“'For Nature ever faithful isTo such as trust her faithfulness.When the forest shall mislead me,When the night and morning lie,When sea and land refuse to feed me,Will be time enough to die.Then will yet my Mother yieldA pillow in her greenest field;Nor the June flowers scorn to coverThe clay of their departed lover.'”
“That is beautiful,” Mrs. Bogardus murmured hastily. “Even I can understand that.” Moya thanked her with a glance.
“And what did the infallible John say?” Christine inquired.
“John looked at me and smiled, as at a babbling infant”—
“Good for John!”
“Christine, be still!”
“John looked at me and smiled,” Moya repeated steadily. Nothing could have stopped her now. She only hoped for some further scattering mention of that “certain member” who had set them all at odds and spoiled what should have been an hour's pure happiness. “'You'll get the pillow all right,' he said. 'It might not be a green one, nor I wouldn't bank much on the flowers; but you'll be tired enough to sleep without rocking about the time you trust to Nature's tuckin' you in and puttin' victuals in your mouth. I neverseenature till I came out here. I'd seen pretty woods and views, that a young lady could take down with her paints; but how are you going to paint that?'—he waved his tallow-stick towards the night outside. 'Ears can't reach the bottom of that stillness. That's creation before God ever thought of man. Long as I've been in the woods, I never get over the feeling that there'ssomething behind me. If you go towards the trees, they come to meet you; if you go backwards, they go back; but you can't sit down and sit still without they'll come a-creeping up and creeping up, and crowding in'—
“He stirred his 'dope' awhile, and then he struck another note. 'I've wintered alone in these mountains,' he said, 'and I've seen snowslides pounce out of a clear sky—a puff and a flash and a roar; an' trees four foot across snappin' like kindlin' wood—not because it hit 'em; only the breath of it struck them; and maybe a man lying dead somewheres under his cabin timbers. That's no mother's love-tap. Pillows and flowers ain't in it. But it's good poetry,' he added condescendingly.
“I have not quoted him right, not being much of a snap-shot at dialect; and his is an undefined, unclassifiable mixture. Eastern farm-hand and Western ranchman, prospector, who knows what? His real language is in his eye and his rare, pure smile. And just as his countenance expresses his thoughts without circumlocution or attempt at effect, so his body informs his clothing. Wind and rain have moulded his hat to his head, his shoes grip the ground like paws; his buckskins have a surface like a cast after Rodin. They are repousséed by the hard bones and sinews underneath. I can think of nothing but the clothing of Millet's peasants to compare with this exterior of John's. He is himself a peasant of the woods. He has not the predatory instincts. If he could have his way, not a shot would be fired by any of us for the mere idle sport of killing. Shooting these innocent, fearless creatures, who have not learned that we are here for their destruction, is too like murder and treachery combined. Hunger should be our only excuse. My forbearance, or weakness, is a sort of unspoken bond between us. But I am a peasant, too, you know. I do not come of the lordly, arms-bearing blood. I shoot at a live mark always under protest; and when I fairly catch the look in the great eye of a dying elk or black-tail, it knocks me out for that day's hunt.”
“Paul is perfectly happy!” Christine broke in. “He has got one of his beloved People to grovel to. They can sleep in the same tent and eat from the same plate, if you like. Why, it's better than the East Side! He'll be blood brother to Packer John before they leave the woods.”
Moya blushed with anger.
“You have said enough on that subject, Christine.” Mrs. Bogardus bent her dark, keen gaze upon her daughter's face. “Come”—she rose. “Come with me!”
Christine sat still. “Come!” her mother repeated sternly. “Moya,”—in a different voice,—“your letter was lovely. Shall you read it to your father?”
“Hardly,” said Moya, flushing. “Father does not care for descriptions, and the woods are an old story to him.”
Mrs. Bogardus placed her hands on the girl's shoulders and gave her one of her infrequent, ceremonious kisses, which, like her finest smile, she kept for occasions too nice for words.
Christine followed her mother to their room, and the two faced each other a moment in pale silence.
Mrs. Bogardus spoke first. “What does this mean?”—her breath came short, perhaps from climbing the stairs. She was a large woman.
“What does what mean? I don't understand you, mother.”
“Ah, child, don't repulse me! Twice you and Moya have nearly quarreled about those men. Why were you so rude to her? Why did you behave so about her letter?”
“Paul is so intolerant! And the airs he puts on! If he is my own brother I must say he's an awful prig about other men.”
“We are not discussing Paul. That is not the question now. Have you anything to tell me, Christine?”
“To tell you?—about what, mother?” Christine spoke lower.
“You know what I mean. Which of them is it? Is it Banks?—don't say it is Banks!”
“Mother, how can I say anything when you begin like that?”
“Have you any idea what sort of a man Banks Bowen really is? His father supports him entirely—six years now, ever since he left the law school. He does nothing, never will do anything. He has no will or purpose in life, except about trifles like this hunting-trip. As far as I can see he is without common sense.”
Christine stood by the dressing-table pleating the cover-frilling with her small fingers that were loaded with rings. She pinched the folds hard and let them go. “Why did no one ever say these things before?”
