Bridge to Trouble: Chapter II
In the small hours of the morning I was awakened by the sound of an automobile.
Bridge to Trouble is a romantic-suspense novella set in 1920s Montana.
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She heaved a sigh and wiped her eye,
And ran over hill and dale, o.
- Little Bo Peep -
In the small hours of the morning I was awakened by the sound of an automobile.
I half turned over in bed and raised my head sluggishly from the pillow, for a few seconds unable to remember where I was. Then I recognized the darkened but familiar outlines of my own room. I was back at the Pont, and an automobile was coming across the bridge. I had my windows open, and the choking growl of the motor and the grinding of tires on gravel echoed back and forth from the rock ledge on which the house sat and the wall of pines that surrounded it.
Mother had been a little more prompt than I expected. She must have left Santa Clara only a few hours after I did to catch up with me so soon. I buried my face in the pillow and groaned. Quite suddenly I didn’t want to face her. I didn’t want to hear the justified scolding I knew I would receive. I didn’t want to give her explanations and reasons that I knew would sound lame and incoherent, no matter how potent they had been to me.
I sat up abruptly on my knees in bed. Then I kicked the covers off and shot myself out of it. It would be several minutes yet before Mother got up the steps and unlocked the door, and even then she wasn’t likely to come straight to my room and wake me out of a sound sleep at four in the morning. Not Mother. First she would take off her gloves and count her luggage and quite possibly put on a kettle for tea. If I moved quickly, I could manage a temporary reprieve.
The faint gray of pre-dawn gave me just enough light to see by. I tumbled into my divided riding-skirt, a linen sailor blouse, an old sweater and my boots. My cousins hadn’t been able to persuade me to have my hair bobbed, and I left it back in the loose plait I wore for sleeping. On swift tiptoe I went to my right-hand window and leaned out. My room was at the back west corner of the house; the tumbled boulders of the outcropping on which it was set fell away on a steep slant to the left beneath my windows. The iron-railed terrace ended just to the left, and though I had made a few speculative tries throughout my childhood, I couldn’t safely reach it. But there was one great split boulder just a foot or two opposite the right-hand window, half concealed by the drooping branches of spruce that hung down over it, which I could and did reach often. It was my own private exit. I got up on the sill, took a firm grasp on a handful of spruce branch, reached for a foothold on the split rock and scrambled across and up.
On hands and feet I climbed the mossy shoulder of rock under the canopy of the tree, finding a handhold on the underside of a branch here and there, until I reached the flat top of the rock, which was about a yard broad. There was a four-foot drop on the other side, and I landed on my hands and knees in a thick carpet of dry pine needles, just a few yards away from the path which ran from the back door to the barn.
After that the rest was easy. I got my saddle from the barn, whistled softly to my mare Esmerelda in the fenced pasture and saddled her mostly by touch in the dimness. The hired hands’ quarters were in the loft on the other end of the barn above where the spring wagon and buggy were kept, with a ladder at the far end, so even if Sonny Barton had been wakened by the automobile and went down to see, I wouldn’t have had to cross paths with him; and the wood behind the house screened the pasture from view.
The great level meadow that opened out to the north beyond the wood was a faint shimmer of dew-laden gray in the pre-dawn, and I could just barely tell where the black bulk of mountain above it met the lighter sky. I opened the gate at the far end of the fenced portion from horseback and closed it the same way, and started Esmerelda at a trot which gradually lengthened into a lope as she found her bearings on the familiar terrain. The early-morning chill filled my lungs and nipped at my nose, but my thick knitted sweater was warm across my shoulders. The further I got across the meadow, the easier it seemed I could breathe. I had made my escape.
I had a favorite spot on the steep-rising mountainside, far on the other side of the park-like network of meadows and valleys divided by smaller ridges that made up the Pont. The light was growing enough that I could take all my little shortcuts instead of sticking to the lowest ground, and by the time the sun rose in earnest I was sitting curled up on a stone ledge that made enough of a break among the young aspens and firs for the beams of sunlight to reach through, and gave me a distant view of lesser peaks in the range of which Mount St. Orleans formed a part. The stone was cold, and my hands were cold, but I folded my arms and tucked my hands beneath them and let the sun warm me slowly as it grew stronger.
