Dorn Of The Mountains (15 page)

“Sometimes at night,” replied Dorn.

“Wal, excuse me. Hope you don’t fetch the yaller rascal down to Pine.”

“I won’t.”

“What’ll you do with this menagerie?”

Dorn regarded the rancher attentively. “Reckon, Al, I’ll take care of them.”

“But you’re goin’ down to my ranch.”

“What for?”

Al scratched his head and gazed perplexedly at the hunter. “Wal, ain’t it customary to visit friends?”

“Thanks, Al. Next time I ride down Pine way…in the spring, perhaps…I’ll run over an’ see how you are.”

“Spring!” ejaculated Auchincloss. Then he shook his head sadly and a faraway look filmed his eyes. “Reckon you’d call some late.”

“Al, you’ll get well now. These girls…now…. They’ll cure you. Reckon I never saw you look so good.”

Auchincloss did not press his point further at that time, but after the meal, when the other men came to see Dorn’s camp and pets, then Helen’s quick ears caught the renewal of the subject.

“I’m askin’ you, will you come?” Auchincloss said, low and eagerly.

“No. I couldn’t fit in down there,” replied Dorn.

“Milt, talk sense. You can’t go on forever huntin’ bear an’ tamin’ cats,” protested the old rancher.

“Why not?” asked the hunter thoughtfully.

Auchincloss stood up and shaking himself, as if to ward off his testy temper, he put a hand on Dorn’s arm. “One reason is you’re needed in Pine.”

“How? Who needs me?”

“I do. I’m playin’ out fast. An’ Beasley’s my enemy. The ranch an’ all I got will go to Nell…. Thet ranch will have to be run by a man an’
held
by a man…. Do you savvy? It’s a big job. An’ I’m offerin’ to make you my foreman right now.”

“Al, you sort of take my breath,” replied Dorn. “An’ I’m sure grateful…. But the fact is, even if I could handle the job, I…I don’t believe I’d want to.”

“Make yourself want to, then. Thet’d soon come. You’d get interested. This country will develop. I seen thet years ago. The government is goin’ to chase the Apaches out of here. Soon homesteaders will be flockin’ in…. Big future, Dorn. You want to get in now…. An’….” Here Auchincloss hesitated, then spoke lower. “An’ take your chance with the girl. I’ll be on your side.”

A slight vibrating start ran over Dorn’s stalwart form. “Al…;you’re plumb dotty!” he exclaimed.

“Dotty! Me? Dotty!” ejaculated Auchincloss. Then he swore. “In a minnit I’ll tell you what you are.”

“But, Al, that talk’s so…so…like an old fool’s.”

“Ahuh. An’ why so?”

“Because that wonderful girl would never look at me,” Dorn replied simply.

“I seen her lookin’ already,” declared Al bluntly.

Dorn shook his head as if arguing with the old rancher was hopeless.

“Never mind thet,” went on Al. “Mebbe I am a dotty old fool…‘specially for takin’ a shine to you…. But I say again…will you come down to Pine an’ be my foreman?”

“No,” replied Dorn.

“Milt, I’ve no son…an’ I’m…afraid of Beasley.” This was uttered in an agitated whisper.

“Al, you make me ashamed,” said Dorn hoarsely. “I can’t come. I’ve no nerve.”

“You’ve no what?”

“Al, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But I’m afraid I’d find out if I came down there.”

“A-huh! It’s the girl!”

“I don’t know, but I’m afraid so…. An’ I won’t come.”

“
Aw
, yes you will….”

Helen rose with beating heart and tingling ears, and moved away out of hearing. She had listened too long to what had not been intended for her ears, yet she could not be sorry. She walked a few rods along the brook, out from under the pines, and, standing in the open edge of the park, she felt the beautiful scene still her agitation. The following moments, then, were the happiest she had spent in Paradise Park, and the profoundest of her whole life.

Presently her uncle called her. “Nell, this here hunter wants to give you thet black hoss! An’ I say you take him!”

“Ranger deserves better care than I can give him,” said Dorn. “He runs free in the woods most of the time…. I’d be obliged if she’d have him.”

