Part 7

He flushed two woodcock from a sparse growth of aspens and watched them wing away and settle on the other side of the creek. Then he put up a single and, farther on, a little flock of five. In the clearing, almost at the camp's door, another single whistled away and dropped near Tumbling Run. That made nine woodcock between the Harkness house and the camp. Definitely it was not a substantial flight and no hunter should be advised to come to the Mahela because of them. But there were more than there had been.

A doe and two spring fawns were nosing about the apple trees. Bears had been climbing the same trees, leaving scarred trunks and broken branches in their wake. Black bears, of which there were a fair number in the Mahela, would come almost as far for apples as they would for honey. But they came only at night and did a lot of damage when they climbed the trees. However, these tough apple trees had been broken by bears every year they'd borne a crop and they'd always recovered. They'd recover again, and Ted supposed bears had as much right as anything else to the apples. He grinned. The fruit was gnarled and wormy, but it was a woodland delicacy and woodland dwellers competed for it as fiercely as a crowd of undisciplined children might compete for a rack of ice-cream cones.

Ted walked all around the camp, saw nothing amiss and unlocked the door. He pulled the hasp back, went in--and saw Tammie's pack lying under the table. Momentarily alarmed, he stopped. Only one person could have left the pack! He picked it up and thrust his hand into a side pocket. He found and pulled out a page torn from the pad of paper he'd inserted in the pack and read the penciled note.

Dear Ted; I was cuming to see you last nite. Tammy met me a sniff from the dor and I snuck up and saw Calhan. Gess he wants to see me rite enuf but I don't want to see him!

Hope taking Tammy's pak don't throw you off.

I can get along a good spel with the stuf in the pak and wudcok seson cuming on. I've saw a mess of flite wudcok. Don't send Tammy agen without you know it's safe and send him after midnite. I won't be so far away he can't get to me and bak. Watch Calhan. He's sharp.

Your dad

P.S. I got the kyote.

Ted heaved a mighty sigh of thanksgiving. Al had the pack's contents and there were three blankets missing from the camp. For the first time, the dark clouds that surged around the boy revealed their silver lining. Al was still a fugitive, but he had enough to eat and he was sleeping under blankets. It seemed a great deal.

Ted read the note again and smiled over it. A hunted outlaw, Al was still abiding by the principles in which he believed. He might have been justified in killing game for food, but the reference to woodcock season indicated that he had done no such thing. Possibly--Ted remembered that he had his coyote traps--he had caught a bobcat or so. The season was never closed on bobcats and, if one could overcome natural squeamishness, they were really delicious eating. Ted lifted the stove lid, put the note within, applied a lighted match, waited until the paper burned to ashes, then used the lid lifter to pound the ashes to dust.

He looked fondly at Tammie, who had been nowise derelict. Ordered to go to Al, he had done exactly that and it was none of Tammie's doing if Al had been within a "sniff" of his own back door.

Ted said cheerfully, "Guess we'll go home, Tammie. But we'll come back for the pack tonight, Mr. Callahan, or some of his friends, probably will be patroling here and there."

That night there were three more letters, two from deer hunters who wanted the camp the usual first two weeks of the season and one from a grouse hunter who wanted the first week. Ted advised them of the camp's present status, put his letters in the mailbox and lifted the red flag to let the carrier know there was mail to pick up. The next night there were five letters, two of which had been sent airmail. Ted opened the first.

Dear Mr. Harkness: Your letter intrigued us no end. We haven't seen a good flight of woodcock for ten years and didn't think there was any such thing any more. Should they come in, by all means call me and reverse the charges. My business phone is TR 5-4397; my home is LA 2-0489. Call either place and we'll start an hour afterwards. There'll be seven of us, and I enclose a ten-dollar check as deposit.

Cordially, George Beaulieu

The second airmail letter read:

Bless you, Ted! You've started me dreaming of Damon and/or Pythias. One or the other will do, but nothing else, please! By your own invitation, you're stuck with me for the full twenty-one days. I'll see you the day before the season opens.

