Proud little Emmy, heiress no longer, had put her spirit into her farm-hand and incited him to the first rebellion of his life. They crossed the river at night, poling through floating ice, and climbed aboard one of those great through trains whose rushing thunder had made the girlish heart so often beat. This was long before the West Shore Line was built. Neither of them had ever seen the inside of a Pullman sleeper. Emmy could count the purchased meals she had eaten in her life; she had never slept in a hotel or hired lodging till after her marriage. Hardly any one could be so provincial in these days.
Adam Bogardus was a plodder in the West as he had been in the East. He was an honest man, and he was wise enough not to try to be a shrewd one. He tried none of the short-cuts to a fortune. Hard work suited him best, and no work was too hard for his iron strength and patient resolution. But it broke the spirit of a man in him to see his young wife's despair. Poverty frightened and quelled her. The deep-rooted security of her old home was something she missed every day of her makeshift existence. It was degradation to live in “rooms,” or a room; to move for want of means to pay the rent. She pined for the good food she had been used to. Her health suffered through anxiety and hard work. She was too proud to complain, but the sight of her dumb unacceptance of what had come to her through him undoubtedly added the last straw to her husband's mental strain.
“It is hard for me to realize it as I once did,” said Paul, as the story paused. “You make tragedy a dream. But there is a deep vein of tragedy in our blood. And my theory is that it always crops out in families where it's the keynote, as it were.”
“Never mind, you old care-taker! We Middletons carry sail enough to need a ton or two of lead in our keel.”
“But, you understand?”—
“I understand the distinction between what I call your good blood, and the sort of blood I thought you had. It explains a certain funny way you have with arms—weapons. Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” said Paul coldly. “I hate a weapon. I am always ashamed of myself when I get one in my hand.”
“You act that way, dear!”
“God made tools and the Devil made weapons.”
“You are civil to my father's profession.”
“Your father is what he is aside from his profession.”
“You are quite mistaken, Paul. My father and his profession are one. His sword is a symbol of healing. The army is the great surgeon of the nation when the time comes for a capital operation.”
“It grows harder to tell my story,” said Paul gloomily;—“the short and simple annals of the poor.”
“Now come! Have I been a snob about my father's profession?”
“No; but you love it, naturally. You have grown up with its pomp and circumstance around you. You are the history makers when history is most exciting.”
“Go on with your story, you proud little Dutchman! When I despise you for your farming relatives, you can taunt me with my history making.”
Paul was about two years old when his parents broke up in the Wood River country and came south by wagon on the old stage-road to Felton. Whenever he saw a “string-bean freighter's” outfit moving into Bisuka, if there was a woman on the driver's seat, he wanted to take off his hat to her. For so his mother sat beside his father and held him in her arms two hundred miles across the Snake River desert. The stages have been laid off since the Oregon Short Line went through, but there were stations then all along the road.
One night they made camp at a lonely place between Soul's Rest and Mountain Home. Oneman Station it was called; afterwards Deadman Station, when the keeper's body was found one morning stiff and cold in his bunk. He died in the night alone. Emily Bogardus had cause to hate the man when he was living, and his dreary end was long a shuddering remembrance to her, like the answer to an unforgiving prayer.
The station was in a hollow with bare hills around, rising to the highest point of that rolling plain country. The mountains sink below the plain, only their white tops showing. It was October. All the wild grass had been eaten close for miles on both sides of the road, but over a gap in the Western divide was the Bruneau Valley, where the bell-mare of the team had been raised. In the night she broke her hopples and struck out across the summit with the four mules at her heels. Towards morning a light snow fell and covered their tracks. Adam was compelled to hunt his stock on foot; the keeper refusing him a horse, saying he had got himself into trouble before through being friendly with the company's horses. He started out across the hills, expecting that the same night would see him back, and his wife was left in the wagon camp alone.
“I know this story very well,” said Paul, “and yet I never heard it but once, when mother decided I was old enough to know all. But every word was bitten into me—especially this ugly part I am coming to. I wish it need not be told, yet all the rest depends on it; and that such an experience could come to a woman like my mother shows what exposure and humiliation lie in the straightest path if there is no money to smooth the way. You hear it said that in the West the toughest men will be chivalrous to a woman if she is the right sort of a woman. I'm afraid that is a romantic theory of the Western man.
