Steadily She Probed His Face, and Slowly She Nodded

Cat O’ Mountain

BY
ARTHUR O. FRIEL
Author of
“King—of Kearsarge”

Illustrated by
DONALD S. HUMPHREYS

THE PENN PUBLISHING
COMPANY PHILADELPHIA
1923

COPYRIGHT
1923 BY
THE PENN
PUBLISHING
COMPANY

Cat o’ Mountain

Made in the U. S. A.

To
JAMES and CAROLINE MACK
whose unfailing kindliness
to the mysterious prowler of
The Traps
will long be remembered by
“The Detective”

FOREWORD

At the northern end of the Shawangunk range lies a region where the Maker of Mountains went mad.

Into his new-laid rock the giant crashed his huge hammer, smashing asunder his handiwork, gouging out chasms, splitting it into fissure and cavern and abyss, slashing its eastern edge into a frowning precipice. When he had gone, up into some of his hammer-scars welled subterranean waters, forming crag-bound lakes hundreds of feet higher than the rugged valley floor. Other chasms became gulfs of verdure, crammed with a veritable jungle of hardwoods and evergreens. And there, in the labyrinth of tree and bowlder, fierce brutes and venomous snakes bred and fought and slew. It was the home of the wolf, the panther, and the bear; of the rattlesnake and the copperhead.

Then came men: savages who killed and ate the wild beasts and clothed themselves in their furry hides. Through the gorges and down the slopes they laid their trails, along which they roved for centuries in hunt and tribal war. At length they paused, staring eastward at new fires burning below them—the fires of white men.

The inevitable followed. First by firewater, then by firearms, the Dutch settlers crowded the tawny “duyvils” out of the forested lowlands between the river of Hendrick Hudson and the mountain wall. But behind that wall, in the natural stronghold created by the mad Mountain-Maker, the red men long held their own. More, at times they swooped out from the one small gap in the cliffs on bloody raids. And when the vengeful whites retaliated with invasions of their fastness, they ambushed those palefaces along their trails.

Then the settlers ended it. Trapped again and again within that gulf, they in turn became the trappers. Stealthily moving in force, they garrisoned the heights of Mohonk and Minnewaska; they outwitted, outmanœuvred, outambushed the Indians; they herded them back against their own precipices, cornered them among their own bowlders, slew them without mercy. Returning to their lowland farms, they left behind them a silent, blood-spattered, death-strewn hole in the hills which henceforth—because of its traps and countertraps—was to be known as The Traps.

Long afterward, men came in again; white men, and red men too, no longer foes. They cleared little farms, brought in their women, intermarried and interbred, led such primitive existences as might have been expected. Dwelling in their own little world, they followed their own inclinations in such matters as mating and hunting and drinking—and thereby achieved a reputation somewhat dubious. The tongue-wagging folk outside declared the Trapsmen were “wife-swappers” and “moonshiners” and other things. And perhaps they were.

Rumor has asserted, too, that these men first settled that craggy hole not because they would but because they must; that the country outside was “too hot” for them; that they even had to obtain their wives by becoming squaw men or by the primeval custom of capture; and that for many years their land was distinctly unsafe for any man not of their clan. This also may be true. Be that as it may, they lived hard lives, and many of them died hard deaths. Yet they lived as free men, untrammeled by slavish subservience to the myriad laws manufactured in the cities beyond them.

But they, too, passed. As the bear and the wolf and the Indian faded out of that country after the coming of the white man, so the Trapsmen have almost vanished before the encroachments of commercialism. Beside the upland lakes now rise those structures from which the pioneer turns with loathing—summer hotels. Moreover, virtually all of the intervening Traps has been bought in by the hotel barons. The little homes of the vanished men are slowly rotting apart; their tiny fields and their hard-grown orchards are going the way of the ancient Indian trails—disappearing into wilderness where snakes thrive unmolested. Few indeed are the people who now live in the mountain bowl; fewer still those who are native-born. The others are from outside.

Yet there are, in the region round about, two or three old men—taciturn, abrupt, whole-souled old fellows—who were born in the Traps and who will die not far from the Traps. From them, and from the whispering ghosts which, by day and by dark, have drifted along beside me on the silent trails and talked to me in weird crevasse and uncanny old house, I have learned the tale which is here set down. It is a tale of Yesterday, in a land of Yesterday, chronicled by one who was there—yesterday.

A. O. F.

New York, 1923.

CONTENTS

Cat o’ Mountain

CHAPTER I
THE PANTHER

High on the crags a panther screamed.

Savage, sinister, yet appallingly human—like the malevolent squall of an infuriated hag—the cry tore through the night shadows whelming the mountain-girt gulf of the Traps. Among the gigantic bowlders and the uncanny crevasses of Dickie Barre it hurtled in a shattered wave of sound. Out across the dense tangle of underbrush and the lazy-creeping water of Coxing Hill it fled, freezing in their tracks the smaller brethren of the wild—fox and raccoon and rabbit and mink—which moved there in their furtive foraging. From the forested steeps of Mohonk and Millbrook it reverberated, and among those trees it was swallowed up.

Again the malignant wail broke out; and now the beast which voiced it was not in the same spot as before. Somewhere on the very brink of the precipice of Dickie Barre the huge cat had been, and somewhere on that edge he still was. But he was moving, seeking a crack or crevice through which he might steal swiftly downward without hurling himself to death on the rubble of cliff-fragments below; and his failure to find it at once exasperated his ugly nature to its ugliest. His eyes told him something down there was moving. His nose said the thing was human, was hurt, was harmless. His fierce brain knew it would be an easy kill, and his ravening jaws slavered at the realization that after one rending attack he could gorge himself—on the tender flesh of a woman.

Baffled, maddened, he screeched once more. Then he became silent. He had found something promising: not a direct line of descent, but a narrow shelf dipping diagonally down the face of the cliff. Along this he proceeded with swift, sure stealth.

Then, down in the density behind him, a light shot out from between two towering bowlders. A clean, brilliant beam it was—the ray of a carbide camp-lamp. Its white sheen played up, down, right, left; and as it moved, the rock-masses and the trees and brush round about stood forth, then vanished again into the gloom. But it did not advance. Between those two colossal blocks it stayed, peering like a dazzling eye.

All at once it jumped. From the chaos of chunks between silent cat and silent light, a voice had cried out.

“Help! Oh—help!”

