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lay before him, a beautiful sheet of water, mirroring the black slopes
and the fringed spruces and the flat peaks. Over all its gray,
twilight-softened surface showed little swirls and boils and splashes
where the myriads of trout were rising. The trail led out over open
grassy shores, with a few pines straggling down to the lake, and clumps
of spruces raising dark blurs against the background of gleaming lake.
Wade heard a sharp crack of hoofs on rock, and he knew he had disturbed
deer at their drinking; also he heard a ring of horns on the branch of a
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tree, and was sure an elk was slipping off through the woods. Across the
lake he saw a camp-fire and a pale, sharp-pointed object that was a
trapper's tent or an Indian's tepee.
Selecting a camp-site for himself, he unsaddled his horse, threw the
pack off the other, and, hobbling both animals, he turned them loose.
His roll of bedding, roped in canvas tarpaulin, he threw under a
spruce-tree. Then he opened his oxhide-covered packs and laid out
utensils and bags, little and big. All his movements were methodical,
yet swift, accurate, habitual. He was not thinking about what he was
doing. It took him some little time to find a suitable log to split for
fire-wood, and when he had started a blaze night had fallen, and the
light as it grew and brightened played fantastically upon the
isolating shadows.
Lid and pot of the little Dutch oven he threw separately upon the
sputtering fire, and while they heated he washed his hands, mixed the
biscuits, cut slices of meat off the deer haunch, and put water on to
boil. He broiled his meat on the hot, red coals, and laid it near on
clean pine chips, while he waited for bread to bake and coffee to boil.
The smell of wood-smoke and odorous steam from pots and the fragrance of
spruce mingled together, keen, sweet, appetizing. Then he ate his simple
meal hungrily, with the content of the man who had fared worse.
After he had satisfied himself he washed his utensils and stowed them
away, with the bags. Whereupon his movements acquired less dexterity and
speed. The rest hour had come. Still, like the long-experienced man in
the open, he looked around for more to do, and his gaze fell upon his
weapons, lying on his saddle. His rifle was a Henry--shiny and smooth
from long service and care. His small gun was a Colt's 45. It had been
carried in a saddle holster. Wade rubbed the rifle with his hands, and
then with a greasy rag which he took from the sheath. After that he held
the rifle to the heat of the fire. A squall of rain had overtaken him
that day, wetting his weapons. A subtle and singular difference seemed
to show in the way he took up the Colt's. His action was slow, his look
reluctant. The small gun was not merely a thing of steel and powder and
ball. He dried it and rubbed it with care, but not with love, and then
he stowed it away.
Next Wade unrolled his bed under the spruce, with one end of the
tarpaulin resting on the soft mat of needles. On top of that came the
two woolly sheepskins, which he used to lie upon, then his blankets, and
over all the other end of the tarpaulin.
This ended his tasks for the day. He lighted his pipe and composed
himself beside the camp-fire to smoke and rest awhile before going to
bed. The silence of the wilderness enfolded lake and shore; yet
presently it came to be a silence accentuated by near and distant
sounds, faint, wild, lonely--the low hum of falling water, the splash of
tiny waves on the shore, the song of insects, and the dismal hoot
of owls.
"Bill Belllounds--an' he needs a hunter," soliloquized Bent Wade, with
gloomy, penetrating eyes, seeing far through the red embers. "That will
suit me an' change my luck, likely. Livin' in the woods, away from
people--I could stick to a job like that.... But if this White Slides is
close to the old trail I'll never stay."
He sighed, and a darker shadow, not from flickering fire, overspread his
cadaverous face. Eighteen years ago he had driven the woman he loved
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away from him, out into the world with her baby girl. Never had he
rested beside a camp-fire that that old agony did not recur! Jealous
fool! Too late he had discovered his fatal blunder; and then had begun a
search over Colorado, ending not a hundred miles across the wild
mountains from where he brooded that lonely hour--a search ended by news
of the massacre of a wagon-train by Indians.
That was Bent Wade's secret.
And no earthly sufferings could have been crueler than his agony and
remorse, as through the long years he wandered on and on. The very good
that he tried to do seemed to foment evil. The wisdom that grew out of
his suffering opened pitfalls for his wandering feet. The wildness of
men and the passion of women somehow waited with incredible fatality for
that hour when chance led him into their lives. He had toiled, he had
given, he had fought, he had sacrificed, he had killed, he had endured
for the human nature which in his savage youth he had betrayed. Yet out
of his supreme and endless striving to undo, to make reparation, to give
his life, to find God, had come, it seemed to Wade in his abasement,
only a driving torment.
But though his thought and emotion fluctuated, varying, wandering, his
memory held a fixed and changeless picture of a woman, fair and sweet,
with eyes of nameless blue, and face as white as a flower.
"Baby would have been--let's see--'most nineteen years old now--if she'd
lived," he said. "A big girl, I reckon, like her mother.... Strange how,
as I grow older, I remember better!"
The night wind moaned through the spruces; dark clouds scudded across
the sky, blotting out the bright stars; a steady, low roar of water came
from the outlet of the lake. The camp-fire flickered and burned out, so
that no sparks blew into the blackness, and the red embers glowed and
paled and crackled. Wade at length got up and made ready for bed. He
threw back tarpaulin and blankets, and laid his rifle alongside where he
could cover it. His coat served for a pillow and he put the Colt's gun
under that; then pulling off his boots, he slipped into bed, dressed as
he was, and, like all men in the open, at once fell asleep.
For Wade, and for countless men like him, who for many years had roamed
the West, this sleeping alone in wild places held both charm and peril.
But the fascination of it was only a vague realization, and the danger
was laughed at.
Over Bent Wade's quiet form the shadows played, the spruce boughs waved, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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