← catalogue

The Harvester

by Gene Stratton-Porter · English · Gutenberg #349 · 802,980 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Harvester
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Harvester

Author: Gene Stratton-Porter


        
Release date: October 1, 1995 [eBook #349]
                Most recently updated: March 17, 2023

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/349

Credits: Charles Keller and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HARVESTER ***




THE HARVESTER

By Gene Stratton-Porter


Author Of A Girl Of The Limberlost, Freckles, Etc.



                        THIS PORTION
               OF THE LIFE OF A MAN OF TO-DAY
          IS OFFERED IN THE HOPE THAT IN CLEANLINESS,
             POETIC TEMPERMENT, AND MENTAL FORCE,
                    A LIKENESS WILL BE SEEN
                            TO
                     HENRY DAVID THOREAU




CHAPTER

     I.     Belshazzar's Decision
     II.    The Effect of a Dream
     III.   Harvesting the Forest
     IV.    A Commission for the South Wind
     V.     When the Harvester Made Good
     VI.    To Labour and to Wait
     VII.   The Quest of the Dream Girl
     VIII.  Belshazzar's Record Point
     IX.    The Harvester Goes Courting
     X.     The Chime of the Blue Bells
     XI.    Demonstrated Courtship
     XII.   ''The Way of a Man with a Maid''
     XIII.  When the Dream Came True
     XIV.   Snowy Wings
     XV.    The Harvester Interprets Life
     XVI.   Granny Moreland's Visit
     XVII.  Love Invades Science
     XVIII. The Better Man
     XIX.   A Vertical Spine
     XX.    The Man in the Background
     XXI.   The Coming of the Bluebird


CHARACTERS

     DAVID LANGSTON, A Harvester of the Woods.
     RUTH JAMESON, A Girl of the City.
     GRANNY MORELAND, An Interested Neighbour.
     DR. CAREY, Chief Surgeon of the Onabasha Hospital.
     MRS. CAREY, Wife of the Doctor.
     DR. HARMON, Who Concludes to Leave the City.
     MOLLY BARNET, A Hospital Nurse with a Heart.
     HENRY JAMESON, A Trader Without a Heart.
     ALEXANDER HERRON, Who Made a Concession.
     MRS. HERRON, A Gentle Woman.
     THE KENNEDYS, Philadelphia Lawyers.




THE HARVESTER



CHAPTER I. BELSHAZZAR'S DECISION

“Bel, come here!” The Harvester sat in the hollow worn in the hewed log
stoop by the feet of his father and mother and his own sturdier tread,
and rested his head against the casing of the cabin door when he gave
the command. The tip of the dog's nose touched the gravel between his
paws as he crouched flat on earth, with beautiful eyes steadily watching
the master, but he did not move a muscle.

“Bel, come here!”

Twinkles flashed in the eyes of the man when he repeated the order,
while his voice grew more imperative as he stretched a lean, wiry
hand toward the dog. The animal's eyes gleamed and his sensitive nose
quivered, yet he lay quietly.

“Belshazzar, kommen Sie hier!”

The body of the dog arose on straightened legs and his muzzle dropped
in the outstretched palm. A wind slightly perfumed with the odour of
melting snow and unsheathing buds swept the lake beside them, and lifted
a waving tangle of light hair on the brow of the man, while a level ray
of the setting sun flashed across the water and illumined the graven,
sensitive face, now alive with keen interest in the game being played.

“Bel, dost remember the day?” inquired the Harvester.

The eager attitude and anxious eyes of the dog betrayed that he did not,
but was waiting with every sense alert for a familiar word that would
tell him what was expected.

“Surely you heard the killdeers crying in the night,” prompted the man.
“I called your attention when the ecstasy of the first bluebird waked
the dawn. All day you have seen the gold-yellow and blood-red osiers,
the sap-wet maples and spring tracing announcements of her arrival on
the sunny side of the levee.”

The dog found no clew, but he recognized tones he loved in the suave,
easy voice, and his tail beat his sides in vigorous approval. The man
nodded gravely.

“Ah, so! Then you realize this day to be the most important of all the
coming year to me; this hour a solemn one that influences my whole after
life. It is time for your annual decision on my fate for a twelve-month.
Are you sure you are fully alive to the gravity of the situation, Bel?”

The dog felt himself safe in answering a rising inflection ending in his
name uttered in that tone, and wagged eager assent.

“Well then,” said the man, “which shall it be? Do I leave home for the
noise and grime of the city, open an office and enter the money-making
scramble?”

Every word was strange to the dog, almost breathlessly waiting for a
familiar syllable. The man gazed steadily into the animal's eyes. After
a long pause he continued:

“Or do I remain at home to harvest the golden seal, mullein, and
ginseng, not to mention an occasional hour with the black bass or tramps
for partridge and cotton-tails?”

The dog recognized each word of that. Before the voice ceased, his sleek
sides were quivering, his nostrils twitching, his tail lashing, and at
the pause he leaped up and thrust his nose against the face of the man.
The Harvester leaned back laughing in deep, full-chested tones; then he
patted the dog's head with one hand and renewed his grip with the other.

“Good old Bel!” he cried exultantly. “Six years you have decided for me,
and right----every time! We are of the woods, Bel, born and reared
here as our fathers before us. What would we of the camp fire, the long
trail, the earthy search, we harvesters of herbs the famous chemists
require, what would we do in a city? And when the sap is rising, the
bass splashing, and the wild geese honking in the night! We never could
endure it, Bel.

“When we delivered that hemlock at the hospital to-day, did you hear
that young doctor talking about his 'lid'? Well up there is ours, old
fellow! Just sky and clouds overhead for us, forest wind in our faces,
wild perfume in our nostrils, muck on our feet, that's the life for us.
Our blood was tainted to begin with, and we've lived here so long it
is now a passion in our hearts. If ever you sentence us to life in the
city, you'll finish both of us, that's what you'll do! But you won't,
will you? You realize what God made us for and what He made for us,
don't you, Bel?”

As he lovingly patted the dog's head the man talked and the animal
trembled with delight. Then the voice of the Harvester changed and
dropped to tones of gravest import.

“Now how about that other matter, Bel? You always decide that too. The
time has come again. Steady now! This is far more important than the
other. Just to be wiped out, Bel, pouf! That isn't anything and it
concerns no one save ourselves. But to bring misery into our lives
and live with it daily, that would be a condition to rend the soul. So
careful, Bel! Cautious now!”

The voice of the man dropped to a whisper as he asked the question.

“What about the girl business?”

Trembling with eagerness to do the thing that would bring more
caressing, bewildered by unfamiliar words and tones, the dog hesitated.

“Do I go on as I have ever since mother left me, rustling for grub,
living in untrammelled freedom? Do I go on as before, Bel?”

The Harvester paused and waited the answer, with anxiety in his eyes
as he searched the beast face. He had talked to that dog, as most
men commune with their souls, for so long and played the game in such
intense earnest that he felt the results final with him. The animal was
immovable now, lost again, his anxious eyes watching the face of the
master, his eager ears waiting for words he recognized. After a long
time the man continued slowly and hesitantly, as if fearing the outcome.
He did not realize that there was sufficient anxiety in his voice to
change its tones.

“Or do I go courting this year? Do I rig up in uncomfortable
store-clothes, and parade before the country and city girls and try to
persuade the one I can get, probably----not the one I would want----to
marry me, and come here and spoil all our good times? Do we want a
woman around scolding if we are away from home, whining because she is
lonesome, fretting for luxuries we cannot afford to give her? Are you
going to let us in for a scrape like that, Bel?”

The bewildered dog could bear the unusual scene no longer. Taking the
rising inflection, that sounded more familiar, for a cue, and his name
for a certainty, he sprang forward, his tail waving as his nose touched
the face of the Harvester. Then he shot across the driveway and lay in
the spice thicket, half the ribs of one side aching, as he howled from
the lowest depths of dog misery.

“You ungrateful cur!” cried the Harvester. “What has come over you? Six
years I have trusted you, and the answer has been right, every time!
Confound your picture! Sentence me to tackle the girl proposition! I
see myself! Do you know what it would mean? For the first thing you'd
be chained, while I pranced over the country like a half-broken colt,
trying to attract some girl. I'd have to waste time I need for my work
and spend money that draws good interest while we sleep, to tempt her
with presents. I'd have to rebuild the cabin and there's not a chance in
ten she would not fret the life out of me whining to go to the city to
live, arrange for her here the best I could. Of all the fool, unreliable
dogs that ever trod a man's tracks, you are the limit! And you never
before failed me! You blame, degenerate pup, you!”

The Harvester paused for breath and the dog subsided to a pitiful
whimper. He was eager to return to the man who had struck him the first
blow his pampered body ever had received; but he could not understand a
kick and harsh words for him, so he lay quivering with anxiety and fear.

“You howling, whimpering idiot!” exclaimed the Harvester. “Choose a
day like this to spoil! Air to intoxicate a mummy! Roots swelling! Buds
bursting! Harvest close and you'd call me off and put me at work like
that, would you? If I ever had supposed lost all your senses, I never
would have asked you. Six years you have decided my fate, when the first
bluebird came, and you've been true blue every time. If I ever trust you
again! But the mischief is done now.

“Have you forgotten that your name means 'to protect?' Don't you
remember it is because of that, it is your name? Protect! I'd have
trusted you with my life, Bell! You gave it to me the time you pointed
that rattler within six inches of my fingers in the blood-root bed.
You saw the falling limb in time to warn me. You always know where the
quicksands lie. But you are protecting me now, like sin, ain't you?
Bring a girl here to spoil both our lives! Not if I know myself!
Protect!”

The man arose and going inside the cabin closed the door. After that the
dog lay in abject misery so deep that two big tears squeezed from his
eyes and rolled down his face. To be shut out was worse than the blow.
He did not take the trouble to arise from the wet leaves covering the
cold earth, but closing his eyes went to sleep.

The man leaned against the door and ran his fingers through his hair as
he anathematized the dog. Slowly his eyes travelled around the room. He
saw his tumbled bed by the open window facing the lake, the small
table with his writing material, the crude rack on the wall loaded
with medical works, botanies, drug encyclopaedias, the books of the few
authors who interested him, and the bare, muck-tracked floor. He went
to the kitchen, where he built a fire in the cook stove, and to the
smoke-house, from which he returned with a slice of ham and some eggs.
He set some potatoes boiling and took bread, butter and milk from the
pantry. Then he laid a small note-book on the table before him and
studied the transactions of the day.

