The hill of adventure

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Gray Cloud Mountain 3

II The Departure of Joe Ling .... 22

Chapter I

I T was with feelings of doubt that were not very far from dismay that Beatrice Deems watched her new acquaintance, Dan O’Leary, saddle her recently acquired horse. She had ridden before, of course, in the tan-bark ring of the riding-school or on shady bridle-paths in the park, always on well-broken steeds whose beauty and grooming were equaled only by their good manners. But now, as she stood in her short khaki riding-skirt and her high boots, waiting outside the great dilapidated shed that, in this little Montana town, did duty as a liv’ery-stable, she was beginning to wonder whether she really knew anything 3 about horses at all. Certainly she had never thought of riding anything like this plunging creature who stood straight up on his hind legs one moment, then dropped to his forefeet and stood on them in turn, with the ease of a circus performer.

She had spent only two days in Ely, the little town planted beside Broken Bow Creek, in the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains. At first she had thought that the village, with its scattered box-like houses and dusty, shadeless street, was disappointingly unlike the West of the pictures-books and the movies. The antics of her new horse, however, were disturbingly like what she had witnessed in Wild West shows.

“’Name’s Buck,” volunteered the man who was struggling with the saddle, and added, though in a tone that seemed to indicate the explanation as quite unnecessary, “It ’s on account of his color, you know.”

“Oh I” returned Beatrice, a little blankly.

For the life of her, she could think of nothing else to say. She had yet to learn that all Western ponies of that golden buckskin shade of coat bear the same name. At the moment she was tempted to believe that the title had something to do with the way in which the horse was humping his back like a gigantic cat and jumping up and down on his nimble white forefeet.

4 ‘Your father went out on the range and chose the horse himself when he was out here getting your house ready,” Dan went on. “He could n’t have found another pony in the valley that could go like this one.”

“Did he — did he try him?” Beatrice wished to know.

Her feelings in the matter were oddly mixed, for she dreaded the moment when she must actually mount to the big, unfamiliar saddle, and yet she was all on fire to try the horse’s speed.

“No, he didn’t try him,” was the answer.

“He just said he wanted a safe horse for his daughter, liked the looks of this one — and well he might, — and took my word for it that the horse would suit and would go like greased lightning, besides. There, now, the saddle ’s firm. You mustn’t think anything of the way he acts when you pull up the cinch ; they all do that!”

For all her misgivings, Beatrice was no coward. She stepped forward, discovered in one violent second that a Western pony sets off the moment he feels the rider’s weight on the stirrup, then flung herself, somehow, into the saddle and was away.

“I did not do that very well,” she was thinking. “Another time — oh, oh!”

For her very thought was interrupted by the sudden rush of wordless delight as the horse beneath her stretched himself to that long easy lope that is like nothing else in the world. The fresh mountain wind, sweeping down from the clean, high peaks above, sang 6 in her ears; the stony road swung past below; the motion was as easy as a rocking-chair but seemed as swift as thought itself. Motoring she had always loved, but she confessed with sudden disloyalty that it was bumpy business compared to the measured swaying of this living creature between her knees. Buck’s personal prejudices seemed, indeed, to be directed solely against the cinching of the saddle. That process once over he was as eager and happy as she to clatter across the bridge, pass the last of the ugly little houses and the highfronted store buildings, and turn his whiteblazed face toward the mounting trail that led out of the valley.

Beatrice drew rein when they had breasted the first rise, and paused a moment to look back. The houses strewn haphazard across the slope below her made more of a town than she had thought. There was the packingbox railroad station where she and her sister, Nancy, and their Aunt Anna had arrived so 7 recently; there was the house where they were living, a little larger than the others, but square, hideous, and unshaded like the rest.

“We mustn’t care for architecture,” Nancy had said when they first surveyed their dwelling rather ruefully, “when the Rocky Mountains begin in our back yard.”

There was also the winding stream with its abrupt bend that warranted the title of Broken Bow Creek, a mere trickle of water just now, in that wide, dry valley down which the thin line of the railroad stretched away, with the straight parallel of the rails seeming to bend and quiver in the hot clearness of the sunshine. South of the town was a portion of Ely that she had not seen before, a group of warehouses, some office buildings, and a huddle of workmen’s bunk-houses. She could see the cobweb lines of temporary railroad, a steam-shovel moving on a flat-car, and innumerable men toiling like black ants along 8 the sides of the raw cut that had been made in the red soil of the valley.