Bo swept a saucy glance from Dorn to her sister. “Sure she’ll have Ranger…. Just offer him to
me!
”

Dorn stood there expectantly, holding a blanket in his hand, ready to saddle the horse.

Carmichael walked around Ranger with that appraising eye so keen in cowboys.

“Las Vegas, do you know anything about horses?” asked Bo.

“Me? Wal, if you ever buy or trade a hoss, you shore have me there,” replied Carmichael.

“What do you think of Ranger?” went on Bo.

“Shore I’d buy him sudden, if I could.”

“Mister Las Vegas, you’re too late,” asserted Helen as she advanced to lay a hand on the horse. “Ranger is mine.”

Dale smoothed out the blanket, and, folding it, he threw it over the horse, and then with one powerful swing he set the saddle in place.

“Thank you very much for him,” said Helen softly.

“You’re welcome, an’ I’m sure glad,” responded Dorn, and then, after a few deft strong pulls at the straps, he continued: “There, he’s ready for you.” With that he laid an arm over the saddle and faced Helen, as she stood patting and smoothing Ranger.

Helen, strong and calm now, in feminine possession of her secret and his, as well as her composure, looked frankly and steadily at Dorn. He seemed composed, too, yet the bronze of his fine face was a trifle pale.

“But I can’t thank you…I’ll never be able to repay you…for your ser vice to me and my sister,” said Helen.

“I reckon you needn’t try,” Dorn returned. “An’ my ser v-ice, as you call it, has been good for me.”

“Are you going down to Pine with us?”

“No.”

“But you will come soon?”

“Not very soon, I reckon,” he replied, and averted his gaze.

“When?”

“Hardly before spring.”

“Spring? That is a long time. Won’t you come to see me sooner than that?”

“If I can get down to Pine.”

“You’re the first friend I’ve made in the West,” said Helen earnestly.

“You’ll make many more…an’ I reckon soon forget him you called the man of the forest.”

“I never forget any of my friends. And you’ve been the…the biggest friend I ever had.”

“I’ll be proud to remember.”

“But will you remember…will you promise to come to Pine?”

“I reckon.”

“Thank you. All’s well then…. My friend, good bye.”

“Good bye,” he said, clasping her hand. His glance was clear, warm, beautiful, yet it was sad.

Auchincloss’s hearty voice broke the spell. Then Helen saw that the others were mounted. Bo had ridden up close, and her face was earnest and happy and grieved all at once as she bade good bye to Dorn. The pack burros were bobbing along toward the green slope. Helen was the last to mount, but Roy was the last to leave the hunter.

It was a merry singing train that climbed that brown odorous trail, under the dark spruces. Helen assuredly was happy, yet a pang abided in her breast. She remembered that halfway up the slope there was a turn in the trail where it came out upon an open bluff. The time seemed long, but at last she got there. And she checked Ranger so as to have a moment’s gaze down into the park.

It yawned there, a dark-green and bright-gold gulf, asleep under a westering sun, exquisite, wild, lonesome. Then she saw Dorn standing in the open space between the pines and the spruces. He waved to her. And she returned the salute.

Roy caught up with her then and halted his horse. He waved his sombrero to Dorn and let out a piercing yell that awoke the sleeping echoes, splitting strangely from cliff to cliff.

“Shore Milt never knowed what it was to be lonesome,” said Roy as if thinking aloud. “But he’ll know now.”

Ranger stepped out of his own accord and, turning off the ledge, entered the spruce forest. Helen lost sight of Paradise Park. For hours then she rode along a shady fragrant trail, seeing the beauty of color and wildness, hearing the murmur and rush and roar of water, but all the while her mind revolved the sweet and momentous realization that had thrilled her—that the hunter, this strange man of the forest, so deeply versed in Nature and so unfamiliar with emotion, aloof and simple and strong like the elements that had developed him, had fallen in love with her and did not know it.