“That night, before his team stampeded, as he sat by the keeper's fire, father had made up his mind that the less they had to do with that man the better. He may have warned mother; and she, left alone with the brute, did not know the wisdom of hiding her fear and loathing of him. He may have meant no more than a low kind of teasing, but her suffering was the same.
“Father did not come. She dared not leave the camp. She knew no place to go to, and in his haste, believing he would soon be with her again, he had taken all their little stock of funds. But he had left her his gun, and with this within reach of her hand in the shelter of the wagon hood, without fire and without cooked food, she kept a sleepless watch.
“The stages came and went; help was within sound of her voice, but she dared make no sign. The passengers were few at that season, always men, on the best of terms with the keeper. He had threatened—well, no matter—such a threat as a more sophisticated woman would have smiled at. She was simple, but she was not weak. It was a moral battle between them. There were hours when she held him by the power of her eye alone; she conquered, but it nearly killed her.
“One morning a man jumped down from the stage whose face she knew. He had recognized my father's outfit and he came to speak to her, amazed to find her in that place alone. There was no need to put her worst fear into words; he knew the keeper. He made the best he could of father's detention, but he assured her, as she knew too well, that she could not wait for him there. He was on his way East, and he took us with him as far as Mountain Home. To this day she believes that if Bud Granger had led the search, my father would have been found; but he went East to sell his cattle, the snows set in, and the search party came straggling home. The man, Granger, had left a letter of explanation, inclosing one from mother to father, with the keeper. He bribed and frightened him, but for years she used to agonize over a fear that father had come back and the keeper had withheld the letter and belied her to him with some devilish story that maddened him and drove him from her. Such a fancy might have come out of her mental state at that time. I believe that Granger left the letter simply to satisfy her. He must have believed my father was dead. He could not have conceived of a man's being lost in that broad country at that season; but my father was a man of hills and farms, all small, compact. The plains were another planet to him.
“The letter was found in the keeper's clothing after his death; no one ever came to claim it of his successor. Somewhere in this great wilderness a tired man found rest. What would we not give if we knew where!
“And she worked in a hotel in Mountain Home. Can you imagine it! Then Christine was born and the multiplied strain overcame her. Strangers took care of her children while she lay between life and death. She had been silent about herself and her past, but they found a letter from one of her old schoolmates asking about teachers' salaries in the West, and they wrote to her begging her to make known my mother's condition to her relatives if any were living. At length came a letter from grandfather—characteristic to the last. The old home was there, for her and for her children, but no home for the traitor, as he called father. She must give him up even to his name. No Bogardus could inherit of a Van Elten.
“She had not then lost all hope of father's return, and she never forgave her father for trying to buy her back for the price of what she considered her birthright. She settled down miserably to earn bread for her children. Then, when hope and pride were crushed in her, and faith had nothing left to cling to, there came a letter from Uncle Jacob, the bachelor, who had bided his time. Out of the division in his brother's house he proposed to build up his own; just as he would step in and buy depreciated bonds to hold them for a rise. He offered her a home and maintenance during his lifetime, and his estate for herself and her children when he was through. There were no conditions referring to our father, but it was understood that she should give up her own. This, mainly, to spite his brother, yet under all there was an old man's plea. She felt she could make the obligation good, though there might not be much love on either side. Perhaps it came later; but I remember enough of that time to believe that her children's future was dearly paid for. Grandfather died alone, in the old rat-ridden house up the Hudson. He left no will, to every one's surprise. It might have been his negative way of owning his debt to nature at the last.
“That is how we came to be rich; and no one detects in us now the crime of those early struggles. But my father was a hired man; and my mother has done every menial thing with those soft hands of hers.” A softer one was folded in his own. Its answering clasp was loyal and strong.
“Isthisthe story you had not the courage to tell me?”
“This is the story I had the courage to tell you—not any too soon, perhaps you think?”
“And do you think it needed courage?”
