Dorn Of The Mountains Read Free Page A

gradually ceasing. Once more the moan of wind and soft patter of rain filled the forest stillness.

Chapter Two
    Milt Dorn quietly sat up to gaze with thoughtful eyes at the flickering fire.
    He was thirty years old. As a boy of fourteen he had run off from his school and home in Iowa, and, joining a wagon train of pioneers, he was one of the first to see log cabins built on the slopes of the White Mountains. But he had not taken kindly to farming or sheep raising or monotonous visits to Pine and Slow Down and Snowdrop. This wandering forest life of his was not that he did not care for the villagers, for he did care, and he was welcome everywhere, but that he loved wild life and solitude and beauty with the primitive instinctive force of a savage.
    And upon this night he had stumbled upon a dark plot against the only one of all the honest white people in that region who he could not call a friend.
    “That man Beasley,” he soliloquized. “Beasley…preacher at Pine…in cahoots with Snake Anson! Well, he was right. Al Auchincloss is on his last legs…. Poor old man…. When I tell him…he’ll never believe me, that’s sure.”
    Discovery of the plot meant to Dorn that he must hurry down to Pine, and, of all seasons, the autumn was the one he loved best in the mountains. He reflected, however, that he need not lose more than several days on the journey. It seemed that he took for granted a necessity of befriending Auchincloss, even though that hard old stockman had wronged him.
    “A girl…Helen Rayner…twenty years old,” he mused. “Beasley wants her made way with…. That means…killed.”
    Dorn accepted facts of life with that equanimity and fatality acquired by one long versed in the cruel annals of forest lore. Bad men worked their evil just as savage wolves relayed a deer. He had shot wolves for that trick. With men, good or bad, he had not clashed. Old women and children appealed to him, but he had never had any interest in girls. The image then of this Helen Rayner came strangely to Dorn, and he suddenly realized that he meant somehow to circumvent Beasley, not to befriend old Al Auchincloss, but for the sake of the girl. Probably she was already on her way West, alone, eager, hopeful of a future home. How little people guessed what awaited them at a journey’s end. Many trails ended abruptly in the forest—and only trained woodsmen could read the tragedy.
    “Strange how I cut across country today from Spruce Swamp,” went on Dorn reflectively. Circumstances, movements usually were not strange to him. His methods and habits were seldom changed by chance. The matter, then, of his turning off a course, out of his way, for no apparent reason, and of his having overheard a plot singularly involving a young girl, was indeed an adventure to provoke thought. It provoked more, for Dorn grew conscious of an unfamiliar smoldering heat along his veins. He, who had little to do with the strife of men, and nothing to do with anger, felt his blood grow hot at the cowardly trap laid for an innocent girl.
    “Old Al won’t listen to me,” pondered Dorn. “An’ even if he did…he wouldn’t believe me. Maybe nobody will…. All the same Snake Anson won’t get that girl.”
    With these last words Dorn satisfied himself of his own position, and his pondering ceased. Taking his rifle, he descended from the loft and peered out of the door. The night had grown darker, windier, cooler; broken clouds were scudding across the sky; only a few stars showed; fine rain was blowing from the northwest; the forest seemed full of a low dull roar.
    “Reckon I’d better hang up here,” he said, and turned to the fire. The coals were red now. From the depths of his hunting coat he procured a little bag of salt and some strips of dried meat. These strips he laid for a moment on the hot embers, until they began to sizzle and curl, then with a sharpened stick he removed them and ate like a hungry hunter grateful for little.
    He sat