“That must be the irrigation ditch that Dan O’Leary was telling us about,” she reflected. “How hot it looks down there! I did not dream they had so many men. And how clear the air is! Oh, surely, surely. Aunt Anna will get well here as fast as we hope!”

The wind lifted Buck’s yellow mane and her own brown hair, while the horse pawed the stony ground impatiently. She let him go on, for she was in truth as eager as he. This was the first day that she had found time to go far from their own house, and she had now a most fascinating goal before her. What girl of sixteen would not feel excited over the prospect of exploring a tract of mountainside woods of which she was sole owner?

Beatrice had never quite understood how her father had come to purchase that stretch of land above Ely; she had not, indeed, 9 thought to ask. She had come into his study one Sunday morning when he was going over his papers and had surprised him with the announcement that she was sixteen that day. Having no other present ready, he had brought out some dusty title-deeds and had made them over to her.

“It will never be of the least use to you, my dear,” he said, “so do not consider it much of a present. Twenty-three acres with timber, cabin, and a waterfall, so the description reads, but you must not think they are worth anything. I have never seen the place myself.”

She had believed that it was on account of this talk about Ely that they thought of the town again when the doctors had prescribed for Aunt Anna “a change of climate — some dry, bracing place in the West.” She was their only aunt, Mr. Deems’s younger sister, and she had cared for his household ever since the death of the two girls’ mother years ago. She was a slim, frail person of indomitable 10 spirit, and had begun to look as though she were far more spirit than body ever since the influenza epidemic had swept through the family. Beatrice had always thought that going to Ely was her own suggestion, though she could not deny that it was Aunt Anna who had carried the plan through in the face of some rather unaccountable opposition from her father. Mr. Deems had finally given in, and had made a flying trip to Ely to be sure that the air and climate were what they wanted, to choose a house, engage a Chinese cook, and make all preparations for a summer’s stay for his sister and the two girls.

“I did not have time to visit your estate on the hill, Beatrice,” he said on his return. “You will have to explore it yourself. Dan O’Leary has charge of it and said he rented it to some engineers who were surveying the mountain, but it is unoccupied now. The place may prove to be a good picnic ground but I fear it has no other possibilities.”

He might say what he chose, Beatrice was thinking, but he could not destroy her eagerness to see the place. The trail ran crookedly upward before her, disappeared in some dense pine woods, then slanted across the spur of the mountain and vanished again. Higher above rose the bare, rocky slopes of the tall peak that dominated the whole valley, Gray Cloud Mountain, on one of whose lower, rugged shoulders lay her land and her cabin. After climbing for a quarter of a mile, she was obliged to hesitate at a fork in the way, uncertain which of the steep paths she was to take.

A little cottage clung to the bare hillside by the road — a shabby place with no paint and a patched roof. The door was swinging open as she passed and a man just going in, a short-set, foreign-looking person, who scowled at her over his shoulder when she asked the way.

“That one,” he said briefly, pointing to the 12 right-hand fork and speaking with a heavy foreign accent. “Up toward John Herrick’s house, only not so far.”

He went in and shut the door abruptly. Beatrice could hear his voice inside calling roughly, “Christina, Christina!”

He had a roll of large papers in his hand, posters that he had evidently been putting up along the way, for she had observed them on trees and fence-posts nearer town. They seemed to announce a meeting of some sort, with English words at the top and odd foreign printing at the bottom in more than one language. She had felt a hot flash of indignant anger at the man’s surly tone, but in a moment she had forgotten him completely, as she and Buck went scrambling up the steep and difficult road.

She came at last to a tiny bridge. Broken Bow Creek, which was little more than a series of pools in the parched stream-bed in the valley, was here a singing rivulet, flowing below 13 the rude crossing amid a group of silvery aspen-trees. At the left of the trail she could see a gate, a set of bars hung between two rough posts. It was with a beating heart that she dismounted to take them down for Buck to pass. Once inside she would be on her own ground.

The agility of a mountain-bred pony was so new to her that she was much astonished, after she had removed two of the bars, to have Buck step over the remaining three as neatly as a dog would have done. She slipped into the saddle again, making a greater success than at the first attempt, and followed the nearly invisible path. The huge straight pine-trees stood in uneven ranks all about her, their branches interweaving overhead, the ground covered with their red-brown needles that muffled the sound of the horse’s hoofs. Up they went, with the splash of falling water sounding louder and ever louder. Here at last was the place she sought, a square, sturdy cabin of 14 ?

gray logs chinked with white plaster, with a solid field stone chimney and a sloping roof drifted over with pine-needles. She slid from the saddle and stood upon the rugged doorstep. Here was her house, her very own !