Gratefully, John L. Wilson

There was a check for a hundred dollars enclosed and almost grimly Ted folded both checks in his wallet. He'd have to spend some money for food, but not a great deal. The freezer was almost full and much of the garden remained to be harvested. He stared at the far wall.

He had not planned it this way. He had looked forward to a happy venture, to enjoying and helping his guests, and if he made money in so doing, that would be fine. Had things turned out as he'd planned, there was already enough money in sight to build and equip another camp. But that was not to be. Al had to come out of the Mahela some time. When he did, they were in for a fight, and money would be a powerful weapon in that all-out battle. They must win, and anything else must be secondary.

The other three letters were from deer hunters who wanted the camp the first two weeks of the season.

Ted devoted the next fortnight to harvesting the garden. He dug the potatoes, emptied them in the cellar bin and stacked squash and pumpkins beside them. Bunches of carrots and turnips were stored in another bin, and shelled beans were put in sacks.

Almost every mail brought more letters, and two out of three were from deer hunters. Ted rented his camp for the season's third week. Maybe nobody could make a living from deer hunters alone, but anybody who had enough camps, perhaps ten or twelve, could certainly earn a decent sum of money from just deer hunters.

The Mahela changed its green summer dress for autumn's gaudy raiment and the frosts came. Woodcock continued to drift in, and two days before the season opened, they arrived in force. Where there had been one, there were thirty, and still they came. Ted drove into Lorton and called from the drugstore.

"Mr. Beaulieu?"

"Yes?"

"This is Ted Harkness, Mr. Beaulieu. The woodcock are in."

"A big flight?"

"The biggest in years."

"We'll be there tomorrow," George Beaulieu said happily. "Hold the camp for us!"

"I'll do that, and anybody in Lorton can tell you where to find me."

"Thanks for calling. We'll be seeing you."

8

TROUBLE FOR NELS

In the beech forest, just beyond Tumbling Run, a buck so young that budding antlers did little more than part the coarse hair on its head stamped a front hoof and snorted. Old enough to have a vast admiration for himself and his own powers, but too young to have any sense, the little buck snorted again and tried to sound as ferocious as possible. Nosing about for any apples that might remain under the trees near Ted's camp, he had stood his ground gallantly when Ted and Tammie approached.

Not ten minutes before their arrival, he'd chased a rabbit away from the trees and he was so impressed by that feat that he thought he could chase anything. But when Ted and Tammie refused to run, he'd trotted into the forest to do his threatening from a safer place. He snorted again, more hopefully than angrily, and when he did not regain possession of the apple trees, he looked sad. Ted grinned at him.

"Junior's almost decided he can't bluff us, Tammie. Poor little guy! He'd just about convinced himself that he's a real ripsnorter of a buck. Oh, well, it's a hard world for everybody."

Ted continued to string clotheslines between the apple trees. He pulled them tight, tested their tension with an experimental finger and turned thoughtfully back to the camp. It might be a hard world for adolescent bucks, but if it weren't for the fact that his father was still laying out in the Mahela, right now it would be a pretty good one for Ted.

True to his promise, George Beaulieu and his six companions had arrived the day before woodcock season opened. In his mid-fifties, Beaulieu was branch manager for an insurance company. Of the six men with him, only twenty-six-year-old George Junior, an insurance salesman who thought his father was the greatest man in the world and who wanted nothing more than to follow in his footsteps, had been less than middle-aged. The other five were a filling station owner, a dentist, a toolmaker, an electrical appliance dealer and a printer. Their party had been complemented by two dogs, an English setter and a springer spaniel.

There had been nothing sensational about any of them, including the dogs. Except for George Beaulieu, his son and the printer, none of the men had been even fair hunters. The three, far and away the best of the seven gunners, had averaged three shots for every woodcock brought down. The worst gunner, the electrical appliance dealer, who appropriately enough was named Joseph Watt, had fired at least fifteen times for every woodcock he put in his pocket. Yet Ted felt that the happy man had lived through an uplifting and a near-sensational experience.

Although unpretentious, his guests had definitely not been meek or demure. Whoever missed an easy shot, which practically all of them did at least twice a day, was needled mercilessly by the others. Not one among them, under the best of conditions, could have made even a meager living as a professional hunter. Yet they represented the best type of present-day game seekers.