     10 lbs. wild cherry bark      6 cents       $.60
     5   “   wahoo root bark      25 “           1.25
     20  “   witch hazel bark      5 “           1.00
     5   “   blue flag root       12 “           .60
     10  “   snake root           18 “           1.80
     10  “   blood root           12 “           1.20
     15  “   hoarhound            10 “           1.50
                                                 -----
                                                $7.95


“Not so bad,” he muttered, bending over the figures. “I wonder if any
of my neighbours who harvest the fields average as well at this season.
I'll wager they don't. That's pretty fair! Some days I don't make it,
and then when a consignment of seeds go or ginseng is wanted the cash
comes in right properly. I could waste half of it on a girl and yet save
money. But where is the woman who would be content with half? She'd want
all and fret because there wasn't more. Blame that dog!”

He put the book in his pocket, prepared and ate his supper, heaped a
plate generously, placed it on the floor beneath the table, and set away
the food that remained.

“Not that you deserve it,” he said to space. “You get this in honour
of your distinguished name and the faithfulness with which you formerly
have lived up to its import. If you hadn't been a dog with more sense
than some men, I wouldn't take your going back on me now so hard. One
would think an animal of your intelligence might realize that you would
get as much of a dose as I. Would she permit you to eat from a plate on
the kitchen floor? Not on your life, Belshazzar! Frozen scraps around
the door for you! Would she allow you to sleep across the foot of the
bed? Ho, ho, ho! Would she have you tracking on her floor? It would be
the barn, and growling you didn't do at that. If I'd serve you right,
I'd give you a dose and allow you to see how you like it. But it's
cutting off my nose to spite my face, as the old adage goes, for
whatever she did to a dog, she'd probably do worse to a man. I think
not!”

He entered the front room and stood before a long shelf on which were
arranged an array of partially completed candlesticks carved from wood.
There were black and white walnut, red, white, and golden oak, cherry
and curly maple, all in original designs. Some of them were oddities,
others were failures, but most of them were unusually successful. He
selected one of black walnut, carved until the outline of his pattern
was barely distinguishable. He was imitating the trunk of a tree with
the bark on, the spreading, fern-covered roots widening for the base,
from which a vine sprang. Near the top was the crude outline of a big
night moth climbing toward the light. He stood turning this stick with
loving hands and holding it from him for inspection.

“I am going to master you!” he exulted. “Your lines are right. The
design balances and it's graceful. If I have any trouble it will be with
the moth, and I think I can manage. I've got to decide whether to use
cecropia or polyphemus before long. Really, on a walnut, and in
the woods, it should be a luna, according to the eternal fitness of
things----but I'm afraid of the trailers. They turn over and half curl
and I believe I had better not tackle them for a start. I'll use the
easiest to begin on, and if I succeed I'll duplicate the pattern and try
a luna then. The beauties!”

The Harvester selected a knife from the box and began carving the stick
slowly and carefully. His brain was busy, for presently he glanced at
the floor.

“She'd object to that!” he said emphatically. “A man could no more sit
and work where he pleased than he could fly. At least I know mother
never would have it, and she was no nagger, either. What a mother she
was! If one only could stop the lonely feeling that will creep in, and
the aching hunger born with the body, for a mate; if a fellow only
could stop it with a woman like mother! How she revelled in sunshine and
beauty! How she loved earth and air! How she went straight to the marrow
of the finest line in the best book I could bring from the library! How
clean and true she was and how unyielding! I can hear her now, holding
me with her last breath to my promise. If I could marry a girl like
mother----great Caesar! You'd see me buying an automobile to make the
run to the county clerk. Wouldn't that be great! Think of coming in from
a long, difficult day, to find a hot supper, and a girl such as she must
have been, waiting for me! Bel, if I thought there was a woman similar
to her in all the world, and I had even the ghost of a chance to win
her, I'd call you in and forgive you. But I know the girls of to-day. I
pass them on the roads, on the streets, see them in the cafe's, stores,
and at the library. Why even the nurses at the hospital, for all the
gravity of their positions, are a giggling, silly lot; and they never
know that the only time they look and act presentably to me is when they
stop their chatter, put on their uniforms, and go to work. Some of them
are pretty, then. There's a little blue-eyed one, but all she needs is
feathers to make her a 'ha! ha! bird.' Drat that dog!”

The Harvester took the candlestick and the box of knives, opened the
door, and returned to the stoop. Belshazzar arose, pleading in his eyes,
and cautiously advanced a few steps. The man bent over his work and paid
not the slightest heed, so the discouraged dog sank to earth and fixedly
watched the unresponsive master. The carving of the candlestick went
on steadily. Occasionally the Harvester lifted his head and repeatedly
sucked his lungs full of air. Sometimes for an instant he scanned the
surface of the lake for signs of breaking fish or splash of migrant
water bird. Again his gaze wandered up the steep hill, crowned with
giant trees, whose swelling buds he could see and smell. Straight before
him lay a low marsh, through which the little creek that gurgled and
tumbled down hill curved, crossed the drive some distance below, and
entered the lake of Lost Loons.

While the trees were bare, and when the air was clear as now, he could
see the spires of Onabasha, five miles away, intervening cultivated
fields, stretches of wood, the long black line of the railway, and
the swampy bottom lands gradually rising to the culmination of the
tree-crowned summit above him. His cocks were crowing warlike challenges
to rivals on neighbouring farms. His hens were carolling their spring
egg-song. In the barn yard ganders were screaming stridently. Over the
lake and the cabin, with clapping snowy wings, his white doves circled
in a last joy-flight before seeking their cotes in the stable loft. As
the light grew fainter, the Harvester worked slower. Often he leaned
against the casing, and closed his eyes to rest them. Sometimes he
whistled snatches of old songs to which his mother had cradled him, and
again bits of opera and popular music he had heard on the streets of
Onabasha. As he worked, the sun went down and a half moon appeared above
the wood across the lake. Once it seemed as if it were a silver bowl set
on the branch of a giant oak; higher, it rested a tilted crescent on the
rim of a cloud.

The dog waited until he could endure it no longer, and straightening
from his crouching position, he took a few velvet steps forward, making
faint, whining sounds in his throat. When the man neither turned his
head nor gave him a glance, Belshazzar sank to earth again, satisfied
for the moment with being a little closer. Across Loon Lake came the
wavering voice of a night love song. The Harvester remembered that as a
boy he had shrunk from those notes until his mother explained that they
were made by a little brown owl asking for a mate to come and live
in his hollow tree. Now he rather liked the sound. It was eloquent of
earnest pleading. With the lonely bird on one side, and the reproachful
dog eyes on the other, the man grinned rather foolishly.

Between two fires, he thought. If that dog ever catches my eye he will
come tearing as a cyclone, and I would not kick him again for a hundred
dollars. First time I ever struck him, and didn't intend to then. So
blame mad and disappointed my foot just shot out before I knew it. There
he lies half dead to make up, but I'm blest if I forgive him in a hurry.
And there is that insane little owl screeching for a mate. If I'd start
out making sounds like that, all the girls would line up and compete for
possession of my happy home.

The Harvester laughed and at the sound Belshazzar took courage and
advanced five steps before he sank belly to earth again. The owl
continued its song. The Harvester imitated the cry and at once it
responded. He called again and leaned back waiting. The notes came
closer. The Harvester cried once more and peered across the lake,
watching for the shadow of silent wings. The moon was high above the
trees now, the knife dropped in the box, the long fingers closed around
the stick, the head rested against the casing, and the man intoned
the cry with all his skill, and then watched and waited. He had been
straining his eyes over the carving until they were tired, and when
he watched for the bird the moonlight tried them; for it touched the
lightly rippling waves of the lake in a line of yellow light that
stretched straight across the water from the opposite bank, directly to
the gravel bed below, where lay the bathing pool. It made a path of gold
that wavered and shimmered as the water moved gently, but it appeared
sufficiently material to resemble a bridge spanning the lake.

“Seems as if I could walk it,” muttered the Harvester.

The owl cried again and the man intently watched the opposite bank. He
could not see the bird, but in the deep wood where he thought it might
be he began to discern a misty, moving shimmer of white. Marvelling, he
watched closer. So slowly he could not detect motion it advanced, rising
in height and taking shape.

“Do I end this day by seeing a ghost?” he queried.

He gazed intently and saw that a white figure really moved in the woods
of the opposite bank.

“Must be some boys playing fool pranks!” exclaimed the Harvester.

He watched fixedly with interested face, and then amazement wiped
out all other expression and he sat motionless, breathless, looking,
intently looking. For the white object came straight toward the water
and at the very edge unhesitatingly stepped upon the bridge of gold and
lightly, easily advanced in his direction. The man waited. On came
the figure and as it drew closer he could see that it was a very tall,
extremely slender woman, wrapped in soft robes of white. She stepped
along the slender line of the gold bridge with grace unequalled.

From the water arose a shining mist, and behind the advancing figure
a wall of light outlined and rimmed her in a setting of gold. As she
neared the shore the Harvester's blood began to race in his veins and
his lips parted in wonder. First she was like a slender birch trunk,
then she resembled a wild lily, and soon she was close enough to prove
that she was young and very lovely. Heavy braids of dark hair rested
on her head as a coronet. Her forehead was low and white. Her eyes were
wide-open wells of darkness, her rounded cheeks faintly pink, and her
red lips smiling invitation. Her throat was long, very white, and the
hands that caught up the fleecy robe around her were rose-coloured and
slender. In a panic the Harvester saw that the trailing robe swept the
undulant gold water, but was not wet; the feet that alternately showed
as she advanced were not purple with cold, but warm with a pink glow.

She was coming straight toward him, wonderful, alluring, lovely beyond
any woman the Harvester ever had seen. Straightway the fountains of
twenty-six years' repression overflowed in the breast of the man and all
his being ran toward her in a wave of desire. On she came, and now her
tender feet were on the white gravel. When he could see clearly she was
even more beautiful than she had appeared at a distance. He opened his
lips, but no sound came. He struggled to rise, but his legs would not
bear his weight. Helpless, he sank against the casing. The girl walked
to his feet, bent, placed a hand on each of his shoulders, and smiled
into his eyes. He could scent the flower-like odour of her body and
wrapping, even her hair. He struggled frantically to speak to her as she
leaned closer, yet closer, and softly but firmly laid lips of pulsing
sweetness on his in a deliberate kiss.

