The Man of the Forest by Zane Grey (fastest ebook reader .TXT) 📖
- Author: Zane Grey
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to her. Seems he has no one else… . Them ranches — an’
all them sheep an’ hosses! You know me an’ Al were pardners
in sheep-raisin’ for years. He swore I cheated him an’ he
threw me out. An’ all these years I’ve been swearin’ he did
me dirt — owed me sheep an’ money. I’ve got as many friends
in Pine — an’ all the way down the trail — as Auchincloss
has… . An’ Snake, see here —”
He paused to draw a deep breath and his big hands trembled
over the blaze. Anson leaned forward, like a serpent ready
to strike, and Jim Wilson was as tense with his divination
of the plot at hand.
“See here,” panted Beasley. “The girl’s due to arrive at
Magdalena on the sixteenth. That’s a week from tomorrow.
She’ll take the stage to Snowdrop, where some of
Auchincloss’s men will meet her with a team.”
“A-huh!” grunted Anson as Beasley halted again. “An’ what of
all thet?”
“She mustn’t never get as far as Snowdrop!”
“You want me to hold up the stage — an’ get the girl?”
“Exactly.”
“Wal — an’ what then?”
“Make off with her… . She disappears. That’s your affair.
… I’ll press my claims on Auchincloss — hound him —
an’ be ready when he croaks to take over his property. Then
the girl can come back, for all I care… . You an’ Wilson
fix up the deal between you. If you have to let the gang in
on it don’t give them any hunch as to who an’ what. This ‘ll
make you a rich stake. An’ providin’, when it’s paid, you
strike for new territory.”
“Thet might be wise,” muttered Snake Anson. “Beasley, the
weak point in your game is the uncertainty of life. Old Al
is tough. He may fool you.”
“Auchincloss is a dyin’ man,” declared Beasley, with such
positiveness that it could not be doubted.
“Wal, he sure wasn’t plumb hearty when I last seen him… .
Beasley, in case I play your game — how’m I to know that
girl?”
“Her name’s Helen Rayner,” replied Beasley, eagerly. “She’s
twenty years old. All of them Auchinclosses was handsome an’
they say she’s the handsomest.”
“A-huh! … Beasley, this ‘s sure a bigger deal — an’ one
I ain’t fancyin’… . But I never doubted your word… .
Come on — an’ talk out. What’s in it for me?”
“Don’t let any one in on this. You two can hold up the
stage. Why, it was never held up… . But you want to
mask… . How about ten thousand sheep — or what they
bring at Phenix in gold?”
Jim Wilson whistled low.
“An’ leave for new territory?” repeated Snake Anson, under
his breath.
“You’ve said it.”
“Wal, I ain’t fancyin’ the girl end of this deal, but you
can count on me… . September sixteenth at Magdalena —
an’ her name’s Helen — an’ she’s handsome?”
“Yes. My herders will begin drivin’ south in about two
weeks. Later, if the weather holds good, send me word by one
of them an’ I’ll meet you.”
Beasley spread his hands once more over the blaze, pulled on
his gloves and pulled down his sombrero, and with an abrupt
word of parting strode out into the night.
“Jim, what do you make of him?” queried Snake Anson.
“Pard, he’s got us beat two ways for Sunday,” replied
Wilson.
“A-huh! … Wal, let’s get back to camp.” And he led the
way out.
Low voices drifted into the cabin, then came snorts of
horses and striking hoofs, and after that a steady trot,
gradually ceasing. Once more the moan of wind and soft
patter of rain filled the forest stillness.
Milt Dale quietly sat up to gaze, with thoughtful eyes, into
the gloom.
He was thirty years old. As a boy of fourteen he had run off
from his school and home in Iowa and, joining a wagon-train
of pioneers, he was one of the first to see log cabins built
on the slopes of the White Mountains. But he had not taken
kindly to farming or sheep-raising or monotonous home toil,
and for twelve years he had lived in the forest, with only
infrequent visits to Pine and Show Down and Snowdrop. This
wandering forest life of his did not indicate that he did
not care for the villagers, for he did care, and he was
welcome everywhere, but that he loved wild life and solitude
and beauty with the primitive instinctive force of a savage.
And on this night he had stumbled upon a dark plot against
the only one of all the honest white people in that region
whom he could not call a friend.
“That man Beasley!” he soliloquized. “Beasley — in cahoots
with Snake Anson! … Well, he was right. Al Auchincloss
is on his last legs. Poor old man! When I tell him he’ll
never believe ME, that’s sure!”
Discovery of the plot meant to Dale that he must hurry down
to Pine.
“A girl — Helen Rayner — twenty years old,” he mused.
“Beasley wants her made off with… . That means — worse
than killed!”
Dale accepted facts of life with that equanimity and
fatality acquired by one long versed in the cruel annals of
forest lore. Bad men worked their evil just as savage wolves
relayed a deer. He had shot wolves for that trick. With men,
good or bad, he had not clashed. Old women and children
appealed to him, but he had never had any interest in girls.