They had come to shoot woodcock and they would have been disappointed not to shoot some. But they did not pursue their quarry with the calculating coldness of a Smoky Delbert or, for that matter, with the intense concentration of an Al Harkness, when Al was after a pelt he wanted. They were out for fun and they had fun, and although game mattered, meat did not. There were so many woodcock that everybody, even Joseph Watt, got some. But considering the shells they shot, the camp rental, food, transportation and licenses, their game probably cost them at least fifteen dollars a pound!

After the first week ended and there seemed to be more woodcock than ever--the flight was still coming in--they had decided that another ten years might pass before they saw this again and stayed the second week. They'd left only this morning, promising to be back next year if there was another flight of woodcock, or for grouse if there was not.

Ted hummed as he started toward the camp. The Beaulieu party had been wonderful guests and certainly they were welcome back. If the Mahela was good for them, they were just as good for the Mahela.

Ted gathered up as much bedding as he could carry. He'd been a little worried about it because he'd provided neither sheets nor pillowcases. But lack of them hadn't seemed to worry the Beaulieu party in the slightest. Most people who hunted all day were too tired by night to care whether their beds were formal, or anything except comfortable. Next year--always supposing his father and he still had the camp, Ted thought that they would have to provide linens, too. Summer campers spent more time in camp than hunters did, and they were apt to be more particular.

Ted hung the blankets and quilts on the lines he had strung and pinned them securely. If they aired all day long, they'd be fresh by night. The grouse hunters--Ted had corresponded with an Arthur Beamish--were due some time after supper and there would be ten in the party.

The small buck, that had been lurking hopefully near and awaiting a chance to come back, snorted his astonishment when the bedding began to blow in the wind and ran away as fast as he could. The little fellow thought he was fully capable of dealing with anything natural, but wind-blown bedclothes smacked of the supernatural. Ted lost himself in thought.

The camp was completely rented, except for the third week of small game season, and it would return a little more than four hundred dollars in rent. Added to that was the money he'd certainly get from John Wilson, and the total was more than it had cost to build and furnish the camp. Some of it would have to go for food and John Wilson probably would expect good things to eat, but he'd get them. Ted had six woodcock, a gourmet's delight, in the freezer, and he would add the legal two days' possession limit of six grouse. He'd need more than that, but even after buying whatever was necessary, he'd still have enough money to put up a hard legal battle for Al when his father finally had to surrender. There would be at least twice as much money as Ted had told John McLean he would have. If more was needed, and it probably would be, he'd sell the camp.

Ted gathered up the dirty towels and wash and dish cloths, put them in a bushel basket brought along for that purpose and replaced them with fresh, clean laundry. The Beaulieu party, another proof of their sportsmanship, had left the camp in fine shape, with the dishes washed and stacked where they belonged and the floor clean. Tammie came in the open door and Ted grinned at him.

"Guess we can go, Tammie, and you'd better rest a bit. You're going into the hills tonight."

Tammie wagged an agreeable tail and trotted out to the pickup with his master; Ted eased the little truck onto the road.

He'd sent Tammie, with a load of food, the night before the Beaulieu party arrived and everything had gone without a hitch. Tammie had left shortly after midnight and returned two and a half hours later. The pack was empty save for the note Al had thrust in it.

Dear Ted: Tammy cum al rite. This works good, huh? I got enuf to last me anyhow 2 weeks mor. Don't send Tammy befor. The les you got to send him, the beter it is. Good luk and thanks.

Your dad

Ted sighed wearily. He'd hoped that, with passing time, the situation would clear itself or be cleared. If anything, it was worse.

Definitely out of danger, but due for a long convalescence in the Lorton hospital, Smoky Delbert had told everything. Starting from the Fordham Road, he had gone up Coon Valley with the intention of finding good places to set fox traps. He'd carried his rifle because there was always a chance of seeing a fox or bobcat, predators upon which there was a bounty. He'd known Al Harkness was ahead of him, for Al's distinctive boot marks had been left in the soft place where the spring overflowed the Coon Valley trail. Nearing the three sycamores, and without any warning at all, Al had risen from behind Glory Rock and shot.

