In almost a moment, Duncan was out of the thickets and into the big timber, for really the first time. In his journey up the mountain road and on the trail that led to the old woman's cabin, he had been many times in the shade of the tall evergreens, but always there had been some little intrusion of civilization, some hint of the works of man that had kept him from the full sense of the majesty of the wild. At first it had been the gleaming railroad tracks, and then a road that had been built with blasting and shovels. To get the full effect of the forest one must be able to behold wide-stretching vistas, and that had been impossible heretofore because of the brush thickets. But this was the virgin forest. As far as he could see there was nothing but the great pines climbing up the long slope of the ridge. He caught glimpses of them in the vales at either side, and their dark tops made a curious background at the very extremity of his vision. They stood straight and aloof, and they were very old.

He fell into their spirit at once. The half-understood emotions that had flooded him in the cabin below died within him. The great calm that is, after all, the all-pervading quality of the big pines came over him. It is always this way. A man knows solitude, his thoughts come clear, superficialities are left behind in the lands of men. Bruce was rather tremulous and exultant as he crept softly up the trail.

It was the last lap of his journey. At the end of the trail he would find--Linda! And it seemed quite fitting that she would be waiting there, where the trail began, in the wildest heart of the pine woods. He was quite himself once more,--carefree, delighting in all the little manifestations of the wild life that began to stir about him.

No experience of his existence had ever yielded the same pleasure as that long walk up the trail. Every curve about the shoulder of a hill, every still glen into which he dipped, every ridge that he surmounted wakened curious memories within him and stirred him in little secret ways under the skin. His delight grew upon him. It was a dream coming true. Always, it seemed to him, he had carried in his mind a picture of this very land, a sort of dream place that was a reality at last. He had known just how it would be. The wind made the same noise in the tree tops that he expected. Yet it was such a little sound that it could never be heard in a city at all. His senses had already been sharpened by the silence and the calm.

He had always known how the pine shadows would fall across the carpet of needles. The trees themselves were the same grave companions that he had expected, but his delight was all the more because of his expectations.

He began to catch glimpses of the smaller forest creatures,--the Little People that are such a delight to all real lovers of the wilderness.

Sometimes it was a chipmunk, trusting to his striped skin--blending perfectly with the light and shadow--to keep him out of sight. These are quivering, restless, ever-frightened little folk, and heaven alone knows what damage they may do to the roots of a tree. But Bruce wasn't in the mood to think of forest conservation to-day. He had left a number of his notions in the city where he had acquired them,--and this little, bright-eyed rodent in the tree roots had almost the same right to the forests that he had himself. Before, he had a measure of the same arrogance with which most men--realizing the dominance of their breed--regard the lesser people of the wild; but something of a disastrous nature had happened to it. He spoke gayly to the chipmunk and pa.s.sed on.

As the trail climbed higher, the sense of wilderness became more p.r.o.nounced. Even the trees seemed larger and more majestic, and the glimpses of the wild people were more frequent. The birds stopped their rattle-brained conversation and stared at him with frank curiosity. The grouse let him get closer before they took to cover.

Of course the bird life was not nearly so varied as in the pretty groves of the Middle West. Most birds are gentle people, requiring an easy and pleasant environment, and these stern, stark mountains were no place for them. Only the hardier creatures could flourish here. Their songs would have been out of place in the great silences and solemnity of the evergreen forest. This was no land for weaklings. Bruce knew that as well as he knew that his legs were under him. The few birds he saw were mostly of the hardier varieties,--hale-fellows-well-met and cheerful members of the lower strata in bird society. "Good old roughnecks," he said to them, with an intuitive understanding.

That was just the name for them,--a word that is just beginning to appear in dictionaries. They were rough in manner and rough in speech, and they pretended to be rougher than they were. Yet Bruce liked them.

He exulted in the easy freedom of their ways. Creatures have to be rough to exist in and love such wilderness as this. Life gets down to a matter of cold metal,--some bra.s.s but mostly iron! He rather imagined that they could be fairly capable thieves if occasion arose, making off with the edibles he had bought without a twitch of a feather. They squawked and scolded at him, after their curiosity was satisfied. They said the most shocking things they could think of and seemed to rejoice in it. He didn't know their breeds, yet he felt that they were old friends. They were rather large birds, mostly of the families of jays and magpies.

The hours pa.s.sed. The trail grew dimmer. Now it was just a brown serpent in the pine needles, coiling this way and that,--but he loved every foot of it. It dipped down to a little stream, of which the blasting sun of summer had made only a succession of shallow pools. Yet the water was cold to his lips. And he knew that little brook trout--waiting until the fall rains should make a torrent of their tiny stream and thus deliver them--were gazing at him while he drank.