The image, then, of this Helen Rayner came strangely to
Dale; and he suddenly realized that he had meant somehow to
circumvent Beasley, not to befriend old Al Auchincloss, but
for the sake of the girl. Probably she was already on her
way West, alone, eager, hopeful of a future home. How little
people guessed what awaited them at a journey’s end! Many
trails ended abruptly in the forest — and only trained
woodsmen could read the tragedy.
“Strange how I cut across country to-day from Spruce Swamp,”
reflected Dale. Circumstances, movements, usually were not
strange to him. His methods and habits were seldom changed
by chance. The matter, then, of his turning off a course out
of his way for no apparent reason, and of his having
overheard a plot singularly involving a young girl, was
indeed an adventure to provoke thought. It provoked more,
for Dale grew conscious of an unfamiliar smoldering heat
along his veins. He who had little to do with the strife of
men, and nothing to do with anger, felt his blood grow hot
at the cowardly trap laid for an innocent girl.
“Old Al won’t listen to me,” pondered Dale. “An’ even if he
did, he wouldn’t believe me. Maybe nobody will… . All
the same, Snake Anson won’t get that girl.”
With these last words Dale satisfied himself of his own
position, and his pondering ceased. Taking his rifle, he
descended from the loft and peered out of the door. The
night had grown darker, windier, cooler; broken clouds were
scudding across the sky; only a few stars showed; fine rain
was blowing from the northwest; and the forest seemed full
of a low, dull roar.
“Reckon I’d better hang up here,” he said, and turned to the
fire. The coals were red now. From the depths of his
hunting-coat he procured a little bag of salt and some
strips of dried meat. These strips he laid for a moment on
the hot embers, until they began to sizzle and curl; then
with a sharpened stick he removed them and ate like a hungry
hunter grateful for little.
He sat on a block of wood with his palms spread to the dying
warmth of the fire and his eyes fixed upon the changing,
glowing, golden embers. Outside, the wind continued to rise
and the moan of the forest increased to a roar. Dale felt
the comfortable warmth stealing over him, drowsily lulling;
and he heard the storm-wind in the trees, now like a
waterfall, and anon like a retreating army, and again low
and sad; and he saw pictures in the glowing embers, strange
as dreams.
Presently he rose and, climbing to the loft, he stretched
himself out, and soon fell asleep.
When the gray dawn broke he was on his way, ‘cross-country,
to the village of Pine.
During the night the wind had shifted and the rain had
ceased. A suspicion of frost shone on the grass in open
places. All was gray — the parks, the glades — and deeper,
darker gray marked the aisles of the forest. Shadows lurked
under the trees and the silence seemed consistent with
spectral forms. Then the east kindled, the gray lightened,
the dreaming woodland awoke to the far-reaching rays of a
bursting red sun.
This was always the happiest moment of Dale’s lonely days,
as sunset was his saddest. He responded, and there was
something in his blood that answered the whistle of a stag
from a near-by ridge. His strides were long, noiseless, and
they left dark trace where his feet brushed the dew-laden
grass.
Dale pursued a zigzag course over the ridges to escape the
hardest climbing, but the “senacas” — those parklike
meadows so named by Mexican sheep-herders — were as round
and level as if they had been made by man in beautiful
contrast to the dark-green, rough, and rugged ridges. Both
open senaca and dense wooded ridge showed to his quick eye
an abundance of game. The cracking of twigs and disappearing
flash of gray among the spruces, a round black lumbering
object, a twittering in the brush, and stealthy steps, were
all easy signs for Dale to read. Once, as he noiselessly
emerged into a little glade, he espied a red fox stalking
some quarry, which, as he advanced, proved to be a flock of
partridges. They whirred up, brushing the branches, and the
fox trotted away. In every senaca Dale encountered wild
turkeys feeding on the seeds of the high grass.
It had always been his custom, on his visits to Pine, to
kill and pack fresh meat down to several old friends, who
were glad to give him lodging. And, hurried though he was
now, he did not intend to make an exception of this trip.
At length he got down into the pine belt, where the great,
gnarled, yellow trees soared aloft, stately, and aloof from
one another, and the ground was a brown, odorous, springy
mat of pine-needles, level as a floor. Squirrels watched him
from all around, scurrying away at his near approach —
tiny, brown, light-striped squirrels, and larger ones,
russet-colored, and the splendid dark-grays with their white
bushy tails and plumed ears.
This belt of pine ended abruptly upon wide, gray, rolling,
open land, almost like a prairie, with foot-hills lifting
near and far, and the red-gold blaze of aspen thickets
catching the morning sun. Here Dale flushed a flock of wild
turkeys, upward of forty in number, and their subdued color
of gray flecked with white, and graceful, sleek build,
showed them to be hens. There was not a gobbler in the
flock. They began to run pell-mell out into the grass, until
only their heads appeared bobbing along, and finally
disappeared. Dale caught a glimpse of skulking coyotes that
evidently had been stalking the turkeys, and as they saw him
and darted into the timber he took a quick shot at the
hindmost. His bullet struck low, as he had meant it to, but
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