heart. Only the crooning of the tree tops, the music of distant water splashing on glistening rocks, the breaking of dead sticks under the shod hoofs of the horse of him who entered the peaceful kingdom, and Steele filled his lungs and felt his blood stir pleasantly.
At last the boom of Thunder River was again in his ears and he was near his journey's end. This ridge, down which he rode slowly, was a long spur about which the river whirled in a six-mile-long horseshoe; he, in crossing it, was taking that short cut which lay between its source and the valley lands below the Corliss home. And yet, with at last the flash of turbulent water in his eyes, there lay the final three miles of broken lands before he came to his camp site at the Goblet. But already he counted the matter accomplished. The way, though uneven, was not to be mistaken. He had but to ride down to the river and turn upward along its course, keeping to the right bank when once he had forded it. In an hour or an hour and a quarter he would be unsaddling, then screwing the sections of his rod together as the first step toward supper.
Supper alone in the big timber! The prospect set him whistling like any boy off for a holiday. Potatoes from his scanty larder, jostling with onions and dried fruit deep within his roll of blankets, to be covered with coals and hot ashes at the rim of his fire, trout to sizzle and sputter and grow brown before exacting eyes, coffee to bubble and send forth its tempting aroma from a treasured, spoutless and very black coffee pot. And the coffee pot itself? It awaited him at Hell's Goblet!
"For I'll bet a man the shirt off my back," was Steele's contented thought, "that the stuff I cached there five years ago hasn't so much as come under the prying eyes of a chipmunk. By the Lord, I'm getting home!"
Bigger and bigger, ever taller and more darkly august grew the trees as he rode on down into the narrow valley, duskier the woodland gloom, sweeter the spring air sprinkled with woodsy incense. When an unseen deer went crashing through the brush and struck out, splashing mightily, through the river just beyond a thick clump of red willows, Steele nodded his head in acceptance of a sound he could have expected and looked forward to with an agreeable sense of the fitness of things. Only some eight or nine miles from the Corliss ranch house, little more than half that distance from the Little Giant where men sweated and thundered the silences with blasts of dynamite and black powder, here was the wilderness in untroubled supremacy. It seemed to him that here the forestland possessed a conscious entity, a sentient personality that it breathed as he himself breathed, taking its bright joy from the sense of living, that its mighty breath touched his hair and enfolded him in an ineffable caress.
"It's because I'm ripe for it," thought Steele.
He rode swiftly along the grass-grown trail where speed was possible, slowly when must be, eager now to come to his camp site before the true dusk of day's end merged with that which broods always over the forest. At a well remembered ford he pushed his horse across the stream, knowing that further up there could be no crossing because of steep, water gouged rocky banks. In a little meadow where a tributary stream and thick rich grass promised the best of pasturage he unsaddled, tethering his horse with a twenty-foot rope. The saddle with its pack thrown over his shoulder, he hastened on upstream on foot.
Now he clambered over piled and strewn boulders, always climbing steeply. The din of the water swelled into a thunderous roar as it flashed out and down in a series of white waterfalls. But impatiently he pushed on, breathing deeply, spurred by the knowledge that in ten minutes he could throw down his saddle and call the day's work done.
In that ten minutes he penetrated the very citadel of solitude. Between great boulders ten, fifteen feet high, over fallen slabs of granite, under occasional monster pines, at last along a little-used deer trail leading back from the river and to a small, grassy, timbered table-land. Upon a sun-dried mat of fallen pine needles he dropped his saddle, and with a deep sigh of utter content turned toward the west. Yonder, still an hour high above the wooded ridge, was the sun. There, catching only infrequently the sun's slant rays, lay the source of Thunder River. And here, to be seen at its best from where he stood, only a hundred yards from him, was Hell's Goblet.
Those who come first into such spots are not men who carry subtle fancies in their brains or golden similes or the tenderer poetical growths. Rude men, roughed by the frontiers, they father a rude nomenclature. Devil's Slide, Fool's Peak, Shirt Tail Cañon, Yankee Jim's, Hang Town, such are the names which sprinkle the western mountain country, names given out of hand which cling on as a memory of an earlier day. Hell's Goblet might have been christened otherwise and more gently, perhaps more befittingly, but it never was.
It was a great granite bowl measuring some twenty-five or thirty feet across filled with eddy-churned, white, angry water, fed from a full stream which plunged down into it from the rocks above, which whipped at the troubled surface night and day, which had lashed the restless waters into white froth and flying spray throughout the ages. And as the stream hurled itself into the monster cup in a frenzied orgy of liquid flashing and thunderous sound, so did it pour itself out over the worn rim, to fall echoing into the pools below. If in the wide woods through which Steele had ridden there held the calm and peace of the solitude, then here was that other expression of the wilderness, the passionate heart of the wild itself.
"And here," mused Steele, his hat off, the cañon air stirring his hair, in his eyes the sombre tints of the forest, the glint of tumbling water, the cloudless blue of the sky, "do I begin my holiday. Thank God I went broke as soon as I did! Old goblet, fuss and fume and sputter and boil over all you please; you are mine now! Tonight you'll sing me to sleep, tonight we'll light up the stars for our candles while we use the world for a pillow! A royal welcome for your liege lord, old fellow, Bill Steele, King of the Universe! What have we to do with petty Queens?"
As though in answer to him there came, faint in his ears through the din of the water, a man's voice shouting to him. Steele's eyes darkened as they had not darkened that day, clouded to an anger such as the man seldom experienced. For the moment he was, in sober earnest, as a king into the privacy of whose meditations some offending mortal had intruded.
"I don't believe in being inhospitable," he grumbled deep in his throat, "but they'll just have to clean out and leave us alone, old goblet."
There were two of them and he turned to watch as they came on toward him across the tableland.
CHAPTER V
ORDERS TO MOVE ON
IF you have ever penetrated deep into some shadowy forest with never the feel of a man-made trail under foot, if you have known that unique thrill which comes with the sensation of being utterly alone save for the tall trees and silent mountains, the sunlight and bickering waters, if there has come to you the grateful emotion born of the thought that perhaps, except for your own, no human foot has ever come into this particular sequestered spot since old time was in swaddling clothes, if just then a chance glance at a creek's edge showed you an old fragment of newspaper or an empty and rusting sardine can … then could you understand and sympathetically condone the first rush of disgust with the situation which filled Steele's heart. Long and across many miles had this hidden, little trodden corner of the big world called to him, long had he enjoyed in anticipation those first few idle hours alone with the solitude. This late afternoon had found him in tune with his surroundings; he was "ready for it." And, though a man usually as slow to anger as he was quick to mirth, for the moment he yielded to a wrath as instinctive as it was illogical.
The two men came on. They were big, rough looking fellows who might have been timber jacks, pick and shovel men strayed from Camp Corliss, or any other undesirable representatives of the human species for whose companionship Steele had no present craving. As he faced them the low sun was full in their blinking eyes. So, while it was given them to read little or nothing in Steele's expression, he did not fail to note that they approached him with purpose in their very stride, that had business with him.
"Say, pardner," said the foremost of the two whom, had she seen the physique