CHAPTER I

A CABIN ON THE CASCADA

Capped in snow, their flanks of felspar rock robed in glistening drifts, the Coronado Peaks swept to towering altitudes above the dark green of the forests. Keen, fresh, heady as wine, was the air in those high places, and each minute crevasse, each ridge, was etched clearly in the sparkling winter sunlight.

But there was no eye to see the glories outspread before these sister queens of the Rockies. The eagles which soared above them through the blue of summer had departed to lower altitudes with the first icy breath of winter, and even now were nesting in canyon crags, where as early as March their Spartan young would hatch. The grizzly of the Holy Ghost would not stir from his deep cave and still deeper lethargy for another month, and it was too far above timber line for the lobo and his followers to find food.

The sun was sinking rapidly. Over the ridges a sharp light wind whistled. But below in the forests there was a hush, deeper than the hush of summer, for now there was no scurrying about of small creatures, the hum of insect life was lacking, and even the trees slept.

Yet beneath the low branches of a cluster of fir trees a life-and-death struggle was going on. A large wolf, gaunt beneath a splendid, tawny coat, strove in silent agony, his lips twisted back from his white tusks, to free himself from the icy steel thing that had held him all day. He made not a sound to break the stillness. This was instinctive caution, for so dulled with pain had his hearing become that he did not even notice the approach of a human being.

On a ridge above the fir and spruce stand a figure had appeared, and now stood outlined against the turquoise sky and snowy peaks; a girl, dressed in furry woolens of white and green, snowshoes in hand. She looked across the rim of the world and in a moment, as though a master stage director had so managed, her figure was bathed in a rosy light that changed the glacier-like heights above to flame-colored damask.

The lobo gnawed with concentrated fury at his imprisoned foot. The girl had turned, poising a moment on the ridge before starting downward. A long blue shadow was cast before her. With a wrench the wolf tore away from the trap and without delay limped off on three feet, disappearing among the boles of pine and fir. In the jaws of the trap dangled a large bloody paw.

Now the sun sank behind the great peaks. It would be dark all too soon. The girl stooped quickly to fasten on her snowshoes, then made toward the darkening shelter of the spruce. A snowy ptarmigan, sole dweller on those arctic heights since the red fox had captured his mate, fluttered before her. Now she saw the gleam of the trap and the dark trickle of blood staining the snow. She clasped her hands and caught her breath with a gasp.

“Oh, oh! _Damn_, curse them! I knew it, I knew it!”

Kneeling down, the girl pulled at the trap’s trophy. The paw was caught fast. She tried to open the formidable jaws of the thing, but it was impossible. Only a steel bar wielded by a man’s strength could open it. She rose to her feet, tears springing, and started off rapidly down the mountain, making her way easily through the open forest and over meadows where within a few weeks she would be picking alpine flowers.

For half a mile the girl sped lightly over the snow, her snowshoes barely breaking the crust. Coming to a spot that was evidently familiar she cast about for a moment, then in the dimming light pounced upon another trap. It was cleverly concealed on the far side of a log and set with a frozen hare for bait. With her forest staff she struck the trap spring smartly. It clicked with an ugly snap which made her jump back. Then she came close and stooped over it. Yes, it was sprung all right.

“There,” said she softly to herself and to the forest, “there’ll be nothing more caught in _that_ trap.” A moment later she was again darting through the trees. The increasing darkness urged her to greater speed, but as she emerged from the gloom of the forest into a barren open space the air was once more filled with rosy light. The afterglow of the setting sun had commenced at the foot of the mountain and was slowly creeping upward. The world seemed to palpitate electrically with delicate colors, mauve, green, orchid, and the spotless snow reflected and radiated the light.

The girl sped along the white crest, avoiding those stretches where barren rock thrust forth. Her flying figure could scarcely have been seen against the snow, but now and again it was silhouetted against a background of somber pine, flashing from one point to another, scarf whipping out behind.

