Arthur O. Friel

“ THE HA’NT
Sunset stretched its long shadows again across the Traps.
Up on the heights, the light of day still was bright and clear. But down in the bluff-bulwarked valley of the Coxing Kill, a thousand feet lower than the Minnewaska table-land behind which the sun was rolling down in the southwest, the dusk was slowly shading into dark. Already the air vibrated with the swelling chorus of the katydids, scraping out their insistent warning of frost which had not yet come; and from every grassy space cheeped the lonesome dirge of the crickets. Night was drawing on. ”

“ Too, by night she painted dingy house-roofs and rickety wagons and all the other ugly man-made things—painted them gray-white with frost, which the new sun quickly blackened and sent creeping down the shingles to drip gently from the eaves of a morning. And as that sun mounted the Wall and rolled its warmth over into the Traps below, she coyly loosed white clouds of mist to go drifting along over the new colors she had made in the dark hours, presently to draw them aside and reveal to human eyes the glory of her handiwork. ”

“ Moving rapidly about, Douglas inspected his real bedroom and the spidery attic, finding his bough-tip couch undisturbed and the upper room empty. Back in the main room, he glowered anew at the bayonet-like blade which had been driven with such venomous force into what seemed to be a sleeping man.
“This cooks your goose, Nat Oaks!” he growled. “You’ve let yourself in for the worst mauling you ever got in your low-down life. Just as soon as you and I meet up again—and we’ll meet just as quick as I can find you!”
He strode to the door. ”

“ Beside him lay his gun. Before him stretched the long panorama of the Traps.
From the half-naked rock of Millbrook Mountain, where the rim of the great bowl curved westward to merge into the Minnewaska steeps, to the castle-like peak of Sky Top, beneath which the strange lake of Mohonk nestled out of sight in a cup of sheer stone, rambled the top of the Great Wall. Northward from Sky Top it dipped downward in a long sweep, and there the east-swinging wall of Dickie Barre seemed to close in and complete the unbroken ring of uplands surrounding the forested chasm. ”

“ He did not reflect on the fact that Steve was an escaped convict: he thought of him only as a hunted victim of the machinations of Snake Sanders and as the wild young sweetheart of Marion, and he resented the coming of men who might be human bloodhounds trailing the unlucky youth. And, though he wondered why honest Uncle Eb should need a warning of the presence of those newcomers, he dismissed the enigma with the guess that this was only a part of the “underground telegraph” system of the Traps, whereby its citizens, good or bad, learned news which might or might not concern them vitally. ”

“ Every day since the ending of the “line storm” he had traveled the Traps. Time and again he had spent an entire day threading his way over, under, and around the myriad bowlders lying at the foot of Dickie Barre’s precipice: some towering on end to the height of their parent rock itself, bearing mute witness to the terrific power of the ice of the glacial age, hiding among them masked chasms seldom seen by human eyes; some leaning together as if placed by the hands of some Indian giant whimsically building a rock wigwam ”

“ Stealthily moving in force, they garrisoned the heights of Mohonk and Minnewaska; they outwitted, outmanœuvred, outambushed the Indians; they herded them back against their own precipices, cornered them among their own bowlders, slew them without mercy. Returning to their lowland farms, they left behind them a silent, blood-spattered, death-strewn hole in the hills which henceforth—because of its traps and countertraps—was to be known as The Traps.
Long afterward, men came in again; white men, and red men too, no longer foes. ”

“ Perhaps her soul, like her body, was hemmed in by the eternal rim of the rock bowl—that soul which yet groped vaguely upward with its unconscious artistry, its vision of dead men who shook the hills with their tramping, its effort to place on paper the beauty of the green pool in Coxing Kill. Perhaps Lou Brackett’s dictum was inexorably true: Them that’s borned into the Traps lives into the Traps and dies into the Traps. ”

“ Rain drizzled monotonously down on the Traps; cold, raw rain swept slantwise by wind. Along Mohonk and the Great Wall crawled clammy fog, blinding all vision and chilling all flesh within its folds. Through rain and fog feebly penetrated the sickly light of a dismal dawn.
In the dankness and the dimness moved a bedraggled figure laden with a sodden blanket-pack and a dripping shotgun; a man whose blue lips and hollow eyes betokened a gnawing chill and scant sleep. ”

“ His deductions were interrupted by Spit. Tiring at last of worrying its broken enemy, or perhaps eager to begin eating the rat, the cat loosed its hold and, ceaselessly growling, stepped around and smelt at the gray-haired victim of the snake.
“Hey! Quit that!” Douglas snapped. “You fool cat, that rat’s poisoned! If you have the slightest scratch on your lips or in your mouth you’ll die! Let it alone!”
At the impact of his voice Spit leaped aside, spat at him, stood flame-eyed, lips writhing and claws unsheathed. ”

“ The Traps gulf was wanly illumined by a late-rising moon.
Stiffly he arose to stretch himself. Something turned gleaming eyes at him. It was Spit, very quiet now, crouched comfortably on the floor, watching two doors—the open one into the bedroom and the closed one at the foot of the stairs. Man and cat eyed each other a moment. Then the man in turn looked toward a door—the entrance to his own room, beyond which waited his blankets and easy couch of bough-tips. ”

“ At the top of the crag-wall the light sped across the forested gulf of the Traps itself, with its tiny scattered farmhouses and its rocky clearings and mysterious by-paths, to strike against more cliffs—the glacier-gouged wall of Minnewaska, holding in its stony setting a tiny jewel of an upland lake; and the fissured butte of Dickie Barre, father of gigantic bowlders and guardian of unknown caverns. ”