The Harvester was on his feet now. Belshazzar shrank into the shadows.

“Come back!” cried the man. “Come back! For the love of mercy, where are
you?”

He ran stumblingly toward the lake. The bridge of gold was there, the
little owl cried lonesomely; and did he see or did he only dream he saw
a mist of white vanishing in the opposite wood?

His breath came between dry lips, and he circled the cabin searching
eagerly, but he could find nothing, hear nothing, save the dog at his
heels. He hurried to the stoop and stood gazing at the molten path of
moonlight. One minute he was half frozen, the next a rosy glow enfolded
him. Slowly he lifted a hand and touched his lips. Then he raised his
eyes from the water and swept the sky in a penetrant gaze.

“My gracious Heavenly Father,” said the Harvester reverently. “Would it
be like that?”



CHAPTER II. THE EFFECT OF A DREAM

Fully convinced at last that he had been dreaming, the Harvester picked
up his knives and candlestick and entered the cabin. He placed them on a
shelf and turned away, but after a second's hesitation he closed the
box and arranged the sticks neatly. Then he set the room in order and
carefully swept the floor. As he replaced the broom he thought for an
instant, then opened the door and whistled softly. Belshazzar came at a
rush. The Harvester pushed the plate of food toward the hungry dog and
he ate greedily. The man returned to the front room and closed the door.

He stood a long time before his shelf of books, at last selected a
volume of “Medicinal Plants” and settled to study. His supper finished,
Belshazzar came scratching and whining at the door. Several times the
man lifted his head and glanced in that direction, but he only returned
to his book and read again. Tired and sleepy, at last, he placed the
volume on the shelf, went to a closet for a pair of bath towels, and
hung them across a chair. Then he undressed, opened the door, and ran
for the lake. He plunged with a splash and swam vigorously for a few
minutes, his white body growing pink under the sting of the chilled
water. Over and over he scanned the golden bridge to the moon, and stood
an instant dripping on the gravel of the landing to make sure that no
dream woman was crossing the wavering floor! He rubbed to a glow and
turned back the covers of his bed. The door and window stood wide.
Before he lay down, the Harvester paused in arrested motion a second,
then stepped to the kitchen door and lifted the latch.

As the man drew the covers over him, the dog's nose began making
an opening, and a little later he quietly walked into the room. The
Harvester rested, facing the lake. The dog sniffed at his shoulder, but
the man was rigid. Then the click of nails could be heard on the floor
as Belshazzar went to the opposite side. At his accustomed place he
paused and set one foot on the bed. There was not a sound, so he lifted
the other. Then one at a time he drew up his hind feet and crouched
as he had on the gravel. The man lay watching the bright bridge. The
moonlight entered the window and flooded the room. The strong lines on
the weather-beaten face of the Harvester were mellowed in the light, and
he appeared young and good to see. His lithe figure stretched the length
of the bed, his hair appeared almost white, and his face, touched by the
glorifying light of the moon, was a study.

One instant his countenance was swept with ultimate scorn; then
gradually that would fade and the lines soften, until his lips curved in
child-like appeal and his eyes were filled with pleading. Several
times he lifted a hand and gently touched his lips, as if a kiss were a
material thing and would leave tangible evidence of having been given.
After a long time his eyes closed and he scarcely was unconscious before
Belshazzar's cold nose touched the outstretched hand and the Harvester
lifted and laid it on the dog's head.

“Forgive me, Bel,” he muttered. “I never did that. I wouldn't have hurt
you for anything. It happened before I had time to think.”

They both fell asleep. The clear-cut lines of manly strength on the face
of the Harvester were touched to tender beauty. He lay smiling softly.
Far in the night he realized the frost-chill and divided the coverlet
with the happy Belshazzar.

The golden dream never came again. There was no need. It had done its
perfect work. The Harvester awoke the next morning a different man. His
face was youthful and alive with alert anticipation. He began his work
with eager impetuosity, whistling and singing the while, and he found
time to play with and talk to Belshazzar, until that glad beast almost
wagged off his tail in delight. They breakfasted together and arranged
the rooms with unusual care.

“You see,” explained the Harvester to the dog, “we must walk neatly
after this. Maybe there is such a thing as fate. Possibly your answer
was right. There might be a girl in the world for me. I don't expect it,
but there is a possibility that she may find us before we locate
her. Anyway, we should work and be ready. All the old stock in the
store-house goes out as soon as we can cart it. A new cabin shall rise
as fast as we can build it. There must be a basement and furnace, too.
Dream women don't have cold feet, but if there is a girl living like
that, and she is coming to us or waiting for us to come to her, we must
have a comfortable home to offer. There should be a bathroom, too. She
couldn't dip in the lake as we do. And until we build the new house we
must keep the old one clean, just on the chance of her happening on us.
She might be visiting some of the neighbours or come from town with some
one or I might see her on the street or at the library or hospital or in
some of the stores. For the love of mercy, help me watch for her, Bel!
The half of my kingdom if you will point her for me!”

The Harvester worked as he talked. He set the rooms in order, put away
the remains of breakfast, and started to the stable. He turned back and
stood for a long time, scanning the face in the kitchen mirror. Once he
went to the door, then he hesitated, and finally took out his shaving
set and used it carefully and washed vigorously. He pulled his shirt
together at the throat, and hunting among his clothing, found an old
red tie that he knotted around his neck. This so changed his every-day
appearance that he felt wonderfully dressed and whistled gaily on his
way to the barn. There he confided in the old gray mare as he curried
and harnessed her to the spring wagon.

“Hardly know me, do you, Betsy?” he inquired. “Well, I'll explain. Our
friend Bel, here, has doomed me to go courting this year. Wouldn't that
durnfound you? I was mad as hornets at first, but since I've slept on
the idea, I rather like it. Maybe we are too lonely and dull. Perhaps
the right woman would make life a very different matter. Last night
I saw her, Betsy, and between us, I can't tell even you. She was the
loveliest, sweetest girl on earth, and that is all I can say. We are
going to watch for her to-day, and every trip we make, until we find
her, if it requires a hundred years. Then some glad time we are going to
locate her, and when we do, well, you just keep your eye on us, Betsy,
and you'll see how courting straight from the heart is done, even if we
lack experience.”

Intoxicated with new and delightful sensations his tongue worked faster
than his hands.

“I don't mind telling you, old faithful, that I am in love this
morning,” he said. “In love heels over, Betsy, for the first time in all
my life. If any man ever was a bigger fool than I am to-day, it would
comfort me to know about it. I am acting like an idiot, Betsy. I know
that, but I wish you could understand how I feel. Power! I am the
head-waters of Niagara! I could pluck down the stars and set them in
different places! I could twist the tail from the comet! I could twirl
the globe on my palm and topple mountains and wipe lakes from the
surface! I am a live man, Betsy. Existence is over. So don't you go at
any tricks or I might pull off your head. Betsy, if you see the tallest
girl you ever saw, and she wears a dark diadem, and has big black eyes
and a face so lovely it blinds you, why you have seen Her, and you balk,
right on the spot, and stand like the rock of Gibraltar, until you
make me see her, too. As if I wouldn't know she was coming a mile away!
There's more I could tell you, but that is my secret, and it's too
precious to talk about, even to my best friends. Bel, bring Betsy to the
store-room.”

The Harvester tossed the hitching strap to the dog and walked down the
driveway to a low structure built on the embankment beside the lake.
One end of it was a dry-house of his own construction. Here, by an
arrangement of hot water pipes, he evaporated many of the barks, roots,
seeds, and leaves he grew to supply large concerns engaged in the
manufacture of drugs. By his process crude stock was thoroughly cured,
yet did not lose in weight and colour as when dried in the sun or
outdoor shade.

So the Harvester was enabled to send his customers big packages of
brightly coloured raw material, and the few cents per pound he asked in
advance of the catalogued prices were paid eagerly. He lived alone,
and never talked of his work; so none of the harvesters of the fields
adjoining dreamed of the extent of his reaping. The idea had been his
own. He had been born in the cabin in which he now lived. His father and
grandfather were old-time hunters of skins and game. They had added to
their earnings by gathering in spring and fall the few medicinal seeds,
leaves, and barks they knew. His mother had been of different type. She
had loved and married the picturesque young hunter, and gone to live
with him on the section of land taken by his father. She found life,
real life, vastly different from her girlhood dreams, but she was one of
those changeless, unyielding women who suffer silently, but never rue a
bargain, no matter how badly they are cheated. Her only joy in life had
been her son. For him she had worked and saved unceasingly, and when he
was old enough she sent him to the city to school and kept pace with him
in the lessons he brought home at night.

Using what she knew of her husband's work as a guide, and profiting by
pamphlets published by the government, every hour of the time outside
school and in summer vacations she worked in the woods with the boy,
gathering herbs and roots to pay for his education and clothing. So
the son passed the full high-school course, and then, selecting such
branches as interested him, continued his studies alone.

From books and drug pamphlets he had learned every medicinal plant,
shrub, and tree of his vicinity, and for years roamed far afield and
through the woods collecting. After his father's death expenses grew
heavier and the boy saw that he must earn more money. His mother
frantically opposed his going to the city, so he thought out the plan
of transplanting the stuff he gathered, to the land they owned and
cultivating it there. This work was well developed when he was twenty,
but that year he lost his mother.

From that time he went on steadily enlarging his species, transplanting
trees, shrubs, vines, and medicinal herbs from such locations as he
found them to similar conditions on his land. Six years he had worked
cultivating these beds, and hunting through the woods on the river
banks, government land, the great Limberlost Swamp, and neglected
corners of earth for barks and roots. He occasionally made long trips
across the country for rapidly diminishing plants he found in the
woodland of men who did not care to bother with a few specimens,
and many big beds of profitable herbs, extinct for miles around, now
flourished on the banks of Loon Lake, in the marsh, and through the
forest rising above. To what extent and value his venture had grown, no
one save the Harvester knew. When his neighbours twitted him with
being too lazy to plow and sow, of “mooning” over books, and derisively
sneered when they spoke of him as the Harvester of the Woods or the
Medicine Man, David Langston smiled and went his way.

How lonely he had been since the death of his mother he never realized
until that morning when a new idea really had taken possession of him.
From the store-house he heaped packages of seeds, dried leaves, barks,
and roots into the wagon. But he kept a generous supply of each, for he
prided himself on being able to fill all orders that reached him. Yet
the load he took to the city was much larger than usual. As he drove
down the hill and passed the cabin he studied the location.