All through my childhood the Pont had been my playground, but only in the three years since my father died had it become my sanctuary. In my sudden introduction to grief, I had only wanted to hide my head, to carry my raw and ravaged feelings out of sight—not to let anyone, even people whose intentions were undoubtedly kind, see how I was buffeted by the storm of emotions to an extent that shocked and shook me. Mother and I were close, but there were times when I felt I needed to spare her; that the violent rebelliousness of my grieving would only hurt her worse than merely the process of navigating her own. I was not too self-absorbed to know that she had loved James Pierpont even more deeply than an affectionate daughter could. And so I escaped to the green thickets and hidden rocky clefts of the Pont, to hide my hurt and wrestle with my bitter grief. The green valleys always welcomed, never rebuked, always sheltered me and hid me from view when I didn’t want to be found or seen. And somehow in those three years escape had become a habit. Anything that stung, or irked, anything that was daunting or frightening, seemed too much for me to face right away; I wanted to put it off. And so more often than not I was out my window and away up the mountain, to find temporary peace on some slope where even the sunlight seemed more gentle, filtered through the pines.
No doubt this was part of the reason I hadn’t wanted to go to California. There were other reasons too—too many memories of our last visit with my father, too little freedom living in even a pleasant town, too many people with whom I didn’t have much in common. Though I had been well educated by intelligent parents, I’d always found something of a gulf in interests between the average town-bred young people and a girl who had grown up with the freedom of a Montana mountainside. I got on better with the daughters of neighboring ranches whom I saw throughout the year.
But Mother had serenely but firmly overcome all my objections, and off we went to Aunt Martha’s. And after the first adjustment I had discovered with an almost pathetic rush of surprise and delight that there was something for me in Santa Clara after all. The society of a mixed crowd of young people held a slightly different aspect at nineteen than it had at fourteen. My cousins and their friends were so gay, so light-hearted, so ready to laugh merrily at anything clever I said, so ready to have me along on outings and at parties and whatever else they took it into their heads to do. I’d swallowed it all without question: I was part of a “set” for the first time in my life.
I shifted on my rock and wrapped my sweater a little tighter, that little bitter gnawing ache rising up in me again. I wasn’t suffering from a broken heart. It would have been less—less humiliating if I had. A real honest-to-goodness broken heart would have been painful, but I wouldn’t have constantly writhed over the recollection the way I did over this.
I hadn’t been in love with him. But I had liked him. And I’d been pleased by his behavior that intimated a particularity of attention toward me. He’d made sure of getting in my company at parties and to be seated near me at dinners and on automobile outings; he’d made just the right amount of gallant little speeches. We’d had our shared jokes, had caught each other’s eye and smiled across rooms.
And then one night at a party I had gone out into the garden, and he was sitting in an arbor with another girl I knew well, ladling out the very same stuff. The same pretty speeches tweaked for a new audience. It wasn’t so much a feeling of betrayal as it was a stunned cognizance that nothing was ever meant by any of it—to me or to her. I walked back into the party with my eyes and ears open, realizing for the first time that I was the only one in all this group that had ever taken a word we said seriously. Ever since I’d been there I’d taken at full value what was mere sport to them—and what was more, there was no way that they didn’t all know it. I’d never tried to hide how happy and pleased I was at a friendly word—or a meaning glance. No wonder they all found me so amusing.
How could I spend another hour in their company, laughing and pretending I didn’t care a bit more than they did? That wasn’t me. I’d only been happy when I thought it was all real. And the humiliation of knowing I’d made a spectacle of myself was so strong I couldn’t think of any course but to hide.
I’d started running, and not stopped until I’d crossed a quarter of the country and reached my sanctuary again.
I blinked; my eyes stung. Oh, yes, I’d been ready enough, excited enough for a possible chance at romance. But romance had been overrated. It hurt far less, I decided, to forego it. My mountain fastness might be lonely sometimes, but a few pangs of loneliness I could live with.
By the time the sun had risen, the clouds broken apart into little dabs of fluffy white in the blue sky, and the mountains taken on their richest green in the daylight, my wrangling feelings of self-pity and self-recrimination had subsided like a small spent tornado, leaving me a little tired but in a more resigned frame of mind. I figured I could even face Mother. She would never discount that I’d been hurt, though she would still have a thing or two to say about the way I’d bolted from Aunt Martha’s. But when I dragged in with my disheveled hair down my back and plaintive haven’t-slept shadows under my eyes, she might hold off on them a while longer, or at least give me the abridged version.
I scrambled down a steep fall of hillside among saplings to where I’d left Esmerelda ground-tied. She was used to browsing peacefully while I climbed in remoter regions. Her black coat looked in good condition, and I slid my hand over her flank approvingly, glad the change in hired hands hadn’t had a negative effect on the horses. I picked up the reins and mounted.
I took a longer route home, leisurely following the course of one of the small winding valleys that opened out on the great meadow. Halfway along it I smelled smoke. Then I rounded the bend and saw the sheepherder’s wagon down at the far end of the valley, with smoke ascending in a thin streak from a campfire in front of it to dissipate into vague sunlit smudges around the tops of the pines. Scattered about in spots of white on the green was a medium-sized band of sheep. Father, ever the entrepreneur, had noted the suitability of the Pont’s rich grass for sheep, and so had always kept a small bunch up there with a single herder to supplement our income, which always came from varied sources.
