Bridge to Trouble: Chapter I
I never wanted to leave the Pont in the first place. So on the night I decided I couldn’t stay one more hour in Santa Clara, I never even considered going anywhere else.
Bridge to Trouble is a romantic-suspense novella set in 1920s Montana.
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And the only tune that he could play
Was “over the hills and far away.”
- Over the Hills and Far Away (17thc.) -I never wanted to leave the Pont in the first place. So on the night I decided I couldn’t stay one more hour in Santa Clara, I never even considered going anywhere else.
I knew Mother would never consent to cutting short our visit to Aunt Martha for any of the reasons I could give her. So before supper I took a surreptitious look at a railroad timetable in my uncle’s study; and after supper, excusing myself on account of a headache, I went to my room and packed a suitcase, with burning throat and eyes and rebelliously trembling lips. And shortly afterwards, I let myself out a side door into the garden, into the mild breath of a Pacific evening, and stole down the flagged path with palm fronds and hibiscus blossoms flicking my shoulders. I half walked, half ran two blocks beneath the street lamps and then hailed a cab to take me to the station.
An hour later I was ensconced in a dark corner of a Pullman on the Union Pacific; and by the middle of next morning I was clear of San Francisco and hurtling across the country toward Montana.
Crossing the continent was no new thing for members of my family. My grandfather, Samuel Pierpont, had astounded his settled New England kin by striking out for California to make his fortune in the early days of the Gold Rush. While he hadn’t exactly turned up a fortune in solid nuggets, he had done well enough to settle satisfactorily in California, eventually becoming the owner of a lumber mill; and his two children were born there. James Pierpont, my father, had inherited his father’s wandering spirit, but his sister Martha had been glad to grow up and marry and settle on a Pacific coast which was gradually growing more civilized and prosperous while she did so. James, meanwhile, had spent his youth ranging all over the western half of the country, his furthest venture east extending as far as New Orleans, where he unexpectedly found a wife. But even after, a year or so later, he found what he described as the place he had been looking for all his life in the timbered mountains of western Montana, he still kept up an amiable relationship with his sister, and we had visited Martha and her family in Santa Clara a few times while I was growing up.
This was the first visit Mother and I had made since Father’s death three years ago, and our first trip away from the Pont since before the Great War. And for the first time in my life, I hadn’t wanted to go.
Darkness was falling by the time we reached Truckee. Morning came, and I sat in my corner and stared from the window all day as the sagebrush plains of Nevada gave way to the salt flats and snow peaks of Utah. At the second nightfall we were among the hills of Idaho, and by morning well into my own Montana at last, steaming north from Silver Bow to Garrison with the pines and the breathtaking blue mountain ranges rising on every side.
I was the only passenger to change to the local branch line to Baldwinsville—an isolated little station serving scattered ranches and lumber camps around it. It was ten miles more from there to my destination, but fortunately when I disembarked I had no trouble engaging Gus Griswold from the combination store and post office to drive me up to the Pont in his buckboard. I waited outside while Gus, a gray-haired man with small square spectacles and a genial moustache, sorted the big mail sacks and left a few instructions for his wife; and waited while he harnessed the team, swinging my suitcase restlessly and keeping an eye on the wagon roads to neighboring ranches that spread out from Baldwinsville like the spokes of a wheel. I had no desire to encounter any acquaintance of mine just now.
Out in the open on the broad logging road to the Pont, with my suitcase under the buckboard seat and the ramparts of the mountain foothills growing ever steeper and nearer in front of us, I kept my hands clasped in my lap, fixed my eyes on the shoulder of hill round which I knew the first view of Mount St. Orleans would appear, and fenced Gus’s entirely normal and unsuspecting questions. No, Mother hadn’t come back with me. Yes, it was a little earlier than we’d planned to return…yes, Mother would be following soon.
