CHAPTER XVIII
Whew! A breath of fresh air!
Joe Grimsby had gone to the woods—to the very heart of the Adirondack wilderness, an old stamping-ground of his—primitive enough in these days, long before the millionaire and his money had invaded and gilded the silent places. Even Atwater did not object to Joe’s going—he had worked hard, and needed a change. Their final set of competition drawings for the big building of the Lawyers’ Consolidated Trust Company had been handed in for decision; the remainder of their work, two cottages on Long Island, were in the hands of the builders, and the office was taking a well-earned rest. So Joe packed up his things, boarded the Montreal express one evening early in August, got off at daylight on the edge of Lake Champlain at Westport, and found his old friend and guide, Ed Munsey, waiting for him at the small station with a hired team and buckboard.
Ed’s quick blue eye caught right of Joe as he stepped off the sleeper.
“Wall! Wall!” grinned Ed, with a hearty handshake. “Knowed ye’d come. Freme Dubois’s boy brought me your letter—let’s see, Thursday, wa’n’t it? No—come to think of it, it was Friday—’bout noon; I’d been off straightening the trail over to the bigsouth medders, fer the survey with Bill Williams. Gosh all whimey! We done some travellin’ in that thar swamp. Goll, sez I, I knowed ye’d write. Haow goes it, Joe?”
“Fine, Ed. Lord, but I’m glad to get here.”
“That yourn?” remarked Ed, noting an English sole-leather trunk by itself on the platform, well scarred and labelled, guaranteeing its travels to Venice, the Tyrol, and beyond.
Joe nodded.
“Reminds me of Hite Pitcomb the time he fell through Hank Jenkins’s sawpit. Thar wa’n’t a spot on him big’s your hand, that Doc Haines didn’t stick a plaster on. Let’s see, got yer gripsack?” and glancing at the big pigskin bag beside Joe, he slung the trunk on his back, Joe following him to the waiting team.
As Ed tucked the yellow horse-blanket snugly around Joe’s knees and picked up the lines, his keen blue eyes looked him quizzically over.
“Lookin’ kinder peaked ’round the gills, ain’t ye?” he remarked, as he clucked to the horses. “Wall, you’ll git over that, soon’s we git to camp—gee up!”
The team started for Keene Valley at a brisk trot.
“If I’d a-knowed you was a-comin’, I’d er fixed up my old lean-to to the head of the pond—roof was leakin’ bad last time I come by thar—a feller’d git kinder moist, as the feller said, if it come on to rain.”
As the springy old buckboard rattled on, the rare mountain air, pungent with the perfume of balsamand pine, sent a glow to Joe’s cheeks. He drew a deep, long, delicious breath.
“That’s what I want,” he cried, with his old breezy enthusiasm, “and plenty of it! Whew! What air, Ed!”
“Help yerself, friend, it’s all free,” returned his companion.
The two talked on—Joe plying his old friend with a score of questions. “Eph Hammond’s girl got married,” he learned. “Yes, yes—run off with the drug-store feller down to Alder Brook. Old Man Stimson was dead at last. Jim Oldfield had cut himself bad with an axe, over to Lily Pond—but deer were plenty, and the still water at the head of the Upper Ausable Pond was chock full of trout.”
They talked on as they passed through Elizabethtown, and clear of the village, some miles farther on, Joe’s eyes feasted upon the first glimpse of the great distant range of mountains that presently loomed up ahead of them—a range he knew every foot of and had loved for years. As they neared Keene Valley, the mountains became majestic; on the left, the black sides of Giant Mountain glistened in the sunlight; beyond, at the extreme end of the long, green, peaceful valley, the peak of Noon Mark peeped above the rifts of morning mist. Now and then a red squirrel skittered across the road. To the left flashed in ripples of light the swirling current of the Ausable River, clear as crystal. The air grew cooler as they dipped down a short hill and skirted an alder swamp, out ofwhich two woodcock whistled up and disappeared in the deeper forest.
“Gee ap!” cried Ed to the sturdy team. They livened into a brisk trot. It was playful going for the mares after drawing logs all winter down lumber roads of sheer ice, where often a fall, a shifted load, or the snapping of a trace-chain meant death to them.
