North of Fifty-Three Part 7

So with the charm of the wild land fresh upon her, she took kindly to Cariboo Meadows. The immediate, disagreeable past bade fair to become as remote in reality as the distance made it seem. Surely no ghosts would walk here to make people look askance at her.

Her first afternoon she spent loafing on the porch of the Briggs domicile, within which Mrs. Briggs, a fat, good-natured person of forty, toiled at her cooking for the "boarders," and kept a brood of five tumultuous youngsters in order--the combined tasks leaving her scant time to entertain her newly arrived guest. From the vantage ground of the porch Hazel got her first glimpse of the turns life occasionally takes when there is no policeman just around the corner.

Cariboo Meadows, as a town, was simply a double row of buildings facing each other across a wagon road. Two stores, a blacksmith shop, a feed stable, certain other nondescript buildings, and a few dwellings, mostly of logs, was all. Probably not more than a total of fifty souls made permanent residence there. But the teams of ranchers stood in the street, and a few saddled cow ponies whose listlessness was mostly a.s.sumed. Before one of the general stores a prospector fussed with a string of pack horses. Directly opposite Briggs' boarding-house stood a building labeled "Regent Hotel." Hazel could envisage it all with a half turn of her head.

From this hotel there presently issued a young man dressed in the ordinary costume of the country--wide hat, flannel s.h.i.+rt, overalls, boots. He sat down on a box close by the hotel entrance. In a few minutes another came forth. He walked past the first a few steps, stopped, and said something. Hazel could not hear the words. The first man was filling a pipe. Apparently he made no reply; at least, he did not trouble to look up. But she saw his shoulders lift in a shrug. Then he who had pa.s.sed turned square about and spoke again, this time lifting his voice a trifle. The young fellow sitting on the box instantly became galvanized into action. He flung out an oath that carried across the street and made Hazel's ears burn. At the same time he leaped from his seat straight at the other man. Hazel saw it quite distinctly, saw him who jumped dodge a vicious blow and close with the other; and saw, moreover, something which amazed her. For the young fellow swayed with his adversary a second or two, then lifted him bodily off his feet almost to the level of his head, and slammed him against the hotel wall with a sudden twist. She heard the thump of the body on the logs. For an instant she thought him about to jump with his booted feet on the prostrate form, and involuntarily she held her breath. But he stepped back, and when the other scrambled up, he side-stepped the first rush, and knocked the man down again with a blow of his fist. This time he stayed down. Then other men--three or four of them--came out of the hotel, stood uncertainly a few seconds, and Hazel heard the young fellow say:

"Better take that fool in and bring him to. If he's still hungry for trouble, I'll be right handy. I wonder how many more of you fellers I'll have to lick before you'll get wise enough not to start things you can't stop?"

They supported the unconscious man through the doorway; the young fellow resumed his seat on the box, also his pipe filling.

"Roarin' Bill's goin' to get himself killed one uh these days."

Hazel started, but it was only Jim Briggs in the doorway beside her.

"I guess you ain't much used to seein' that sort of exhibition where you come from, Miss Weir," Briggs' wife put in over his shoulder. "My land, it's disgustin'--men fightin' in the street where everybody can see 'em. Thank goodness, it don't happen very often. 'Specially when Bill Wagstaff ain't around. You ain't shocked, are you, honey?"

"Why, I didn't have time to be shocked," Hazel laughed. "It was done so quickly."

"If them fellers would leave Bill alone," Briggs remarked, "there wouldn't be no fight. But he goes off like a hair-trigger gun, and he'd sc.r.a.p a dozen quick as one. I'm lookin' to see his finish one uh these days."

"What a name!" Hazel observed, caught by the appellation Briggs had first used. "Is that Roaring Bill over there?"

"That's him--Roarin' Bill Wagstaff," Briggs answered. "If he takes a few drinks, you'll find out to-night how he got the name. Sings--just like a bull moose--hear him all over town. Probably whip two or three men before mornin'."