“We don't say things about the sons of our friends, unless we are compelled to. They were implied in every way possible. When have I asked Banks Bowen to the house except when everybody was asked! I would never in the world have come out in Mr. Borland's car if I had known the Bowens were to be of the party.”
“That made no difference,” said Christine loftily.
“It was all settled before then, was it?”
“Have I said it was settled, mother? He asked me if I could ever care for him; and I said that I did—a little. Why shouldn't I? He does what I like a man to do. I don't enjoy people who have wills and purposes. It may be very horrid of me, but I wouldn't be in Moya's place for worlds.”
“You poor child! You poor, unhappy child!”
“Why am I unhappy? Has Paul added so much to our income since he left college?”
“Paul does not make money; neither does he selfishly waste it. He has a conscience in his use of what he has.”
“I don't see what conscience has to do with it. When it is gone it's gone.”
“You will learn what conscience has to do with a man's spending if ever you try to make both ends meet with Banks Bowen. I suppose he will go through the form of speaking to me?”
“Mother dear! He has only just spoken to me. How fast you go!”
“Not fast enough to keep up with my children, it seems. Was it you, Christine, who asked them to come here?”
Christine was silent.
“Where did you learn such ways?—such want of frankness, of delicacy, of the commonest consideration for others? To be looking out for your own little schemes at a time like this!” Mrs. Bogardus saw now what must have been Paul's reason for doing what, with all her forced explanations of the hunting-trip, she had never until now understood. He had taken the alarm before she had, and done what he could to postpone this family catastrophe.
Christine retreated to a deep-cushioned chair, and threw herself into it, her slender hands, palm upwards, extended upon its arms. Total surrender under pressure of cruel odds was the expression of her pointed eyebrows and drooping mouth. She looked exasperatingly pretty and irresponsibly fragile. Her blue-veined eyelids quivered, her breath came in distinct pants.
“Perhaps you will not be troubled with my 'ways' for very many years, mother. If you could feel my heart now! It jumps like something trying to get out. It will get out some day. Have patience!”
“That is a poor way to retaliate upon your mother, Christine. Your health is too serious a matter to trifle with. If you choose to make it a shield against everything I say that doesn't please you, you can cut yourself off from me entirely. I cannot beat down such a defense as that. Anger me you never can, but you can make me helpless to help you.”
“I dare say it's better that I should never marry at all,” said Christine, her eyes closed in resignation. “You never would like anybody I like.”
“I shall say no more. You are a woman. I have protected you as far as I was able on account of your weakness. I cannot protect you from the weakness itself.”
Mrs. Bogardus rose. She did not offer to comfort her child with caresses, but in her eyes as she looked at her there was a profound, inalienable, sorrowing tenderness, a depth of understanding beyond words.
“I know so well,” the dark eyes seemed to say, “how you came to be the poor thing that you are!”
The constraint which she felt towards her mother threw Chrissy back upon Moya. Being a lesser power, she was always seeking alliances. Moya had put aside their foolish tiff as unworthy of another thought; she was embarrassed when at bedtime Christine came humbly to her door, and putting her arms around her neck implored her not to be cross with her “poor pussy.” It was always the other person who was “cross” with Christine.
“Nobody is cross with anybody, so far as I know,” said Moya briskly. A certain sort of sentimentality always made her feel like whistling or singing or asserting the commonplace side of life in some way.
Mrs. Bogardus received many letters, chiefly on business, and these she answered with manlike brevity, in a strong, provincial hand. They took up much of her time, and mercifully, for it was now the last week in November and the young men did not return.
The range cattle had been driven down into the valleys, deer-tracks multiplied by lonely mountain fords; War Eagle and his brethren of the Owyhees were taking council under their winter blankets. The nights were still, the mornings rimy with hoarfrost. Fogs arose from the river and cut off the bases of the mountains, converting the valley before sunrise into the likeness of a polar sea.
“You have let your fire go out,” said the colonel briskly. He had invaded the sitting-room at an unaccustomed hour, finding the lady at her letters as usual. She turned and held her pen poised above her paper as she looked at him.
“You did not come to see about the fire?” she said.
“No; I have had letters from the north. Would you step into my study a moment?”
Moya was in her father's room when they entered. She had been weeping, but at sight of Paul's mother she rose and stood picking at the handkerchief she held, without raising her eyes.
“Don't be alarmed at Moya's face,” said the colonel stoutly. “Paul was all right at last accounts. We will have a merry Christmas yet.”
“This is not from Paul!” Mrs. Bogardus fixed her eyes upon a letter which she held at arm's length, feeling for her glasses. “It's not for me—'MissBogardus.'”
“Ah, well. I saw it was postmarked Lemhi—Fort Lemhi, you know. Sit down, madam. Suppose I give you Mr. Winslow's report first—Lieutenant Winslow. You heard of his going to Lemhi?”
“She doesn't know,” whispered Moya.
“True. Well, two weeks ago I gave Mr. Winslow a hunter's leave, as we call it in the army, to beat up the trail of those boys. I thought it was time we heard from them, but it wasn't worth while to raise a hue and cry. He started out with a few picked men from Lemhi, the Indian Reservation, you know. I couldn't have sent a better man; the thing hasn't got into the local papers even. My object, of course, has been to save unnecessary alarm. Mr. Winslow has just got back to Challis. He rounded up the Bowen youths and the cook and the helper, in bad shape, all of them, but able to tell a story. The details we shall get later, but I have Mr. Winslow's report to me. It is short and probably correct.”