Dorn stood with face and arm upraised, and he watched Helen ride off the ledge to disappear in the forest. That vast spruce slope seemed to have swallowed her. She was gone! Slowly Dorn lowered his arm with a gesture expressive of a strange finality, an eloquent despair, of which he was unconscious. He turned to the park, to his camp, and the many duties of a hunter. The park did not seem the same, nor did his home, nor his work.

“I reckon this feelin’s natural,” he soliloquized resignedly, “but it’s sure queer for me. That’s what comes of makin’ friends…. Nell an’ Bo, now, they made a difference, an’ a difference I never knew before.”

He calculated that this difference had been simply one of responsibility, and then the charm and liveliness of the companionship of girls, and finally friendship. These would pass now that the causes were removed.

Before he had worked an hour around camp, he realized a change had come but it was not the one anticipated. Always before he had put his mind on his tasks, what ever they might be; now he worked while his thoughts were strangely involved.

The little bear cub whined at his heels; the tame deer seemed to regard him with deep questioning eyes; the big cougar padded softly here and there as if searching for something.

“You all miss Bo…now…I reckon,” said Dorn. “Well, she’s gone an’ you’ll have to get along with me.”

Some vague approach to irritation with his pets surprised him. Presently he grew both irritated and surprised with himself—a state of mind totally unfamiliar. Several times as old habit brought momentary abstraction he found himself suddenly looking around for Helen and Bo. And each time the shock grew stronger. They were gone, but their presence lingered. After his camp chores were completed, he went over to pull down the lean-to that the girls had utilized as a tent. The spruce boughs had dried out brown and sear; the wind had blown the roof away; the sides were leaning in. As there was now no further use for this little habitation, he might better pull it down. Dorn did not acknowledge that his gaze had involuntarily wandered toward it many times. Therefore he strode over with the intention of destroying it.

For the first time since Roy and he had built the lean-to, he stepped inside. Nothing was more certain than the fact that he experienced a strange sensation, perfectly incomprehensible to him. The blankets lay there on the spruce boughs, disarranged and thrown back by hurried hands, yet still holding something of round folds where the slender forms had nestled. A black scarf often worn by Bo lay covering the pillow of pine needles, a red ribbon that Helen had worn on her hair hung from a twig. These articles were all that had been forgotten. Dorn gazed at them attentively, then at the blankets and all around the fragrant little shelter, and he stepped outside with an uncomfortable knowledge that he could not destroy the place where Helen and Bo had spent so many hours.

Whereupon, in studious mood, Dorn took up his rifle and strode out to hunt. His winter supply of venison had not yet been laid in. Action suited his mood; he climbed far and passed by many a watching buck to slay, which seemed murder, and at last he jumped one that was wild and bounded away. This he shot, and set himself a Herculean task in packing the whole carcass back to camp. Burdened thus he staggered under the trees, sweating freely, many times laboring for breath, aching with toil, until at last he had reached camp. There he slid the deer carcass off his shoulders, and, standing over it, he gazed down while his breast labored. It was one of the finest young bucks he had ever seen. But neither in stalking it, or making a wonderful shot, or in packing home a weight that would have burdened two men, or in gazing down at his beautiful quarry, did Dorn experience any of the old joy of the hunter.

“I’m a little off my feed,” he mused as he wiped the sweat from his heated face. “Maybe a little dotty, as I called Al…. But that’ll pass.”

What ever his state, it did not pass. As of old after a long day’s hunt he reclined beside the campfire and watched the golden sunset glows change on the ramparts; as of old he lay a hand on the soft furry head of the pet cougar; as of old he watched the gold change to red and then to dark, and twilight fall like a blanket; as of old he listened to the dreamy lulling murmur of the waterfall. The old familiar beauty, wildness, silence, and loneliness were there, but the old content seemed strangely gone.

Soberly he confessed then that he missed the happy company of the girls. He did not distinguish Helen from Bo in his slow introspection. When he sought his bed, he did not at once fall to sleep. Always after a few moments of wakefulness, while the silence settled down or the wind moaned through the pines, he had fallen asleep. This night he found different. Although he was tired, sleep would not soon come. The wilderness, the mountains, the park, the camp—all seemed to have lost something. Even the darkness seemed empty. And when at length Dorn fell asleep, it was to be troubled by restless dreams.

