Chapter VII: Book TWO: The Blood Atonement (4)

A knife slashed at his bonds. Simon stood up, and Bruce sprang from his chair like a wild cat, aiming his hardened knuckles straight for the leering lips. He made the attack with astonishing swiftness and power, and his intention was to deliver at least one terrific blow before Simon could get his arms up to defend himself. He had given the huge clan leader credit for tremendous physical strength, but he didn't think that the heavy body could move with real agility. But the great muscles seemed to snap into tension, the head ducked to one side, and his own huge fists struck out.

If Bruce's blow had gone straight home where it had been aimed, Simon would have had nothing more to say for a few moments at least. When man was built of clay, Nature saw fit to leave him with certain imperfections lest he should think himself a god, and a weak spot in the region of the chin is one of them. The jaw bones carry the impact of a hard blow to certain nerve centers near the temples, and restful sleep comes quickly. There are never any ill effects, unless further damage is inflicted while unconsciousness is upon him. In spite of the fact that Simon got quickly into a position of defense, that first blow still had a fair chance of bringing the fight to an abrupt end. But still another consideration remained.

Bruce's muscles had refused to respond. The leap had been powerful and swift yet wholly inaccurate. And the reason was just that his wrists and ankles had been numbed by the tight thongs by which they had been confined. Simon met the leap with a short, powerful blow into Bruce's face; and he reeled backward. The arms of the clansmen alone kept him from falling.

The blow seemed to daze Bruce; and at first his only realization was that the room suddenly rang with harsh and grating laughter. Then Simon's words broke through it. "Put back the thongs," he ordered, "and go get your horses."

Bruce was dimly aware of the falling of a silence, and then the arms of strong men half carrying him to the door. But he couldn't see plainly at first. The group stood in the shadow of the building; the moon was behind. He knew that the clan had brought their horses and were waiting for Simon's command. They loosened the ropes from about his ankles, and two of the clansmen swung him on to the back of a horse. Then they passed a rope under the horse's belly and tied his ankles anew.

Simon gave a command, and the strange file started. The night air dispelled the mists in Bruce's brain, and full realization of all things came to him again. One of the men--he recognized him as Young Bill--led the horse on which he rode. Two of the clansmen rode in front, grim, silent, incredibly tall figures in the moonlight. The remainder rode immediately behind. Simon himself, bowed in his saddle, kept a little to one side. Their shadows were long and grotesque on the soft grass of the meadows, and the only sound was the soft footfall of their mounts.

A full mile distant across the lush fields the cavalcade halted about a grotesque shadow in the grass. Bruce didn't have to look at it twice to know what it was: the half-devoured body of the yearling calf that had been the Killer's prey the night before. From thence on, their operations became as outlandish occurrences in a dream. They seemed to know just what to do. They took him from the saddle and bound his feet again; then laid him in the fragrant grass. They searched his pockets, taking the forged note that had led to his downfall. "It saves me a trip," Simon commented. He saw two of them lift the torn body of the animal on to the back of one of the horses, and he watched dully as the horse plunged and wheeled under the unfamiliar weight. He thought for an instant that it would step upon his own prone body, but he didn't flinch. Simon spoke in the silence, but his words seemed to come from far away.

"Quiet that horse or kill him," he said softly. "You can't drag the carcass with your rope--the Killer would trace it if you did and maybe spoil the evening for Bruce."

Strong arms sawed at the bits, and the horse quieted, trembling. For a moment Bruce saw their white moonlit faces as they stared down at him.

"What about a gag?" one of them asked.

"No. Let him shout if he likes. There is no one to hear him here."

Then the tall men swung on their horses and headed back across the fields. Bruce watched them dully. Their forms grew constantly more dim, the sense of utter isolation increased. Then he saw the file pause, and it seemed to him that words, too faint for him to understand, reached him across the moonlit spaces. Then one of the party turned off toward the ridge.

He guessed that it was Simon. He thought the man was riding toward Linda's home.

He watched until the shadows had hidden them all. Then, straining upward, he tested his bonds. He tugged with the full strength of his arms, but there was not the play of an inch between his wrists. The Turners had done their work well. Not the slightest chance of escape lay in this quarter.

He wrenched himself to one side, then looked about him. The fields stretched even and distant on one side, but he saw that the dark forest was but fifty yards away on the other. He listened; and the little night sounds reached him clearly. They had been sounds to rejoice in before,--impulses to delightful fancies of a fawn stealing through the thickets, or some of the Little People in their scurried, tremulous business of the night hours. But lying helpless at the edge of the forest, they were nothing to rejoice in now. He tried to shut his ears to them.

He rolled again to his back and tried to find peace for his spirit in the stars. There were millions of them. They were larger and more bright than any time he had ever seen them. They stood in their high places, wholly indifferent and impassive to all the strife and confusion of the world below them; and Bruce wished that he could partake of their spirit enough so that he could rise above the fear and bitterness that had begun to oppress him. But only the pines could talk to them. Only the tall trees, stretching upward toward them, could reach into their mysterious calm.