As I approached, a lean shaggy-coated gray dog, of uncertain heritage but showing a distinct collie influence in his general shape and glassy blue eyes, rose from a sphinx-like position in the grass near the sheep and gave two barks to announce my arrival, then trotted off about his own business. The man who sat by the campfire, tending something that sizzled and spattered in a cast-iron skillet, raised his head briefly and marked my presence, and returned to his.
Undaunted by this lack of greeting, I dismounted and looped Esmerelda’s reins over a bush near the wagon, a plain rectangular box on wheels, a little broader at the top with a slightly curved roof and projecting stovepipe like a gypsy caravan. I knew Jacot’s ways. Sheepherders as a class were known for being at best eccentric, if not anti-social, though no one had ever quite decided if such men adopted the profession by taste or if sheepherding made them that way. Cynics, especially cowmen, said that no one in possession of their full faculties would ever agree to herd sheep in the first place. In any case I suppose it’s well that a few hermits by bent do exist, since it wouldn’t be easy to find someone willing to live in such a secluded place as the Pont with no company but sheep—not the most intelligent companions in the animal kingdom.
Jacot was a thick-set man of average height who might have been anywhere between thirty-five and sixty. He was always unshaven but never fully bearded, and his ears seemed to stick out a little, though that may only have been because he wore his hat pressed down on them, and I had never in six years seen him without his hat. He was French Canadian, and that was all anybody knew about him except that he was a very good herder and resented being given any advice on the care and feeding of sheep.
“Morning, Jacot,” I said, coming over to stand by the campfire. The air was still crisp, and the heat radiating from the small fire felt good on my face and the front of my legs. “I’d forgotten you would be down here. This spot is always the greenest at this time of year, isn’t it.”
Jacot knew I already knew the answer to that rhetorical question, so he didn’t bother being repetitive. The sausages he was turning with a two-tined fork in the skillet were just reaching the fine line between blackened and well done, so he nodded to me to sit down by the fire, which plainly encompassed an invitation to breakfast. I hesitated only a second, and then sat down on a convenient rock. It might be a slight matter of question where Jacot got his provisions and where they were kept until being eaten, but sausages always smell good, and I had just realized I was ravenously hungry, not having eaten since I was on the train yesterday afternoon.
Jacot handed me a tin plate with two sausages in it, and filled a tin cup with thick black unsweetened coffee, which I accepted politely but set down on the ground beside my rock; I knew I could only manage a token sip or two of that. My unannounced appearance at his campfire after a two months’ absence caused no comment with Jacot. He never troubled himself over how other people were redeeming the time; we could have moved to the Antipodes for a year and then returned and presented ourselves with no prior warning for breakfast, and Jacot would have evinced no surprise. In my present mood, this attitude suited my views; I didn’t care to talk about my reappearance either.
“How are the lambs doing?” I asked, after I had burnt my fingers and my tongue on the sausage and managed to swallow a couple of mouthfuls.
Jacot raked up the coals of the campfire with the sausage fork, and preserved his silence. He eyed me with a look that a stranger might have taken for hostility, but fortunately I understood him better. “Comment vont les agneaux?” I repeated. Mother spoke fluent French and so I did too, which came in handy with Jacot, who decided for himself when and if he spoke English.
He still delayed his answer for a few seconds, before permitting himself to reply, “Bien.”
“A-t-il fait beau ici? L’herbe est merveilleuse.”
But Jacot was uncommunicative today even in French. His answers to my questions about the sheep, his chief interest, were all monosyllabic; and I thought he seemed generally out of humor—I knew him well enough to discern the finer shadings in a demeanor that seemed uniformly forbidding to anyone who didn’t.
“Avez-vous rencontré le nouveau garçon d’écurie?” I thought to inquire suddenly.
Without answering, Jacot got up, took the coffeepot off the fire, and went over to dump it out in the weeds behind the wagon, giving it an almost vindictive shake to get out the last drops. That answered my question as well as anything. Jacot evidently had met Sonny Barton and did not care for him. Ted Weems had long since given up paying any attention to the sheepherder, but if Sonny, being young and a cowman, had amused himself by taunting the misanthropic minder of the flock, perhaps it was no wonder Jacot was in a bad mood.
As there was no prospect of conversation here, and I had finished my impromptu breakfast, I put my plate aside and got up from my rock. Taking a French leave, in the literal sense, of Jacot, I mounted Esmerelda and rode off, skirting the flock of sheep on my way toward the end of the valley. I criss-crossed a narrow little creek that tumbled down a few foot-high cataracts before it emerged from the valley to run sedately around the west side of the great meadow. Here I parted company with it, and rode straight across to the pasture gate.