“Was Paul not with them?” his mother questioned in a hard, dry voice. “Where is he then?”
“He is in camp, madam, in charge of the wounded.”
“Dear father! if you would speak plain!” Moya whispered nervously.
“Certainly. There is nothing whatever to hide. We know now that on their last day's hunt they met with an accident which resulted in a division of the party. A fall of snow had covered the ice on the trails, and the guide's horse fell and rolled on him—nature of his injuries not described. This happened a day's journey from their camp at Ten-Mile cabin, and the retreat with the wounded man was slow and of course difficult over such a trail. They put together a sort of horse-litter made of pine poles and carried him on that, slung between two mules tandem. A beastly business, winding and twisting over fallen timber, hugging the cañon wall, near a thousand feet down—'Impassable' the trail is marked, on the government military maps. This first day's march was so discouraging that at Ten Mile they called a council, and the packer spoke up like a man. He disposed of his own case in this way. If he were to live, they could send back help to fetch him out. If not, no help would be needed. The snows were upon them; there was danger in every hour's delay. It was insane to sacrifice four sound men for one, badly hurt, with not many hours perhaps to suffer.”
A murmur from the mother announced her appreciation of the packer's argument.
“It was no more than a man should do; but as to taking him at his word, why, that's another question.” The colonel paused and gustily cleared his throat. “They were up against it right then and there, and the party split upon it. Three of them went on,—for help, as they put it,—and Paul stayed behind with the wounded man.”
“Paul stayed—alone?” Mrs. Bogardus uttered with hoarse emphasis. “Was not that a very strange way to divide? Among them all, I should think they might have brought the man out with them.”
“Their story is that his injuries were such that he could not have borne the pain of the journey. Rather an unusual case,” the colonel added dryly. “In my experience, a wounded man will stand anything sooner than be left on the field.”
“I cannot understand it,” Mrs. Bogardus repeated, in a voice of indignant pain. “Such a strange division! One man left alone—to nurse, and hunt, and cook, and keep up fires! Suppose the guide should die!”
“Paul was notleft, you know,” the colonel said emphatically. “Hestayed. And I should be thankful in your place, madam, that my son was the man who made that choice. But setting conduct aside, for we are not prepared to judge, it is merely a matter of time our getting in there, now that we know where he is.”
“How much time?” Mrs. Bogardus opened her ashen lips to say.
The colonel's face fell. “Mr. Winslow reports heavy snows for the past week,—soft, clogging snow,—too deep to wade through and too soft to bear. A little later, when the cold has formed a crust, our men can get in on snowshoes. There is nothing for it but patience, Mrs. Bogardus, and faith in the boy's endurance. The pluck that made him stay behind will help him to hold out.”
Moya gave a hurt sob; the colonel stepped to the desk and stood there a moment turning over his papers. Behind his back the mother sent a glance to Moya expressive of despair.
“Do you know what happened to his father? Did he ever tell you?” she whispered.
Moya assented; she could not speak.
“Twice, twice in a lifetime!” said the older woman.
With a gesture, Moya protested against this wild prophecy; but as Paul's mother left the room she rushed upon her father, crying: “Tellmethe truth! What do you think of it? Did you ever hear of such a dastardly thing?”
“It was a rout,” said the colonel coolly. “They were in full flight before the enemy.”
“What enemy? They deserted a wounded comrade, and a servant at that!”
“The enemy was panic,—panic, my dear. In these woods I've seen strong men go half beside themselves with fear of something—the Lord knows what! Then, add the winter and what they had seen and heard of that. Anyway, you can afford to be easy on the other boys. The honors of the day are with Paul—and the old packer, though it's all in the day's work to him.”
“And you are satisfied with Paul, father?”
“He didn't desert his command to save his own skin.” The colonel smiled grimly.
“When the men of the Fourth discovered those other fellows they had literally sat down in the snow to die. Not a man of them knew how to pack a mule. Their meat pack slipped, going along one of those high trails, and scared the mule, and in trying to kick himself free the beast fell off the trail—mule and meat both gone. They got tired of carrying their stuff and made a raft to float it down the river, and lost that! Paul has been much better off in camp than he would have been with them. So cheer up, my girl, and think how you'd like to have your bridegroom out on an Indian campaign!”
“Ah, but that would be orders! It's the uselessness that hurts. There was nothing to do or to gain. He didn't want to go. Oh, daddy dear, I made fun of his shooting,—I did! I laughed at his way with firearms. Wretched fool and snob that I was! As if I cared! I thought of what other people would say. You remember,—he went shooting up the gulch with Mr. Lane, and when he hit but didn't kill he wouldn't—couldn't put the birds out of pain. Jephson had to do it for him, and he told it in barracks and the men laughed.”
“How did you know that! And what does it all amount to! Blame yourself all you like, dear, if it does you any good, but don't make him out a fool! There's not much that comes to us straight in this world—not even orders, you'll find. But we have to take it straight and leave the muddles and the blunders as they are. That's the brave man's courage and the brave woman's. Orders are mixed, but duty is clear. And the boy out there in the woods has found his duty and done it like a man. That should be enough for any soldier's daughter.”
