CHAPTER II
It is a far cry from the fastnesses of Idaho back to the lounging room of the Greenwood Club in a great and fashionable city on the Atlantic seaboard; but that distance must be traveled in order to explain at all, to the satisfaction of the old camp-robber bird that perched and squawked upon a limb beside his camp, the presence of Hugh Gaylord in Smoky Land. It all went back to a June evening, immediately preceding the dinner hour, in which he had a short and somewhat important talk with that gray, wise, venerable head of the board of governors whom all men knew fondly as the “Old Colonel.”
It was always very easy to learn to love the Old Colonel. On the particular late June night in question the Colonel looked his usual best in correctly tailored dinner clothes, possessing only one note of individuality, the black bow, obviously factory-tied, set at his collar at a rather startling angle.
“Gaylord,” he said suddenly. “I’d like a few words with you. Bring your glass over to my chair.”
The young man thus addressed had been one of a gay group across the lounging room, and they all looked up with interest. It was a remembered fact that when the Colonel spoke in that tone of voice it was well to listen closely. Gaylord himself smiled and came at once toward him. The group went on with their talk.
The club lights showed the young man plainly, yet he did not in the least stand out. In fact, at first glance there was very little to distinguish him from most of the other men of his age that frequented the club rooms. It was not until two weeks later, when his great adventure had actually begun, and when the camp-robber studied him from the tree limb, that his real personality stood forth. Of course it was by light of contrast. In these luxurious rooms he was among his own kind: in those far mountains he was a stranger and an alien.
He was a familiar type: rather boyish, kind-hearted as are most men who have lived sheltered lives, a fair athlete and a good sportsman at the poker table. It was enough; most of his young friends were wholly satisfied with him, and except perhaps for a vague, troubled hour—usually late at night—Hugh Gaylord was wholly satisfied with himself. And perhaps the reason why the blood mounted higher in his cheeks as the Colonel summoned him was his realization that the old man had had sterner training, and that he possessed X-ray eyes that could read straight into a man. In the first place the Colonel had amassed a fortune by his own resistless effort. In the second, he had known the great school of the forest. He was a sportsman whose metal had been tried and proven on the game trails of two continents.
His eyes leaped over Hugh’s face, and he wondered if he had undertaken a vain task. He knew that a steel-worker cannot make tempered blades out of inferior metal. He wondered if he could hope for any real response from the treatment he was about to suggest. Hugh looked soft, and soft men are not usually made hard by a few weeks in the mountains. To follow the high trails, to seek the hidden people, to scale the cliffs and wade the marsh require a certain hardihood of spirit to start with,—and Hugh Gaylord seemed lacking in that trait. It was not that he had a weakling’s body. Because it was the thing to do in his own circle he had kept himself fit on the gym-floor of his athletic club. His hands were hard and brown, his figure lithe, his face and neck were tanned in tennis court and golf links.
Yet that hard-eyed old woodsman looked at him straight and knew the truth. Hugh would not be able at once to enter into the spirit of the land where the Colonel was about to advise him to go. The lean foresters, natives of the land, would not accept him either; nor would they stay to eat at his camp. They wouldn’t linger to tell him secrets of the wild. If they talked to him at all, it would be to narrate long and impossible adventures that are usually, on the frontier, the “feed” for tenderfeet. He could not enter into the communion of the camp fire; and yet no one—except possibly the Colonel himself—could tell him why.
Perhaps he lacked the basic stuff. The Old Colonel was a little despairing: he had begun to fear that in this lay the true explanation. But perhaps—and this was the old man’s hope—the matter got down to a simple phrase of ancient usage: that Hugh had merely not yet learned to be a “man of his hands.” The meaning goes deeper than mere manual toil. It implies achievement, discipline, self-reliance. It is not a thing to mistake. It promotes the kind of equality that the Old Colonel himself knew,—that which abides at a Western cow ranch or in the battle trench. Hugh’s face was not unlined; but dissipation rather than stress had made the furrows. The lips did not set quite firm, the young eyes were slightly dimmed and bloodshot. There was, however, the Colonel saw with relief, no trace of viciousness in his youthful face. He was an Anglo-Saxon: after the manner of most Northern men he was an honest young debaucher, taking his orgies rather seriously and overdoing them in a way that would be shocking in a Latin. Possibly the same Northern blood gave him a background of strength: this was the old man’s hope.
“You’re looking a bit seedy, Hugh,” the Old Colonel began in his usual straightforward way. “I’m afraid you’re getting to be sort of a poor stick.”
His tone was that with which he was wont to begin an interesting story: perfectly matter-of-fact, just as if he were pronouncing a judgment on the weather. Hugh flushed to the roots of his hair but he didn’t take offense. No one ever could take offense when the Colonel told them truths.
“Complimentary mood to-day, eh, Colonel,” Hugh commented lightly. In reality he didn’t feel in a festive mood at all. But he sat still, dreading what might come next.
“No, not particularly,” the Colonel answered soberly. “You know, Hugh, the interest I’ve always taken in you. And you know why.”
Yes, Hugh knew why. It went back to one of his own mother’s girlhood romances,—a rather beautiful story such as men tell their wives and sweethearts but from masculine reserve do not talk over among themselves.
“I know,” Hugh agreed.
“I can’t see,” the old man went on thoughtfully, “that in spite of the—er—damnable joy of having you around, you’re any good to yourself or any one else. Why don’t you lay off of it a while?”
“You mean—this?” Hugh tilted his glass up on one edge.
