The Everlasting Whisper

  Produced by Dave Morgan and PG Distributed Proofreaders

  THE EVERLASTING WHISPER

  _A Tale of the California Wilderness_.

  By JACKSON GREGORY

  To Maxwell E. Perkins

  With The Author'S Grateful Recognition Of His Countless SympatheticCriticisms And Suggestions

  _Chapter I_

  It was springtime in the California Sierra. Never were skies bluer,never did the golden sun-flood steep the endless forest lands in richerlife-giving glory. Ridge after ridge the mountains swept on and fellaway upon one side until in the vague distances they sank to themonotonous level of the Sacramento Valley; down there it was alreadysummer, and fields were hot and brown. Ridge after ridge the mountainsstretched on the other side, rising steadily, growing ever more augustand mighty and rocky; on their crests across the blue gorges the snowwas dazzling white and winter held stubbornly on at altitudes of seventhousand feet. Thus winter, springtime, and ripe, fruit-dropping summercoexisted, touching fingers across the seventy miles that lie betweenthe icy top of the Sierra and the burning lowlands.

  Here, in a region lifted a mile into the rare atmosphere, was a ridgeall naked boulder and spire along its crest, its sides studded with pineand incense cedar. The afternoon sunlight streaked the big bronze treetrunks, making bright gay spots and patches of light, casting cool blackshadows across the open spaces where the brown dead needles lay in thickcarpets. It was early June, and thus far only had the springtimeadvanced in its vernal progress upward through the timbered solitudes.Some few small patches of snow still lingered on in spots sheltered fromthe sun, but now they were ebbing away in thin trickles. Down in ahollow at the base of the sunny slope was a round alpine lake no biggerthan a pond in a city park. It was of the same deep, perfect blue as thesky, whose colour it seemed not to reflect but to absorb.

  A tiny fragment of this same heavenly azure drifted downward among thetrees like a bit of sky falling. A second bit of blue that had skimmedacross the lake and was visible now only as it rose and winged acrossthe contrasting coloured meadow rimming the pool was like a bit of thelake itself. Two bluebirds. They swerved before the meeting, their wingsfluttered, they lighted on branches of the same tree and shyly eyed eachother. Did a man need to have the still message of all the woods summedup in final emphasis, this it was: spring is here.

  The man himself, as the birds had done before him, had the appearance ofmaterializing spontaneously from some distilled essence of hisenvironment. A moment ago the spaces between the wide-set cedar-treeswere empty. Yet he had been there a long time. It was only because hehad moved that he attracted attention even of the sharp-eyed forest folkwho were returning to tree and thicket. As the bluebirds had beenviewless when merged into the backgrounds of their own colour, so he,while sitting with his back against a tawny cedar, had been drawn intothe entity of the wilderness to which, obviously, he belonged. Here heblended, harmonized, disappeared when he held motionless. The well-worn,tall, laced boots were of brown leather, much scuffed, one in colourwith the soil dusting them. The khaki trousers gathered into theboot-tops, the soft flannel shirt, were the brown of the tree trunks;skin of hands and face and muscular throat were the bronze of ripepine-cones and burnished pine-needles. And, in a landscape spotted withlight and shadow, the head of black hair might have passed for a bit ofsuch pitch-black shadow as a tuft of thick foliage casts upon thelight-smitten ground.

  Beyond this outward harmony there was something at once more intangibleand yet more vital and positive that made the man a piece with thenatural world about him. Perhaps it was that he had lived so many monthsof so many years in the open that he had grown to be true brother of thewild; that he had shed coat after coat of artificial veneer as he tookon the layers of tan; that in doing so he shed from his mind many of theartificialities of the twentieth century and remembered ancientinstincts. His deep chest knew the tricks of proper breathing; he wouldcome to the top of a steep climb with unlaboured breath. He stood talland stalwart, filled with vigorous strength in repose like the straightvaliant cedars. His eyes were black and piercing, as keen as those ofthe hawk which, circling in the deeper sky, had seen him when he moved;he, too, had seen the hawk. All about him was a lustily masculine phaseof the world, giant trees dominating giant slopes, rugged bouldersupheaved, iron cliffs defying time and battling the years; he, likethem, was virile, his sex clothing him magnificently. He had not shavedfor three days and yet, instead of looking untidy, was but clothed inthe greater vitality. While his eyes sped swiftly hither and thither,now busied with wide groupings, now catching small details, his face wasimpassive. In keeping both with his own magnificent physique and therugged note of the forest, it was the face of a man who had defied andbattled.

  Beyond the lake a peak upthrust its rocky front into the sky. It frownedacross the ridges, darkened by the shadows which its own irregularitiescast athwart its massive features. But the sun, slowly as it rolled,sought out those shadows; they moved, crept to other hiding-places, andthe golden light coaxed a subdued, soft gentleness across the massiveboulders. This, too, the man saw.

  He stood looking out across the ridges and so to the final bulwarkagainst the sky still white with last December. He sought landmarks andmeasured distance, not in miles but in hours. Then he glanced briefly atthe sun. But now, before starting on again, he turned from the moredistant landscape and, remembering the immediate scene about him as hehad viewed it last, drowsing in the Indian summer of last October, henoted everywhere the handiwork of young June. The eyes which had beenkeen and alert filled suddenly with a shining brightness.