His spouse calling him at that moment, Briggs detailed no more information about Roaring Bill. And Hazel sat looking across the way with considerable interest at the specimen of a type which hitherto she had encountered in the pages of fiction--a fighting man, what the West called a "bad actor." She had, however, no wish for closer study of that particular type. The men of her world had been altogether different, and the few frontier specimens she had met at the Briggs'

dinner table had not impressed her with anything except their shyness and manifest awkwardness in her presence. The West itself appealed to her, its bigness, its nearness to the absolutely primeval, but not the people she had so far met. They were not wrapped in a glamor of romance; she was altogether too keen to idealize them. They were not her kind, and while she granted their worth, they were more picturesque about their own affairs than when she came in close contact with them.

Those were her first impressions. And so she looked at Roaring Bill Wagstaff, over the way, with a quite impersonal interest.

He came into Briggs' place for supper. Mrs. Briggs was her own waitress. Briggs himself sat beside Hazel. She heard him grunt, and saw a mild look of surprise flit over his countenance when Roaring Bill walked in and coolly took a seat. But not until Hazel glanced at the newcomer did she recognize him as the man who had fought in the street.

He was looking straight at her when she did glance up, and the mingled astonishment and frank admiration in his clear gray eyes made Hazel drop hers quickly to her plate. Since Mr. Andrew Bush, she was beginning to hate men who looked at her that way. And she could not help seeing that many did so look.

Roaring Bill ate his supper in silence. No one spoke to him, and he addressed no one except to ask that certain dishes be pa.s.sed. Among the others conversation was general. Hazel noticed that, and wondered why--wondered if Roaring Bill was taboo. She had sensed enough of the Western point of view to know that the West held nothing against a man who was quick to blows--rather admired such a one, in fact. And her conclusions were not complimentary to Mr. Bill Wagstaff. If people avoided him in that country, he must be a very hard citizen indeed.

And Hazel no more than formulated this opinion than she was ashamed of it, having her own recent experience in mind. Whereupon she dismissed Bill Wagstaff from her thoughts altogether when she left the table.

Exactly three days later Hazel came into the dining-room at noon, and there received her first lesson in the truth that this world is a very small place, after all. A nattily dressed gentleman seated to one side of her place at table rose with the most polite bows and extended hand.

Hazel recognized him at a glance as Mr. Howard Perkins, traveling salesman for Harrington & Bush. She had met him several times in the company offices. She was anything save joyful at the meeting, but after the first unwelcome surprise she reflected that it was scarcely strange that a link in her past life should turn up here, for she knew that in the very nature of things a firm manufacturing agricultural implements would have its men drumming up trade on the very edge of the frontier.

Mr. Perkins was tolerably young, good looking, talkative, apparently glad to meet some one from home. He joined her on the porch for a minute when the meal was over. And he succeeded in putting Hazel unqualifiedly at her ease so far as he was concerned. If he had heard any Granville gossip, if he knew why she had left Granville, it evidently cut no figure with him. As a consequence, while she was simply polite and negatively friendly, deep in her heart Hazel felt a pleasant reaction from the disagreeable things for which Granville stood; and, though she nursed both resentment and distrust against men in general, it did not seem to apply to Mr. Perkins. Anyway, he was here to-day, and on the morrow he would be gone.

Being a healthy, normal young person, Hazel enjoyed his company without being fully aware of the fact. So much for natural gregariousness.

Furthermore, Mr. Perkins in his business had been pretty much everywhere on the North American continent, and he knew how to set forth his various experiences. Most women would have found him interesting, particularly in a community isolated as Cariboo Meadows, where tailored clothes and starched collars seemed unknown, and every man was his own barber--at infrequent intervals.

So Hazel found it quite natural to be chatting with him on the Briggs'

porch when her school work ended at three-thirty in the afternoon. It transpired that Mr. Perkins, like herself, had an appreciation of the scenic beauties, and also the picturesque phases of life as it ran in the Cariboo country. They talked of many things, discussed life in a city as compared with existence in the wild, and were agreed that both had desirable features--and drawbacks. Finally Mr. Perkins proposed a walk up on a three-hundred-foot knoll that sloped from the back door, so to speak, of Cariboo Meadows. Hazel got her hat, and they set out.

She had climbed that hill by herself, and she knew that it commanded a great sweep of the rolling land to the west.

They reached the top in a few minutes, and found a seat on a dead tree trunk. Mr. Perkins was properly impressed with the outlook. But before very long he seemed to suffer a relaxation of his interest in the view and a corresponding increase of attention to his companion.