“The drainage is perfect,” he said to Belshazzar beside him on the seat.
“So is the situation. We get the cool breezes from the lake in summer
and the hillside warmth in winter. View down the valley can't be
surpassed. We will grub out that thicket in front, move over the
driveway, and build a couple of two-story rooms, with basement for
cellar and furnace, and a bathroom in front of the cabin and use it with
some fixing over for a dining-room and kitchen. Then we will deepen and
widen Singing Water, stick a bushel of bulbs and roots and sow a peck of
flower seeds in the marsh, plant a hedge along the drive, and straighten
the lake shore a little. I can make a beautiful wild-flower garden and
arrange so that with one season's work this will appear very well. We
will express this stuff and then select and fell some trees to-night.
Soon as the frost is out of the ground we will dig our basement and lay
the foundations. The neighbours will help me raise the logs; after that
I can finish the inside work. I've got some dried maple, cherry,
and walnut logs that would work into beautiful furniture. I haven't
forgotten the prices McLean offered me. I can use it as well as he.
Plain way the best things are built now, I believe I could make tables
and couches myself. I can see plans in the magazines at the library.
I'll take a look when I get this off. I feel strong enough to do all of
it in a few days and I am crazy to commence. But I scarcely know where
to begin. There are about fifty things I'd like to do. But to fell and
dry the trees and get the walls up come first, I believe. What do you
think, old unreliable?”

Belshazzar thought the world was a place of beauty that morning. He
sniffed the icy, odorous air and with tilted head watched the birds.
A wearied band of ducks had settled on Loon Lake to feed and rest,
for there was nothing to disturb them. Signs were numerous everywhere
prohibiting hunters from firing over the Harvester's land. Beside
the lake, down the valley, crossing the railroad, and in the farther
lowlands, the dog was a nervous quiver, as he constantly scented game
or saw birds he wanted to point. But when they neared the city, he sat
silently watching everything with alert eyes. As they reached the outer
fringe of residences the Harvester spoke to him.

“Now remember, Bel,” he said. “Point me the tallest girl you ever saw,
with a big braid of dark hair, shining black eyes, and red velvet lips,
sweeter than wild crab apple blossoms. Make a dead set! Don't allow her
to pass us. Heaven is going to begin in Medicine Woods when we find her
and prove to her that there lies her happy home.

“When we find her,” repeated the Harvester softly and exultantly. “When
we find her!”

He said it again and again, pronouncing the words with tender
modulations. Because he was chanting it in his soul, in his heart,
in his brain, with his lips, he had a hasty glance for every woman
he passed. Light hair, blue eyes, and short figures got only casual
inspection: but any tall girl with dark hair and eyes endured rather
close scrutiny that morning. He drove to the express office and
delivered his packages and then to the hospital. In the hall the
blue-eyed nurse met him and cried gaily, “Good morning, Medicine Man!”

“Ugh! I scalp pale-faces!” threatened the Harvester, but the girl was
not afraid and stood before him laughing. She might have gone her way
quite as well. She could not have differed more from the girl of the
newly begun quest. The man merely touched his wide-brimmed hat as he
walked around her and entered the office of the chief surgeon.

A slender, gray-eyed man with white hair turned from his desk, smiled
warmly, pushed a chair, and reached a welcoming hand.

“Ah good-morning, David,” he cried. “You bring the very breath of spring
with you. Are you at the maples yet?”

“Begin to-morrow,” was the answer. “I want to get all my old stock off
hands. Sugar water comes next, and then the giddy sassafras and spring
roots rush me, and after that, harvest begins full force, and all
my land is teeming. This is going to be a big year. Everything is
sufficiently advanced to be worth while. I have decided to enlarge the
buildings.”

“Store-room too small?”

“Everything!” said the Harvester comprehensively. “I am crowded
everywhere.”

The keen gray eyes bent on him searchingly.

“Ho, ho!” laughed the doctor. “'Crowded everywhere.' I had not heard of
cramped living quarters before. When did you meet her?”

“Last night,” replied the Harvester. “Her home is already in
construction. I chose seven trees as I drove here that are going to fall
before night.”

So casual was the tone the doctor was disarmed.

“I am trying your nerve remedy,” he said.

Instantly the Harvester tingled with interest.

“How does it work?” he inquired.

“Finely! Had a case that presented just the symptoms you mentioned.
High-school girl broken down from trying to lead her classes, lead her
fraternity, lead her parents, lead society----the Lord only knows what
else. Gone all to pieces! Pretty a case of nervous prostration as you
ever saw in a person of fifty. I began on fractional doses with it, and
at last got her where she can rest. It did precisely what you claimed it
would, David.”

“Good!” cried the Harvester. “Good! I hoped it would be effective.
Thank you for the test. It will give me confidence when I go before the
chemists with it. I've got a couple more compounds I wish you would try
when you have safe cases where you can do no harm.”

“You are cautious for a young man, son!”

“The woods do that. You not only discover miracles and marvels in them,
you not only trace evolution and the origin of species, but you get
the greatest lessons taught in all the world ground into you early and
alone----courage, caution, and patience.”

“Those are the rocks on which men are stranded as a rule. You think you
can breast them, David?”

The Harvester laughed.

“Aside from breaking a certain promise mother rooted in the blood and
bones of me, if I am afraid of anything, I don't know it. You don't
often see me going head-long, do you? As to patience! Ten years ago I
began removing every tree, bush, vine, and plant of medicinal value from
the woods around to my land; I set and sowed acres in ginseng, knowing
I must nurse, tend, and cultivate seven years. If my neighbours had
understood what I was attempting, what do you think they would have
said? Cranky and lazy would have become adjectives too mild. Lunatic
would have expressed it better. That's close the general opinion,
anyway. Because I will not fell my trees, and the woods hide the work I
do, it is generally conceded that I spend my time in the sun reading
a book. I do, as often as I have an opportunity. But the point is that
this fall, when I harvest that ginseng bed, I will clear more money than
my stiffest detractor ever saw at one time. I'll wager my bank account
won't compare so unfavourably with the best of them now. I did well
this morning. Yes, I'll admit this much: I am reasonably cautious, I'm
a pattern for patience, and my courage never has failed me yet, anyway.
But I must rap on wood; for that boast is a sign that I probably will
meet my Jonah soon.”

“David, you are a man after my own heart,” said the doctor. “I love you
more than any other friend I have I wouldn't see a hair of your head
changed for the world. Now I've got to hurry to my operation. Remain as
long as you please if there is anything that interests you; but don't
let the giggling little nurse that always haunts the hall when you come
make any impression. She is not up to your standard.”

“Don't!” said the Harvester. “I've learned one of the big lessons of
life since last I saw you, Doc. I have no standard. There is just one
woman in all the world for me, and when I find her I will know her, and
I will be happy for even a glance; as for that talk of standards, I will
be only too glad to take her as she is.”

“David! I supposed what you said about enlarged buildings was nonsense
or applied to store-rooms.”

“Go to your operation!”

“David, if you send me in suspense, I may operate on the wrong man. What
has happened?”

“Nothing!” said the Harvester. “Nothing!”

“David, it is not like you to evade. What happened?”

“Nothing! On my word! I merely saw a vision and dreamed a dream.”

“You! A rank materialist! Saw a vision and dreamed a dream! And you
call it nothing. Worst thing that could happen! Whenever a man of
common-sense goes to seeing things that don't exist, and dreaming
dreams, why look out! What did you see? What did you dream?”

“You woman!” laughed the Harvester. “Talk about curiosity! I'd have to
be a poet to describe my vision, and the dream was strictly private.
I couldn't tell it, not for any price you could mention. Go to your
operation.”

The doctor paused on the threshold.

“You can't fool me,” he said. “I can diagnose you all right. You are
poet enough, but the vision was sacred; and when a man won't tell, it's
always and forever a woman. I know all now I ever will, because I know
you, David. A man with a loose mouth and a low mind drags the women of
his acquaintance through whatever mire he sinks in; but you couldn't
tell, David, not even about a dream woman. Come again soon! You are
my elixir of life, lad! I revel in the atmosphere you bring. Wish me
success now, I am going to a difficult, delicate operation.”

“I do!” cried the Harvester heartily. “I do! But you can't fail. You
never have and that proves you cannot! Good-bye!”

Down the street went the Harvester, passing over city pave with his
free, swinging stride, his head high, his face flushed with vivid
outdoor tints, going somewhere to do something worth while, the
impression always left behind him. Men envied his robust appearance and
women looked twice, always twice, and sometimes oftener if there was any
opportunity; but twice at least was the rule. He left a little roll of
bills at the bank and started toward the library. When he entered the
reading room an attendant with an eager smile hastily came toward him.

“What will you have this morning, Mr. Langston?” she asked in the voice
of one who would render willing service.

“Not the big books to-day,” laughed the Harvester. “I've only a short
time. I'll glance through the magazines.”

He selected several from a table and going to a corner settled with them
and for two hours was deeply engrossed. He took an envelope from his
pocket, traced lines, and read intently. He studied the placing of
rooms, the construction of furniture, and all attractive ideas were
noted. When at last he arose the attendant went to replace the magazines
on the table. They had been opened widely, and as she turned the
leaves they naturally fell apart at the plans for houses or articles of
furniture.

The Harvester slowly went down the street. Before every furniture store
he paused and studied the designs displayed in the windows. Then he
untied Betsy and drove to a lumber mill on the outskirts of the city and
made arrangements to have some freshly felled logs of black walnut
and curly maple sawed into different sizes and put through a course in
drying.

He drove back to Medicine Woods whistling, singing, and talking to
Belshazzar beside him. He ate a hasty lunch and at three o'clock was in
the forest, blazing and felling slender, straight-trunked oak and ash of
the desired proportions.



CHAPTER III. HARVESTING THE FOREST


The forest is never so wonderful as when spring wrestles with winter for
supremacy. While the earth is yet ice bound, while snows occasionally
fly, spring breathes her warmer breath of approach, and all nature
responds. Sunny knolls, embankments, and cleared spaces become bare,
while shadow spots and sheltered nooks remain white. This perfumes the
icy air with a warmer breath of melting snow. The sap rises in the trees
and bushes, sets buds swelling, and they distil a faint, intangible
odour. Deep layers of dead leaves cover the frozen earth, and the sun
shining on them raises a steamy vapour unlike anything else in nature. A
different scent rises from earth where the sun strikes it. Lichen faces
take on the brightest colours they ever wear, and rough, coarse mosses
emerge in rank growth from their cover of snow and add another perfume
to mellowing air. This combination has breathed a strange intoxication
into the breast of mankind in all ages, and bird and animal life prove
by their actions that it makes the same appeal to them.

