CHAPTER XI
THE SILVERSTAKE PINE
The double-headed engine came snorting and puffing up the grade, pulling behind it the early express. Through the red canyons it wound and slowed to a stop for thirty seconds at the highest station on the Santa Fe system. In those thirty seconds Garen Shepherd swung down, suitcase in hand, waved ahead to the engineer, and turned to Hal Benty, whom he had wired to meet him on the five-thirty and who was waiting with his Ford on the other side of the tracks.
Hal had had to leave home at three-thirty but was just as glad, for it was a hot day and they might as well make the trip early. They would be up on the Amarillo by nine. Already the temperature in the railroad cut was insufferable, and the place looked like an inferno of red earth, studded with stunted, twisted little trees, writhing in the heat.
Garen might have stopped for breakfast at one of the dude ranches in the lower valley, but he pushed on eagerly. He had left the city at four, forcing his way on to the through express. The city was prostrate with bad news and heat. The afternoon before there had been queues of creditors before every bank till long after closing time.
The stockmen were all ruined and had pulled down with them tradesmen, citizens, shopkeepers, and professional men. There wasn’t any ready money to be had, Garen told Hal; just the cash people had on ’em. They would have to get along till more actual cash was brought into the state from outside. He had fifty dollars himself till next Government payday.
The president of the People’s Bank had nearly lost his mind. He had been fighting this thing for weeks. He’d make good every cent with his personal funds before he finished. But it would clean him out, leave him penniless. The Perry bank? Perry had paid out that afternoon and had left on the midnight train for the East with his family.
“I don’t think he has the faintest notion of coming back,” said Garen, “though I may be doing him an injustice. He said he was going East for loans. His personal fortune is untouchable. He’s a blowhard. Development? Hell!”
Garen spent little time over the breakfast that good, fat Mrs. Benty set before him. He was eager to be on his way up to the aspen-log cabin on the Cascada. The sun was already high and incredibly hot for the mountains when he parted the trees on the trail and splashed across the ford below the ranger’s home.
“Halloo, there!” They would be surprised to see him, two days earlier than he had said he would come. Damon appeared in the door, shouting a hearty greeting. Dawn had ridden over to McGuire’s valley. He’d told her not to go. They sat down and Damon heard the news. As Garen’s story of the bank crash corroborated his worst fears Damon’s teeth closed tighter about the old briar pipe.
“Cleared out, eh? Wish I’d taken a minute with him yesterday! It can’t be possible that they won’t pay up in full! Until the day before yesterday I had never even been afraid of that bank. Man, do you know that all my savings of years, everything that was for Dawn, is in that bank—was in it, I should say?”
Garen nodded silently. A terrible thing. People down below had lost the savings of years. And how were the people in the cities to tide over without cash, actual cash in hand, for the next few months? It was harder on the bank people than any one else. They had lost everything.
“And it is in the next few years that my girl needs her schooling,” Damon exclaimed bitterly.
As they talked the air outside had grown strangely lurid, and the white heat of the sun became suddenly obscured by a greenish light. Damon jumped up and went to the door. “Rain! By the powers of the mountain, at last!” he ejaculated. “And a heavy one. And Dawn’s over on the other side. I hope she started for home as soon as it began to cloud over. I told her she’d better stay home.”
“I’ll ride over and meet her,” said Garen. “She’ll likely come back by the upper trail, won’t she?”
“Yes, that’s the shortest way,” Damon nodded. “And she usually rides back that way when she’s been to the falls. She likes to go there when she’s the least out of sorts.”
“I know.” Garen jumped eagerly on the horse which he’d rented from Mr. Benty. “I’ll look after her, Mr. O’Neill, or she’ll look after me! So long.”
When Garen emerged from the aspen glade at the top of the trail it was like another world. The clear green light that looked as though one were living at the bottom of the sea had turned to a dark angry blue. About the head of the Coronado Peaks thunder rumbled mutteringly. Heat lightning flashed on distant summits. The air was disturbed, electric, menacing.
Where would Dawn be? He started down the trail into the valley. Above him and about, the clouds were massing rapidly. The mutter and rumble increased, echoing from one peak to another with solemn majesty. Garen felt a nervous response to the tension of the elements. Beyond lay Snow Lake and the gateway out of the valley where the fire had been stopped so short a time ago. He had been the first to reach Dawn and to pull her from the water the night of the fire, while others dragged young Perry from the horse. So many heroic deeds had been accomplished that night that the girl’s act had passed among the others, so unconscious had she herself been of any heroism.
She had been quite unaware of his own torturing anxiety for her that night. And now he felt most uneasy. This was going to be a tremendous electrical storm. Lightning took its toll in the mountains every year. That splendid natural quality that made Dawn so fine in his eyes made her take a joy in the elements beyond the power of mere thinking to understand or explain. While animals took shelter from the storm, she braved it. Garen was worried. What had begun with admiration for and delight in Dawn, had become a strong, deep love.
Where was she? The waterfall lay straight across the valley from him. Lightning struck the rocky summits as he looked. He could see faintly along the ridge, and as he peered intently, searching for the great tree which Dawn had showed him on that first day of theirs together, he saw a great bird wing laboriously up from a summit directly over where the falls must be and with a few powerful wingbeats reach a dead tree, a gaunt giant standing beyond the falls.
