Chapter II.

       The Mountain Cave

       Table of Contents

      Was I frightened at what I had glimpsed?

      I was so badly scared that the beating of my heart seemed to be up in my throat and choking me! The shadowy thing I had seen was a man! And no friend, else he would not have been sneaking away from my approach. And swiftly though he had gone, I had not heard the slightest sound of his footsteps. He must, then, be an Apache, I thought. One of those renegades who, despite the vigilance of the soldiers, now and then somehow get possession of a gun and cartridges and sneak off upon a war trail of their own.

      I did not know what to do. But after standing for a long time listening and staring about in the deepening night, I at last made a run for the cabin, got safely inside, and slammed shut the door and barred it. Then it suddenly dawned upon me that I must not light the lamp. I could curtain the windows with dishcloths, but there were all those yawning spaces between the logs that I could not cover, through which an enemy could see me and shoot me the instant that I struck a light. I sat upon the bunk and took off my shoes, and then, rifle in hand, stole from wall to wall of the cabin and stared out through the unchinked spaces; and for all the good that did, might as well have stuck my head into a sack. The night was intensely dark; I could not even see the pile of split white-spruce stovewood less than ten feet from the south wall!

      But, presently, I heard something; like the cautious steps of some one to the east of the cabin. Just such sounds as I imagined moccasined feet would make upon the stony ground. They had been faint at first; they became fainter and soon ceased. I stood against the wall a long time. My legs began to tremble. I felt my way back to the bunk and sat upon it, again listening, open-mouthed, for those shuffling, soft, padding steps. I must have sat there for hours. I was hungry, but did not dare risk the noise I should make in opening the iron food chest for a handful of crackers and some cheese. And how I wished that I was down home, safe in my bed! This was my first night away from my people; and here I was, eleven miles from them, and in danger. How sorry I was for myself! Several times I went sound asleep sitting straight up upon the bunk, and awoke with a start, and scolded myself, and said that I just would keep awake! Then the next I knew dawn had come, and I was lying flat upon my back, my rifle tightly gripped with both hands. I sprang up and looked out of the windows, and through the wall spaces, and saw nothing to alarm me. The daylight itself was heartening. I slowly unbarred the door and stepped out upon the little porch. About twenty feet away a porcupine was descending a small spruce that he had partly denuded of its bark. When he left the trunk and waddled off down the slope, he made just the shuffling noise that I had heard in the night: ‘‘You are the Apache that was prowling around here, you scalper of trees!” I yelled to him, and the sound of my voice was good in my ears. And seizing a stick I took after him and knocked him in the head. All Forest Service men are required to kill porcupines, for in the course of a year they do a great deal of damage to the forest.

      I went back to the cabin, built a fire in the little stove, and washed face and hands. Then, as I sliced some bacon, opened a can of corn, and made some biscuits, it suddenly came to me that, though the porcupine had probably made the noise I had heard in the night, he certainly was not the shadowy figure I had seen skurrying into the shelter of the spruces! All my fears of the night were back in me with a rush. The temptation to seize my rifle and strike out on the run down the mountain for home was almost irresistible. Then I said to myself: “I've just got to stay here! I've got to stick to this job no matter what happens to me! My Uncle Cleve is n’t running from those terrible Huns in France, and I shall not run from a sneaking Apache!”

      I rushed my cooking and bolted my breakfast, for I had until nine o’clock to report from the lookout, up on top, and I was going to make those cabin walls proof against the eyes of any prowlers of the night. I collected a number of lengths of small, dead spruces, quartered them, and drove them into the wall spaces from the inside. But fast though I worked, at eight-thirty I had chinked but three of the walls. I dropped the axe, seized my rifle, locked the cabin door, and hurried up the trail to the summit.

      As soon as I arrived at the lookout I swept the whole forest as far as I could see with the field-glasses that had been furnished me, and at nine o’clock reported in that no fire was to be seen from Mount Thomas. Then, for a time, I listened to other lookouts making similar reports, some of them away down in the Blue Range, at the south end of the forest. Happening, then, to look into the canyon of Black River, a half-mile or more almost straight down from me, I thought that I saw a faint haze of smoke. But even with the glasses I could not be sure that my eyes had not deceived me. The sun had not yet reached that part of the canyon and it was in deep shadow, made all the darker by the heavy growth of spruce that shrouded its steep sides and bottom. I marked the particular spot in it, where I thought that I had seen the smoke, by a narrow strip of grassland that bordered the stream. Again and again in the course of the morning I looked down at the place, failed to see the least sign of smoke, and almost convinced myself that I had been mistaken in the first instance. I had heard our mountain men say that this canyon of Black River was the worst one in the whole range; that in their roundups it was the one place they passed, for it was so rough that neither cattle nor horses could ascend it. Since it was so inaccessible, and as there had been no electric storm to start a fire in it, I argued that if I had seen anything, it had been mist rising from the stream in the cool of the morning.

      In my haste to leave the cabin, I had neglected to bring a lunch. And now, when noon came, I was very hungry. By the rules of the Service, I was privileged to take an hour off — from twelve until one — for lunch. But hungry though I was, I just would not go back to the cabin until I had to. That flitting figure I had glimpsed in the dusk haunted me. Up here on top I was perfectly safe: no one could come anywhere near my lookout station if I was minded to forbid his advance.

      I concluded to use my noon hour in exploring the whole length of the summit of my mountain, and set off along its crest, from which I could see well down both slopes. The one on the west side is bare for a long way down, but on the east side a few scattering groups of stunted spruces stand within a hundred yards of the top. Not a treelet of them has a limb nor even the stub of a limb upon the west side of its trunk, proving how fierce and constant are the west winds except in the three months of sunimer.

      All the way from the rough rock uplift at the southeast end of the mountain, and well beyond its saddle, the footing is of coarsely decomposed rock; then, for the last several hundred yards to the northwest end of the summit, the formation is of slabs of rock of varying size. I was passing over the first of these when I noticed, some fifty yards down to the west, a pile of the slabs in the shape of a half-circle — bowing from me — and several feet in height. I knew at once that man, not an earthquake, had made that pile, and hurried down to it. I nearly fell into a deep, narrow rift in the rock, from around which the slabs forming the half-circle had been heaved, and by Indians, in the long ago, as was proved by quantities of broken, brightly painted pottery scattered all around the place. The length of the fault in the rock, about six