  The springtime, eternally youthful coquette, had come with a greatoutward display of timidity and shyness into the sternly solemn forestland of the high Sierra. To the last fine detail and exquisite touchwas she, more here than elsewhere, softly, prettily, daintily feminine,her light heart idly set on wooing from its calm and abstractedaloofness this region of granite and lava, of rugged chasms and augustancient trees. She filled the air with fragrances, lightly shaken; shescattered bright fragile flowers to brighten the earth and clearbird-notes to sparkle through the air. Hesitant always in the seeming,she came with that shy step of hers to the feet of glooming precipices;under crests where the snow clung on she played at indifference,loitering with a new flower, knowing that little by little the thawwould answer her veiled efforts, that in the end the monarch of all thebrooding mountain tops would discard the white mantle of aloofness andthrill to her embrace; knowing, too, that with each successive conquestmade secure she would only laugh in that singing voice of hers and turnher back and pass on. On and on, over ridges and ranges, and so aroundthe world.

  The woods lay steeped in sunshine, enwrapped in characteristic quietude.There was no wind to ruffle the man's hair, no sound of a falling coneor of dead leaves crackling under a squirrel's foot. And yet the man hadthe air now of one listening, hearkening to the silence itself. Forsilence among the pines is not the dead void of desert lands, but agreat hush like the finger-to-lip command in a sleeper's room, or thestill message of a sea-shell held to the ear. The countless millions ofcedar and pine needles seemed as motionless as the very mountainsthemselves, yet it was they who laid the gently audible command upon thebalmy afternoon and whispered the great hush. That whisper the manheard, it seemed to him, less with his ears than with his soul.

  He went back to the tree against which he had rested and picked up hishat and a small canvas roll. And yet again, with his hat in his hand, hestood motionless, his eyes lingering along the cliff tops across thelittle lake, his attitude that of a man listening to an invitation whichhe would like to accept but in the end meant to refuse. Already he hadmarked out the way he planned to go, and still the nearer peaks with t
hesunshine upon them called to him. One would have hazarded that they werefamiliar from oft-repeated visits, and that among his plans to thecontrary a desire to climb them insisted. He glanced at the sun again,shook his head, and took the first step slantingly downward along theslope. But only once more to grow as still as the big trees about him.Slowly he drew back into the shadows to watch and not be seen.

  For abruptly two figures had appeared upon the rocky head of themountain across the lake. They had come up from the further side, andwhen he saw them first stood clear-cut against the sky. They might havebeen hunters since each carried a rifle. And yet the watcher's browsgathered in a frown and his eyes glinted angrily.

  The two figures separated, one going along the crest of the ridge, theother climbing downward cautiously until he stood at the edge of thecliffs. He craned his body to look down as though seeking a way to thelake; he straightened and stared for a long time toward the snow tops ofthe more distant altitudes. The sun lay in pools all about him, andacross the distance separating him and his companion from the man whowatched them so intently, his gestures could be followed readily. Heturned and must have said something to his companion, who leaped downfrom a boulder and came to his side. The second man towered over him,head and shoulder. This the eyes upon the other slope were quick tonote; they cleared briefly as though with a new understanding, only togrow harder than before.

  They talked together, and yet the only sound to carry across the lakeand meadow was the rush of air through innumerable tree-tops. The bluewater glinted softly under the westering sun; in the blue void of thesky the hawk wheeled, silent and graceful and watchful. The smaller manpointed, his arm outheld steadily. The other drew nearer, towering abovehim. He, too, pointed or seemed about to point. They stood so closetogether that the two figures merged. From a distance they looked likeone man now.

  It was with startling abruptness that the two figures were torn apart,each resolved again into an individual. One, the towering man, had drawnsuddenly back; the other was falling. And yet the silence was unbroken.There was never a cry to echo through the gorges from a horror-clutchedthroat. The falling man plunged straight down a dozen feet, struckagainst a ragged rock, writhed free, fell again a few feet, and began toroll. There had been the flash of the sun on the rifle in his hand; hehad clutched wildly at that as though it could save him. Now it flewfrom his grasp as he rolled over and over, plunging down the steep flankof the mountain.

  The man who had watched from across the lake had not stirred. The bigman on the cliffs came back slowly to the brink and crouched there,looking down, motionless so long that it was hard for the eye to be sureof him, to know if it were really a human being or a poised bouldersquatting there. There came no call from below; the hawk wheeled andwheeled, lost interest, drifting away. In the little hollow where thelake glinted it was very still with the soft perfection of the firstspring days.

  The man on the cliff stood up, holding his rifle. He had done withlooking down; now he pivoted slowly, looking off in all otherdirections. Presently he began climbing back up the few feet to theknife-like crest from which he had descended not five minutes ago. Hepaused there for hardly more than an instant and then went on, down thefurther side, out of sight.

  The man who had seen all this from his own slope caught up his canvasroll again and hurried down toward the lake. For the first time he spokealoud, saying:

  "Swen Brodie. There's not another man in the mountains brute enough forthat."

  He hastened on, taking the shortest way, making nothing of the steepestslopes. He was going straight toward the nearer end of the lake, whichhe must skirt to come up the further mountain and to the man who hadfallen; and, by the way, straight toward the peak, still bright in thesunlight, which he had wanted to revisit all along.