Tales of Trail and Town

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"No," said the master, "I came here first. There are two other boys
missing,--Providence Smith and Julian Fleming. Did either of them"--

But Mrs. Tribbs had interrupted him with a gesture of impatient relief.
"Oh, that's all, is it? Playin' hookey together, in course. 'Scuse me,
I must go back to my bakin'." She turned away, but stopped suddenly,
touched, as the master fondly believed, by some tardy maternal
solicitude. But she only said: "When he DOES come back, you just give
him a whalin', will ye?" and vanished into her kitchen.

The master rode away, half ashamed of his foolish concern for the
derelicts. But he determined to try Smith's father, who owned a small
rancho lower down on a spur of the same ridge. But the spur was really
nearer Hemlock Hill, and could have been reached more directly by a road
from there. He, however, kept along the ridge, and after half an hour's
ride was convinced that Jackson Tribbs could have communicated with
Provy Smith without coming nearer Hemlock Hill, and this revived his
former belief that they were together. He found the paternal Smith
engaged in hoeing potatoes in a stony field. The look of languid
curiosity with which he had regarded the approach of the master changed
to one of equally languid aggression as he learned the object of his
visit.

"Wot are ye comin' to ME for? I ain't runnin' your school," he said
slowly and aggressively. "I started Providence all right for it mornin'
afore last, since when I never set eyes on him. That lets ME out. My
business, young feller, is lookin' arter the ranch. Yours, I reckon, is
lookin' arter your scholars."

"I thought it my business to tell you your son was absent from school,"
said the master coldly, turning away. "If you are satisfied, I have
nothing more to say." Nevertheless, for the moment he was so startled
by this remarkable theory of his own responsibility in the case that
he quite accepted the father's callousness,--or rather it seemed to him
that his unfortunate charges more than ever needed his protection. There
was still the chance of his hearing some news from Julian Fleming's
father; he lived at some distance, in the valley on the opposite side
of Hemlock Hill; and thither the master made his way. Luckily he had not
gone far before he met Mr. Fleming, who was a teamster, en route. Like
the fathers of the other truants, he was also engaged in his vocation.
But, unlike the others, Fleming senior was jovial and talkative. He
pulled up his long team promptly, received the master's news with amused
interest, and an invitation to spirituous refreshment from a demijohn in
his wagon.

"Me and the ole woman kind o' spekilated that Jule might hev been over
with Aunt Marthy; but don't you worry, Mr. Schoolmaster. They're limbs,
every one o' them, but they'll fetch up somewhere, all square! Just
you put two fingers o' that corn juice inside ye, and let 'em slide. Ye
didn't hear what the 'lekshun news was when ye was at Smith's, did ye?"

The master had not inquired. He confessed he had been worried about the
boys. He had even thought that Julian might have met with an accident.

Mr. Fleming wiped his mouth, with a humorous affectation of concern.
"Met with an ACCIDENT? Yes, I reckon not ONE accident, but TWO of 'em.
These yer accidents Jule's met with had two legs, and were mighty lively
accidents, you bet, and took him off with 'em; or mebbe they had four
legs, and he's huntin' 'em yet. Accidents! Now I never thought o' that!
Well, when you come across him and THEM ACCIDENTS, you just whale 'em,
all three! And ye won't take another drink? Well, so long, then! Gee
up!" He rolled away, with a laugh, in the heavy dust kicked up by his
plunging mules, and the master made his way back to the schoolhouse. His
quest for that day was ended.

But the next morning he was both astounded and relieved, at the
assembling of school, to find the three truants back in their places.
His urgent questioning of them brought only the one and same response
from each: "Got lost on the ridge." He further gathered that they had
slept out for two nights, and were together all the time, but nothing
further, and no details were given. The master was puzzled. They
evidently expected punishment; that was no doubt also the wish of their
parents; but if their story was true, it was a serious question if he
ought to inflict it. There was no means of testing their statement;
there was equally none by which he could controvert it. It was evident
that the whole school accepted it without doubt; whether they were in
possession of details gained from the truants themselves which they
had withheld from him, or whether from some larger complicity with the
culprits, he could not say. He told them gravely that he should withhold
equally their punishment and their pardon until he could satisfy himself
of their veracity, and that there had been no premeditation in their
act. They seemed relieved, but here, again, he could not tell whether
it sprang from confidence in their own integrity or merely from youthful
hopefulness that delayed retribution never arrived!

It was a month before their secret was fully disclosed. It was slowly
evolved from corroborating circumstances, but always with a shy
reluctance from the boys themselves, and a surprise that any one should
think it of importance. It was gathered partly from details picked up at
recess or on the playground, from the voluntary testimony of teamsters
and packers, from a record in the county newspaper, but always shaping
itself into a consecutive and harmonious narrative.

