Kinney came into town the next morning bright and early, as he phrased it; but he did not stop at the hotel for Bartley till nine o'clock. “Thought I'd give you time for breakfast,” he exclaimed, “and so I didn't hurry up any about gettin' in my supplies.”
It was a beautiful morning, so blindingly sunny that Bartley winked as they drove up through the glistening street, and was glad to dip into the gloom of the first woods; it was not cold; the snow felt the warmth, and packed moistly under their runners. The air was perfectly still; at a distance on the mountain-sides it sparkled as if full of diamond dust. Far overhead some crows called.
“The sun's getting high,” said Bartley, with the light sigh of one to whom the thought of spring brings no hope.
“Well, I shouldn't begin to plough for corn just yet,” replied Kinney. “It's curious,” he went on, “to see how anxious we are to have a thing over, it don't much matter what it is, whether it's summer or winter. I suppose we'd feel different if we wa'n't sure there was going to be another of 'em. I guess that's one reason why the Lord concluded not to keep us clearly posted on the question of another life. If it wa'n't for the uncertainty of the thing, there are a lot of fellows like you that wouldn't stand it here a minute. Why, if we had a dead sure thing of over-the-river,—good climate, plenty to eat and wear, and not much to do,—I don't believe any of us would keep Darling Minnie waiting,—well, agreatwhile. But you see, the thing's all on paper, and that makes us cautious, and willing to hang on here awhile longer. Looks splendid on the map: streets regularly laid out; public squares; band-stands; churches; solid blocks of houses, with all the modern improvements; but you can't tell whether there's any town there till you're on the ground; and then, if you don't like it, there's no way of gettin' back to the States.” He turned round upon Bartley and opened his mouth wide, to imply that this was pleasantry.
“Do you throw your philosophy in, all under the same price, Kinney?” asked the young fellow.
“Well, yes; I never charge anything over,” said Kinney. “You see, I have a good deal of time to think when I'm around by myself all day, and the philosophy don't cost me anything, and the fellows like it. Roughing it the way they do, they can stand 'most anything. Hey?” He now not only opened his mouth upon Bartley, but thrust him in the side with his elbow, and then laughed noisily.
Kinney was the cook. He had been over pretty nearly the whole uninhabitable globe, starting as a gaunt and awkward boy from the Maine woods, and keeping until he came back to them in late middle-life the same gross and ridiculous optimism. He had been at sea, and shipwrecked on several islands in the Pacific; he had passed a rainy season at Panama, and a yellow-fever season at Vera Cruz, and had been carried far into the interior of Peru by a tidal wave during an earthquake season; he was in the Border Ruffian War of Kansas, and he clung to California till prosperity deserted her after the completion of the Pacific road. Wherever he went, he carried or found adversity; but, with a heart fed on the metaphysics of Horace Greeley, and buoyed up by a few wildly interpreted maxims of Emerson, he had always believed in other men, and their fitness for the terrestrial millennium, which was never more than ten days or ten miles off. It is not necessary to say that he had continued as poor as he began, and that he was never able to contribute to those railroads, mills, elevators, towns, and cities which were sure to be built, sir, sure to be built, wherever he went. When he came home at last to the woods, some hundreds of miles north of Equity, he found that some one had realized his early dream of a summer hotel on the shore of the beautiful lake there; and he unenviously settled down to admire the landlord's thrift, and to act as guide and cook for parties of young ladies and gentlemen who started from the hotel to camp in the woods. This brought him into the society of cultivated people, for which he had a real passion. He had always had a few thoughts rattling round in his skull, and he liked to make sure of them in talk with those who had enjoyed greater advantages than himself. He never begrudged them their luck; he simply and sweetly admired them; he made studies of their several characters, and was never tired of analyzing them to their advantage to the next summer's parties. Late in the fall, he went in, as it is called, with a camp of loggers, among whom he rarely failed to find some remarkable men. But he confessed that he did not enjoy the steady three or four months in the winter woods with no coming out at all till spring; and he had been glad of this chance in a logging camp near Equity, in which he had been offered the cook's place by the owner who had tested his fare in the Northern woods the summer before. Its proximity to the village allowed him to loaf in upon civilization at least once a week, and he spent the greater part of his time at the Free Press office on publication day. He had always sought the society of newspaper men, and, wherever he could, he had given them his. He was not long in discovering that Bartley was smart as a steel trap; and by an early and natural transition from calling the young lady compositors by their pet names, and patting them on their shoulders, he had arrived at a like affectionate intimacy with Bartley.