His eyes discerned a thin filament of cloud that had swept up from behind the ridges, and the sight recalled him to his own position with added force. The moonlight, soft as it was, had been a tremendous relief to him. At least, it would have enabled him to keep watch, and now he dreaded the fall of utter darkness more than he had ever dreaded anything in his life. It was an ancient instinct, coming straight from the young days of the world when nightfall brought the hunting creatures to the mouth of the cave, but he had never really experienced it before. If the clouds spread, the moon that was his last remaining solace would be obscured.

He watched with growing horror the slow extension of the clouds. One by one the stars slipped beneath them. They drew slowly up to the moon and for a long minute seemed to hover. They were not heavy clouds, however, and in their thinner patches the stars looked dimly through. Finally the moon swept under them.

The shadow fell around Bruce. For the first time he knew the age-old terror of the darkness. Dreadful memories arose within him,--vague things that had their font in the labyrinthal depths of the germ-plasm. It is a knowledge that no man, with the weapons of the twentieth century in his hands and in the glow of that great symbol of domain, the camp fire, can really possess; but here, bound hand and foot in the darkness, full understanding came to Bruce. He no longer knew himself as one of a dominant breed, master of all the wild things in the world. He was simply a living creature in a grim and unconquered world, alone and helpless in the terror of the darkness.

The moonlight alternately grew and died as the moon passed in and out of the heavier cloud patches. Winds must have been blowing in the high lanes of the air, but there was no breath of them where Bruce lay. The forests were silent, and the little rustlings and stirrings that reached him from time to time only seemed to accentuate the quiet.

He speculated on how many hours had passed. He wondered if he could dare to hope that midnight had already gone by and, through some divergence from wilderness customs, the grizzly had failed to return to his feast. It seemed endless hours since he had reentered the empty rooms of Linda's home. A wave of hope crept through the whole hydraulic system of his veins. And then, as a sudden sound reached him from the forests at one side, that bright wave of hope turned black, receded, and left only despair.

He heard the sound but dimly. In fact, except for his straining with every nerve alert, he might not have heard it at all. Nevertheless, distance alone had dimmed it; it had been a large sound to start with. So far had it come that only a scratch on the eardrums was left of it; but there was no chance to misunderstand it. It cracked out to him through the unfathomable silence, and all the elements by which he might recognize it were distinct. It was the noise of a heavy thicket being broken down and parted before an enormous body.

He waited, scarcely breathing, trying to tell himself he had been mistaken. But a wiser, calmer self deep within him would not accept the lie. He listened, straining. Then he heard the sound again.

Whoever came toward him had passed the heavy brush by now. The sounds that reached him were just faint and intermittent whispers,--first of a twig cracking beneath a heavy foot, then the rattle of two pebbles knocked together. Long moments of utter silence would ensue between, in which he could hear the steady drum of his heart in his breast and the long roll of his blood in his veins. The shadows grew and deepened and faded and grew again, as the moon passed from cloud to cloud.

The limbs of a young fir tree rustled and whispered as something brushed against them. Leaves flicked together, and once a heavy limb popped like a distant small-calibered rifle as a great weight broke it in two. Then, as if the gods of the wilderness were using all their ingenuity to torture him, the silence closed down deeper than ever before.

It lasted so long that he began to hope again. Perhaps the sounds had been made by a deer stealing on its way to feed in the pastures. Yet he knew the step had been too heavy for anything but the largest deer, and their way was to encircle a thicket rather than crash through it. The deer make it their business always to go with silence in these hours when the beasts of prey are abroad, and usually a beetle in the leaves makes more noise than they. It might have been the step of one of the small, black bears--a harmless and friendly wilderness dweller. Yet the impression lingered and strengthened that only some great hunter, a beast who feared neither other beasts nor men, had been steadily coming toward him through the forest. In the long silence that ensued Bruce began to hope that the animal had turned off.

At that instant the moon slipped under a particularly heavy fragment of cloud, and deep darkness settled over him. Even his white face was no longer discernible in the dusk. He lay scarcely breathing, trying to fight down his growing terror.

This silence could mean but one of two things. One of them was that the creature who had made the sounds had turned off on one of the many intersecting game trails that wind through the forest. This was his hope. The alternative was one of despair. It was simply that the creature had detected his presence and was stalking him in silence through the shadows.

He thought that the light would never come. He strained again at his ropes. The dark cloud swept on; and the moonlight, silver and bright, broke over the scene.

The forest stood once more in sharp silhouette against the sky. The moon stood high above the tapering tops of the pines. He studied with straining eyes the dark fringe of shadows one hundred feet distant. And at first he could see only the irregularities cast by the young trees, the firs between which lay the brush coverts.