The big woods had weathered another winter of cruel winds and biting cold, deep in millions of tons of snow. Formidable mountain torrents, like John’s Brook, had lain for months frozen and choked under a mass of white domes marking its big boulders; down beneath this coverlet the black water gurgled and swirled. Here and there, during the hard winter, an air-hole disclosed the icy water purling beneath, quarrelling, talking to itself, and where for all these long winter months the trout lay like prisoners in the dark, scarcely moving. Above them the big hemlocks had creaked, groaned, and cried under bitter onslaughts of sleet and wind. Now and then a tree strung tense with the cold gave out a report like a pistol-shot. From the great boulders hung huge yellow icicles, like the stained beards of old men. Tracks were everywhere, a vast labyrinth of telltale goings and comings of the hungry and the wary. The fox cross-tracked the wolverene, circling over the clean snow were noiseless tracks of lean white hares and the straight, mincing tread of partridges. Now and then the solid, nimble track of a panther, prowling while the bears slept soundly in their caves. Here andthere tiny tracks, the timid trot of a mouse, his tail making a faint gash in the snow. Spring had come as a relief at last, freeing all things. To-day the woods basked in the kind old summer. The big brook had become again a roaring torrent. Birds sang again; the hermit-thrush, the last to sing at evening. Nocturnal animals went their several ways under the gentle light of the moon, and every early morning brought that pirate, the kingfisher, like a flash of azure down John’s Brook, chattering with devilish glee as he drove the smaller trout in a panic ahead of him, and filled his belly with the one that pleased him, an insolent and arrogant thief, vain of his strong beak and his gay plumage.
To Ed the woods were an open book, and he read them as easily as some do a printed page, though he could scarcely spell, and wrote with difficulty. His shock of hair, seldom combed except for dances, funerals, or weddings, was sandy; his heart was big and his eyes of a clear, penetrating blue. He could see farther than most men in the woods, and could shoot straight under difficulties when many a man would have missed. He was as garrulous as a magpie at times, and silent at others, though his voice, like that of most men living in the wilderness, was low-pitched, a soft, earnest voice. Once a year he dyed his mustache blue-black; that it wore green to one side did not bother him. He had a pet fancy for a stub of a brier pipe, stuffed generally with his “favorite” tobaccos—“Blue Ruin” or “Honey Comb”—and wore gay suspendersand two thick blue-flannel shirts to keep him warm. He had never ridden on the cars. They were the only thing he was afraid of, never having tried them, though they had tempted him more than once to take him as far as the fair at “Ticonderogi.” He had a habit of talking seriously to inanimate things about him. His fire that slowly kindled in a rain, sticks that refused to “lay daown” to kindle, again to the dulled edge of his long-handled, double-bitted axe—a rare occurrence, for he kept it as sharp as a carpenter’s chisel. Often he spoke to the weather.
“Goll ding ye!” he’d say, between his teeth, glancing up at the low-lying clouds. “Ain’t ye got yer satisfy? Ain’t ye got dreened aout yit?”
Joe loved him and he loved Joe. They were close pals. Ed had guided him ever since he was a little shaver of fifteen, taking care of him as if he was his own son—and for all of these precious services he asked nothing, and only accepted their remuneration after long persuasion from Joe and bashful protests—scratching his shock of sandy hair awkwardly and declaring: “By gum! that he wa’n’t worth it—that it was a goll-dummed sight too much in dollars, friend. Ain’t we hed a good time?” He’d argue: “Wall—ain’t that enough?” Ed always “cal’ated” it was. Now and then he managed to send Joe a hind quarter or a saddle of venison; once the skin of a wolverene, a prime pelt killed in December; and twice, when his bear traps yielded over in St. Armand Valley, he sent Joe the skins—ears and all—forfeiting the rewardfrom the State, and never mentioning it, either. Though he was seldom at home, he had a snug cabin with a dirt floor down by the river, four hound dogs, a wife, a melodeon that nobody could play, two strapping daughters, afraid of no man alive, and a suspension lamp.
They were only details in his life. He preferred the deep woods, often travelling in the wilderness for weeks alone, sometimes off with the State Survey, who always got him when they could, since he possessed a bump of location, a sense of direction that was phenomenal; often he was fishing or still-hunting for deer, or following his line of sable traps as far up as Panther Gorge and the summit of Mount Marcy. He could spend a week in the woods with no more than a dozen matches; when one got damp he rubbed it dry in his hair.
The two spent the night in the valley at the old white hotel with the green blinds. Early the next morning they provisioned up at the small store and post-office opposite, smelling of dried herrings, calico, cheese, baby’s shoes, and lumbermen’s new brogans.
Half a dozen habitués who had known Joe for years slid off the counter close to the cheese screen to grip him by the hand in welcome.
“Wall! Wall!” they exclaimed, and that was about all, except they added that, “Ed had been expectin’ ye and that your letter come all right.”