Up with the keen-edged, steely bright dawn he went at his tasks with the springy stride of the deerstalker.

At the end of that strenuous day, which was singularly full of the old excitement and action and danger, and of new observations, he was bound to confess that no longer did the chase suffice for him. Many times on the heights that day, with the wind keen in his face and the vast green billows of spruce below him, he had found that he was gazing without seeing, halting without object, dreaming as he had never dreamed before.

Once, when a magnificent elk came out upon a rocky ridge, and whistling a challenge to invisible rivals, stood there a target to stir any hunter’s pulse, Dorn did not even raise his rifle. Into his ear just then rang Helen’s voice:
Milt Dorn, you are no Indian. Giving yourself to a hunter’s wild life is selfish. It is wrong. You love this lonely life, but it is not work. Work that does not help others is not a real man’s work.

From that moment conscience tormented him. It was not what he loved, but what he ought to do that counted in the sum of good achieved in the world. Old Al Auchincloss had been right. Dorn was wasting strength and intelligence that should go to do his share in the development of the West. Now that he had reached maturity, if through his knowledge of Nature’s laws he had come to see the meaning of the strife of men for existence, for place, for possession, and to hold them in contempt, that was no reason why he should keep himself aloof from them, from some work that was needed in an incomprehensible world.

Dorn did not hate work, but he loved freedom. To be alone, to live with Nature, to feel the elements, to labor and dream and idle and climb and sleep unhampered by duty, by worry, by restriction, by the petty interests of men—this had always been his ideal of living. Cowboys, riders, sheepherders, farmers—these toiled on from one place and one job to another for the little money doled out to them. Nothing beautiful, nothing significant had ever existed in that for him. He had worked as a boy at every kind of range work, and of all that humdrum waste of effort he had liked sawing wood best. Once he had quit a job of branding cattle because the smell of burning hide, the bawl of the terrified calf had sickened him. If men were honest, there would be no need to scar cattle. He had never in the least desired to own land and droves of stock, and make deals with ranchmen, deals advantageous to himself. Why should a man want to make a deal or trade a horse or do a piece of work to another man’s disadvantage? Self-preservation was the first law of life. But as the plants and trees and birds and beasts interpreted that law, merciless and inevitable as they were, they had neither greed nor dishonesty. They lived by the grand rule of what was best for the greatest number.

But Dorn’s philosophy, cold and clear and inevitable, like Nature itself, began to be pierced by the human appeal in Helen Rayner’s words. What did she mean? Not that he should lose his love of wilderness, but that he realize himself! Many chance words of that girl had depth. He was young, strong, intelligent, free from taint of disease, or the fever of drink. He could do something for others. Who? If that mattered, there for instance was poor old Mrs. Cass, aged and lame now, and there was Al Auchincloss, dying in his boots, afraid of enemies, and wistful for his blood and his property to receive the fruit of his labors, and there were the two girls, Helen and Bo, new and strange to the West, about to be confronted by a big problem of ranch life and rival interests. Dorn thought of still more people in the little village of Pine—of others who had failed, whose lives were hard, who could have been made happier by kindness and assistance.

What then was the duty of Milt Dorn to himself? Because men preyed on each other and on the weak, should he turn his back upon a so-called civilization or should he grow like them? Clear as a bell came the answer that his duty was to do neither. And then he saw how the little village of Pine, as well as the whole world, needed men like him. He had gone to Nature, to the forest, to the wilderness for his development, and all the judgments and efforts of his future would be a result of that education.

Thus Dorn, lying in the darkness and silence of his lonely park, arrived at a conclusion that he divined was but the beginning of a struggle.

It took long introspection to determine the exact nature of that struggle, but at length it evolved into the paradox that Helen Rayner had opened his eyes to his duty as a man, that he accepted it, yet found a strange obstacle in the perplexing, tumultuous, sweet fear of ever going near her again.

Suddenly, then, all his thought revolved around the girl, and, thrown off his balance, he weltered in a wilderness of unfamiliar ideas.