It was a high, clear, penetrating call, with an under-note of terror and pain.

Two voices answered: one, a ferine snarl from the merciless cat-creature beyond; the other, a quick response in the tones of a man.

“Right here! Where are you?”

“Here into the—the rocks! Oh, hurry up, before that critter gits to me!”

“Coming!”

The glaring white eye moved forward in haste. Behind it, boots scraped and bumped on rock. It rose in a steep slant, slid suddenly down, accompanied by more scraping of boot-heels; disappeared between two blocks leaning together; emerged beyond, ascended again, wavering erratically with the strain of climbing a treacherous slope; halted at the peak of another bowlder and rapidly searched the surroundings.

“Can’t see you!” the man panted. “Speak up!”

“Hold stiddy a minute!” implored the other voice. “I’m a-comin’—up this rock—if I don’t slip. Oh!” The last was a choked moan.

“What’s the matter? Hurt?”

“Ye-yes. But wait—I’m a-comin’——”

The light quivered, as if the man behind it were impatient to leap forward. But it remained poised on its own bowlder, shooting at the upper edge of another mass of conglomerate beyond which the girlish voice had spoken. A few seconds later, atop that rough stone, something glinted red-gold in the white glare. Under it rose wide gray eyes, a pale face—the eyes suddenly shut and the face shrank from the blinding beam. Again the gas ray lit up the glowing glory of the red hair.

“All right. Stick there,” commanded the man. A quick twist of the light—then another grind of sliding heels, terminating in a solid bump like the impact of a gun-butt against stone. The white eye now was swinging about at the base of the bowlder, hunting a way around the almost vertical block. A few seconds, and it began staggering over the smaller debris toward one corner.

“Oh—look out—here’s the critter now!”

With the warning came a swift scramble overhead. The light wheeled and revealed a girlish figure in a torn drab dress swinging itself out—slipping rapidly down—hanging by its hands from the upper edge.

“Hold hard!” snapped the man. “Don’t be silly—he’s a coward, like all cats. He’ll run if you say ‘boo.’ Hang tight a minute. Don’t drop.”

But the girl, dangling with face turned upward and heels a yard or more above the jagged jumble below, sniffed scornfully at his assertion of knowledge. Before he could make two steps toward her she let go. Down she darted in a grayish streak, and on the stones beneath she crumpled.

One sharp moan of pain broke from her. Then, looking upward, she breathed: “Look!”

The light switched up. From the edge above now protruded another head: a flat-nosed, fang-toothed, tawny visage whose eyes flamed green with ferocity and whose snarling jaws writhed in malignant menace.

A startled grunt sounded behind the light. The white eye lifted, hung poised as if held by a hand grown rigid. Beside it, twin tubes of steel centered on that horrid head.

Boomboom! A double flash leaped thundering from the tubes. In a swirl of blue smoke the face of the great cat vanished.

The light pitched backward, fell clattering on the rocks. A muffled impact and a sullen thwack of metal told that the man and his gun too had been knocked down by the recoil. Over behind the bowlder something else thudded softly and was still.

But, though dropped, the lantern burned faithfully on. Its ray lit up a pair of high-laced boots, tan corduroys, and a hammerless shotgun sprawling on a slanting bowlder. A second later a broad hand swooped at it and righted it. The gun was lifted, broken at the breech, swiftly reloaded and snapped shut. Then the legs drew up and the light rose, darting at the girl.

She was huddled where she had dropped, but her pale face was alive and her gray eyes wide open. As the glare fell on her she threw up an arm to shield her dark-dilated pupils. Upon the tanned skin of that firm young forearm showed a long red gash.

“Good Lord! You’re badly hurt!” exclaimed the man.

The lips under the shadowing arm curved in a strained smile.

“’Tain’t much,” she deprecated. “I got a gouge when I tumbled. Guess you kilt Mister Catamount, or scairt him off anyway. They take a mighty lot of killin’ sometimes. Now can you git me down to where I can walk? My ankle’s hurt.”

A quiet laugh of admiration came from the invisible man.

“You’re a plucky little lady,” he informed her. “Most girls in your place would be fainting or going all to pieces. As for walking, I don’t know. This is a tough hole to navigate in after dark. But we’ll see.”

The light moved toward her. As it advanced the man added in a chiding tone: “You shouldn’t have dropped like that. No wonder your ankle’s hurt.”

“Is that so! What was I goin’ to do, Mister Smarty—let that critter claw me? And I hurt my leg an hour ago, not jest now. And I wish you’d look and see if the catamount’s alive yet. He’s been pesterin’ round here ’most a month, and you better kill him good and dead.”

“Oh, he’s dead enough——”

“You go and look!”

Again the quiet laugh sounded.

“Just as you say, my lady. I think I heard him fall over back there.”

Once more the light turned. It wavered around the base of the bowlder, bobbed up and down among the jags and juts of the rock-heap, paused, swung slowly, came to rest on a furry huddle hanging limp over a misshapen stone. There dangled two powerful fore-legs, topped by massive shoulders, terminated by big paws. Between them hung a red ruin which had been a head.

“Whew!” whistled the man, studying the size of the legs and the breadth of the back. “What a brute! Never knew they grew so big. Lucky he was close enough to take those charges before they could spread. Otherwise that bird-shot would only have maddened him.”

Turning, he picked his way back to the spot where the girl waited. He found her sitting up on a stone and frowning down at her left foot. For the first time he observed that her feet and the shapely ankles above them were bare. The left one was much swollen.

“He’s as dead as they make ’em,” he sang out cheerily. “We’re a bunged-up lot, aren’t we? Cat lost his head, your arm and foot are hurt, and my right shoulder’s kicked into the middle of my back from letting both barrels go at once. And even my gun is all mauled from falling on the rocks.”

“Ain’t that too bad?” The tone was amusedly sarcastic. “But I guess I’m the wust off—I’ve got more bad luck comin’.”

“How so?”

“I’ll catch hell when I git home,” was the naive explanation.

For a minute the man was speechless. Then he chuckled.

“So? Then why go home?”

The mountain girl’s answer was as straightforward as before.

“I don’t know any other place to go.”

Her sober face told that she spoke the gaunt truth, and that she dreaded the thought of returning to the house whence she had come. An awkward pause followed.

“Well, you may not get there to-night,” the man declared. “I doubt if I can find my way out of this mess of rocks before daylight, and you certainly can’t go scrambling around on that bad foot. You’ll have to come to my camp now and get bandaged up.”