It was a story so replete with marvelous escape and adventure that the
master hesitated to accept it in its entirety until after it had
long become a familiar history, and was even forgotten by the actors
themselves. And even now he transcribes it more from the circumstances
that surrounded it than from a hope that the story will be believed.


WHAT HAPPENED

Master Provy Smith had started out that eventful morning with the
intention of fighting Master Jackson Tribbs for the "Kingship" of
Table Ridge--a trifling territory of ten leagues square--Tribbs having
infringed on his boundaries and claimed absolute sovereignty over
the whole mountain range. Julian Fleming was present as referee and
bottle-holder. The battle ground selected was the highest part of the
ridge. The hour was six o'clock, which would allow them time to reach
school before its opening, with all traces of their conflict removed.
The air was crisp and cold,--a trifle colder than usual,--and there was
a singular thickening of the sun's rays on the ridge, which made the
distant peaks indistinct and ghostlike. However, the two combatants
stripped "to the buff," and Fleming patronizingly took position at the
"corner," leaning upon a rifle, which, by reason of his superior years,
and the wilderness he was obliged to traverse in going to school, his
father had lent him to carry. It was that day a providential weapon.

Suddenly, Fleming uttered the word, "Sho!" The two combatants paused in
their first "squaring off" to see, to their surprise, that their referee
had faced round, with his gun in his hand, and was staring in another
direction.

"B'ar!" shouted the three voices together. A huge bear, followed by its
cubs, was seen stumbling awkwardly away to the right, making for the
timber below. In an instant the boys had hurried into their jackets
again, and the glory of fight was forgotten in the fever of the chase.
Why should they pound each other when there was something to really
KILL? They started in instant pursuit, Julian leading.

But the wind was now keen and bitter in their faces, and that peculiar
thickening of the air which they had noticed had become first a dark
blue and then a whitening pall, in which the bear was lost. They still
kept on. Suddenly Julian felt himself struck between the eyes by what
seemed a snowball, and his companions were as quickly spattered by gouts
of monstrous clinging snowflakes. Others as quickly followed--it was
not snowing, it was snowballing. They at first laughed, affecting
to retaliate with these whirling, flying masses shaken like clinging
feathers from a pillow; but in a few seconds they were covered from head
to foot by snow, their limbs impeded or pinioned against them by its
weight, their breath gone. They stopped blindly, breathlessly. Then,
with a common instinct, they turned back. But the next moment they heard
Julian cry, "Look out!" Coming towards them out of the storm was
the bear, who had evidently turned back by the same instinct. An
ungovernable instinct seized the younger boys, and they fled. But Julian
stopped with leveled rifle. The bear stopped too, with sullen, staring
eyes. But the eyes that glanced along the rifle were young, true, and
steady. Julian fired. The hot smoke was swept back by the gale into his
face, but the bear turned and disappeared in the storm again. Julian ran
on to where his companions had halted at the report, a little ashamed of
their cowardice. "Keep on that way!" he shouted hoarsely. "No use tryin'
to go where the b'ar couldn't. Keep on!"

"Keep on--whar? There ain't no trail--no nuthin'!" said Jackson
querulously, to hold down a rising fear. It was true. The trail had long
since disappeared; even their footprints of a moment before were filled
up by the piling snow; they were isolated in this stony upland, high in
air, without a rock or tree to guide them across its vast white level.
They were bitterly cold and benumbed. The stimulus of the storm and
chase had passed, but Julian kept driving them before him, himself
driven along by the furious blast, yet trying to keep some vague
course along the waste. So an hour passed. Then the wind seemed to have
changed, or else they had traveled in a circle--they knew not which, but
the snow was in their faces now. But, worst of all, the snow had changed
too; it no longer fell in huge blue flakes, but in millions of stinging
gray granules. Julian's face grew hard and his eyes bright. He knew it
was no longer a snow-squall, but a lasting storm. He stopped; the boys
tumbled against him. He looked at them with a strange smile.

"Hev you two made up?" he said.

"No--o!"

"Make up, then."

"What?"

"Shake hands."

They clasped each other's red, benumbed fingers and laughed, albeit a
little frightened at Julian. "Go on!" he said, curtly.

They went on dazedly, stupidly, for another hour.

