Читать книгу On the Trail of Four - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 3

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I had seen the cabin before, two or three times. It had been thrown up, within the last six months, by an old sour-dough prospector who had located a rift of pay dirt on the face of a mountain of quartzite. There he had been pegging away ever since. I suppose that his coffee mill ground out three or four dollars a day, but that was enough for him. Every two months or so he went down from the mountainside, herding his burro before him. He came into the town and there he always managed to discover whisky and drank enough of it to reach a fairly mellowed condition—that is to say, he put away a quart or more of raw stuff.

After that, he bought what he needed to float him through the next two months—powder, caps, fuse, molasses, flour, and bacon. There were not many essentials in the life of such a man as “Truck” Janvers. But the taste of pone and molasses was like a sweet dream leading me on as I struggled ahead for the cabin.

I say that I was struggling, and I was. It did not make much difference that I had beneath me the surest-footed mule that ever cat-jumped up the face of a precipice, hanging on by the toes of his hoofs. Spike would have had to be a mind reader and a prophet combined to make anything out of the trail which we were trying to follow.

The reason was that the upper mountains were blanketed in the dark of the night and in smoke-thick fog. All that I could do was to keep Spike near the big wall of the upper mountain and then simply trust to luck to bring me right at the end of the trail.

There is nothing so baffling as mountain fog—which is simply a cloud that floats no higher than the elevation at which one happens to be traveling. For the very reason that we of the mountains generally expect crystal-clear weather, a fog is an almost unnerving nuisance.

Now and again I got my head above the level of the sea of white. It was not a thick stratum of cloud, but what there was of it was as opaque as clouded quartz. When my head was above the smoke I could see the bright cold stars above me and the blue-black of the midnight sky.

Cold stars, and cold fog. How under heaven that fog could have been so cold without turning into snow and falling, I cannot understand. My nose and chin were almost frozen and the breath I drew into my lungs seemed to congeal and turn to ice there. My hands grew numb. I wrapped the reins around the pommel of the saddle—though I knew very well that that is a dangerous expedient—and I let Spike do pretty much as he pleased.

After all, that mule had about as much sense as most mountain-wise men. I had only one thing to guide me. I knew that the cabin lay in the neighborhood of a hundred yards above the edge of the trees. My plan was simply to zigzag back and forth, covering a hundred yards or more out, and then combing carefully back to the trees and starting once more.

That sounds like a simple proceeding, and under ordinary conditions it would have been. But with the feeling that I was freezing to death and that I had to make haste—and with the knowledge that unless I came actually blundering upon the cabin I should miss it altogether—and above all with a wild sense of confusion owing to the fog. I suppose that I must have traced and retraced my steps a dozen times in the next hour and a half. In fact, I had direct evidence that I had done so when I looked about me the next day.

I wondered, however, that I did not see some token of a light breaking through the blind wall of the fog, for on other occasions before this, as I had sent Spike swinging over the lower lands of the valley beneath, I had looked up even at midnight and seen the ray of light from the miner’s cabin like a thin wand of yellow, pointed down to me. Probably Truck Janvers was one of those who stayed up late at night to read yarns in the magazines. However, though it was now not more than half-past eight, there was no sign of a light near me.

All sorts of illusions come into the mind of a man in a fog, just as they come into the mind of a man in a waiting room. I felt that that infernal cabin must have slid off the face of the mountain and smashed to bits in the ravine beneath. I almost hoped that it had, in my vexation.

But then, with a thud and a snort, Spike found the log wall. I swung myself down from the saddle with more groans than any rusted door.

“Hey Janvers!” I called.

Then I paused. I had never spoken to this fellow. One never could tell. It was true that the reputation of Hugo Ames stood fairly high among the outlying dwellers of those high places, and I knew that Janvers could not help having heard of me—also that he could never have heard that I had ever injured or stuck-up any lonely shepherd, miner, or trapper. They were not my “meat.” On the whole, therefore, I was reassured. But truly assured I could not be, any more than any man upon whose head the price of fifteen thousand dollars hangs, alive or dead.

Fifteen thousand dollars!