The auburn brows drew together in another frown, and the eyes under them peered toward him in open suspicion.

“I ain’t so sure about that,” she asserted. “I can git home some way alone, if I have to, and I don’t figger to stay up here all night. Who are you?”

“Oh, just a rambling camper. But don’t be silly. I’m not a skunk. I’ll gladly take you home if it’s possible and sensible, but until you’re in condition to travel it’s neither. Now you need a bandage on that arm, some hot water on the ankle, and—are you hungry?”

“I’m ’most starved,” she admitted. “I got mad and run away this mornin’, and I ain’t et since breakfast.”

“Oho! I’m afraid you’re a temperamental little redbird. Well, come on down to camp and I’ll feed you bacon and beans—and hot coffee, lots of it. How’s that?”

“Sounds awful good. I guess you’re all right. You go ’long and show the way.”

She turned about on her stone. The movement disclosed a long rent in the faded dress, running from arm to waist, through which glowed pink flesh. Her skirt, too, was badly ripped. The man behind the light switched it from her to the formidable mass of stones ahead.

“If you can stub along on one foot,” he suggested, “we can make better progress by hugging each other. I can stand it if you can.”

A quick laugh answered him. The light veered back, revealing dancing eyes, perfect teeth, and flushed cheeks under the glowing hair.

“I can stand ’most anything—if I have to,” she flashed. “And it looks like I’d have to.”

“By George! Young lady, you’re a little beauty when you laugh! I think I’m going to enjoy this trip. Wait a minute and I’ll let you put your arm around my neck.”

Followed the grind of boot-soles and the approach of the lamp.

“You’re awful good.” She laughed again. “You’d ought to sell soft soap for a livin’, you’ve got so much of it.”

“Humph! That’ll do. Now let’s walk.”

Slowly the white eye wobbled along among the tumbled blocks. The only sounds behind it were those of labored breathing and curt directions regarding the placing of feet. Not once did the girl whimper from the pain of the injured ankle.

Presently the pair of tall cliff-chunks took shape ahead, their bases lost among smaller stones, their crests invisible in the upper gloom, their irregular sides framing a narrow black cañon which seemed to end in emptiness. But out from that gloomy slit drifted a tang of smouldering wood-smoke; and beyond it, the girl knew, the hidden camp of her unknown rescuer waited.

At the entrance to the covert they paused. So narrow was the passage that they could no longer advance side by side. But the carbide flame showed that the footing ahead was smooth and almost level, offering no obstacle to her progress alone; also, that the distance to the cavern beyond was hardly more than a couple of rods.

“Now if you’ll hop along by yourself for a few yards more you’ll be there,” spoke the tall, vague form behind the metal lamp. “Sorry my doorway’s so tight, but it was made before I came here.”

The injured girl, drooping against a stone beside her, let the jest pass without a smile.

“You go ahead,” she prompted wearily. “You’ve got boots.”

“What of it?” he puzzled.

“Snakes.”

“Ouch! Snakes around here?”

“Why, sure. This country’s full of ’em—rattlers and copperheads. Guess you ain’t been into here long, mister.”

“Right. I haven’t. But—Lordy! You shouldn’t go around barefoot in snake country.”

“Mebbe. But folks can’t wear out their shoes into summer if they’re goin’ to have ’em for winter, can they?”

He made no reply. Into the gap he turned, and through it he passed to the larger space beyond, his wide shoulders rubbing the rock as he passed. Behind him she limped along, leaning against one wall.

At the end of the little cañon he stepped downward, halted, and set gun and lamp on a rock shelf. Some twenty feet away, under an overhang of the cliff, an open blanket-roll and various small camp-tools showed beside an Indian fire—short sticks laid like wagon-wheel spokes, with the flame at the hub.

“Now you can hug me for the last time—maybe,” he solemnly stated. “I’m going to tote you over there. It’s rough going.”

With which she was lifted and carried across a rubble of fragments to the blankets.

As he straightened up in the brilliant light thrown across by the lamp, she saw him plainly for the first time: a lithe, firm-jawed man whose face glowed red with new sunburn between a gray flannel shirt and a head of silky blond hair; a clean-mouthed, clean-limbed chap whose twinkling blue eyes might have brought an approving smile to the lips of many a girl far more critical of men than this maiden of the mountains. But no hint of liking for her new-found friend dawned in her face.

Into her eyes darted a light of mingled recognition, suspicion, repulsion. She shrank from him as if he had suddenly become one of those snakes against which she had just warned him.

“Oh, Lord!” she breathed. “It’s you! The detective!”

CHAPTER II
NIGGER NAT’S GIRL

Blank astonishment crept across the countenance of the blond man. Motionless as the rocks around him he stood, staring down at the hostile face upturned to his.

“Detective? Me?” he muttered.

“Yes, you!” she flared. “Think you’re smart, don’t you? Mebbe you think us folks are a lot of numbskulls, but we ain’t. And seein’ you jest helped me out of a fix, I’ll tell you somethin’, Mister Spy—you better git out of the Traps right quick, while you’re able to travel!”

The man threw back his head and laughed—a gurgling laugh of pure enjoyment.

“Well, if this isn’t rich!” he chuckled. “Old Cap Hampton, the famous dee-teck-tiff! Say, little redbird, I’m glad you dropped in this evening. I was thinking I’d go to-morrow, but now I reckon I’ll stay awhile. Looks as if this place might prove interesting.”

The gray eyes snapped.

“Oh, it’ll be interestin’!” was the ominous prediction. “If you don’t git right outside the Big Wall and stay out—some of the boys will be sleepin’ into new blankets and totin’ a newfangled shotgun, I shouldn’t wonder.”

His gaze dropped to the blankets under her, which were obviously new; then darted to his hammerless gun across the way. When his eyes returned to hers the merriment was gone from them. They glinted like cold blue steel.

“So that’s the game, eh?” His voice was hard-edged. “To kill a stranger for his gun and money. Well, your ‘boys’ are slow. They were snooping around my camp down by the creek last night, but they didn’t have the nerve to do anything but watch. Thanks for your tip. Hereafter I’ll load my gun with buckshot. You can tell your friends that.”

A flush of anger dyed the girl’s cheeks.