“The question is what you think. What are we to do with Uncle Jacob's money? Go off by ourselves and have a good time with it?”
“We will not decide to-night,” said Moya, tenderly subdued. But, though the story had interested and touched her, as accounting for her lover's saddened, conscience-ridden youth, it was no argument against teaching him what youth meant in her philosophy. The differences were explained, but not abolished.
“It was spite money, remember, not love money,” he continued, reverting to his story. “It purchased my mother's compliance to one who hated her father, who forced her to listen, year after year, to bitter, unnatural words against him. I am not sure but it kept her from him at the last; for if Uncle Jacob had not stepped in and made her his, I can't help thinking she would have found somehow a way to the soft place in his heart. Something good ought to be done with that money to redeem its history.”
“You must not be morbid, Paul.”
“That sounds like mother,” said Paul, smiling. “She is always jealous for our happiness; because she lost her own, I think, and paid so heavily for ours. She prizes pleasure and success, even worldly success, for us.”
“I don't blame her!” cried Moya.
“No; of course not. But you mustn't both be against me, and Chrissy, too. She is so, unconsciously; she does not know the pull there is on me, through knowing things she doesn't dream of, and that I can never forget.”
“No,” said Moya. “I am sure she is perfectly unconscious. We exchanged biographies at school, and there was nothing at all like this in hers. Why was she never told?”
“She has always been too strained, too excitable. Every least incident is an emotion with her. When she laughs, her laugh is like a cry. Haven't you noticed that? Startle her, and her eyes are the very eyes of fear. Mother was wise, I think, not to pour those old sorrows into her little fragile cup.”
“So she emptied them all into yours!”
“That was my right, of the elder and stronger. I wouldn't have missed the knowledge of our beginnings for the world. What a prosperous fool and ass I might have made of myself!”
“Morbid again,” said Moya. “You belong to your own day and generation. You might as well wear country shoes and clothes because your father wore them.”
“Still, if we have such a thing in this country as class, then you and I do not belong to the same class except by virtue of Uncle Jacob's money. Confess you are glad I am a Bevier and a Broderick and a Van Elten, as well as a Bogardus.”
“I shall confess nothing of the kind. Now you do talk like anouveauPaul, dear,” said Moya, with her caressing eyes on his—they had paused under the lamp at the top of the steps—“I think your father must have been a very good man.”
“All our fathers were,” Paul averred, smiling at her earnestness.
“Yes, but yours in particular; becauseyouare an angel; and your mother is quite human, is she not?—almost as human as I am? That carriage of the head,—if that does not mean the world!”—
“She has needed all her pride.”
“I don't object to pride, myself,” said the girl, “but you dwell so upon her humiliations. I see no such record in her face.”
“She has had much to hide, you must remember.”
“Well, she can hide things; but one's self must escape sometimes. What has become of little Emily Van Elten who ran away with her father's hired man? What has become of the freighter's wife?”
“She is all mother now. She brought us back to the world, and for our sakes she has learned to take her place in it. Herself she has buried.”
“Yes; but which is—was herself?”
“And you cannot see her story in her face?”
“Not that story.”
“Not the crushing reserve, the long suspense, the silence of a sorrow that even her children could not share?”
“I know her silence. Your mother is a most reticent woman. But is she now the woman of that story?”
“I don't understand you quite,” said Paul. “How much are we ourselves after we have passed through fires of grief, and been recast under the pressure of circumstances! She was that woman once.”
“The saddest part of the story to me is, that your father, who loved her so, and worked so hard for his family, should have served you all the better by his death.”
“Oh, don't say that, dear! Who knows what is best? But one thing we do know. The sorrow that cut my mother's life in two brought you and me together. It rent the stratum on which I was born and raised it to the level of yours, my lady!”
“I shall not forget,” whispered Moya with blissful irony, “that you are the Poor Man's son!”
The autumn days were shortening imperceptibly and the sunsets had gained an almost articulate splendor: cloud calling unto cloud, the west horizon signaling to the east, and answering again, while the mute dark circle of hills sat like a council of chiefs with their blankets drawn over their heads. Soon those blankets would be white with snow.