It was a simple, straightforward story and one that bore out other known facts. By his own admission, Al had been in Coon Valley the same day. He did wear boots with soles of his own design, and therefore they were distinctive. Smoky Delbert, a woodsman of vast experience, might very well have seen these tracks, in spite of the fact that Loring Blade had missed them. Ted sighed again.

The papers had printed Smoky's story and most were sympathetic. There had even been a couple of resounding editorials demanding that Al be brought in--regardless of the cost and effort that might be expended to apprehend him--and face the justice he so richly deserved. But editors were not the only ones who had swung to Smoky's side.

Time, John McLean had asserted, made people forget. Only, in this instance, it had made too many of them forget that Smoky Delbert was a vicious poacher. He had, instead, become the wronged innocent, and when Ted went into Lorton now there were those who averted their faces when they passed him or even crossed to the other side of the street to avoid meeting him at all.

Carl Thornton had become something of a local hero. Nobody knew how the news had leaked out, but everyone knew that Crestwood's owner was paying all of Smoky's extensive hospital bills. That puzzled Ted, for Thornton had never seemed the type to care about anyone's welfare save his own. But he would do anything that worked to his own advantage, and perhaps he thought it worth his while, at the price of Smoky's hospital expenses, to have Lorton solidly behind him. There could be no doubt that Lorton was there.

"Cut it out!" Ted urged himself. "You don't like Thornton, but give him credit, if credit's due."

Ted swung up the Harkness drive and parked. While Tammie went off on an inspection tour to assure himself that everything was as it should be, the boy took the basket of laundry inside. He grimaced. Modern in some respects, Al had by no means accepted the streamlined age as an unmixed blessing. He'd bought a freezer and refrigerator because their advantages were obvious. But he scorned washing machines and was sure that, though clothes emerging from one might look clean, they couldn't possibly be as pure as those that were washed on a scrub-board.

Ted put the washtub on its stand, filled it with hot water, added soap and went to scrubbing. He rinsed the laundry, ran it through a hand wringer and hung it on a line stretched behind the house.

An hour before sundown, he went back to camp to replace the bedding and wind his clotheslines on a spool. He got his own supper, fed Tammie, washed the dishes and had just finished putting them where they belonged when the collie whined a warning. A car, followed by a second, came up the drive and, a moment later, there was an unnecessarily loud knock on the door.

Ted opened it to confront a rather plump man, who was probably in his mid-thirties. He was dressed in a gaudy wool shirt, hunting pants, ten-inch lace boots, and around his middle was belted a hunting knife almost long enough to be a small sword. His black hair was a little wild and so were his eyes, but his smile was pleasant and his outstretched hand was quite steady.

"Ted?"

"That's right."

"I'm Beamish," the other stated, a little thickly. "B'-gosh, we found you!"

"You certainly did!"

Ted smiled faintly. Hunters going into camp often did a little anticipatory celebrating and evidently Arthur Beamish had been overdoing it.

"This the camp?" he asked.

"No, the camp's farther up the road."

"Good!" Arthur Beamish said happily. "You go in the woods, you go in the woods! More woods, the better! That's what I always say! What do you always say?"

"Same thing." Ted grinned. "If you want to follow me, I'll show you the way up there."

"Ride with ya," Beamish declared. "Tha's just what I'll do."

"You're welcome."

Ordering Tammie to stay in the house, Ted guided his exuberant guest to the pickup and opened the door for him. Arthur Beamish bellowed, "Follow us, men! Ah, wilderness!"

He sat companionably close and draped a friendly arm across Ted's shoulder. "Lots of grouse?"

"Plenty. You like grouse hunting, eh?"

"Best darn' game there is!" Beamish exploded. "I rather get me one grouse than forty-nine deer! And I get 'em, too!"

"You do?"

"Didn't you ever hear about me?"

"I--" Ted hesitated. Obviously, he was supposed to know his guest. But he didn't, yet to say the wrong thing might mean to give offense, "Uh--aren't you--?"