An hour passed in suspense. Moya was disappointed in her expectation of sharing in whatever the letter from Fort Lemhi might contain. Christine was in bed with a headache, her mother dully gave out, with no apparent expectation that any one would accept this excuse for the girl's complete withdrawal. The letter, she told Moya, was from Banks Bowen. “There was nothing in it of consequence—to us,” she added, and Moya took the words to mean “you and me” to the unhappy exclusion of Christine.
Mrs. Bogardus's face had settled into lines of anxiety printed years before, as the creases in an old garment, smoothed and laid away, will reappear with fresh wear. Her plan was to go back to New York with Christine, who was plainly unfit to bear a long siege of suspense. There she could leave the girl with friends and learn what particulars could be gathered from the Bowens, who would have arrived. She would then return alone and wait for news at the garrison. That night, with Moya's help, she completed her packing, and on the following day the wedding party broke up.
Fine, dry snowflakes were drifting past the upper square of a window set in a wall of logs. The lower half was obscured by a white bulk that shouldered up against the sash in the likeness of a muffled figure stooping to peer in.
Lying in his bunk against the wall, the packer watched this sentinel snowdrift grow and become human and bold and familiar. His deep-lined visage was reduced to its bony structure. The hand was a claw with which he plucked at the ancient fever-crust shredding from his lips: an occupation at once so absorbing and so exhausting that often the hand would drop and the blankets rise upon the arch of the chest in a sigh of retarded respiration. The sigh would be followed by a cough, controlled, as in dread of the shock to a sore and shattered frame. The snow came faster and faster until the dim, wintry pane was a blur. Millions of atoms crossed the watcher's weary vision, whirling, wavering, driven with an aimless persistence, unable to pause or to stop. And the blind white snowdrift climbed, fed, like human circumstance, from disconnected atoms impelled by a common law.
There were sounds in the cabin: wet wood sweating on hot coals; a step that went to and fro. Outside, a snow-weighted bough let go its load and sprang up, scraping against the logs. Some heavy soft thing slid off the roof and dropped with achug. Then the door, that hung awry like a drooping eyelid, gave a disreputable wink, and the whole front gable of the cabin loomed a giant countenance with a silly forehead and an evil leer. Now it seemed that a hand was hurling snow against the door, as a sower scatters grain,—snow that lay like beach sand on the floor, or melted into a crawling pool—red in the firelight, red as blood!
These and other phantasms had now for an unmeasured time been tenants of the packer's brain, sharing and often overpowering the reality of the human step that went to and fro. To-day the shapes and relations of things were more natural, and the step aroused a querulous curiosity.
“Who's there?” the sick man imagined himself to have said. A croaking sound in his throat, which was all he could do by way of speech, brought the step to his bedside. A young face, lightly bearded, and gaunt almost as his own, bent over him. Large, black eyes rested on his; a hand with womanish nails placed its fingers on his wrist.
“You are better to-day. Your pulse is down. I wouldn't try to talk.”
“Who's that—outside?”
“There is no one outside,” Paul answered, following the direction of his patient's eyes. “That? That is only a snowdrift. It grows faster than I can shovel it away.”
The packer had forgotten his own question. He dozed off, and presently roused again as suddenly as he had slept. His utterance was clearer, but not his meaning.
“What—you want to fetch me back for?”
“Back?” Paul repeated.
“I was most gone, wa'n't I?”
“Back to life, you mean? You came back of yourself. I hadn't much to do with it.”
“What's been the matter—gen'ly speaking?”
“You were hurt, don't you remember? Something like wound fever set in. The altitude is bad for fevers. You have had a pretty close call.”
“Been here all the time?”
“Have I been here?—yes.”
“'Lone?”
“With you. How is your chest? Does it hurt you still when you breathe?”
The sick man filled his lungs experimentally. “Something busted inside, I guess,” he panted. “'Tain't no killing matter, though.”
Nourishment, in a tin cup, warm from the fire was offered him, refused with a gesture, and firmly urged upon him. This necessitated another rest. It was long before he spoke again—out of some remoter train of thought apparently.
“Family all in New York?”
“My family? They were at Bisuka when I left them.”
“You don'tliveWest!”
“No. I was born in the West, though. Idaho is my native state.”
The patient fell to whimpering suddenly like a hurt child. He drew up the blanket to cover his face. Paul, interpreting this as a signal for more nourishment, brought the sad decoction,—rinds of dried beef cooked with rice in snow water.
“Guess that'll do, thank ye. My tongue feels like an old buckskin glove.”
“When I was a little fellow,” said the nurse, beguiling the patient while he tucked the spoonfuls down, “I was like you: I wouldn't take what the doctor ordered, and they used to pretend I must take it for the others of the family,—a kind of vicarious milk diet, or gruel, or whatever it was. 'Here's a spoonful for mother, poor mother,' they would say; and of course it couldn't be refused when mother needed it so much. 'And now one for Chrissy'”—
“Who?”