As they worked deep into the woods on their way to the camp, the road dwindled to a well-worn track between the stumps and bushes. The ground was rough, and they constantly plunged down the slopes of little hills, and climbed the sides of the little valleys, and from time to time they had to turn out for teams drawing logs to the mills in Equity, each with its equipage of four or five wild young fellows, who saluted Kinney with an ironical cheer or jovial taunt in passing.
“They're all just so,” he explained, with pride, when the last party had passed. “They're gentlemen, every one of 'em,—perfect gentlemen.”
They came at last to a wider clearing than any they had yet passed through, and here on a level of the hillside stretched the camp, a long, low structure of logs, with the roof broken at one point by a stovepipe, and the walls irregularly pierced by small windows; around it crouched and burrowed in the drift the sheds that served as stables and storehouses.
The sun shone, and shone with dazzling brightness, upon the opening; the sound of distant shouts and the rhythmical stroke of axes came to it out of the forest; but the camp was deserted, and in the stillness Kinney's voice seemed strange and alien. “Walk in, walk in!” he said, hospitably. “I've got to look after my horse.”
But Bartley remained at the door, blinking in the sunshine, and harking to the near silence that sang in his ears. A curious feeling possessed him; sickness of himself as of some one else; a longing, consciously helpless, to be something different; a sense of captivity to habits and thoughts and hopes that centred in himself, and served him alone.
“Terribly peaceful around here,” said Kinney, coming back to him, and joining him in a survey of the landscape, with his hands on his hips, and a stem of timothy projecting from his lips.
“Yes, terribly,” assented Bartley.
“But itainta bad way for a man to live, as long as he's young; or haint got anybody that wants his company more than his room.—Be the place for you.”
“On which ground?” Bartley asked, drily, without taking his eyes from a distant peak that showed through the notch in the forest.
Kinney laughed in as unselfish enjoyment as if he had made the turn himself. “Well, that aint exactly what I meant to say: what I meant was that any man engaged in intellectual pursuits wants to come out and commune with nature, every little while.”
“You call the Equity Free Press intellectual pursuits?” demanded Bartley, with scorn. “I suppose it is,” he added. “Well, here I am,—right on the commune. But nature's such a big thing, I think it takes two to commune with her.”
“Well, a girl's a help,” assented Kinney.
“I wasn't thinking of a girl, exactly,” said Bartley, with a little sadness. “I mean that, if you're not in first-rate spiritual condition, you're apt to get floored if you undertake to commune with nature.”
“I guess that's about so. If a man's got anything, on his mind, a big railroad depot's the place forhim. But you're run down. You ought to come out here, and take a hand, and be a man amongst men.” Kinney talked partly for quantity, and partly for pure, indefinite good feeling.
Bartley turned toward the door. “What have you got inside, here?”
Kinney flung the door open, and followed his guest within. The first two-thirds of the cabin was used as a dormitory, and the sides were furnished with rough bunks, from the ground to the roof. The round, unhewn logs showed their form everywhere; the crevices were calked with moss; and the walls were warm and tight. It was dark between the bunks, but beyond it was lighter, and Bartley could see at the farther end a vast cooking-stove, and three long tables with benches at their sides. A huge coffee-pot stood on the top of the stove, and various pots and kettles surrounded it.
“Come into the dining-room and sit down in the parlor,” said Kinney, drawing off his coat as he walked forward. “Take the sofa,” he added, indicating a movable bench. He hung his coat on a peg and rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and began to whistle cheerily, like a man who enjoys his work, as he threw open the stove door and poked in some sticks of fuel. A brooding warmth filled the place, and the wood made a pleasant crackling as it took fire.
“Here's my desk,” said Kinney, pointing to a barrel that supported a broad, smooth board-top. “This is where I compose my favorite works.” He turned round, and cut out of a mighty mass of dough in a tin trough a portion, which he threw down on his table and attacked with a rolling-pin. “That means pie, Mr. Hubbard,” he explained, “and pie means meat-pie,—or squash-pie, at a pinch. Today's pie-baking day. But you needn't be troubled on that account. So's to-morrow, and so was yesterday. Pie twenty-one times a week is the word, and don't you forget it. They say old Agassiz,” Kinney went on, in that easy, familiar fondness with which our people like to speak of greatness that impresses their imagination,—“they say old Agassiz recommended fish as the best food for the brain. Well, I don't suppose but what it is. But I don't know but what pie is more stimulating to the fancy. Ineversaw anything like meat-pie to make ye dream.”