By noon they were en route to camp on the Upper Ausable Pond, by way of the muddiest lumber roadin the world, mud hub-deep, black mud, covering patches of sunken corduroy, treacherous roots and hidden rocks that snapped their full share of axles during a season, spilled off provisions, burst flour-sacks, and brought forth a string of profanity along its entire contrary length. Ed and Joe trudged on back of the buckboard. To ride was impossible. Now and then the strong team, guided to-day by Bill Dubois’s boy, also on foot, strained, plunged on, and stopped for a panting rest. Moreover, the old road was steep, only reaching its height of land as it came into a glimmering view through the trees of the Lower Ausable Pond, that lay below, still and mirrored between the flanks of the great mountains. To the right rose the Gothics, and beyond, sheer up above their granite flanks, the high peak of Mount Marcy.
Once in sight of the Lower Ausable, the air became even rarer. A gentle breeze that shirred the surface of the long pond, set the silvery leaves of a clump of poplar-trees shivering and the water slopping along the rocky shore. Here, too, they said good-by to Bill Dubois’s boy. By the time they had rowed through the Lower Ausable, made the carry of a mile and a half between the twin ponds, and reached Ed’s lean-to at the head of the upper pond, it was nearly dark. Ed’s frail green boat, loaded down within three inches of the water-line, slipped up to a small patch of sand that served as a landing before the cleared spot in front of his primitive camp. Ed sprang out and steadied the boat for Joe. The next instanthe had picked up the heaviest of the two pack-baskets, slid his strong arms through its broad leather straps, and with a grunt slowly staggered with it to his feet, over a hundred pounds dead weight.
“Hold on!” cried Joe. “Let me help!” he insisted, in vain, as Ed started up the bank. “Pretty heavy, isn’t it? Looks as if it weighed a ton to me.”
Under the dead weight Ed turned and grinned.
“Wall,” he drawled, “it ain’t no earring.”
He set down the pack-basket with a thump before the lean-to and glanced about him. Finally, he decided on a group of dry balsams to the left, a few strokes of his keen axe levelled three. These he cut into lengths, and hauled before the camp. Then he went in search of a rotten stump, broke out from its centre a handful of “punk,” gathered a few shreds of birch bark, arranged his fire, struck one sulphur match on the seat of his thick, gray-woollen, homespun trousers, and soon had a cheery blaze crackling and snapping a welcome.
Nothing is worse than a fireless camp. The fire is everything; it is almost meat and drink.
As it grew darker it made the spot a home. An owl hooted across the silent pond. Beyond the limit of the firelight lay the hushed wilderness, stretching afar, and it is safe to say that the only other campfire to-night for miles was Si Skinner’s, whom Ed “cal’ated was floatin’ for deer clear over to the Boreas Ponds.”
Out came Ed’s magic “fry-pan.” With the fragranceof the coffee and the scent of sizzling bacon and beans Joe became ravenous. He could hardly wait until Ed cried, “Supper!” and added, with a shout that echoed across the pond: “Daylight on zee swamp, and beans on zee tab’, git up, you peasonuers!” being an old lumberjack’s shout in calling the Canuck French element in camp to breakfast.
“We’d er done well to hev took thet little whiffet dorg of Bill Saunders along,” declared Ed, as they sat smoking in the warm glow of the fire after supper. “Cunningest little cuss you ever seen to run a deer. Me and Bill killed four ahead of him last fall. He don’t make no noise—Bill learned him that; got a voice on him ez weak’s a kitten’s. Then, thinks I, we won’t hev no trouble gitten a deer jackin’ if it keeps up ez warm ez this. Flies hev begun to trouble ’em considerable nights. They’ll be sloshin’ down into the still water soon. Bill come through here, it wa’n’t more’n a week ago, and seen four—three bucks and a doe—jest this side of the Gull rock, not forty rod from whar you shot at the otter two year ago. ’Bout ez neat a shot as I ever see.”
The two lay smoking on their backs on a fresh and springy bed of balsam boughs, a fragrant mattress skilfully thatched by Ed, their boots off before the warm blaze, while they talked on of many things—among them two dances over in New Russia Valley that Ed was sorry Joe had not been up to go to.
The dance Ed recounted “over to Jedwins’ folks Christmas night” was a great success. More than adozen sleighs had brought the crowd. The Williams boys fiddled; the coonskin coats were piled as high as the ceiling. They had moved out the stove in the square kitchen of the log cabin, and had danced until broad daylight.