I gulped a little to myself after this last. Mother would probably be with me sooner than I liked. No doubt I deserved whatever scolding she might give me, but at least I could receive it in the privacy of the Pont, and then go off up into the pine woods with their still, soft, scented air, and sit on a sun-warmed ledge of rock and put my head back and close my eyes and let the breeze stroke my face, and the utter peace and quiet of the high mountains seep into my soul—instead of pasting on a smile and following my cousins back into the hectic laughter and clinking champagne glasses and insincere smiles of their social circle, which at first I’d been so delighted to be welcomed into.
Until I learned better.
The shoulder of hill seemed to be turning, turning slowly, as the buckboard and its trotting team crawled along the road that would end up skirting its base a mile ahead. I could see the feathery texture of the pines that dotted its open, rock-broken slope in clumps, and the dark brown shaft of a half-rotted abandoned mine high up on the side. I held my breath, watching the blue above where hill met sky, and then to the rhythmic accompaniment of hoof and wheel the peak glimmered into view. A massive, stately mountain, head and shoulders above the other sizeable peaks of the range, silvery with snow and rock only at the very top, its timbered slopes and ridges falling in folds around it like the deep-green robes of a queen. It was nameless when my parents first saw it, and they had called it Mount St. Orleans in tribute to my mother’s birthplace. The mountain was a part of family lore, a continual presence looking down upon the family home, almost a member of the family.
It was nearly sunset when we reached Pierpont.
As with his father before him, it was gold that first brought James Pierpont to Montana. After he made a successful strike a small mining camp-cum-town had sprung up at the foot of Mount St. Orleans, which took his name. The veins of ore petered out shortly before I was born, and by the time I was ten years old the last of the miners and their suppliers were gone and Pierpont was a ghost town. It had no source of water to support a sawmill and it was too far from the railroad to be of use for anything else. But the buildings remained, and occasionally were temporarily used by a lumber crew once Father, again following family tradition, had turned his hand to cutting timber. But there had been no timber cut on Mount St. Orleans since we fulfilled our last wartime contract, so Pierpont had stood silent and empty for two years.
I had never found Pierpont a sad or gloomy place. Its buildings were scattered carelessly, like the clumps of pines, along both sides of the road on open ground that sloped up toward the mountains. Some were weathered gray, others looked dark and damp and near to rotting; a few which had once been brightly painted had faded to sandy brick-red and sage-green, and a few names of past proprietors were still faintly traceable on the false-front signs, daytime ghosts like the town itself. Smooth green grass had obliterated all yards and paths, so the buildings stood alone like small islands in a grassy sea.
There were only a few stray panes of glass left in the town, and the setting sun struck gold gleams from them as we drove through. But most of the windows were blank and empty, and I didn’t mind that. Empty windows hold no suggestion that one is being watched, and it was restful to feel that I was in a place far from all watching eyes, and that the old buildings were sympathetic to my feeling.
Ever since Baldwinsville our road had been steadily rising further and further above sea level, but after Pierpont the climb became noticeable. We were into the pine woods now, the glimmering sunset split into a million tiny rays as it filtered between trunks and through needles, and the road switched back and forth in steep bends, following a long ridge that rose toward the main body of the mountain. Gus Griswold spoke encouragingly to the team on the steepest turns; he whistled and flicked the lines over their backs and they leaned determinedly into the harness, forging upward.
The dusk was deepening, the sun mere deep-gold winks between the black ranks of tree trunks as we ascended a long, angled stretch of road that I knew well. One more right-hand curve at the top and we came in sight of the bridge.
I laid a hand on Gus Griswold’s arm. “Mr. Griswold, you can stop and leave me here. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
Gus said “Whoa” to the team and brought them to a stop, then let his hands holding the lines rest on his knees and turned a questioning look on me. “You sure about that, Miss Jeanette? It’s quite a piece to walk, and it’s getting dark. It’s no trouble to me to drive on up, so don’t you go worrying about that.”
“Oh no, it’s not that. I like to walk, and I know every step from here like the back of my hand. And it’s not very dark yet. Really, it’s all right, Mr. Griswold; I’d just like to go the rest of the way myself.”
