Dear Nancy, you will have heard terrible things about the way we broke out from John Brett’s house. They kept me locked in the cellar for ten days. They did what they could to torment me, and on the eleventh morning they were to finish me off. That night Roger Lincoln came. He managed to slip past the guards and get to me. They surprised us as we were trying to get out. In the fight, I know that we shot down four men. I hope that all of them lived. If not, I want you to know that we only fired because we were fighting for our lives.
Then Roger Lincoln started to take me west to Fort Kendry, because he had heard from Jack that you were to be taken there. We got to this point, then Roger disappeared one morning from the camp.
Whether some animal killed him, or Indians surprised him, I don’t know. I only know that he didn’t come back. If he is dead, heaven be good to him. He was the bravest and the best man in the world!
Oh, Nancy, if I had known that our ride down the valley was to be the last time that I should ever see you, I never would have left. But that chance is gone. I’d think that my life was thrown away—because I’ve never done anything worth living for—but I know that for one day, at least, you loved me, dearest Nan, and that is more than the world to me. And when I think of you now, it makes my heart ache more than death can do.
Beautiful, beautiful Nan, good bye. Remember me.
Paul
When he had written this he put it away in his wallet, and then he gave himself up to sad thoughts until tears came into his eyes, and even trickled down his cheeks.
Something stirred on the inner side of the riverbank. He caught up his rifle from the ground beside him and listened, hair on end. It was a stealthy rustling, a stealing noise that seemed to his straining senses to come straight toward him.
And then, above the bank, came the proud head of a stag, and a beautiful young deer stood outlined against the sky just above him.
II
His heartbreaking sorrow he forgot with desperate speed. Here was food for a month, if only he could catch it. At the shift of his rifle to his shoulder, the deer saw him and leaped not back, but straight ahead. It was a blurred streak at which he fired. The racing animal gave three tremendous bounds, the last high in the air, and fell dead.
Torridon stood up and looked to the white-hot sky in mute thankfulness. Certainly this was a gift from heaven to him, the novice hunter.
Feverishly, paying no heed to the future, but all for the sake of the future, he worked during the rest of that day. He had been shown by Lincoln the proper way to strip off a pelt, but he rather hacked the good hide away. The meat was what he wanted, and that meat he cut into long strips. Out of the willows along the riverbed he prepared many slender sticks, and these he used to hang the venison upon.
How long would the sun take to dry the meat thoroughly?
Then night came on him as his labors neared an end. He was tired with excitement and with work. He lay down and slept like a child. Once, before morning, Ashur neighed softly, and stamped. Torridon was on his feet at once, and found the great black stallion beside him, almost trampling on him, while the pricked ears and the glistening eyes of the horse were turned toward the north. Yonder in the darkness some danger was moving—coyote, wolf, bear, Indian, renegade white. He knew that the two fine horses would be enough to enlarge the heart of any trapper with fierce greed, and, as for the Indians, Roger Lincoln had assured him that any Indian on the plains would pay all but life for the possession even of the famous gray mare, to say nothing of that matchless king of runners, Ashur.
Still lay Torridon, one ear close to the ground, his attention directed by the stallion, as Ashur veered a little, and pointed now more to the east. Yet Torridon heard nothing whatever. A long half hour—and then Ashur put down his head and began to graze once more. The danger had ended.
And Torridon, though he told himself that he could not sleep again after such a shock, was almost instantly in slumber once more. After all, there was Ashur, more keenly alive and alert, more dependable than any human sentinel.
The morning was only past him while his brain still was befogged. His first thought was: I have lived one day in the desert, and the finish of me is not yet. No, there’s the meat that will keep me alive for a long time, if I use patience.
It was a day of burning heat. It ate through the coat of Torridon, stout homespun though it was, and fairly singed his shoulders. It covered the prairie with shimmering lines of heat as with a veil, and it wrought wonders upon the meat, as though a slow fire were playing on the wet venison.
All that day and the next Torridon watched the curing of the meat. But by that time he began to feel that the prairie, after all, was not so totally dangerous. Running down the edge of the narrow rivulet that wound back and forth through the pebbles and the boulders of the stream bottom, there seemed to be a constant procession of rabbits. He did not need to shoot them. The simplest little traps, constructed as Lincoln had showed him how to do, were sufficient to snare the jacks. Torridon lived well and watched his venison cure to strips withered and black-looking, hard as boards, but promising much nutriment. He had a pack of that food prepared before the thing was ended, and then he asked himself where he should go.
What would Roger Lincoln do if he were not dead and ever managed to escape from the troubles that now held him? It seemed obvious to Torridon. In the first place, the hunter would inquire at Fort Kendry to learn if the traveler had come. In the second place, Lincoln would go to the spot of that last camp and there strive to take up the trail.
So Torridon went back, and, where the fire had been built, he drove down a strong stake. The stake he split, and in the split he fixed firmly a bit of paper that simply said:
Dear Roger:
I’ve decided to go south to the first river, and then follow that river toward the right—west. I’ll keep on it to its source. I don’t know what else to do, and I’d go mad if I stayed here in the loneliness without a move of some kind.
Paul Torridon
He added as a postscript:
If I turn to the left from the river, I’ll put two blazes on a big tree. If I turn to the right, I’ll put one.
That might, eventually, be the means for bringing Roger Lincoln to the trail of him.
Then he went back to the river to the south, by the banks of which he had killed the deer and cured its venison. He turned to the right and journeyed slowly up its banks. He had no reason to journey fast; rather he dreaded leaving the stream by coming to the end of it. For a day he went up it, and then came to a fork. A mere trickle of water descended each big gorge. Apparently later in the summer the bed would be entirely dry, and only in the winter the water roared down in floods. He hesitated for a long time at that division of the trail. Both forks seemed of an equal size. Neither carried more water than the other, and as for their direction, one pointed a little northwest, the other a little south of west. There was not a whit to choose between them.
He chose the northern one, therefore, because this made it unnecessary for him to cross either of the beds of the streams.
Up the northern fork he continued for two days, and all that time he had no cause to use up his precious stock of dried venison. Rabbit meat was plentiful, and rabbit was not yet a weary diet to him.