Crows caw supremacy from tall trees; flickers, drunk on the wine of
nature, flash their yellow-lined wings and red crowns among trees in a
search for suitable building places; nut-hatches run head foremost down
rough trunks, spying out larvae and early emerging insects; titmice
chatter; the bold, clear whistle of the cardinal sounds never so gaily;
and song sparrows pipe from every wayside shrub and fence post. Coons
and opossums stir in their dens, musk-rat and ground-hog inspect the
weather, while squirrels race along branches and bound from tree to tree
like winged folk.

All of them could have outlined the holdings of the Harvester almost
as well as any surveyor. They understood where the bang of guns and the
snap of traps menaced life. Best of all, they knew where cracked nuts,
handfuls of wheat, oats, and crumbs were scattered on the ground, and
where suet bones dangled from bushes. Here, too, the last sheaf from the
small wheat field at the foot of the hill was stoutly fixed on a high
pole, so that the grain was free to all feathered visitors.

When the Harvester hitched Betsy, loaded his spiles and sap buckets
into the wagon, and started to the woods to gather the offering the wet
maples were pouring down their swelling sides, almost his entire family
came to see him. They knew who fed and passed every day among them, and
so were unafraid.

After the familiarity of a long, cold winter, when it had been easier
to pick up scattered food than to search for it, they became so friendly
with the man, the dog, and the gray horse that they hastily snatched
the food offered at the barn and then followed through the woods. The
Harvester always was particular to wear large pockets, for it was good
company to have living creatures flocking after him, trusting to his
bounty. Ajax, a shimmering wonder of gorgeous feathers, sunned on the
ridge pole of the old log stable, preened, spread his train, and uttered
the peacock cry of defiance, to exercise his voice or to express his
emotions at all times. But at feeding hour he descended to the park and
snatched bites from the biggest turkey cocks and ganders and reigned in
power absolute over ducks, guineas, and chickens. Then he followed to
the barn and tried to frighten crows and jays, and the gentle white
doves under the eaves.

The Harvester walked through deep leaves and snow covering the road that
only a forester could have distinguished. Over his shoulder he carried
a mattock, and in the wagon were his clippers and an ax. Behind him came
Betsy drawing the sap buckets and big evaporating kettles. Through the
wood ranged Belshazzar, the craziest dog in all creation. He always went
wild at sap time. Here was none of the monotony of trapping for skins
around the lake. This marked the first full day in the woods for
the season. He ranged as he pleased and came for a pat or a look of
confidence when he grew lonely, while the Harvester worked.

At camp the man unhitched Betsy and tied her to the wagon and for
several hours distributed buckets. Then he hung the kettles and gathered
wood for the fire. At noon he returned to the cabin for lunch and
brought back a load of empty syrup cans, and barrels in which to collect
the sap. While the buckets filled at the dripping trees, he dug roots in
the sassafras thicket to fill orders and supply the demand of Onabasha
for tea. Several times he stopped to cut an especially fine tree.

“You know I hate to kill you,” he apologized to the first one he felled.
“But it certainly must be legitimate for a man to take enough of his
trees to build a home. And no other house is possible for a creature of
the woods but a cabin, is there? The birds use of the material they find
here; surely I have the right to do the same. Seems as if nothing else
would serve, at least for me. I was born and reared here, I've always
loved you; of course, I can't use anything else for my home.”

He swung the ax and the chips flew as he worked on a straight half-grown
oak. After a time he paused an instant and rested, and as he did so he
looked speculatively at his work.

“I wonder where she is to-day,” he said. “I wonder what she is going to
think of a log cabin in the woods. Maybe she has been reared in the
city and is afraid of a forest. She may not like houses made of logs.
Possibly she won't want to marry a Medicine Man. She may dislike the
man, not to mention his occupation. She may think it coarse and common
to work out of doors with your hands, although I'd have to argue there
is a little brain in the combination. I must figure out all these
things. But there is one on the lady: She should have settled these
points before she became quite so familiar. I have that for a foundation
anyway, so I'll go on cutting wood, and the remainder will be up to her
when I find her. When I find her,” repeated the Harvester slowly. “But I
am not going to locate her very soon monkeying around in these woods. I
should be out where people are, looking for her right now.”

He chopped steadily until the tree crashed over, and then, noticing a
rapidly filling bucket, he struck the ax in the wood and began gathering
sap. When he had made the round, he drove to the camp, filled the
kettles, and lighted the fire. While it started he cut and scraped
sassafras roots, and made clippings of tag alder, spice brush and white
willow into big bundles that were ready to have the bark removed during
the night watch, and then cured in the dry-house.

He went home at evening to feed the poultry and replenish the
ever-burning fire of the engine and to keep the cabin warm enough that
food would not freeze. With an oilcloth and blankets he returned to camp
and throughout the night tended the buckets and boiling sap, and worked
or dozed by the fire between times. Toward the end of boiling, when the
sap was becoming thick, it had to be watched with especial care so it
would not scorch. But when the kettles were freshly filled the Harvester
sat beside them and carefully split tender twigs of willow and slipped
off the bark ready to be spread on the trays.

“You are a good tonic,” he mused as he worked, “and you go into some of
the medicine for rheumatism. If she ever has it we will give her some
of you, and then she will be all right again. Strange that I should be
preparing medicinal bark by the sugar camp fire, but I have to make this
hay, not while the sun shines, but when the bark is loose, while the sap
is rising. Wonder who will use this. Depends largely on where I sell it.
Anyway, I hope it will take the pain out of some poor body. Prices so
low now, not worth gathering unless I can kill time on it while waiting
for something else. Never got over seven cents a pound for the best I
ever sold, and it takes a heap of these little quills to make a pound
when they are dry. That's all of you----about twenty-five cents' worth.
But even that is better than doing nothing while I wait, and some one
has to keep the doctors supplied with salicin and tannin, so, if I do,
other folks needn't bother.”

He arose and poured more sap into the kettles as it boiled away and
replenished the fire. He nibbled a twig when he began on the spice
brush. As he sat on the piled wood, and bent over his work he was
an attractive figure. His face shone with health and was bright with
anticipation. While he split the tender bark and slipped out the wood he
spoke his thoughts slowly:

“The five cents a pound I'll get for you is even less, but I love the
fragrance and taste. You don't peel so easy as the willow, but I like
to prepare you better, because you will make some miserable little sick
child well or you may cool some one's fevered blood. If ever she has a
fever, I hope she will take medicine made from my bark, because it will
be strong and pure. I've half a notion to set some one else gathering
the stuff and tending the plants and spend my time in the little
laboratory compounding different combinations. I don't see what bigger
thing a man can do than to combine pure, clean, unadulterated roots and
barks into medicines that will cool fevers, stop chills, and purify bad
blood. The doctors may be all right, but what are they going to do if we
men behind the prescription cases don't supply them with unadulterated
drugs. Answer me that, Mr. Sapsucker. Doc says I've done mighty well so
far as I have gone. I can't think of a thing on earth I'd rather do, and
there's money no end in it. I could get too rich for comfort in short
order. I wouldn't be too wealthy to live just the way I do for any
consideration. I don't know about her, though. She is lovely, and
handsome women usually want beautiful clothing, and a quantity of things
that cost no end of money. I may need all I can get, for her. One never
can tell.”

He arose to stir the sap and pour more from the barrels to the kettles
before he began on the tag alder he had gathered.

“If it is all the same to you, I'll just keep on chewing spice brush
while I work,” he muttered. “You are entirely too much of an astringent
to suit my taste and you bring a cent less a pound. But you are thicker
and dry heavier, and you grow in any quantity around the lake and on the
marshy places, so I'll make the size of the bundle atone for the price.
If I peel you while I wait on the sap I'm that much ahead. I can spread
you on drying trays in a few seconds and there you are. Howl your head
off, Bel, I don't care what you have found. I wouldn't shoot anything
to-day, unless the cupboard was bare and I was starvation hungry. In
that case I think a man comes first, and I'd kill a squirrel or quail
in season, but blest if I'd butcher a lot or do it often. Vegetables
and bread are better anyway. You peel easier even than the willow. What
jolly whistles father used to make!

“There was about twenty cents' worth of spice, and I'll easy raise it to
a dollar on this. I'll get a hundred gallons of syrup in the coming two
weeks and it will bring one fifty if I boil and strain it carefully and
can guarantee it contains no hickory bark and brown sugar. And it won't!
Straight for me or not at all. Pure is the word at Medicine Woods; syrup
or drugs it's the same thing. Between times I can fell every tree I'll
need for the new cabin, and average a dollar a day besides on spice,
alder, and willow, and twice that for sassafras for the Onabasha
markets; not to mention the quantities I can dry this year. Aside from
spring tea, they seem to use it for everything. I never yet have had
enough. It goes into half the tonics, anodyne, and stimulants; also soap
and candy. I see where I grow rich in spite of myself, and also where my
harvest is going to spoil before I can garner it, if I don't step
lively and double even more than I am now. Where the cabin is to come
in----well it must come if everything else goes.

“The roots can wait and I'll dig them next year and get more and larger
pieces. I won't really lose anything, and if she should come before I
am ready to start to find her, why then I'll have her home prepared.
How long before you begin your house, old fire-fly?” he inquired of a
flaming cardinal tilting on a twig.

He arose to make the round of the sap buckets again, then resumed his
work peeling bark, and so the time passed. In the following ten days he
collected and boiled enough sap to make more syrup than he had expected.
His earliest spring store of medicinal twigs, that were peeled to dry in
quills, were all collected and on the trays; he had digged several wagon
loads of sassafras and felled all the logs of stout, slender oak he
would require for his walls. Choice timber he had been curing for
candlestick material he hauled to the saw-mills to have cut properly,
for the thought of trying his hand at tables and chairs had taken
possession of him. He was sure he could make furniture that would appear
quite as well as the mission pieces he admired on display in the store
windows of the city. To him, chairs and tables made from trees that grew
on land that had belonged for three generations to his ancestors, trees
among which he had grown, played, and worked, trees that were so much
his friends that he carefully explained the situation to them before
using an ax or saw, trees that he had cut, cured, and fashioned into
designs of his own, would make vastly more valuable furnishings in his
home than anything that could be purchased in the city.