Gus’s spectacles glimmered doubtfully through the dusk. “Well, if that’s what you like…but I don’t know. You’re sure you don’t mind being all alone way up here?”
“I’m sure. Anyway I won’t be alone; you know we left Ted Weems up here to look after our horses. It’s only a few steps to the house; I’ll be fine.”
“Well,” said Gus, conceding. He leaned forward as if to put down the lines. “Here, let me fetch your—”
I had already leaped down from the buckboard and was hauling my suitcase from the back. “I’ve got it, thanks! Thank you very much for driving me up here, Mr. Griswold; I appreciate it.”
“No trouble at all. You take care, Miss Jeanette.”
“I will.”
I started on my way, suitcase in hand, skirting the needle-carpeted verge of the road to give Gus room to turn. There was enough level ground this side of the bridge that the road had been widened so one wagon could pull aside to let another pass if they met one coming off the bridge, and it was just enough space for Gus to bring the buckboard around in a tight circle. I paused and watched him out of sight around the first bend, and waited until the thump of hoofs and jingle of harness had died away through the woods below. Then I turned and went on across the bridge.
Except for the sleepy song of a late bird in the woods and the continual whispering rush of the stream far below, my footsteps on the broad planks were the only sound. The bridge was a broad, solid, heavy-timbered wooden structure, built to take the passage of a well-loaded wagon with hardly a tremor. It was only about twenty yards long, for the deep gorge it spanned was narrow at this point. Feathery tips of spruce and hemlock branches brushed the ends of the big square rails, framing the exit at the far end like dark green curtains—and once through, there was the house above me.
The house my father built often made strangers seeing it for the first time utter an exclamation, and even people who knew it well would stop for another look, as I did now. It set back a little atop a large outcropping of rock about thirty feet high—a long, rambling gray story built of roughly quarried native stone, all angles and corners, some rooms dropping down a step or climbing up two to follow the level of the rock, so it almost looked as if it had grown right out of the crevices. All along the front face overlooking the bridge ran a flagged stone terrace with an iron railing, with long windows opening onto it. Several great stately spruces sheltered it from behind, and to my right, the road curved upward to climb up around the side of the outcropping of rock and reach the house at the back.
The sky above the treetops was a calm, pale, elusive tint of gray-blue. I took a quick breath of the clean, pungent scent of pine, and tried to disregard what was left of the angry little ache inside me, which had begun, but not quite finished fading away. It was better to be back here, even utterly alone at the edge of nightfall. Better this high retreat embraced by the arms of the forest than the post-war world down below with its frantic gaiety and jammed automobiles and its murders and riots and kidnappings splashed all over its newspapers—a world where you never knew who you could trust. I’d never leave the Pont again.
Pont du Claire, Father had named his eyrie in the mountains; given it in name as well as in fact to his bride, Claire. He always said it was his gift to her because it was the most perfect jewel he had ever found. A green jewel: a lush green tableland hidden away halfway up the side of Mount St. Orleans, whose peculiarity was that it was nearly inaccessible to the rest of the world. A rushing mountain stream cut a deep gorge down around the west and south sides; the eastern side was a perilous rockslide and the only way out to the north was over the peak of Mount St. Orleans, a trek of days on foot or horseback. Father had built the bridge over the south gorge after he stumbled upon the place in his prospecting days and determined that here and here only was the place he wanted to build a home for his Claire.
Inevitably local usage shortened Pont du Claire first to Pont Claire, and by now it was known by everyone in this part of Montana simply as the Pont—its pronunciation flattened by twenty-five years on western tongues into one with little resemblance to the original. One time when we had a genuine Frenchman to visit—a friend of one of Mother’s cousins—when the carriage rounded the last bend and the bridge came into view he said involuntarily, “Oh, I see,” in an illuminated voice.