“My sister, Christine. And then I'd take one for 'uncle' and one for each of the servants; and the cupful would go down to the health of the household, and I the dupe of my sympathies! Now you are taking this for me, because it's nicer to be shut up here with a live man than a dead one; and we haven't the conveniences for a first-class funeral.”
“You never took a spoonful for 'father,'—eh?”
Paul answered the question with gravity. “No. We never used that name in common.”
“Dead was he?”
“I will tell you some time. Better try to sleep now.”
Paul returned the saucepan to the fire, after piecing out its contents with water, and retired out of his patient's sight.
Again came a murmur, chiefly unintelligible, from the bunk.
“Did you ask for anything?”
The sick man heaved a worried sigh. “See what a mis'rable presumptuous piece of work!” he muttered, addressing the logs overhead. “But that Clauson—he wa'n't no more fit to guide ye than to go to heaven! Couldn't 'a' done much worse than this, though!”
“He has done worse!” Paul came over to the bunk-side to reason on this matter. “They started back from here, four strong men with all the animals and all the food they needed for a six weeks' trip. We came in in one. If they got through at all, where is the help they were to send us?”
“Help!” The packer roused. “They helped themselves, and pretty frequent. I said to them more than once—they didn't like it any too well: 'We can't drink up here like they do down to the coast. The air is too light. What a man would take with his dinner down there would fit him out with a first-class jag up here, 'leven thousand above the sea!'”
“It's a waste of breath to talk about them—breath burns up food and we haven't much to spare. We rushed into this trouble and we dragged you in after us. We have hurt you a good deal more than you have us.”
The sick man groaned. He flung one hand back against the logs, dislodging ancient dust that fell upon his corpse-like forehead. It was carefully wiped away. Helpless tears stole down the rigid face.
“John,” said Paul with animation, “your general appearance just now reminds me of those worked-out placer claims we passed in Ruby Gulch, the first day out. The fever and my cooking have ground-sluiced you to the bone.”
John smiled faintly. “Don't look very fat yourself. Where'd you git all that baird on your face?”
“We have been here some time, you know—or you don't know; you have been living in places far away from here. I used to envy you sometimes. And other times I didn't.”
“You mean I was off my head?”
“At times. But more of the time you were dreaming and talking in your dreams; seeing things out loud by the flash-light of fever.”
“Talking, was I? Guess there wa'n't much sense in any of it?” The hazard was a question.
“A kind of sense,—out of focus, distorted. Some of it was opium. Didn't you coax a little of his favorite medicine out of the cook?”
Packer John apologized sheepishly, “I cal'lated I was going to be left. You put it up on me—making out you were off with the rest.Thatwas all right. But I wa'n't going to suffer it out; why should I? A gunshot would have cured me quicker, perhaps. Then some critter might 'a' found me and called it murder. A word like that set going can hang a man. No, I just took a little to deaden the pain.”
“The whole discussion was rather nasty, right before the man we were talking about,” said Paul. “I wanted to get them off and out of hearing. Then we had a few words.”
At intervals during that day and the next, Paul's patient expended his strength in questions, apparently trivial. His eyes, whenever they were open, followed his nurse with a shrinking intelligence. Paul was on his guard.
“What day of the month do you make it out to be?”
“The second of December.”
“December!” The packer lay still considering. “Game all gone down?”
“I am not much of a pot-hunter,” said Paul. “There may be game, but I can't seem to get it. The snow is pretty deep.”
“Wouldn't bear a man on snowshoes?”
“He would go out of sight.”
“Snowing a little every day?”
“Right along, quietly, for I don't know how many days! I think the sky is packed with it a mile deep.”
“How much grub have we got?”
Paul gave a flattering estimate of their resources. The patient was not deceived.
“Where's it all gone to? You ain't eat anything.”
“I've eaten a good deal more than you have.”
“I was livin' on fever.”
“You can't live on fever any longer. The fever has left you, and you'll go with it if you don't obey your doctor.”
“But where's all the stuffgoneto?”
“There were four of them, and they allowed for some delay in getting out,” Paul explained, with a sickly smile.
“Well, they was hogs! I knew how they'd pan out! That was why”—He wearied of speech and left the point unfinished.
On the evening following, when the two could no longer see each other's faces in the dusk, Paul spoke, controlling his voice:—
“I need not ask you, John, what you think of our chances?”
“I guess they ain't much worth thinking about.” The fire hissed and crackled; the soft subsidence of the snow could be heard outside.
“We are 'free among the dead,' how does it go? 'Like unto them that are wounded and lie in the grave.' What we say to each other here will stop here with our breath. Let us put our memories in order for the last reckoning. I think, John, you must, at some time in your life, have known my father, Adam Bogardus? He was lost on the Snake River plains, twenty-one years ago this autumn.”
Receiving no answer, the pale young inquisitor went on, choosing his words with intense deliberation as one feeling his way in the dark.
“Most of us believe in some form of communication that we can't explain, between those who are separated in body, in this world, but closely united in thought. Do I make myself clear?”
There was a sound of deep breathing from the bunk; it produced a similar conscious excitement in the speaker. He halted, recovered himself, and continued:—
“After my father's disappearance, my mother had a distinct presentiment—it haunted her for years—that something had happened to him at a place called One Man Station. Did you ever know the place?”