“Oh, that ain’t it!” she denied. “Strangers are safe enough, long’s they mind their own business. But we’ve got no use for sneakin’ spies that den up into the rocks like copperheads. And if you think anybody’s scairt of your buckshot, Mister Spy, jest remember this is old Injun country, and folks was gittin’ kilt into the Traps before your grandpop was borned. If all the dead men that’s been shot and tommyhawked round here should git up all together they’d—they’d shake the hills with their trompin’! You and your buckshot—ha, ha, ha!”

Her scornful laugh stung like a whip-lash. Yet, though his sunburned face grew still redder under its sting, he thought: “Lordy, what a stunning little beauty she is with that color! There’s more than one kind of wildcat in these hills, too. I like this place better every minute.”

Aloud he said: “All right, fair damosel. I don’t know——”

Abruptly she started up—winced and paled as her sprained ankle stabbed with pain—but caught the wall and faced him in righteous wrath.

“Don’t you cuss me!” she blazed.

“Huh? I didn’t!”

“You did! You called me a dam-somethin’——”

“Oho! Fair damosel? Why, that’s an old-fashioned compliment—means ‘beautiful girl,’ or something like that. Would you rather be called a cross-eyed old maid?”

“No!” The word snapped. But she smiled in spite of herself.

“You must be a furriner to talk like that,” she added. “Why don’t you say what you mean? Dam-o-sell—that ain’t a name to call folks by. It’s ’most the same as what mom calls me.”

“What’s that?”

“Dambrat.”

He regarded her a moment in silence.

“Your mother calls you a brat?” he slowly asked then.

“Brat—and lots of other things,” she nodded. “And now I’ve got to git home. I’ll git a good hidin’, I shouldn’t wonder, but I won’t stay here——”

“You will!” came his incisive contradiction. “You’ll stay here until that foot is doctored and you’ve had some food. Sit down!”

At the crisp crackle of his command she eyed him in surprised defiance. Her chin lifted, and she took a combative step on the hurt foot. Pallor and pain swept again across her face, and she staggered. He promptly picked her up, squirming and resisting; set her down on the blankets, and inexorably held her there. Then, his eyes boring into hers, he spoke in cool determination.

“Behave yourself. Listen to me.

“You’re not going away until I say so. I’ll not say so until you’re better able to travel. You won’t be able to travel until that ankle is reduced. It won’t be reduced until I’ve worked on it. That’s all there is to that.

“Now about me. I’m no detective. I am Douglas Hampton, a rover, a drifter, with no home and no folks. I’ve been in quite a few places, done quite a few things; but I’ve never been a detective and I don’t intend to be one. My last job was as reporter on a New York newspaper, and I lasted almost a year. Got fired last week because the city editor rode me too hard and I sat him down in his own waste-basket. Now I’m in here because I feel like roughing it awhile and somebody told me it was rough up here in the Shawangunks.

“I intended to stay here only a day or two and then ramble along, stopping again wherever I found something that hit my fancy. But now that people around here think they’re going to kick me out—I’ll stay longer. I’m one of those cantankerous chaps who can be coaxed a mile but can’t be kicked an inch. I always kick back.

“As I started to say awhile ago, I don’t know the history of this hole in the hills, but I’m right willing to learn all about it—past and present. And if people around here want to consider me a detective, let ’em. I don’t care what they think. The only reason why I’m telling you who I am is—well, because I feel like it.”

With that he took his hands from her shoulders and straightened up. She made no move to rise again. Steadily she probed his face, and slowly she nodded.

“You talk straight,” she admitted. “But if you ain’t here to spy, what are you doin’ up here, hid into the ledge? Folks said you went out through the Gap this mornin’ with your pack and all. So to-night I thought you must be some new feller.”

“I did go. I moved because I want to sleep at night instead of watching men sneak around in the bushes. Then I decided to come back, and I came. Didn’t try to hide myself, either—tramped right along the road. You people ought to keep sharper watch on desperate dee-teck-tiffs who wander in and out of here; you never know when they’ll come back.”

His cheerful grin brought an answering smile this time. But it did not last long. At his next question it vanished.

“By the way, what am I supposed to detect in here? Detectives have to detect something, you know.”

“You be careful, mister, or you’ll detect a rock fallin’ off onto your head from up top, or a load of buckshot scatterin’ out of the brush. Some of the boys are awful careless. If you figger to stay round here you better stay away from these ledges—and keep out of caves—and don’t ask too many questions.”

“M-hm. I take it that this is a good place to keep still.”

Her tongue made no answer; but her eyes narrowed at the emphasis on the word “still.” He laughed again and bent to freshen the fire.

When he had moved the sticks inward upon their common focus and the flame was growing brighter and hotter, he frowned at a canvas water-bag pendent from a splinter of rock; thoughtfully eyed the girl’s inflamed ankle and gashed arm; glanced at a small coffee-pot at the edge of the blaze, and ran a hand through his light hair. Then his face brightened. Rising, he rummaged in a small bag of waterproof fabric, from which he produced two flat tins of tobacco.

“Have to economize on water,” he said. “All I own is in that cloth bucket, and the spring’s a deuce of a distance down. Between bathing your arm and making coffee and fixing your ankle—well, I just can’t cook that ankle as it should be done. But I can draw out most of the soreness with a tobacco poultice. That’s what we’ll have to do.”

She eyed the two tins in his hand.

“Is that all the tobacco you’ve got?”

“Why, yes. But it’s enough to do the trick.”

“Then what’ll you smoke? There ain’t any stores here.”

“Then I don’t smoke for awhile,” was the matter-of-fact reply.

Dropping the cans beside her, he strode over to the lantern and brought it and the gun to the overhanging wall. Swiftly then he put coffee to boil, dipped a cupful of water from the canvas bag, flipped a clean white handkerchief from the ditty-bag, and returned to her. Without a word she let him inspect the lacerated arm.

“You got a nasty rip,” he stated, scowling. “Right along the bone. How did you do it? Fall?”

“Yes.” Her tone was more gentle now than it had yet been, and her eyes dwelt on the sober face bending over the injury. “I’ve—I’ve got a little secret up here—a hole into the rocks that’s been my playhouse since I was little, and when mom’s awful mean or pop’s ugly drunk or—or I can’t stand it down there, I come up here and stay all by my own self. This time I got to dreamin’, I guess, and I went to sleep there. And when I woke up it was night. Mebbe I’d ought to have stayed there till mornin’, but I was awful hungry, and I tried to git down the rocks and took a fall.”