I unsaddled Esmerelda and turned her loose, put my saddle in the barn, and walked, albeit reluctantly, down to the house. But here I got a surprise. Every window was still closed and curtained, and no smoke came from any of the chimneys. The front and back doors were still locked, and I had to let myself in with the hidden key again. Not until I had made the circuit of the undisturbed rooms could I fully credit it: there was no sign of Mother or any of her luggage. She hadn’t come home this morning after all.
Surprised, and mildly puzzled, I went outdoors again and made my way back to the barn. Here I met Sonny Barton, just rounding the corner of it as if coming from his own quarters.
“Morning!” he said. “You’re out early. I knocked on the door down at the house an hour ago and didn’t get any answer—thought you were still asleep, till I saw there was a saddle gone from the barn.”
Seen in daylight, he looked about twenty-five, with a square, dark, rather small-featured face. He seemed much more at ease this morning; his smile was friendly enough to intimate he took a personal pleasure in seeing me again. Though I was far from being offended by this, it was the last sort of thing I was in the mood for just now, so I merely smiled back and did my best to assume a manner of cool, airy indifference. “Oh, yes, I slip out for early morning rides all the time. I like to watch the sun rise from the mountain.”
“Sure. Did you go all the way to the peak?”
“Oh, goodness, no, that would be a few hours’ ride. I just rode up to a spot I like on the mountainside, and then I stopped at the sheep camp on my way back and had some breakfast.”
“The sheep camp?” Sonny sounded startled.
I laughed. “Jacot really isn’t such a bad cook, so long as you don’t think too hard about what you’re eating. I think it may actually prove the old saying that ‘what you don’t know, can’t hurt you.’”
“I don’t think I’ve got enough nerve to put that one to the test,” said Sonny Barton with a broad grin. “I’ll stick to my own cooking, thanks. I like to know what kills me.”
“Can’t argue with that,” I said with a laugh. I turned to go, and then in mid-step turned back. “Oh, by the way, Sonny, did you hear an automobile sometime last night?”
“An automobile? Nope, can’t say I did. Why—did you hear one?”
“I certainly thought I did, anyway. It woke me up, and for a minute I thought my mother must have come home a little earlier than I expected; but it wasn’t her after all. I can’t imagine who else would drive an automobile up here.”
Sonny shrugged. “Well, if somebody did have one on the road they must not have come all the way up. If they’d come across the bridge I’m sure I would’ve heard it.”
“I guess they didn’t, then,” I said carelessly. “Well, I’d better get back to the house; I’ve got lots of windows to open. I’ll see you later.”
We parted amicably, and I returned to the house. I judged it best not to betray my thoughts just now, but I suspected Sonny would not have said anything even if he had heard an automobile last night. I didn’t have anything in particular to accuse him of, but I had a feeling he was on his best behavior for some reason: maybe just because he still thought we might look askance on the way he had gotten his job.
Housework, though, was no mere polite excuse. I couldn’t abide the stuffiness of darkened rooms on such a lovely morning, so I flung open all the curtains, opened the windows wide to the fresh air and set about pulling off the dust covers, which I carried out and draped haphazardly over the terrace railings. By then I was already longing to be outdoors again, so I dashed a broom over the floors just enough to satisfy decency from a housekeeper’s point of view, and then went off to deal with my own disheveled appearance. I had a thorough wash and changed my rumpled blouse for a fresh and trim green one, brushed out my hair and pinned it up in its usual low chignon. Then I escaped again, down the steps through the rock garden this time, with the dust-sheets rippling gently like the sails of a shipwrecked vessel on the railings up above.
I lingered on the bridge a few moments, hanging over the broad rail watching the foaming rush of the water tumbling over the rocks below, and then left it and wandered on downhill. I often liked to walk for a mile or so down the shady, winding mountain road—and just as often, like today, I would stray off the road before I had gone far below the bridge and ramble through the sloping woods instead.
I always lose track of time when I’m in the woods. The canopy of the trees and the thick carpet of rust-brown pine needles underfoot seem to deaden sounds, so that one feels curiously remote and far away even when just out of sight and sound of house or road—as if one enters a sort of enchantment by slipping in among the trunks of the pines. You have to watch your footing on a slope as steeply pitched as the one I crossed now; and there is enough variety on a forest floor to make me linger and observe—every twisted tree root, every clump of ruffle-edged toadstools, every moldering moss-covered tree stump, every slab of rock dotted with pale sea-green blotches of lichen seems to lead me on like clues scattered along the trail of a treasure-hunt, until at last I happen to lift my head and see by the changed light that I’ve whiled away hours without realizing it and am miles from home.
Which is why I don’t know exactly how far from the road I had wandered when I smelled campfire smoke for the second time that day—this time a campfire I couldn’t account for.
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