A quarter of a mile away, on a hog’s-back running parallel to but lower than the height which the girl was traveling, a man was scanning the far slopes through a field glass. The figure darted across the radius of his fixed gaze. With an exclamation he swept the slope until he caught the moving object again. For a moment only he focused on the flashing figure, for it disappeared over the crest and down toward the Santo Spirito canyon. The man rubbed his lens impatiently and looked again.

“Am I seeing things?” he grumbled, half amused. “A flying wraith of the mountains? Is it an ice maiden, or what?”

After all, who could it be, all alone, way up here in this wilderness? He’d inquire down below. Garen Shepherd, a young irrigation engineer, dug his spiked walking-stick into the treacherous surface and started down the trail—an hour or so, and even the prolonged afterglow, the amazing snow-light, would be gone. He had barely time to get back to the canyon of the Amarillo and Benty’s Lodge, where he was staying.

Below, in the canyon of the Santo Spirito, it lacked but three minutes of nightfall. When the dying afterglow reached a certain point the canyon would be suddenly submerged in darkness. Damon O’Neill, the forest ranger of the Coronado slopes, led his mare into the log stable back of his cabin. He blanketed her against a bitter night, so bitter that even the chatter of the Cascada, the noisy stream that flowed at the bottom of the canyon, was sealed up and silenced in a prison of ice. He buckled the straps deftly, patted the sorrel mare’s nose, and went out, closing the door carefully behind him.

As he stood on the cabin steps, peering nervously about and gazing where the upper mountain still glowed with light, the white figure for which he was looking emerged from the spruce. With a shout and a few sliding steps the girl reached the cabin just as the canyon was slipping into night.

“Dawn! You just made it. Where’ve you been so late?”

“Snowshoeing up on the divide, Dad. It was glorious. Don’t worry. I keep my eye on the time.” She was unstrapping her snowshoes, while her father gathered an armful of wood from the pile beside the door. She hung the shoes on a nail against the cabin, opened the door for her father, and followed him inside. In a moment squares of light twinkled out from the cabin windows. All about the little log house fir and pine rose like clustered cathedral spires. All the universe was dark except for the far stars—and for pairs of shining eyes that came and went through the forest.

Inside the cabin it was warm and close. Damon kicked the logs smoldering in the wide stone fireplace and threw on light fuel till they blazed high. In a small kitchen adjoining the one big living-room a little cook-stove gave out waves of warmth and the smell of supper, of spruce pitch and resin burning, of wet woolen things drying.

Dawn had taken off her outer wraps and her heavy boots. She slipped into felt house shoes and an old green sweater and skirt. She hurried about laying the table, filling the coffee pot, and handing her father a fresh towel after his noisy ablutions. The cabin was very pleasant, the main room long, and eighteen or twenty feet wide. Against the log walls hung heavy Indian rugs, but so snug and well built was Damon O’Neill’s cabin that the rugs never swelled with drafts, no matter how the wind might howl outside. The floors too were strewn with well-worn Navajo blankets. The furniture was rough, made by hand—before the fire a rustic seat, a long table with two benches at one side, some chairs, a chest, a wood box at the other, and five shelves of worn books.

Dawn turned the wick lower in the kerosene lamp and they sat down to supper; beans and chili, brown bread and steaming canned tomatoes, stewed apricots deluged with canned cream. They ate in silence. Damon O’Neill seemed tired, but Dawn appeared not to notice it, though she cast him covert glances. When he took his place before the fire she came as usual and sat on a little hassock at his knee. He drew her head down and puffed at his briar pipe in contentment, putting his stockinged feet on top of Shep, the white collie that slept before the fire.

“You tired, Damon?”

“No. Just sleepy from the cold. Thinkin’ about a young lady I know, too.” He patted the girl’s tousled auburn hair, his brows knitting. “What’s troublin’ you, Dawn? Lonesome? Well, I guess it’ll be school for you next year, Missie.”

“School! Who should I be lonesome for when I’ve got you for company! I tell you, I’m mad. Daddy, if you must know. You’d find it out anyway; you always do. I found another lobo’s paw in a trap this afternoon. Up on the divide. Not very far below timber line.”