I crossed the clearing between the bridge and the cliff’s foot and walked partway up the curving sweep of the road, and then turned off up a set of twisting stairs to the house—flat stones set into a natural rock garden lushly grown over with moss and ferns. The flagged terrace took an L-shaped turn to run level on this side of the house too, beneath a wooden pergola heavy with wild grapevines, and the steps reached it opposite the front door, just round the corner of the house. With the sun faded away, it was almost pitch black in the shadow of the spruces and the pergola, but I knew every stone so well I didn’t have to let my eyes get used to the dark. By touch I produced the key from a convenient chink in the stone of the house, and unlocked the door. I knew the house was empty. Our visit was supposed to be for several months, so we had shut up the house, and the elderly Indian woman who had helped Mother cook and clean since before I was born had gone down the mountain to visit her daughter. The single hand we had left to look after the horses would likely be in his quarters over the barn, and might not even have heard my arrival. I’d let him know I was back in the morning.
The layout of the house was just as unconventional inside, but I knew where the hall bent to the right and climbed a couple of wedge-shaped steps. There was a lamp on a bracket here, and I found the matches and lit it, just to give myself a little light to operate by. At this hour I didn’t care to go into any of the spacious front rooms with the dust covers over the furniture, so I picked up my suitcase and turned down the corridor that branched left a few steps beyond the bracket. This one dropped down one step and then another before it reached my bedroom door; and at the end a dim, translucent oval showed where a curiously-shaped window would let in a blaze of sunlight from a nook between two pines in the daylight.
In my room I lit a candle and pushed my suitcase into a corner out of the way, and went back out to blow out the lamp in the hall. I wasn’t hungry enough to go foraging in the kitchen, but I was bone-tired after three days of Pullmans and changing trains. For now I was content to go straight to bed.
Back in my room I’d only taken off my hat and linen duster and started to open my suitcase to look for my hairbrush, when a sound made me pause and turn my head. It wasn’t merely the innocuous nighttime creak of an empty house. Our stone walls were thick and fairly sound-proof, so what had reached my ears as a faint metallic rattle was likely something being knocked over with a considerable racket in the neighborhood of the kitchen.
Ted Weems, I supposed. He must have seen or heard my arrival somehow after all, and had come to the back door to see what was up. I opened my door and put my head out in the corridor. But somewhat to my surprise, everything was still dark. There was no dim glow of lamplight spilling along the main hall from the kitchen. And of the sounds I half expected to hear—a man stamping and growling and perhaps swearing over his kitchen mishap—there were none.
All was perfect silence for perhaps ten seconds. And then I heard what I least expected to hear: a very soft, careful footstep, somewhere in the dark hall.
Probably on pure instinct, I drew back into my room and pulled the door mostly closed. The light from my candle probably didn’t reach all the way down the corridor to the main hall, but if someone glanced down from the juncture they couldn’t help seeing the dim light emanating from my open door. More puzzled than alarmed, I stood still for a moment and listened closely with my ear at the crack. I heard the cautious footsteps come opposite the corridor and fade slightly once past it. A moment later, I heard a sort of scuff and thump from the front of the house, followed by some a muffled utterance, as if somebody had tripped over one of the dust covers that trailed on the floor between the furniture; and then a very thin, bright pencil of light skimmed up the hall floor, flashed up on the wallpaper for an instant and disappeared.
I retrieved my candle from the bureau and went out to investigate. It had to be Ted Weems, and yet why he was blundering around in the dark I didn’t know. My candle cast a little wavering, glimmering circle of light as I turned into the hall, went down the two steps and approached the door of the big front sitting-room. For a second I thought I’d been mistaken about the source of the sounds, for it was pitch dark. I took one cautious step into the room and then another—and suddenly there was a jerk of motion in the dark and the skid of a side-table being bumped against, someone swung around and his electric flashlight switched on full in my face, half blinding me, at the same instant my candle palely lit up his. We both instinctively fell back a step and stared at each other’s garishly lit countenances in amazement.