As he drove back and forth he watched constantly for her. He was working
so desperately, planning far ahead, doubling and trebling tasks, trying
to do everything his profession demanded in season, and to prepare
timber and make plans for the new cabin, as well as to start a pair
of candlesticks of marvellous design for her, that night was one
long, unbroken sleep of the thoroughly tired man, but day had become a
delightful dream.

He fed the chickens to produce eggs for her. He gathered barks and
sluiced roots on the raft in the lake, for her. He grubbed the spice
thicket before the door and moved it into the woods to make space for a
lawn, for her. His eyes were wide open for every woven case and dangling
cocoon of the big night moths that propagated around him, for her. Every
night when he left the woods from one to a dozen cocoons, that he had
detected with remarkable ease while the trees were bare, were stuck
in his hat band. As he arranged them in a cool, dry place he talked to
them.

“Of course I know you are valuable and there are collectors who would
pay well for you, but I think not. You are the prettiest thing God made
that I ever saw, and those of you that home with me have no price on
your wings. You are much safer here than among the crows and jays of the
woods. I am gathering you to protect you, and to show to her. If I don't
find her by June, you may go scot free. All I want is the best pattern
I can get from some of you for candlestick designs. Of everything in the
whole world a candlestick should be made of wood. It should be carved
by hand, and of all ornamentations on earth the moth that flies to the
night light is the most appropriate. Owls are not so bad. They are of
the night, and they fly to light, too, but they are so old. Nobody I
ever have known used a moth. They missed the best when they neglected
them. I'll make her sticks over an original pattern; I'll twine
nightshade vines, with flowers and berries around them, and put a
trailed luna on one, and what is the next prettiest for the other? I'll
think well before if decide. Maybe she'll come by the time I get to
carving and tell me what she likes. That would beat my taste or guessing
a mile.”

He carefully arranged the twigs bearing cocoons in a big, wire-covered
box to protect them from the depredations of nibbling mice and the
bolder attacks of the saucy ground squirrels that stored nuts in his
loft and took possession of the attic until their scampering sometimes
awoke him in the night.

Every trip he made to the city he stopped at the library to examine
plans of buildings and furniture and to make notes. The oak he had
hauled was being hewed into shape by a neighbour who knew how, and every
wagon that carried a log to the city to be dressed at the mill brought
back timber for side walls, joists, and rafters. Night after night he
sat late poring over his plans for the new rooms, above all for her
chamber. With poised pencil he wavered over where to put the closet and
entrance to her bath. He figured on how wide to make her bed and where
it should stand. He remembered her dressing table in placing windows
and a space for a chest of drawers. In fact there was nothing the active
mind of the Harvester did not busy itself with in those days that might
make a woman a comfortable home. Every thought emanated from impulses
evolved in his life in the woods, and each was executed with mighty
tenderness.

A killdeer sweeping the lake close two o'clock one morning awakened him.
He had planned to close the sugar camp for the season that day, but when
he heard the notes of the loved bird he wondered if that would not be a
good time to stake out the foundations and begin digging. There was yet
ice in the ground, but the hillside was rapidly thawing, and although
the work would be easier later, so eager was the Harvester to have walls
up and a roof over that he decided to commence.

But when morning came and he and Belshazzar breakfasted and fed Betsy
and the stock, he concluded to return to his first plan and close the
camp. All the sap collected that day went into the vinegar barrel. He
loaded the kettles, buckets, and spiles and stopped at the spice thicket
to cut a bale of twigs as he passed. He carried one load to the wagon
and returned for another. Down wind on swift wing came a bird and
entered the bushes. Motionless the Harvester peered at it. A mourning
dove had returned to him through snow, skifting over cold earth. It
settled on a limb and began dressing its plumage. At that instant a
wavering, “Coo coo a'gh coo,” broke in sobbing notes from the deep wood.
Without paying the slightest heed, the dove finished a wing, ruffled
and settled her feathers, and opened her bill in a human-like yawn. The
Harvester smiled. The notes swelled closer in renewed pleading. The cry
was beyond doubt a courting male and this an indifferent female.
Her beady eyes snapped, her head turned coquettishly, a picture of
self-possession, she hid among the dense twigs of the spice thicket.
Around the outside circled the pleading male.

With shining eyes the Harvester watched. These were of the things
that made life in the woods most worth while. More insistent grew the
wavering notes of the lover. More indifferent became the beloved. She
was superb in her poise as she amused herself in hiding. A perfect burst
of confused, sobbing notes broke on the air. Then away in the deep wood
a softly-wavering, half-questioning “Coo-ah!” answered them. Amazement
flashed into the eyes of the Harvester, but his face was not nearly so
expressive as that of the bird. She lifted a bewildered head and grew
rigid in an attitude of tense listening. There was a pause. In quicker
measure and crowding notes the male called again. Instantly the soft
“Coo!” wavered in answer. The surprised little hen bird of the thicket
hopped straight up and settled on her perch again, her dark eyes
indignant as she uttered a short “Coo!” The muscles of the Harvester's
chest were beginning to twitch and quiver. More intense grew the notes
of the pleading male. Softly seductive came the reply. The clapping
of his wings could be heard as he flew in search of the charmer. “A'gh
coo!” cried the deserted female as she tilted off the branch and tore
through the thicket in pursuit, with wings hastened by fright at the
ringing laugh of the Harvester.

“Not so indifferent after all, Bel,” he said to the dog standing in
stiff point beside him. “That was all 'pretend!' But she waited just a
trifle too long. Now she will have to fight it out with a rival. Good
thing if some of the flirtatious women could have seen that. Help them
to learn their own minds sooner.”

He laughed as he heaped the twigs on top of the wagon and started down
the hill chuckling. Belshazzar followed, leading Betsy straight in the
middle of the road by the hitching strap. A few yards ahead the man
stopped suddenly with lifted hand. The dog and horse stood motionless.
A dove flashed across the road and settled in sight on a limb. Almost
simultaneously another perched beside it, and they locked bills in a
long caress, utterly heedless of a plaintive “Coo” in the deep wood.

“Settled!” said the Harvester. “Jupiter! I wish my troubles were that
nearly finished! Wish I knew where she is and how to find my way to her
lips! Wonder if she will come when I call her. What if I should
find her, and she would have everything on earth, other lovers, and
indifference worse than Madam Dove's for me. Talk about bitterness! Well
I'd have the dream left anyway. And there are always two sides. There is
just a possibility that she may be poor and overworked, sick and tired,
and wondering why I don't come. Possibly she had a dream, too, and she
wishes I would hurry. Dear Lord!”

The Harvester began to perspire as he strode down the hill. He scarcely
waited to hang the harness properly. He did not stop to unload the wagon
until night, but went after an ax and a board that he split into pegs.
Then he took a ball of twine, a measuring line, and began laying out his
foundation, when the hard earth would scarcely hold the stakes he drove
into it. When he found he only would waste time in digging he put away
the neatly washed kettles, peeled the spice brush, spread it to dry, and
prepared his dinner. After that he began hauling stone and cement for
his basement floor and foundation walls. Occasionally he helped at
hewing logs when the old man paused to rest. That afternoon the first
robin of the season hailed him in passing.

“Hello!” cried the Harvester. “You don't mean to tell me that you have
beaten the larks! You really have! Well since I see it, I must believe,
but you are early. Come around to the back door if crumbs or wheat will
do or if you can make out on suet and meat bones! We are good and ready
for you. Where is your mate? For any sake, don't tell me you don't know.
One case of that kind at Medicine Woods is enough. Say you came ahead
to see if it is too cold or to select a home and get ready for her. Say
anything on earth except that you love her, and want her until your body
is one quivering ache, and you don't know where she is.”



CHAPTER IV. A COMMISSION FOR THE SOUTH WIND

The next morning the larks trailed ecstasy all over the valley, the
following day cuckoos were calling in the thickets, a warm wind swept
from the south and set swollen buds bursting, while the sun shone,
causing the Harvester to rejoice. Betsy's white coat was splashed with
the mud of the valley road; the feet of Belshazzar left tracks over
lumber piles; and the Harvester removed his muck-covered shoes at the
door and wore slippers inside. The skunk cabbage appeared around the
edge of the forest, rank mullein and thistles lay over the fields in
big circles of green, and even plants of delicate growth were thrusting
their heads through mellowing earth and dead leaves, to reach light and
air.

Then the Harvester took his mattock and began to dig. His level best
fell so far short of what he felt capable of doing and desired to
accomplish that the following day he put two more men on the job. Then
the earth did fly, and so soon as the required space was excavated the
walls were lined with stone and a smooth basement floor was made of
cement. The night the new home stood, a skeleton of joists and rafters,
gleaming whitely on the banks of Loon Lake, the Harvester went to the
bridge crossing Singing Water and slowly came up the driveway to see how
the work appeared. He caught his breath as he advanced. He had intended
to stake out generous rooms, but this, compared with the cabin, seemed
like a big hotel.

“I hope I haven't made it so large it will be a burden,” he
soliloquized. “It's huge! But while I am at it I want to build big
enough, and I think I have.”

He stood on the driveway, his arms folded, and looked at the structure
as he occasionally voiced his thoughts.

“The next thing is to lay up the side walls and get the roof over. Got
to have plenty of help, for those logs are hewed to fourteen inches
square and some of them are forty feet long. That's timber! Grew with
me, too. Personally acquainted with almost every tree of it. We will bed
them in cement, use care with the roof, and if that doesn't make a cool
house in the summer, and a warm one in winter, I'll be disappointed.
It sets among the trees, and on the hillside just right. We must have a
wide porch, plenty of flowers, vines, ferns, and mosses, and when I get
everything finished and she sees it----perhaps it will please her.”

A great horned owl swept down the hill, crossed the lake, and hooted
from the forest of the opposite bank. The Harvester thought of his dream
and turned.

“Any women walking the water to-night? Come if you like,” he bantered,
“I don't mind in the least. In fact, I'd rather enjoy it. I'd be so
happy if you would come now and tell me how this appears to you,
for it's all yours. I'd have enlarged the store-room, dry-houses and
laboratory for myself, but this cabin, never! The old one suited me as
it was; but for you----I should have a better home.”

The Harvester glanced from the shining skeleton to the bridge of gold
and back again.

