Part 11 (1/2)

Ben made no reply at once; but his mind sped like lightning. Of course Neilson was lying about the claim: he knew perfectly that at that moment he was occupying one of Hiram Melville's cabins. He was a first-cla.s.s actor, too--his voice indicating scarcely no acquaintance with or interest in the name.

”He hasn't come up this way?” Ben asked casually.

”He hasn't come through here that I know of. Of course I'm working at my claim--with my partners--and he might have gone through without our seeing him. It seems rather unlikely.”

Ben was really puzzled now. If Ezram had already made his presence known and was camping somewhere in the hills about, there was no reason immediately evident why Neilson should deny his presence. Ben found himself wondering whether by any chance Ezram had been delayed along the trail, perhaps had even lost his way, and had not yet put in an appearance.

”He told me, in the few minutes that I talked to him, that his cabin was somewhere close to this one--I thought he said up this creek.”

”There is a cabin up the creek a way,” Neilson admitted, ”but it isn't the one he meant. It's on my claim, and my two partners are living in it. But when he said near to this one, he might have meant ten miles.

That's the way we Northern men speak of distance.”

There was nothing more to say, nothing to do at present. He said his farewells to the girl, refused an invitation to pa.s.s the night in the cabin, and made his way to the green bank of the stream. Four hundred yards from the cabin, and perhaps a like number from the cabin of Ray and Charley--obscured from both by the thickets--he pitched his camp.

In the cabin he had left Jeffery Neilson catechized his daughter, trying to learn all he could concerning Ben. It was true that he carried the dead Hiram's rifle, and that the latter's pet wolf followed at his heels, but it was wholly probable that the old man, Hiram's brother, with whom he had conversed at the river, had designated him to get them.

He had been courteous and respectful throughout the journey to the Yuga, Beatrice said, and he had also saved her from possible death in the fangs of the wolf the evening previous. Neilson decided that he would take no steps at present but merely wait and watch developments.

Meanwhile Ben had made his fire and unpacked his horses. He confined his riding horse with a picket rope; the others he turned loose. Then he cooked a simple meal for himself and the gaunt servant at his heels.

When the night had come down in full, and as he sat about the glowing coals of his supper fire, he had time to devote serious thought to the fate of Ezram. It occurred to him that perhaps the old man had discovered, at a distance, the presence of the claim-jumpers; and was merely waiting in the thickets for a chance to take action. If such were the case, sooner or later they could join their fortunes again. It was also easy to imagine that Ezram had lost his way on the journey out.

He stood at the edge of the firelight, gazing out into the darkened forest. The wolf crouched beside him: alert, watching his face for any command. It was wholly plain that the gaunt woods creature had accepted him at once as his master; and that the bond between them, because of some secret similarity of spirit, was already far closer than between most masters and their pets.

Ben sensed another side of the forest to-night because of his inborn love of the waste places not often seen. The thickets were menacing, sinister to-night. The spruce crept up to the skyline with darkness and mystery: he realized the eternal malevolence that haunts their silent fastnesses. They would have tricks in plenty to play on such as would lose their way on their dusky trails! Oh, they would have no mercy or remorse for any one who was lost, _out there_, to-night! Ben felt a heavy burden of dread!

Even now, old Ezram might be wandering, vainly, through the gloomy, whispering woods, ever penetrating farther into their merciless solitudes. And no homes smoked in the clearings, no camps glowed in the immensity of the dark--out there. This was just the beginning of the forest; clear into the shadow of the Arctic Circle, where the woodlands gave way to the Weary wastes of barrens, there was no break, no tilled fields or fisher's villages, only an occasional Indian encampment which not even a wolf, running through the night, might find. His supply of food would quickly be exhausted, fatigue would break his valiant spirit.

Ben planned an extensive search for his tracks as soon as the morning light permitted him to see.

He missed the old man's comrades.h.i.+p with a deep and fervid longing. They had come to count on each other, these past weeks. It wasn't alone infinite grat.i.tude that he felt for him now. The thing went too deep to tell. Yet there was no use seeking for him to-night.

He turned to the wolf and dropped his hand upon the animal's shoulder.

Fenris started, then quivered in ecstasy. ”I wish I had your nose, to-night, old boy,” Ben told him. ”I'd find that old buddy of mine. I wish I had your eyes to see in the dark, and your legs to run. Fenris, do you know where he is?”

The wolf turned his wild eyes toward his master's face, as if he were trying to understand.

XIV

Impelled by an urge within himself Ben suddenly knelt beside his lupine friend. He could not understand the flood of emotion, the vague sense of impending and dramatic events that stirred him to the quick. He only knew, with a knowledge akin to inspiration, that in Fenris lay the answer to his problem.

The moment was misted over with a quality of unreality. In the east rose the moon, s.h.i.+ning incredibly on the tree tops, showering down through the little rifts in the withholding branches, enchanting the place as by the weaving of a dream. The moon madness caught up Ben like a flame, enthralling him as never before. He knew that white sphere of old. And all at once he realized that here, at his knees, was one who knew it too,--with a knowledge as ancient and as infinite as his own. Not for nothing had the wolf breed lived their lives beneath it through the long roll of the ages. Its rising and its setting had regulated the hunting hours of the pack time without end; its beams had lighted the game trails where the gray band had bayed after the deer; its light had beheld, since the world was young, the rapturous mating of the old pack leader and his female. Fenris too knew the moon-madness; but unlike Ben he had a means of expression of the wonder and mystery and vague longing that thrilled his wild heart. No man who has heard the pack song to the moon could doubt this fact. It is a long, melancholy wail, poignant with the pain of living, but it tells what man can not.

Ben knew, now, why he was a forester, a woodsman famed even among woodsmen. Most of his fellows had been tamed by civilization; they had lived beneath roofs instead of the canopy of heaven, and they had almost forgotten about the moon. Ben, on the other hand, was a recurrence of an earlier type, inheriting little from his immediate ancestors but reverting back a thousand centuries to the Cave and the Squatting Place.

His nature was that of prehistoric man rather than that of the son of civilization; and in this lay the explanation for all that had set him apart from the great run of men and had made him the master woodsman that he was. And because his spirit was of the wildwood, because he also knew the magic of the moon, he was able to make this wildwood thing at his feet understand and obey his will.

The world of to-day seemed to fade out for him and left only the wolf, its fierce eyes on his own. Time swung back, and this might have been a scene of forgotten ages,--the wolf, the human hunter, the smoldering camp fire, the dark, jagged line of spruce against the sky. It was thus at the edge of the ice. Wolf and man--both children of the wild--had understood each other then; and they could understand each other now.