As Ed continued his narrative, Joe could almost hear the tramping, swishing feet, for he had gone to many of these dances; hear the laughter and the rough jokes; could see a score of rosy-cheeked, healthy girls sitting in the room off the kitchen, and being beckoned to by their partners to dance; and the jigs they played, swift jigs to stir the blood—“The Pride of Michigan” and the “Cat in the Cabbage” scraped out with a will, with a speed and a rhythm that is characteristic of these backwoods fiddlers; and above the music the shouts: “Alley mand left! Alley mand right! Dos a dos! First lady in the centre, and all hands around and swing your own!”
They pounded the floor; often they broke it in places, and in every hip pocket was a flask.
“Let’s have a song, Ed,” pleaded Joe, kicking up the fire into a shower of sparks, and returning to the fragrant bed of balsams, and though Ed tried to beg off, Joe insisted.
Finally Ed cleared his throat and began in a sing-song drone:
“Willy Jones—hez gone an’—’listed.Willy to—the war hez gone.He left his little wife, all to hum,All to hum—to grief and mourn.”
“Willy Jones—hez gone an’—’listed.Willy to—the war hez gone.He left his little wife, all to hum,All to hum—to grief and mourn.”
“Willy Jones—hez gone an’—’listed.
Willy to—the war hez gone.
He left his little wife, all to hum,
All to hum—to grief and mourn.”
He wiped the green side of his dyed mustache with the back of his hand, and began the second verse drowsily, quavering on the high notes:
“She dressed herself—in man’s attire,And went by the name—of Richard Carr,With her lily-white fingers—all besmirched,All besmirched—with pitch and tar.”
“She dressed herself—in man’s attire,And went by the name—of Richard Carr,With her lily-white fingers—all besmirched,All besmirched—with pitch and tar.”
“She dressed herself—in man’s attire,
And went by the name—of Richard Carr,
With her lily-white fingers—all besmirched,
All besmirched—with pitch and tar.”
Here he paused.
“Go on,” coaxed Joe. “How about the part on the parade-ground. Remember?”
“Hold on—let’s see. Kinder slipped out of my mind—been so long since I tried to sing it.”
But Joe was again insistent, and after a little thinking Ed resumed:
“One day when she—was exercisin’—Exercisin’—on the green,A silver butting—flew off her waistcoat,And her lily-white throat was seen.”
“One day when she—was exercisin’—Exercisin’—on the green,A silver butting—flew off her waistcoat,And her lily-white throat was seen.”
“One day when she—was exercisin’—
Exercisin’—on the green,
A silver butting—flew off her waistcoat,
And her lily-white throat was seen.”
Again the singer stopped.
“Now, hold on, there’s a fourth verse,” declared Joe eagerly.
“Let’s see—so there is,” confessed Ed sleepily, and after a long pull at his pipe, resumed slowly:
“When the captin—see this action,See the deed—that she had done,He made her gineral—of the army,Of the army—ninety-one——”
“When the captin—see this action,See the deed—that she had done,He made her gineral—of the army,Of the army—ninety-one——”
“When the captin—see this action,
See the deed—that she had done,
He made her gineral—of the army,
Of the army—ninety-one——”
“Thar! thet’s all I kin remember,” he declared.
It was one of those old lumberjack songs that had come from no one knew where. As far as Joe knew, this favorite backwoods ballad of his had never been written, like scores of others gleaned out of the lumber camps.
But it was growing late, and both were drowsy after their long tramp. The fire had sunk to embers. They stacked it up for the night with the remaining niggered ends of the dry balsams, and before another five minutes had elapsed the two were rolled up and snoring in their blankets. Then all was still, save that at intervals the owl hooted hoarsely from across the pond, or a muskrat plunged down by the landing, close to their boat. When they awoke, the warm sun was streaming in upon them, and the pond, still as a plate of glass, lay under a blanket of rosy mist. That night Joe had dreamed of Sue.
To Joe the still water at the head of the pond had a strange fascination, a silent stream, black as onyx, its current bordered by the deep forest of spruce and pine, with now and then a giant hemlock, centuries old, lifting its shaggy top above them. So perfectly were the trees mirrored in the stream that it was often difficult to tell where the water-line began.
The stream this year was swarming with trout; seldom had its gravelled spawning beds yielded better fishing. Here, too, the deer came to drink. At night the winding stream became ghostly and as silent asdeath, save now and then the slosh of a leaping trout or the plunge of a muskrat.
There was something of the unfathomable and the unknown in this weird, lonely river, buried as it was miles back of civilization.
