CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

ON THE TRAIL OF A “BANDIT”

Up through the old trail the boy had broken his way, and into the newer, more open path he leaped, his feet winged with eagerness, and it was a very breathless lad who at last reached the trail’s end and found the cold gray ashes that had been a camp-fire.

“He’s gone!” he said aloud. “Whoever ’twas has gone on farther.” Then, as he glanced among the near pines, he thought, “I might have known he’d be gone by this time. A sheep-rustler, or a bandit, either, wouldn’t just stay on a mountain-peak.”

Truly disappointed, the boy climbed to the highest point, and, shading his eyes, looked in every direction.

The sun was high, the lake a deep emerald hue, with here and there the reflection of a fleecy white cloud slowly drifting across its mirror-like surface, for not a breath of air was stirring. Then the lad’s gaze swept the mountain-ranges beyond.

“Guess I’m not much good at catching sheep-rustlers,” he commented, “but then, I wouldn’t think much of one, or a bandit either, who’d sit here and wait to be caught.”

The lad suddenly realized that he was very hungry. He sat on a rock near, and looked meditatively about as he munched on the sandwich which he had taken from his pocket.

Suddenly he leaped to his feet, ran a little way toward the burned-out camp-fire, and, kneeling, examined the ground. A footprint! It hadn’t been made by the soft leather shoe that Washoe Indians often wore. Rising, and still munching his bread and meat, he placed his own smaller foot in the print.

“Whoever he is, he’s a big fellow!” he said admiringly. “A reg’lar giant.” Then, having finished the bread, he drew a rosy apple from the depth of another pocket where it had been bulging. The boy walked about, poking in the ashes; then suddenly, with a whoop of delight, he knelt down, jammed the remaining piece of apple in his mouth to dispose of it speedily, and with his freed hands drew forth a sheet of partly burned, much-blackened paper that had writing on it.

“Whizzle!” he ejaculated. “How I hope it’s a clue.”

He spread the paper on a flat boulder, and knelt to examine it closely. The fire and the smoke had done their best to make it hard for him to decipher the finely written words. It seemed to be the fragment of a personal letter written to a relative, but not one reference was made to holding up a train or rustling sheep. At the very bottom, in a scorched place, the boy found something which caused him to leap to his feet and prance about as a wild Indian would, when celebrating a joyous occasion.

“Hurray! Hurray!” he fairly shouted, and the near peak echoed back the cry. Then, climbing again to the highest boulder, the lad once more shaded his eyes, this time with an even greater eagerness to discover some sign of a camp. At last, over on the next mountain which was so perilously steep that few attempted to scale it, and up near the top, the boy’s eyes found what he sought—a camp-fire.

“Ginger!” he thought. “I don’t know how he ever got there, whoever he is. Climbing that mountain is like trying to shin up the wall of a barn, but if he can do it, so can I, but ’twould take me a day, and it’s too late now.”

The boy looked toward the west, and saw the sun was low in the horizon. “I’d go to-morrow, but Dixie wouldn’t like it if I cut school, and I’d ought to stick at arithmetic if I’m going to be a civil engineer. But I’ll come up here Saturday before sun-up, and if that camp’s over there then, I’m going to head for it, and if it’s who I think maybe ’tis— Aw—but, gee, it couldn’t be. Well, it’s somebody, and who it is I want to find out.”

“There wasn’t anybody there,” was the report he gave Miss Bayley the next day. “Whoever it was made the fire had moved on.” He said nothing of his plans, but it was very hard for the boy, yearning for adventure, to keep his mind on mathematics that week, and Saturday was a long time coming.

But come it did, and hours before the sun was up Ken was on the trail, eager, expectant.

Again on the top of the trail where the burnt-out camp-fire had been discovered, Ken scrambled to the peak of the highest boulder, and, with a heart beating like a trip-hammer, he pulled his wide-brimmed hat over his eyes to shade them from the glare of the sun that was rising in a cloudless sky.

Would there be any sign of the camp on the mountains beyond, he wondered. Even as he looked he decided that whether there was or not, he would not return to Woodford’s without having further investigated.

At first the lad saw nothing but the dazzling golden light of the sun that was slowly rising higher, driving the gloom from the cañons, but, as he continued to gaze, faint and far he saw a thin column of smoke wavering uncertainly, and then suddenly drop down, to rise again a moment later, as though invigorated when fresh and more inflammable fuel had been added to the fire.

The lad scrambled down from his peak of observation and danced about as he shouted aloud, to the very evident astonishment of a squirrel near by: “He’s there! That is, somebody’s there, and, oh, if it should be— But I mustn’t get my heart set on that.”

Then he looked again to make sure that he had not been imagining. It might be mist or haze, but there it was, unmistakably rising in a straight, unwavering dark line against the gleaming blue of the sky. Then, as the boy watched, a breeze, wafting across the lake, waved the column of smoke.

“I feel sort o’ like an Indian trying to read smoke-signals,” he thought gleefully; “only, whoever made that fire isn’t trying to send messages to me. If it’s a bandit hiding there, he wouldn’t want any one to know where he is even. Gee, he might be a dangerous character! Maybe I’d better steal up soft-like so that I can make a good getaway without his knowin’ I’m about, if—”

Then he chuckled as he started down the trail on the other side of the low peak. “Dixie’s the one in our family who is supposed to have ’magination,” he thought; “but this morning my head seems to be full of queer notions.”

