Bridge to Trouble: Chapter X
The familiar glint was in his eye. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were daring me.”
Bridge to Trouble is a romantic-suspense novella set in 1920s Montana.
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If with me you’d fondly stray,
Over the hills and far away.
- Over the Hills and Far Away (1728) -It took the sheriff and the deputy U.S. marshals almost four days to find the two kidnappers on the Pont. Part of that time was spent in getting up there by a roundabout route through the mountains, of course. By the time the lawmen found them they were practically gibbering, undone by the experience of trying to get out over the mountains and getting more and more lost each hour—Jacot’s description of les imbeciles had never fitted better.
Mills wouldn’t talk, but the other two were very ready, and through their information the police were able to lay their hands on the fifth member of the gang, who had remained in the city sending ransom demands to Conover Senior and telegrams to Mills, and who was the chief architect of the plot. As I had surmised, he and Sonny Barton and one of the others had met in the army, and when they had little luck finding work that suited them after being demobilized, they had put their heads together to plan a daring crime. Sonny had first suggested the Pont as a hideout when they were still thinking along the lines of robbery, and when they put together an item in the society columns about Riley Conover’s Yellowstone trip with Sonny’s discovery that Mother and I were away from the Pont for three months, the kidnap idea was born.
Sonny, to his credit, had believed from the start that the gang meant to return their prisoner unharmed when the ransom was paid, but the carelessness of the men at the cabin in letting their faces be seen had planted the suspicion in his mind that the others had never intended to let the boy leave the hideout alive at all. He said as much during one of their arguments, so it was not surprising that when Riley went missing, the others jumped to the conclusion that Sonny had double-crossed them and connived at his escape because he had no stomach for being involved in a murder.
All this and more the police would learn from their confessions in time. But before any of this took place, on the morning after the capture of Mills, I rode up to the Pont on a horse borrowed from one of the deputy sheriffs in the posse that had followed the automobile up the mountain. After last night’s confusion everyone had gone down to Pierpont, where Mother had taken charge and set up headquarters in an abandoned store, made tea for everyone and I think even opened some cans of soup out of Mills’ crate. They were all still there this morning except for the sheriff and the federal marshals, who were already in the mountains; but I wanted to go off quietly by myself and look in daylight at what was left of my father’s bridge.
I dismounted at the edge of the clearing and stood looking down for a few minutes. Broken and blackened, the ends hung down against the cliffs on both sides, and the one buckled timber that remained stretched across looked as thin and fragile as a thread. And only yesterday it had been as solid as the mountain around it.
I heard a horse coming up the road behind me, and I had an idea who it was even before the hoofbeats came to a stop, and Keith Phillips dismounted and came to join me by the cliff. He didn’t say anything, but looked where I looked for a few moments.
“My father built that bridge before I was born,” I said. “He blazed this road and brought men and wagons up here, and built it out of timber off this mountain. I’ve probably been back and forth across it on half the days of my life.”
“You’ll build it again,” said Keith. “Sooner than you think, I’ll bet. Riley Conover’s father is going to want to find some way of thanking you—it wouldn’t surprise me if he wanted to help.”
There was silence again for a minute. I pulled a needle from a nearby spruce branch and split it into tiny fragrant bits with my thumbnail. “I’ve been thinking,” I said. “You told me you’d been working odd jobs to make your way. We’re—we’ll be needing someone to look after our horses again. If Mother doesn’t have any objections—would you want to stay on here and take Sonny’s job for a while?”
There was a very slight pause before Keith answered. “I think I’d like that,” he said. “But I also think you should consider before you make that offer official. I warn you, if I stay around here I’m going to do my very best to make you fall in love with me.”
I looked quickly at him. He was smiling a little as usual, but his eyes were serious.
I gazed at the ruined bridge and thought again about certain moments from the past few days that had lingered in my memory of their own accord. It seemed like a very long time since I had sat on a rock on the mountain and declared to myself that I preferred being alone. Perhaps solitude was safer, but it wasn’t half as interesting.
I looked again at Keith, and a mischievous smile edged its way to my lips. “I’m willing to risk it.”
“Jeanette, I’m not teasing you now. I want to be fair to you. I haven’t got any false ideas about myself. I’m a bad risk from an insurance point of view—and even if I do manage to beat my bad health for good, the kind of life I mean to lead won’t be easy or predictable.”
I began to laugh. “I would say this last week has been a pretty good sample of that!”
For once Keith was the one who remained serious. “What I’m trying to say is,” he said, “that I couldn’t spend my whole life hidden away on the Pont. I don’t know if you can understand that.”
“Father never built it to be a hiding-place,” I said. “I think he built it more as a crow’s-nest that you could look down at the whole world from. I think that’s what I didn’t understand as a child—that the Pont wasn’t the whole world to my parents, even if it was their favorite part of the world. After all,” I added, with a kind of surprise at recognizing the truth in the words, “he didn’t build a drawbridge.”
I looked up over the trees, toward where I knew the white peak of Mount St. Orleans gleamed in the sun. “I’ll always love it. But I know now it can’t be absolutely everything.”
I looked at Keith. “Fair enough?”
The familiar glint was in his eye. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were daring me.”
I didn’t even try to hide my smile anymore. “You sound pretty definite about what you want. Are you that sure it’ll be worthwhile?”
“I’m willing to risk it.”
“In that case,” I said, “you have a job. If it’s all right with Mother, of course.”
“Somehow,” said Keith, “I don’t think your mother will mind. She already offered me the job this morning.”
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