I was the first to speak. “Who are you? What are you doing in here?”
The automatic note of authority in my voice seemed to give him the clue, about halfway through his own speech. He said, “I work here. But you—are you one of the Pierponts?”
“I’m Jeanette Pierpont. Mrs. Pierpont’s daughter. But who are you? I don’t—”
“My name’s Barton—Sonny Barton, that’s what most folks call me.” He gave a half-hearted laugh. He seemed far more rattled than I was, which was a little surprising.
He let the flashlight down a little so the beam was no longer directly in my eyes. He was young and spare, not much taller than me, with dark hair; almost black, I thought, though it was hard to tell in the little light. “I didn’t expect you. I mean, I thought you weren’t supposed to be home for almost another month.”
“No, I came back earlier than we planned. But I don’t understand. You work here? Where’s Ted Weems?”
“Gone. He left, I should say,” said Sonny. He added, “I suppose I ought to explain.”
“It would help,” I allowed, though not as forcibly as I might have done; Sonny Barton seemed pretty apologetic enough already.
He began with an explanatory gesture of the flashlight, somewhat spoiled by his knocking his elbow against a dust-sheeted chair lurking by his side and giving it a reproachful look. “It’s simpler than it sounds, actually. I’m from this part of the country; I worked on the C Bar ranch for three or four years before the war. I haven’t had any luck getting a job since I was demobilized, so I drifted back up this way, but I still hadn’t found anything up till last month. I met Ted Weems one Saturday night at the pool hall in Baldwinsville, and we had a drink or two together and got talking. He told me about his job up here, and said the lonesomeness was getting to him and he wished he’d never taken it on. He’d been coming down to Baldwinsville on Saturdays just for the sight of another human face. Well, with one thing and another, we talked, and I got the idea: he didn’t like his job, I needed one, so why shouldn’t we change places? He could go where he liked, I’d come up here for the rest of the time the Pierponts were away. I didn’t think they would mind so long as there was someone here. Weems took a little convincing, but in the end he was glad to see it my way, and so we made the switch. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I see,” I said slowly. “No…I suppose not. If we had been here when Ted wanted to quit we probably would have hired you, so I guess there’s no harm done. You just had me confused for a moment there when I saw you and it wasn’t Ted.”
“Oh, sure,” said Sonny, with a slightly lopsided grin. “I know. You gave me kind of a jar too. Is Mrs. Pierpont with you?”
“She’ll be along in a day or two,” I said, falling back on caution, which also happened to be truth. “I was impatient to get home.”
Sonny Barton had let the flashlight beam drift a little further downward, so I couldn’t see his face as well. He turned it to left and right over the white shapes of sheeted furniture that surrounded us like a drift of miniature icebergs. “You got any grips you need carried in, or anything needs doing in here? I can help you if you want.”
“No, thanks. I’m not going to do anything in here tonight; I was going straight to bed. I’ll open up the windows and things in the morning.”
“All right. I’ll see myself out the back then—see if I can get there without running into anything this time. I kicked over a pail or something by the door coming in.”
“I heard you,” I said, grinning. “Just keep to the right, that usually works, and use your headlights after dark.”
Sonny laughed, though somehow not very enthusiastically. “Yeah, sure. Well, good night then, Miss Pierpont.”
He motioned me respectfully out of the room ahead of him, and I didn’t waste any time on further ceremony, for I’d just discovered that my candle was dripping warm wax all down over my hand. I turned off into my bedroom corridor and Sonny Barton went on toward the kitchen, scouting well ahead of him with his flashlight beam. It occurred to me that he hadn’t used the flashlight before—not until he was well inside the sitting-room.
I went to bed thoughtful, though not overly concerned. There had been something a little off-kilter about that whole conversation—not necessarily in anything Sonny Barton had said, but in the way he had acted. I couldn’t fit a good reason to it just now. It was too late and I was too tired after my journey to puzzle it out. There would be plenty of time for that in the morning.
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