Then he detected a strange variation in the dark border of shadows. It held his gaze, and its outlines slowly strengthened. So still it stood, so seemingly a natural shadow that some irregularly shaped tree had cast, that his eyes refused to recognize it. But in an instant more he knew the truth.

The shadow was that of a great beast that had stalked him clear to the border of the moonlight. The Killer had come for his dead.

XXIV

When Linda returned home the events of the night partook even of a greater mystery. The front door was open, and she found plenty of evidence that Bruce had returned from his journey. In the center of the room lay his pack, a rifle slanting across it.

At first she did not notice the gun in particular. She supposed it was Bruce's weapon and that he had come in, dropped his luggage, and was at present somewhere in the house. It was true that one chair was upset, but except for an instant's start she gave no thought to it. She thought that he would probably go to the kitchen first for a bite to eat. He was not in this room, however, nor had the lamp been lighted.

Her next idea was that Bruce, tired out, had gone to bed. She went back softly to the front room, intending not to disturb him. Once more she noticed the upset chair. The longer she regarded it, the more of a puzzle it became. She moved over toward the pack and looked casually at the rifle. In an instant more it was in her hands.

She saw at once that it was not Bruce's gun. The action, make, and caliber were different. She was not a rifle-woman, and the little shooting she had done had been with a pistol; but even a layman could tell this much. Besides, it had certain peculiar notches on the stock that the gun Elmira had furnished Bruce did not have.

She stood a moment in thought. The problem offered no ray of light. She considered what Bruce's first action would have been, on returning to the house to find her absent. Possibly he had gone in search of her. She turned and went to the door of his bedroom.

She knocked on it softly. "Are you there, Bruce?" she called.

No answer returned to her. The rooms, in fact, were deeply silent. She tried the door and found it unlocked. The room had not been occupied.

Thoroughly alarmed, she went back into the front room and tried to decipher the mystery of the strange weapon. She couldn't conceive of any possibility whereby Bruce would exchange his father's trusted gun for this. Possibly it was an extra weapon that he had procured on his journey. And since no possible gain would come of her going out into the forests to seek him, she sat down to wait for his return. She knew that if she did start out he might easily return in her absence and be further alarmed.

The moments dragged by and her apprehension grew. She took the rifle in her hands and, slipping the lever part way back, looked to see if there were a cartridge in the barrel. She saw a glitter of brass, and it gave her a measure of assurance. She had a pistol in her own room--a weapon that Elmira had procured, years before, from a passing sportsman--and for a moment she considered getting it also. She understood its action better and would probably be more efficient with it if the need arose, but for certain never-to-be-forgotten reasons she wished to keep this weapon until the moment of utmost need.

Her whole stock of pistol cartridges consisted of six--completely filling the magazine of the pistol. Closely watched by the Turners, she had been unable to procure more. Many a dreadful night these six little cylinders of brass had been a tremendous consolation to her. They had been her sole defense, and she knew that in the final emergency she could use them to deadly effect.

Linda was a girl who had always looked her situations in the face. She was not one to flinch from the truth and with false optimism disbelieve it. She had the courage of many generations of frontiersmen and woodsmen, and she had their vision too. She knew these mountain realms; better still she understood the dark passions of Simon and his followers, and this little half-pound of steel and wood with its brass shells might mean, in the dreadful last moment of despair, deliverance from them. It might mean escape for herself when all other ways were cut off. In this wild land, far from the reaches of law and without allies except for a decrepit old woman, the pistol and its deadly loads had been her greatest solace.

But she relied on the rifle now. And sitting in the shadow, she kept watch over the moonlit ridge.

The hours passed, and the clouds were starting up from the horizon when she thought she saw Bruce returning. A tall form came swinging toward her, over the little trail that led between the tree trunks. She peered intently. And in one instant more she knew that the approaching figure was not Bruce, but the man she most feared of anyone on earth, Simon Turner.

She knew him by his great form, his swinging stride. Her thoughts came clear and true. It was obvious that his was no mission of stealth. He was coming boldly, freely, not furtively; and he must have known that he presented a perfect rifle target from the windows. Nevertheless, it is well to be prepared for emergencies. If life in the mountains teaches anything, it teaches that. She took the rifle and laid it behind a little desk, out of sight. Then she went to the door.

"I want to come in, Linda," Simon told her.

"I told you long ago you couldn't come to this house," Linda answered through the panels. "I want you to go away."

Simon laughed softly. "You'd better let me in. I've brought word of the child you took to raise. You know who I mean."

Yes, Linda knew. "Do you mean Bruce?" she asked. "I let Dave in to-night on the same pretext. Don't expect me to be caught twice by the same lie."

"Dave? Where is Dave?" The fact was that the whereabouts of his brother had suddenly become considerable of a mystery to Simon. All the way from the pasture where he had left his clan he had been having black pictures of Dave. He had thought about him and Linda out in the darkness together, and his heart had seemed to smolder and burn with jealousy in his breast. It had been a great relief to him to find her in the house.