Damon O’Neill shook his head in annoyance. He did not answer for a few moments.

“Too bad. Hate to see it. It’s all wrong,” he said. “But these predatory animal fellows’ve got their orders. It’s been a hard winter for the stockmen, and it’s going to be a harder summer down below. They think they had it bad last year, but,” he predicted, “it was nothing compared to what they’re going to get.”

“You think there’s going to be another drouth, Damon?” queried Dawn anxiously.

“Drouth? No. And that would never affect us up here to amount to anything. The forest will always draw its own water, Dawn, never forget that. But down below it’s different. Yet as a matter of fact,” he went on, “for the past seven years they’ve had more rainfall in this country than for a quarter century past.

“But there’ll be little grass just the same. Dust will fly in their pastures and the folks down below will be bleating, ‘Drouth, drouth.’ They’ve not sowed; so they can’t reap. They’re greedy, those fellows, but can’t see it. Overstocked, that’s the trouble; the range eaten up, and cattle dying for lack of food. And what with losses from the wolves and lions—” Damon puffed for a while silently.

“And so they’re killing off all the wild things that interfere with cattle or eat anything cattle might eat.” Dawn shuddered. “I’d feel awful if they ever caught the old Custer wolf. They’d never get him to take poison bait, would they, Damon? He’s too smart, isn’t he? He wouldn’t even let one of his pack touch poison bait, would he? If they were starving he wouldn’t take a chance.”

“I guess that’s right,” agreed her father. “He knows about traps too. Can smell one under a snow drift. He’s got almost human reasoning, that lobo.”

“I reckon that couldn’t have been his paw in the trap this afternoon then?”

“Not likely. And old Grizzly”—Damon leaned his head contentedly against the balsam pillow on the chair’s back—“that bear can spring a trap easier than a man. Hinray Dorsay claims he crept up on the bear one time. It was traveling along through light feathery snow and its foot struck the outer rim of a trap. It stopped, then dainty and cunning as if he’d thought it out, struck straight at the spring—”

“And?” Dawn prompted breathlessly, although she had heard the tale twenty times before from old Hinray himself.

“And sprung the teeth of the trap, click!”

The white collie whimpered and yelped softly in his sleep before the fire, wrapped in primeval visions of the chase. Outside a far, lone wail came up the canyon.

“But, Dad,” Dawn pressed, “can’t the Government see that the big animals wouldn’t kill hardly any stock if they had enough of the small game they’re used to?”

“The scheme of Nature is all upset,” Damon replied slowly, “and it’s going to take some time to straighten it out again. They never can get back to where they were. But that’s to be expected to a certain extent when man enters into the scheme.—It’s hard for us of the forest to stick up for the animals when they pile up such records as the Magdalena wolf’s a few summers ago. Remember?”

Dawn nodded. “Seventy-two sheep killed in two weeks. A hundred and fifty head of cattle in six months.”

“Yet we need the animals.” Damon shook his head. “We need them all here in the forest, and in the end only harm can come, I believe, from this business of killing off all one kind of creature and favoring another. They never learned a thing from the slaughter of the passenger pigeon, though when they’d wiped ’em clean out there came a hemlock blight that near destroyed hundreds of miles of forests.

“We kill off vultures, eagles, hawks and goshawks, cat, wolf, and lion, and leave the range free for rabbits to breed, and gophers, and prairie dogs to gnaw at roots, and all the grain-eatin’ creatures to fill their craws with seed for next year’s range.—That’s not going to better Nature’s scheme of things. No, sir, not yet awhile.” Damon O’Neill was off on his favorite topic, but Dawn remembered something that she had been saving up to tell him.

“Damon, what do you think? I’ve found the great pine of the Silverstake. No, let me tell you about it. You know that forty where McGuire’s homestead stops? Follow that ridge up about a mile to where it faults; it drops there maybe twenty-five feet. But the same vein shows up in a ledge that rises several hundred feet away.” Dawn had turned round on her hassock to face her father, her eyes round with excitement. “The ledge is broad, tilted—and the same stratum runs right through it, all right. It’s the mother vein, a part of the main mountain, I’m sure.”