What a monarch among birds! Huge, primeval, as the forest itself, Garen thought. But already large raindrops were falling. He pushed his horse down into the valley. He must find a shorter trail up to the falls. The storm, he felt, was gathering its powers for some fearful demonstration, and he prayed it would hold off until he could find Dawn. Surely she must already be headed toward home.
He reached the bottom of the valley. McGuire’s son was hurrying through the pasture. Garen shouted to him, asking whether he’d seen Dawn. The boy pointed up to the ridge and the falls, shouting, but Garen could not hear him between the peals of thunder. Now the sky was leaden, the air green, the heavens filled with rending flashes of lightning, succeeded by claps of thunder. The noise was deafening. Then came a roar like stampeding cattle, a patter of rain on the leaves; the heavy clouds were rent by louder and more appalling successions of thunder and lightning; and a sheet of water stood between heaven and mountains. “My God, what a cloudburst!” Garen shouted futilely.
Dawn had seen the storm mounting and had lingered to watch its grandeur. From where she sat well above the waterfall she could see the peaks and the valley magnificently. Now too she could see the great pine which her father had made use of as the base for his last survey which had resulted in such hopeless variance with that of the ancient grant.
“I was wrong,” she thought; “it was not the Silverstake after all.” She had been so sure; she felt defeated, but not discouraged. Perhaps the silver-bearing ledge itself could be found. She was thrilled, exhilarated with the coming storm, tingling in an atmosphere vibrant with electric forces. She knew that she should be returning to the Cascada if she were to get back before the storm broke; yet she lingered, climbing a bit in this direction and then in that.
Piñon was down at the foot of the cliff, tied under a projecting shelf below the waterfall, where the foliage was dense. Clap after clap of thunder broke overhead, and the terrific echoes had not died before another followed. Now rain began to fall, and without delay Dawn commenced to scramble down to the foot of the cliff. A jagged bolt of lightning struck somewhere on the peaks above her, and she winced in anticipation of thunder that did not come.
She’d barely make it to McGuire’s cabin. Dad would know that she’d gone there. It never occurred to her that Damon would doubt her ability to take care of herself on the mountain. Suddenly she saw the golden eagle, no longer shining, but dark and majestic, his powerful wings cupped to hold the air as he sailed straight over her head.
She watched him, forgetting her own situation, as he made straight for a dead tree not far away, the same in which she had seen him before, and lit among the nest of branches at the top. There the great bird folded his wings and bent his head to the storm. The rain was now coming fast. Dawn clambered down the trail, her own head bent. She would reach Piñon and they would make what speed they could down into the valley. But before she could reach the chestnut pony she was drenched. Then one terrific flash of light smote the mountainside and threw her on her face. The skies became like an ocean turned upside down.
Cloudburst! A cloudburst never to be forgotten. If it had come the night of the fire it could have extinguished twenty such fires. Only the shelter of the cliff saved Dawn. She was flattened against it, subdued, acquiescent, as she had never been. Stones came rolling down the slopes, gathering speed as they came, and suddenly, with a grinding roar, a great boulder shot over the ledge almost over her head, bounding downward with frightful speed. Loosed from its place by the torrents above, or perhaps by the shafts of lightning that smote the hillsides repeatedly, it tore its way down the mountain.
Dawn gasped for breath as the rain beat in on her. She pursed her lips vainly to whistle for Piñon. If he would only come to her. She shouted his name over and over, and strangely enough, through the storm her cries carried to Garen. He was fighting his way up the trail which was clearly enough marked now by the water which had followed it downward, cutting it into a rapidly deepening trench. Garen had found it almost impossible to climb, but the certainty that Dawn was above him on the mountain gave him new strength.
He pulled himself up by bushes and trees; he must make it, must cover the distance quickly before the greater deluge that follows such a downpour should wash them away as it tore down the slopes. Piñon must be near. Dawn was calling the chestnut pony. She was calling him. “Garen, Garen! Piñon!” Garen Shepherd thought he heard the pony’s nicker. He was blinded by the rain, but with an effort he pulled himself toward the sound. At that moment the great boulder tore its way through the trees and passed him like a landslide, following the path of the eroded trail.
His heart almost stopped with the shock of it; then he saw Piñon ahead of him. A moment’s respite gave him strength to overtake the horse and he caught him by the bridle and urged him on. The chestnut pony responded gallantly. He quivered with response, his flanks shook, his nicker sounded above the storm. Garen seized him by the tail and Piñon pulled him up the slopes and under the cliff. Dawn was almost ready to let herself be washed down the mountain. She would find Piñon below and reach the valley before the water that was coming down from the peaks should wash her away anyway, crush her with its freight of stones. And then Garen was beside her. He put his arms about her and forced her back under the ledge. She saw that Piñon was there, and subsided. Presently she was clinging to Garen for support.
Piñon drooped over them, the water running down his tail. Together they weathered it through, and the chestnut pony kept them from being swept down the mountainside. They waited till the torrent should have rushed by them.
At the same moment that Dawn was thrown to the ground the golden eagle had fallen too, plunging from his lofty perch. He had been struck by the same electric bolt, had gone out in glory at the last moment of his days, spared the ignominy of falling to lesser birds or to the jackals of the wild. The ancient tree on which he had perched had also received its last blow, the tiro de gracia, the mercy-stroke, of the elements.