“Where are you to-night?” he questioned. “What are you doing? Can't you
give me a hint of where to search for you when this is ready? I don't
know but I am beginning wrong. My little brothers of the wood do
differently. They announce their intentions the first thing, flaunt
their attractions, and display their strength. They say aloud, for all
the listening world to hear, what is in their hearts. They chip, chirp,
and sing, warble, whistle, thrill, scream, and hoot it. They are strong
on self-expression, and appreciative of their appearance. They meet,
court, mate, and THEN build their home together after a mutual plan.
It's a good way, too! Lots surer of getting things satisfactory.”

The Harvester sat on a lumber pile and gazed questioningly at the
framework.

“I wish I knew if I am going at things right,” he said. “There are two
sides to consider. If she is in a good home, and lovingly cared for, it
would be proper to court her and get her promise, if I could----no I'm
blest if I'll be so modest----get her promise, as I said, and let her
wait while I build the cabin. But if she should be poor, tired, and
neglected, then I ought to have this ready when I find her, so I could
pick her up and bring her to it, with no more ceremony than the birds.”

The Harvester's clear skin flushed crimson.

“Of course, I don't mean no wedding ceremony,” he amended. “I was
thinking of a long time wasted in preliminaries when in my soul I know I
am going to marry my Dream Girl before I ever have seen her in reality.
What would be the use in spending much time in courting? She is my wife
now, by every law of God. Let me get a glimpse of her, and I'll prove
it. But I've got to make tracks, for if she were here, where would I put
her? I must hurry!”

He went to the work room and began polishing a table top. He had bought
a chest of tools and was spending every spare minute on tables,
chair seats, and legs. He had decided to make these first and carve
candlesticks later when he had more time. Two hours he worked at the
furniture, and then went to bed. The following morning he put eggs under
several hens that wanted to set, trimmed his grape-vines, examined the
precious ginseng beds, attended his stock, got breakfast for Belshazzar
and himself, and was ready for work when the first carpenter arrived.
Laying hewed logs went speedily, and before the Harvester believed it
possible the big shingles he had ordered were being nailed on the roof.
Then came the plumber and arranged for the bathroom, and the furnace
man placed the heating pipes. The Harvester had intended the cabin to
be mostly the work of his own hands, but when he saw how rapidly
skilled carpenters worked, he changed his mind and had them finish the
living-room, his room, and the upstairs, and make over the dining-room
and kitchen.

Her room he worked on alone, with a little help if he did not know how
to join the different parts. Every thing was plain and simple, after
plans of his own, but the Harvester laid floors and made window casings,
seats, and doors of wood that the big factories of Grand Rapids used in
veneering their finest furniture. When one of his carpenters pointed
out this to him, and suggested that he sell his lumber to McLean and use
pine flooring from the mills the Harvester laughed at him.

“I don't say that I could afford to buy burl maple, walnut, and cherry
for wood-work,” said the Harvester. “I could not, but since I have it,
you can stake your life I won't sell it and build my home of cheap,
rapidly decaying wood. The best I have goes into this cabin and what
remains will do to sell. I have an idea that when this is done it is
going to appear first rate. Anyway, it will be solid enough to last
a thousand years, and with every day of use natural wood grows more
beautiful. When we get some tables, couches, and chairs made from the
same timber as the casings and the floors, I think it will be fine.
I want money, but I don't want it bad enough to part with the BEST of
anything I have for it. Go carefully and neatly there; it will have to
be changed if you don't.”

So the work progressed rapidly. When the carpenters had finished the
last stroke on the big veranda they remained a day more and made flower
boxes, and a swinging couch, and then the greedy Harvester kept the best
man with him a week longer to help on the furniture.

“Ain't you going to say a word about her, Langston?” asked this man as
they put a mirror-like surface on a curly maple dressing table top.

“Her!” ejaculated the Harvester. “What do you mean?”

“I haven't seen you bathe anywhere except in the lake since I have been
here,” said the carpenter. “Do you want me to think that a porcelain
tub, this big closet, and chest of drawers are for you?”

A wave of crimson swept over the Harvester.

“No, they are not for me,” he said simply. “I don't want to be any more
different from other men than I can help, although I know that life in
the woods, the rigid training of my mother, and the reading of only the
books that would aid in my work have made me individual in many of my
thoughts and ways. I suppose most men, just now, would tell you anything
you want to know. There is only one thing I can say: The best of my soul
and brain, the best of my woods and store-house, the best I can buy with
money is not good enough for her. That's all. For myself, I am getting
ready to marry, of course. I think all normal men do and that it is a
matter of plain common-sense that they should. Life with the right woman
must be infinitely broader and better than alone. Are you married?”

“Yes. Got a wife and four children.”

“Are you sorry?”

“Sorry!” the carpenter shrilled the word. “Sorry! Well that's the best
I ever heard! Am I sorry I married Nell and got the kids? Do I look
sorry?”

“I am not expecting to be, either,” said the Harvester calmly. “I think
I have done fairly well to stick to my work and live alone until I am
twenty-six. I have thought the thing all over and made up my mind. As
soon as I get this house far enough along that I feel I can proceed
alone I am going to rush the marrying business just as fast as I can,
and let her finish the remainder to her liking.”

“Well this ought to please her.”

“That's because you find your own work good,” laughed the Harvester.

“Not altogether!” The carpenter polished the board and stood it on end
to examine the surface as he talked. “Not altogether! Nothing but good
work would suit you. I was thinking of the little creek splashing down
the hill to the lake; and that old log hewer said that in a few more
days things here would be a blaze of colour until fall.”

“Almost all the drug plants and bushes leaf beautifully and flower
brilliantly,” explained the Harvester. “I studied the location suitable
to each variety before I set the beds and planned how to grow plants
for continuity of bloom, and as much harmony of colour as possible.
Of course a landscape gardener would tear up some of it, but seen as a
whole it isn't so bad. Did you ever notice that in the open, with God's
blue overhead and His green for a background, He can place purple and
yellow, pink, magenta, red, and blue in masses or any combination you
can mention and the brighter the colour the more you like it? You
don't seem to see or feel that any grouping clashes; you revel in each
wonderful growth, and luxuriate in the brilliancy of the whole. Anyway,
this suits me.”

“I guess it will please her, too,” said the carpenter. “After all the
pains you've taken, she is a good one if it doesn't.”

“I'll always have the consolation of having done my best,” replied
the Harvester. “One can't do more! Whether she likes it or not depends
greatly on the way she has been reared.”

“You talk as if you didn't know,” commented the carpenter.

“You go on with this now,” said the Harvester hastily. “I've got to
uncover some beds and dig my year's supply of skunk cabbage, else folk
with asthma and dropsy who depend on me will be short on relief. I ought
to take my sweet flag, too, but I'm so hurried now I think I'll leave it
until fall; I do when I can, because the bloom is so pretty around the
lake and the bees simply go wild over the pollen. Sometimes I almost
think I can detect it in their honey. Do you know I've wondered often
if the honey my bees make has medicinal properties and should be kept
separate in different seasons. In early spring when the plants and
bushes that furnish the roots and barks of most of the tonics are in
bloom, and the bees gather the pollen, that honey should partake in a
degree of the same properties and be good medicine. In the summer
it should aid digestion, and in the fall cure rheumatism and blood
disorders.”

“Say you try it!” urged the carpenter. “I want a lot of the fall kind.
I'm always full of rheumatism by October. Exposure, no doubt.”

“Over eating of too much rich food, you mean,” laughed the Harvester.
“I'd like to see any man expose his body to more differing extremes of
weather than I do, and I'm never sick. It's because I am my own cook
and so I live mostly on fruits, vegetables, bread, milk, and eggs, a few
fish from the lake, a little game once in a great while or a chicken,
and no hot drinks; plenty of fresh water, air, and continuous work out
of doors. That's the prescription! I'd be ashamed to have rheumatism at
your age. There's food in the cupboard if you grow hungry. I am going
past one of the neighbours on my way to see about some work I want her
to do.”

The Harvester stopped for lunch, carried food to Belshazzar, and started
straight across country, his mattock, with a bag rolled around the
handle, on his shoulder. His feet sank in the damp earth at the foot of
the hill, and he laughed as he leaped across Singing Water.

“You noisy chatterbox!” cried the man. “The impetus of coming down the
curves of the hill keeps you talking all the way across this muck bed to
the lake. With small work I can make you a thing of beauty. A few bushes
grubbed, a little deepening where you spread too much, and some more
mallows along the banks will do the trick. I must attend to you soon.”

“Now what does the boy want?” laughed a white-haired old woman, as the
Harvester entered the door. “Mebby you think I don't know what you're
up to! I even can hear the hammering and the voices of the men when the
wind is in the south. I've been wondering how soon you'd need me. Out
with it!”

“I want you to get a woman and come over and spend a day with me.
I'll come after you and bring you back. I want you to go over mother's
bedding and have what needs it washed. All I want you to do is to
superintend, and tell me now what I will want from town for your work.”

“I put away all your mother's bedding that you were not using, clean as
a ribbon.”

“But it has been packed in moth preventives ever since and out only four
times a year to air, as you told me. It must smell musty and be yellow.
I want it fresh and clean.”

“So what I been hearing is true, David?”

“Quite true!” said the Harvester.

“Whose girl is she, and when are you going to jine hands?”

The Harvester lifted his clear eyes and hesitated.

“Doc Carey laid you in my arms when you was born, David. I tended you
'fore ever your ma did. All your life you've been my boy, and I love you
same as my own blood; it won't go no farther if you say so. I'll never
tell a living soul. But I'm old and 'til better weather comes, house
bound; and I get mighty lonely. I'd like to think about you and her, and
plan for you, and love her as I always did you folks. Who is she, David?
Do I know the family?”

“No. She is a stranger to these parts,” said the unhappy Harvester.

“David, is she a nice girl 'at your ma would have liked?”

“She's the only girl in the world that I'd marry,” said the Harvester
promptly, glad of a question he could answer heartily. “Yes. She is
gentle, very tender and----and affectionate,” he went on so rapidly that
Granny Moreland could not say a word, “and as soon as I bring her home
you shall come to spend a day and get acquainted. I know you will love
her! I'll come in the morning, then. I must hurry now. I am working
double this spring and I'm off for the skunk cabbage bed to-day.”

“You are working fit to kill, the neighbours say. Slavin' like a horse
all day, and half the night I see your lights burning.”

“Do I appear killed?” laughingly inquired the Harvester.

