Part 44 (1/2)

When Bruce was left alone in the gloomy canyon, where the winter sun at its best did not s.h.i.+ne more than three hours in the twenty-four, he had wondered whether the days or nights would be the hardest to endure. It was now well into December, and still he did not know. They were equally intolerable.

During the storms which kept him inside he spent the days looking at the floor, the nights staring at the ceiling, springing sometimes to his feet burning with feverish energy, a maddening desire to _do_ something--and there was nothing for him to do but wait. Moments would come when he felt that he could go out and conquer the world bare-handed but they quickly pa.s.sed with a fresh realization of his helplessness, and he settled back to the inevitable.

It was folly to go out penniless--unarmed; he had learned that lesson in the East and his condition then had been affluence compared to this. He was doing the one thing that it was possible for him to do in the circ.u.mstances--to get money enough to go outside.

”Slim” had brought a collection of traps down the river from Meadows, and Bruce had set these out. So far he had been rather lucky and the pile of skins in the corner was growing--lynx, cougar, marten, mink--but it still was not high enough.

If Bruce had been less sensitive, more world-hardened, his failure would not have seemed such a crus.h.i.+ng, unbearable thing, but alone in the killing monotony he brooded over the money he had sunk for other people until it seemed like a colossal disgrace for which there was no excuse and that he could never live down. In his bitter condemnation of himself for his inexperience, his ill-judged magnanimity, he felt as though his was an isolated case--that no human being ever had made such mistakes before.

But it was thoughts of Helen that always gave his misery its crowning touch. She pitied him, no doubt, because, she was kind, but in her heart he felt she must despise him for a weakling--a braggart who could not make good his boasts. She needed him, too,--he was sure of it--and lack of money made him as helpless to aid her as though he were serving a jail sentence. When, in the night, his mind began running along this line he could no longer stay in his bunk; and not once, but many times, he got up and dressed and went outside, stumbling around in the brush, over the rocks--anything to change his thoughts.

He tried his utmost to put her out of his mind, yet as he plodded on his snow-shoes, along his fifteen-mile trap line, either actively or subconsciously his thoughts were of her. He could no longer imagine himself feeling anything more than a mild interest in any other woman.

He loved her with the same concentration of affection that he had loved his mother.

Bruce had formed the habit of wondering what she would think of this and that--of imagining how she would look--what she would say--and so all through the summer she had been a.s.sociated with the work. He had antic.i.p.ated the time when he should be showing her the rapids with the moonlight s.h.i.+ning on the foam, the pink and amber sunsets behind the umbrella tree, and when the wind blew among the pines of listening with her to the sounds that were like Hawaiian music in the distance.

Now, try as he would, he could not rid himself of the habit, and, as he pushed his way among the dark underbrush of creeks, he was always thinking that she, too, would love that ”woodsy” smell; that she, too, would find delight in the frozen waterfalls and the awesome stillness of the snow-laden pines.

But just so often as he allowed his imagination rein, just so often he came back to earth doubly heavy-hearted, for the chance that she would ever share his pleasure in these things seemed to grow more remote as the days went by.

Bruce had built himself a shelter at the end of his trap-line that consisted merely of poles and pine boughs leaned against a rim-rock.

Under this poor protection, wrapped in a blanket, with his feet toward the fire at the entrance and his back against the wall, he spent many a wretched night. Sometimes he dozed a little, but mostly wide-eyed, he counted the endless hours waiting for the dawn.

During the summer when things had continually gone wrong Bruce had found some comfort in recounting the difficulties which his hero of the Calumet and Hecla had gone through in the initial stages of the development of that great mine. But that time had pa.s.sed, for, while Alexander Aga.s.siz had had his struggles, Bruce told himself with a shadowy smile, he never had been up against a deal like this! there was no record that he ever had had to lie out under a rim-rock when the thermometer stood twenty and twenty-five below.

In the long, soundless nights that had the cold stillness of infinite s.p.a.ce, Bruce always had the sensation of being the only person in the universe. He felt alone upon the planet. Facts became hazy myths, truths merely hallucinations, nothing seemed real, actual, except that if he slept too long and the fire went out he would freeze to death under the rim-rock.

It was only when he dropped down from the peaks and ridges and began to follow his own steps back, that he returned to reality and things seemed as they are again. Then it was not so hard to believe that over beyond that high, white range there were other human beings--happy people, successful people, people with plenty to read and plenty to do, people who looked forward with pleasure, not dread, to the days as they came.

He was so lonely that he always felt a little elated when he came across an elk track in the snow. It was evidence that something _was_ stirring in the world beside himself.

One day three deer came within thirty feet of him and stared.

”I suppose,” he mused, ”they're wondering what I am? Dog-gone!” with savage cynicism. ”I'm wondering that myself.”

Whatever small portion of his spirits he had recovered by exercise and success at his traps, always disappeared again on his return down Big Squaw Creek. To pa.s.s the head-gate and the flume gave him an acute pang, while the high trestle which represented so much toil and sweat, hurt him like a stab. It seemed unbelievable that he could fail after all that work!

When he pa.s.sed the power-house with its nailed windows and doors he turned his head the other way. It was like walking by a graveyard where some one was sleeping that he loved.

Bruce always had been peculiarly depressed by abandoned homesteads, deserted cabins, machinery left to rust, because they represented wasted efforts, failure, but when these monuments to dead hopes were his own!

His quickened footsteps sometimes became very nearly like a run.

It was from such a trip that Bruce came back to his cabin after two days' absence more than ordinarily heavy-hearted, if that were possible, though his luck had been unusually good. He had a cougar, one lynx, and six dark marten. Counting the State bounty on the cougar, the green skins be brought back represented close to a hundred dollars. At that rate he soon could go ”outside.”

But to-night the thought did not elate him. What was there for him outside? What was there for him anywhere? As he had trudged along the trail through the broken snow, the gloom of the canyon had weighed upon him heavily, but it was the chill silence in the bare cabin when he opened the door that put the finis.h.i.+ng touches upon his misery. The emptiness of it echoed in his heart.

The blankets were in a mound in the bunk; he had been too disheartened before he left even to sweep the floor; the ashes over-flowed the stove hearth and there was no wood split. The soiled dishes, caked with hardened grease, made him sick. The chimney of the lamp he lighted was black with smoke. It was the last word in cheerlessness, and there was no reason to think, Bruce told himself, that it would not be in such surroundings that he would end his days. He was tired, hungry; his vitality and spirits were at low ebb.