Well, I was not shivering with the cold long before I finished that train of thought. Yet, I decided that this night was too horribly wet and cold to attempt to make a camp in the dripping forest if I could possibly avoid it. I blundered on toward the shack and found that I had come to the rear of it. I had to feel my way around two corners before I reached the front—with Spike following obediently behind me.

Then I came to the door, and I found it closed. I rattled the latch and called: “Janvers! Hey, Truck!”

I got no answer to this hail. I yelled again at the top of my lungs, and when I received no response this time, I decided that Truck must have started down to the town that night and decided not to return through the fog. At any rate, that was no good reason why I should not go in and cook myself a few slices of bacon and a cup of coffee, to say nothing of a mouthful of cold pone which I might find in the bread box.

I opened the latch without any difficulty and stepped in. I shouted once more, because Truck, being on in years, might be a little deaf and a very heavy sleeper.

“Truck Janvers!”

I called at the top of my lungs, but I got nothing in response but the deep, sudden echo of my own voice roaring back at me and instantly stilled. Then I lighted a match. There was no Janvers there—he had left in a hurry, apparently, for yonder was a table tilted over against the wall, and here were two chairs overturned. I was about to take a step forward when an instinct in my very flesh made me look down. There lay Janvers at my feet, with crimson stains on his gray hair!

I had the two lanterns lighted instantly. In such a case one needs plenty of light before one attempts to see what has happened. Then I kneeled over him.

One bullet had struck him in the breast and come out under his shoulder blade behind. Another bullet had struck his body lower down. As I ripped away his shirt I discovered these things. The second bullet had not come out. But, by the position of both wounds, I guessed very safely that either of them would have been enough to soak the life out of poor Truck Janvers. The wounds were still bleeding. There was still a ray of life left in him, but it was already twinkling, and it would soon be out.

Yet if I could fan that to a momentary fire and learn the name of his murderer—that would be an end worth while. This was the sort of a case that would make Sheriff Jud Hawkins spend sleepless days and nights of labor until he had solved it. For it was his boast that a poor man was more promptly avenged than a rich one, in his county.

I thought of trying bandages. But I saw that that would be a useless formality. Probably the pain would kill him instantly. Besides, he was not bleeding fast. I had a flask of brandy which I carried with me constantly—Mexican brandy, colorless as water and terrible as nitroglycerin. I wedged open the hard-gripped teeth of the miner and poured a dram of that awful pale brandy down his throat. He gasped feebly. Then he managed to swallow the stuff. I tried him with a second swig, and his dazed eyes slowly opened wide and looked out blankly at me.

I heaved him up. He was a burden even to my arms. I sat him up in a chair against the wall. Still he watched me with sagging mouth and with those dreadful, dying eyes—as though he were struggling to make out my features at a great distance.

“Janvers!” I shouted at him. “Wake up and talk—who did it to you?”

There was a faint gleam in his eyes, I thought. But no words came. He made a numb movement with his lips, but only a gasp came from his throat.

I tried the brandy again—I put half the flask down his throat, and with that half pint of liquid fire in him, he began to show a sign of life. His eyelids fluttered over his dull eyes, and a groan left his lips.

In the white, blind night outside, Spike echoed that groan with a snort, as though he had stumbled against a rock.

“Who did it, Janvers?” I shouted to him.

His head wobbled over to one side. Life was dropping out of him fast, but he began to speak with a great effort.

“My boy—San Marin—”

Then a whisper passed under the pit of my arm as I leaned over him and a heavy knife buried itself in the hollow of the throat of Janvers. He dropped back in the chair, dead! He rolled heavily from the chair and fell on the floor upon his face.

I was on the floor myself, by that time, which is the safest place by all odds in time of such emergency, but I was facing the door with my revolver stretched out before me. There was nothing but the solid sheet of the fog and one long arm of white mist, reaching into the cabin as though that was the ghostly arm which had just flung the knife into the throat of the miner.

Then, blindly, I ran out into the night, but three steps through that blanketing mist assured me that I was playing the part of a fool. Whoever had flung that knife or fired the shots into the body of Janvers, I could not locate them in such weather as this. I turned back slowly to the cabin and went in again.