The Forester's Daughter Read online

  The north-bound coach got away first, and as the girl came out to take her place, Norcross said: “Won’t you have my seat with the driver?”

  She dropped her voice humorously. “No, thank you, I can’t stand for Bill’s clack.”

  Norcross understood. She didn’t relish the notion of being so close to the frankly amorous driver, who neglected no opportunity to be personal; therefore, he helped her to her seat inside and resumed his place in front.

  Bill, now broadly communicative, minutely detailed his tastes in food, horses, liquors, and saddles in a long monologue which would have been tiresome to any one but an imaginative young Eastern student. Bill had a vast knowledge of the West, but a distressing habit of repetition. He was self-conscious, too, for the reason that he was really talking for the benefit of the girl sitting in critical silence behind him, who, though he frequently turned to her for confirmation of some of the more startling of his statements, refused to be drawn into controversy.

  In this informing way some ten miles were traversed, the road climbing ever higher, and the mountains to right and left increasing in grandeur each hour, till of a sudden and in a deep valley on the bank of another swift stream, they came upon a squalid saloon and a minute post-office. This was the town of Moskow.

  Bill, lumbering down over the wheel, took a bag of mail from the boot and dragged it into the cabin. The girl rose, stretched herself, and said: “This stagin’ is slow business. I’m cramped. I’m going to walk on ahead.”

  “May I go with you?” asked Norcross.

  “Sure thing! Come along.”

  As they crossed the little pole bridge which spanned the flood, the tourist exclaimed: “What exquisite water! It’s like melted opals.”

  “Comes right down from the snow,” she answered, impressed by the poetry of his simile.

  He would gladly have lingered, listening to the song of the water, but as she passed on, he followed. The opposite hill was sharp and the road stony, but as they reached the top the young Easterner called out, “See the savins!”

  Before them stood a grove of cedars, old, gray, and drear, as weirdly impressive as the cacti in a Mexican desert. Torn by winds, scarred by lightnings, deeply rooted, tenacious as tradition, unlovely as Egyptian mummies, fantastic, dwarfed and blackened, these unaccountable creatures clung to the ledges. The dead mingled horribly with the living, and when the wind arose—the wind that was robustly cheerful on the high hills—these hags cried out with low moans of infinite despair. It was as if they pleaded for water or for deliverance from a life that was a kind of death.

  The pale young man shuddered. “What a ghostly place!” he exclaimed, in a low voice. “It seems the burial-place of a vanished race.”

  Something in his face, some note in his voice profoundly moved the girl. For the first time her face showed something other than childish good nature and a sense of humor. “I don’t like these trees myself,” she answered. “They look too much like poor old squaws.”

  For a few moments the man and the maid studied the forest of immemorial, gaunt, and withered trees—bright, impermanent youth confronting time-defaced and wind-torn age. Then the girl spoke: “Let’s get out of here. I shall cry if we don’t.”

  In a few moments the dolorous voices were left behind, and the cheerful light of the plain reasserted itself. Norcross, looking back down upon the cedars, which at a distance resembled a tufted, bronze-green carpet, musingly asked: “What do you suppose planted those trees there?”

  The girl was deeply impressed by the novelty of this query. “I never thought to ask. I reckon they just grew.”

  “No, there’s a reason for all these plantings,” he insisted.

  “We don’t worry ourselves much about such things out here,” she replied, with charming humor. “We don’t even worry about the weather. We just take things as they come.”

  They walked on talking with new intimacy. “Where is your home?” he asked.

  “A few miles out of Bear Tooth. You’re from the East, Bill says—‘the far East,’ we call it.”

  “From New Haven. I’ve just finished at Yale. Have you ever been to New York?”

  “Oh, good Lord, no!” she answered, as though he had named the ends of the earth. “My mother came from the South—she was born in Kentucky—that accounts for my name, and my father is a Missourian. Let’s see, Yale is in the state of Connecticut, isn’t it?”

  “Connecticut is no longer a state; it is only a suburb of New York City.”