He nodded sympathetically, bathing the wound with gentle touch.

“And then that mis’rable catamount had to smell me. They’re awful bad when they’re hungry and smell blood. I thought I was a goner till your light showed. Who ever told you a catamount would run if you said boo?”

“Somebody who didn’t know as much as he thought he did, I guess.”

“I guess so too. They’ll run from a dog ’most every time—even a little yippin’ yappin’ tarrier—and mostly they’ll run from a man, but not always. If they’ve kilt somethin’ or are jest goin’ to kill somethin’, look out. And they’re ready to tear up a young ’un, or a hurt woman, any time. If you shoot ’em you’ve got to kill ’em stone dead or they’ll rip you. Jonah Hay, he kilt one last winter—shot it four times and blew its jaw off and everything—and it lived long enough to git to him and claw his legs terrible. Its hide was longer than Jonah is himself, and Jonah stands six foot.”

He nodded again, absorbed in his work but marveling at her new friendliness. Now that she was talking, she chattered as easily as if to an old friend.

“And there was Sam Codd—he went to chop wood and run onto a little bobcat, nowheres near as big’s a catamount. The critter had kilt a rabbit, and it come at Sam, ready to jump right onto him. Sam, he backed more’n a quarter of a mile through the snow, holdin’ his axe ready to bust the critter, till he got to his cabin. Then he jumped in and got his gun. But by the time he come out the cat was gone back to the rabbit, and when he got there the rabbit was et and nothin’ left but blood and tracks.”

He desisted from his cleaning of the arm, which had remained as stoically steady as if it were not in the least tender. Tearing the edges of the big handkerchief, he bound it around the injury and carefully knotted the edge-strips. Then he turned to the coffee, which now was steaming. In a moment he put a cupful of the hot liquid in her hands and dumped the grounds from the pot.

“Only one good cupful to a pot, but it’s strong enough to knock you over,” he explained. “And I need the pot now for your ankle. After the tobacco gets to drawing I’ll cook some grub and make more coffee——”

He paused suddenly, staring at one of the tobacco-tins he had picked up. Its blue revenue-paper seal was broken.

“Now when did I open that can?” he puzzled, turning up the lid. “I was sure these were fresh. Confound it, it’s only half full!”

She made no answer. She blew on the coffee and took a tentative sip.

“Ooh! It’s scaldin’ hot!”

“Uh-huh. Well, this other can’s full, anyhow. Guess I can make out.”

While the fresh water came to a boil he squinted repeatedly at the opened can, half rifled of its fragrant brown slices. He did not see the impish glances she threw at him. Nor, when he brought the hot water, the tobacco, and more handkerchiefs, did he spy the laughing light in the demurely downcast eyes.

With utmost care, though with necessary firmness, he bound the hot-water-soaked slices around the swollen ankle. Then he poured more hot water on the bandages until, despite herself, she flinched and drew up the foot.

“That’ll do, I reckon,” he said. “Lucky I have plenty of handkerchiefs. That’s one thing I’m a crank about—plenty of clean handkerchiefs and socks. Now I’ll warm up some beans a la can.”

“Don’t you want a smoke?” she teased.

“Well, since the tobacco’s all gone, I do,” he frankly admitted. “However——”

“Then fill your pipe!” And from under the blanket-edge she produced the missing slices.

“Well, you—you——” he stuttered.

“Now don’t you call me a dam-sell again, mister! You stuff your pipe and have a good smoke.”

He scowled, grinned, laughed, produced a stubby briar, and obeyed orders.

“I’ve a large mind to spank you,” he threatened, between puffs. “But I never like to pick on a cripple. So instead I’ll condemn you to stay here all night.”

“That’s all right,” she countered serenely. “I’ve made up my mind to stay anyway.”

He missed two puffs while he stared at her.

“Glad to see you’re showing sense,” he blurted. “But what’s the reason for the sudden change of heart?”

“You’re smokin’ the reason. ’Most any man round here would have kilt that catamount. That’d be fun. But none of ’em would use up his last smokin’ on a woman—not if both her legs were busted. A feller that would do that is worth trustin’.”

He threw up his hands.

“Talk about feminine logic! That beats ’em all,” he laughed. “Well, fair dam—I beg pardon—young woman, just who are you, if I may ask?”

The answer staggered him.

“Me? Oh, I’m only Nigger Nat’s girl.”

Over his pipe he blinked at her.

“My name’s Marry,” she went on. “Marry Oaks. My whole name is Marryin’, but it’s Marry for short.”

“Marion,” he repeated absently. “But who’s Nigger Nat? Not a colored man!”

The frank eyes looked steadily back at him.

“Why, yes he is. He’s yeller—half nigger. He’s my pop. And mom’s part Injun.”

CHAPTER III
PIPE-SMOKE—AND POWDER-SMOKE

Dawn swept across the Shawangunks.

From the far-off crests of the Berkshires light leaped athwart the silvery Hudson and smote the frowning cliffs of the Great Wall of the Wallkill Valley: a grim gray precipice stretching mile after mile to the northeast, towering eight hundred feet upward from the lower lands; unscalable, impenetrable save at one small high gap—the Jaws of the Traps, whence in other days the redskin had slipped forth in bloody foray on the settlers below, and where in turn the white man had lurked in retaliatory ambush. Through that gap now wormed the sandy road of the descendants of those pioneers, and along that road at this early hour passed nothing more sinister than dawn-sheen and morning breeze.

At the top of the crag-wall the light sped across the forested gulf of the Traps itself, with its tiny scattered farmhouses and its rocky clearings and mysterious by-paths, to strike against more cliffs—the glacier-gouged wall of Minnewaska, holding in its stony setting a tiny jewel of an upland lake; and the fissured butte of Dickie Barre, father of gigantic bowlders and guardian of unknown caverns. And as the dayshine flung itself against those forbidding ledges and then fled on westward, the following breeze also threw against them a wave of sound—the dry quacking chorus of myriads of katydids.

All through the moonless September night those queer insects had ground out their tuneless song, so monotonous and so steady that the ears of other living things had long since become dulled to it. But now, swept by the dawn-wind in among the echoing crevices and cañons, it seemed suddenly redoubled in volume. Upon the senses of native bird and beast it made slight impact, for they were well used to it; but on the nerves of a long, blanketed figure lying in a narrow passage between towering stone walls it struck like the clatter of an alarm-clock. His towsled blond head moved, his long-lashed lids lifted, and his blue eyes darted about in inspection of his surroundings.

