Bridge to Trouble: Chapter III
I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was that on this particular stretch of mountainside it was very unlikely that a boulder, let alone more than one, should come tumbling down from natural causes.
Bridge to Trouble is a romantic-suspense novella set in 1920s Montana.
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Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.
- Jack and Jill -If it hadn’t been for the petty accumulation of circumstances I might not have felt such a surge of annoyance. I was not, ordinarily, anti-social to the level of a sheepherder. But I’d traveled a thousand miles in search of peace and quiet and here we were approaching the Pont’s semi-yearly average for unheralded guests in a single day.
I set my teeth and scrambled down the slope in the direction of the smoke smell. The unseen fire-builder was about to feel the wrath that ought properly to have been shared equally with Sonny Barton and an unknown motorist.
The trees were a little thinner here, and in a moment I came down upon a rock ledge jutting out amongst the pine, which ended in a short cliff eight or nine feet high. At the foot of it was a little open space among the trees, and from the middle of this natural camp site rose the smoke of the fire. At the moment it was just a tiny flame crackling in a few half-charred twigs, but it sat atop a black patch of ashes which indicated somebody had had a fire there for some hours at least. There was a rumpled blanket or sleeping bag spread out beside it; a saddle lay up against the roots of a tree, and a buckskin horse was tied at a nearby bush. At first I thought the clearing was otherwise empty, but then I saw that its occupant was sitting with his back to a tree trunk and to me, so all I could see was a shoulder and one boot.
I altered my course a little to come down around the end of the ledge, but I made the descent with too much energy, and halfway down found I was going too fast to stop. I flung out my arm and looped it around a young tree and brought myself up with a jerk a couple yards above level ground. The buckskin pricked its ears and flung up its head, shifting around with a rumbling whicker. The boot disappeared and the camper, a good deal younger and slighter than I had expected, got to his feet and emerged from behind the tree to meet my eyes with some astonishment. He was reasonably tall, with tousled light hair, and thin—almost too thin; his khaki shirt, open at the neck and with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, hung loosely across his shoulders. I would have said he was not much older than me, for his features were youthful; but at second glance there was a slightly worn, fine-drawn look about his face that made it hard to guess his age with any precision.
In the few seconds before he turned I had managed to dig my heels into the ground and straighten up, for hanging around a tree is not the most dignified way to confront somebody. “Look here,” I said, “what is this?”
(I was already getting tired of “Who are you and what are you doing here?”)
“Good morning,” he said. Then he grinned as if he couldn’t help seeing the absurdity of it. “I mean, it is a good morning in some respects at least, but I don’t think that’s what you meant.”
“No, it is not,” I snapped. “What I mean is, who are you, and what are you doing here?”
“Nothing, at the moment,” he said, “though if you’d caught me about half an hour ago I was having breakfast.”
I must have looked dangerous, for he added ingenuously, “Am I trespassing? I didn’t think there was anyone living within a few miles of here at least.”
To tell the truth, we had never objected to the occasional hunter or traveler camping overnight on Pierpont timberland, so now I had my conscience to be annoyed with too. “That depends. You still haven’t told me who you are, or why you’re up here.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. My name’s Keith Phillips. The simple truth is I’m just on a sort of camping-trip—I’ve been exploring around in these mountains for a couple of weeks. I had an idea I’d strike the road to Baldwinsville once I got around the south side of Mount St. Orleans, but I hadn’t come on it by dark last night, so I camped here.”
While he spoke I had been taking further survey of him and his camp. I could see the stock of a rifle in a scabbard sticking up over the saddle on the ground, not at all unusual for a man living in the open; but Keith Phillips had not even glanced that way since he got up—evidently he did not feel threatened or desire to appear threatening himself. I also noticed he had a strip of sticking-plaster on his forehead above his eyebrow, and one trouser leg torn below the knee with the white of a bandage showing through.
“Last night?” I said. “It’s almost the middle of the morning. You seem to be making yourself pretty much at home.”
“Worse than that,” said Keith Phillips with another half-suppressed grin. “I was almost dozing off in the sun when you dropped down on me just now. I suppose that’s trespassing compounded.”
I nodded abruptly toward his torn trouser leg. “What happened to your leg?”
He glanced down at it and back at me. “Oh—I got mixed up in a rockslide.”
“Rockslide! On this side of the mountain?”
“I don’t know the mountain,” said Keith Phillips simply, “but I had a pretty narrow escape from at least one good-sized boulder. I was up that way”—he pointed up to the left of the rock overhang—“early this morning, picking up some sticks for my fire, when I heard a clatter and looked up and saw a big rock bounding down at me. I got out of the way just in time, but I lost my footing and fell quite a ways myself, and cut my leg pretty badly somewhere along the way.”