“ Onward down the slope marched Douglas, scowling ahead at a well-marked path which his feet now were following but which his mind hardly noticed. The half-spoken threat of the woman behind against Marion Oaks bothered him. Primitive, ignorant, unmoral, willing to abandon her “man” for a better one but jealous of any other woman who might attract him—there was no knowing what she might do in some vindictive rage. Douglas was not one of those men who look on all women as children and scoff at their dangerous moods ”

“ One more step in the dark would have trapped him in a pit where death, swift or slow, would inevitably have obliterated him; death from the fall, from starvation, or from Snake Sanders’ merciless hands. ”

“ Though the desperate look of the hunted still was on the fugitive’s face, he looked far better than when Douglas had carried him into the den among the bowlders. Then he had been wan, pinched, utterly exhausted. Now his cheeks were more round, his eyes unrimmed by blue crescents, his swarthy skin tinged by healthy color. Food and sleep in plenty had transformed him from a hatchet-faced wreck to a not unhandsome young man. But the hard set of the mouth and the glitter of the dark eyes still were there. ”

“ Yet, in his unintrospective way, he felt a vague irritation over the eternal presence of Steve. If only the youth did not exist—— He let the thought go no farther. He did not consider what might be if Steve were removed. Neither did he recall that this girl’s blood was tainted by her parentage. He let the whole matter die, and instead put his mind on the lonely, sick boy himself, victim of Snake Sanders’ machinations and fugitive from the insensate monster which killed men’s souls—the Law. ”

“ Here was nothing to do but relax, absorbing the golden sunlight and the green beauty of nature and the clinking music of unseen hammers far below and far away on the Mohonk slope, where millstone-makers were rifting rock in their little quarries. What though one had no habitation? What though his food was almost gone and the pipe dangling from the corner of his mouth was empty? Time enough to seek shelter when night approached; time enough to rustle for food when the last crumb had vanished. ”

“ His gun leaped up. Its muzzles licked toward the entrance. One barrel vomited flame and lead.
The flare of the explosion lit up the portal. It stood ajar, but not wide enough to admit a man. Nor was any man standing there. Outside was only black, cavernous night.
His ears numbed by the concussion of the shell, he squatted there in the blankets, the other barrel ready for instantaneous use. Presently his stunned auditory nerves regained their acuteness. They told him something that brought a new chill crawling down his back. The song of the insects no longer swung through the night. ”

“ Who ever told you you were a grown-up man? You’re nothing but a scared-of-the-dark baby!”
He drank in a deep breath of the sweet air and nodded unseen encouragement to some lusty cricket in the grass near the stoop. But, as he turned again toward the door, he hesitated. Wind and rain could not be blamed for the footsteps on the stairs or the sounds and movements of his bed. Something urged him to take his blankets and lie down outdoors, even though the ground was wet: to sleep surrounded by the honest-voiced crickets, unconfined by walls within which stalked bodiless things. ”

“ Douglas resumed his puffing and puzzling.
“Must be a throwback of heredity,” he decided. “There are such things as red-headed niggers. Saw one in Detroit once. The white strain in her folks cropped out strong when she was born. Must be tough for a girl to be white and yet have the tainted blood in her veins. No self-respecting white man could marry her, of course. But it’s a dirty shame that you have to be cursed by your ancestors, little Miss Marion. ”

“ In under the funereal trees he passed, scrutinizing the vague dark things here and there among the trunks, finding them to be only rotting fragments of old logs, half-buried juts of stone, or lumps of forest mould. No sound came to him but the tiny impacts of falling leaves and the watery squash of his own boots on the soaked soil. Dreary and dismal stood the forest, telling him nothing of what had taken place last night. His only reward for his wandering there was a renewal of his wetness. ”

“ Douglas understandingly, Uncle Eb decisively, Steve sombrely.
“That’s right,” Douglas agreed. “You’ve been underground long enough, and now you must blossom out into the sun. It’s your daddy’s blood that has driven you to draw and dream, and he’d tell you now to go out and develop your talent. ”

“ Yet, when Douglas edged into the slit and bore his burden through, she halted behind him and put a tentative hand on the gun, still loaded in one barrel. Narrowly she inspected the “newfangled” weapon—so unlike the ancient muzzle-loaders common in the Traps—wavering between a desire to draw its remaining charge and fear lest it might disastrously explode again. After a dubious moment she shook her head and went on. She must trust this man, whether she would or not. ”

“ Savage, sinister, yet appallingly human—like the malevolent squall of an infuriated hag—the cry tore through the night shadows whelming the mountain-girt gulf of the Traps. Among the gigantic bowlders and the uncanny crevasses of Dickie Barre it hurtled in a shattered wave of sound. ”

“ When he lowered the vessel he licked his lips, and across them flitted a faint grin.
“Gawd, am I dead or dreamin’?” he breathed hoarsely. “Marry! Be ye there? An’ this here licker—I’m a dunkey if ’tain’t real! Who—who’s this feller?”
His brown eyes glared into the cool blue ones. Involuntarily his right hand gripped the jug-handle as if it were a gun-stock. His gaunt face tightened into a menacing mask. He wavered like a mortally wounded wildcat gathering its last strength to spring.
“I’m all right, Steve,” soothed Douglas. “I’m not after you. ”