"I wonder--where he is by now," Linda answered in a strange voice. "No one in this world can answer that question, Simon. Tell me what you want."

She opened the door. She couldn't bear to show fear of this man. And she knew that an appearance of courage, at least, was the wisest course.

"No matter about him now. I want to talk to you on business. If I had meant rough measures, I wouldn't have come alone."

"No," Linda scorned. "You would have brought your whole murdering band with you. The Turners believe in overwhelming numbers."

The words stung him but he smiled grimly into her face. "I've come in peace, Linda," he said, more gently. "I've come to give you a last chance to make friends."

He walked past her into the room. He straightened the chair that had been upset, smiling strangely the while, and sat down in it.

"Then tell me what you have to tell me," she said. "I'm in a hurry to go to bed--and this really isn't the hour for calls."

He looked a long time into her face. She found it hard to hold her own gaze. Many things could be doubted about this man, but his power and his courage were not among them. The smile died from his lips, the lines deepened on his face. She realized as never before the tempestuous passions and unfathomable intensity of his nature.

"We've never been good friends," Simon went on slowly.

"We never could be," the girl answered. "We've stood for different things."

"At first my efforts to make friends were just--to win you over to our side. It didn't work--all it did was to waken other desires in me--desires that perhaps have come to mean more than the possession of the lands. You know what they are. You've always known--that any time you wished--you could come and rule my house."

She nodded. She knew that she had won, against her will, the strange, somber love of this mighty man. She had known it for months.

"As my wife--don't make any mistake about that. Linda, I'm a stern, hard man. I've never known how to woo. I don't know that I want to know how, the way it is done by weaker men. It has never been my way to ask for what I wanted. But sometimes it seems to me that if I'd been a little more gentle--not so masterful and so relentless--that I'd won you long ago."

Linda looked up bravely into his face. "No, Simon. You could have never--never won me! Oh, can't you see--even in this awful place a woman wants something more than just brute strength and determination. Every woman prays to find strength in the man she loves--but it isn't the kind that you have, the kind that makes your men grovel before you, and makes me tremble when I'm talking to you. It's a big, calm strength--and I can't tell you what it is. It's something the pines have, maybe--strength not to yield to the passions, but to restrain, not to be afraid of, but to cling to--to stand upright and honorable and manly, and make a woman strong just to see it in the man she loves."

He listened gravely. Her cheeks blazed. It was a strange scene--the silent room, the implacable foes, the breathless suspense, the prophecy and inspiration in her tones.

"Perhaps I should have been more gentle," he admitted. "I might have forgotten--for a little while--this surging, irresistible impulse in my muscles--and tried just to woo you, gently and humbly. But it's too late now. I'm not a fool. I can't expect you to begin at the beginning. I can only go on in my own way--my hard, remorseless, ruthless way.

"It isn't every man who is brave enough to see what he wants and knock away all obstacles to get it," he went on. "Put that bravery to my credit. To pay no attention to methods, only to look forward to the result. That has been my creed. It is my creed now. Many less brave men would fear your hatred--but I don't fear it as long as I possess what I go after and a hope that I can get you over it. Many of my own brothers hate me, but yet I don't care as long as they do my will. No matter how much you scorn it, this bravery has always got me what I wanted, and it will get me what I want now."

The high color died in her face. She wondered if the final emergency had come at last.

"I've come to make a bargain. You can take it or you can refuse. On one side is the end of all this conflict, to be my wife, to have what you want--bought by the rich return from my thousands of acres. And I love you, Linda. You know that."

The man spoke the truth. His terrible, dark love was all over him--in his glowing eyes, in his drawn, deeply-lined face.

"In time, when you come around to my way of thinking, you'll love me. If you refuse--this last time--I've got to take other ways. On that side is defeat for you--as sure as day. The time is almost up when the title to those lands is secure. Bruce is in our hands--"

She got up, white-faced. "Bruce--?"

He arose too. "Yes! Did you think he could stand against us? I'll show him to you in the morning. To-night he's paying the price for ever daring to oppose my will."

She turned imploring eyes. He saw them, and perhaps--far distant--he saw the light of triumph too. A grim smile came to his lips.

"Simon," she cried. "Have mercy."

The word surprised him. It was the first time she had ever asked this man for mercy. "Then you surrender--?"

"Simon, listen to me," she begged. "Let him go--and I won't even try to fight you any more. I'll let you keep those lands and never try any more to make you give them up. You and your brothers can keep them forever, and we won't try to get revenge on you either. He and I will go away."

He gazed at her in deepening wonderment. For the moment, his mind refused to accept the truth. He only knew that since he had faced her before, some new, great strength had come to her,--that a power was in her life that would make her forego all the long dream of her days.

He had known perfectly the call of the blood in her. He had understood her hatred of the Turners, he could hate in the same way himself. He realized her love for her father's home and how she had dreamed of expelling its usurpers. Yet she was willing to renounce it all. The power that had come to her was one that he, a man whose code of life was no less cruel and remorseless than that of the Killer himself, could not understand.