Behind the Post where the hills climb toward the Cottonwood Creek divide, there is a little canon which at sunset is especially inviting. It hastens twilight by at least an hour during midsummer, and in autumn it leads up a stairway of shadow to the great spectacle of the day—the day's departure from the hills.
The canon has its companion rivulet always coming down to meet the stage-road going up. As this road is the only outlet hillward for all the life of the plain, and as the tendency of every valley population is to climb, one thinks of it as a way out rather than a way in. Higher up, the stage-road becomes a pass cut through a wall of splintered cliffs; and here it leads its companion, the brook, a wild dance over boulders, and under culverts of fallen rock. At last it emerges on what is called The Summit; and between are green, deep valleys where the little ranches, fields and fences and houses, seem to have slid down to the bottom and lie there at rest.
A party of young riders from the post had gone up this road one evening, and two had come down, laughing and talking; but the other two remained in the circle of light that rested on the summit. Prom where they sat in the dry grass they could hear a hollow sound of moving feet as the cattle wandered down through folds of the hills, seeking the willow copses by the water. On the breast of her habit Moya wore the blossoms of the wild evening primrose, which in this region flowers till the coming of frost. They had been gathered for her on the way up, and as she had waited for them, sitting her horse in silence, the brown owls gurgled and hooted overhead from nest to nest in the crannies of the rocks.
“You need not hold the horses,” she commanded, in her fresh voice. “Throw my bridle over your saddle pommel and yours over mine.—There!” she said, watching the horses as they shuffled about interlinked. “That is like half the marriages in this world. They don't separate and they don't go astray, but they don'tgetanywhere!”
“I have been thinking of those 'two in the Garden,'” mused Paul, resting his dark, abstracted eyes on her. “Whether or no your humble servant has a claim to unchallenged bliss in this world, there's no doubt about your claim. If my plans interfere, I must take myself out of the way.”
“Oh, you funny old croaker!” laughed the girl. “Take yourself out of the way, indeed! Haven't you chosen me to show you the way?”
“Moya, Moya!” said Paul in a smothered voice.
“I know what you are thinking. But stop it!” she held one of her crushed blossoms to his lips. “What was this made for? Why hasn't it some work to do? Isn't it a skulker—blooming here for only a night?”
“'Ripen, fall, and cease!'” Paul murmured.
“How much more am I—are you, then? The sum of us may amount to something, if we mind our own business and keep step with each other, and finish one thing before we begin the next. I will not be in a hurry about being good. Goodness can take care of itself. What you need is to be happy! And it's my first duty to make you so.”
“God knows what bliss it would be.”
“Don't say 'would be.'”
“God knows it is!”
“Then hush and be thankful!” There was a long hush. They heard the far, faint notes of a bugle sounding from the Post.
“Lights out,” said Moya. “We must go.”
“You haven't told me yet where our Garden is to be,” he said.
“I will tell you on the way home.”
When they had come down into the neighborhood of ranches, and Bisuka's lights were twinkling below them, she asked: “Who lives now in the grandfather's house on the Hudson?”
“The farmer, Chauncey Dunlop.”
“Is there any other house on the place?”
“Yes. Mother built a new one on the Ridge some years ago.”
“What sort of a house is it?”
“It was called a good house once; but now it's rather everything it shouldn't be. It was one of the few rash things mother ever did; build a house for her children while they were children. Now she will not change it. She says we shall build for ourselves, how and where we please. Stone Ridge is her shop. Of course, if Chrissy liked it—But Chrissy considers it a 'hole.' Mother goes up there and indulges in secret orgies of economy; one man in the stable, one in the garden—'Economy has its pleasures for all healthy minds.'”
“Economy is as delicious as bread and butter after too much candy. I should love to go up to Stone Ridge and wear out my old clothes. Did any one tell me that place would some day be yours?”
“It will be my wife's on the day we are married.”
“That is where your wife, sir, would like to live.”
“It is a stony Garden, dear! The summer people have their places nearer the river. Our land lies back, with no view but hills. For one who has the world before her where to choose, it strikes me she has picked out a very humble Paradise.”