“Vein of granite?” Damon reached out to tweak Dawn’s ear. She paid no heed, brushing him off.

“And it’s on a corner of the spot you always said was the old survey boundary of the Indian Reservation grant. The Little Falls of the Holy Ghost come out of the mountain not far above it and a little inside the line. And, Father, _I_ know where it comes from! I’ve seen the source!” She sat back solemnly to note the effect on her father.

Damon opened his eyes wide, but it was only to mock her. He laughed for the first time that week. “I might have known you’d get up to the source some day. Oh, last summer, was it? Why didn’t you tell me then? I guess there’s not half a dozen rangers, including myself, ever made the climb; and no one else except the Pueblo Indians from down below fifteen or twenty miles.

“But what has that to do with the Silverstake, and what makes you think you’ve located the old tree?”

“Because, Daddy, it was when I was standing by the pool where the water seems to gush out of the mountain that I first saw the white quartz of the faulted vein where it cropped up along the mountain side. I thought to myself then, ‘Here’s where the Indians must have stood and seen that vein beneath them, and then found silver.’ I was trying to fix it in my mind so that I could find that ledge with the quartz vein again when I came down. That was a hard job.” Damon nodded sympathetically. “But I couldn’t fix on any landmark.

“Then today it just came to me. I was standing on the end of that ridge where it faults, looking away over the mountain side, following the ridge along, because the snow sticking to it outlined it almost like the quartz had from above—though I hadn’t thought much about it since summer—and suddenly my eyes picked out a great tree, higher than all the rest, a pine among fir and hemlock. It stood out from the rest, it was so green. _They_ were covered with snow, but the top branches of this big pine didn’t hold any. It was an old tree, Damon. Could it be the Silverstake?”

“Might be,” replied Damon. “It’s been sixty, seventy-five years, since that pine was blazed, according to the old survey report. They say it bore a ‘witness’ of the old Indian grant, and of the location of an old claim on the Silverstake, beneath. There’s a record in the archives of the state that speaks of the Reservation witness too.

“But no one thought of it for fifty years. Then this business came up about the water rights of the Pueblos, and their Reservation boundaries. The attorney representing them was a damn clever scoundrel that was at the same time representin’ a political gang. This gang wanted to take over the Reservation for themselves, ‘throw it open for the use of the citizens of the state,’ meanin’ themselves. The attorney got a resurvey made. He got a measure introduced openin’ up the Indian Reservation to the public; but the new boundaries never were accepted, so fortunately that held them up for a while.

“It’s bein’ contested now. The Indians didn’t know about it at first, nor did the Forest Service. You remember, dear. They couldn’t find any witness stake or tree that marked the survey of the original grant. No trace. And how could they? It might have been struck by lightnin’, or blown over, or possibly cut down.

“Anyway, it’s always remained a mystery, that old blaze. It’s a pity, too”—Damon knocked the ashes out of his pipe preparatory to turning in for the night—“because I staked me a claim up there. You were a little thing not more than four or five years old. You never heard me speak of it? Well, no one else has either. Scotch enough in me for that!” Damon chuckled.

“Well, that’s it. Right inside the forty, in the National Forest Reservation, that being open to any one. I was looking to verify the Indians’ original grant, and I found me a silver mine. Much good is it likely to do me!

“But to this day I’d swear there was silver ore in that quartz. I got a fair sample out of the bed of the stream below the falls a way. Must have washed down from an outcropping of the vein above. But there was no use doing anything with it; I hadn’t the money or the time for prospecting, and then the uncertainty as to the claim came up, and I knew if I turned it over to the Pueblos it would likely be grabbed from them.

“I had the sample assayed and dreamed about it awhile—what we’d do when you got to be a big girl, with the proceeds from our mine.” He laughed a bit wryly. “I never told any one about it. Thought I might as well get the _right_ location myself. I couldn’t even find the outcropping on the exposed vein, though. I’m no miner. I’m a forester.”