  “Is that so? My geography calls it ‘The Nutmeg State.’”

  “Your geography is behind the times. New York has absorbed all of Connecticut and part of Jersey.”

  “Well, it’s all the same to us out here. Your whole country looks like the small end of a slice of pie to us.”

  “Have you ever been in a city?”

  “Oh yes, I go to Denver once in a while, and I saw St. Louis once; but I was only a yearling, and don’t remember much about it. What are you doing out here, if it’s a fair question?”

  He looked away at the mountains. “I got rather used up last spring, and my doctor said I’d better come out here for a while and build up. I’m going up to Meeker’s Mill. Do you know where that is?”

  “I know every stove-pipe in this park,” she answered. “Joe Meeker is kind o’ related to me—uncle by marriage. He lives about fifteen miles over the hill from Bear Tooth.”

  This fact seemed to bring them still closer together. “I’m glad of that,” he said, pointedly. “Perhaps I shall be permitted to see you now and again? I’m going to be lonesome for a while, I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t you believe it! Joe Meeker’s boys will keep you interested,” she assured him.

  The stage overtook them at this point, and Bill surlily remarked: “If you’d been alone, young feller, I’d ‘a’ give you a chase.” His resentment of the outsider’s growing favor with the girl was ludicrously evident.

  As they rose into the higher levels the aspen shook its yellowish leaves in the breeze, and the purple foot-hills gained in majesty. Great new peaks came into view on the right, and the lofty cliffs of the Bear Tooth range loomed in naked grandeur high above the blue-green of the pines which clothed their sloping eastern sides.

  At intervals the road passed small log ranches crouching low on the banks of creeks; but aside from these—and the sparse animal life around them—no sign of settlement could be seen. The valley lay as it had lain for thousands of years, repeating its forests as the meadows of the lower levels send forth their annual grasses. Norcross said to himself: “I have circled the track of progress and have re-entered the border America, where the stage-coach is still the one stirring thing beneath the sun.”

  At last the driver, with a note of exultation, called out: “Grab a root, everybody, it’s all the way down-hill and time to feed.”

  And so, as the dusk came over the mighty spread of the hills to the east, and the peaks to the west darkened from violet to purple-black, the stage rumbled and rattled and rushed down the winding road through thickening signs of civilization, and just at nightfall rolled into the little town of Bear Tooth, which is the eastern gateway of the Ute Plateau.

  Norcross had given a great deal of thought to the young girl behind him, and thought had deepened her charm. Her frankness, her humor, her superb physical strength and her calm self-reliance appealed to him, and the more dangerously, because he was so well aware of his own weakness and loneliness, and as the stage drew up before the hotel, he fervently said: “I hope I shall see you again?”

  Before she could reply a man’s voice called: “Hello, there!” and a tall fellow stepped up to her with confident mien.

  Norcross awkwardly shrank away. This was her cowboy lover, of course. It was impossible that so attractive a girl should be unattached, and the knowledge produced in him a faint but very definite pang of envy and regret.

  The happy girl, even in the excitement of meeting her lover, did not forget t
he stranger. She gave him her hand in parting, and again he thrilled to its amazing power. It was small, but it was like a steel clamp. “Stop in on your way to Meeker’s,” she said, as a kindly man would have done. “You pass our gate. My father is Joseph McFarlane, the Forest Supervisor. Good night.”

  “Good night,” he returned, with sincere liking.

  “Who is that?” Norcross heard her companion ask.

  She replied in a low voice, but he overheard her answer, “A poor ‘lunger,’ bound for Meeker’s—and Kingdom Come, I’m afraid. He seems a nice young feller, too.”

  “They always wait till the last minute,” remarked the rancher, with indifferent tone.