To-night the slim, green boat moved up it, and turned to the right and left in its varied bends, hemmed in by the black trees. The boat, like the two men within it, did not make a sound, and though Ed’s paddle kept constantly in motion under water, he avoided lifting it clear of the current. In the absolute stillness even its drip would have been heard. In the bow where Joe sat in the chill air, with a Winchester across his knees, glowed with a peculiar ghostly light an old-fashioned jack-lantern; back of its stub of a candle Ed had nailed a semicircle of hemlock bark, whose inner slippery peel, white as ivory, served as a reflector, obliterating from view the boat and its occupants. It was an ideal night to float for deer—the moon not yet up.
It was past midnight when they stealthily turned to the right up a stretch of water, swinging along under some alders that shaded in daylight a patch of shallow water with a clean sand bottom. Suddenly Ed’s paddle gently backed water. Joe did not know his paddle had reversed, but he felt an almost imperceptible shake to the green boat, cautiously lifted his rifle, and, peering ahead of him, saw a grayish object close up to the alders. Half a stroke of Ed’s paddle, and he saw more plainly an animal that resembled a sortof phantom horse but was in reality a small spike-horned buck. He had been drinking, and now raised his trim head and stood gazing into the lantern’s ghostly light. Like a flash he started to spring to the bank, but Joe was too quick for him; down he went with a shot that broke his neck.
“By goll, Joe, you done well,” came Ed’s quiet remark, as together they lifted the deer in the boat and started for camp. They had barely reached the Gull rock when the moon rose, flooding the pond with its soft radiance, changing the chill low-lying mist to a silvery veil.
When they reached camp they turned in and slept late, and it was nearly noon before Ed had the fat spike-horned buck “dressed out” and hung.
They kept a saddle and a fore quarter with them, and the hind quarters and the other fore quarter they took down to the lower pond, where they hung it for safe-keeping close to the shore in a small cavern below some big boulders known as the Ice Cave. Here nature had provided for the hunter an excellent refrigerator, inasmuch as it held several tons of ice all the year round, possibly due to its being entirely screened from the sun’s rays, and the fact that a cold draft of air whirled through it constantly.
These were the good old days when rich clubs and improvement companies had not penetrated the wilderness; macadamed roads, luxurious camps, electric-lighted hotels, French chefs, automobiles, and golf courses did not exist. The big woods still held theirmysteries and their hardships; they held natives, too—big-hearted men like Ed Munsey, simple as children and full of dry humor. It was a vast paradise of things beautiful and real, and of constant adventure.
Already Joe looked like a different man; you would have scarcely recognized him as the smiling but rather peaked Joe, who had stepped off the stuffy sleeper. No fellow could have been more constantly in a better humor; the girth of his already broad shoulders seemed to have increased—at least Ed “’lowed” they had—and there was a healthy, solid ruddiness about him that made Ed’s heart glad. Moreover, though it was August, they had the upper pond, so far, to themselves. The four or five other modest open lean-to camps along its shore were still fireless and deserted, and though a small party of hunters in two boats a few days later passed through the ponds en route to the Boreas country, they did not stop.
The weather held fine. Sharp, cold nights, splendid crisp, sunny mornings, the pond boiling in mist, lazy noons and peaceful twilights, when Joe cast for trout up the silent, still water. The little camp was dry and in perfect order. Wasps crawled into the jam-pot whenever they could get a chance, or droned over the warm ashes of their fire, their only other visitors being a few friendly chipmunks and a family of cedar-birds.
Be it said in passing, that if we have been at pains to describe in detail the exact environment in whichMr. Joseph Grimsby found himself these days, carefree as a gypsy and as brown and healthy as a lumberjack, it is because this very spot marked, ten days later, the turning-point in his life. To receive a telegram in camp generally means bad news. We instantly think of an imperative order to return at once to civilization, or worse, the serious illness of those nearest to us—even death. The telegram addressed to Joe was brought into Keene Valley by the mail stage at noon, and handed to the postmaster in the small country store, who, having got hold of Bill Dubois’s boy, sent him off with it to the upper pond.
It must be said to his credit that Bill Dubois’s boy, whose name was Henry, and who was called Hi for short, made the trip up to camp at his best speed. That he only arrived after twilight was no fault of his. There was his father’s flat-bottomed scow hid in the bushes at the end of the lower pond, and it leaked badly; besides the pond, unlike its mate above, had roughened up under a sudden breeze, and he had to pull with all his long-legged, long-armed, red-eared strength to reach the carry, at the other end of which the boat he had counted on he found had been taken by the party going to the Boreas country. There was a vague and overgrown trail, however, skirting the shore, that he knew Joe and Ed were camped on, and having hallooed for some minutes in vain in the hope of their hearing him, he took to the trail, no easy going in the fast deepening dusk, stumbling over fallen logs. Finally he began to reach the head of the pond, andpresently came out upon the small clearing before the lean-to.