Short and terrific was the storm. Dawn unclasped her arms from Garen’s neck, sighed, trembling. She had clung to him like a child. The bolt that had taken the veterans of the forest had spared them. But it had struck something in Dawn. One does not go through such an experience without coming closer to the being with whom it is shared.
“Thank goodness I found you.” Garen tried to dry her off with a kerchief pulled from the saddle bag. “I was afraid when the storm broke, Dawn. Why do you take such risks?”
“I love it,” she answered, “but this time I was frightened. I called Piñon, but he didn’t hear me.”
“I did,” Garen replied. “You called me too.”
She had not known it and looked at him in surprise. Garen was drenched, muddy, his clothes half torn off. His face was smudged and scratched, his fingers bleeding. Affection and gratitude shone from her wide eyes.
“Dawn, Dawn,” Garen stammered, “I’m not much, but—but—”
Impulsively she leaned toward him and kissed his cheek.
“You’re all a man should be.”
He wanted to shout and yell. He shook her rapturously. “Including a bath and a close shave, eh?” he shouted in her ear.
The rain had stopped, but the deluge was still rushing down the mountain side with fearful velocity. Already they could hear the roar of the falls above, and of the stream below in the canyon opening into McGuire’s pasture.
What had become of the eagle? Dawn looked up; he was gone. The tree itself was gone!
“Let us start down now, Dawn,” Garen was saying. “I think we can make it.”
“Oh, Garen, I must see where the lightning struck over there. It’s just a little way. We couldn’t be any wetter.” She was already leading Piñon through the drenched shrubbery, and Garen had to follow. The blasted pine loomed before them; the trunk still stood, but it was split down into the earth. At its foot lay the golden eagle, conquered only by death at the hands of the mountain. Tenderly Dawn stooped to look at the great creature. “See, Garen.”
Then the riven tree gaped before her. It confronted her with something. She peered closer, saw and gasped. There on the heart-wood, exposed by the lightning shaft which had split it neatly, laying it bare for the first time since the healing bark had closed over it so many years ago, there was the “witness blaze” of the old Pueblo grant! “Garen, look!” They came closer. Together they stooped above it.
It was unmistakable. On a smooth surface of the pine it was still clearly written for all the world to read:
Northeast corner of the grant made to the Pueblos of Picuris; Anno domini 1870.
And beneath the legend:
70 feet east and south this point by 30 paces the vein of the Silverstake mine lies, following the mother vein to the fault.
“This is an act of God,” Dawn said. She passed her hand over the writing traced there so long ago by the early surveyors. Why had they not returned to work the mine themselves? That the surveyors had never again penetrated this wilderness to claim the discovery was clear. But the story had survived; had even been entered in the public records. No wonder that no one had ever been able to find the witness tree.
Garen was profoundly impressed. What instinct had led her here? “No one but you, Dawn,” he said, “would have been drawn to this spot at such a time.” Some subtle connection between her and the wild, he felt, surely existed.
But if it had not been for the golden eagle she would never have found the tree. Before any one came that way again the surface of the exposed wood might become so weathered that the inscription would have looked like the meanderings of a worm through the dead tree. The trunk of the old pine was still sound wood, and the heart-wood was still firm and colored darkly, the wood about it still light and resinous. Great growth-rings encircled the core. The tree had stood alone in its youth, receiving plenty of light, growing to great size. That was undoubtedly why it had been chosen as the witness tree.
“To think,” murmured Dawn, almost forgetting Garen, “that you have stood all these years, until this moment, growing by day, sleeping at night, covering your secret, month by month, year by year, hiding it until this moment. Oh, witness tree, wait till I fetch Damon!”
She could not take the golden eagle with her; yet she could not bear to leave him to be rent by the creatures of the forest. So Garen lifted him and laid him on a ledge of rock where he might lie covered by stones till some one could return to get the splendid wings for Dawn. Then she mounted Piñon and turned his head down the mountain. Garen found his own horse just over the top of the ridge.
It had begun to rain again, and although the fury of the storm had been spent, still the rain fell in sheets. Sometimes they had to take shelter under the pines to keep from being washed down the mountain side. Eventually they reached McGuire’s cabin just as a fresh outburst shut off all view of the hills about them. None but the anchored trees could have held a place on the slopes. Rocks were loosened and rolled down as though by the ocean’s waves.
In McGuire’s cabin Dawn and Garen sat before the fire, wrapped in blankets and old clothes while their own things dried, and were plied with hot coffee by Mrs. McGuire. All telephone wires were down, so that Dawn could not call her father. The cabin was crowded with children, dogs, a young deer, and a little striped coon.
“Come, Dawn,” Mrs. McGuire was bustling about with motherly solicitude; “lay right down on the seat and go to sleep, girlie. You must be clean tuckered out. I’d put ye in a bedroom, but the baby’s in one with the old man, and grandma’s in the other. She didn’t sleep all night with the toothache, and she sleeps awful light.”
Dawn nodded and smiled. She was warm and safe and relaxed. The seat was too short for her feet, but Garen took her head on his shoulder, and while the children played about them she slept the deep sleep of exhaustion. Mrs. McGuire nodded meaningly to her husband, and they turned their backs and went into the kitchen.