  * * *

  II

  A RIDE IN THE RAIN

  There are two Colorados within the boundaries of the state of that name, distinct, almost irreconcilable. One is a plain (smooth, dry, monotonous), gently declining to the east, a land of sage-brush, wheat-fields, and alfalfa meadows—a rather commonplace region now, given over to humdrum folk intent on digging a living from the soil; but the other is an army of peaks, a region of storms, a spread of dark and tangled forests. In the one, shallow rivers trickle on their sandy way to the Gulf of Mexico; from the other, the waters rush, uniting to make the mighty stream whose silt-laden floods are slowly filling the Gulf of California.

  If you stand on one of the great naked crests which form the dividing wall, the rampart of the plains, you can see the Colorado of tradition to the west, still rolling in wave after wave of stupendous altitudes, each range cutting into the sky with a purple saw-tooth edge. The landscape seems to contain nothing but rocks and towering crags, a treasure-house for those who mine. But this is illusive. Between these purple heights charming valleys wind and meadows lie in which rich grasses grow and cattle feed.

  On certain slopes—where the devastating miners have not yet played their relentless game—dark forests rise to the high, bold summits of the chiefest mountains, and it is to guard these timbered tracts, growing each year more valuable, that the government has established its Forest Service to protect and develop the wealth-producing power of the watersheds.

  Chief among the wooded areas of this mighty inland empire of crag and stream is the Bear Tooth Forest, containing nearly eight hundred thousand acres of rock and trees, whose seat of administration is Bear Tooth Springs, the small town in which our young traveler found himself.

  He carefully explained to the landlord of the Cottage Hotel that he had never been in this valley before, and that he was filled with astonishment and delight of the scenery.

  “Scenery! Yes, too much scenery. What we want is settlers,” retorted the landlord, who was shabby and sour and rather contemptuous, for the reason that he considered Norcross a poor consumptive, and a fool to boot—“one of those chaps who wait till they are nearly dead, then come out here expecting to live on climate.”

  The hotel was hardly larger than the log shanty of a railway-grading camp; but the meat was edible, and just outside the door roared Bear Creek, which came down directly from Dome Mountain, and the young Easterner went to sleep beneath its singing that night. He should have dreamed of the happy mountain girl, but he did not; on the contrary, he imagined himself back at college in the midst of innumerable freshmen, yelling, “Bill McCoy, Bill McCoy!”

  He woke a little bewildered by his strange surroundings, and when he became aware of the cheap bed, the flimsy wash-stand, the ugly wallpaper, and thought how far he was from home and friends, he not only sighed, he shivered. The room was chill, the pitcher of water cold almost to the freezing-point, and his joints were stiff and painful from his ride. What folly to come so far into the wilderness at this time.

  As he crawled from his bed and looked from the window he was still further disheartened. In the foreground stood a half dozen frame buildings, graceless and cheap, without tree or shrub to give shadow or charm of line—all was bare, bleak, sere; but under his window the stream was singing its glorious mountain song, and away to the west rose the aspiring peaks from which it came. Romance brooded in that shadow, and on the lower foot-hills the frost-touched foliage glowed like a mosaic of jewels.

  Dressing hurriedly he went down to the small bar-room, whose litter of duffle-bags, guns, saddles, and camp utensils gave evidence of the presence of many hunters and fishermen. The slovenly landlord was poring over a newspaper, while a discouraged half-grown youth was sludging the floor with a mop; but a cheerful clamor from an open door at the back of the hall told that breakfast was on.

  Venturing over the threshold, Norcross found himself seated at table with some five or six men in corduroy jackets and laced boots, who were, in fact, merchants and professional men from Denver and Pueblo out for fish and such game as the law allowed, and all in holiday mood. They joked the waiter-girls, and joshed one another in noisy good-fellowship, ignoring the slim youth in English riding-suit, who came in with an air of mingled melancholy and timidity and took a seat at the lower corner of the long table.

  The landlady, tall, thin, worried, and inquisitive, was New England—Norcross recognized her type even before she came to him with a question on her lips. “So you’re from the East, are you?”

  “I’ve been at school there.”

  “Well, I’m glad to see you. My folks came from York State. I don’t often get any one from the real East. Come out to fish, I s’pose?”

