Every morning now there was frost. The sky was gray often enough, and one night, when there were no clouds, we saw the Northern Lights, a tremendous display brightening the whole heavens. I’d heard of it but seen it but once before, in Montana, but never like this.
It was late afternoon, and Tyrel was riding point. It was an easy trail, across some green meadows and up along a trail through huge boulders and scattered clumps of fir. Me, I was riding on the flank when I saw Tyrel pull up short.
Well, my rifle snaked into my hands, and I saw Cap Rountree out with his, but Tyrel wasn’t drawing. He was looking at a big gray boulder beside the trail.
Coming down off the slope, I rounded the head of the herd and pulled up alongside him. I started to say, “What’s wrong, Tye?” and did say it before I looked past him and saw the mark on the face of the boulder.
Scratched on the face of the rock was CLINCH-S-Dease-?
“Well,” Orrin had come up, “he isn’t dead then.”
“Who isn’t dead?” It was Fleming.
Orrin an’ Tyrel glanced at me, and I said, “We’re losin’ time, boys. We’ve got a far piece to go.”
Fleming stared hard at the scratching on the rock.
“What’s that mean?” he wondered. “It don’t make no sense!”
“Doesn’t, does it?” Tyrel said mildly. He turned his mount “Hustle them along, Charlie. We’ve a ways to go.”
Reluctantly, Charlie Fleming turned away.
Nettie Molrone rode up with Mary McCann. “What is it, Orrin?”
“Just some scratching on a rock,” he said. “We were wondering about it, that’s all.”
She looked at him quickly, her eyes searching his. She glanced at the rock. “It doesn’t make sense. Except” — she paused, studying it — “there’s a Dease River up here somewhere and a Dease Lake.”
“There is?” Orrin looked surprised. “What d’you know about that?”
She looked at him again, half angry.
In the morning, Charlie Fleming was gone.
Chapter XXIII
Fleming was gone, and a light rain was falling that froze as it reached the ground. We drank our coffee standing around the hissing fire in our slickers.
“I’d like to know where he went,” Orrin said, “but it’s not worth following him.”
“D’you think he made sense out of Logan’s message?”
“If he did,” Shorty said, “he’s smarter than me.”
“We’ve been passing messages around for years,” Orrin said. “Started back in the feuding days, I reckon. The ‘Clinch S’ just means he’s a Clinch Mountain Sackett, which is one branch of the family, descended from old Yance. ‘Dease?’ simply means we should head for the Dease River, and the destination after that is in doubt.”
“Unless you were one of the family,” Tyrel commented, “it’s unlikely you’d guess.”
“Why’d you say he was still alive? That message might have been written days ago.”
“Could be, but it’s scratched on there with some of that chalk rock he picked up, and had it been more’n a few days old, it would have washed away.”
Cap came riding in as they were mounting. “Took a look at the trail,” he said. “There’s a marker there. Could be by one of you boys, but that trail is one thin cow wide, and with this ice — ”
“Think we can make it?”
“Maybe. There’s no tellin’ the luck of a lousy cow. Anyway, it doesn’t seem like we have much choice.”
“It’s up to me, then,” I said, and rode out with old Brindle falling in behind.
When we started up the trail, old Brindle hesitated, not liking it. His horns rattled against the wall, but as I was going on, and he was used to following, he sort of fell in behind.
“Hope I don’t let you down, old boy,” I said. “It looks bad to me, too!”
We wound steadily upward, the trail narrowing, then widening, occasionally opening to a small space of an acre or more covered with stunted trees, then narrowing again. The sleet continued to fall, and the air was cold. Far below, we could see the spearlike tops of trees, and the silver ribbon of a stream.
The trail grew steeper. At times, I had to dismount and lead my mount over the icy rocks. At one point, I came to a bank of last year’s snow, a dirty gray shelf of the stuff, which I had to break off to make a way for my horse and the following cattle.
It was slow, hard work. All day long, we climbed. There was no place to stop and rest; there was not even a place to stop.
Suddenly, the trail dipped down around a steep elbow bend, and the rock of the trail slanted toward the outer edge. Walking along the wall as tightly as possible, I led the roan around the corner.
The cattle came on. Glancing back when several hundred yards farther along, I was in time to see a steer suddenly slip and, legs flailing, plunge off into space headed for the tops of the trees five hundred feet below. Even as I looked, another fell.
Swearing softly, I plodded on, feeling for footholds around the edge. Suddenly, as it had begun, the narrow trail ended and gave out into a thick forest. Ahead, there was a meadow and beyond a stream, already icing over.
There was room enough, and there was but little undergrowth. Tying the roan, I went to a deadfall and from under it tried to gather some scraps of bark that had not been soaked by the rain. From inside my shirt, I took a little tinder that I always kept for the purpose, and breaking a tuft of it free, I lit a fire. As it blazed up, I hastily added more fuel.
Walking back into the woods, I broke off some of the small suckers that grew from the tree trunks and died. They had long been dead and were free from rain. By the time the cattle began to wander out on the meadow and the first rider appeared, I had a fine fire blazing and was rigging a lean-to between two trees that stood about ten feet apart.
The trees had lower limbs approximately the same height above the ground, and selecting from among the fallen debris, broken limbs, and dead branches one of proper length I rested it in the crotches of the limbs selected, and then I began gathering other sticks to lean slant-wise from the pole to the ground.
From time to time I stopped to add fuel to the fire, well knowing the effect the fire would have on the tired men and the two women.
Across the poles, I put whatever lay to hand. I was not building anything but a temporary shelter, and I used slabs of bark from fallen trees, fir branches and whatever was close by.
By the time Lin and Baptiste reached the fire with the pack horses, I had a fairly comfortable shelter and was starting on another. Haney was first to reach the fire, and he began gathering fir boughs from nearby trees.
Orrin helped Nettie from her horse, and for a moment she swayed and fell against the horse. She straightened up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m tired.”
One by one, the men came in, carrying their gear, which they dropped under the second shelter. Several of them went to the fire. Cap walked out and began gathering boughs, and after a minute Shorty went to help.
Highpockets Haney held his hands to the fire. He looked around at me. “Tell Sackett I been a lot of places with you, but if you think I’m goin’ back over that trail in the snow, you got another think a-comin’.”
“We lost some stock, Cap?”
Rountree looked at me. Tired as he had to be, he looked no different than always. He had degrees of toughness nobody had ever scratched. “That we did!”
Shorty looked over at me. “Fourteen, fifteen head, Tell. I’m sorry.”
“This weather’s rough,” Haney added. “We’ll lose some more if we’ve far to go.”
We huddled about the fire, and soon the smell of coffee was in the air. Tyrel went back to the edge of camp, and soon he came in with several chunks of meat “Big horn,” he said. “I nailed him back on the other side of the mountain.”
Soon the smell of broiling meat was added to that of coffee. Outside, the falling sleet rustled on the fir boughs and on the meadow. The cattle ceased to eat, and one by one took shelter under the trees.
“Ain’t nothin’ like a fire,” Cap said, “and the smell of coffee boilin’.”
“How far you reckon it is” Shorty asked.
Nobody answered because nobody knew. Me, I leaned my forehead on my crossed arms and hoped there would be a marker on this side of the pass we’d come over. We would surely need it because I had no idea which way to turn.