“I didn’t happen to mean that, but perhaps I’d better include it. I saw you last night, Hugh, and I’m not one to think hard of a boy for an occasional exhilaration. But the trouble was—it was the night before too, and the night before that, and nobody knows how many more such nights. You’re looking a little soft around the mouth, and just a little—too old for your years. Won’t do, Hughey boy. I mean why don’t you lay off this sort of life you’ve been leading: too much ease, too much loaf, too much booze, too much chorus, not enough work. Oh, damn their skins! I wish they’d sent you to France.”
“And I guess you know how I felt about that,” Hugh replied in his own defense. Yes, the Colonel knew: Hugh had really and earnestly wanted to go to France. He had been commissioned, however, rather sooner than was best for him, and he had been kept in an office in Washington.
“And the worst of it is you never even had to go through the grind of being a real buck private, with nothing particularly in sight. You’ve had everything too easy. You ought to sweat once, and feel a few breaks in your skin and a few sore muscles. Soft, Hugh, soft as soap. Lazy as sin. Why don’t you get out and rough it for a while?”
Hugh stood up. “I don’t know——” he began stiffly.
“But I do. Sit down.”
The eyes of the two men met, and those of the old man smiled under his bushy brows. Hugh sat down again. He knew, only too well, how true these words were. He had always been soft, and trial had never hardened him. “I suppose the same old chant—to go to work.”
“Not this time. I’m going to prescribe another treatment—a more pleasant one. I know there’s no use of asking you to go to work. I don’t see what work you could do. Sitting around an office, considering the safe and sane nature of your investments, wouldn’t help you much. But, Hugh, I have some English friends—good enough beggars most of ’em—and once or twice they’ve confessed—that the only thing that kept them from utter damnation was devoting their lives to sport.”
Hugh knew about these “good enough beggars” that were friends to the Colonel—many of them men of great names and titles whom lesser Americans would boast of knowing. The Old Colonel shook his head somewhat sadly, and for a moment his eyes gazed out over the twilight grounds.
“When I say ‘sport,’ ” he explained, “I mean he-man sport. Into Africa after lions. Shooting a tiger from the ground. Up to Tibet after snow leopards. Down to New Zealand after trout. Going—going—going—never getting soft. Blizzards and jungle and thirst and cold. I know there’s no chance for me to get you to do real work. But damn me—I can’t help but think there’s a little of the old stuff in you somewhere, and I’ve been thinking that a hard course with rifle and fly rod might—might get you going along the right lines. If you’d once learn to love the outdoors, and learn to love to fight, who knows what might not happen.”
“And you suggest—that I take a trip after lions?”
“Lions are hard game, not for children,” was the reply. “ ‘I hunted the lion,’ was one of the few things an old and tough Egyptian Pharaoh saw fit to record imperishably on his monument—but you’re not a Pharaoh yet. I’ve got something here.”
He fished through many waistcoat pockets and drew out a clipping, spreading it out on the broad arm of his chair. “I thought of you when I read it—and cut it out—and I thought what I would have done if it wasn’t for the old game leg. I thought maybe it would stir up your dormant imagination and set you off. Read it.”
Hugh read, noting first that the clipping was a reprint from an Idaho paper:
The stockmen of the Smoky Land section, up Silver Creek way, say that unless government hunters come to their aid, the stock business in that district will be seriously impaired. Wolves and coyotes seem extra plentiful this year, and besides a giant cougar, to whom the sparse settlers have given the name of Broken Fang, has been ranging there for some months, doing thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to cattle and sheep. From the size of his track and the occasional glimpses of him, the residents of that section think that he is the largest of the great cats that has ranged in Idaho for many years.
The Old Colonel studied Hugh’s face as he read. “Not very interesting, eh?” he commented at last. “My boy—he would be a trophy. I know something about that hairy old breed of mountaineers in the Upper Salmon country. They don’t take the trouble to give a puma a name unless he’s a moose. I know quite a little about pumas, too—or cougars, they call ’em. Usually they are about as dangerous as white rabbits. But once in a while one of them gets overgrown and thinks he bosses the range. If wounded—and sometimes by a long chance even if he isn’t wounded—they put up a wicked fight. This big boy would be a trophy worth having; besides, you might pick up a grizzly or a smaller puma. There are always trout, and this is trout-time in the West. Why don’t you go after him?”
The Old Colonel always put his propositions in just that straight-out way; and it made them hard to refuse.
“You mean—go out there three thousand miles on a long chance of killing this cattle-slayer?”
“Why not? You’re not paralyzed or anything. You ought to see Idaho. Every man should. As I said, there are worlds of smaller game. Every man ought to have an objective in his trip; so I say go to Smoky Land. These two weeks might teach you to love the woods so you’d go again and again. And a few trips to the high ranges, once you really got to love ’em and play ’em right, might make—might do wonders for you. Please give me the pleasure of telling the boys that Hughey Gaylord has gone big-game hunting.”
Hugh felt the wave of red spreading in his cheeks again. He knew perfectly what the old man had been about to say—“to make a man of him.”
“Remember,” the Old Colonel urged further, “you’re an Anglo-Saxon—a white man of straight descent. It’s a heritage, Hugh. And it implies an obligation.”
“I’d hate it,” Hugh protested.
“Try it and see. Perhaps—there might be a miracle.”
Hugh drained his glass; then stood up. “Very well, I’ll start next week,” he said at last simply.
Thus this son of cities gave his promise to go forth into a man’s land: a land of trial and travail, of many perils and strong delights, a jagged mountain land where the powers of the wilderness still ruled supreme—and yet a place where miracles might come to pass.