It was a larger dwelling than she had expected and very solidly and substantially built. She found that wooden bars had been nailed across the doors and windows, and she had, moreover, forgotten to obtain the keys from Dan O’Leary, so that she could not go in. She could, however, peep through the casement windows and see the low-ceilinged rooms, the rough stairs, and the wide fireplace. The big trees nodded overhead, the roar of the waterfall came from beyond the house, the creek, rushing and tumbling, slid away down the mountainside. Somebody had planted pansies on both sides of the step, pansies that crowded and jostled each other as they only can in the cool air of the high mountains, spreading sheets of gleaming color over the 15 barren soil. With a quivering sigh, Beatrice sat down upon the step.

“Mine!” she said aloud, just to see how it would sound. “Mine!”

It would take a long time to explore the place thoroughly.

“I must be able to tell Nancy about every bit of it,” she told herself.

Yet first she sat very quietly, for a little, on the rough stone step. She had hurried up the hill, eager to see the new place; she had been hurrying for the last two days, getting the house in the village settled ; she had hurried before the journey: when indeed had she not been hurrying? It was very pleasant to sit so still and let the silent minutes march by to the tune of rustling pine branches and the murmuring waterfall. As she sat looking down into the valley, time seemed very big and calm and empty, instead of bustling and full.

She rose at last to go on with her explorations. Behind the cabin was the tumbling cas- 16 cade that identified the place, a plunge of foaming waters over a high ledge with a still black pool below, shot with gleams of sunshine and full of darting trout. Beyond the stream, almost hidden from sight by the high slope of the ravine, was the roof of another house, a larger one than hers, with a whole group of chimneys sending forth a curl of smoke to indicate that here were neighbors. Looking up the course of the brook she could see where the dense shadows of the pine grove ended and the waters ran in brighter sunshine on the higher slope.

“I should like to see what it is like up there/’ she thought, “but I must be quick ; it is getting late.”

She went scrambling up the rocky slope, feeling a little breathless, but forgetting entirely that in such a high altitude haste is far from wise. In a moment her lungs seemed entirely empty and her heart began to pound against her side, but she pressed on, deter- 17 mined to reach a certain high rock before she turned back. It was a rash desire, for presently she was obliged to lie down upon the rough grass to gasp and rest and gather herself together for another effort. She got up to struggle forward again, for she was not used to abandoning a fixed purpose, but after a few yards she was forced to lie down once more, panting and completely exhausted.

“I don’t believe I understand the Rocky Mountains,” she reflected as she lay, limp and flat, looking across the barren valley, the sparsely wooded slopes, to the rising peaks opposite. She had been accustomed to mountains like the Adirondacks, round and covered thick with forest almost to the summit, friendly heights that invited one to climb them. It was a far cry from them to the precipitate slopes of Gray Cloud Mountain.

When she had recovered a little she gave up her project and slid humbly down the steep way she had come. Buck, with his bridle over 18 the post at the cabin door, whinnied an anxious welcome as she came back to him. He had been searching for tufts of grass between the stones, and had also nipped at the pansies, but had found them not to his liking. His impatience, as well as the creeping shadows in the valley below, reminded her that evening was near despite the clear sunshine higher up the mountainside. Reluctantly she mounted and, with many a glance backward at her house, rode down the trail.

Through an opening in the trees Beatrice caught a glimpse, as she descended, of the house beyond the stream. She could even see a man ride up to the door and a girl come running out to greet him. Then a drop in the trail hid both house and people abruptly from her view.

The warm sun seemed to be left completely behind as she and Buck pressed onward with all possible haste. Something new caught her curious attention in a moment, however, 19 and made her stop again. To the right of the pathway, in a little clearing among the pines, she had spied the glow of a tiny fire.

“Who is burning brush on my land?” she questioned inwardly, with a throb of pride at the thought of her proprietorship.

Guiding her horse among the trees, she rode a little nearer to investigate. The blaze was kindled skilfully between two stones, evidently by the hands of some one who knew the dangers of careless camp-fires in a pine grove. Bending over the crackling flame was a woman, with a yellow handkerchief covering her hair and a green shawl slanting about her hips above a shabby skirt. A big basket stood beside her, showing that she had been gathering berries in the wood, while an appetizing smell rising from the fire told of a supper of bacon and fresh trout. The smoke was in her eyes and she was, moreover, intent on balancing the frying-pan between the stones, so that she did not see Beatrice. For this the 20 girl was thankful, since, after a glance at the other’s broad, brown face, she concluded that one ill-mannered foreigner was all she wished to encounter that day and that she would push her investigations no further. She turned her pony to make for the path again, but a rolling stone, dislodged by Buck’s foot, attracted the woman’s attention. Beatrice looked back to see that the stranger had abandoned her cooking and was standing erect, staring intently after them.

