The Earth Lords Page 4

  “I’ll be back,” he said again; and swung himself up over the pony, which he had saddled some minutes earlier.

  Emma handed up the end of the rope fastened to the mule’s halter, and he took it.

  “Here.”

  “Thanks. Goodbye, Emma. I’ll be back.”

  “I know you will.”

  He shook up the reins of his pony and rode off. The mule followed after without protest.

  chapter

  three

  IT WAS NOT until he rode out into the settlement street that the feeling of uneasiness struck him. From where he was he could see, only a little way farther beyond the houses and the tiny graveyard, the valley slope down which he had approached Mossby. That slope continued a short distance past the town to the edge of the river; and it ran alongside the river, rising to the place where the river first came into sight between two hills.

  When he had come, no one had been expecting him. But the slope before him was wooded. The way he must go, up alongside the river, he was open and exposed to any rifleman who now might be hidden in the trees that covered most of the ground to the far wall of the small valley. There was absolutely no reason to expect such a rifleman, but he had a sudden, inexplicable feeling inside him that someone was up there. He turned to look behind him and saw that Emma had followed him out of the yard behind the store, still smiling.

  She continued to follow him as he rode past the buildings and the graveyard, out into the open land. By the last house she halted, and stood watching him as he went. And the apprehension lifted. Just as he had felt the reasonless certainly that a gun was waiting, aimed at him from the trees on the crest of the valley rise, perhaps beyond the river, he also was suddenly certain that it would not fire as long as Emma was standing there, watching.

  She watched him out of sight and no gun sounded.

  Nearly a mile from the settlement, the trees on the left bank of the river, up which he rode, closed in on the water; and the underbrush between them was too thick for riding. He turned and swam the river with both animals, emerging on the tree-crowned bank of the far side. But as he passed into the trees, he passed beyond the point where he could see back to the settlement—or Emma, watching there, could see him.

  The uneasy feeling he had had was gone. After all, he thought, even if there had been someone there with a rifle, that person might have had nothing against him specifically, might not even have known who he was, but been on guard against a possible enemy who had nothing to do with Bart. There were many men on the frontier who had reason to be wary of strangers.

  He rode on, alone but cheerfully now that the feeling was gone.

  The map he was following was simple and straightforward enough. Like most maps in this country that had been opened to Europeans by the fur traders, whoever had drawn it originally had thought in terms of canoe routes; and so the paper Bart had been given had shown a route following a sequence of three rivers, with the first important one—not the one he was on now—eventually flowing into the second, and a route over land where he would leave the second river to take the third, on the western watershed of the Rockies.

  It was easy enough going; and the mule gave him no trouble. However, on the afternoon of the sixth day after leaving Mossby, the uneasiness that had touched him as he rode away from Emma came back on him. Only now, it was the feeling of someone deliberately stalking him. He continued to travel just as he had been doing, but he kept eyes, ears and nose alert for any sign that could back up the feeling.

  However, there was nothing. And yet the feeling, instead of going away, persisted and even grew until it was strong within him as he camped for the night.

  Here, where the end of day had caught him, the second of his three rivers ran narrow and deep between vertical cliffs of eighty to a hundred feet. So the camp he made was on a shadowed, mossy ledge among thick but stunted spruce and pine; and the roar of the river below hid any sound he might hear of someone approaching. And once the sun was gone he was effectively blind as well as deaf.

  He did not like camping under these conditions, but the end of the daylight left him no choice. He unloaded the pony and mule and tied them out among the trees only a couple of dozen feet ; from his fire. Then he set about preparing some of his bacon with an amount of the dried beans he had had soaking in a closed flask, tied to his saddle throughout the day.

  The beans took longer than the bacon to cook, even with the day’s soaking, so that it was deep dark and no moon visible because of thick cloud cover by the time the food was ready to eat. He had made an amount that suited his large appetite, and he stuffed himself with everything he had cooked, leaving nothing; for he had decided to get out of here at the first glimmer of daylight, without waiting to make any kind of breakfast.

  Meanwhile, both the pony and the mule had been quiet, which gave him a certain amount of reassurance. He let the fire bum down to coals against the boulder before which he had deliberately built it; and, warmed by the reflected heat from the fire-warmed stone, rolled himself in his blankets and let himself go off to sleep.

  He woke suddenly, at once fully awake and alert. The cloud cover had thinned, and a small pale moon could be glimpsed through thin parts of it at stray moments, high overhead. It must be well past midnight, he thought; and he closed his hands, one around the rifle he had taken to bed with him, the other on the butt of his revolver.

  He lay still. The feeling of an inimical presence nearby was as strong as a rank smell in his nostrils. But as he continued to lie still, waiting, no betraying sound or odor came to him to help him identify it, or tell where about him it might be.

  There was an uneasy stir from one of his animals. He glanced in their direction, wishing the moon would come full out; or that he dared to give away the fact he was no longer sleeping by putting some more wood on the fire, so that he could see better. The pony moved; he heard though he could not see it. It was completely hidden in darkness; but he could just make out the head of the mule, who had not moved but stood now, stock-still but head-on to a niche between two huge boulders, with its rear hooves facing outward and its ears upright and listening.

