on silently in the beaten trail, and more and more slowly, we at last sighted the open grass park, and then stood a long time looking out at it, and searching the timber bordering it for our man. On our right some dead wood had been broken up and carried away, and a young spruce stripped of its branches — for a bed, of course, but of him there was no sign. ‘‘You two stand right here, while I circle around a bit,” Uncle John told us, and turned straight off to the left and was soon out of our sight. Hannah then came up beside me, pistol in hand, and we waited fearfully, hardly breathing, for whatever was to happen: waited for hours, it seemed, and at last heard Uncle John shout: ‘‘Come on! Come ahead, youngsters, the bird has flown!”
I uncocked my rifle. Hannah slipped her pistol back into its holster. All my excitement went with Uncle John’s call. I felt suddenly tired. We went to the edge of the little opening, to Uncle John poking about under a thick branching spruce. “There’s where the sneak slept,” he said, pointing to a thick-laid bed of spruce branches. “And he has quilts: there’s a wad of cotton from one of them; and over there close to the creek is his fireplace.”
We went to it, within a few feet of the creek, and found around it the end of a ham bone, several empty cans, and a pair of tattered socks. The ashes of the fireplace and several half-burned sticks in it were water-soaked.
“Yes, the bird sure has flown!’’ Uncle John repeated.
“It was he who frightened the deer and turkeys! He has gone west! Over on the other slope! But we did n’t see him cross the bare ridgetop —”
“What is all this? Explain,” Uncle John interrupted. And when I had told him all about it, he said: “Sure it was he who scared them; but he never crossed the ridge, there in the open: he crossed farther south, where it is well timbered. Come. I ’ll bet we can find his tracks going up the canyon.”
We did find them, almost at once, on the other side of the grass park and going up the canyon, and wondered why he had left this place, where he could live comfortably upon his stealings from me, and for what place he was heading?
“Why, that is easily explained,’’ said Hannah. “He came up on top last night, found that we had moved all our food up to the lookout, and knew that his stealing had been discovered and it was time for him to go.”
“He will not starve; he will rob the cattlemen’s camps, over on the Reservation, of everything he needs. You must ’phone over there about him as soon as the line is working. Well, back we go! Gee! I’m mad! Your Uncle Cleve and all the others, over there doing their best against the Huns, and this low-down coward sneaking about here in the forest, feeding his worthless carcass with our good grub! Well, maybe we’ll get him yet!” Uncle John exclaimed.
We had no more than arrived at the cabin and sat down to get our breath after the long climb, when the two telephone linemen came in sight down the trail, and I asked Uncle John to say nothing to them, nor others, about my cave find. I wanted it all to myself.
“Well, boy,” one of them said to me, as they dismounted, “you can ring up the office now; the line’s working. We found the break not three hundred yards below here. Not a break, either: the wire had been cut! Cut with a couple of rocks, it appeared like! Now, who in thunder could have done that?”
Henry King! Deserter! Grub thief!” we cried.
Uncle John began explaining about him, and I went in to the telephone and did the like to the Supervisor, in Springerville, who said that he would ask the Indian agent on the Reservation to order his Apache police out in search for King. Neither the police nor the sheriff’s posse on our side had been able to find the I.W.W. firebugs, and it was hoped that they had left the country. However, I was to remain at the lookout from sunrise to sunset until further orders.
Uncle John was in a hurry to go home and insisted that Hannah return with him. But, first, he and the linemen brought my things at the lookout back to the cabin, packing them down on their horses in one trip. Hannah left her bed roll with me. She would soon be up to help me explore the cave, she said.
So, at about four o’clock, I was again alone on the summit of Mount Thomas. And lonely enough I was. More lonely still when I went down to the cabin in the dusk, cooked and hurriedly ate my supper, and tumbled into bed. And thought about Henry King. Why had he cut the telephone wire? Was it that he intended to make one last grand raid upon our supplies, and wanted to make sure that we should have no chance to report him before he could get well away from Mount Thomas? Yes, that was probably the explanation.
And there was all that wall chinking to be mudded — what time would I ever have to do that?
At three-thirty, the next morning, I had my breakfast, and then, by the light of a small fire that I built outside, I mixed mud and slammed it into the spaces, smoothed it with a strip of box cover and soon after dawn completed the task. I washed the mud off my hands, washed the breakfast dishes, prepared a lunch, took up my rifle, and, locking the door behind me, hurried up the trail to the lookout. The sun was just rising. A heavy bank of clouds was low in the southern sky. I looked out upon the great forest: nowhere was there even a wisp of smoke. Five mule deer were slowly feeding down the bare ridge between the White River forks. I watched them with the glasses until they entered the heavy timber that clothes all but the upper end of the ridge. The bucks had funny stubs of growing antlers; not until September would they get their full growth of branching prongs.
The belt of black clouds kept creeping up from the south, and at eight o’clock the first electric storm of the season struck Mount Thomas. With the first boom of it I was out of the lookout and running down the trail to the cabin. Terrible thunder crashed and echoed down into the deep canyons, and the whole summit of the mountain was one glare of lightning; blinding, zigzag lightning that struck the rocks time and again and tore them apart. Capped with a four-prong lightning rod though it was, I felt sure that the lookout would be destroyed. Only little rain came with the storm, but I was shivering with cold when I got into the cabin and built a fire in the stove.
At nine o’clock I ’phoned the office, reported the storm, and was told to return to the lookout as soon as it ceased, for the lightning had probably started some fires. Now and then the rain beat upon the iron roof of the cabin with a deafening noise, but upon opening the door and looking out, I saw that the showers were but slight, wind-driven drizzles, not heavy enough to wet the ground. I returned to the summit in the last of them, the thunder and lightning having ceased, and upon emerging from the spruces, saw that the lookout had survived the storm. For seven years it had stood there, beaten by the fierce winter winds, shaken by the thunderstorms of summer, and though lightning had several times come into it along the wire and smashed the telephone, it had never been directly struck. I hurried up into it, looked north, south, east, and west, and discovered the smoke of three fires: one away down in the Blue Range, and two on the Indian reservation, in the direction of Fort Apache. I reported them.
For eight days I kept those sunrise to sunset hours upon the summit, and during that time no one came near me, nor had I to report any new fires. I spent some time each day collecting beads and arrow-points close around the lookout, but did not once visit my cave hole. My mother and sister called me up from Riverside Station — still without a ranger — to learn how I was standing my lonely watch and long hours. I frequently listened in at the telephone and heard bits of news about the war, I.W.W. troubles at Globe and other mining camps, and the doings of the men in the Forest Service. Many of these men had girls in the different mountain settlements, and after hours would talk with them over the ’phone. And such silliness they talked. It was sickening.
“Hello; that you, Laura? That you?” Bill would say.
“Yes, it’s me. How you getting along. Bill?”
“All