“Did you think my idea was to travel—a poor army girl who spends her life in trunks? Do we ever buy a book or frame a picture without thinking of our next move? As for houses, who am I that I should be particular? In the Army's House are many mansions, but none that we can call our own. Oh, I'm very primitive; I have the savage instinct to gather sticks and stones, and get a roof over my head before winter sets in.”
To such a speech as this there was but one obvious answer, as she rode at his side, her appealing slenderness within reach of his arm. It did not matter what thousands he proposed to spend upon the roof that should cover her; it was the same as if they were planning a hut of tules or a burrow in the snow.
“It is a poor man's country,” he said; “stony hillsides, stony roads lined with stone fences. The chief crop of the country is ice and stone. In one of my grandfather's fields there is a great cairn which Adam Bogardus, they say, picked up, stone by stone, with his bare hands, and carted there when he was fourteen years old. We will build them into the walls of our new house for a blessing.”
“No,” said Moya. “We will let sleeping stones lie!”
There was impatience at the garrison for news that the hunters had started. Every day's delay at Challis meant an abridgment of the bridegroom's leave, and the wedding was now but a fortnight away. It began to seem preposterous that he should go at all, and the colonel was annoyed with himself for his enthusiasm over the plan in the first place. Mrs. Bogardus's watchfulness of dates told the story of her thoughts, but she said nothing.
“Mamsie is restless,” said Christine, putting an arm around her mother's solid waist and giving her a tight little hug apropos of nothing. “I believe it's another case of 'mail-time fever.' The colonel says it comes on with Moya every afternoon about First Sergeant's call. But Moya is cunning. She goes off and pretends she isn't listening for the bugle.”
“'First Sergeant or Second,' it's all one to me,” said Mrs. Bogardus. “I never know one call from another, except when the gun goes off.”
“Mamsie! 'When the gun goes off!' What a civilian way of talking. You are not getting on at all with your military training. Now let me give you some useful information. In two seconds the bugle will call the first sergeant—of each company—to the adjutant's office, and there he'll get the mail for his men. The orderly trumpeter will bring it to the houses on the line, and the colonel's orderly—beautiful creature! There he goes! How I wish we could take him home with us and have him in our front hall. Fancy the feelings of the maids! And the rage on the noble brow of Parkins—awful Parkins. I should like to give his pride a bump.”
Mother and daughter were pacing the colonel's veranda, behind a partial screen of rose vines—October vines fast shedding their leaves. Every breeze shook a handful down, which the women's skirts swept with them as they walked. Mrs. Bogardus turned and clasped Christine's arm above the elbow; through the thin sleeve she could feel its cool roundness. It was a soft, small, unmuscular arm, that had never borne its own burdens, to say nothing of a share in the burdens of others.
“Get your jacket,” said the mother. “There is a chill in the air.”
“There is no chill in me,” laughed Christine. “You know, mamsie, you aren't a girl. I should simply die in those awful things that you wear. Did you ever know such a hot house as the colonel keeps!”
“The rooms are small, and the colonel is—impulsive,” Mrs. Bogardus added with a smile.
“There is something very like him about his fire-making. I should know by the way he puts on wood that he never would have “—Mrs. Bogardus checked herself.
“A large bank account?” Christine supplied, with her quick wit, which was not of a highly sensitive order.
“He has a large heart,” said her mother.
“And plenty of room for it, bless him! The slope of his chest is like the roof of a house. The only time I envy Moya is when she lays her head down on it and tries to meet her arms around him as if he were a tree, and he strokes her hair as if his hand was a bough! If ever I marry a soldier he shall be a colonel with a white mustache and a burnt-sienna complexion, and a sword-belt that measures—what is the colonel's waist-measure, do you suppose?”
Mrs. Bogardus listened to this nonsense with the smile of a silent woman who has borne a child that can talk. Moya had often noticed how uncritical she was of Christine's “unruly member.”
“It isn't polite to speak of waist-measures to middle-aged persons like your mother and the colonel,” she said placidly. “You like it very much out here?”
