Thurston of Orchard Valley

Bransome, who mopped his forehead, stared at the speaker with some wonder and more admiration before he answered:

"There's a good deal of cast iron about you, and I guess I'd a long way sooner have trusted the rest than have gone back to stir up those two charges. What took me? – well, I figured you had turned suddenly crazy, and I was in a way responsible for you. Made the best bargain for your time I could, but I didn't buy you up bones and body – see?"

"I think I do," answered Geoffrey, and that was all, but it meant the recognition of a bond between them. Bransome, as if glad to change the subject, asked:

"Say, after you had fired the fuse what did you waste precious seconds looking for? If I wasn't too scared to notice anything clearly I'd swear you found something and picked it up."

"I did!" declared Geoffrey, smiling. "It was something I must have dropped before. Only a trifle, but I would not like to lose it, and – I had one eye on the fuses – there seemed a second or two to spare. However, for some reason my throat feels all stuck together. Have you any cider in your wagon?"

Half-an-hour later, when most of the spectators stood watching the released waters thunder down the gorge, for the blast had been successful, Helen Savine said:

"I don't quite understand what happened, Mr. Bransome."

"It was this way!" answered the rancher, glad to profit by any opportunity of interesting the girl. "That Thurston is a hard, tough man. Two fuses that were to fire small charges petered out, and sooner than risk anything he must light them again. I don't quite understand all the rest of it, either, for he's not a mean man, and why he should stay fooling on top of a powder mine looking for one dollar when I've a hatful to pay him is away beyond me. Yet I'm sure he picked up a piece of silver just before we ran. Curious kind of creature, isn't he?"

Helen thought the incident distinctly odd. She could not comprehend why a man should risk his life for the sake of a silver coin. She could not find a solution of the mystery until it was explained that evening.

Geoffrey Thurston, attired in white shirt, black sash, and new store clothes, had tramped over to Graham's ranch and by degrees he and Miss Savine gravitated away from the others. They were interested in subjects that did not appeal to the rest, and, though Jean smiled mischievously at times, this excited no comment.

Clear moonlight sparkled upon the untrodden snows above them, snows that had remained stainless since the giant peaks were framed when the world was young. The pines were black on their lower slopes, and white mists filled the valley, out of which the song of the river rose in long reverberations. Geoffrey and Helen leaned on the veranda balustrade, both silent, for the solemnity of the mountains impressed them, and speech seemed superfluous.

After a while, the girl told Geoffrey that he ought to be glad to live after his narrow escape from death. "There was really no great risk, and, if there had been, the results would have justified it," Geoffrey replied. "The failure of two charges might have spoiled all my work for me. Since I left you the Roads and Trails Surveyor voluntarily offered me a rock work contract he had refused before, and I at once accepted it."

"You have not been used to this laborious life. Have you no further ambition, and do you like it?" asked Helen, flashing a quick glance at him.

"It is not exactly what I expected, but as there appears to be no great demand in this country for mental abilities, one is glad to earn a living as one can," he said. "I am afraid I am a somewhat ambitious person. I consider this only the beginning, and Miss Savine responsible for it. You will remember who it was offered me my first contract."

"Don't!" commanded Helen, averting her eyes. "That is hardly fair or civil. You really looked so – and how was I to know?"

Geoffrey's pulse beat faster, and the smile faded out of his eyes as he noticed, for the moon was high, the trace of faintly heightened color in the speaker's face.

"I doubtless looked the hungry, worn-out tramp I was," he interposed gravely. "And out of gentle compassion, you offered me a dollar. Well, I earned that dollar, and I have it still. It has brought me good luck, and I will keep it as a talisman."