"But why?" he demanded. "Why are you willing to do all this for him?"

"Why?" she echoed. Once more the luster was in her dark eyes. "I suppose it is because--I love him."

He looked at her with slowly darkening face. Passion welled within him. An oath dropped from his lips, blasphemous, more savage than any wilderness voice. Then he raised his arm and struck her tender flesh.

He struck her breast. The brutality of the man stood forth at last. No picture that all the dreadful dramas of the wild could portray was more terrible than this. The girl cried out, reeled and fell fainting from the pain, and with smoldering eyes he gazed at her unmoved. Then he turned out of the door.

But the curtain of this drama in the mountain home had not yet rung down. Half-unconscious, she listened to his steps. He was out in the moonlight, vanishing among the trees. Strange fancies swept her, all in the smallest fraction of an instant, and a voice spoke clearly. With all the strength of her will she dispelled the mists of dawning unconsciousness that the pain had wrought and crept swiftly to the little desk placed against the wall. Her hand fumbled in the shadow behind it and brought out a glittering rifle. Then she crept to the open doorway.

Lying on the floor, she raised the weapon to her shoulder. Her thumb pressed back, strong and unfaltering, against the hammer; and she heard it click as it sprung into place. Then she looked along the barrel until she saw the swinging form of Simon through the sights.

There was no remorse in that cold gaze of hers. The wings of death hovered over the man, ready to swoop down. Her fingers curled tighter about the trigger. One ounce more pressure, and Simon's trail of wickedness and bloodshed would have come to an end at last. But at that instant her eyes widened with the dawn of an idea.

She knew this man. She knew the hatred that was upon him. And she realized, as if by an inspiration from on High, that before he went to his house and to sleep he would go once more into the presence of Bruce, confined somewhere among these ridges and suffering the punishment of having opposed his will. Simon would want one look to see how his plan was getting on; perhaps he would want to utter one taunting word. And Linda saw her chance.

She started to creep out of the door. Then she turned back, crawled until she was no longer revealed in the silhouette of the lighted doorway, and got swiftly to her feet. She dropped the rifle and darted into her own room. There she procured a weapon that she trusted more, her little pistol, loaded with six cartridges.

If she had understood the real nature of the danger that Bruce faced she would have retained the rifle. It shot with many times the smashing power of the little gun, and at long range was many times as accurate, but even it would have seemed an ineffective defense against such an enemy as was even now creeping toward Bruce's body. But she knew that in a crisis, against such of the Turners as she thought she might have to face, it would serve her much better than the more awkward, heavier weapon. Besides, she knew how to wield it, and all her life she had kept it for just such an emergency.

The pain of the blow was quite gone now, except for a strange sickness that had encompassed her. But she was never colder of nerve and surer of muscle. Cunningly she lay down again before she crept through the door, so that if Simon chanced to look about he would fail to see that she followed him. She crept to the thickets, then stood up. Three hundred yards down the slope she could see Simon's dimming figure in the moonlight, and swiftly she sped after him.

XXV

The shadow that Bruce saw at the edge of the forest could not be mistaken as to identity. The hopes that he had held before--that this stalking figure might be that of a deer or an elk--could no longer be entertained. Men as a rule do not love the wild and wailing sobs of a coyote, as he looks down upon a camp fire from the ridge above. Sleep does not come easily when a gaunt wolf walks in a slow, inquisitive circle about the pallet, scarcely a leaf rustling beneath his feet. And a few times, in the history of the frontier, men have had queer tinglings and creepings in the scalp when they have happened to glance over their shoulders and see the eyes of a great, tawny puma, glowing an odd blue in the firelight. Yet Bruce would have had any one of these, or all three together, in preference to the Killer.

The reason was extremely simple. No words have ever been capable of expressing the depths of cowardice of which a coyote is capable. He will whine and weep about a camp, like a soul lost between two worlds, but if he is in his right mind he would have each one of his gray hairs plucked out, one by one, rather than attack a man. The cunning breed to which he belongs has found out that it doesn't pay. The wolf is sometimes disquietingly brave when he is fortified by his pack brethren in the winter, but in such a season as this he is particularly careful to keep out of the sight of man. And the Tawny One himself, white-fanged and long-clawed and powerful as he is, never gets farther than certain dreadful, speculative dreams.

But none of these things was true of the Killer. He had already shown his scorn of men. His very stride showed that he feared no living creature that shared the forest with him. In fact, he considered himself the forest master. The bear is never a particularly timid animal, and whatever timidity the Killer possessed was as utterly gone as yesterday's daylight.