“Fascinating! Never had such a good time in my whole life.”
“And you like the West altogether? Would you like to live here?”
“Oh, if it came to living, I should want to be sure there was a way out.”
“There generally is a way out of most things. But it costs something.” Mrs. Bogardus was so concise in her speech as at times to be almost oracular.
“Army people are sure of their way out,” said Christine, “and I guess they find it costs something.”
“Why do they buy so many books, I wonder? If I moved as often as they do, I'd have only paper covers and leave them behind.”
“You are not a reader, mummy. You're a business woman. You look at everything from the practical side.”
“And if I didn't, who would?” Mrs. Bogardus spoke with earnestness. “We can't all be dreamers like Paul or privileged persons like you. There has to be one in every family to say the things no one likes to hear and do the things nobody likes to do.”
“We are the rich repiners and you are the household drudge!” Christine shouted, laughing at her own wit.
“Hush, hush!” her mother smiled. “Don't make so much noise.”
“I should like to know who's to be the drudge in Paul's privileged family. It doesn't strike me it's going to be Moya. And Paul only drudges for people he doesn't know.”
“Moya is a girl you can expect anything of. She is a wonderful mixture of opposites. She has the Irish quickness, and yet she has learned to obey. She has had the freedom and the discipline of these little lordly army posts. She is one of the few girls of her age who does not measure everything from her own point of view.”
“Is that a dig at me, ma'am?”
At that moment Moya came out upon the porch.
She was very striking with the high color and brilliant eyes that mail-time fever breeds. Christine looked at her with freshly aroused curiosity, moved by her mother's unwonted burst of praise. The faintest tinge of jealousy made her feel naughty. As Moya went down the board walk, the colonel's orderly came springing up the steps to meet her with the mail-bag. He saluted and turned off at an angle down the embankment not to present his back to the ladies.
“Did you see that! He never raised his eyes. They are like priests. You can't make them look at you.” Moya looked at Christine in amazement. The man himself might have heard her. It was not the first time this privileged guest had rubbed against garrison customs in certain directions hardly worth mentioning. Moya hesitated. Then she laughed a little, and said: “Only a raw recruity would look at an officer's daughter, or any lady of the line.”
“Oh, you horrid little aristocrat! Well, I look at them, when they are as pretty as that one, and I forgive them if they look at me.”
Moya turned and hovered over the contents of the mail-bag. In the exercise of one of her prerogatives, it was her habit to sort its contents before delivering it at the official door.
“All, all for you!” she offered a huge packet of letters, smiling, to Mrs. Bogardus. It was faced with one on top in Paul's handwriting. “All but one,” she added, and proceeded to open her own much fatter one in the same hand. She stood reading it in the hall.
Mrs. Bogardus presently followed and remained beside her. “Could I speak to your father a moment?” she asked.
“Certainly, I will call him,” said Moya.
“Wait: I hear him now.” The study door opened and Colonel Middleton joined them. Mrs. Bogardus leading the way into the sitting-room, the colonel followed her, and Moya, not having been invited, lingered in the hall.
“Well, have the hunters started yet?” the colonel inquired in his breezy voice, which made you want to open the doors and windows to give it room. “Be seated! Be seated! I hope you have got a long letter to read me.”
Mrs. Bogardus stood reflecting. “The day this letter was mailed they got off—only two days ago,” she said. “Could I reach them, Colonel, with a telegram?”
“Two days ago,” the colonel considered. “They must have made Yankee Fork by yesterday. Today they are deep in the woods. No; I should say a man on horseback would be your surest telegram. Is it anything important?”
“Colonel, I wish we could call them back! They have gone off, it seems to me, in a most crazy way—against the judgment of every one who knows. The guide, this man whom they waited for, refused, it appears, to go out again with another party so late in the fall. But the Bowens were determined. They insisted on making arrangements with another man. Then, when 'Packer John,' they call him, heard of this, he went to Paul and urged him, if he could not prevent the others from going, to give up the trip himself. The Bowens were very much annoyed at his interference, and with Paul for listening to him. And Paul, rather than make things unpleasant, gave in. You know how young men are! What silly grounds are enough for the most serious decisions when it is a question of pride or good faith. The Bowens had bought their outfit on Paul's assurance that he would go. He felt he could not leave them in the lurch. On that, the guide suddenly changed his mind and said he would go with them sooner than see them fall into worse hands. They were, in a way, committed to the other man, so they tookhimalong as cook—the whole thing done in haste, you see, and unpleasant feelings all around. Do you call that a good start for a pleasure trip?”