Hazel recognized the symptoms. At first it amused, then it irritated her. The playful familiarity of Mr. Perkins suddenly got on her nerves.

"I think I shall go down," she said abruptly.

"Oh, I say, now, there's no hurry," Perkins responded smilingly.

But she was already rising from her seat, and Mr. Perkins, very likely gauging his action according to his experience in other such situations, did an utterly foolish thing. He caught her as she rose, and laughingly tried to kiss her. Whereupon he discovered that he had caught a tartar, for Hazel slapped him with all the force she could muster--which was considerable, judging by the flaming red spot which the smack of her palm left on his smooth-shaven cheek. But he did not seem to mind that. Probably he had been slapped before, and regarded it as part of the game. He attempted to draw her closer.

"Why, you're a regular sc.r.a.pper," he smiled. "Now, I'm sure you didn't cuff Bush that way."

Hazel jerked loose from his grip in a perfect fury, using at the same time the weapons nature gave her according to her strength, whereby Mr.

Perkins suffered sundry small bruises, which were as nothing to the bruises his conceit suffered. For, being free of him, Hazel stood her ground long enough to tell him that he was a cad, a coward, an ill-bred nincomp.o.o.p, and other epithets grievous to masculine vanity. With that she fled incontinently down the hill, furious, shamed almost to tears, and wis.h.i.+ng fervently that she had the muscle of a man to requite the insult as it deserved. To cap the climax, Mrs. Briggs, who had seen the two depart, observed her return alone, and, with a curious look, asked jokingly:

"Did you lose the young man in the timber?"

And Hazel, being keyed to a fearful pitch, unwisely snapped back:

"I hope so."

Which caused Mrs. Briggs' gaze to follow her wonderingly as she went hastily to her own room.

Like other mean souls of similar pattern, it suited Mr. Perkins to seek revenge in the only way possible--by confidentially relating to divers individuals during that evening the Granville episode in the new teacher's career. At least, Hazel guessed he must have told the tale of that ambiguously worded bequest and the subsequent gossip, for as early as the next day she caught certain of Jim Briggs' boarders looking at her with an interest they had not heretofore displayed--or, rather, it should be said, with a _different_ sort of interest. They were discussing her. She could not know it positively, but she felt it.

The feeling grew to certainty after Perkins' departure that day. There was a different atmosphere. Probably, she reflected, he had thrown in a few embellishments of his own for good measure. She felt a tigerish impulse to choke him. But she was proud, and she carried her head in the air, and, in effect, told Cariboo Meadows to believe as it pleased and act as it pleased. They could do no more than cut her and cause her to lose her school. She managed to keep up an air of cool indifference that gave no hint of the despairing protest that surged close to the surface. Individually and collectively, she reiterated to herself, she despised men. Her resentment had not yet extended to the women of Cariboo Meadows. They were mostly too busy with their work to be much in the foreground. She did observe, or thought she observed, a certain coolness in Mrs. Briggs' manner--a sort of suspended judgment.

In the meantime, she labored diligently at her appointed task of drilling knowledge into the heads of a dozen youngsters. From nine until three-thirty she had that to occupy her mind to the exclusion of more troublesome things. When school work for the day ended, she went to her room, or sat on the porch, or took solitary rambles in the immediate vicinity, avoiding the male contingent as she would have avoided contagious disease. Never, never, she vowed, would she trust another man as far as she could throw him.

The first Sat.u.r.day after the Perkins incident, Hazel went for a tramp in the afternoon. She avoided the little hill close at hand. It left a bad taste in her mouth to look at the spot. This was foolish, and she realized that it was foolish, but she could not help the feeling--the insult was still too fresh in her mind. So she skirted its base and ranged farther afield. The few walks she had taken had lulled all sense of uneasiness in venturing into the infolding forest.

She felt that those shadowy woods were less sinister than man. And since she had always kept her sense of direction and come straight to the Meadows whenever she went abroad, she had no fear or thought of losing her way.

A mile or so distant a bare spot high on a wooded ridge struck her as a likely place to get an un.o.bstructed view. To reach some height and sit in peace, staring out over far-spreading vistas, contented her. She could put away the unpleasantness of the immediate past, discount the possible sordidness of the future, and lose herself in dreams.