“Yes,” said Bartley, nodding gloomily, “I've tried it.”
Kinney laughed. “Well, I guess folks of sedentary pursuits, like you and me, don't need it; but these fellows that stamp round in the snow all day, they want something to keep their imagination goin'. And I guess pie does it. Anyway, they can't seem to get enough of it. Ever try apples when you was at work? They say old Greeley kep' his desk full of 'em; kep' munchin' away all the while when he was writin' his editorials. And one of them German poets—I don't know but what it was old Gutty himself—keptrottenones inhisdrawer; liked the smell of 'em. Well, there's a good deal of apple in meat-pie. May be it's the apple that does it.Idon't know. But I guess if your pursuits are sedentary, you better take the apple separate.”
Bartley did not say anything; but he kept a lazily interested eye on Kinney as he rolled out his piecrust, fitted it into his tins, filled these from a jar of mince-meat, covered them with a sheet of dough pierced in herring-bone pattern, and marshalled them at one side ready for the oven.
“If fishisany better for the brain,” Kinney proceeded, “they can't complain of any want of it, at least in the salted form. They get fish-balls three times a week for breakfast, as reg'lar as Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday comes round. And Fridays I make up a sort of chowder for the Kanucks; they're Catholics, you know, and I don't believe in interferin' withanyman's religion, it don't matter what it is.”
“You ought to be a deacon in the First Church at Equity,” said Bartley.
“Is that so? Why?” asked Kinney.
“Oh, they don't believe in interfering with any man's religion, either.”
“Well,” said Kinney, thoughtfully, pausing with the rolling-pin in his hand, “there 'a such a thing as beingtooliberal, I suppose.”
“The world's tried the other thing a good while,” said Bartley, with cynical amusement at Kinney's arrest.
It seemed to chill the flow of the good fellow's optimism, so that he assented with but lukewarm satisfaction.
“Well, that's so, too,” and he made up the rest of his pies in silence.
“Well,” he exclaimed at last, as if shaking himself out of an unpleasant reverie, “I guess we shall get along, somehow. Do you like pork and beans?”
“Yes, I do,” said Bartley.
“We're goin' to have 'em for dinner. You can hit beans any meal you drop in on us; beans twenty-one times a week, just like pie. Set 'em in to warm,” he said, taking up a capacious earthen pot, near the stove, and putting it into the oven. “I been pretty much everywheres, and I don't know as I found anything for a stand-by that come up to beans. I'm goin' to give 'em potatoes and cabbage to-day,—kind of a boiled-dinner day,—but you'll see there aint one in ten 'll touch 'em to what there will these old residenters. Potatoes and cabbage'll do for a kind of a delicacy,—sort of a side-dish,—on-tree, you know; but give 'em beans for a steady diet. Why, off there in Chili, even, the people regularly live on beans,—not exactly like ours,—broad and flat,—but they're beans. Wa'n't there some those ancients—old Horace, or Virgil, may be—rung in something about beans in some their poems?”
“I don't remember anything of the kind,” said Bartley, languidly.
“Well, I don't know asIcan. I just have a dim recollection of language thrown out at the object,—as old Matthew Arnold says. But it might have been something in Emerson.”
Bartley laughed “I didn't suppose you were such a reader, Kinney.”
“Oh, I nibble round wherever I can get a chance. Mostly in the newspapers, you know. I don't get any time for books, as a general rule. But there's pretty much everything in the papers. I should call beans a brain food.”
“I guess you call anything a brain food that you happen to like, don't you, Kinney?”
“No, sir,” said Kinney, soberly; “but I like to see the philosophy of a thing when I get a chance. Now, there's tea, for example,” he said, pointing to the great tin pot on the stove.
“Coffee, you mean,” said Bartley.
“No, sir, I mean tea. That's tea; and I give it to 'em three times a day, good and strong,—molasses in it, and no milk. That's a brain food, if ever there was one. Sets 'em up, right on end, every time. Clears their heads and keeps the cold out.”
“I should think you were running a seminary for young ladies, instead of a logging-camp,” said Bartley.
