Читать книгу The Hidden Trail - Roy J. Snell - Страница 3

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“We—we’ve killed him!” These words, stammered from the lips of Johnny Thompson, brought no denial from his pal, “Pant.”

Instead of denying, or even questioning the statement, the other boy gripped the side of a ragged rock and peered over the edge of a sheer precipice. Fully five hundred feet from base to top, this abrupt break on the Kentucky side of Stone Mountain stood as square and straight as a prison wall.

A tremendous current of air was sweeping up its rugged face, and even as Pant leaned over the edge he felt something whiz past him. Carried by the current of air far above the boys’ heads, the object at last came fluttering down at their feet.

“That’s his,” whispered Johnny. He did not touch the thing, merely stood dumbly staring at it.

It was a battered old hat. The edge of the brim was as notched as a discarded circular saw. It had no band and it came to a ridiculous peak at the top.

There is something intensely personal about an old hat, and as if accepting this shapeless bit of felt as final evidence that the boy they had spoken of had actually jumped from this dizzy height, Pant crept gingerly back from his perilous position and for a long time sat moodily staring at the pathetically ragged old hat.

“That’s what you get for trying to help somebody,” he grumbled. “I told you it wasn’t any of our business and that we’d better leave him alone. Now—now he’s lying down there at the foot of this cliff—dead!”

“Yes, I know,” agreed Johnny, “but he was such a hungry looking fellow, and he didn’t seem to have a friend in the world. I thought that if we could catch him and hold him long enough to make him feel we were his friends we might help him a lot. There must be something wrong somewhere, or he wouldn’t be hiding out here in the mountains the way he is.”

“The way he was, you mean,” Pant corrected, “he isn’t any more.”

Again he glided toward the edge of the cliff.

“Hold my feet,” he said, “I’m going to take a good look down.”

For a full three minutes there was no sound save the rattle of bits of rock that went over the edge to go plunging to dizzy depths below.

“Humph,” grunted Pant, as he at last drew himself back and sat up, “there’s a strange pink spot down there among the trees at the bottom. Looks small from here, but it can’t be. It’s a long way down and everything looks small. A cabin would look like a beehive.”

“Well,” said Johnny with a sigh that spoke plainly of a very sick feeling at the pit of his stomach, “since we chased him over this place, we can’t do less than go down and try to find him. Perhaps someone here in the mountains knows him. Maybe he has some relatives. If he hasn’t we’ll have to see what can be done.”

The two boys had meant the stranger no harm. Their work had called them into this rugged mountain country of the Cumberlands in Kentucky. Of that work we will speak later. It was a strange set of circumstances that had brought them to this home of mountain feuds and moonshine. While at work on these supposedly uninhabited slopes, they had more than once discovered evidence of someone living up here. A bed of leaves in a deserted shack; the skin of a freshly killed squirrel; a meager trickling spring carefully dammed with mud to make a pool of fresh water; these were the signs.

Then they had caught a glimpse of the stranger. He was a tall, gaunt boy; the poorest, hungriest looking person one might hope to see. Johnny’s sympathetic heart had gone out to him from the first. Twice they had seen him. Then as they caught sight of him the third time, racing away like a deer, Johnny had proposed that they give chase; that, if possible, they capture him and establish friendly relations.

To all appearances the result had been disastrous. The mysterious boy had headed straight for Pillar Rock, which was at the top of the highest cliff in the mountains. Once there, he could not hide from his pursuers. His only way of escape was to leap over the precipice. The ragged hat which lay at Johnny’s feet seemed proof enough that he had done that very thing.

“But what did he do it for?” Johnny half sobbed as he picked up the hat and fastened it solidly to the stub of a broken branch of a scrub pine tree.

“That,” answered Pant, “is just what I don’t know. Might not have been right in his head; might have been scared out of his senses. Anyway, we’d better go down.”

It was a long and winding trail that lead toward the bottom. Nothing was said by either boy for some time. Beneath a spreading pine tree they paused long enough to gather up some surveying instruments—transit, tripod, red and white pole, and steel tape. These they carried down a steep slope, concealing them at last in the hollow trunk of a spreading chestnut tree.