  Plainly, both beasts were feeling what he was feeling. Perhaps, with their animal hearing, they had heard what he had not. The mule, at least, had moved into a position of defense—anything coming at it would face those lashing rear hooves. The pony, less intelligent, was the likely target if what was out there in the dark was animal, rather than human.

  If it was human, the chances were that he was the target.

  It was strange, as strange as his fear of a hidden rifleman among the trees when he had left Mossby. The price on his head was enough to attract a casual bounty hunter who just happened to cross Bart’s path. But it was not enough to make it worth anyone’s time to trail him for it. Particularly since any such person must know that Bart would not be an easy man to take or kill; so that trying to collect the bounty could be a dangerous business. And Bart’s habit of avoiding closeness with people generally had kept him from making personal enemies—at least the sort of enemies that might take the trouble to hunt him down.

  The minutes slipped by without a sign or a sound. Still, Bart waited. The pony neighed, suddenly, a frightened sound.

  Moving abruptly, Bart reached out from his blankets, snatched up a handful of small twigs and threw them on the red coals of the fire. They did not catch for a moment, but the coals, disturbed, brightened; and a small flame licked up from one blackened bit of log. In that extra light, Bart caught a glimpse of the pony; and, on top of a boulder six feet above it, a pair of glowing eyes.

  Cougar.

  He was out of the blanket, on his feet and firing the rifle even as the eyes sailed through the air toward the pony. The crash of the rifle, the kick of its butt against his shoulder combined with the thud of a body falling almost at his feet. The twigs had caught, now, and flame was rising from them, illuminating the two equines and the camp area clearly.

  The cougar lay
still, stretched out and dead on the stony ground a long step from Bart’s feet. The rifle bullet had gone through its throat and head as it leaped. Bart lowered the rifle. A cougar. The only predator other then a grizzly or a hungry wolf that would be likely to try taking a prey as large as the pony in single attack; and often a night hunter. He should have guessed that it might be a cougar that had been shadowing them all day, hoping for a chance at one of his animals.

  A flicker of movement seen out of the comer of his right eye made him duck instinctively; and a heavy blow sent him tumbling to the ground, losing his grip on the rifle. Even as he went down, a thought flashed through his mind.

  There had not been one cougar but two, a mated pair, perhaps, hunting together. It was rare but it happened. He scrabbled at his belt holster for the revolver, found it fallen away, too, and reached instead for his knife. At the same time he was rolling over on his back and drawing his knees up tight against his body to protect his stomach and chest.

  He had a glimpse in the dim firelight of a gray body leaping at him—from the direction of his legs. He had his hand on the hilt of his knife now, but no time to get it out, and the angle of the beast’s attack made the knife awkward to use. He lashed out with both feet and all the heavy power of his massive thigh muscles behind the movement.

  His heels slammed into the leaping body in midair. The big cat glanced off to one side and upward; then, dropped—over the edge of the cliff to the riverbed a hundred feet below, with a yowl of surprise and alarm that fell away into silence below. For a moment Bart lay where he was, catching his breath.

  There were no more enemies to fear now; and the instinctive feeling in him was now gone. For more than two cougars to hunt together was unheard of.

  The pony was neighing shrilly and pulling wildly at its neckrope. The mule still stood in a position of defense and turned itself slightly to put its rear hooves toward Bart as Bart got to his feet and shakily went about collecting his dropped rifle and revolver. The mule’s eyes continued to be rolled back, watching him, ready to act if he came within kicking range.

  Bart stayed well clear and the pony began to calm down. He sat down by the fire and threw several more, larger, branches on it. Then he got back up and walked over to where his saddlebags lay, with the saddle on the other side of his fire. From the left boot he removed a pint bottle of whisky and took a couple of swallows. He recorked the bottle tightly, then put it back into the small nest of hay that protected it against accidental blows and breakage.

  The fire was blazing strongly now. He got out his coffee pot, which he had cleaned and packed away before going to sleep, in preparation for his planned early start in the morning. He threw a handful of new coffee grounds into it and added water from his canteen and put it on the coals. He sat there, watching the flames of the fire as the pot came to the boil, feeling the alcohol inside him gradually beginning to make its calming effect felt.

  Then he sat, drinking, and as the level of the coffee in the pot slowly dropped, he began to notice a lightening of the sky. They were closer to dawn, then, than he had thought. He finished the coffee and set about getting the pony saddled and the load on the mule. By the time they were ready >it was almost light enough to travel. He had another half cup of coffee, carefully put out the fire and left.

  The rest of the trip was uneventful, and he was not visited again by the feeling of being watched or pursued. He came at last to the portage across to the third river. Like most portages, it was passable enough for human animals on two legs, even those loaded down with more than a hundred pounds of canoe gear or supplies, but impassable to four-legged beasts like the two with him. He had to cut a way through for the horse and mule, including the chopping through and clearing of two good-sized trees, over which the human portagers would merely have clambered, before he could bring them all safely to the third river.