“What would we do if we had a mine?” Dawn mused. “I’d get Whitey Shep a silver-studded collar, and Piñon a silver-mounted Cordoba leather saddle, and you that set of books you’ve never got and would have time to read.” Dawn laughed happily. “And we’d go to the Canadian woods, and to—”

“To bed, girl, to bed. It’s all of nine o’clock.” Damon rose abruptly and turned toward the door. He lifted his hand awkwardly to brush a sudden mist from his eyes. At times vague but nevertheless poignant misgivings about his girl wrung him.

“We didn’t mount the blue columbine tonight, Damon.” Dawn reminded him sleepily of her neglected studies. She still lolled before the fire, her cheeks flushed, her eyes dreamy, her strong young body relaxed in the heat. “I’ve three hundred specimens to mount. The alpine blossoms will soon be coming; it will be spring before we know it.”

“That’s right,” Damon agreed in a cheerful tone. He was fumbling on the shelf for his flashlight. “We got talking, and no lessons. To tell the truth I was tired. I was down at Benty’s cabin all day. One of the Government trappers was there. He’s going the rounds of his traps in the morning. And two of the engineers from the Irrigation Service. They’re up looking over water sources, calculating snow depth, and how much rainshed and snow water are likely to come down in the spring. The young chap went up the mountain alone.”

“Oh, Damon—” Dawn sat up quickly—“why didn’t he stay here? Did you tell him about me? Oh, Dad, it’s such fun to see some one once in a while! I like those Irrigation men. They understand about forests and trees.”

“She wants company,” Damon thought. “Trees and animals, they’ve had to take the place of folks to her.”

Out of the silence that surrounded the warm little cabin above the Cascada sounded a sharp, eerie yapping. It was answered by a far and mournful howling, a full-throated wolf song that rose and swelled. There was a moment of utter quiet, broken only by the ticking of Damon’s wrist watch. Then, just outside the cabin apparently, there came a sudden barking.

“The coyotes are growing worse every winter, spite of everything,” Damon said. “They’ve had to come up into the mountains for food. I’d better get out to Little Sorrel. I should have put a new fastening on that door. She might kick it down.” He took a burning stick from the fireplace, and stepped outside, pulling his fur cap over his ears, but not stopping for a blazer.

Dawn reluctantly pulled herself up from before the fire. She pushed aside a thick Indian rug curtaining a doorway which led into her little bedroom and looped it over a nail. In the cold room she undressed quickly, knelt in her nightgown and bare feet a moment, then opened her window a crack, fastened it by a stout iron hook, and sprang into bed.

Tomorrow she would look again for the Silverstake Pine. If her chestnut pony’s foot was healed she would ride him. Perhaps they would meet the engineer. In less than a minute she was asleep, deep in the long dreamless slumber of mountain nights.

Damon O’Neill sat long before the fire. He came in from securing the stable door, looked into his daughter’s room, saw that she was asleep, and sank into his chair again.

A fine girl. What a puny little thing she’d been when he brought her to the mountains. “Take her out west,” the clinic specialist had said. “Sunshine, altitude.” This was the way he’d found. Study, a year of practical training, and Damon O’Neill emerged a forest ranger.

Before he could get the baby up here into the sunshine she had been starving herself, clenching her tiny teeth on the spoon forced between her lips. It was the thought of all that, everything that had happened before and after his wife’s death, that had kept him up here. Two wretched years in the east, while his wife was dying of tuberculosis, had filled him with a hatred of cities. Poverty and want had left him with a deep-seated fear of ever being without money in the bank. The mountains had given him a life that was worth living, and security.

“I’ll stick by the mountain,” he swore. “It saved Dawn for me, and a forest full of trees is better company than most cities full o’ humans. Folks may say I’m not doing right by her, but she’s to go to school a year on the money in the bank, some of it, an’ the rest shall be saved for her.”

Damon reached deep into his pocket and pulled out a chunk of white quartz. A bright silvery vein ran through it; a pretty thing.

“By Golly, if Dawn ever _did_ find the Silverstake witness tree!”