“No, but look at it: I'm in earnest about tea. You look at the tea drinkers and the coffee-drinkers all the world over! Look at 'em in our own country! All the Northern people and all the go-ahead people drink tea. The Pennsylvanians and the Southerners drink coffee. Why our New England folks don't even know how tomakecoffee so it's fit to drink! And it's just so all over Europe. The Russians drink tea, and they'd e't up those coffee-drinkin' Turks long ago, if the tea-drinkin' English hadn't kept 'em from it. Go anywheres you like in the North, and you find 'em drinkin' tea. The Swedes and Norwegians in Aroostook County drink it; and they drink it at home.”
“Well, what do you think of the French and Germans? They drink coffee, and they're pretty smart, active people, too.”
“French and Germans drink coffee?”
“Yes.”
Kinney stopped short in his heated career of generalization, and scratched his shaggy head. “Well,” he said, finally, “I guess they're a kind of a missing link, as old Darwin says.” He joined Bartley in his laugh cordially, and looked up at the round clock nailed to a log. “It's about time I set my tables, anyway. Well,” he asked, apparently to keep the conversation from flagging, while he went about this work, “how is the good old Free Press getting along?”
“It's going to get along without me from this out,” said Bartley. “This is my last week in Equity.”
“No!” retorted Kinney, in tremendous astonishment.
“Yes; I'm off at the end of the week. Squire Gaylord takes the paper back for the committee, and I suppose Henry Bird will run it for a while; or perhaps they'll stop it altogether. It's been a losing business for the committee.”
“Why, I thought you'd bought it of 'em.”
“Well, that's what I expected to do; but the office hasn't made any money. All that I've saved is in my colt and cutter.”
“That sorrel?”
Bartley nodded. “I'm going away about as poor as I came. I couldn't go much poorer.”
“Well!” said Kinney, in the exhaustion of adequate language. He went on laying the plates and knives and forks in silence. These were of undisguised steel; the dishes and the drinking mugs were of that dense and heavy make which the keepers of cheap restaurants use to protect themselves against breakage, and which their servants chip to the quick at every edge. Kinney laid bread and crackers by each plate, and on each he placed a vast slab of cold corned beef. Then he lifted the lid of the pot in which the cabbage and potatoes were boiling together, and pricked them with a fork. He dished up the beans in a succession of deep tins, and set them at intervals along the tables, and began to talk again. “Well, now, I'm sorry. I'd just begun to feel real well acquainted with you. Tell you the truth, I didn't take much of a fancy to you, first off.”
“Is that so?” asked Bartley, not much disturbed by the confession.
“Yes, sir. Well, come to boil it down,” said Kinney, with the frankness of the analytical mind that disdains to spare itself in the pursuit of truth, “I didn't like your good clothes. I don't suppose I ever had a suit of clothes to fit me. Feel kind of ashamed, you know, when I go into the store, and take the first thing the Jew wants to put off on to me. Now, I suppose you go to Macullar and Parker's in Boston, and you get whatyouwant.”
“No; I have my measure at a tailor's,” said Bartley, with ill-concealed pride in the fact.
“You don't say so!” exclaimed Kinney. “Well!” he said, as if he might as well swallow this pill, too, while he was about it. “Well, what's the use? I never was the figure for clothes, anyway. Long, gangling boy to start with, and a lean, stoop-shouldered man. I found out some time ago that a fellow wa'n't necessarily a bad fellow because he had money, or a good fellow because he hadn't. But I hadn't quite got over hating a man because he had style. Well, I suppose it was a kind of asurvival, as old Tylor calls it. But I tell you, I sniffed round you a good while before I made up my mind to swallow you. And that turnout of yours, it kind of staggered me, after I got over the clothes. Why, it wa'n't so much the colt,—any man likes to ride after a sorrel colt; and it wa'n't so much the cutter: it was the red linin' with pinked edges that you had to your robe; and it was the red ribbon that you had tied round the waist of your whip. When I see that ribbon on that whip, damn you, I wanted to kill you.” Bartley broke out into a laugh, but Kinney went on soberly. “But, thinks I to myself: 'Here! Now you stop right here! You wait! You give the fellow a chance for his life. Let him have a chance to show whether that whip-ribbon goes all through him, first. If it does, kill him cheerfully; but give him a chancefirst.' Well, sir, I gave you the chance, and you showed that you deserved it. I guess you taught me a lesson. When I see you at work, pegging away hard at something or other, every time I went into your office, up and coming with everybody, and just as ready to pass the time of day with me as the biggest bug in town, thinks I: 'You'd have made a great mistake to kill that fellow, Kinney!' And I just made up my mind to like you.”