Suddenly Provy Smith's keen eyes sparkled. He pointed to a singular
irregular mound of snow before them, plainly seen above the dreary
level. Julian ran to it with a cry, and began wildly digging. "I knew I
hit him," he cried, as he brushed the snow from a huge and hairy leg.
It was the bear--dead, but not yet cold. He had succumbed with his huge
back to the blast, the snow piling a bulwark behind him, where it had
slowly roofed him in. The half-frozen lads threw themselves fearlessly
against his furry coat and crept between his legs, nestling themselves
beneath his still warm body with screams of joy. The snow they had
thrown back increased the bulwark, and drifting over it, in a few
moments inclosed them in a thin shell of snow. Thoroughly exhausted,
after a few grunts of satisfaction, a deep sleep fell upon them, from
which they were awakened only by the pangs of hunger. Alas! their
dinners--the school dinners--had been left on the inglorious
battlefield. Nevertheless, they talked of eating the bear if it came to
the worst. They would have tried it even then, but they were far above
the belt of timber; they had matches--what boy has not?--but no WOOD.
Still, they were reassured, and even delighted, with this prospect, and
so fell asleep again, stewing with the dead bear in the half-impervious
snow, and woke up in the morning ravenous, yet to see the sun shining in
their faces through the melted snow, and for Jackson Tribbs to quickly
discover, four miles away as the crow flies, the cabin of his father
among the flaming sumacs.

They started up in the glare of the sun, which at first almost blinded
them. They then discovered that they were in a depression of the
table-land that sloped before them to a deep gully in the mountainside,
which again dropped into the canyon below. The trail they had lost, they
now remembered, must be near this edge. But it was still hidden, and
in seeking it there was danger of some fatal misstep in the treacherous
snow. Nevertheless, they sallied out bravely, although they would fain
have stopped to skin the bear, but Julian's mandate was peremptory. They
spread themselves along the ridge, at times scraping the loose snow away
in their search for the lost trail.

Suddenly they all slipped and fell, but rose again quickly, laughing.
Then they slipped and fell again, but this time with the startling
consciousness that it was not THEY who had slipped, but THE SNOW! As
they regained their feet they could plainly see now that a large crack
on the white field, some twenty feet in width, extended between them and
the carcass of the bear, showing the glistening rock below. Again
they were thrown down with a sharp shock. Jackson Tribbs, who had been
showing a strange excitement, suddenly gave a cry of warning. "Lie flat,
fellers! but keep a-crawlin' and jumpin'. We're goin' down a slide!" And
the next moment they were sliding and tossing, apparently with the whole
snow-field, down towards the gullied precipice.

What happened after this, and how long it lasted, they never knew.
For, hurried along with increasing momentum, but always mechanically
clutching at the snow, and bounding from it as they swept on, they
sometimes lost breath, and even consciousness. At times they were half
suffocated in rolling masses of drift, and again free and skimming over
its arrested surface, but always falling, as it seemed to them, almost
perpendicularly. In one of these shocks they seemed to be going through
a thicket of underbrush; but Provy Smith knew that they were the tops of
pine-trees. At last there was one shock longer and lasting, followed by
a deepening thunder below them. The avalanche had struck a ledge in the
mountain side, and precipitated its lower part into the valley.

Then everything was still, until Provy heard Julian's voice calling. He
answered, but there was no response from Tribbs. Had he gone over
into the valley? They set up a despairing shout! A voice--a smothered
one--that might be his, came apparently from the snow beneath them. They
shouted again; the voice, vague and hollow, responded, but it was now
surely his.

"Where are you?" screamed Provy.

"Down the chimbley."

There was a black square of adobe sticking out of the snow near them.
They ran to it. There was a hole. They peered down, but could see
nothing at first but a faint glimmer.

"Come down, fellows! It ain't far!" said Tribbs's voice.

"Wot yer got there?" asked Julian cautiously.

"Suthin' to eat."

That was enough. In another instant Julian and Provy went down the
chimney. What was a matter of fifteen feet after a thousand? Tribbs had
already lit a candle by which they could see that they were in the cabin
of some tunnel-man at work on the ridge. He had probably been in the
tunnel when the avalanche fell, and escaped, though his cabin was
buried. The three discoverers helped themselves to his larder. They
laughed and ate as at a picnic, played cards, pretended it was a
robber's cave, and finally, wrapping themselves in the miner's blankets,
slept soundly, knowing where they were, and confident also that they
could find the trail early the next morning. They did so, and without
going to their homes came directly to school--having been absent about
fifty hours. They were in high spirits, except for the thought
of approaching punishment, never dreaming to evade it by anything
miraculous in their adventures.


Such was briefly their story. Its truth was corroborated by the
discovery of the bear's carcass, by the testimony of the tunnel-man, who
found his larder mysteriously ransacked in his buried cabin, and, above
all, by the long white tongue that for many months hung from the ledge
into the valley. Nobody thought the lanky Julian a hero,--least of all
himself. Nobody suspected that Jackson Tribbs's treatment of a "slide"
had been gathered from experiments in his father's "runs"--and he was
glad they did not. The master's pardon obtained, the three truants cared
little for the opinion of Hemlock Hill. They knew THEMSELVES, that was
enough.