her hand sped toward it. But the
motion, fast as it was, came too late. Chan saw it; and leaping swiftly,
his arms went about her and pinned her own arms to her sides.

She tried in vain to fight her way out of his grasp. She writhed,
screaming; and in the frenzy of her fear she all but succeeded in
hurling him off. She managed to draw the knife clear of the sheath, yet
she couldn't raise her arm to strike. Ray was aiding his confederate
now; and in an instant more she was helpless.

Their drawn faces bent close to hers. She felt their hot hands as they
drew her wrists in front of her and fastened them with a rope. "Not too
tight, Chan," Ray advised. "We don't want her to get uncomfortable
before we're done with her. Don't tie her ankles; she can't run through
the brush with her arms tied.--Now give her a moment to breathe."

They stood on each side of her, regarding her with secret, growing
excitement. Already they had descended too far to know pity for this
girl. The wide-open eyes, so dark with terror and in contrast with the
stark paleness of her face, the lips that trembled so piteously, the
slender, girlish figure so helpless to their depraved desires moved them
not at all.

The scene was one of never-to-be-forgotten vividness. The tenderness and
mercy, most of all the restraint that has become manifest in men in
these centuries since they have left their forest lairs to live in
permanent abodes, had no place here. About them ringed the primeval
forest, ensilvered by the moon; the fire crackled with a dread ferocity;
and at the edge of the thickets the motionless form of Jeffery Neilson
lay with face buried in the soft, summer grass. All was silent and
motionless, except the fierce crackling of the fire; except a curious,
intermittent, upward twitching of the corner of Ray's lips.

"So you and Ben are bunkies now, are you?" he asked slowly, without
emphasis.

But the girl made no reply, only gazing at him with starting eyes.

"A traitor to us, and Ben's squaw!" He turned fiercely to Chan. "I guess
that gives us right to do what we want to with her. And now she can yell
if she wants to for her lover to come and save her."

She did not even try to buy their mercy by informing them where they
might find Ben. Only too well she knew that their dreadful intentions
could not be turned aside: she would only sacrifice Ben without aiding
herself. Ray moved toward her, his eyes deeply sunken, the pupils
abnormally enlarged.

"You haven't lost all your looks," he told her breathlessly. "That mouth
is still pretty enough to kiss. And I guess you won't slap--this time--"

He drew her toward him, his dark face lowering toward hers. She
struggled, trying to wrench away from him. Helpless and alone, the
moment of final horror was at hand. In this last instant her whole being
leaped again to Ben,--the man whose strength had been her fort
throughout all their first weeks in the wilds, but whom she had left
helpless and sick in the distant cavern. Yet even now he would rise and
come to her if he knew of her peril. Her voice rose shrilly to a scream.
"Ben--help me!"

And Ray's hands fell from her shoulders as he heard the incredible
answer from the shore of the lake. The brush rustled and cracked: there
was a strange sound of a heavy footfall,--slow, unsteady, but
approaching them as certain as the speeding stars approach their
mysterious destinations in the far reaches of the sky. Ray
straightened, staring; Chan stood as if frozen, his hands half-raised,
his eyes wide open.

"I'm coming, Beatrice," some one said in the coverts. Her cries, uttered
when her father fell, had not gone unheard. In the last stages of
exhaustion, deathly pale yet with a face of iron, Ben came reeling
toward them out of the moonlight.

XLII

Ben walked quietly into the circle of firelight and stood at Beatrice's
side. But while Ray and Chan gazed at him as if he were a spectre from
the grave, Beatrice's only impulse was one of immeasurable and
unspeakable thankfulness. No fate on earth was so dreadful but that it
would be somewhat alleviated by the fact of his presence: just the sight
of him, standing beside her, put her in some vague way out of Ray's
power to harm. Exhausted, reeling, he was still the prop of her life and
hope.

"Here I am," he said quietly. "The letter's in my pocket. Do what you
want with me--but let Beatrice go."

His words brought Ray to himself in some degree at least. The ridiculous
fear of the moment before speedily passed away. Why, the man was
exhausted--helpless in their hands--and the letter was in his pocket. It
meant _triumph_--nothing else. All Ray's aims had been attained. With
Ben's death the claim, a fourth of which had been his motive when he had
slain Ezram, would pass entirely to him,--except for such share as he
would have to give Chan. His star of fortune was in the sky. It was his
moment of glory,--long-awaited but enrapturing him at last.

Neilson lay seriously wounded, perhaps dead by now. Whatever his
injuries, he would not go back with them to share in the gold of the
claim. The girl, also, was his prey,--to do with what he liked.

"I see you've come," he answered. "You might as well; we'd have found
you to-morrow." His voice was no longer flat, but rather exultant,
boasting. "You thought you could get away--but we've shown you."

Ben nodded. "You are--" he strained for the name he had heard Beatrice
speak so often--"Ray Brent?" His eyes fell to the form of Neilson,
wounded beyond the fire. "I see you've been at your old job--killing. It
was you who killed Ezra Melville."

Ray smiled, ever so faintly: this was what he loved. "You're talking to
the right man. Anything you'd like to do about it?"

Ben's face hardened. "There is nothing I can do, now. You came too late.
But I would have had something to do if I had my rifle. I'm glad it was
you, not Beatrice's father. I ask you this--will you accept my
proposition. To take Ezram's letter, destroy it and me too--and let the
girl go in safety?"

Beatrice stretched her bound arms and touched his hairy wrist. "No,
Ben," she told him quietly. "There's no use of trying to make such a
bargain as that. Men that murder--and assault women,--won't keep their
word."

"They were about to attack you, were they?" His voice dropped a tone;
otherwise it seemed the same.

"Yes--just as you came."

He turned once more to Ray, eyeing him with such a look of contempt and
scorn that it smarted like a whiplash in spite of the protecting mantel
of his new-found triumph. "Oh, you depraved dogs!" he told them quietly
and distinctly. "You yellow, mongrel cowards!"

Ray straightened, stung by the words. "And I'll make you wish you was
dead before you ever said that," he threatened. "I'll tell you what you
wanted to know a minute ago--and I tell you no. I won't make any deal
with you. We'll do what we like to you, and we'll do what we like with
your dirty squaw, too--the woman you've been living with all these
months. We've got you where we want you. You're in no fix to make terms.
Chan--put a rope around his legs and a gag in his rotten mouth!"

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