Beside his head lay a shotgun, its muzzle pointing outward, its safety-catch off, ready for instant use. Beyond the slit of an entrance showed nothing but more rocks and a labyrinthine tangle of trees and brush. Behind, the sheer wall of Dickie Barre alone was visible across a roomy space open to the sky. The only sounds were the everlasting quack of the insects and the subdued yarrup of some invisible yellowhammer flitting about in search for a breakfast.

He yawned, stretched, and sat up. The blanket dropped from his chest, and he stared blankly at it. Then his gaze shot toward the cliff beyond.

“Well, you ought to be spanked hard, you little bunch of wilfulness!” he muttered. “Sneaked in here after I was asleep and spread this blanket over me, didn’t you? And you needed both of ’em yourself—it’s clammy up here at night. And walking on that bad foot, too!”

But his eyes belied his growling tone as he arose and tiptoed to the end of the passage. As they swept the farther wall and dwelt on the little huddle of gray blanket beside the charred embers of the fire they softened still more. Obviously the girl muffled under that stout sheet of wool was sleeping as peacefully on her mattress of fragrant hemlock tips as if at home in her own bed.

“These mountain girls are as tough as rawhide,” he thought. “Imagine a city girl going through what she did last night without a whine! And sleeping like that under a rock. And——”

His hand strayed to a shirt pocket and fingered some crumbled shreds of tobacco.

“And saving some smokes for me and stubbing over here on a sprained ankle to give me half the bedding. Would any of those flossy dolls in New York—or Chi or San Fran or N’Orleans—do that? Humph!”

Softly he stepped along the little shelf where last night he had set lamp and gun; sank to a comfortable squat, his back against the wall; filled and lit his pipe. Thereafter he squatted a few minutes smoking and musing.

“‘Nigger Nat’s girl,’” he thought. “Daddy a drunken yellow mongrel, mother a hard-tongued half-breed. How in thunder can a pair like that produce such a witching wildcat as Marion Oaks? Her skin’s brown, but the brown is only sun-tan, or my eyes are liars. And that hair and those eyes! How come?”

A flirt of active wings drew his gaze away for a moment. On a limb of a plucky young pine growing from the face of the cliff above, a pair of inquisitive yellowhammers had paused to spy and gossip. Their bright eyes peered knowingly downward, and as they bobbed and bowed their restless heads the black crescents under their creamy throats vied for notice with the brilliant red splashes behind their crowns. Up and down the branch they hopped, murmuring fussily over this most scandalous event—a man and a girl shamelessly occupying an outdoor boudoir, just as if they were as free of convention as the birds themselves. The man smiled up at them and waved a hand in acknowledgment of their sharp scrutiny. Instantly they winnowed away on whispering wings, to perch again farther on and renew their eager watch. Douglas resumed his puffing and puzzling.

“Must be a throwback of heredity,” he decided. “There are such things as red-headed niggers. Saw one in Detroit once. The white strain in her folks cropped out strong when she was born. Must be tough for a girl to be white and yet have the tainted blood in her veins. No self-respecting white man could marry her, of course. But it’s a dirty shame that you have to be cursed by your ancestors, little Miss Marion. You haven’t a chance. You’ll become the ‘woman’ of some ignorant brute down below, and before you’re thirty you’ll be old and gaunt and broken-spirited.”

He flipped the ash from the top of his pipe-bowl and puffed on.

“And yet your mind is that of a white girl—and a thoroughbred, too,” he silently asserted. “The tobacco and the blanket prove that. And you despise your mongrel people. You run away up here to your little secret ‘playhouse,’ and there you dream yourself to sleep, as you did yesterday. And there’s poetry in you, too. Let’s see, what was that you said—‘If all the dead men here should rise they’d shake the hills with their tramping!’”

His gaze grew absent, as through the smoke he visioned an army of musket-bearing pioneers, shaggy-haired and deerskin-clad, and of fierce-faced Indians carrying bow and tomahawk, marching along the ancient trails. They passed, those long-dead fighting men, and in their wake strode whiskered mountaineers of a later day, gripping shotgun and rifle, watching one another in distrust—the victims of bullet and buckshot hurled from the masking thickets of rhododendron, the men who had died at the hands of their neighbors. Crag and crevasse echoed to the tread of their ghostly feet, and the cliffs quivered in unison. Out through the Jaws of the Traps they swung into the eye of the rising sun. The caverns ceased to echo. The man found himself staring at a gray blanket and listening to the rasping clack of the katydids.

With a long sigh he arose and knocked out his pipe against his thigh.

“Oh, well,” he muttered. “The past is past, the present is here, and the future is rolling closer every minute. Poor little kid, with your dreams and your picture-words! I’m sorry for you. But all I can do is to cook some more grub for you and take you home. Then we’ll each have to gang our ain gait.”

He moved toward the dead fire, still stepping softly. But half-way across the rocky rubble he halted short, struck by a sudden memory.

“By thunder!” he exclaimed. “I wonder if——”

Back into his mind had come a fragment of a tale told months ago in New York by a chance acquaintance—a man from up-State.

“Yessir,” he heard the voice saying, “there’s queer things back in the hills—stories that’s never been told much. These fellers I’m thinkin’ about, now: they were the hardest crowd you’d ever want to meet. They were bad whites and bad Indians and bad niggers, all in this one gang and livin’ in back of a long mountain wall with only one way into it. Outlaws? Yessir, and worse’n that. Land pirates, I’d call ’em. Cut your throat and never even wipe off the knife afterward.

“Well, sir, they’d come out of this here hole-in-the-wall I’m tellin’ about, and they’d waylay folks drivin’ along the roads, the rich folks in coaches and so on. And they’d kill the men travelers and strip ’em clean. And they’d carry off the women and hold ’em for ransom. And if the ransom wasn’t paid the women never got out. They had to stay there and be the women of that gang. If they were extry good-lookin’ maybe they never got a chance to be ransomed. More’n one fine lady went into that hole in the hills and never was heard of again. Yessir. That’s right.