“At least she cannot follow,” thought the girl with some relief; then observed, with a sinking of the heart, that the woman had turned abruptly and was hurrying down the hill through the underbrush. It was plain that she intended to reach the road first and intercept the horse and rider at the bridge.

Chapter II

T HE yellow pony, stamping and sidling, came to an unwilling stop before the sturdy figure that blocked the way. Beatrice began to see that the red firelight had made the woman seem unduly terrifying and that her face, while it was sunburnt almost to the color of leather, was merely a square, stolid one, with keen, blue eyes and heavy, fair hair showing under the picturesque head handkerchief. With one hard, big hand, the stranger was feeling within her dress and, as Beatrice came close, she held up a letter.

“I saw you in town yesterday, and you looked kind. I want you to read my letter to me; I cannot read English myself. My 22 name is Christina Jensen. The letter is from my boy.”

She spoke with a strong accent that, while it was somewhat like that of the man from whom Beatrice had asked the way, was not unpleasant, for her voice was rich and clear. The girl thought as she looked into the upturned face, that she had never seen such eager, appealing eyes.

“You can’t read?” Beatrice exclaimed, forgetting politeness in her surprise.

“My own language, Finnish, yes, but not yours. My boy, Olaf, made me learn to talk English plain, but I was always so busy with my two hands I could not learn to read or write. Bead, read, please, before it is too dark to see the letter.”

Beatrice spread out the paper on the pommel of the saddle.

“Why,” she said, glancing at the date, “it is nearly a year old!”

“Yes,” returned the woman nodding heavily, 23

“ten months ago he wrote it from his ship in Marseilles. I have nearly worn it out carrying it around and having it read to me. But it is only kind people I ask to read it now, for some begin to say, ‘Like father, like son; your Olaf will never come back.”

“Was his father a sailor too?” the girl asked.

“Yes, but he sailed away from our home in Finland when our boy was only a month old, and I never heard from him again. It was nearly a year later that we learned how his ship had been wrecked on the voyage to Japan. I brought my boy to this country then where I could support him better, and what a credit and a comfort to me he was. He was wild to go in the navy when the war began, but he was just too young; so it was not till last year that he slipped away, as I had always feared he would. He hardly even said good-by to me, and this is my only letter from him. But I talk too long; you will not be able to see.”

Once more Beatrice turned to the paper and began:

“My dear mother : I expect you think I am never going to send you a letter — ”

She read through to the end, thinking that it sounded affectionate but contained little news beyond the fact that the writer was going to China.

“He gives an address to send an answer,” she observed as she folded the letter and handed it back. “What did you write to him?”

To her surprise she saw big tears stand suddenly in Christina’s eyes.

“Ah, Thorvik would not let me, and I couldn’t write myself,” she said. “And my Olaf is such an American, he cannot read my language. That is perhaps why he has not written again and has not come home.”

Then, seeing Beatrice’s puzzled look, she explained more fully, although it was difficult to make plain her foreign notion that women are subject to the men in their houses.

“Thorvik is my brother, once a good Finn like myself, but now — oh, so different. He was to come to America some years ago, but he war broke out over here and he went, instead into the Russian army. Now that there is peace he has come to us, but how that time had changed him! He is full of wild talk of revolution, and tyrants and destroying every thing. He and Olaf never agreed. It was what made my boy unhappy at home, and, though I did what I could, Olaf went away from us at last.”

Beatrice leaned forward in her saddle with sudden interest.

“Do you live in a little cottage half-way up the hill above Ely? That man I saw there when I rode by — is that your brother?”

Christina nodded.

“And if you could write to your son,” the girl pursued, “what would you say?”

“I would say, ‘Come home,’ ” cried Christina. “Over and over I would say, ‘Come 26 home. If it is only for a week or a day between voyages/ I would say, 'come still, no matter what happened before you went away.’ ”

Beatrice felt in the pocket of her riding skirt. There were a note-book and pencil there, she felt sure, for she had made a list of supplies to be bought in the village before she set out on her ride.

“Do you want me to put down the address and write to your son for you?” she offered.

“Oh, if you would!” cried Christina. “And you would never tell Thorvik?”

“There is no danger of that,” Beatrice assured her. “And I think somehow that your boy will come back.”