“Thanks,” said Bartley, with ironical gratitude.
Kinney did not speak at once. He whistled thoughtfully through his teeth, and then he said: “I'll tell you what: if you're going awayverypoor, I know a wealthy chap you can raise a loan out of.”
Bartley thought seriously for a silent moment. “If your friend offers me twenty dollars, I'm not too well dressed to take it.”
“All right,” said Kinney. He now dished up the cabbage and potatoes, and throwing a fresh handful of tea into the pot, and filling it up with water, he took down a tin horn, with which he went to the door and sounded a long, stertorous note.
“Guess it was the clothes again,” said Kinney, as he began to wash his tins and dishes after the dinner was over, and the men had gone back to their work. “I could see 'em eyin' you over when they first came in, and I could see that they didn't exactly like the looks of 'em. It would wear off in time, but ittakestime for it to wear off; and it had to go pretty rusty for a start-off. Well, I don't know as it makes much difference to you, does it?”
“Oh, I thought we got along very well,” said Bartley, with a careless yawn. “There wasn't much chance to get acquainted.” Some of the loggers were as handsome and well-made as he, and were of as good origin and traditions, though he had some advantages of training. But his two-button cutaway, his well-fitting trousers, his scarf with a pin in it, had been too much for these young fellows in their long 'stoga boots and flannel shirts. They looked at him askance, and despatched their meal with more than their wonted swiftness, and were off again into the woods without any demonstrations of satisfaction in Bartley's presence.
He had perceived their grudge, for he had felt it in his time. But it did not displease him; he had none of the pain with which Kinney, who had so long bragged of him to the loggers, saw that his guest was a failure.
“I guess they'll come out all right in the end,” he said. In this warm atmosphere, after the gross and heavy dinner he had eaten, he yawned again and again. He folded his overcoat into a pillow for his bench and lay down, and lazily watched Kinney about his work. Presently he saw Kinney seated on a block of wood beside the stove, with his elbow propped in one hand, and holding a magazine, out of which he was reading; he wore spectacles, which gave him a fresh and interesting touch of grotesqueness. Bartley found that an empty barrel had been placed on each side of him, evidently to keep him from rolling off his bench.
“Hello!” he said. “Much obliged to you, Kinney. I haven't been taken such good care of since I can remember. Been asleep, haven't I?”
“About an hour,” said Kinney, with a glance at the clock, and ignoring his agency in Bartley's comfort.
“Food for the brain!” said Bartley, sitting up. “I should think so. I've dreamt a perfect New American Cyclopaedia, and a pronouncing gazetteer thrown in.”
“Is that so?” said Kinney, as if pleased with the suggestive character of his cookery, now established by eminent experiment.
Bartley yawned a yawn of satisfied sleepiness, and rubbed his hand over his face. “I suppose,” he said, “if I'm going to write anything about Camp Kinney, I had better see all there is to see.”
“Well, yes, I presume you had,” said Kinney. “We'll go over to where they're cuttin', pretty soon, and you can see all there is in an hour. But I presume you'll want to see it so as to ring in some description, hey? Well, that's all right. But what you going to do with it, when you've done it, now you're out of the Free Press?”
“Oh, I shouldn't have printed it in the Free Press, anyway Coals to Newcastle, you know. I'll tell you what I think I'll do, Kinney: I'll get my outlines, and then you post me with a lot of facts,—queer characters, accidents, romantic incidents, snowings-up, threatened starvation, adventures with wild animals,—and I can make something worth while; get out two or three columns, so they can print it in their Sunday edition. And then I'll take it up to Boston with me, and seek my fortune with it.”
“Well, sir, I'll do it,” said Kinney, fired with the poetry of the idea. “I'll post you! Dumn 'f I don't wishIcould write! Well, Ididuse to scribble once for an agricultural paper; but I don't call that writin'. I've set down, well, I guess as much as sixty times, to try to write out what I know about loggin'—”
“Hold on!” cried Bartley, whipping out his notebook. “That's first-rate. That'll do for the first line in the head,—What I Know About Logging,—large caps. Well!”
Kinney shut his magazine, and took his knee between his hands, closing one of his eyes in order to sharpen his recollection. He poured forth a stream of reminiscence, mingled observation, and personal experience. Bartley followed him with his pencil, jotting down points, striking in sub-head lines, and now and then interrupting him with cries of “Good!” “Capital!” “It's a perfect mine,—it's a mint! By Jove!” he exclaimed, “I'll makesixcolumns of this! I'll offer it to one of the magazines, and it'll come out illustrated! Go on, Kinney.”