“Oh, yes, it was a long while ago. Good many years before our time. After the Revolution, maybe—it was pretty rough in lots of places round here then, and these fellers could fight off a whole army by guardin’ that gap of theirs. What ever become of ’em I don’t know. But the descendants of that gang and the women prisoners are livin’ there yet—outlaw white blood and high-toned white blood and nigger and Indian blood all mixed up together—and I’ve heard tell that some of ’em are handsome, especially the women. No, I never was in there myself——”

The memory-voice died and was lost. Vainly he racked his brain for more of the tale. Where did that man say the place was? In these Shawangunks? Farther south in the Ramapos? Up north in the Catskills, or far beyond in the Adirondacks? No answer came. The rest of the story, its beginning and end, were lost in the fog of many such chance conversations at odd moments and in odd places.

But he was sure that the locale of that legend was somewhere in the mountains of New York State. And out there across the Traps was a long mountain wall with but one way of entrance. And this girl’s father and mother were of mongrel blood, and——

“By the Lord Harry, it fits!” he exclaimed aloud. “If this isn’t the place it ought to be. And there’s been a lady—a real, high-bred lady—in your family not many generations ago, Miss Marion, or I’m a Chinaman!”

The surrounding rocks reverberated with his words. The blanket before him moved quickly. Out from it rose dancing gray eyes, glowing cheeks, and laughing red lips.

“Mornin’, Mister Detective!” she caroled. “Are you talkin’ into your sleep, or did you find a drink somewheres? You’re foolish, sounds like.”

Somewhat sheepish, he stood a moment without reply. His eyes dwelt on the wealth of tumbled hair, now glowing like forest-fire in the clean light of the new day: no pale sandy tresses, but rich, vivid, Titian red. Nowhere in it showed dark streak or telltale kink.

“Listen,” he countered. “Did you ever hear of a crowd of men—white and red and black—who went out through the Gap over yonder and brought in women and made slaves of them?”

At once her friendly face turned cold.

“You’re huntin’ into the wrong place,” she told him, lifting her chin. “Our fellers don’t do that. You better look somewheres else.”

“Oh, shucks! Can’t you get rid of that idea that I’m hunting somebody? These desperadoes were all dead long before we were born. But haven’t you heard some such story from the old folks?”

After watching his frank face a moment she shook her head.

“No, never heard tell of such a thing. If they’re all dead, what’s the good of worryin’ about ’em anyway?”

He shrugged and moved on toward the charred sticks, meanwhile turning the conversation into another channel.

“How’s the ankle?”

She probed under the blanket, threw the covering aside, pushed herself up, and took a tentative step.

“Why, by mighty, mister! You’re a reg’lar doctor! It’s sore, but it ain’t half as bad as ’twas. It hurt terrible last night when I——”

She stopped abruptly, but her eyes went to the entrance.

“When you came and covered me up? Serves you right. That was the most foolish thing—but I thank you, just the same.”

Her lips opened, but for a moment no word came. Her eyes still were fixed on the narrow slit, and a little frown of concentration furrowed her brow. He pivoted and squinted against the glare of the rising sun now darting in at that crack. Then she spoke—low and tense.

“Where’s your gun? Layin’ there?”

“Yes.”

“Go git it!”

He sprang for the passage, where the weapon still lay beside his discarded blanket. As he moved he heard a badly balanced stone outside grate under the weight of a moving body.

In a bounding rush he was across the open cavern and between the bowlders. With a swoop he snatched up his gun. His clutching hand closed with one finger inside the trigger-guard.

Before he realized that he was pressing the little curved lever, the gun jumped violently backward. A thundering report smashed out. Powder-gas stung his throat. The firearm fell with a sullen clack on the stones beside his feet.

Vaguely his deafened ears received the echo of the shot roaring along the farther wall of the Traps, a mile away. He felt, rather than heard, something fall among the rocks outside.

Grabbing the gun again, he slipped forward to the entrance. At the corners of the upstanding bowlders he halted short, staring at a huddled form which had collapsed among the prone blocks beyond.

Only the head and upper torso of the stranger were visible, his lower body and legs lying behind a slanting stone. But clear in the sunlight showed a wan, pinched young face, swarthy-skinned, with close-cropped black hair. Along the stone under the head crept a red trickle.

Suddenly Douglas was thrown aside. From behind him Marion darted, wild-eyed. From her pale lips broke a sharp cry: “Steve!”

Across the stones she struggled. Beside the youth she dropped. Then she turned to Douglas a face startling in its white wrath.

“You—murderin’—hound!” she choked. “You’ve kilt him!”

CHAPTER IV
THE FUGITIVE

Dumb, Douglas leaned his gun against the wall and moved outward.

“Don’t you touch him!” blazed Marion. “Don’t you put a hand onto him or I’ll—I’ll use that gun onto you! I might have knowed you was lyin’—if I’d knowed Steve was out I’d never trusted a word you said. Now you’ve got him, leave him to be buried where he was borned. Oh, Steve, Stevie lad! And I—I give this feller the word to git his gun and do for you! If I’d only knowed you was out! Oh, Stevie boy!”

In a storm of grief she dropped her head on the thin chest, hugging the limp lad to her with convulsive strength. A few feet away the blond man halted, dazed by the unintentional tragedy and the violence of the girl’s outburst. For minutes he stood there motionless, hardly grasping the significance of her denunciation.

Then his brain began to work. Her words, repeating themselves, became appallingly plain. This young Steve was “out”—and his swarthy pallor was not merely that of unconsciousness or death: it was that of long confinement in some place whence he had just escaped—a place where hair was kept cropped. And he, Douglas Hampton, who had been half accepted by this girl as the chance camper he claimed to be, now had become in her mind a far blacker monster than a mere “detective”—a merciless bloodhound who killed poor fugitives on sight. Gazing miserably on the mountain maid mourning her luckless boy lover, he found the sight unendurable. His head drooped, and his eyes rested unseeing on the stones between him and the pathetic pair.

Up overhead fluttered the yellowhammers, scared by the shot but emboldened by the ensuing silence to wheel about and whet their curiosity in scrutiny of the tragic group on the stones. High on the cliff behind, an unseen squirrel fussed and fumed; and from crack and cranny along the wall and from crevices among the fallen fragments more than one furtive little eye peered out. Steadily the sun slipped upward in the clean blue sky, lighting up in pitiless nakedness one more spectacle such as it had seen all too often in the long stretch of time since men first penetrated into this grim gulf. The wretched man neither heard nor saw any of these things. Stone-still he stood, staring down at a spattered splotch of white on a gray rock.

All at once his blank gaze focused sharply on that white spot. He started. In one stride he was beside the rock. As he stooped and squinted, a light flamed in his face. With a bound he was up and leaping toward the limp form beyond.