“I might have.” The words came huskily.
“Father had left her at this place, and to her knowledge he never came back. But she had this intimation—and suffered from it—that he did come back and was foully dealt with there—wronged in body or mind. The place had most evil associations for her; it was not strange she should have connected it with the great disaster of her life. As you lay talking to yourself in your fever, you took me back on that lost trail that ended, as we thought, in the grave. But we might have been mistaken. Is there anything it would not be safe for you and me to speak of now? Do you know any tie between men that should be closer than the tie between us? Any safer place where a man could lay off the secret burdens of his life and be himself for a little while—before the end answers all? I know you have a secret. I believe that a share of it belongs to me.”
“We are better off sometimes if we don't get all that belongs to us,” said John gratingly.
“It doesn't seem to be a matter of choice, does it? If you were not meant to tell me—what you have partly told me already—where is there any meaning in our being here at all? Let us have some excuse for this senseless accident. Do you believe much in accidents? How foolish”—Paul sighed—“for you and me to be afraid of each other! Two men who have parted with everything but the privilege of speaking the truth!”
The packer raised himself in his bunk slowly, like one in pain. He looked long at the listless figure crouching by the fire; then he sank back again with a low groan. “What was it you heared me say? Come!”
“I can't give you the exact words. The words were nothing. Haven't you watched the sparks blow up, at night, when the wind goes searching over the ashes of an old camp-fire? It was the fever made you talk, and your words were the sparks that showed where there had been fire once. Perhaps I had no right to track you by your own words when you lay helpless, but I couldn't always leave you. Now I'd like to have my share of that—whatever it was—that hurt you so, at One Man Station.”
“You ought to been a lawyer,” said the packer, releasing his breath. There was less strain in his voice. It broke with feeling. “You put up a mighty strong case for your way of looking at it. I don't say it's best. There, if you will have it! Sonny—my son! It—it's like startin' a snow-slide.”
The sick man broke down and sobbed childishly.
“Take it quietly! Oh, take it quietly!” Paul shivered. “I have known it a long time.”
Hours later they were still awake, the packer in his bunk, Paul in his blankets by the winking brands. The pines were moving, and in pauses of the wind they could hear the incessant soft crowding of the snow.
“When they find us here in the spring,” said the packer humbly, “it won't matter much which on us was 'Mister' and which was 'John.'”
“Are you thinking of that!” Paul answered with nervous irritation. “I thought you had lived in the woods long enough to have got rid of all that nonsense!”
“I guess there was some of it where you've been living.”
“We are done with all that now. Go to sleep,—Father.” He pronounced the word conscientiously to punish himself for dreading it. The darkness seemed to ring with it and give it back to him ironically. “Father!” muttered the pines outside, and the snow, listening, let fall the word in elfin whispers. Paul turned over desperately in his blankets. “Father!” he repeated out loud. “Doyoubelieve it? Does it do you any good?”
“I wouldn't distress myself, one way or t' other, if it don't come natural,” the packer spoke, out of his corner in the darkness. “Wait till you can feel to say it. The word ain't nothing.”
“But do you feel it? Is it any comfort to you at all?”
“I ain't in any hurry to feel it. We'll get there. Don't worry. And s'pose we don't! We're men. Man to man is good enough for me.”
Paul spent some wakeful hours after that, trying not to think of Moya, of his mother and Christine. They were of another world,—a world that dies hard at twenty-four. Towards morning he slept, but not without dreams.
He was in the pent-road at Stone Ridge. It was sunset and long shadows striped the lane. A man stood, back towards him, leaning both arms on the stone fence that bounds the lane to the eastward,—a plain farmer figure, gazing down across the misty fields as he might have stood a hundred times in that place at that hour. Paul could not see his face, but something told him who it must be. His heart stood still, for he saw his mother coming up the lane. She carried something in her hand covered with a napkin, and she smiled, walking carefully as if carrying a treat to a sick child. She passed the man at the fence, not appearing to have seen him.
“Won't you speak to him, mother? Won't you speak to”—He could not utter the name. She looked at him bewildered. “Speak? who shall I speak to?” The man at the fence had turned and he watched her, or so Paul imagined. He felt himself choking, faint, with the effort to speak that one word. Too late! The moment passed. The man whom he knew was his father, the solemn, quiet figure, moved away up the road unquestioned. He never looked back. Paul grew dizzy with the lines of shadow; they stretched on and on, they became the ties of a railroad—interminable. He awoke, very faint and tired, with a lost feeling and the sense upon him of some great catastrophe. The old man was sleeping deeply in his bunk, a ray of white sunlight falling on his yellow features. He looked like one who would never wake again. But as Paul gazed at him he smiled, and sighed heavily. His lips formed a name; and all the blood in Paul's body dyed his face crimson. The name was his mother's.
A few hours seemed days, after the great disclosure. Both men had recoiled from it and were feeling the strain of the new relation. Three times since their first meeting the elder had adjusted himself quietly to a change in the younger's manner to him. First there had been respectful curiosity in the presence of a new type, combined with the deference due a leader and an expert in strange fields. Then indignant partisanship, pity, and the slight condescension of the nurse. This had hurt the packer, but he took it as he accepted his physical downfall. The last change was hardest to bear; for now the time was short, and, as Paul himself had said, they were in the presence of the final unveiling.