Bruce watched him with unwinking eyes. The shadow wavered ever so slightly, as the Killer turned his head this way and that. But except to follow it with his eyes, Bruce made no motion. The inner guardians of a man's life--voices that are more to be relied upon than the promptings of any conscious knowledge--had already told him what to do. These monitors had the wisdom of the pines themselves, and they had revealed to him his one hope. It was just to lie still, without a twitch of a muscle. It might be that the Killer would fail to discern his outline. Bruce had no conscious knowledge, as yet, that it is movement rather than form to which the eyes of the wild creatures are most receptive. But he acted upon that fact now as if by instinct. He was not lying in quite the exact spot where the Killer had left his dead the preceding night, and possibly his outline was not enough like it to attract the grizzly's attention. Besides, in the intermittent light, it was wholly possible that the grizzly would try to find the remains of his feast by smell alone; and if this were lacking, and Bruce made no movements to attract his attention, he might wander away in search of other game.

For the first time in his life, Bruce knew Fear as it really was. It is a knowledge that few dwellers in cities can possibly have; and so few times has it really been experienced in these days of civilization that men have mostly forgotten what it is like. If they experience it at all, it is usually only in a dream that arises from the germ-plasm,--a nightmare to paralyze the muscles and chill the heart and freeze a man in his bed. The moon was strange and white as it slipped in and out of the clouds, and the forest, mysterious as Death itself, lightened and darkened alternately with a strange effect of unreality; but for all that, Bruce could not make himself believe that this was just a dream. The dreadful reality remained that the Killer, whose name and works he knew, was even now investigating him from the shadows one hundred feet away.

The fear that came to him was that of the young world,--fear without recompense, direct and primitive fear that grew on him like a sickness. It was the fear that the deer knew as they crept down their dusky trails at night; it was the fear of darkness and silence and pain and heaven knows what cruelty that would be visited upon him by those terrible, rending fangs and claws. It was the fear that can be heard in the pack song in the dreadful winter season, and that can be felt in strange overtones, in the sobbing wail of despair that the coyote utters in the half-darkness. He had been afraid for his life every moment he was in the hands of the Turners. He knew that if he survived this night, he would have to face death again. He had no hopes of deliverance altogether. But the Turners were men, and they worked with knife blade and bullet, not rending fang and claw. He could face men bravely; but it was hard to keep a strong heart in the face of this ancient fear of beasts.

The Killer seemed disturbed and moved slowly along the edge of the moonlight. Bruce could trace his movements by the irregularity in the line of shadows. He seemed to be moving more cautiously than ever, now. Bruce could not hear the slightest sound.

For an instant Bruce had an exultant hope that the bear would continue on down the edge of the forest and leave him; and his heart stood still as the great beast paused, sniffing. But some smell in the air seemed to reach him, and he came stealing back.

In reality, the Killer was puzzled. He had come to this place straight through the forest with the expectation that food--flesh to tear with his fangs--would be waiting for him. Perhaps he had no actual memory of killing the calf the night before. Possibly it was only instinct, not conscious intelligence, that brought him back to what was left of his feast the preceding night. And now, as he waited at the border of the darkness, he knew that a strange change had taken place. And the Killer did not like strangeness.

The smell that he had expected had dimmed to such an extent that it promoted no muscular impulse. Perhaps it was only obliterated by a stranger smell,--one that was vaguely familiar and wakened a slow, brooding anger in his great beast's heart.

He was not timid; yet he retained some of his natural caution and remained in the gloom while he made his investigations. Probably it was a hunting instinct alone. He crept slowly up and down the border of moonlight, and his anger seemed to grow and deepen within him. He felt dimly that he had been cheated out of his meal. And once before he had been similarly cheated; but there had been singular triumph at the end of that experience.

All at once a movement, far across the pasture, caught his attention. Remote as it was, he identified the tall form at once; it was just such a creature as he had blasted with one blow a day or two before. But it dimmed quickly in the darkness. It seemed only that some one had come, taken one glance at the drama at the edge of the forest, and had departed. Bruce himself had not seen the figure; and perhaps it was the mercy of Fate--not usually merciful--that he did not. He might have been caused to hope again, only to know a deeper despair when the man left him without giving aid. For the tall form had been that of Simon coming, as Linda had anticipated, for a moment's inspection of his handiwork. And seeing that it was good, he had departed again.

The grizzly watched him go, then turned back to his questioning regard of the strange, dark figure that lay so prone in the grass in front. The darkness dropped over him as the moon went behind a heavy patch of cloud.

And in that moment of darkness, the Killer understood. He remembered now. Possibly the upright form of Simon had suggested it to him; possibly the wind had only blown straighter and thus permitted him to identify the troubling smells. All at once a memory flashed over him,--of a scene in a distant glen, and similar tall figures that tried to drive him from his food. He had charged then, struck once, and one of the forms had lain very still. He remembered the pungent, maddening odor that had reached him after his blow had gone home. Most clearly of all, he remembered how his fangs had struck and sunk.

