The Man of the Forest - Zane Grey (white hot kiss txt) 📗

CHAPTER XV

Dale stood with face and arm upraised, and he watched Helen

ride off the ledge to disappear in the forest. That vast

spruce slope seemed to have swallowed her. She was gone!

Slowly Dale lowered his arm with gesture expressive of a

strange finality, an eloquent despair, of which he was

unconscious.

 

He turned to the park, to his camp, and the many duties of a

hunter. The park did not seem the same, nor his home, nor

his work.

 

“I reckon this feelin’s natural,” he soliloquized,

resignedly, “but it’s sure queer for me. That’s what comes

of makin’ friends. Nell an’ Bo, now, they made a difference,

an’ a difference I never knew before.”

 

He calculated that this difference had been simply one of

responsibility, and then the charm and liveliness of the

companionship of girls, and finally friendship. These would

pass now that the causes were removed.

 

Before he had worked an hour around camp he realized a

change had come, but it was not the one anticipated. Always

before he had put his mind on his tasks, whatever they might

be; now he worked while his thoughts were strangely

involved.

 

The little bear cub whined at his heels; the tame deer

seemed to regard him with deep, questioning eyes, the big

cougar padded softly here and there as if searching for

something.

 

“You all miss them — now — I reckon,” said Dale. “Well,

they’re gone an’ you’ll have to get along with me.”

 

Some vague approach to irritation with his pets surprised

him. Presently he grew both irritated and surprised with

himself — a state of mind totally unfamiliar. Several

times, as old habit brought momentary abstraction, he found

himself suddenly looking around for Helen and Bo. And each

time the shock grew stronger. They were gone, but their

presence lingered. After his camp chores were completed he

went over to pull down the lean-to which the girls had

utilized as a tent. The spruce boughs had dried out brown

and sear; the wind had blown the roof awry; the sides were

leaning in. As there was now no further use for this little

habitation, he might better pull it down. Dale did not

acknowledge that his gaze had involuntarily wandered toward

it many times. Therefore he strode over with the intention

of destroying it.

 

For the first time since Roy and he had built the lean-to he

stepped inside. Nothing was more certain than the fact that

he experienced a strange sensation, perfectly

incomprehensible to him. The blankets lay there on the

spruce boughs, disarranged and thrown back by hurried hands,

yet still holding something of round folds where the slender

forms had nestled. A black scarf often worn by Bo lay

covering the pillow of pine-needles; a red ribbon that Helen

had worn on her hair hung from a twig. These articles were

all that had been forgotten. Dale gazed at them attentively,

then at the blankets, and all around the fragrant little

shelter; and he stepped outside with an uncomfortable

knowledge that he could not destroy the place where Helen

and Bo had spent so many hours.

 

Whereupon, in studious mood, Dale took up his rifle and

strode out to hunt. His winter supply of venison had not yet

been laid in. Action suited his mood; he climbed far and

passed by many a watching buck to slay which seemed murder;

at last he jumped one that was wild and bounded away. This

he shot, and set himself a Herculean task in packing the

whole carcass back to camp. Burdened thus, he staggered

under the trees, sweating freely, many times laboring for

breath, aching with toil, until at last he had reached camp.

There he slid the deer carcass off his shoulders, and,

standing over it, he gazed down while his breast labored. It

was one of the finest young bucks he had ever seen. But

neither in stalking it, nor making a wonderful shot, nor in

packing home a weight that would have burdened two men, nor

in gazing down at his beautiful quarry, did Dale experience

any of the old joy of the hunter.

 

“I’m a little off my feed,” he mused, as he wiped sweat from

his heated face. “Maybe a little dotty, as I called Al. But

that’ll pass.”

 

Whatever his state, it did not pass. As of old, after a long

day’s hunt, he reclined beside the campfire and watched the

golden sunset glows change on the ramparts; as of old he

laid a hand on the soft, furry head of the pet cougar; as of

old he watched the gold change to red and then to dark, and

twilight fall like a blanket; as of old he listened to the

dreamy, lulling murmur of the water fall. The old familiar

beauty, wildness, silence, and loneliness were there, but

the old content seemed strangely gone.