  “Yes,” he replied, thinking this the easiest way out.

  “Well, they’s plenty of fishing—and they’s plenty of air, not much of anything else.”

  As he looked about the room, the tourist’s eye was attracted by four young fellows seated at a small table to his right. They wore rough shirts of an olive-green shade, and their faces were wind-scorched; but their voices held a pleasant tone, and something in the manner of the landlady toward them made them noticeable. Norcross asked her who they were.

  “They’re forestry boys.”

  “Forestry boys?”

  “Yes; the Supervisor’s office is here, and these are his help.”

  This information added to Norcross’s interest and cheered him a little. He knew something of the Forest Service, and had been told that many of the rangers were college men. He resolved to make their acquaintance. “If I’m to stay here they will help me endure the exile,” he said.

  After breakfast he went forth to find the post-office, expecting a letter of instructions from Meeker. He found nothing of the sort, and this quite disconcerted him.

  “The stage is gone,” the postmistress told him, “and you can’t get up till day after to-morrow. You might reach Meeker by using the government ’phone, however.”

  “Where will I find the government ’phone?”

  “Down in the Supervisor’s office. They’re very accommodating; they’ll let you use it, if you tell them who you want to reach.”

  It was impossible to miss the forestry building for the reason that a handsome flag fluttered above it. The door being open, Norcross perceived from the threshold a young clerk at work on a typewriter, while in a corner close by the window another and older man was working intently on a map.

  “Is this the office of the Forest Supervisor?” asked the youth.

  The man at the machine looked up, and pleasantly answered: “It is, but the Supervisor is not in yet. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “It may be you can. I am on my way to Meeker’s Mill for a little outing. Perhaps you could tell me where Meeker’s Mill is, and how I can best get there.”

  The man at the map meditated. “It’s not far, some eighteen or twenty miles; but it’s over a pretty rough trail.”

  “What kind of a place is it?”

  “Very charming. You’ll like it. Real mountain country.”

  This officer was a plain-featured man of about thirty-five, with keen and clear eyes. His voice, though strongly nasal, possessed a note of manly sincerity. As he studied his visitor, he smiled.

  “You look brand-new—h
aven’t had time to season-check, have you?”

  “No; I’m a stranger in a strange land.”

  “Out for your health?”

  “Yes. My name is Norcross. I’m just getting over a severe illness, and I’m up here to lay around and fish and recuperate—if I can.”

  “You can—you will. You can’t help it,” the other assured him. “Join one of our surveying crews for a week and I’ll mellow that suit of yours and make a real mountaineer of you. I see you wear a Sigma Chi pin. What was your school?”

  “I am a ‘Son of Eli.’ Last year’s class.”

  The other man displayed his fob. “I’m ten classes ahead of you. My name is Nash. I’m what they call an ‘expert.’ I’m up here doing some estimating and surveying for a big ditch they’re putting in. I was rather in hopes you had come to join our ranks. We sons of Eli are holding the conservation fort these days, and we need help.”

  “My knowledge of your work is rather vague,” admitted Norcross. “My father is in the lumber business; but his point of view isn’t exactly yours.”

  “He slays ’em, does he?”

  “He did. He helped devastate Michigan.”

  “After me the deluge! I know the kind. Why not make yourself a sort of vicarious atonement?”

  Norcross smiled. “I had not thought of that. It would help some, wouldn’t it?”

  “It certainly would. There’s no great money in the work; but it’s about the most enlightened of all the governmental bureaus.”

  Norcross was strongly drawn to this forester, whose tone was that of a highly trained specialist. “I rode up on the stage yesterday with Miss Berrie McFarlane.”

  “The Supervisor’s daughter?”

  “She seemed a fine Western type.”

  “She’s not a type; she’s an individual. She hasn’t her like anywhere I’ve gone. She cuts a wide swath up here. Being an only child she’s both son and daughter to McFarlane. She knows more about forestry than her father. In fact, half the time he depends on her judgment.”