He knew this strange shadow now. It was just another of that tall breed he had learned to hate, and it was simply lying prone as his foe had done after the charge beside Little River. In fact, the still-lying form recalled the other occasion with particular vividness. The excitement that he had felt before returned to him now; he remembered his disappointment when the whistling bullets from the hillside above had driven him from his dead. But there were no whistling bullets now. Except for them, there would have been further rapture beside that stream; but he might have it now.

His fangs had sunk home just once, before, and his blood leaped as he recalled the passion he had felt. The old hunting madness came back to him. It was the fair game, this that lay so still in the grass, just as the body of the calf had been and just as the warm body of Hudson in the distant glen.

The wound at his side gave him a twinge of pain. It served to make his memories all the clearer. The lurid lights grew in his eyes. Rage swept over him.

But he didn't charge blindly. He retained enough of his hunting caution to know that to stalk was the proper course. It was true that there was no shrubbery to hide him, yet in his time he had made successful stalks in the open, even upon deer. He moved farther out from the edge of the forest.

At that instant the moon came out and revealed him, all too vividly, to Bruce. The Killer's great gray figure in the silver light was creeping toward him across the silvered grass.

* * * * *

When Linda left her house, her first realization was the need of caution. It would not do to let Simon see her. And she knew that only her long training in the hills, her practice in climbing the winding trails, would enable her to keep pace with the fast-walking man without being seen.

In her concern for Bruce, she had completely forgotten the events of the earlier part of the evening. Wild and stirring though they were, they now seemed to her as incidents of remote years, nothing to be remembered in this hour of crisis. But she remembered them vividly when, two hundred yards from the house, she saw two strange figures coming toward her between the moonlit tree trunks.

There was very little of reality about either. The foremost figure was bent and strange, but she knew that it could be no one but Elmira. The second, however--half-obscured behind her--offered no interpretation of outline at all at first. But at the turn of the trail she saw both figures in vivid profile. Elmira was coming homeward, bent over her cane, and she led a saddled horse by its bridle rein.

Still keeping Simon in sight, Linda ran swiftly toward her. She didn't understand the deep awe that stole over her,--an emotion that even her fear for Bruce could not transcend. There was a quality in Elmira's face and posture that she had never seen before. It was as if she were walking in her sleep, she came with such a strange heaviness and languor, her cane creeping through the pine needles of the trail in front. She did not seem to be aware of Linda's approach until the girl was only ten feet distant. Then she looked up, and Linda saw the moonlight on her face.

She saw something else too, but she didn't know what it was. Her own eyes widened. The thin lips were drooping, the eyes looked as if she were asleep. The face was a strange net of wrinkles in the soft light. Terrible emotions had but recently died and left their ashes upon it. But Linda knew that this was no time to stop and wonder and ask questions.

"Give me the horse," she commanded. "I'm going to help Bruce."

"You can have it," Elmira answered in an unfamiliar voice. "It's the horse that--that Dave Turner rode here--and he won't want him any more."

Linda took the rein, passed it over the horse's head, and started to swing into the saddle. Then she turned with a gasp as the woman slipped something into her hand.

Linda looked down and saw it was the hilt of the knife that Elmira had carried with her when the two women had gone with Dave into the woods. The blade glittered; but Linda was afraid to look at it closely. "You might need that, too," the old woman said. "It may be wet--I can't remember. But take it, anyway."

Linda hardly heard. She thrust the blade into the leather of the saddle, then swung on her horse. Once more she sought Simon's figure. Far away she saw it, just as it vanished into the heavy timber on top of the hill.

She rode swiftly until she began to fear that he might hear the hoof beat of her mount; then she drew up to a walk. And when she had crested the hill and had followed down its long slope into the glen, the moon went under the clouds for the first time.

She lost sight of Simon at once. Seemingly her effort to save Bruce had come to nothing, after all.

But she didn't turn back. There were light patches in the sky, and the moon might shine forth again.

She followed down the trail toward the cleared lands that the Turners cultivated. She went to their very edge. It was a rather high point, so she waited here for the moon to emerge again. Never, it seemed to her, had it moved so slowly. But all at once its light flowed forth over the land.

Her eyes searched the distant spaces, but she could catch no glimpse of Simon between the trees. Evidently he no longer walked in the direction of the house. Then she looked out over the tilled lands.

Almost a quarter of a mile away she saw the flicker of a miniature shadow. Only the vivid quality of the moonlight, against which any shadow was clear-cut and sharp, enabled her to discern it at all. It was Simon, and evidently his business had taken him into the meadows. Feeling that she was on the right track at last, she urged her horse forward again, keeping to the shadow of the timber at first.

Simon walked almost parallel to the dark fringe for nearly a mile; then turned off into the tilled lands. She rode opposite him and reined in the horse to watch.

When the distance had almost obscured him, she saw him stop. He waited a long time, then turned back. The moon went in and out of the clouds. Then, trusting to the distance to conceal her, Linda rode slowly out into the clearing.