“Hark!” said Kinney, craning his neck forward to listen. “I thought I heard sleigh-bells. But I guess it wa'n't. Well, sir, as I was sayin', they fetched that fellow into camp with both feet frozen to the knees—Dumn 'f itwa'n'tbells!”
He unlimbered himself, and hurried to the door at the other end of the cabin, which he opened, letting in a clear block of the afternoon sunshine, and a gush of sleigh-bell music, shot with men's voices, and the cries and laughter of women.
“Well, sir,” said Kinney, coming back and making haste to roll down his sleeves and put on his coat. “Here'sa nuisance! A whole party of folks—two sleigh-loads—rightonus. I don't know who theybe, or where they're from. But I know where I wish theywas. Well, of course, it's natural they should want to see a loggin'-camp,” added Kinney, taking himself to task for his inhospitable mind, “and there ain't any harm in it. But I wish they'd give a fellow alittlenotice!”
The voices and bells drew nearer, but Kinney seemed resolved to observe the decorum of not going to the door till some one knocked.
“Kinney! Kinney! Hello, Kinney!” shouted a man's voice, as the bells hushed before the door, and broke into a musical clash when one of the horses tossed his head.
“Well, sir,” said Kinney, rising, “I guess it's old Willett himself. He's the owner; lives up to Portland, and been threatening to come down here all winter, with a party of friends. You just stay still,” he added; and he paid himself the deference which every true American owes himself in his dealings with his employer: he went to the door very deliberately, and made no haste on account of the repeated cries of “Kinney! Kinney!” in which others of the party outside now joined.
When he opened the door again, the first voice saluted him with a roar of laughter. “Why, Kinney, I began to think you were dead!”
“No, sir,” Bartley heard Kinney reply, “it takes more to kill me than you suppose.” But now he stepped outside, and the talk became unintelligible.
Finally Bartley heard what was imaginably Mr. Willett's voice saying, “Well, let's go in and have a look at it now”; and with much outcry and laughter the ladies were invisibly helped to dismount, and presently the whole party came stamping and rustling in.
Bartley's blood tingled. He liked this, and he stood quite self-possessed, with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets and his elbows dropped, while Mr. Willett advanced in a friendly way.
“Ah, Mr. Hubbard! Kinney told us you were in here, and asked me to introduce myself while he looked after the horses. My name's Willett. These are my daughters; this is Mrs. Macallister, of Montreal; Mrs. Witherby, of Boston; Miss Witherby, and Mr. Witherby.Youought to know each other; Mr. Hubbard is the editor of the Equity Free Press. Mr. Witherby, of The Boston Events, Mr. Hubbard. Oh, andMr.Macallister.”
Bartley bowed to the Willett and Witherby ladies, and shook hands with Mr. Witherby, a large, solemn man, with a purse-mouth and tight rings of white hair, who treated him with the pomp inevitable to the owner of a city newspaper in meeting a country editor.
At the mention of his name, Mr. Macallister, a slight little straight man, in a long ulster and a sealskin cap, tiddled farcically forward on his toes, and, giving Bartley his hand, said, “Ah, haow d'e-do,haowd'e-do!”
Mrs. Macallister fixed upon him the eye of the flirt who knows her man. She was of the dark-eyed English type; her eyes were very large and full, and her smooth black hair was drawn flatly backward, and fastened in a knot just under her dashing fur cap. She wore a fur sack, and she was equipped against the cold as exquisitely as her Southern sisters defend themselves from the summer. Bits of warm color, in ribbon and scarf, flashed out here and there; when she flung open her sack, she showed herself much more lavishly buttoned and bugled and bangled than the Americans. She sat clown on the movable bench which Bartley had vacated, and crossed her feet, very small and saucy, even in their arctics, on a stick of fire-wood, and cast up her neat profile, and rapidly made eyes at every part of the interior. “Why, it's delicious, you know. I never saw anything so comfortable. I want to spend the rest of me life here, you know.” She spoke very far down in her throat, and with a rising inflection in each sentence. “I'm going to have a quarrel with you, Mr. Willett, for not telling me what a delightful surprise you had for us here. Oh, but I'd no idea of it, I assure you!”