The trail followed the creek a distance, and at last he found the spring that was its source. It was only a small spring, lost in a bed of deep, green ferns. He sat down to rest and to eat part of his lunch. The little wind had died, leaving a profound silence.

By a queer pounding of his blood Bruce knew that he was in the high alt.i.tudes. He had already come six miles from the cabin. The hour was about six-thirty; in two hours more it would be too dark to make his way at all.

He examined the mud about the spring, and there was plenty of evidence that the forest creatures had pa.s.sed that way. Here was a little triangle where a buck had stepped, and farther away he found two pairs of deer tracks,--evidently those of a doe with fawn. A wolf had stopped to cool his heated tongue in the waters, possibly in the middle of some terrible hunt in the twilight hours.

There was a curious round track, as if of a giant cat, a little way distant in the brown earth. It told a story plainly. A cougar--one of those great felines that is perhaps better called puma--had had an ambush there a few nights before. Bruce wondered what wilderness tragedy had transpired when the deer came to drink. Then he found another huge abrasion in the mud that puzzled him still more.

At first he couldn't believe that it was a track. The reason was simply that the size of the thing was incredible,--as if some one had laid a flour sack in the mud and taken it up again. He did not think of any of the modern-day forest creatures as being of such proportions. It was very stale and had been almost obliterated by many days of sun. Perhaps he had been mistaken in thinking it an imprint of a living creature. He went to his knees to examine it.

But in one instant he knew that he had not been mistaken. It was a track not greatly different from that of an enormous human foot; and the separate toes were entirely distinct. It was a bear track, of course, but one of such size that the general run of little black bears that inhabited the hills could almost use it for a den of hibernation!

His thought went back to his talk with Barney Wegan; and he remembered that the man had spoken of a great, last grizzly that the mountaineers had named "The Killer." No other animal but the great grizzly bear himself could have made such a track as this. Bruce wondered if the beast had yet been killed.

He got up and went on,--farther toward Trail's End. He walked more swiftly now, for he hoped to reach the end of Pine-needle Trail before nightfall, but he had no intention of halting in case night came upon him before he reached it. He had waited too long already to find Linda.

The land seemed ever more familiar. A high peak thrust a white head above a distant ridge, and it appealed to him almost like the face of an old friend. Sometime--long and long ago--he had gazed often at a white peak of a mountain thrust above a pine-covered ridge.

Another hour ended the day's sunlight. The shadows fell quickly, but it was a long time yet until darkness. He yet might make the trail-end. He gave no thought to fatigue. In the first place, he had stood up remarkably well under the day's tramp for no other reason than that he had always made a point of keeping in the best of physical condition.

Besides, there was something more potent than mere physical strength to sustain him now. It was the realization of the nearing end of the trail,--a knowledge of tremendous revelations that would come to him in a few hours more.

Already great truths were taking shape in his brain; he only needed a single sentence of explanation to connect them all together. He began to feel a growing excitement and impatience.

For the first time he began to notice a strange breathlessness in the air. He paused, just for an instant, his face lifted to the wind. He did not realize that all his senses were at razor edge, trying to interpret the messages that the wind brought. He felt that the forest was wakening. A new stir and impulse had come in the growing shadows. All at once he understood. It was the hunting hour.

Yet even this seemed familiar. Always, it seemed to him, he had known this same strange thrill at the fall of darkness, the same sense of deepening mystery. The jays no longer gossiped in the shrubs. They had been silenced by the same awe that had come over Bruce. And now the man began to discern, here and there through the forest, queer rustlings of the foliage that meant the pa.s.sing through of some of the great beasts of prey.

Once two deer flashed by him,--just a streak that vanished quickly. The dusk deepened. The further trees were dimming. The sky turned green, then gray. The distant mountains were enfolded in gloom. Bruce headed on--faster, up the trail.

The heaviness in his limbs had changed to an actual ache, but he gave no thought to it. He was enthralled by the change that was on the forest,--a whipping-back of a thousand-thousand years to a young and savage world. There was the sense of vast and tragic events all in keeping with the gathering gloom of the forest. He was awed and mystified as never before.

It was quite dark now, and he could barely see the trail. For the first time he began to despair, feeling that another night of overpowering impatience must be spent before he could reach Trail's End. The stars began to push through the darkening sky. Then, fainter than the gleam of a firefly, he saw the faint light of a far distant camp fire.

His heart bounded. He knew what was there. It was the end of the trail at last. And it guided him the rest of the way. When he reached the top of a little rise in the trail, the whole scene was laid out in mystery below him.