Simon reentered the timber, his inspection seemingly done, and Linda still rode in the general direction he had gone. The darkness fell again, and for the space of perhaps five minutes all the surroundings were obscured. A curious sense of impending events came over her as she headed on toward the distant wall of forest beyond.

Then, the clouds slowly dimming under the moon, the light grew with almost imperceptible encroachments. At first it was only bright enough to show her own dim shadow on the grass. The utter gloom that was over the fields lessened and drew away like receding curtains; her vision reached ever farther, the shadows grew more clearly outlined and distinct. Then the moon rolled forth into a wholly open patch of sky--a white sphere with a sprinkling of vivid stars around it--and the silver radiance poured down.

It was like the breaking of dawn. The fields stretched to incredible distances about her. The forest beyond emerged in distinct outline; she could see every irregularity in the plain. And in one instant's glance she knew that she had found Bruce.

His situation went home to her in one sweep of the eyes. Bruce was not alone. Even now a great, towering figure was creeping toward him from the forest. Linda cried out, and with the long strap of her rein lashed her horse into the fastest pace it knew.

* * * * *

Bruce did not hear her come. He lay in the soft grass, waiting for death. A great calm had come upon him; a strange, quiet strength that the pines themselves might have lent to him; and he made no cry. In this dreadful last moment of despair the worst of his terror had gone and left his thoughts singularly clear. And but one desire was left to him: that the Killer might be merciful and end his frail existence with one blow.

It was not a great deal to ask for; but he knew perfectly that only by the mercy of the forest gods could it come to pass. They are usually not so kind to the dying; and it is not the wild-animal way to take pains to kill at the first blow. Yet his eyes held straight. The Killer crept slowly toward him; more and more of his vast body was revealed above the tall heads of the grass. And now all that Bruce knew was a great wonder,--a strange expectancy and awe of what the opening gates of darkness would reveal.

The Killer moved with dreadful slowness and deliberation. He was no longer afraid. It was just as it had been before,--a warm figure lying still and helpless for his own terrible pleasure. A few more steps and he would be near enough to see plainly; then--after the grizzly habit--to fling into the charge. It was his own way of hunting,--to stalk within a few score of feet, then to make a furious, resistless rush. He paused, his muscles setting. And then the meadows suddenly rang with the undulations of his snarl.

Almost unconscious, Bruce did not understand what had caused this utterance. But strangely, the bear had lifted his head and was staring straight over him. For the first time Bruce heard the wild beat of hoofs on the turf behind him.

He didn't have time to turn and look. There was no opportunity even for a flood of renewed hope. Events followed upon one another with startling rapidity. The sharp, unmistakable crack of a pistol leaped through the dusk, and a bullet sung over his body. And then a wild-riding figure swept up to him.

It was Linda, firing as she came. How she had been able to control her horse and ride him into that scene of peril no words may reveal. Perhaps, running wildly beneath the lash, his starting eyes did not discern or interpret the gray figure scarcely a score of yards distant from Bruce; and it is true the grizzly's pungent smell--a thing to terrify much more and to be interpreted more clearly than any kind of dim form in the moonlight--was blown in the opposite direction. Perhaps the lashing strap recalled the terrible punishment the horse had undergone earlier that evening at the hands of Simon and no room was left for any lesser terror. But most likely of all, just as in the case of brave soldiers riding their horses into battle, the girl's own strength and courage went into him. Always it has been the same; the steed partook of its rider's own spirit.

The bear reared up, snarling with wrath, but for a moment it dared not charge. The sudden appearance of the girl and the horse held him momentarily at bay. The girl swung to the ground in one leap, fired again, thrust her arm through the loop of the bridle rein, then knelt at Bruce's side. The white blade that she carried in her left hand slashed at his bonds.

The horse, plunging, seemed to jerk her body back and forth, and endless seconds seemed to go by before the last of the thongs was severed. In reality the whole rescue was unbelievably swift. The man helped her all he could. "Up--up into the saddle," she commanded. The grizzly growled again, advancing remorselessly toward them, and twice more she fired. Two of the bullets went home in his great body, but their weight and shocking power were too slight to affect him. He went down once more on all fours, preparing to charge.

Bruce, in spite of the fact that his limbs had been nearly paralyzed by the tight bonds, managed to grasp the saddlehorn. In the strength of new-born hope he pulled himself half up on it, and he felt Linda's strong arms behind him pushing up. The horse plunged in deadly fear; and the Killer leaped toward them. Once more the pistol cracked. Then the horse broke and ran in a frenzy of terror.

Bruce was full in the saddle by then, and even at the first leap his arm swept out to the girl on the ground beside him. He swung her towards him, and at the same time her hands caught at the arching back of the saddle. Never had her fine young strength been put to a greater test than when she tried to pull herself up on the speeding animal's back. For the first fifty feet she was half-dragged, but slowly--with Bruce's help--she pulled herself up to a position of security.