"Tha's right!" Beamish said happily. "I'm Beamish, the trapshooter! Traps in summer, grouse in season! Br-br-br! Up they go! Bang! Down they come! Every time!"

Ted twisted uneasily. Three grouse was the daily bag limit. Nobody should need, or take, more than that. He calmed himself. As yet, nobody had taken more. He pulled in to the camp and stopped.

"Fine camp!" enthused Beamish, who could see only that part of it which was illuminated by the pickup's lights. "Best I ever did see! Great lil' camp!"

The other two cars stopped and the rest of the hunters got out. Even in the night, there was that about them which at once set them apart from the quiet Beaulieu party. They were younger, more restless, and they fairly oozed that nervous sparkle which so often marks young executives. They were also sensible--only Arthur Beamish and one other had been over-indulging themselves. Definitely, the drivers of the two cars were in full possession of all their faculties.

The three beautiful setters that had ridden in a pen in one of the car's trunks were as smartly turned out as the men. Obviously, they were hunting dogs, the best money could buy. But this crowd had money to spend.

"Come 'round!" Arthur Beamish bellowed. "Wan'sha to meet Ted!"

One by one, Ted was introduced to the rest of the party and as he met them, he liked them. If they were young and restless, they were also competent and talented and they had an air of belonging here in the wilderness. Probably this was not the first camp they'd ever seen.

"Let's go in," Ted suggested.

Arthur Beamish bubbled, "You get the best ideas!"

Ted let the men into the camp, watched closely as they inspected it and knew definitely that they'd been in such places before. Their glances were quick but all encompassing.

One of them, and although Ted did not remember all the names, he thought this one was Tom Strickland, turned with a smile. "This will do very well. Do you know where we can get a wet nurse?"

"A what?"

Strickland grinned, "A sort of combination cook, fire-builder, sweeper-upper, dishwasher; we'll want to spend our time hunting."

"I think I can find somebody. Is nine dollars a day all right?"

"Sure. Can you send him up tomorrow?"

"Send him tonight!" somebody yelled.

Strickland said scathingly, "I wouldn't inflict you wild hyenas on anyone tonight. I'll cook breakfast."

"Oh, my aching ptomaine!"

Ted grinned. "I'm sure I can send somebody tomorrow. Everything's O.K., eh?"

"Right as rain."

Ted got grimly back into the pickup and started down the road. Nine dollars a day for fourteen days meant another hundred and twenty-six dollars that probably would be sorely needed when Al had his inevitable day in court, but Ted hadn't wanted to accept the job tonight because, somehow, doing so would have seemed grasping. But he'd swallow his pride and take it tomorrow. He must think of nothing except clearing his father's name.

Back at the house, Ted loaded Tammie's pack very carefully. Laying out in the Mahela, Al would not expect and did not need luxuries. Ted packed cornmeal and oatmeal, desiccated soup, a parcel of dried apricots, powdered milk, sugar, tea, flour. But when everything else was in, there was room for a parcel of frozen pork chops. Ted added them and a note.

Dad: Everything's fine. There are grouse hunters in camp now and there will be bear hunters next. Take care of yourself and let me know what you need.

Love, Ted

At five minutes past midnight, he strapped the pack on Tammie, took him to the back door and let him out. Just as he did, there was an almost timid knock on the front door. He jumped nervously.

"Go to Al!" he urged. "Take it to Al, Tammie! And please run!"

He shut the back door and perspiration broke on his brow as he stood anxiously near it. Callahan, whose suspicions should have been effectively lulled, was not lulled at all. He'd merely bided his time, struck at the right hour and Ted was trapped.

He crossed the floor on shaky legs and opened the front door to come face to face with Nels Anderson. Ted gasped.

His one-time working partner was pale and looked ill. Weariness had left its impression in great blue patches beneath both eyes, but it was not entirely physical weariness. Nels had suffered some terrible shock--and in his extremity he had come to his friend.

"Nels! What's wrong?"

"I," Nels forced the shadow of his former smile, "am all right."

"Come on in!"

"I--I do not want to bother you. But I saw your light and--"

"What on earth have you been doing?"

"Walkin'. Yoost walkin'."