The fire had been built at the door of a mountain house,--a log structure of perhaps four rooms. The firelight played in its open doorway. Something beside it caught his attention, and instinctively he followed it with his eyes until it ended in an incredible region of the stars. It was a great pine tree, the largest he had ever seen,--seemingly a great sentinel over all the land.

But the sudden awe that came over him at the sight of it was cut short by the sight of a girl's figure in the firelight. He had an instant's sense that he had come to the wilderness's heart at last, that this tall tree was its symbol, that if he could understand the eternal watch that it kept over this mountain world, he would have an understanding of all things,--but all these thoughts were submerged in the realization that he had come back to Linda at last.

He had known how the mountains would seem. All that he had beheld to-day was just the recurrence of things beheld long ago. Nothing had seemed different from what he had expected; rather he had a sense that a lost world had been returned to him, and it was almost as if he had never been away. But the girl in the firelight did not answer in the least degree the picture he had carried of Linda.

He remembered her as a blond-headed little girl with irregular features and a rather unreasonable allowance of homeliness. All the way he had thought of her as a baby sister,--not as a woman in her flower. For a long second he gazed at her in speechless amazement.

Her hair was no longer blond. Time, it had peculiar red lights when the firelight shone through it; but he knew that by the light of day it would be deep brown. He remembered her as an awkward little thing that was hardly able to keep her feet under her. This tall girl had the wilderness grace,--which is the grace of a deer and only blind eyes cannot see it. He dimly knew that she wore a khaki-colored skirt and a simple blouse of white tied with a blue scarf. Her arms were bare in the fire's gleam. And there was a dark beauty about her face that simply could not be denied.

She came toward him, and her hands were open before her. And her lips trembled. Bruce could see them in the firelight.

It was a strange meeting. The firelight gave it a tone of unreality, and the whole forest world seemed to pause in its whispered business as if to watch. It was as if they had been brought face to face by the mandates of an inexorable destiny.

"So you've come," the girl said. The words were spoken unusually soft, scarcely above a whisper; but they were inexpressibly vivid to Bruce. In his lifetime he had heard many words that were just so many lifeless selections from a dictionary,--flat utterances with no overtones to give them vitality. He had heard voices in plenty that were merely the mechanical result of the vibration of vocal cords. But these words--not for their meaning but because of the quality of the voice that had spoken them--really lived. They told first of a boundless relief and joy at his coming. But more than that, in these deep vibrant tones was the expression of an unquenchable life and spirit. Every fiber of her body lived in the fullest sense; he knew this fact the instant that she spoke.

She smiled at him, ever so quietly. "Bwovaboo," she said, recalling the name by which she called him in her babyhood, "you've come to Linda."

IX

As the fire burned down to coals and the stars wheeled through the sky, Linda told her story. The two of them were seated in the soft gra.s.s in front of the cabin, and the moonlight was on Linda's face as she talked.

She talked very low at first. Indeed there was no need for loud tones.

The whole wilderness world was heavy with silence, and a whisper carried far. Besides, Bruce was just beside her, watching her with narrowed eyes, forgetful of everything except her story.

It was a perfect background for the savage tale that she had to tell.

The long shadow of the giant pine tree fell over them. The fire made a little circle of red light, but the darkness ever encroached upon it.

Just beyond the moonlight showed them silver-white patches between the trees, across which shadows sometimes wavered from the pa.s.sing of the wild creatures.

"I've waited a long time to tell you this," she told him. "Of course, when we were babies together in the orphanage, I didn't even know it. It has taken me a long time since to learn all the details; most of them I got from my aunt, old Elmira, whom you talked to on the way out. Part of it I knew by intuition, and a little of it is still doubtful.

"You ought to know first how hard I have tried to reach you. Of course, I didn't try openly except at first--the first years after I came here, and before I was old enough to understand." She spoke the last word with a curious depth of feeling and a perceptible hardness about her lips and eyes. "I remembered just two things. That the man who had adopted you was Newton Duncan; one of the nurses at the asylum told me that. And I remembered the name of the city where he had taken you.

"You must understand the difficulties I worked under. There is no rural free delivery up here, you know, Bruce. Our mail is sent from and delivered to the little post-office at Martin's store--over fifteen miles from here. And some one member of a certain family that lives near here goes down every week to get the mail for the entire district.

"At first--and that was before I really understood--I wrote you many letters and gave them to one of this family to mail for me. I was just a child then, you must know, and I lived in the same house with these people. And queer letters they must have been."

For an instant a smile lingered at her lips, but it seemed to come hard.

It was all too plain that she hadn't smiled many times in the past days.