CHAPTER XII
HEART-WOOD
“Yes, you bet I testified,” recounted Hinray, who stood before a mirror hung against a tree and combed his mustaches. “I seen it with my own eyes. ’Twas all the better that the tree was old. You can’t counterfeit old heart-wood. No! Nature ain’t to be duplicated.
“There she read, just as pretty: Silverstake claim, 70 feet east, and south by 30 paces, and on—”
“But when is my father coming back?” Dawn persisted. “Now that the Indian thing is straightened up why doesn’t he come back? I expected him yesterday morning and again this morning. What’s that you have, Hinray? Give it to me now. It’s mail.”
With exasperating deliberation Hinray was sorting out some very dirty envelopes from one or two fairly clean ones. He handed her a heavy, important-looking envelope.
“That’ll be from the Irrigation Service, I take it.”
“Yes, one might guess it from the letterhead,” Dawn replied witheringly.
Hinray appeared not to notice her sarcasm or to have further interest in the letter.
“Oh!” Dawn exclaimed, too disappointed to hide her feelings. “It’s from Garen, and he can’t get away till Thanksgiving. That’s six weeks! He sends two paper clippings. Look, Hinray!” She cried excitedly and thrust the paper before him. “It’s all about the Silverstake tree, and me finding it. Read it.”
The evidence of the Reservation boundary recently located was unmistakable, so the article said; the disputed boundary of the Indian Reservation was now settled, for never had there been any doubt of the validity of the original grant. With the discovery of the old blaze had also come to light the exact location of an ancient silver working, long since forgotten, but referred to in old records and remembered by the Indians. There was still evidence of a long-abandoned shaft on the Indian Reservation, and the vein extended along the mountain to the edge of the Forest Reserve where there was a fault or slipping of the rock. There had been only one claim filed on the faulted vein in the last forty years, and that had been made ten years ago by Damon O’Neill, forest ranger.
Dawn shouted with delight. “Read, read,” Hinray counseled, and she continued. “The immediate workings in the shaft of the Pueblo mine, it was said by the caciques of the Tesuque and Picuris pueblos, had been exhausted, and there was a curse on the mine. One of their chiefs had been killed there by an arrow from the Spirit of the Mountain. Others among the young men thought that it was because the shaft was so inaccessible that work in it had been abandoned. It was less trouble for the Pueblo to get silver for jewelry by working for the white man.”
The article went on to say that the Pueblos, a simple agrarian people, were more interested in their water rights and their crops than anything else, and that now that the source of their rivers had been determined and secured to them, they were satisfied. Through the white friends of the Pueblos the use of their own water had been restored to them, so that never again even in a time of drouth would they be made to suffer for lack of water as they had been in the past ten to twenty years, particularly this summer.
At the end of the article Dawn read the simple statement, “‘The finding of the exact location of the old witness tree was made by Miss Dawn O’Neill, daughter of the Forest Ranger, Damon O’Neill.’
“Dad’s probably getting his sample assayed,” Dawn said. “The claim is his; he can sell it or work it himself if he wants to. Can’t he, Hinray?”
“He can that,” Hinray agreed, “but I misdoubt iffen he’ll want to. If you sell it and it proves to be worth the sellin’ or buyin’, that’ll mean an awful mess in the best stand of timber left up there. It’ll mean workin’s and noises of cranes and pulleys and ingines and dynamitin’.”
“But I thought, Hinray,” Dawn faltered, “that this kind of mining would all be done underground. I thought a shaft and maybe a small engine would be all they’d need.”
“And how would they get the ore out?” Hinray pursued relentlessly. “And where would the miners live? They’d not want to climb up from McGuire’s valley every morning and down every night. No, sirree. Ever go to a silver mine? See them great steam shovels?”
“But, Hinray, don’t be a silly. Those are what they use at the great ghino copper mines, where the ore runs only two per cent. to the ton and is scooped by steam shovel. This ore is rich, rich! And they’d pack it down by burro to the railroad.”
“Mm-mm. Would they now? Do you think if Perry and that gang got interested they’d stop at a burro load of rich ore? Not them. They’d have a railroad spur run right up into the mountains, that’s what. Look at what they do just to get timber out. Build camps, stores, railroads. They have to. Thing to do is work it yourselves. Little by little as you can.”
Dawn was visibly depressed. “But Dad’s no miner, and I’m surely not. I don’t want to work underground, Hinray, at the roots of trees, or in the heart of the mountain. We’re foresters, Hinray, the two of us.”
“Well,” Hinray concluded consolingly, “perhaps Perry and them’ll buy it from yore father. Now they’ve been shet out of the Indian Reservation range they’ve had to sell their cattle. But Gershwin took no loss. Not he! Mark my words. ’Twas a fine set of cattle his herders drove down to the stockyards to ship east. What profit Perry made he lost in the bank. He brought nothin’ with him; he took nothin’ away.”
“And the James?” Dawn queried. “How did they come out? I never heard.”
“I reckon that poor fellow had to let his profit go, if he had any, to cover his loan. But if he had any cash in hand I hope he kept holt of it.” Hinray was a confirmed skeptic about the ways of the financial world.