Not a human being was in sight, and though he hallooed and shouted again, no one answered him, save a loon about thirty rods from shore, whose shrill, diabolical laugh seemed to mock him. He searched around, found the lantern, lighted it, brightened up the smouldering fire, made himself some tea, discovered a square of raw pork “freshening” in the dew on a stump, cut off a slice with his jack-knife, slipped it between two hardtack biscuits and, having eaten it, washed it down with the rest of the tea. Then he flung himself on the bed of balsam and was soon snoring, the telegram stuck conspicuously in an axe-cut on the lean-to’s ridge-pole.
By this time Joe and Ed, who had fished far up the still water, were making their way back to camp. As their boat came out into the pond and clear of the Gull rock, Ed was the first to catch sight of their brightened fire.
“Wall, I swan!” he exclaimed. “I presume likely we got a visitor, Joe.”
“Looks like it, Ed.”
“Some pitiful cuss hez got lost, mebbe,” reasoned Ed, and sunk his oars deep, lifting the frail craft with every stroke as they made for the flickering fire.
“Halloo thar!” shouted Ed, but neither the loon’s laugh nor Ed’s halloo awakened Hi Dubois. He lay on his back, one freckled hand thrown across his open mouth. Ed shook him into consciousness as Joecaught sight of the telegram. He tore it open anxiously. He could scarcely believe the news. His breath came quick, and his eyes gleamed as he read it again under the lantern.
Sue and the Jacksons arrive Wednesday eighteenth. Have camp and guides ready Upper Ausable.Enoch Crane.
Sue and the Jacksons arrive Wednesday eighteenth. Have camp and guides ready Upper Ausable.
Enoch Crane.
That night Joe scarcely slept a wink. He was too happy to sleep. Sleep! And you ask a young man to sleep under the stimulant of as much sheer, unexpected happiness as that telegram contained? He got up a dozen times and paced around the fire. Joy had made him too nervous to lie down. Finally he abandoned the fire and, slipping on his moccasins, went down to the edge of the pond, where he sat on a log, his eyes wide open, dreaming. The first vestige of dawn, that peculiar gray light which is neither night nor day, and which first favors the open places, crept over the pond, awakening the loon, who laughed at him and instantly dived. Joe still sat there—trying to realize it all—to reason out how it had happened. He had thought the old pond enough of a paradise until now. It was nothing compared with what it would be.
Sue was coming!
He had never met the Jacksons, though Sue had casually mentioned them. Were they old or young? How many Jacksons were there? The whole thingseemed incredible. Why had Enoch Crane sent the telegram? Only Atwater knew where he was.
These thoughts and conjectures passed in a flood through his mind. A kingfisher, making his earliest morning round of the shore, chattered by him. He heard Ed yawn, and knew he was awake. Ed was talking now to the Dubois boy. Presently he heard the sound of his axe, lopping down some fresh firewood. It brought him to his feet and out of his revery, waking him up to his responsibility and the practical side of the situation. Joe knew there was no camp among the four or five lean-tos on the pond comfortable enough for women. They were like Ed’s, primitive shelters, roofed with bark and sadly out of repair. A good weather-tight, open lean-to must be built with a separate one as dressing-room for the ladies. All this he discussed eagerly with Ed after breakfast. They rowed Hi Dubois down to the carry, and Joe having rewarded that faithful messenger, they returned to camp.
Here Joe’s pent-up enthusiasm broke loose.
“By the gods!” he cried. “We’ll build a dandy, Ed!” in which he was seconded by the trapper, whose blue eyes already twinkled over the scheme. A week still remained before the Jacksons’ arrival, and they went to work with a will, clearing a space beside the old lean-to, Ed chopping and Joe hauling.
By the next night the three log sides of the new camp were notched and in place, and before another forty-eight hours the roof was on. The next morning,a few rods behind it, they started a smaller one. This was to serve as a dressing-tent for the ladies, for in those days, friends, chaperons, boys and girls, sweethearts, cousins, guides, and aunts, all shared the same roof and the same open fire at their feet. Ah! the good old days—they’re gone now.
The millionaire attended to that.