To reach her objective point, she crossed a long stretch of rolling land, well timbered, dense in parts with thickets of berry bushes.

Midway in this she came upon a little brook, purring a monotone as it crawled over pebbled reaches and bathed the tangled roots of trees along its brink. By this she sat a while. Then she idled along, coming after considerable difficulty to abruptly rising ground. Though in the midst of timber the sun failed to penetrate, she could always see it through the branches and so gauge her line of travel. On the hillside it was easier, for the forest thinned out. Eventually she gained a considerable height, and while she failed to reach the opening seen from the Meadows, she found another that served as well. The sun warmed it, and the sun rays were pleasant to bask in, for autumn drew close, and there was a coolness in the shade even at noon. She could not see the town, but she could mark the low hills behind it. At any rate, she knew where it lay, and the way back.

So she thought. But the short afternoon fled, and, warned by the low dip of the sun, she left her nook on the hillside to make her way home.

Though it was near sundown, she felt no particular concern. The long northern twilight gave her ample time to cover the distance.

But once down on the rolling land, among the close-ranked trees, she began to experience a difficulty that had not hitherto troubled her.

With the sun hanging low, she lost her absolute certainty of east and west, north and south. The forest seemed suddenly to grow confusingly dim and gloomier, almost menacing in its uncanny evening silence. The birds were hushed, and the wind.

She blundered on, not admitting to herself the possibility of being unable to find Cariboo Meadows. As best she could, and to the best of her belief, she held in a straight line for the town. But she walked far enough to have overrun it, and was yet upon unfamiliar ground. The twilight deepened. The sky above showed turquoise blue between the tall tree-tops, but the woods themselves grew blurred, dusky at a little distance ahead. Even to a seasoned woodsman, twilight in a timbered country that he does not know brings confusion; uncertainty leads him far wide of his mark. Hazel, all unused to woods travel, hurried the more, uneasy with the growing conviction that she had gone astray.

The shadows deepened until she tripped over roots and stones, and snagged her hair and clothing on branches she could not see in time to fend off. As a last resort, she turned straight for the light patch still showing in the northwest, hoping thus to cross the wagon road that ran from Soda Creek to the Meadows--it lay west, and she had gone northeast from town. And as she hurried, a fear began to tug at her that she had pa.s.sed the Meadows unknowingly. If she could only cross a trail--trails always led somewhere, and she was going it blind. The immensity of the unpeopled areas she had been looking out over for a week appalled her.

Presently it was dark, and darkness in the woods is the darkness of the pit itself. She found a fallen tree, and climbed on it to rest and think. Night in gloomy places brings an eerie feeling sometimes to the bravest--dormant sense impressions, running back to the cave age and beyond, become active, harry the mind with subtle, unreasoning qualms--and she was a girl, brave enough, but out of the only environment she knew how to grapple with. All the fearsome tales of forest beasts she had ever heard rose up to hara.s.s her. She had not lifted up her voice while it was light because she was not the timid soul that cries in the face of a threatened danger. Also because she would not then admit the possibility of getting lost. And now she was afraid to call. She huddled on the log, shuddering with the growing chill of the night air, partly with dread of the long, black night itself that walled her in. She had no matches to light a fire.

After what seemed an age, she fancied she saw a gleam far distant in the timber. She watched the spot fixedly, and thought she saw the faint reflection of a light. That heartened her. She advanced toward it, hoping that it might be the gleam of a ranch window. Her progress was slow. She blundered over the litter of a forest floor, tripping over unseen obstacles. But ten minutes established beyond peradventure the fact that it was indeed a light. Whether a house light or the reflection of a camp fire she was not woodwise enough to tell. But a fire must mean human beings of one sort or another, and thereby a means to reach home.

She kept on. The wavering gleam came from behind a thicket--an open fire, she saw at length. Beyond the fire she heard a horse sneeze.

Within a few yards of the thicket through which wavered the yellow gleam she halted, smitten with a sudden panic. This endured but a few seconds. All that she knew or had been told of frontier men rea.s.sured her. She had found them to a man courteous, awkwardly considerate.