So when Paul made artificial remarks to break the pauses, avoiding his father's eye and giving him neither name nor title, the latter became silent and lay staring at the logs and picking at his hands.
“If I was hunting up a father,” he said to himself aloud one day, “I'd try to find a better lookin' one. I wouldn't pa'm off on myself no such old warped stick as I be.” The remark seemed a tentative one.
“I had the choice, to take or leave you,” Paul responded. “You were an unconscious witness. Why should I have opened the subject at all?”
Both knew that this answer was an evasion. By forcing the tie they had merely marked the want of ease and confidence between them. As “Packer John” Paul could have enjoyed, nay, loved this man; as his father, the sum and finality of his filial dreams, the supplanter of that imaginary husband of his mother's youth, the thing was impossible. And the father knew it and did not resent it in the least, only pitied the boy for his needless struggle. He was curious about him, too. He wanted to understand him and the life he had come out of: his roundabout way of reaching the simplest conclusions; his courage in argument, and his personal shying away from the truth when found. More than all he longed for a little plain talk, the exile's hunger for news from home. It pleased him when Paul, rousing at this deliberate challenge, spoke up with animation, as if he had come to some conclusion in his own mind. It could not be expected he would express it simply. The packer had become used to his oddly elaborate way of putting things.
“If we had food enough and time, we might afford to waste them discussing each other's personal appearance.Ipropose we talk to some purpose.”
“Talking sure burns up the food.” The packer waited.
“I wish I knew what my father was doing with himself, all those years when his family were giving him the honors of the dead.”
“I warned ye about this pumping out old shafts. You can't tell what you'll find in the bottom. I suppose you know there are things in this world, Boy, a good deal worse than death?”
“Desertion is worse. It is not my father's death I want explained, it is his life, your life, in secret, these twenty years! Can you explain that?”
The packer doubled his bony fist and brought it down on the bunk-side. “Now you talk like a man! I been waiting to hear you say that. Yes, I can answer that question, if you ain't afeard of the answer!”
“I am keeping alive to hear it!” said Paul in a guarded voice.
“You might say you're keeping me alive to tell it. It's a good thing to git off of one's mind; but it's a poor thing to hand over to a son. All I've got to leave ye, though: the truth if you can stand it! Where do you want I should begin?”
“At the night when you came back to One Man Station.”
“How'd you know I come back?”
“You were back there in your fever, living over something that happened in that place. There was a wind blowing and the door wouldn't shut. And something had to be lifted,”—the old man's eyes, fixed upon his son, took a look of awful comprehensions,—“something heavy.”
“Yes; great Lord, it was heavy! And I been carrying it ever since!” His chest rose as if the weight of that load lay on it still, and his breath expired with a hoarse “haugh.” “I got out of the way because it wasmyload. I didn't want no help from them.” He paused and sat picking at his hands. “It's a dreadful ugly story. I'd most as soon live it over again as have to tell it in cold blood. I feel sometimes itcan't be!”
“You need not go back beyond that night. I know how my mother was left, and what sort of a man you were forced to leave her with. Was it—the keeper?”
“That's what it was. That was the hard knot in my thread. Nothing wouldn't go past that. Some, when they git things in a tangle, they just reach for the shears an' cut the thread. I wa'n't brought up that way. I was taught to leave the shears alone. So I went on stringin' one year after another. But they wouldn't join on to them that went before. There was the knot.”
“It was between you and him—and the law?” said Paul.
“You've got it! I was there alone with it,—witness an' judge an' jury; I worked up my own case. Manslaughter with extenuatin' circumstances, I made it—though he was more beast than man. I give myself the outside penalty,—imprisonment for life. And I been working out my sentence ever since. The Western country wa'n't home to me then—more like a big prison. It's been my prison these twenty-odd years, while your mother was enjoying what belonged to her, and making a splendid job of your education. If I had let things alone I might have finished my time out: but I didn't, and now the rest of it's commuted—for the life of my son!”
“Don't put it that way! I am no lamb of sacrifice. Why, how can we let things alone in this world! Should I have stood off from this secret and never asked my father for his defense?”
“Do you mean to say a boy like you can take hold of this thing and understand it?”
“I can,” said Paul. “I could almost tell the story myself.”
“Put it up then!” said the packer. The fascination of confession was strong upon him.
“You had been out in the mountains—how long?”
“Two days and three nights, just as I left camp.”
“You were crazed with anxiety for us. You came back to find your camp empty, the wife and baby gone. You had reason to distrust the keeper. Not for what he did—for what you knew he meant to do.”
“For what he meant and tried to do. I seen it in his eye. The devil that wanted him incited him to play with me and tell me lies about my wife. She scorned the brute and he took his mean revenge. He kep' back her letter, and he says to me, leerin' at me out of his wicked eyes, 'Your livestock seems to be the strayin' kind. The man she went off with give me that,'—he lugged a gold piece out of his clothes and showed me,—'give me that,' he says, 'to keep it quiet.' He kep' it quiet! Half starved and sick's I was, the strength was in me. But vengeance in the hand of a man, it cuts both ways, my son! His bunk had a sharp edge to it like this. He fell acrost it with my weight on top of him and he never raised up again. There wasn't a mark on him. His back was broke. He died slow, his eyes mocking me.