Dawn sat idly on the porch, her back against the wall, grateful for the October sun. Shep lay with his head in her lap, and Piñon was grazing near the cabin. The trees parted below them at the ford where the trail turned up the Cascada, and a rider appeared. It was an Indian, mounted on a little cream-colored pony. The diminutive creature plodded slowly up the incline to the porch, weary as though it had traveled far that day. The Indian slid from his horse as Dawn greeted him. It was Julio, a boy who had worked for Damon in restoring Pueblo cave dwellings. He was a nephew of the rain-priest.
Julio seated himself on the steps and Dawn asked him if he would have food, but he shook his head gravely and courteously. The boss, her father, where was he? Dawn explained that Damon had gone into town two days after the storm and had not yet returned. They were expecting him the next day. Julio remained quiet and reflective a while and then turned to her and said in a manner both sorrowful and proud, “We have found him, the Priest of the Rain. He has gone to the Dance Hall of the Dead. For two days we have searched.”
Dawn was mystified. In reply to her eager questions Julio told the story. “He was a great rainmaker, Mi-uchin,” he concluded devoutly. “Never have we had such rain in our lifetime in response to prayer. For one week he fasted and prayed in the mountains, and you saw—” He waved his hand about the heavens.
“But none knew where he had gone or that he had gone. When he did not return during the days following the rain, we came to search for him—I leading the young men, for I thought I knew where he would be. But we found him not there.—Mi-uchin gave his life in exchange for the rain, for when at last it came it took him. He lay in the stream, washed, and with a great happiness upon his face—” The boy fell silent. Dawn had no further words; her tender pity had been sympathy enough.
At length the boy drew a deerskin pouch from his pocket. “I have brought this for you,” he said. “It is a gift from our people for you.” He held out a chain of white shell from which hung an emblem of turquoise mosaic of unusual design. “For you,” Julio repeated, “because of your friendship for our people. And that you have saved their land and their water. The forest has held our secret since the boyhood of my grandfather. That secret was shown to you. Take this.” He regarded Dawn with a look of superstitious awe.
She took the luck emblem reverently. But, she told Julio, she had already been more than repaid for the chance service she had been able to do the pueblo. Long ago Mi-uchin had shown her the Source and the ancient shaft of the Indian mine. She had known all the time where the Indians came to get their silver and where they held their springtime ceremonies. “But no one shall ever know from me,” she concluded.
“Mi-uchin knew that you were like a good tree,” said Julio, “the heart-wood of which is sound. Once the heart decays the tree falls, the forest falls. It is so with men. What is graven on the stout heart remains there.
“The red men gave you the forest,” he said after a while, finding his words with difficulty. “It is for you to keep it. I go. Good-by.”
CHAPTER XIII
THANKSGIVING
“Well, if I’m not going to school this winter I might as well be busy.” Dawn was pecking at the typewriter, copying botanical notes. Her school books were spread on the long bare table around her; a fire was burning in the fireplace. Frost had already touched the aspens, turning them into little silver trees with golden leaves. The mountain side was a glory of yellow and copper.
Hal Benty sat on the swing seat and ate piñons contentedly. “Gee, I’m glad we live up here, Dawn. Folks down in town are havin’ an awful time. My aunt’s husband is a butcher and now that meat’s so cheap he says you can’t give it away. Nobody will buy it. They’re awful poor.”
“Did your ma’s summer boarders all pay up?” Dawn questioned sympathetically.
Hal shook his head gloomily. “Some of ’em had to borrow money from her to get back to town. She figgered it would be cheaper to let ’em go than to keep ’em and feed ’em. So they went. Never have heard from them two boys that was the cause of the fire creepin’ up on me.”
“Oh, you will, I think,” Dawn consoled. “They were good kids. They’re just broke. When they get some money they’ll remember your mother. How about the Perrys?”
“Oh, yes, they settled up nearly everything before they left. Perry sent Ma a check for the last week’s balance, the eggs and canned goods, after they got back. Say, that reminds me. Do you ever hear from Jack Perry?” Hal put his question slyly, he thought. In fact he had been leading up to it all afternoon. He had arrived at the stage where he got red in the face and grinned foolishly at the least provocation in Dawn’s presence.
Dawn did not answer. Hal went on, “That reminds me, Dawn, here’s a letter from Kansas City, and it says J. Perry on the back. It came this morning. I brought it up to you.”
“So I see,” Dawn replied calmly. “Well, why didn’t you give it to me then?” She reached out a hand for the letter.
What was in it? She laid it down on the table, looking at the unformed scrawly boy handwriting. Somehow she didn’t want to read a letter from Jack now. She picked it up and held it before the fire, ready to toss it in; then laid it slowly down again, between the leaves of her study book. If she opened it Hal would want to know what was in it.
Damon had gone over to the Amarillo Ridge to look at the burned-over area for his final report. Dawn would not go. She could not bear to look at it now. It was but two weeks until Thanksgiving, when Garen would come. When Dad had come home from town, on the trip after the cloudburst, he had been downcast. His sample of ore, treasured for so many years, had been assayed, and showed up wonderfully well. The silver deposit would run three hundred and fifty ounces to the ton easily. But he could get no one interested in a silver mine. Why, the state was flat, suffering under the worst depression it had ever known! There had never been such hard times. Even mining men handed the sample back to him regretfully. “Nothing doing, O’Neill, I’m afraid.”