“Git away!” shrilled Marion, lifting a tear-swollen face and turning on him like a tigress. “Keep your bloody hands off him—he’s mine! My onliest——”

“Listen to me!” he commanded. “I never hit him! The shot struck that stone yonder—the whole charge! It was an accident anyway—and he was out of line—the shot couldn’t hit him from where I stood. Let me see that wound.”

For an instant she sat rigid, unable to believe, yet thrilled with hope. Quickly, but gently, he raised the head of the youth and probed the injury he found. Then he nodded vehemently.

“This is no gunshot wound,” he asserted. “It’s a cut and a bump. He tumbled and knocked his head against a stone. Got a hard crack, but nothing dangerous. Poor kid, he looks half starved, and that smash he took just finished him—for awhile. All he needs is water, food, rest, and safety. I’ll give him all of them.”

After one stare at the split scalp now turned toward her, she sprang up, her cheeks aglow with joy. But then she paused and shot a glance at the gun near by.

“And you’ll take him back! No you won’t—I’ll——”

In the nick of time he caught her wrist as she started toward the weapon.

“Take him back where?” he snapped. “I’ll take him nowhere, except back among the rocks. After he’s able to walk he can go where he likes. He’s nothing to me. If he’s anything to you, don’t stand in his way. I’m trying to help him. Now behave!”

She was tugging furiously away, but as he released her she stood where she was, fighting now against her distrust of him. He lifted the sagging body, got a firm grip, and lurched back toward the cliff. As he passed the shot-scarred stone he grunted and jerked his head downward toward it. Following, she paused an instant and studied the white patch, glanced at the little cañon, then moved on with clearer face. She knew well how shot-marks looked; saw, too, that the tall stranger had spoken truth when he said Steve was out of his line of fire from the walled passage. Though she had not seen the gun fired, she realized now that hardly any man would have made so poor a shot if he had actually been trying to hit the hunted youth.

Yet, when Douglas edged into the slit and bore his burden through, she halted behind him and put a tentative hand on the gun, still loaded in one barrel. Narrowly she inspected the “newfangled” weapon—so unlike the ancient muzzle-loaders common in the Traps—wavering between a desire to draw its remaining charge and fear lest it might disastrously explode again. After a dubious moment she shook her head and went on. She must trust this man, whether she would or not.

Down on the tumbled blanket and the bough-tip bed Douglas laid the youth. Then he reached for the canvas water-pail. Its lightness brought a frown to his brow. Hardly a cupful remained in it.

“I’ll git somethin’,” she volunteered, reading his thought. Before he could fathom her purpose she was leaving through the passage, limping a little but moving as if sure of herself. Presently she returned, carefully bearing a jug.

“Well, you witch! Where did you dig up that?”

“That’s one of the questions you better not ask round here,” she parried. “Jest hold up his head while I give him a good snort.”

Smiling grimly, he raised the lad’s head and opened his lax mouth while she pulled the corn-cob plug. Deftly she put the nozzle to that mouth and poured the “snort.” The aptness of the word was speedily demonstrated by the uncouth noise which erupted from Steve.

His eyes flew open, rolled, blinked. He coughed, sprayed a mouthful of the colorless but powerful liquor on his helpers, gasped, and struggled up as if kicked out of sleep. Wildly he stared at the two faces so near his. Then, as the girl put the jug again to his mouth, he grabbed it with both hands and gulped thirstily. When he lowered the vessel he licked his lips, and across them flitted a faint grin.

“Gawd, am I dead or dreamin’?” he breathed hoarsely. “Marry! Be ye there? An’ this here licker—I’m a dunkey if ’tain’t real! Who—who’s this feller?”

His brown eyes glared into the cool blue ones. Involuntarily his right hand gripped the jug-handle as if it were a gun-stock. His gaunt face tightened into a menacing mask. He wavered like a mortally wounded wildcat gathering its last strength to spring.

“I’m all right, Steve,” soothed Douglas. “I’m not after you. You’re safe, and this is Marry, and that’s real stuff in the jug. Calm down.”

Under the steadying influence of the quiet tone the youth relaxed a little. Yet his lined mouth remained set as he demanded: “Who shot at me?”

“Nobody,” Douglas told him. “My gun exploded accidentally. I didn’t even see you. You fell and cracked your head.”

The boy still glowered suspiciously, but when Marion spoke his gaze shifted to her.

“That’s right, Steve. You’re all right, ’cept a little cut and a bump. Tell me quick—how long you been out? Are they after you?”

A savage smile twisted the thin mouth.

“I dunno if they’re trackin’ me—I reckon so. I ain’t seen ’em. I got ’way Monday night, an’ I ain’t goin’ back till I git Snake Sanders. Cuss him, he put me away—an’ I never done it, Marry, I never! It was Snake done it! An’ I got the blame. Three years I been doin’ time—but I’ll take them three years outen him quick’s I git to a gun! Yas, an’ all the rest of his life too! I’ll——”

“Don’t you! He’ll git you, not you git him. You might’s well try to git a copperhead by grabbin’ onto him with your bare hands. And you’ve got to keep out till the officers quit huntin’—they’ll be into here, if they ain’t here now. Don’t you go near the house or a gun—don’t move or make a noise till I tell you, or you’re a goner! Now gimme that jug and I’ll put it back. We’ve got to go quick to some other hide-out—there’s been shootin’ up here and we don’t know who’ll come—gimme that jug!”

“Not till I git ’nother big snort under my shirt,” refused Steve, lifting the jug in unsteady hands. “I ain’t et much for four days, an’——”

“Gimme that jug!” she stormed. “Know whose it is? Snake’s!”

The boy started as if stung. His grip relaxed, and she yanked the jug from him and grabbed up the corn-cob. Douglas noticed, in an absent way, that the clay was smeared with a streak of green paint.

“Snake’s? I been drinkin’ that varmint’s licker?” raged Steve. “I’d ruther lap up p’ison! Gimme that jug back! I’ll bust it!”

“No you won’t!” She backed off. “He’s right round here now somewheres, I shouldn’t wonder, a-sneakin’ and a-slidin’ along, and you’ve got to lay low awhile—you ain’t even got a gun. I’m goin’ to put this right back where ’twas. You keep quiet.”

She hobbled away. Steve struggled to rise and overtake her, but found himself powerless in the grip of Douglas.