Chapter XII: Signs on the Mountain

I must now tell you of an incident which shook me as nothing else in my whole life has ever shaken me, and the meaning of it was not clear to me till long afterward. I suppose that the gloom of that cheerless day affected me. I can hardly describe my feeling more than to say that throughout the long, bleak afternoon, as I sat at work in the lodge, I was harassed by a strange presentiment as of something impending.

I had looked forward to a few days of solitude, but the loneliness of the place was intolerable in the half darkness and that continuous, blowing rain. By mid-afternoon I was in such a state that I blew out the smelly little lamp which had lighted my work in the dim apartment and resigned myself to idleness. I stood at one of the windows gazing out upon the dismal scene. Through the thin, driven rain, the lake looked hazy and there was the odd effect of the water moving toward me. It was not like the surf on a seashore, ever lapping and receding, but a sort of straining of the whole body of water under the impetus of the wind. There occurred to me the whimsical fancy that if the water should succeed in its effort the bed of the lake would be laid bare and I would see, perchance, the object which had enmeshed and held for so many days the body of poor Roland McClintick. I think I never saw a more gloomy sight than Weir Lake on that dreary, haunting afternoon.

The lodge, you will understand, was between the base of the mountain and the lake. I stepped across the room and stood looking out upon the deserted scene of our recent labors. And there I beheld a strange sight which for the moment startled me. It was a trail passing between two of the new cabins. It ran behind the stone bungalow of the old camp (where the boys slept) but beyond this, in the direction of the mountain, I saw no certain trace of it. At one spot where the rugged ascent began I could just make out a faint line perhaps fifty feet in extent. It hovered between visibility and invisibility; I thought it was the trail.

The sight of this hardly tangible and broken line leading, as I thought, up the mountain, astonished me. I had always understood that there was no regular trail up Hogback. Tom is a perfect fiend on such matters; he will find a trail if there is one, but he knew of none up those dense slopes. Many times I had looked from that window, and heaven knows I had never seen the faintest sign of a trail. Nor had any of our group ever mentioned one. In talking of our projected ascent after the prowling creature whose moaning we had heard, Tom had said that he thought the best way was to hike around the base of the mountain and ascend the easier slopes of the farther side.

I was so curious about what I had seen that despite the weather I went to the cupboard beside the fireplace and took from its hook the great oilskin coat with hat to match, which belonged to Skipper Tim. How many times I had seen him in this storm attire helping canoeists at the boating club home in Bridgeboro! It was then that I noticed (I don’t know how I happened to think about them) that the used targets were not in their place upon the shelf. I don’t know that the disappearance of these telltale squares of paper aroused any suspicions in my mind. But as I told you before, the gloom and loneliness somehow gave the whole place a certain ghostly unreality, the McClintick tragedy seemed to haunt the bleak scene, and I was strangely unnerved by every sound and by this discovery. I was curious enough to go up into Brent’s little room to see if the targets were there. But they were neither in his room nor Tom’s and I was puzzled. As I descended the bare stairs my own echoing footsteps startled me and brought home to me a vivid sense of my isolation.

I sallied forth into the storm to examine the trail and follow it a little distance. But I could not find it. Try as I would, I could not find it. I returned indoors and looked again from the window, but could not see it. Then in a sudden gust of wind I saw it even more clearly than before. And I saw, too, that the elusive line upon the mountainside was indeed a visible section of it.

Here was a strange phenomenon. I was reminded of a certain novel toy I had in childhood, a bit of glass which one had only to breathe upon to see a picture which immediately faded out with the dissolving breath. And so it is with trails, the trails of bygone days. Uncle Jeb Rushmore, up at Temple Camp has told me that the route man has trodden in the wilds is never wholly obliterated. The freakish wind, a lucky vantage point, a certain slant of light and the obscure path is revealed in hovering uncertainty, if only for a moment. I have not the scout’s eye. I think now that the rushing wind, swaying the long grass, showed me stretches of that faint hidden trail. Perhaps the soaked and glossy condition of the vegetation had something to do with it. All I know is that I saw it, the ghost of a departed trail, and that when my friends returned we could not find it again.

I went out again into the driven rain and the heavy, bending grass clung to my limbs, impeding my progress. It was like trying to walk through seaweed. The rain smote my right cheek leaving my left cheek almost dry; it seemed horizontal. I plodded through this drenching artillery of the elements to the space between two cabins where I had seen the trail from the window. I had thought to surprise it, as it were, in this narrow pass. But there was no sign of a trail there. Why could not my exploring limbs and hands lay bare this elusive marking, so apparent from the lodge? I parted the drenched grass, searching in vain. In heaven’s name, I said aloud, is this desolate wilderness haunted by a spectral trail? I had seen it; where was it?

