Part 16 (1/2)
He sat down on the edge of the table, and Hazel blinked at him, half scared, and full of wonder. She had grown so used to seeing him calm, imperturbable, smiling cheerfully no matter what she said or did, that his pa.s.sionate outbreak amazed her. She could only sit and look at him.
He got out his cigarette materials. But his fingers trembled, spilling the tobacco. And when he tore the paper in his efforts to roll it, he dashed paper and all into the fireplace with something that sounded like an oath, and walked out of the house. Nor did he return till the sun was well down toward the tree-rimmed horizon. When he came back he brought in an armful of wood and kindling, and began to build a fire.
Hazel came out of her room. Bill greeted her serenely.
”Well, little person,” he said, ”I hope you'll perk up now.”
”I'll try,” she returned. ”Are you really going to take me out?”
Bill paused with a match blazing in his fingers.
”I'm not in the habit of saying things I don't mean,”' he answered dryly. ”We'll start in the morning.”
The dark closed in on them, and they cooked and ate supper in silence.
Bill remained thoughtful and abstracted. He slouched for a time in his chair by the fire. Then from some place among his books he unearthed a map, and, spreading it on the table, studied it a while. After that he dragged in his kyaks from outside, and busied himself packing them with supplies for a journey--tea and coffee and flour and such things done up in small canvas sacks.
And when these preparations were complete he got a sheet of paper and a pencil, and fell to copying something from the map. He was still at that, sketching and marking, when Hazel went to bed.
By all the signs and tokens, Roaring Bill Wagstaff slept none that night. Hazel herself tossed wakefully, and during her wakeful moments she could hear him stir in the outer room. And a full hour before daylight he called her to breakfast.
CHAPTER XIII
THE OUT TRAIL
”This time last spring,” Bill said to her, ”I was piking away north of those mountains, bound for the head of the Naas to prospect for gold.”
They were camped in a notch on the tiptop of a long divide, a thousand feet above the general level. A wide valley rolled below, and from the height they overlooked two great, sinuous lakes and a mult.i.tude of smaller ones. The mountain range to which Bill pointed loomed seventy miles distance, angling northwest. The sun glinted on the snow-capped peaks, though they themselves were in the shadow.
”I've been wondering,” Hazel said. ”This country somehow seems different. You're not going back to Cariboo Meadows, are you?”
Bill bestowed a look of surprise on her.
”I should say not!” he drawled. ”Not that it would make any difference to me. But I'm very sure you don't want to turn up there in my company.”
”That's true,” she observed. ”But all the clothes and all the money I have in the world are there.”
”Don't let money worry you,” he said briefly. ”I have got plenty to see you through. And you can easily buy clothes.”
They were now ten days on the road. Their course had lain across low, rolling country, bordered by rugged hills, spotted with lakes, and cut here and there by streams that put Bill Wagstaff to many strange s.h.i.+fts in crossing. But upon leaving this camp they crossed a short stretch of low country, and then struck straight into the heart of a mountainous region. Steadily they climbed, reaching up through gloomy canons where foaming cataracts spilled themselves over sheer walls of granite, where the dim and narrow pack trail was crossed and recrossed with the footprints of bear and deer and the snowy-coated mountain goat. The spring weather held its own, and everywhere was the pleasant smell of growing things. Overhead the wild duck winged his way in aerial squadrons to the vast solitudes of the North.
Roaring Bill lighted his evening fire at last at the apex of the pa.s.s.
He had traveled long after sundown, seeking a camp ground where his horses could graze. The fire lit up huge firs, and high above the fir tops the sky was studded with stars, brilliant in the thin atmosphere.
They ate, and, being weary, lay down to sleep. At sunrise Hazel sat up and looked about her in silent, wondering appreciation. All the world spread east and west below. Bill squatted by the fire, piling on wood, and he caught the expression on her face.
”Isn't it great?” he said. ”I ran across some verses in a magazine a long time ago. They just fit this, and they've been running in my head ever since I woke up:
”'All night long my heart has cried For the starry moors And the mountain's ragged flank And the plunge of oars.
'Oh, to feel the Wind grow strong Where the Trail leaps down.