“It's very much the way with young troops when they start out—everything wrong end foremost, everybody mad with everybody else. A day in the saddle will set their little tempers all right.”
“That isn't the point,” Mrs. Bogardus persisted gloomily. As she spoke, the two girls came into the room and stood listening.
“What is the point, then?” Christine demanded. “Moya has no news; all those pages and pages, and nothing for anybody or about anybody!”
“'Such an intolerable deal of sack to such a poor pennyworth of bread,'” the colonel quoted, smiling at Moya's bloated envelope.
“But what do you think?” Mrs. Bogardus recalled him. “Don't you think it's a mistake all around?”
“Not at all, if they have a good man. This flat-footed fellow, John, will take command, as he should. There is no danger in the woods at any season unless the party gets rattled and goes to pieces for want of a head.”
“Father!” exclaimed Moya. “You know there is danger. Often, things have happened!”
“Why, what could happen?” asked Christine, with wide eyes.
“Many things very interesting could happen,” the colonel boasted cheerfully. “That is the object of the trip. You want things to happen. It is the emergency that makes the man—sifts him, and takes the chaff out of him.”
“Take the chaff out of Banks Bowen,” Moya imprudently struck in, “and what would you have left?” She had met Banks Bowen in New York.
“Tut, tut!” said the colonel. “Silence, or a good word for the absent—same as the”—The colonel stopped short.
“You are so scornful about the other men, now you have chosen one!” Christine's face turned red.
“Why, Chrissy! You would not compare your brother to those men! Papa, I beg your pardon; this is only for argument.”
“I don't compare him; but that's not to say all the other men are chaff!” Christine joined constrainedly in the laugh that followed her speech.
“You need not go fancying things, Moya,” she cried, in answer to a quizzical look. “As if I hadn't known the Bowen boys since I was so high!”
“You might know them from the cradle to the grave, my dear young lady, and not know them as Paul will, after a week in the woods with them.”
The colonel had missed the drift of the girls' discussion. He was considering, privately, whether he had not better send a special messenger on the young men's trail. His assurances to the women left a wide margin for personal doubt as to the prudence of the trip. Aside from the lateness of the start, it was, undoubtedly, an ill-assorted company for the woods. There was a wide margin also for suspense, as all mail facilities ceased at Challis.
Early in November, about a week before the hunters were expected home, a packet came addressed to Moya. It was a journal letter from Paul, mailed by some returning prospector chance encountered in the forest as the party were going in. Moya read it aloud, with asterisks, to a family audience which did not include her father.
“To-day,” one of the first entries read, “we halt at Twelve-Mile Cabin, the last roof we shall sleep under. There are pine-trees near the cabin cut off fifteen feet above the ground, felled in winter, John tells us,at the level of the snow!
“These cabins are all deserted now; the tide of prospecting has turned another way. The great hills that crowd one another up against the sky are so infested and overridden by this enormous forest-growth, and the underbrush is so dense, it would be impossible for a 'tenderfoot' to gain any clear idea of his direction. I should be a lost man the moment I ventured out of call. Woodcraft must be a sixth sense which we lost with the rest of our Eden birthright when we strayed from innocence, when we ceased to sleep with one ear on the ground, and to spell our way by the moss on tree-trunks. In these solitudes, as we call them, ranks and clouds of witnesses rise up to prove us deaf and blind. Busy couriers are passing every moment of the day; and we do not see, nor hear, nor understand. We are the stocks and stones. Packer John is our only wood-sharp;—yet the last half of the name doesn't altogether fit him. He is a one-sided character, handicapped, I should say, by some experience that has humbled and perplexed him. Two and two perhaps refused to make four in his account with men, and he gave up the proposition. And now he consorts with trees, and hunts to live, not to kill. He has an impersonal, out-door odor about him, such as the cleanest animals have. I would as soon eat out of his dry, hard, cool hand, as from a chunk of pine-bark.