They had descended half way to the bottom of the cliff when Pant, turning abruptly to the right, jumped down a rocky ledge to a spot where the waters of a large spring welled forth from the rocks. Below were two other springs. These three springs sent quite a volume of water racing down the steep slope. On either side of the stream rhododendrons and mountain ivy grew in wild profusion, and meeting overhead formed a perfect archway.

“This’ll get us there sooner,” Pant said, and bending low and leaping forward he lost himself from sight beneath the arch of strange, flat-leafed evergreens.

Johnny followed in silence. The pent-up air of the leafy tunnel, chilled by the rushing spring water, was as cool as an autumn night.

“Like going down into a well,” Johnny whispered to himself with a shudder.

To tell the truth, Johnny Thompson’s nerves had been greatly shaken by this sudden tragedy. He had experienced many thrilling things, as you will remember if you have read the other stories about him: “Panther Eye,” “White Fire,” and others. He was a brave youth and knew no fear. Yet he had been born with a desire to be friendly to all human beings. He had always tried to be helpful; had meant to help the mysterious waif of the mountain, and had miserably failed.

He felt so down-hearted about the matter as he thought of the terrible probabilities that awaited their search at the base of the precipice, that, in a halting way, he began to pray about it. He prayed that they might not find the boy dead; that he might not die. Johnny had faith in prayer when it was uttered in the right spirit, and after he had whispered his petition he felt greatly relieved.

So, splashing through water that reached half way to the tops of his high laced boots, now slipping over smooth, mossy stones, and now letting himself down little falls by clinging to overhanging branches, he fought his way downward until at last he saw a gleam of light ahead.

“That’s where it joins Turkey Creek,” said Pant, pausing to mop his brow. “Man! Oh Man! What a secret trail! Must be a half mile long with all its windings. What a bully place to use in escaping from an enemy. Once here you could certainly lose yourself. I tell you what, Johnny,” he paused impressively, “the time may come, and that mighty soon, when we’ll need just such a hidden trail as this.”

“Yes, it might,” Johnny agreed.

The time did come, and that even sooner than either dreamed it might.

After leaving the shelter of the hidden trail they rounded a rocky slope, then climbed to a place where ragged pine trees grew among the rocks. Here they paused to look up at the towering precipitous wall.

“Ought—ought to be about over there,” Johnny said as he pointed toward a rugged field of rock.

With mingled feelings of hope and fear, they picked their way over the rocks until they found themselves at the very base of the cliff.

“Must have been about here,” said Pant in a tone of conviction. “The lone pine on the crest is just a little to the right. That’s where we saw him last.”

Much to their surprise, a half hour’s search revealed no sign of the missing boy.

“Well! What do you make of that?” exclaimed Pant, by this time completely mystified. “He couldn’t have landed safely and gone away?”

“Of course not.”

“And he wasn’t hiding on the top of the cliff.”

“Couldn’t have been.”

“That beats me!”

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t know.” Pant sat down and scratched his head. “All I know is that we’ve searched every spot where he might be lying, and haven’t found him. We’ve done all we can do. Might as well go back to Crider’s.”

“Shall—shall we tell them about it?”

“Wouldn’t do any good, would it? What could they do that would help?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

“And they’re such queer folks that they might do a lot that would harm.”

To these boys who had spent all their lives in the active centers of the north, the people of the Cumberlands, with their queer homespun ways, their strange manner of speaking and their suspicion of all “Foreigners”—as they called outsiders—had seemed queer indeed.

Pant had a suspicion that these mountain people were planning in some way to hinder the work he and Johnny had been carrying forward. He had no proof of this intent, but he had been made uneasy by certain whispered conversation held outside the cabin where he slept.

It was a strange mission that had brought the two boys back here in the Cumberlands some thirty miles from the railroad. Pant had long believed himself without a living relative. A few months back he had been searched out by a lawyer and informed that a great-uncle of his had recently died, leaving him a legacy.