She could not tell, herself, what made her offer such a definite opinion.

There was something she liked about the words of the letter. “I went ashore at Marseilles, and it is such a strange place that before I had been there an hour I wanted to 27 stay a year. But loafing does n’t suit me, so I am off again for Hong-Kong, but I ’ll not forget you, Mother, not even on the other side of the world.”

She folded the worn page once again, gave it to Christina, and rode on. To her own surprise, she had that pleasant, satisfied feeling, that comes with the making of a new friend. After a few rods, she turned to look back and saw the Finnish woman still looking after her. Beatrice raised her hand in a quick gesture of leave-taking. It was a slight move but it had important consequences, since it seemed to cement their regard for each other and to strengthen Christina in a wavering resolution. She came swiftly down the road, calling in her clear, full voice :

“Stop, I must tell you something.”

When she came to Buck’s side she began with quick questioning that would have sounded impertinent, had it not been so earnest.

“Why did you come here, to Ely? How long are you going to stay?”

Briefly Beatrice explained about her aunt’s health and the arrangements her father had made.

“I believe Aunt Anna wanted to come because she had been here once before,” she concluded rather vaguely. “I don’t seem to remember if she told me when or why she came.”

“The place has changed since she was here, even since your father was here.” Christina declared. “There is a whole army of foreign laborers, Slavs, Poles, what the men call Bohunks, working on this irrigation project to water the valley. There is a strike brewing. Ah, do I not know? My brother Thorvik talks of nothing else. It is he who urges them on. When such a thing breaks out, Ely will not be a good place for you and your aunt and your sister.”

“But strikes mean just parades and people carrying banners and talking on street-corn- 29 ers,” Beatrice protested. She had seen industrial unrest at home and had thought very little of it. What she did fear was the long journey which had been so difficult for her aunt and which it seemed impossible to face soon again.

“Strikes are not the same in the West. Men carry something besides banners in the parades, and talking on street-corners ends in fights. You had better take your aunt away.”

“It does not seem possible,” Beatrice replied, “but thank you for telling me.” Again she said good-by and rode on, feeling only a little uneasy, for, she reflected, “To live with a man like that brother would make any one think that things were going wrong.”

There were lamps showing in some of the windows of the village, as she rode clattering up the street, and streaks of light dropping through the rickety shutters of a big, ramshackle building in the center of the town. A 30 stream of men was moving up the steps of this place, which seemed, as its door swung open, to be a public meeting hall. Its benches were crowded with rough-looking men, and someone on a platform at the far end was addressing the close-packed audience. She turned Buck loose at her own door to find his way home, as she had been instructed by Dan O’ Leary. Then, tired, stiff, and with much to tell, she hurried into the house.

Dinner that night, in the candle-lit diningroom with the noiseless Chinaman serving them delicious food, was very welcome to the hungry Beatrice. Aunt Anna, looking very frail and weary, but still able to sit up in her cushioned chair, was at the head of the table, with one tall chestnut-haired niece at her right and with the other, the younger one, the pink and plump Nancy who was always laughing and nearly always asking questions, sitting at her left.

“Joe Ling is a good cook,” observed Bea- 31 trice with satisfaction, when their white- jacketed chef had gone into the kitchen for the dessert.

“Yes, but he would n’t let me come into the kitchen to get Aunt Anna a glass of milk ; and when I told him about the broth she needed, I could n’t make out whether he heard or not, for he paid no attention at all. I don’t think I understand Chinamen. Their faces don’t change, you can’t tell what they are thinking about, and they look as though they knew everything in the world.”

Nancy sighed as she spoke, for she had undertaken the housekeeping, since she had more domestic tastes than her sister. The new and strange difficulties in this establishment in Ely were, however, sometimes rather appalling.

Aunt Anna said very little; she seemed to have small appetite and to be too tired to talk. After dinner Nancy went out to give orders for breakfast, but she came in again 32 looking much discouraged. It seemed impossible for her to get used to Joe Ling with his mask-like face and silent Oriental manners.

The next day Nancy was to try the new horse; but she was not so good a rider as Beatrice, and the astute Buck, guessing that fact at once, took liberties with her that she did not enjoy. She gave her sister a lively account of her misadventures in the evening when they were going to bed.

“I wanted to ride up to your cabin, but Buck had other plans. I saw most of the town and part of this end of the valley and then the pony decided to take me home. Some workmen, coming in from the place where they are digging that big ditch, scowled and stared at me and I did n’t like it. I sometimes wonder a little why Aunt Anna wanted to come here.”