As he sat in the dusty red plush seat of the train on his way back home Damon told himself that he was an impractical fool, not fitted for the world. He was tired, discouraged. Just because he had wanted so much to send Dawn to school this winter, in spite of the bank failure, he had thought he would be able to wrest money from his claim. Even yet it was hard to give up. Damon was full of visions and tenacious. Dawn had done her part; she’d found the witness tree. Why couldn’t he do his?
He brooded all the way up the grade. Last winter he’d had an offer to be forester for a big private lumber company in California. He knew how to grow trees; a good farmer he was. They offered him a fine salary. But he had just laughed. He and Dawn had money in the bank then; why, they wouldn’t think of leaving the mountain and the Service. Then last spring there had been another offer from an Oregon concern—wood pulp. To superintend the cutting on a million acres! Perhaps he had been a fool not to accept such offers. They would probably never come again. Great forest tracts were, after all, getting scarce.
Dawn was nearing seventeen; she was so well grown. She didn’t want schooling so much for her self, but Damon wanted it passionately for her. She had never known anything but the mountain, but he, after all, could never forget the ambitions of his youth. Dawn should have a taste of life beyond the mountains; then she would return to them with even greater affection. It never occurred to him that Dawn might ever be wooed away from the life she loved. He knew better than that.
He had stepped out of Benty’s old mountain rig on to the stoop of the aspen-log cabin, feeling dirty and silly in his town clothes. But Dawn’s arms about his neck had restored him. They sat for hours before the fire, and Dawn listened sympathetically, the shining pebble in her palm, turning it this way and that in the firelight.
“Don’t mind, Dad. We’ll work the claim ourselves if no one wants it!” She laughed with delight at the idea. “Can’t you see me in overalls, my face dirty, a miner’s candle on my forehead? No, Dad, when this bank failure has cleared up we’ll be able to sell the mine all right, or get the cash to operate it maybe—on a small scale.”
“But who knows when that will be, child? It might be five years. School can’t wait forever.”
“Yes, it can, Dad; as far as I’m concerned it can wait a long time,” Dawn asserted stoutly. But in the days that followed this talk, she turned with more than her old interest and fervor to her books. Garen Shepherd sent her a box of his own favorite books and one or two new ones for which he’d paid quite a penny. Dawn had finished a classified list of the trees of their mountain. She had gathered rare data on seventy-five birds. What she needed was a good camera. Her own had been ruined last summer when she had attempted to swim the lake with the camera held aloft in her left hand. That was all right, but when she had tried to snap a picture of a kingfisher, treading water meanwhile, she had got a ducking and so had the camera. The camera had never recovered.
“Your notes are excellent,” Garen wrote her, “and the snaps are good, the illustrations extraordinary. Did you really draw them yourself? I showed them all to Mrs. Stearn—you remember, the wife of my chief, who entertained us—and she was immensely interested.”
Dawn was enchanted. Garen’s interest stimulated her, pushed her forward. She had gathered her material from love of it, but had made no attempt at orderly and complete data. Accurate classification she had insisted on. Damon had used much of Dawn’s findings in his reports and had secretly hoped that in some way the Forest Service would sponsor the publication of a book on Rocky Mountain flowers when Dawn had completed her collection. It was almost ready now. She had but to mount the specimens gathered in the summer and drying now between sheets of blotting-paper.
He did not himself realize how much she knew about birds until one evening after the cloudburst, when Garen had challenged the statement of how early the golden eagle nested. With the first week of February, at over eight thousand feet altitude, too, she had seen eggs, Dawn told them. She knew far more about the feathered inhabitants of the forest than the ranger did.
Garen was amazed and filled with admiration. “What a contribution to the Biological Survey all this personal observation would be!” he exclaimed. “Why, I know their bird expert is dying for just such data as you can roll off your tongue, the actual observation of an eyewitness of the habits of the birds in all the various zones in this state.”
Dawn flushed with resentment. “I wouldn’t tell him a word,” she fired, “if he begged me on his knees. Not if he’s one of the Biological Survey gang.”
And nothing he could say would change her. She’d keep her facts to herself and thank Mr. Garen Shepherd to mind his own affairs. “Little spitfire,” he grinned. A wild cat herself. Nevertheless Garen gave the idea that had come to him a good deal of thought.
And Dawn gave Garen a good deal of thought. She wanted him to be proud of her. Ever since the visit to the dam and the glimpse of another world, she had thought seriously of Garen. That nice lady had liked him; he was very smart. He knew figures. She had acquired a vast respect for figures. Everything he did had to be worked out by arithmetic, she suspected. But she knew more about the mountain than he did. Ah, that was something! Well, she’d just show him how much she did know. So from six to ten every long evening since the great rain, she had burned the old student-lamp while Dad dozed before the fire, read a bit, or worked at his desk. Painstakingly Dawn wrote out all that was stored back of her level brows and in her loving heart. Enthusiasm for her task possessed her; she could remember all sorts of things that she’d seen and known ever since she could remember at all on the Cascada.