“Well, I'm glad you like it, Mrs. Macallister,” said Mr. Willett, with the clumsiness of American middle-age when summoned to say something gallant. “If I'd told you what a surprise I had for you, it wouldn't have been one.”
“Oh, it's no good your trying to get out of itthatway,” retorted the beauty. “There he comes now! I'm really in love with him, you know,” she said, as Kinney opened the door and came hulking forward.
Nobody said anything at once, but Bartley laughed finally, and ventured, “Well, I'll propose for you to Kinney.”
“Oh, I dare say!” cried the beauty, with a lively effort of wit. “Mr. Kinney, I have fallen in love with your camp, d' ye know?” she added, as Kinney drew near, “and I'm beggin' Mr. Willett to let me come and live here among you.”
“Well, ma'am,” said Kinney, a little abashed at this proposition, “you couldn't do a better thing for your health, Iguess.”
The proprietor of The Boston Events turned about, and began to look over the arrangements of the interior; the other ladies went with him, conversing, in low tones. “These must be the places where the men sleep,” they said, gazing at the bunks.
“We must get Kinney to explain things to us,” said Mr. Willett a little restlessly.
Mrs. Macallister jumped briskly to her feet. “Oh, yes, do, Mr. Willett, make him explain everything! I've been tryin' to coax it out of him, but he'ssucha tease!”
Kinney looked very sheepish in this character, and Mrs. Macallister hooked Bartley to her side for the tour of the interior. “I can't let you away from me, Mr. Hubbard; your friend's so satirical, I'm afraid of him. Only fancy, Mr. Willett! He's been talkin' tomeabout brain foods! I know he's makin' fun of me; and it isn't kind, is it, Mr. Hubbard?”
She did not give the least notice to the things that the others looked at, or to Kinney's modest lecture upon the manners and customs of the loggers. She kept a little apart with Bartley, and plied him with bravadoes, with pouts, with little cries of suspense. In the midst of this he heard Mr. Willett saying, “You ought to get some one to come and write about this for your paper, Witherby.” But Mrs. Macallister was also saying something, with a significant turn of her floating eyes, and the thing that concerned Bartley, if he were to make his way among the newspapers in Boston, slipped from his grasp like the idea which we try to seize in a dream. She made sure of him for the drive to the place which they visited to see the men felling the trees, by inviting him to a seat at her side in the sleigh; this crowded the others, but she insisted, and they all gave way, as people must, to the caprices of a pretty woman. Her coquetries united British wilfulness to American nonchalance, and seemed to have been graduated to the appreciation of garrison and St. Lawrence River steamboat and watering-place society. The Willett ladies had already found it necessary to explain to the Witherby ladies that they had met her the summer before at the sea-side, and that she had stopped at Portland on her way to England; they did not know her very well, but some friends of theirs did; and their father had asked her to come with them to the camp. They added that the Canadian ladies seemed to expect the gentlemen to be a great deal more attentive than ours were. They had known as little what to do with Mr. Macallister's small-talk and compliments as his wife's audacities, but they did not view Bartley's responsiveness with pleasure. If Mrs. Macallister's arts were not subtle, as Bartley even in the intoxication of her preference could not keep from seeing, still, in his mood, it was consoling to be singled out by her; it meant that even in a logging-camp he was recognizable by any person of fashion as a good-looking, well-dressed man of the world. It embittered him the more against Marcia, while, in some sort, it vindicated him to himself.
The early winter sunset was beginning to tinge the snow with crimson, when the party started back to camp, where Kinney was to give them supper; he had it greatly on his conscience that they should have a good time, and he promoted it as far as hot mince-pie and newly fried doughnuts would go. He also opened a few canned goods, as he called some very exclusive sardines and peaches, and he made an entirely fresh pot of tea, and a pan of soda-biscuit. Mrs. Macallister made remarks across her plate which were for Bartley alone; and Kinney, who was seriously waiting upon his guests, refused to respond to Bartley's joking reference to himself of some questions and comments of hers.
After supper, when the loggers had withdrawn to the other end of the long hut, she called out to Kinney, “Oh,dotell them to smoke: we shall not mind it at all, I assure you. Can't some of them do something? Sing or dance?”
Kinney unbent a little at this. “There's a first-class clog-dancer among them; but he's a little stuck up, and I don't know as you could get him to dance,” he said in a low tone.
“What a bloated aristocrat!” cried the lady. “Then the only thing is for us to dance first. Can they play?”