  The portage came out at the point where the third river joined a fourth that was not on his map and that was navigable downstream by canoe. The third river itself was not. It was a racehorse of water from the high mountains, forty yards wide and not much more than a yard deep, foaming around boulders of all sizes and stampeding downhill at twenty to thirty miles an hour. He began to pick his way up along one side of it, riding around obstacles when these intervened on the bankside. The far bank looked like it would be easier going; but to try to cross the river, alone or with the horses, would have been suicide.

  In the late afternoon, he encountered a wagon trail from somewhere else downslope, which he could follow upriver in the direction he was going. The road curved in toward the river from somewhere else off through the mountains—evidently there was another town or settlement not too far away, and perhaps having a quicker route by river to larger centers of civilization in some mountain valley or even down on the coast. The road showed the signs of frequent use. It was a “corduroy” road, surfaced with the narrow, trimmed stems of small trees, laid down side by side, to form a surface that would not go into impassable muddy ruts under the wagon wheels.

  He took it, as an easier route to Shunthead; and one late afternoon he came up over a steep crest of rock to look down into a narrow, rocky valley with a lake at its bottom hardly wider than the river had been. Buildings constructed of boards clung to the side of the nearer of the two steeply inclined slopes. The road went at an angle down the slope, to a precarious platform of rock and earth; where it did a switchback and then angled in the opposite direction to deal with the steep pitch of the valleyside until it reached the gentler slopes just above the lakeshore, on which the buildings were erected.

  One glance at those buildings was enough. The name of the place should have told him, as well as the fact that it was a mule he was returning. For that matter, the corduroy road itself had been a strong indication that it must lead to a mining camp, since only a mine would require the bringing in of equipment and supplies heavy enough to require the use of wagons. There was no farming this far up in these mountains. The only use for mules here could be for hauling, in and out of and around a mine—and this was a mine.

  Now that he had made the identification, it was easy to pick out the miners’ bunkhouse, the cookshed, the offices and other buildings used by the staff, as separate from the one or two residences that would be occupied by those in charge here, who ran the mine. There was even the waterwheel-driven sawmill, sited on a stream that spilled over the valley wall about two hundred yards away and plunged down a steep ravine into the lake below. At the moment, the sluice gates in its wooden dam were open and its waterwheel stood motionless, clear of the water. He saw no other human or animal in sight. It was possible that everyone was at work. But as at Mossby, the absence of people moving about between the buildings roused an uneasiness in him.

  He picked out the largest of the staff buildings and rode to the three steps that rose to the small landing before its front door. He dismounted. The pony had been trained to stand with its reins trailing, “ground-hitched.” The mule he untied from the lead rope that had tethered it to his saddle leather, and retied the rope to the end of the two-by-four handrail of the steps.

  As he was doing this, a man came out of the door and stood on the landing. He was tall, middle-aged, very erect and with a noticeable pot belly. His hair was gray and thinning, and a gray mustache drooped its ends around the corners of his mouth.

  “Here, you!” he said. His voice was baritone and slightly hoarse. “This is private property. I don’t think we know you.”

  “I rather think not,” said Bart, glancing up at him.

  Bart had deliberately colored his voice with the accent of someone who was upper class English; and as he had expected, the contrast between his appearance and the accent checked the other for a wordless moment.

  Bart, however, had unavoidably reminded himself once more of his father; and of his real schooling, which had taken place between his father and himself in that private life they shared and which the world had never suspected. As a boy, Ba
rt had necessarily to attend the small school that was held in Sainte Anne so as not to attract attention to himself or his father; but it had been a chore—until he got to know Emma and the school became a place where he could see her. It would have been too easy in the classroom for him to score a hundred per cent correct on all the tests, and even to correct the occasional mistake of the teacher, who himself had only had a high school education.

  Bart’s father had taught him many unusual things, including a number of different accents, not only in English, but in French. If the man on the landing had spoken to Bart in French, he could have replied as easily with an upper-class Parisian accent. His father had also taught Bart smatterings of other languages—some German, Italian and Latin; as well as a great deal of the science and technical knowledge of the nineteenth century world, from beyond the boundaries, and in most cases beyond the imaginations, of the Canadians and Americans Bart was later to deal with.

  What the older man had not taught his son was anything about his father’s boyhood and family—an exception Bart had not realized for a long time simply because he had known no other way. And somehow the boy had been brought to understand that questions about these things would not be welcome to him.

  “I was headed up this way, so the storekeeper in Mossby asked me to deliver a mule he said you’d lent to a man named Guillaume Barre,” Bart said in the same accent, mounting the steps. “There it is, tied to the handrail down there. I don’t suppose you’d care to sell me another one—or this one, if you’ve been getting on all right without it. As you see, I’ve got quite a bit of stuff to pack. I may be wintering here in the mountains.”

  He was on the landing by the time he had finished this speech, and was interested to discover that the other man was a good deal shorter than his first appearance on the raised platform of the landing would have given anyone to believe. The mine man had an imposing upper body and arms, but his legs were short, so that, as they stood facing each other on a level, the other was revealed, in spite of his erectness, to be a good four or five inches shorter than Bart.