She could see that Damon had set his heart on doing something with the Silverstake claim. She could see that he brooded. Well, perhaps she could sell it for him. She knew there must be money somewhere else than in this state. A silver mine was a silver mine. One day she wrote a letter. Hal Benty took it down for her to the weekly mail that left from the village at the foot of the valley. Damon was in truth having a bad attack of depression and resentment over the loss of his money, but he would not speak of it to Dawn. He did not need to; she knew him too well. Damon could not part with the slow savings of years without a pang, or some effort to recover or replace the loss.
But when the opportunity came and father and daughter sat in the big room of the aspen-log cabin, opposite Gershwin, on a Monday before Thanksgiving, they were silent. Neither reached out to grasp the dazzling chance. Gershwin was patient. He thought he understood them.
“I don’t think you will do better than that, Mr. O’Neill,” he said with an air of openness and candor. “You understand that this particular proposition will require capital. It will have to be developed on a big scale.” Developed? Dawn shuddered. Gershwin went on unheeding. “Your former claim, and the new claim you’ve made, cover the only direct outcroppings of ore.
“I had the ground gone over last summer by expert mining engineers. The mountain is full of faulted veins, and the risk of locating the mother vein would be too much of a venture. You might sink a million and not strike ore. There’s enough exposed on your claims, however, to justify following the vein along, although it will take capital to cover the initial investment: shafts, tracks, engines, and so on.”
He waited again for three, five minutes. “Well, what do you say? I’ll make you an offer—” he spoke slowly, letting out each word impressively and as though testing its effect. “I’ll make you an offer—of—” He named a sum far beyond their wildest dreams, twenty-five thousand dollars, fifteen thousand down and ten more in the next six months. Damon almost put his head in his hands. The agony of indecision was terrible. Dawn did not speak. She was waiting to hear what her father would say.
Damon got up and paced the floor. School, travel, comfort, security, luxuries. Finally he looked at Dawn. “What do you think, daughter?”
She shook her head. “We won’t sell,” she said simply. Gershwin looked at her in astonishment. His wolfish intelligence was off guard. Sheer surprise overtook him, anger. They wouldn’t sell? Surely that wasn’t final? They’d live to regret it—that he could prophesy. It would take this country twelve years to recover from the financial blow it had suffered this summer. It would take it fifteen or twenty to begin to recover from the overgrazed condition of its ranges.
Here was a chance for them to bring in some outside capital. It would help develop the state—develop it. At that word Dawn’s eyebrows pricked. Her lips set in a stubborn line. No, they would hold on to their claims just the same. Fifteen or twenty years to recover. She looked at Damon; Damon looked at her. Before them a vision of the fire-swept heights above Snow Lake materialized; in another five years the barren slopes beyond would have grown into golden glades of aspen and cool stretches of blue spruce. Others might take up the work, some one else labor in the vineyard. Some one else? On this part of the forest? Never. Never so long as Dawn and Damon lived. She caught her lip between her teeth; stinging tears came.
Suppose Damon should decide to sell and to send her away? Sometimes he got stubborn and held to a notion, and then she knew that after all he would have his way. But Damon was thinking too.
“Why are you so greedy?” Dawn cried to Gershwin. “Didn’t this summer teach you a lesson? Must every one begin again right away? Can’t you wait to start in wrecking the forest? I’d rather live right here the rest of my life than anywhere. I don’t want to hear engines snorting, whistles screeching, under the Three Sister Peaks. I don’t want to see one tree cut on the most perfect spot on the mountain. If the fire spared it that’s the least that we can do.”
“I thought last summer that you were a very sensible young woman.” Gershwin glared, rolling his big cigar betweeen his lips. “But now you are behaving foolishly.
“Well, O’Neill, if you change your mind in the next ten days let me know. The offer won’t be open indefinitely.” Gershwin got into the mountain wagon, which sagged perilously from his great girth, and it rolled down the hill, forded the Cascada, and disappeared through the trees.
Dawn heaved a great sigh. Another peril had passed them by. “Dad,” she said, pushing Damon into a chair and piling on to his lap like a young colt trying to dispose of its legs, “Dad, it’s rather fun just having a silver mine for a hobby, isn’t it?”
Damon could not speak. After all these years, what had he done, sentimental visionary that he was! But the spirit of the mountain that had brooded above the peaks in the shape of the soaring golden eagle still flowed about the two in the cabin on the Cascada.
“Order is Heaven’s first law,” he said at last. “Let us see how we have followed it on earth. Do you know that we had more range this summer, my girl, than for seven years past?”
The first snow of the season had fallen on the mountain two nights before Thanksgiving. The thermometer stood at zero at noon. Yet it did not seem cold, for there was no wind. By night the thermometer had dropped to ten below, and on the deep silence of the dark Dawn could hear once more the wolf song, the cry of the hungry wild under the moon. She bolted the door securely, having kissed Piñon on his cool velvet nose and petted Little Sorrel. “I’d let you sleep indoors, darling, but Daddy wouldn’t like it,” she murmured into each pricked ear.
Back in the cabin she pored over the work spread out under the student-lamp. She must get it finished before Garen came up tomorrow. It was midnight before the last slip was pasted into place, and Dawn’s eyes were a deep violet with unaccustomed fatigue. “Come, my girl,” Damon said at length, “you mustn’t keep at that any longer.” But the task was done. The beautiful book was set on the shelf and Dawn tumbled into bed. Tomorrow would be a great day. Garen Shepherd reached the cabin on the Cascada about three o’clock. He brought with him many good things that did not suggest hard times. Cigars of the finest for Damon, the red wine he had promised, candy for Dawn, and dainties she’d never eaten in her life. Last of all he pulled a letter from his pocket. It was from Mrs. Stearn, their hostess of last summer; an invitation for Dawn to visit the Stearns in Washington that winter. Couldn’t she leave New Mexico after Christmas and stay in Washington as Mrs. Stearn’s guest throughout the winter? They would be in New York a while.