At first he started to sing, a glad shouting kind of song without words or meaning except that he was eager, excited, and happy. But suddenly he stopped as though fearing that some wanton wind would carry his voice to the lone man who was probably then breakfasting.

Ken was following the trail that had been made by the Washoe Indians from the cañon, when they went over to Lake Tahoe to fish, but at last the boy left it and broke through the sagebrush and other tangled growths and began climbing a trailless way toward the highest mountain near Woodford’s, which rose bare, gray, grim, lonely, forbidding.

There were times in the ascent when Ken came to a sheer wall, higher than his head, and, to scale it, he took off his shoes, knotted the strings, flung them over his shoulder, and then went up, clinging to crevices with his toes and finger-tips.

It was lucky that Dixie, the little mother of them all, could not see just then, the brother she so loved, for he was often in most perilous positions, where a single slip would have sent him hurtling on the jagged rocks far below. But his desire to reach the goal of his dreams gave him strength and skill, it would seem, and soon he reached the first small plateau and there he sat, the sun at its zenith assuring him that it was noon. Taking the inevitable sandwich from his pocket, he ate it hungrily. Then he stretched out on the flat rock, conscious of strained muscles and glad of a moment’s rest. But it wasn’t long before he had leaped to his feet and rejoiced to find that, around the outjutting rocks, there was a belt of scraggly low-growing pines. To these he could cling and make greater progress. How near was he to the camp, he wondered. Suddenly he paused and listened intently.

A gunshot rang out so close to the boy that instinctively he dropped to the ground, pressing close behind a boulder. What could it mean? Was he nearer the camp than he had supposed? Had the bandit, or whoever was in hiding, seen him or heard him? This was possible, as but a moment before he had slipped, displacing some loose stones that had rattled noisily down the mountain-side.

Or, if he had caused a motion among the dwarf pines to which he was clinging, as he made the ascent, he might have been taken for a skulking coyote or a mountain-lion.

Almost breathlessly the lad waited, listening, watching, but he heard nothing and no one came. Fifteen minutes passed before he dared to go on, and even then he did not stand erect, but crouched, keeping hidden by the stunted growths about him.

This was the big adventure that his boyish heart had yearned for, and the real element of danger but enhanced his joy in it.

He was wondering how much farther he would have to go before he saw signs of a camp, when suddenly he rounded a denser and higher clump of trees and found himself looking directly into a clearing on a small plateau, which was protected on three sides, the fourth opening toward the lake. Darting back under cover of the low-growing pines, Ken peered out and beheld a rude structure that was neither cabin nor wigwam, but a shelter made of green branches. The campfire in front of it was still smoldering, proving that either the man was not far away, or that he had not long been gone. Then a terrible fear smote the heart of the lad. What if that had been the camper’s last meal on the mountain! What if he had now departed, not to return!

Just at that moment another shot rang out, the sound reverberating from the cañon below. The camper was evidently hunting for game. Indeed he probably had nothing else to eat, though lower down and near the lake there were rushing streams in which the little mountain trout could be caught in abundance.

The lad hardly knew what to do. He feared it would not be wise for him to go boldly into this unknown man’s camp while he was away, for if it should be one of the “dangerous characters” occasionally described by the Genoa “Crier,” who sought a hiding-place in the high Nevadas, the lad would want to slip away unobserved.

He decided to remain under cover until the camper had returned. Luckily, Ken had not long to wait, for a nearer shot told that the hunter was approaching, and in another moment a tall, sinewy, broad-shouldered young man swung into view, a small deer flung over his shoulder.

His brown hair was long and his face nearly covered with a beard. Indeed, at first glance, he looked as though he might be a very dangerous character, but just as Ken had made this decision, the young man, little knowing that he was being so closely observed, began to sing in a tenor voice that carried to the heart of the listener the conviction that, whatever might be the reason for his hiding, it was not because of an evil record.

However, he did not leave his place of observation at once. He watched as the young giant dropped the small deer upon the ground, stretched his arms out as though to rest them, and then disappeared in his pine shelter. A moment later he reappeared without the gun, and carrying a long sharp knife. Kneeling by the deer, he prepared to skin it.

Silently the lad drew nearer, but so intent was the camper upon his occupation that he did not hear a footfall nor a sound of any kind until the boy spoke hesitatingly, “I say, mister, I’m awful good at skinning creatures. Couldn’t I help?”

The young man, who had believed himself to be alone near the top of an almost unscaleable mountain, leaped to his feet, amazed. His keen gray eyes swept over the very small figure of the barefooted boy, and then, to the unutterable joy of the lad, his hands were seized and a voice he knew and loved was fairly shouting: “Ken Martin, old pal; I’ve been wondering how in time I could get word to you that I was—well, sort of a neighbor of yours. I fully intended to drop down into Woodford’s soon and hunt you up, but I’m mighty glad you called first, so to speak. Sit down, old man. But wait; I’ll get you a drink of aqua pura from my near-by sparkling fount. You look petered out, as though you had climbed to near the end of your strength.”

The boy drank long of the water which was given him in a folding cup, and then, as he sank down on the ground in a truly weary heap, he gasped, “I say, Mr. Edrington, what-all are you doing up here?”