Before noon of the seventeenth the new camp was ready, and “ez neat as a piny,” as Ed expressed it, its double roof of bark water-tight, its open front facing the pond, and its bed of balsams deep and long enough to comfortably sleep ten if need be.
That afternoon, leaving Ed in camp, Joe started alone down to the valley to meet them on the morrow. Despite all his joyful expectancy, he had his keen moments of doubt and fear. What were the Jacksons like? he wondered. Somehow he could not help fearing they would bring with Sue some impossible girl—some selfish, fastidious niece, perhaps. He was ready for anything, however, as long as they brought Sue.
He spent that night at the old hotel, and most of the next morning between the middle of the road and the porch of the store. The faintest sound of wheels brought him out to the highway.
Suddenly he caught sight of a distant buckboard. It drew nearer. There was no mistaking it. Joe’s heart beat like a trip-hammer. There they were! Bill Dubois’s boy was driving; next to him sat a shortgray-haired, middle-aged man in a slouch-hat, shading a genial, round countenance; behind them a lady wearing a green veil, and beside her—Sue.
Joe was waving frantically. Jackson waved both arms wildly in the air, Sue waved her pocket-handkerchief, and Mrs. Jackson, untying her green veil, waved that.
They had arrived, and there was no niece—only their baggage, roped on behind.
“Well, here we are!” exclaimed Mr. Richard Jackson, as he jumped from the front seat and gripped Joe’s hand. There was a smile playing all over his round, genial face, and a twinkle in his eyes. “We got here, you see, safe and sound. Whew! What air!”
Joe felt they were friends already.
“Mr. Grimsby,” Sue ventured, turning to Alice Jackson, by way of presenting him.
“I’m going to call you Joe,” she said frankly, stretching out her gloved hand to him across Sue’s knees.
The moment he had looked into her brown eyes and heard her speak, he knew she was “a dear.” It was evident she was some ten years younger than her husband, a slim, energetic little woman, with a smile that was merry and sincere. He noticed, too, that her dark hair was just turning gray. She was charming—that charm that comes from frankness, intelligence, and refinement.
“I’m going to call you Joe, too,” declared her husband, gripping Joe heartily by both shoulders, “and don’t you forget that my name’s Dick.”
No one would have taken this jolly man of forty-five for the auditor of one of the largest systems of railroads in the country, but he was. He, too, needed a well-earned rest.
Ah, yes—there was another one standing now by the empty buckboard who called him “Joe”—but her small hand lingered in his the longest.
That very night, with big Jim Turner as extra guide, they reached the Upper Ausable and camp.
It did not take Ed, Joe, or Jim Turner long to find out that the Jacksons were used to the woods. They had a camp of their own in northern Canada, where they had fished and hunted for years, but it was too far away for this trip. As for Sue, she was gloriously happy. She went into ecstasies over everything—the beauty of the ponds, the water, the silence, the snug camp, the table of rough boards, and the crackling fire.
Never had she seemed so dear to Joe, more attractive than ever, in her sensible short skirt of greenish-brown homespun, her trim camping boots, and a very becoming little felt hat, which Joe lost no time in making gay with three scarlet ibis and a silver doctor from his fly-book.
That night at supper came another surprise; under Joe’s tin plate lay a letter, which Sue had slipped there under strict orders from Enoch.
“He will understand, my dear, when he reads it,” he had said to her, and, furthermore, that she should hide it under his plate their first night in camp. Even the Jacksons did not know of its existence.
“Hello!” cried Joe, as he seated himself and discovered it. “Mail, eh! Why, there isn’t any stamp on it. Who of you three dear people brought this?”
The Jacksons’ innocence was evident at a glance.
Joe looked at Sue and smiled.
“You?” he asked. “Come, confess.” But her eyes already confessed it.
“It’s from Mr. Crane. Hadn’t you better read it? He said it was important.”
He tore open the envelope and scanned the following. Then for an instant his eyes opened wide and he half rose. It ran as follows:
My Dear Fellow:I have the honor to inform you that, at our last meeting of the Lawyers’ Consolidated Trust Company, the firm of Atwater and Grimsby have been awarded the plans for our new building. My hearty congratulations. As ever,Your old friend,Enoch Crane.
My Dear Fellow:
I have the honor to inform you that, at our last meeting of the Lawyers’ Consolidated Trust Company, the firm of Atwater and Grimsby have been awarded the plans for our new building. My hearty congratulations. As ever,
Your old friend,Enoch Crane.
Two weeks passed—two whole weeks of memorable days. No jollier party had ever come to the pond.