“'You fool,' he says. 'Go look in that coat hangin' on the wall.' I found her letter there inside of one from Granger. He watched me read it and he laughed. 'Now, go tell her you've killed a man!' He knew I didn't come of a killin' breed. There was four hours to think it over. Four hours! I thought hard, I tell you! 'T was six of one and half a dozen of t' other 'twixt him and me, but I worked it back 'n' forth a good long while about her. First, taking her away from her father, an old man whose bread I'd eat. She was like a child of my own raising. I always had felt mean about that. We'd had bad luck from the start,—my luck,—and now disgrace to cap it all. Whether I hid it or told her and stood my trial, I'd never be a free man again. There he lay! And a sin done in secret, it's like a drop of nitric acid: it's going to eat its way out—and in!
“I knew she'd have friends enough, once she was quit of me. That was the case between us. The thing that hurt me most was to put her letter back where I found it, and leave it, there with him. Her little cry to me—and I couldn't come! I read the words over and over, I've said 'em to myself ever since. I've lived on them. But I had to leave the letter there to show I'd never come back. I put it back after he was dead.
“The sins of the parents shall be visited,—when it's in the blood! But I declare to the Almighty, murder wa'n't in my blood! It come on me like a stroke of lightning hits a tree, and I had a clear show to fall alone.
“That's the answer. Maybe I didn't see all sides of it, but there never was no opening to do different, after that night. Now, you've had an education. I should be glad to hear your way of looking at it?”
“I should think you might stand your trial, now, before any judge or jury, in this world or the next,” Paul answered.
“There is only one Judge.” The packer smiled a beautiful quiet smile that covered a world of meanings. “What a man re'ly wants, if he'd own up it, is a leetle shade of partiality. Maybe that's what we're all going to need, before we git through.”
Paul was glad to be saved the necessity of speech, and he felt the swift discernment with which the packer resumed his usual manner. “Got any more of that stuff you call soup? Divide even! I won't be made no baby of.”
“We might as well finish it up. It's hardly worth making two bites of a cherry.”
“Call this 'cherry'! It's been a good while on the bough. What's it mostly made of?”
“Rind of bacon, snow water,—plenty of water,—and a tablespoonful of rice.”
“Good work! Hungry folks can live on what the full bellies throw away.”
“Oh, I can save. But there comes a time when you can't live by saving what you haven't got.”
“That's right! Well, let's talk, then, before the bacon-rind fades out of us.”
The packer's face and voice, his whole manner, showed the joy of a soul that has found relief. Paul was not trying now to behave dutifully; they were man to man once more. The quaint, subdued humor asserted itself, and the narrator's speech flowed on in the homely dialect which expressed the man.
“I stayed out all that winter, workin' towards the coast. One day, along in March, I fetched a charcoal burner's camp, and the critter took me in and nursed my frost-bites and didn't ask no questions, nor I of him. We struck up a trade, my drivin' stock, mostly skin and bone, for a show in his business. He wa'n't gettin' rich at it, that was as plain as the hip bones on my mules. I kep' in the woods, cuttin' timber and tendin' kiln, and he hauled and did the sellin'. Next year he went below to Portland and brought home smallpox with him. It broke out on him on the road. He was a terrible sick man. I buried him, and waited for my turn. It didn't come. I seemed kind o' insured. I've been in lots of trouble since then, but nothing ever touched me till now. I banked on it too strong, though. I sure did! My pardner was just such another lone bird like me. If he had any folks of his own he kep' still about them. So I took his name—whether it was his name there's no knowing. Guess I've took full as good care of it as he would. 'Hagar?' folk would say, sort o' lookin' me over. 'You ain't Jim Hagar.' No, but I was John, and they let it go at that.
“I heard of your mother that summer, from a prospector who came up past my camp. He'd wintered in Mountain Home. He told me my own story, the way they had it down there, and what straits your mother was in. I had scraped up quite a few dollars by then, and was thinking how I'd shove it into a bank like an old debt coming to Adam Bogardus. I was studying how I was going to rig it. There wasn't any one who knew me down there, so I felt safe to ventur' a few inquiries. What I heard was that she'd gone home to her folks and was as well off as anybody need be. That broke me all up at first. I must have had a sneakin' notion that maybe some day I could see my way to go back to her, but that let me out completely. I quit then, and I've stayed quit. The only break I made was showin' up here at the 'leventh hour, thinking I could be some use to my son!”
“It was to be,” said Paul. “For years our lives have been shaping towards this meeting. There were a thousand chances against it. Yet here we are!”
“Here we are!” the packer repeated soberly. “But don't think that I lay any of my foolishness on the Almighty! Maybe it was meant my son should close my eyes, but it's too dear at the price. Anybody would say so, I don't care who.”
“But aside from the 'price,' is it something to you?”
“More—more than I've got words to say. And yet it grinds me, every breath I take! Not that I wish you'd done different—you couldn't and be a man. I knew it even when I was kickin' against it. Oh, well! It ain't no use to kick. I thought I'd learned something, but I ain't—learned—a thing!”