The Wild Olive. Basil King

nothing but a path, zigzagging up a hillside between patches of Indian corn. The girl sped over it so lightly that Ford would have found it hard to keep her in sight if from time to time she had not paused and waited. When he came near enough to see the outlines of her form she flew on again, less like a living woman than a mountain wraith.

      From the top of the hill he could see the dull gleam of the lake with its girdle of lamp-lit towns. Here the woodland began again; not the main body of the forest, but one of its long arms, thrust down over hill and valley, twisting its way in among villages and farm lands. That which had been a path now become a trail, along which the girl flitted with the ease of habit and familiarity.

      In the concentration of his effort to keep the moving white spot in view Ford lost count of time. Similarly he had little notion of the distance they were covering. He guessed that they had been ten or fifteen minutes on the way, and that they might have gone a mile, when, after waiting for him to come almost near enough to speak to her, she began moving in a direction at an acute angle to that by which they had come. At the same time he perceived that they were on the side of a low wooded mountain and that they were beating their way round it.

      All at once they emerged on a tiny clearing—a grassy ledge on the slope. Through the starlight he could see the hillside break away steeply into a vaporous gorge, while above him the mountain raised a black dome amid the serried points of the sky-line. The dryad-like creature beckoned him forward with her scarf, until suddenly she stopped with the decisive pause of one who has reached her goal. Coming up with her, he saw her unlock the door of a small cabin, which had hitherto not detached itself from the surrounding darkness.

      "Go in," she whispered. "Don't strike a light. There are biscuits somewhere, in a box. Grope for them. There's a couch in a corner."

      Without allowing him to speak, she forced him gently over the threshold and closed the door upon him. Standing inside in the darkness, he heard the grating of her key in the lock, and the rustle of her skirts as she sped away.

      III

       Table of Contents

      From the heavy sleep of fatigue Ford woke with the twittering of birds that announces the dawn. His first thought before opening his eyes, that he was still in his cell, was dispelled by the silky touch of the Sorrento rugs on which he lay. He fingered them again and again in a kind of wonder, while his still half-slumbering senses struggled for the memory of what had happened, and the realization of where he was. When at last he was able to reconstruct the events of the preceding night, he raised himself on his elbow and peered about him in the dim morning twilight.

      The object he discerned most readily was an easel, giving him the secret of his refuge. On the wooden walls of the cabin, which was fairly spacious, water-color sketches were pinned at intervals, while on the mantelpiece above a bricked fireplace one or two stood framed. Over the mantelpiece a pair of snow-shoes were crossed as decorations, between which hung a view of the city of Quebec. On a lay-figure in a corner was thrown carelessly the sort of blanket coat worn by Canadians during winter sports. Paints and palettes were arranged on a table by the wall, and on a desk in the middle of the room were writing materials and books. More books stood in a small suspended bookcase. Beside a comfortable reading-chair one or two magazines lay on the floor. His gaze travelled last to the large apron, or pinafore, on a peg fastened in a door immediately beside his couch. The door suggested an inner room, and he got up promptly to explore it. It proved to be cramped and dark, lighted only from the larger apartment, which in its turn had but the one high north window of the ordinary studio. The small room was little more than a shed or "lean-to", serving the purposes of kitchen and storeroom combined. The arrangements of the whole cabin showed that some one had built it with a view to passing in seclusion a few days at a time without forsaking the simpler amenities of civilized life; and it was clear that that "some one" was a woman. What interested Ford chiefly for the moment was the discovery of a sealed glass jar of water, from which he was able to slake his twenty hours' thirst.

      Returning to the room in which he had slept, he drew back the green silk curtain covering the north light in order to take his bearings. As he had guessed on the previous night, the slope on which the cabin was perched broke steeply down into a wooded gorge, beyond which the lower hills rolled in decreasing magnitude to the shore of Champlain, visible from this point of view in glimpses, less as an inland sea than like a chain of lakelets. Sunrise over Vermont flooded the waters with tints of rose and saffron, but made of the Green Mountains a long, gigantic mass of purple-black twisting its jagged outline toward the north into the Hog's Back and the Camel's Hump with a kind of monstrous grace. To the east, in New York, the Adirondacks, with the sunlight full upon them, shot up jade-colored peaks into the electric blue—the scarred pyramid of Graytop standing forth dark, detached, and alone, like a battered veteran sentinel.

      In an access of conscious hatred of this vast panoramic beauty which had become the background of his tragedy, Ford pulled the curtain into place again and turned once more to the interior of the room. It began to seem more strange to him the more it grew familiar. Why was he here? How long was he to stay? How was he to get away again? Had this girl caught him like a rat in a trap, or did she mean well by him? If, as he supposed, she was Wayne's daughter, she would probably not be slow in carrying out her father's plan of handing him back to justice—and yet his mind refused to connect the wraith of the night before with either police work or betrayal. Her appearance had been so dim and fleeting that he could have fancied her the dryad of a dream, had it not been for his surroundings.

      He began to examine them once more, inspecting the water-colors on the wall one by one, in search of some clew to her personality. The first sketch was of a nun in a convent garden—the background vaguely French, and yet with a difference. The next was of a trapper, or voyageur, pushing a canoe into the waters of a wild northern lake. The next was a group of wigwams with squaws and children in the foreground. Then came more nuns; then more voyageurs with their canoes; then more Indians and wigwams It occurred to Ford that the nuns might have been painted from life, the voyageurs and Indians from imagination He turned to the two framed drawings on the chimney-piece Both represented winter scenes. In the one a sturdy voyageur was conveying his wife and small personal belongings across the frozen snow on a sled drawn by a team of dogs. In the other a woman, apparently the same woman as in the preceding sketch, had fallen in the midst of a blinding storm, while a tall man of European aspect—decidedly not the voyageur—was standing beside her with a baby in his arms. These were clearly fancy pictures, and, so it seemed to Ford, the work of one who was trying to recapture some almost forgotten memory. In any case he was too deeply engrossed by his own situation to dwell on them further.

      He wheeled round again toward the centre of the room, impatiently casting about him for something to eat. The tin box, from which he had devoured all the biscuits, lay empty on the floor, but he picked it up and ate hungrily the few crumbs sticking in its corners. He ransacked the small dark room in the hope of finding more, but vainly. As far as he could see, the cabin had never been used for the purpose it was meant to serve, nor ever occupied for more than a few hours at a time. It had probably been built in a caprice that had passed with its completion. He guessed something from the fact that there was no visible attempt to sketch the scene before the door, though the site had evidently been chosen for its beauty.

      He had nothing by which to measure time, but he knew that precious hours which he might have utilized for escape were passing. He began to chafe at the delay. With the impulse of youth to be active, he longed to be out, where he could at least use his feet. His clothes had dried upon him; in spite of his hunger he was refreshed by his night's sleep; he was convinced that, once in the open, he could elude capture. He pulled back the curtain again in order to reconnoitre. It was well to be as familiar as possible with the immediate lay of the land, so as to avail himself of any advantages it might offer.

      The colors of sunrise had disappeared, and he judged that it must be seven or eight o'clock. Between the rifts of the lower hills the lake was flashing silver, while where Vermont had been nothing but a mass of shadow, blue-green mountains were emerging in a triple row, from which the last veils of vapor were being dragged