 

Soberly he confessed then that he missed the happy company

of the girls. He did not distinguish Helen from Bo in his

slow introspection. When he sought his bed he did not at

once fall to sleep. Always, after a few moments of

wakefulness, while the silence settled down or the wind

moaned through the pines, he had fallen asleep. This night

he found different. Though he was tired, sleep would not

soon come. The wilderness, the mountains, the park, the camp

— all seemed to have lost something. Even the darkness

seemed empty. And when at length Dale fell asleep it was to

be troubled by restless dreams.

 

Up with the keen-edged, steely-bright dawn, he went at the

his tasks with the springy stride of the deer-stalker.

 

At the end of that strenuous day, which was singularly full

of the old excitement and action and danger, and of new

observations, he was bound to confess that no longer did the

chase suffice for him.

 

Many times on the heights that day, with the wind keen in

his face, and the vast green billows of spruce below him, he

had found that he was gazing without seeing, halting without

object, dreaming as he had never dreamed before.

 

Once, when a magnificent elk came out upon a rocky ridge

and, whistling a challenge to invisible rivals, stood there

a target to stir any hunter’s pulse, Dale did not even raise

his rifle. Into his ear just then rang Helen’s voice: “Milt

Dale, you are no Indian. Giving yourself to a hunter’s

wildlife is selfish. It is wrong. You love this lonely life,

but it is not work. Work that does not help others is not a

real man’s work.”

 

From that moment conscience tormented him. It was not what

he loved, but what he ought to do, that counted in the sum

of good achieved in the world. Old Al Auchincloss had been

right. Dale was wasting strength and intelligence that

should go to do his share in the development of the West.

Now that he had reached maturity, if through his knowledge

of nature’s law he had come to see the meaning of the strife

of men for existence, for place, for possession, and to hold

them in contempt, that was no reason why he should keep

himself aloof from them, from some work that was needed in

an incomprehensible world.

 

Dale did not hate work, but he loved freedom. To be alone,

to live with nature, to feel the elements, to labor and

dream and idle and climb and sleep unhampered by duty, by

worry, by restriction, by the petty interests of men — this

had always been his ideal of living. Cowboys, riders,

sheep-herders, farmers — these toiled on from one place and

one job to another for the little money doled out to them.

Nothing beautiful, nothing significant had ever existed in

that for him. He had worked as a boy at every kind of

range-work, and of all that humdrum waste of effort he had

liked sawing wood best. Once he had quit a job of branding

cattle because the smell of burning hide, the bawl of the

terrified calf, had sickened him. If men were honest there

would be no need to scar cattle. He had never in the least

desired to own land and droves of stock, and make deals with

ranchmen, deals advantageous to himself. Why should a man

want to make a deal or trade a horse or do a piece of work

to another man’s disadvantage? Self-preservation was the

first law of life. But as the plants and trees and birds and

beasts interpreted that law, merciless and inevitable as

they were, they had neither greed nor dishonesty. They lived

by the grand rule of what was best for the greatest number.

 

But Dale’s philosophy, cold and clear and inevitable, like

nature itself, began to be pierced by the human appeal in

Helen Rayner’s words. What did she mean? Not that he should

lose his love of the wilderness, but that he realize

himself! Many chance words of that girl had depth. He was

young, strong, intelligent, free from taint of disease or

the fever of drink. He could do something for others. Who?

If that mattered, there, for instance, was poor old Mrs.

Cass, aged and lame now; there was Al Auchincloss, dying in

his boots, afraid of enemies, and wistful for his blood and

his property to receive the fruit of his labors; there were

the two girls, Helen and Bo, new and strange to the West,

about to be confronted by a big problem of ranch life and

rival interests. Dale thought of still more people in the

little village of Pine — of others who had failed, whose

lives were hard, who could have been made happier by

kindness and assistance.

 

What, then, was the duty of Milt Dale to himself? Because

men preyed on one another and on the weak, should he turn

his back upon a so-called civilization or should he grow

like them? Clear as a bell came the answer that his duty was

to do neither. And then he saw how the little village of

Pine, as well as the whole world, needed men like him. He

had gone to nature, to the forest, to the wilderness for his

development; and all the judgments and efforts of his future

would be a result of that education.

 

Thus Dale, lying in the darkness and silence