Instinctively his fingers slid to one end of a thin gold chain, and for a moment a look of consternation came into his face, for the links hung loose; then as the hard hand dropped to his pocket, he looked relieved and Helen found it judicious to watch a gray blur of shadow moving across the snow. She had sometimes wondered what he wore at one end of that cross-pattern chain, for rock cutters do not usually adorn themselves with such trinkets, but, remembering Bransome's comments, she now understood what had happened just before the explosion. Geoffrey's quick eyes had noticed something unusual in her air, and his old reckless spirit, breaking through all restraint, prompted him to say:

"It will, I fancy, still bring me good fortune. I come of a superstitious race, and nothing would tempt me to part with it. This, as I said, is only the beginning. It appeared impossible to move the boulder from your wagon trail, and I did it. The neighbors declared nobody could drain Bransome's prairie, and a number of goodly acres are drying now, while to-night I feel it may be possible to go on and on, until – "

"Does not that sound somewhat egotistical?" interposed Helen.

"Horribly," said Thurston, with a curious smile. "But you see I am trusting in the talisman, and some day I may ask you to admit that I have made it good. I'm not avaricious, and desire money only as means to an end. Dollars! If all goes well, the contract for the wagon road rock work should bring me in a good many of them."

"You are refreshingly certain," averred Helen. "But will the end or dominant purpose justify all this?"

Thurston answered quietly:

"I may ask you to judge that, also, some day!"

Helen was conscious of a chagrin quite unusual to her. Hitherto, she had experienced little difficulty in making the men she knew regret anything that resembled presumption, but with this man it was different. What he meant she would not at the moment ask herself, but, though she rather admired his quietly confident tone, it nettled her, and yet, without begging an awkward question she could not resent it. Geoffrey's reckless frankness was often more unassailable than wiser men's diplomacy – and she was certainly pleased that he had recovered the dollar.

"The dew is getting heavy, and I promised Jean some instruction in netting," she told him rather unsteadily. She paused a second, and, with an assumed carelessness, added, "isn't it useless to forecast the future?"

CHAPTER V

THE LEGENDS OF CROSBIE GHYLL

Helen Savine had passed two years in England, and, because her father was a prosperous man who humored her slightest wishes, she occasionally returned to take her pleasure in what she called the Old Country. It is a far cry from the snowy heights of the Pacific slope to the pleasant valleys of the North Country, but in these days of quadruple-expansion engines, distance counts but little when one has sufficient money.

The Atlantic express had brought Helen and her aunt by marriage, Mrs. Thomas P. Savine, into Montreal, whence a fast train had conveyed them to New York in time to catch a big Southampton liner, but Mrs. Savine was a restless lady, and had grown tired of London within six weeks from the day she left Vancouver. She was an American, and took pains to impress the fact upon anybody who mistook her for a Canadian, and, finding a party of her countrymen and women, whom she had hoped to overtake in the metropolis, had departed northwards, she determined to follow them to the English lakes.

"It's a big, hot, dusty wilderness, Tom, and we've seen all they've got to show us here before," she said to her long-suffering husband, as she stood in the vestibule of a fashionable hotel. "Say, we'll pull out to-day and catch the Schroeders' party meditating around Wordsworth's tomb. Young man, will you kindly get us a railroad schedule?"

The silver-buttoned official, who watched the big plate-glass door, started at a smart rap on his shoulder, and blinked at the angular lady in a startling costume and a blue veil. Thomas Savine interposed meekly:

"A time-table; and that's evidently not the man to ask, my dear."

"Then he can tell the right one," Mrs. Savine answered airily, and presently halted before a row of resplendently-gilded books adorning one portion of the vestibule. She thereupon explained for the benefit of all listeners that it was hard to see the necessity for so many railways in so small a country, and finally, with a clerk's assistance, selected a train which would deposit her at Oxenholme, from which place the official suggested that she might find means of transport into the district in which, to the best of his belief, Coleridge and Wordsworth, or one of them, wrote what Mrs. Savine entitled charming little pieces. It proved good counsel, and two of the party passed a delightful week at Ambleside, where their sojourn was marred only by Mrs. Savine's laments that potatoes were not served at supper and breakfast.

"I want some potatoes with my ham," she said, and when the attendant explained that the vegetables were never eaten in England at that meal, she inquired, "Don't you grow potatoes anywhere in this country?"

The attendant said that very fine ones were produced in the immediate vicinity, and Mrs. Savine waved a jeweled hand majestically.

"Then away you go and buy some. I'll sit right here until they're boiled," she said.