“One of 'em can whistle like a bird,—he can whistle like a whole band,” answered Kinney, warming. “And of course the Kanucks can fiddle.”
“And what are Kanucks? Isthatwhat you call us Canadians?”
“Well, ma'am, it aint quite the thing to do,” said Kinney, penitently.
“It isn't atallthe thing to do! Which are the Kanucks?”
She rose, and went forward with Kinney, in her spoiled way, and addressed a swarthy, gleaming-eyed young logger in French. He answered with a smile that showed all his white teeth, and turned to one of his comrades; then the two rose, and got violins out of the bunks, and came forward. Others of their race joined them, but the Yankees hung gloomily back; they clearly did not like these liberties, this patronage.
“I shall have your clog-dancer on his feet yet, Mr. Kinney,” said Mrs. Macallister, as she came back to her place.
The Canadians began to play and sing those gay, gay airs of old France which they have kept unsaddened through all the dark events that have changed the popular mood of the mother country; they have matched words to them in celebration of their life on the great rivers and in the vast forests of the North, and in these blithe barcaroles and hunting-songs breathes the joyous spirit of a France that knows neither doubt nor care,—France untouched by Revolution or Napoleonic wars; some of the airs still keep the very words that came over seas with them two hundred years ago. The transition to the dance was quick and inevitable; a dozen slim young fellows were gliding about behind the players, pounding the hard earthen floor, and singing in time.
“Oh, come, come!” cried the beauty, rising and stamping impatiently with her little foot, “suppose we dance, too.”
She pulled Bartley forward by the hand; her husband followed with the taller Miss Willett; two of the Canadians, at the instance of Mrs. Macallister, came forward and politely asked the honor of the other young ladies' hands in the dance; their temper was infectious, and the cotillon was in full life before their partners had time to wonder at their consent. Mrs. Macallister could sing some of the Canadian songs; her voice, clear and fresh, rang through those of the men, while in at the window, thrown open for air, came the wild cries of the forest,—the wail of a catamount, and the solemn hooting of a distant owl.
“Isn't it jolly good fun?” she demanded, when the figure was finished; and now Kinney went up to the first-class clog-dancer, and prevailed with him to show his skill. He seemed to comply on condition that the whistler should furnish the music; he came forward with a bashful hauteur, bridling stiffly like a girl, and struck into the laborious and monotonous jig which is, perhaps, our national dance. He was exquisitely shaped, and as he danced he suppled more and more, while the whistler warbled a wilder and swifter strain, and kept time with his hands. There was something that stirred the blood in the fury of the strain and dance. When it was done, Mrs. Macallister caught off her cap and ran round among the spectators to make them pay; she excused no one, and she gave the money to Kinney, telling him to get his loggers something to keep the cold out.
“I should say whiskey, if I were in the Canadian bush,” she suggested.
“Well,Iguess we sha'n't say anything of that sort inthiscamp,” said Kinney.
She turned upon Bartley, “I know Mr. Hubbard is dying to do something. Do something, Mr. Hubbard!” Bartley looked up in surprise at this interpretation of his tacit wish to distinguish himself before her. “Come, sing us some of your student songs.”
Bartley's vanity had confided the fact of his college training to her, and he was really thinking just then that he would like to give them a serio-comic song, for which he had been famous with his class. He borrowed the violin of a Kanuck, and, sitting down, strummed upon it banjo-wise. The song was one of those which is partly spoken and acted; he really did it very well; but the Willett and Witherby ladies did not seem to understand it quite; and the gentlemen looked as if they thought this very undignified business for an educated American.
Mrs. Macallister feigned a yawn, and put up her hand to hide it. “Oh, what a styupid song!” she said. She sprang to her feet, and began to put on her wraps. The others were glad of this signal to go, and followed her example. “Good by!” she cried, giving her hand to Kinney. “Idon't think your ideas are ridiculous. I think there's no end of good sense in them, I assure you. I hope you won't leave off that regard for the brain in your cooking. Good by!” She waved her hand to the Americans, and then to the Kanucks, as she passed out between their respectfully parted ranks. “Adieu, messieurs!” She merely nodded to Bartley; the others parted from him coldly, as he fancied, and it seemed to him that he had been made responsible for that woman's coquetries, when he was conscious, all the time, of having forborne even to meet them half-way. But this was not so much to his credit as he imagined. The flirt can only practise her audacities safely by grace of those upon whom she uses them, and if men really met them half-way there could be no such tiling as flirting.