“Will you go?” Garen asked, his face beaming.
“Must I, Daddy? Oh, I scarcely know, Garen. But what a wonderful sound it has.”
“Mrs. Stearn also invites you to come down to the dam next June and be her guest at the official opening. And”—here Garen paused impressively—“I am allowed to inform you that you will be officially asked to inaugurate the ceremony, baptize the dam. You’ll do it, won’t you?” Garen seized her hands boyishly.
“Do it?” Her eyes were solemn and reverent as she raised them to his. “Why, I think it’s perfectly wonderful, Garen! Of course I will.” He was radiant. Garen had long cherished a vision of Dawn dressed in white, standing on the summit of the dam above the blue water, drawing the cord that would let the water through the dam—the symbolical figure of the mountains.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve always told you that you were the guardian of the water. Well, I told the chief too all about you, and he suggested you for the baptism and said it would typify the union of the mountain and desert. Sort of poetic thing, you know? The wedding of the mountain and the plain—”
“Is weddin’s bein’ talked of?” Hinray D’Orsay interrupted. Hinray came in through the kitchen door and dumped his bulging sack on the hearth. Garen shrugged hopelessly.
“I have something else still to tell you, Dawn,” he said later, sitting down to talk seriously, “some grand news. Your flower and bird material can be made into a book; I’ve talked with some publishers who will bring it out. What do you think? Could you work on it this winter, get enough in shape to show them by spring?”
She got the leather binder from the shelf, its sides bulging with the mounted cards and the typewritten sheets, and laid it in his lap. A white envelope from Kansas City fell to the floor unnoticed. Garen opened the book with delight. It was wonderful. She had done this in two months! He was astounded with the book’s skill and beauty. Could he take it with him? Would she trust him?
She would. “Providing—” They both burst into laughter at memory of Dawn’s animosities. Then he must hear all about Gershwin. But the tale was soon told. Oh, yes, Garen said, fellows like that were already trying to buy up the dam reclamation facilities. Today there was no time for anything but themselves, and this vast, silent, frozen world. Twilight fell too early now, but in the morning they would snowshoe across the divide to the Silverstake pine.
The Thanksgiving dinner would be late in the afternoon, and Damon would watch the turkey roasting; Hinray would be on hand as assistant cook too. They would have wild turkey, stuffed with piñons, red wine from Pecos grapes, wild berry jelly, rice and canned vegetables. Mrs. Benty would send them mince pies, and Dawn would make a plum pudding, which she would deck with holly, and around which she would burn the brandy Dad had been saving since last year. The McGuires had promised them a large pumpkin from their fields and a sack of beans, and Hal James had sent them a kid and two young pigs, scarcely larger than shoats, for their winter larder. They were squealing and rooting now in a new corral out back on the hillside.
Hinray had brought in for his contribution some wild honey, found in the mountains, and promised them a haunch of venison too. That would be good, for Dawn was tired of rabbit stew. They had had a lean cupboard all fall. Provisions were hard to get up here, and prices in town had gone up. Thinking of the good food they would have soon, Dawn did not mind living on beans and cornbread, with an occasional chicken. They hadn’t had butter in three weeks, and she’d used the last of the lard in the biscuits and beans last night.
The bird must be stuffed tonight; so Damon tied on an apron and set himself to the task of plucking out pinfeathers while Dawn and Garen cracked piñon nuts for the stuffing and jokes for the sauce.
Fresh snow fell during the night, and when they left the cabin stoop the next morning the little snowshoe cottontail flopped before them, leaving its unguarded spoor clear as day. “It knows that it has nothing to be afraid of,” said Dawn, “with that turkey and a haunch of venison inside.”
It was no easy hike that Dawn took Garen on. He was fairly winded when they reached the top of the hills above McGuire’s valley. Swiftly they shot down the slopes, along the ridge from which Dawn had watched the fire in the early fall. They reached the shore of Snow Lake, frozen now, and climbed to a seat on a boulder.
“Do you know where we are?” Dawn asked. Would he ever forget?
It was the stone on which he had sat when he watched Dawn swim Piñon across the lake so long ago last summer. The snow covered the scarred bank now, but the dead trees stood exquisitely etched against the drifts. Yet the world was glistening and white, lovely as a bride. Here they had sat in the summer, and here Garen had carried Dawn when he pulled her from the water on the night of the fire. They sat for a while, resting, then made for the top of the ridge. The sun would be going down early.
Indeed, it was already dropping in a fiery disk below the western mountain. Hand in hand Garen and Dawn stood on the top of the ridge, bathed in glowing color, that waxed and waned and reappeared again on the slopes of the Coronado Peaks. As the rich afterglow crept up their granite flanks the two snowshoers dug their staffs into the snow and sped along the ridge, down the slopes, and into the deepening twilight of the Canyon of the Cascada.