A queer sort of legacy it was, too; the deed to a Blanket Survey of Harlan County, Kentucky. With little notion of what it all meant, Pant had been inclined to treat the whole matter as a joke. But Johnny, who was endowed with a natural legal mind, had delved about in musty law books, asking questions here and there until he had learned that in the early days, when settlers had taken up all the land that was considered of immediate value in a certain county, the Government had sold all the bits of land that remained here and there in the mountains of that county to one man. The property was known as a Blanket Survey.

“There’s no telling what it might be worth,” Johnny had said to Pant. “Land worth nothing twenty years ago is worth a lot now. You’d better go down there and look things over.”

“I’ll go if you will,” Pant had said, “and share half and half of what we make out of the land.”

“That might not be fair,” Johnny demurred, “but I’ll go. We’ll pick up enough knowledge of a transit to enable us to run lines, then we’ll have a grand time wandering around among the moonshiners, dodging feuds and looking for boundaries of your property. Property! Don’t that sound grand!”

They had learned a bit about running lines, had bought a second-hand surveyor’s kit, and had come to the mountains.

On consulting county records they found that most of Pant’s “property” was to be found at the head of Turkey Creek.

“Why, you’re rich, Pant!” Johnny had exclaimed joyously. “There must be all of three thousand acres in one tract up there on Turkey Creek!”

“Let’s go see it,” was all Pant would say.

They had gone, and Pant had laughed at what he saw. He had heard of the Bad Lands and had hunted in the Rockies, but never had he seen anything rougher than his own three thousand acres.

“Come on,” he had said after his laugh, “you couldn’t raise mountain sheep on it. Let’s get away and forget it.”

“Aw, come on. Let’s stick. Let’s run the lines. You never can tell,” Johnny had insisted.

For ten days now the boys had been living with the mountain people and running their lines. Each day had brought the boys face to face with new conditions of which they had not dreamed. Now Johnny was sure of one thing; Pant’s land, barren and rocky as it might be, was valuable; quite worth the trouble of surveying it and, if need be, fighting for afterward.

Without any word of the strange experiences of this day, the boys entered the long, low, two room cabin owned by a man known as Blinkey Bill Crider. Here they had been boarding. Having removed their coats and “washed up” at the spring above the cabin, they proceeded to do justice to a meal of corn bread, sorgum molasses, fried bacon and eggs.

Twilight passes quickly in the mountains and the boys were soon ready to retire. As Johnny crept beneath the homespun blankets and allowed his eyes to rove about the room he caught sight of something strange. A long barreled squirrel rifle hung on the mantel above the fireplace. It had been there before, but to-night there was a bright and shiny new cap to be seen beneath its hammer.

“I wonder,” he asked himself, “what that could mean?” A moment later he was fast asleep.

When he awoke some hours later he was conscious of a movement in the room; then the flash of a torchlight was thrown in his eyes as a gruff voice said:

“I reckon hit’s time you wuz a’stirrin. Climb outen that air bed and git yer clothes on!”

Sitting up quickly, Johnny found the room full of men with rifles. Tall, lanky men they were; men with faces as brown as a side of leather and as wrinkled as a weather beaten shoe.

“Wha—what—”

He meant to ask what they wanted. Something in their deep set eyes told him it would be useless to ask. Pant was already silently drawing on his trousers and Johnny followed his example.

He dressed as quickly as he could. A moment later he found himself astride a horse behind one of those grim-visaged mountaineers. Pant, similarly mounted, rode just ahead.

All this time his head was fairly humming with questions. What did it all mean? One moment he was sure this strange affair was connected with the surveying of Pant’s land; the next he was quite certain that they were to be accused of causing the death of the mysterious boy of the mountain and were to be hanged for it.

So it was that a thousand half-formed plans ran through his mind. Slowly there came the realization that whatever the reason for this journey, these silent captors were not friendly; that somehow he and Pant must escape.

All the time, proceeded and followed by grim, silent horsemen, they rode forward into the cool, damp night.