But there upon the rugged lower reaches of the mountain, between two mighty rocks, I could see, not the trail, but a certain narrow length of gray earth where surely, if there were indeed a trail, it must pass. It would pass between those sentinel rocks for that would be the path of least resistance in the arduous ascent. And it seemed to me that the farthest section of the broken line I had seen from the window was in that direction.

Well, I was in for it now; I was thoroughly soaked, a fine, adventurous resolve was aroused within me, and I would not be baffled and confounded by storm and taunting shadows. I vowed that I would scramble over obstacles and through soaking foliage to those two mammoth rocks which I thought were Nature’s rough portals, to the unknown upper reaches of the towering Hogback Mountain.

I don’t know what I expected to find there. But if the passage between those rocks were clear surely that would prove that the trail passed through there in its circuitous windings up the mountain. Perhaps at that point I could get a clear sight of it, up or down. And if I could I would have something to say to Tom Slade and Brent Gaylong. I would be a scout and a detective rolled into one. They could no longer call me a fountain pen adventurer.

I shall never as long as I live forget that laborious scramble. What I had called the _lower reaches_ of the mountain proved to be a whole range of mountains before I had attained my goal. One looks at a mountain and says, “I would like to climb it.” Looking and doing are two such different matters where mountains are concerned. There are cliffs and crevices that one never sees from the land below. And yet in plain fact those two huge rocks were not a fifth part of the way up that mighty jumble of rock and forest. I stumbled and groped and climbed and in places became enmeshed in dripping, tangled undergrowth. No sign of any trail could I find in my difficult progress.

Excepting one sign. At the head of a certain short, precipitous place I saw a long withe tied like a rope around a tree trunk with a long end hanging loose. It was perfectly evident to me that this had been fastened there to assist a climber in scrambling up or down, probably down, this declivity. By holding the loose end one might be saved from falling while groping for a sure foothold below it. It could have been fastened there only by a human being and my discovery of it in that desolate jungle quite startled me. I thought the wood seemed fresh; I pulled with all my strength, but could not break it. I was not a good enough scout to know what kind of wood it was, but I thought it was willow. Yet there were no willow trees thereabouts. I suppose that willow retains its moisture and pliancy a long time, though surely not for years or even months. Whence, then, came this crude device to brace one on that perilous climb?

To search for any sign of a trail in that topsy-turvy thicket was out of the question and I made my way by easier progress now to the great rocks which I have called the portals to the upper reaches of Hogback. Here I could look down upon our camp. How strange it appeared in bird’s-eye view! I wondered how it would look from the summit of the mountain. The lake seemed small and the fine, rustic effect of the lodge was even more attractive from my vantage point than it was at closer range. The new buildings stood out clear and detached from the surrounding disorder of our labors. The whole scene was wrapped in mist so that I saw the camp as through a gauze curtain.

Now these rocks were of an odd formation; quite different from their appearance as seen from below. That front view of them, as I might call it, had shown them as two great rocks with a passageway between them. But on closer view, I saw that one rock leaned against the other (save at the entrance) so that the narrow passage was not only between precipitous walls, but was roofed also by the meeting of these walls above. The falling of one rock against the other had made a sort of triangular passage with the converging walls touching the head as one passed through.

Into this narrow pass the storm had not penetrated, and I later found that the crevice between the two rocks was completely overgrown outside. But the narrow pass was dank and mossy and frequented by little lizards that paused, heads upraised, then scooted this way and that. If human-kind had ever used this passage in following a trail, there certainly was no sign of a trail at the time of my inspection. The ground was rocky so that one might pass through the entire length of a dozen yards or so without stepping on earth. But there was one little area of earth, hard but with a thin mossy surface, or rather hardened scum. It was as if moss had started to grow there, but had not developed; a thin, damp crust of vegetation, compact but sensitive to pressure.

Upon this natural film some living being had laid a naked foot, and all the beating fury of the drenching storm, and of other storms for aught I knew, had not obliterated it. What I noticed particularly about it was that running diagonally across the ball of the foot was an irregular mark which identified the footprint with the one I had seen permanently embedded in the concrete of the McClintick lodge on the first night of our arrival at Leatherstocking Camp.

Then suddenly, before my consternation had subsided, I noticed some crude lettering on the rocky wall of the passage. If the letters were intended to form a word their irregular size and positions suggested an erratic, not to say irrational, procedure in the work. Yet large and small and tilted crazily as they were, they were still in proper order to form the appalling word STRANGLE.

I recalled with a shudder that Harrison McClintick had met his tragic end at the hands of an unknown strangler.