“It is amusing to see him with a certain member of the party who tries to be fresh with him. He has a disconcerting eye when he fixes it on a man, or turns it away from one who has said a coarse or a foolish thing.
“'The jungle is large,' he seems to say, 'and the cub he is small. Let him think and be still!'”
“Who is this 'certain member' who tries to be 'fresh'?” Christine inquired with perceptible warmth.
“The cook, perhaps,” said Moya prudently.
“The cook isn't a 'member'!—Well, can't you go on, Moya? Paul seems to need a lot of editing.” Moya had paused and was glancing ahead, smiling to herself constrainedly.
“Is there more disparagement of his comrades?” Christine persisted.
“Christine, be still!” Mrs. Bogardus interfered. “Moya ought to have the first reading of her own letter. It's very good of her to let us hear it at all.”
“Oh dear, there's no disparagement. Quite the contrary! I'll go on with pleasure if you don't mind.” Moya read hurriedly, laughing through her words:—
“'If you were here, (Ah,ifyou were here!) You should lend me an ear—One at the least Of a pair the prettiest'—which is, within a foot or two, the rhythm of 'Wood Notes.' Of course you don't know it!”
“This is a gibe at me,” Moya explained, “because I don't read Emerson. 'It is the very measure of a marching chorus,' he goes on to say, 'where the step is broken by rocks and tree-roots;'—and he is chanting it to himself (to her it was in the original) as they go in single file through these 'haughty solitudes, the twilight of the gods!'”
“'Haughty solitudes'!” Christine derided.
Mrs. Bogardus sighed with impatience, and Moya's face became set. “Well, here he quotes again,” she haughtily resumed. “Anybody who is tired of this can be excused. Emerson won't mind, and I'm sure Paul won't!” She looked a mute apology to Paul's mother, who smiled and said, “Go on, dear. I don't read Emerson either, but I like him when Paul reads him for me.”
“Well, I warn you there is an awful lot of him here!” Moya's voice was a trifle husky as she read on.
“Old as Jove, Old as Love'”
“I thought Love was young!”—Christine in a whisper aside.
“'Who of me Tells the pedigree? Only the mountains old, Only the waters cold, Only the moon and stars, My coevals are.'”
Moya sighed, and sank into prose again. “There is a gaudy yellow moss in these woods that flecks the straight and mournful tree-trunks like a wandering glint of sunlight; and there is a crêpe-like black moss that hangs funeral scarfs upon the boughs, as if there had been a death in the forest, and the trees were in line for the burial procession. The grating of our voices on this supreme silence reminds one of 'Why will you still be talking, Monsieur Benedick?—nobody marks you.'
“There are silences, and again there are whole symphonies of sound. The winds smites the tree-tops over our heads, a surf-like roar comes up the slope, and the yellow pine-needles fall across the deepest darks as motes sail down a sunbeam. One wearies of the constant perpendicular, always these stiff, columnar lines, varied only by the melancholy incline where some great pine-chieftain is leaning to his fall supported in the arms of his comrades, or by the tragic prostration of the 'down timber'—beautiful straight-cut English these woodsmen talk.
“Last evening John and I sat by the stove in the men's tent, while the others were in the cabin playing penny-ante with the cook (a sodden brute who toadies to the Bowens, and sulks with John because he objected to our hiring the fellow—an objection which I sustained, hence his logical spite includes me). John was melting pine gum and elk tallow into a dressing for our boots. I took a mean advantage of him, his hands being in the tallow and the tent-flap down, and tried on him a little of—now, don't deride me!—'Wood Notes.' It is seldom one can get the comment of a genuine woodsman on Nature according to the poets.'”
Moya read on perfunctorily, feeling that she was not carrying her audience with her, and longing for the time when she could take her letter away and have it all to herself. If she stopped now, Christine, in this sudden new freak of distrustfulness, would be sure to misunderstand.