When he awoke next day, the fight was on in earnest. In his sleep his mind had been active. The idea that greeted him, beautiful as the sunrise, flashed in memory of Auchincloss’s significant words:
Take your chance with the girl.

The old rancher was in his dotage. He hinted of things beyond the range of possibility. That idea of a chance for Dorn remained before his consciousness only an instant. Stars were unattainable; life could not be fathomed; the secrets of Nature did not abide alone on the earth—these theories were not any more impossible of proving than that Helen Rayner might be for him.

Nevertheless her strange coming into his life had played havoc, the extent of which he had only begun to realize.

For a month he tramped through the forest. It was October, a still golden fulfilling season of the year, and everywhere in the vast dark green a glorious blaze of oak and aspen made beautiful contrast. He carried his rifle, but he never used it. He would climb miles and go this way and that with no object in view. Yet his eye and ear had never been keener. Hours he would spend on a promontory, watching the distance, where the golden patches of aspen shone brightly out of dark-green mountain slopes. He loved to fling himself down in an aspen grove at the edge of a
parque,
and there lie in that radiance like a veil of gold and purple and red, with the white tree trunks striping the shade. Always, whether there were breeze or not, the aspen leaves quivered, ceaselessly, wonderfully, like his pulse, beyond his control. Often he reclined against a mossy rock beside a mountain stream to listen, to watch, to feel all that was there, while his mind held a haunting, dark-eyed vision of a girl. On the lonely heights, like an ea gle, he sat gazing down into Paradise Park, which was more and more beautiful, but would never again be the same, never fill him with content, never be all and all to him.

Late in October the first snow fell. It melted at once on the south side of the park, but the north slopes and the rims and domes above stayed white.

Dorn had worked quick and hard at curing and storing his winter supply of food, and now he spent days chopping and splitting wood to burn during the months he would be snowed-in. He watched for the dark gray, fast-scudding storm clouds, and welcomed them when they came. Once there lay ten feet of snow on the trails he would be snowed-in until spring. It would be impossible to go down to Pine. And perhaps during the long winter he would be cured of this strange nameless disorder of his feelings.

November brought storms up on the peaks. Flurries of snow fell in the park every day, but the sunny south side, where Dorn’s camp lay, retained its autumnal color and warmth. Not till late in winter did the snow creep over this secluded nook.

The morning came at last, piercingly keen and bright, when Dorn saw that the heights were impassable, and the realization brought him a poignant regret. He had not guessed how he had wanted to see Helen Rayner again until it was too late. That opened his eyes. A raging frenzy of action followed, in which he only tired himself physically without helping himself spiritually.

It was sunset when he faced the west, looking up at the pink snow domes and the dark golden fringe of spruce, and in that moment he found the truth.

“I love that girl. I love that girl!” he spoke aloud to the distant white peaks, to the winds, to the loneliness and silence of his prison, to the great pines and to the murmuring streams, and to his faithful pets. It was his tragic confession of weakness, of amazing truth, of hopeless position, of pitiful excuse for the transformation wrought in him.

Dorn’s struggle ended there when he faced his soul. To understand himself was to be released from strain, worry, ceaseless importuning doubt, and wonder and fear.

But the fever of unrest, of uncertainty had been nothing compared to a sudden upflashing torment of love.

With somber deliberation he set about the tasks needful, and others that he might make—his campfires and meals, the care of his pets and horses, the mending of saddles and pack harness, the curing of buckskin for moccasins and hunting suits. So his days were not idle. But all this work was habit for him and needed no application of mind.

And Dorn, like some men of lonely wilderness lives who did not retrograde toward the savage, was a thinker. Love made him a sufferer.

The surprise and shame of his unconscious surrender, the certain hopelessness of it, the long years of communion with all that was wild, lonely, and beautiful, the wonderfully developed insight into Nature’s secrets, and the sudden dawning revelation that he was no omniscient being exempt from the ruthless ordinary destiny of man—all these showed him the strength of his manhood and of his passion, and that the life he had chosen was of all lives the one calculated to make love sad and terrible.