I said, rather unwillingly—which no doubt made my voice sound less friendly than it should have—“Is it a deep cut? If you need a better dressing put on it—you could come up to the house—”
“No, it’s all right, thanks. I took care of it myself. But by the time I’d got it to stop bleeding and bandaged it up, and had something to eat, I was pretty tired out, and a little shaken up from coming down that slope head over heels—so I just flopped down to rest for a while instead of packing up camp. If it hadn’t been for that I should have been well on my way by now.”
I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was that on this particular stretch of mountainside it was very unlikely that a boulder, let alone more than one, should come tumbling down from natural causes. Aloud I said, “Well, that’s no matter now. I don’t suppose there’s any harm done.”
“Provided the prisoner doesn’t do it again? Yes, ma’am. I can take a hint,” said Keith with a shrewd, provoking smile. “I’ll get going.” He turned and bent to pick up his blankets from beside the fire and shook them out.
“There’s no need to try and make me sound officious just because I came to investigate the smoke from a fire on my mother’s land,” I said, pricked by the consciousness that I was behaving badly. “Maybe you don’t know how little it can take to start a forest fire.”
“As it happens, I do know. I helped fight one once.”
“Well, then you’ve no call to go playing injured innocent.”
“Now that,” said Keith, going down for a minute on one knee, “is just too unfair. I didn’t claim to be innocent (in fact I pled guilty), but I am technically injured, even if it’s just a little. If I thought I could do it without starting it bleeding all over again, I’d unwind this bandage and let you see for yourself.”
“I don’t want to see it!” I said, furious at my wild urge to laugh. “You’re impossible. If I were you I’d watch my tongue when I was on other people’s ground, because someday it’s going to get you into real trouble.”
An amused undertone lurked in his voice too. “I’m not sure you would. I’d say you prefer being on your own ground.”
Having no suitable answer to this, I turned on my heel and departed in as stately a fashion as climbing a steep hill in a calf-length riding skirt would allow. Behind me, Keith Phillips got to his feet, hobbling just a trifle on the injured leg, and called after me: “Say, wait a minute! You didn’t tell me who you are.”
I paused near the top of the ledge and looked down over my shoulder. “I think you can find your way down to Baldwinsville without that knowledge,” I said, and then climbed on my way without another backward glance.
I kept climbing until I was out of sight and sound of Keith Phillips’ camp, and then I doubled back to my left, still angling upward, toward the place where Keith said he had dodged the rockslide. It didn’t take me long to find the scuffed marks in the carpet of pine needles exposing the dry dirt beneath, showing where he had fallen—and a few yards beyond I found a deep gouge in the soil where the boulder had glanced as it bounded downhill. I stood there and gazed up the wooded slope, trying to guess where it might have come down from. The mountainside was steep indeed just here, with overhanging moss-covered ledges jutting out far enough that anything or anyone up above would be hidden from view. I began to climb again. I had an idea about where that rock had come from.
I was right. About thirty yards above, I found the place where it had been pried up, like a gaping socket after a tooth is pulled, with torn moss around the edges and tiny grubs still wriggling on the hard-packed soil at the bottom of the hole. There were other half-sunk boulders embedded around the ledges, with perhaps ten inches or so sticking up out of the ground—enough for somebody to grip one and rock it loose, but they would never have budged on their own.
And if I needed the proof, there it was in a clear footprint about a foot from the hole. It was not from the narrow heeled boot of a cowboy nor the heavy hobnailed boot of a prospector or lumberman, but the print of an ordinary city shoe.
My nose figuratively twitching by now, I scanned the ground for further sign. Anybody who wore a shoe like that up here was bound to have left other marks.
He had. He was no woodsman, but evidently fancied he was—he had played hopscotch from stone to log under the impression that he was leaving no tracks, but I followed him easily enough. Here, a fresh scraped patch on a mossy log, where the rotted wood had crumbled beneath his foot when it slipped; a little further on, a streak of mud across the smooth surface of a flat rock.
The trail led all the way back to the road, and in the road were two beautifully distinct sets of automobile tire tracks crisscrossed one atop the other, coming and going. Keeping to the side of the road so as not to mar them, I traced the car’s progress uphill, along the last few climbing turns of the road.
The tracks stopped at the last turn below the bridge, but not naturally—any more than that moss-covered boulder had loosened itself. They broke off short where somebody had carefully brushed them away—had swept the whole of the wide place where vehicles could pass. It was neatly done, so that I hadn’t given the ground a thought when I came down this way an hour before, but I knew for certain that it had been done, because they had eliminated the tracks of Gus Griswold’s buckboard too. Lower down the road the buckboard’s wheel tracks still showed plainly with the automobile tracks over the top of them.
I inspected the ground on the Pont side of the bridge too—I’d never have noticed anything amiss if I didn’t know what to look for, but on close examination I could see the strokes of something like a pine branch that had been used to smooth the gravel.
So Sonny had lied after all. The auto had crossed the bridge, and it was hard to imagine that he did not know who had driven it. The only question remaining was—why?
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