"It really isn't the custom, and you know you never got them in London, and hardly ate them at home," said Thomas Savine, but Mrs. Savine remained superior to such reasoning.

"That's quite outside the question. I want those potatoes, and I'm going to have them," she insisted.

There was a whispering at the end of the breakfast hall, somebody whistled up a tube, and the hotel manager appeared to announce, with regrets, that it was unfortunately impossible in the busy season to upset the culinary arrangements for the benefit of a single guest.

"Then we'll start again and follow the Schroeders' trail to that place in Cumberland," Mrs. Savine decided. "Tom, you go out and buy one of those twenty five cent guide-books which tell you all about everything. Hire some ponies and a man, and we'll drive a straight line across the mountains."

The manager respectfully suggested it would be better to take the train, even though the railway went round, because the mountains were lofty, and the roads were indifferent in the region traversed. To this the lady answered with some truth that the highest peak in Britain was a pigmy to the lowest of the Selkirks, and that she had spent two summers camping among the fastnesses of the snow-clad Olympians.

"Your aunt is a smart woman, but she can't help upsetting things," said Thomas Savine, when his niece went out with him to make arrangements for the trip. Helen smiled pleasantly, for she knew her aunt's good qualities, and also she was fond of adventurous wanderings.

It was perfect weather, and the three tourists enjoyed their journey among the less frequented fells, during which they camped, so Thomas Savine termed it, each night in some high-perched hostelry or trout-fisher's haunt. Helen realized that never before had she fully appreciated the beauty of England. Quite apart from its wonders of industrial enterprise, tide of world-wide commerce, and treasury of literature and art, the old country was to be loved for its quiet, green restfulness, she thought.

Suddenly there came a change. A south-wester drove thick rain-clouds scudding across peak and valley, and filled the passes with dank, white mists from the Irish Sea, and so, towards the close of a threatening day, Mrs. Savine's party came winding down in a hurry from a bare hill shoulder and under the gray crags of Crosbie Fell. The hollows beneath them were lost in a woolly vapor, low-flying scud raked the bare ridges above, and even as they passed a black rift in the hillside the first heavy drops of rain fell pattering. Helen Savine had seen many a mining adit in British Columbia, and, turning to glance at the mouth of the tunnel, she read, scratched on the rock beside it, "Thurston's Folly." That careless glance over her shoulder was to lead to important results.

"There's wild weather brewing," said Thomas Savine. "Make those ponies rustle, and we'll get in somewhere before it comes along."

When they reached the little wind-swept village, it became evident that no shelter for the night could be found there, for it was seldom that even an enterprising pedestrian tourist came down from the high moors behind Crosbie Fell. Still, one inhabitant informed their guide, in a tongue none of the others could comprehend, that if he was in an unusually good humor old Musker, the keeper, might take them in at Crosbie Ghyll. Thus it happened that just as the rain began in earnest, such a cavalcade as had probably never before passed its gloomy portals rode up to the gate of the dilapidated edifice. Some of the iron-bound barriers still lay moldering in the hollow of the arch, and Helen noticed slits for muskets in the stout walls above, for the owners had been a fighting race, and several times in bygone centuries the tide of battle had rolled about and then had ebbed away from the stubbornly-held stronghold. The observer had gathered so much from a paragraph in her guide-book.

The romance of English history appealed to Helen as it does to the citizens of the wider Britain over seas, and she turned in her saddle to look about her. Framed by the weather-worn archway she could see the black rampart of the fells fading into the rain, and the bare sweep of moss and moor, which had once stretched unbroken to the feet of the great ranges above the Solway shore. Inside the quadrangle, for the place had during the past century served as farm instead of hall, barn, cart-shed and shippon were ruinous and empty, but she could fill the space in fancy with sturdy archer, man-at-arms, and corsleted rider, for that the present venerable edifice had been built into an older one the stump of a square tower remained to testify.

Thomas Savine pounded on the oaken door at one end of the courtyard until it was opened by a bent-shouldered man with frosted hair and wrinkled visage.

"We are unfortunate strangers with a guide who has lost his way, and it would be a favor if you could take us in to-night out of the storm," he said. The older man glanced at the party suspiciously.