Then came their last evening, when that mysterious magnetic spell of the dark old still water drew their green boat far up its silent stretches, Joe at the paddle and Sue lying wrapped in a camp blanket in the bow. There were long moments when neither spoke to-night—their last on the old stream together. Sue lay motionless, gazing up at the great star-strewnheavens above her, framed by the dark spruces. Despite their millions of stars, it was so dark under the trees that Joe in the stern could scarcely make out her silhouette. Now and then her ears caught the drip-drip of his paddle. The silence was intense. It seemed to Sue almost a sacrilege to break it by words.
What could she say!
To-morrow meant good-by to their paradise.
Two weeks ago they were rich in days—now they counted the hours.
She lay there trying to be brave, to reason, to be grateful for all those days of comradeship. It had been her first experience in the woods. She felt as if she dreaded ever seeing the city again, the dingy old house, the hot, stifling streets, and the lessons. The green boat moved noiselessly around another bend. Sue closed her eyes.
Joe felt strangely silent, too. Something gripped at his heart, but he kept on bravely at his paddle. Finally, with a feeling of desperation, he drove the boat straight into the overhanging alders.
“Sue!”
She heard him call softly to her and opened her eyes.
“Yes, Joe.”
“Hold fast to that branch, please—quick! That’s it—hold tight——”
She did as he bid her, freeing herself quickly from the blanket, gripping the branch with both hands, for the current ran strong there.
Joe drove his paddle into the swift shallow water,burying it deep in the sandy bottom. He lashed his paddle with his belt-strap to an oar-pin, stepped forward, leaned over Sue, made the bow chain fast to a half-sunken snag, and crept down beside her.
“Sue, are you cold?”
“No,” she murmured; “that is, not—very.”
He wrapped her again snugly in the blanket and sought her small hand beneath it.
It was like ice.
“Sue, you are frozen.”
“I’m all right,” she declared faintly.
“Sue!”
He felt her hand tighten in his own. He bent over her, his heart beating.
“Sue—it’s our last night.”
Her lips quivered. The small hand in his own trembled, but she did not speak.
“Sue, do you realize it all—that to-night you and I must say good-by to this dear old stream; that it may be years before we shall ever see it again—live it again—perhaps never?”
“I know,” she breathed, scarce audibly.
“You can never know what it meant to me to get that telegram. To know that you were coming. That we should be together—day in and day out. Sue, I’ve tried to be a good playmate—just as you wished—just as I promised I would.”
“Oh, Joe! It’s been so wonderful; just like some wonderful dream—every day of it, every hour of it,” she exclaimed softly.
Impulsively he slipped his strong arm beneath her fair little head, and drew it gently to his shoulder.
“Oh, Joe—don’t—don’t make it any harder!” she pleaded. “I—I can’t bear it.”
She made an effort to strain away from him, her face, though close to his own, only barely visible in the dark.
“Sue!” he cried tensely—with a sudden tightening of his arm, “can’t you see how hard it is for me? That I love you—that I love you with my whole heart and soul?”
He felt her tremble.
“Can’t you believe me? Can’t you feel what I say is true?”
She felt weak—only half conscious now of his voice.
He was past all reasoning.
“I love you,” he whispered against her smooth young cheek, wet now with the tears she could no longer keep back.
“Joe, you—you must not—oh, Joe, please——”
“I love you,” he repeated, his lips wet with her tears. “I didn’t think it square to say so before; but now things are so different—with the big building ours. Can’t you see——”
She drew a quick, tense breath and a stifled sob escaped her quivering mouth—that warm, yielding little mouth his lips sought now and gained.
She had no longer the strength to resist.
“Sue,” he pleaded, against her lips; “Sue—will—will you be my wife?”
“Tell me you love me,” he insisted.“Tell me you love me,” he insisted.
“Tell me you love me,” he insisted.
“Tell me you love me,” he insisted.
For an instant he released her.
“Will you?” he pleaded.
“Yes,” she whispered in his ear.
“Yes,” she repeated tensely, and her young arm went strong about his neck.
“Yes, I will be your wife,” she breathed.
“Tell me you love me,” he insisted.
“Ah, Joe—how can you ask!” came her quick reply between two kisses, seeking his lips of her own free will.
Frail as she was, he felt her strength, felt her young heart beating against his own, and for a long while he held her close in his arms.
Beneath the green boat the dark stream flowed on, purling, eddying, chuckling to itself. It is safe to say that never had so strange a thing happened in that hushed and lonely spot, to which the strong spruces can to this day bear witness, as well as an old owl (be he still alive), who saw it all from the hemlock with his big yellow eyes.