“You look peart as a struttin' turkey gobbler,” said the old woman. “Go
on with your work! Work don't hurt a-body. Eat a-plenty, sleep all you
ort, and you CAN'T work enough to hurt you.”

“So the neighbours say I'm working now? New story, isn't it? Usually I'm
too lazy to make a living, if I remember.”

“Only to those who don't sense your purceedings, David. I always knowed
how you grubbed and slaved an' set over them fearful books o' yours.”

“More interesting than the wildest fiction,” said the man. “I'm making
some medicine for your rheumatism, Granny. It is not fully tested yet,
but you get ready for it by cutting out all the salt you can. I haven't
time to explain this morning, but you remember what I say, leave out the
salt, and when Doc thinks it's safe I'll bring you something that will
make a new woman of you.”

He went swinging down the road, and Granny Moreland looked after him.

“While he was talkin',” she muttered, “I felt full of information as a
flock o' almanacs, but now since he's gone, 'pears to me I don't know a
thing more 'an I did to start on.”

“Close call,” the Harvester was thinking. “Why the nation did I admit
anything to her? People may talk as they please, so long as I don't
sanction it, but I have two or three times. That's a fool trick. Suppose
I can't find her? Maybe she won't look at me if I can. Then I'd have
started something I couldn't finish. And if anybody thinks I'll end
this by taking any girl I can get, if I can't find Her, why they think
wrongly. Just the girl of my golden dream or no woman at all for me.
I've lived alone long enough to know how to do it in comfort. If I can't
find and win her I have no intention of starting a boarding house.”

The Harvester began to laugh. “'I'd rather keep bachelor's hall in Hell
than go to board in Heaven!'” he quoted gaily. “That's my sentiment too.
If you can't have what you want, don't have anything. But there is no
use to become discouraged before I start. I haven't begun to hunt her
yet. Until I do, I might as well believe that she will walk across the
bridge and take possession just as soon as I get the last chair leg
polished. She might! She came in the dream, and to come actually
couldn't be any more real. I'll make a stiff hunt of it before I give
up, if I ever do. I never yet have made a complete failure of anything.
But just now I am hunting skunk cabbage. It's precisely the time to take
it.”

Across the lake, in the swampy woods, close where the screech owl sang
and the girl of the golden dream walked in the moonlight the Harvester
began operations. He unrolled the sack, went to one end of the bed and
systematically started a swath across it, lifting every other plant
by the roots. Flowering time was almost past, but the bees knew where
pollen ripened, and hummed incessantly over and inside the queer
cone-shaped growths with their hooked beaks. It almost appeared as if
the sound made inside might be to give outsiders warning not to poach
on occupied territory, for the Harvester noticed that no bee entered a
pre-empted plant.

With skilful hand each stroke brought up a root and he tossed it to one
side. The plants were vastly peculiar things. First they seemed to be a
curled leaf with no flower. In colour they shaded from yellow to almost
black mahogany, and appeared as if they were a flower with no leaf.
Closer examination proved there was a stout leaf with a heavy outside
mid-rib, the tip of which curled over in a beak effect, that wrapped
around a peculiar flower of very disagreeable odour. The handling of
these plants by the hundred so intensified this smell the Harvester
shook his head.

“I presume you are mostly mine,” he said to the busy little workers
around him. “If there is anything in my theory of honey having varying
medicinal properties at different seasons, right now mine should be
good for Granny's rheumatism and for nervous and dropsical people. I
shouldn't think honey flavoured with skunk cabbage would be fit to eat.
But, of course, it isn't all this. There is catkin pollen on the wind,
hazel and sassafras are both in bloom now, and so are several of the
earliest little flowers of the woods. You can gather enough of them
combined to temper the disagreeable odour into a racy sweetness, and all
the shrub blooms are good tonics, too, and some of the earthy ones. I'm
going to try giving some of you empty cases next spring and analyzing
the honey to learn if it isn't good medicine.”

The Harvester straightened and leaned on the mattock to fill his lungs
with fresh air and as he delightedly sniffed it he commented, “Nothing
else has much of a chance since I've stirred up the cabbage bed. I can
scent the catkins plainly, being so close, and as I came here I could
detect the hazel and sassafras all right.”

Above him a peculiar, raucous chattering for an instant hushed other
wood voices. The Harvester looked up, laughing gaily.

“So you've decided to announce it to your tribe at last, have you?”
 he inquired. “You are waking the sleepers in their dens to-day? Well,
there's nothing like waiting until you have a sure thing. The bluebirds
broke the trail for the feathered folk the twenty-fourth of February.
The sap oozed from the maples about the same time for the trees. The
very first skunk cabbage was up quite a month ago to signal other plants
to come on, and now you are rousing the furred folk. I'll write this
down in my records----'When the earliest bluebird sings, when the sap
wets the maples, when the skunk cabbage flowers, and the first striped
squirrel barks, why then, it is spring!'”

He bent to his task and as he worked closer the water he noticed
sweet-flag leaves waving two inches tall beneath the surface.

“Great day!” he cried. “There you are making signs, too! And right! Of
course! Nature is always right. Just two inches high and it's harvest
for you. I can use a rake, and dried in the evaporator you bring me
ten cents a pound; to the folks needing a tonic you are worth a small
fortune. No doubt you cost that by the time you reach them; but I fear
I can't gather you just now. My head is a little preoccupied these days.
What with the cabbage, and now you, and many of the bushes and trees
making signs, with a new cabin to build and furnish, with a girl to find
and win, I'm what you might call busy. I've covered my book shelf.
I positively don't dare look Emerson or Maeterlinck in the face. One
consolation! I've got the best of Thoreau in my head, and if I read
Stickeen a few times more I'll be able to recite that. There's a man for
you, not to mention the dog! Bel, where are you? Would you stick to me
like that? I think you would. But you are a big, strong fellow. Stickeen
was only such a mite of a dog. But what a man he followed! I feel as
if I should put on high-heeled slippers and carry a fan and a lace
handkerchief when I think of him. And yet, most men wouldn't consider my
job so easy!”

The Harvester rapidly pitched the evil-smelling plants into big heaps
and as he worked he imitated the sounds around him as closely as he
could. The song sparrow laughed at him and flew away in disgust when he
tried its notes. The jay took time to consider, but was not fooled. The
nut-hatch ran head first down trees, larvae hunting, and was never a
mite deceived. But the killdeer on invisible legs, circling the lake
shore, replied instantly; so did the lark soaring above, and the dove of
the elm thicket close beside. The glittering black birds flashing over
every tree top answered the “T'check, t'chee!” of the Harvester quite as
readily as their mates.

The last time he paused to rest he had studied scents. When he
straightened again he was occupied with every voice of earth and air
around and above him, and the notes of singing hens, exultant cocks, the
scream of geese, the quack of ducks, the rasping crescendo of guineas
running wild in the woods, the imperial note of Ajax sunning on the
ridge pole and echoes from all of them on adjoining and distant farms.

“'Now I see the full meaning and beauty of that word sound!'” quoted
the Harvester. “'I thank God for sound. It always mounts and makes me
mount!'”

He breathed deeply and stood listening, a superb figure of a man, his
lean face glowing with emotion.

“If she could see and hear this, she would come,” he said softly. “She
would come and she would love it as I do. Any one who understands,
and knows how to translate, cares for this above all else earth has to
offer. They who do not, fail to read as they run!”

He shifted feet mired in swamp muck, and stood as if loath to bend again
to his task. He lifted a weighted mattock and scraped the earth from
it, sniffing it delightedly the while. A soft south wind freighted with
aromatic odours swept his warm face. The Harvester removed his hat and
shook his head that the breeze might thread his thick hair.

“I've a commission for you, South Wind,” he said whimsically. “Go find
my Dream Girl. Go carry her this message from me. Freight your breath
with spicy pollen, sun warmth, and flower nectar. Fill all her senses
with delight, and then, close to her ear, whisper it softly, 'Your lover
is coming!' Tell her that, O South Wind! Carry Araby to her nostrils,
Heaven to her ears, and then whisper and whisper it over and over until
you arouse the passion of earth in her blood. Tell her what is rioting
in my heart, and brain, and soul this morning. Repeat it until she must
awake to its meaning, 'Your lover is coming.'”



CHAPTER V. WHEN THE HARVESTER MADE GOOD

The sassafras and skunk cabbage were harvested. The last workman was
gone. There was not a sound at Medicine Woods save the babel of bird and
animal notes and the never-ending accompaniment of Singing Water. The
geese had gone over, some flocks pausing to rest and feed on Loon Lake,
and ducks that homed there were busy among the reeds and rushes. In
the deep woods the struggle to maintain and reproduce life was at its
height, and the courting songs of gaily coloured birds were drowned by
hawk screams and crow calls of defiance.

Every night before he plunged into the lake and went to sleep the
Harvester made out a list of the most pressing work that he would
undertake on the coming day. By systematizing and planning ahead he was
able to accomplish an unbelievable amount. The earliest rush of spring
drug gathering was over. He could be more deliberate in collecting the
barks he wanted. Flowers that were to be gathered at bloom time and
leaves were not yet ready. The heavy leaf coverings he had helped
the winds to heap on his beds of lily of the valley, bloodroot, and
sarsaparilla were removed carefully.

Inside the cabin the Harvester cleaned the glass, swept the floors with
a soft cloth pinned over the broom, and hung pale yellow blinds at the
windows. Every spare minute he worked on making furniture, and with each
piece he grew in experience and ventured on more difficult undertakings.
He had progressed so far that he now allowed himself an hour each day on
the candlesticks for her. Every evening he opened her door and with soft
cloths polished the furniture he had made. When her room was completed
and the dining-room partially finished, the Harvester took time to stain
the cabin and porch roofs the shade of the willow leaves, and on the
logs and pillars he used oil that served to intensify the light yellow
of the natural wood. With that much accomplished he felt better. If she
came now, in a few hours he would be able to offer a comfortable room,
enough conveniences to live until more could be provided, and of food
there was always plenty.

His daily programme was to feed and water his animals and poultry,
prepare breakfast for himself and Belshazzar, and go to the woods,
dry-house or store-room to do the work most needful in his harvesting.
In the afternoon he laboured over furniture and put finishing touches on
the new cabin, and after supper he carved and found time to read again,
as before his dream.

He was so happy he whistled and sang at his work much of the time at
first, but later there came days when doubts crept in and all his will
power was required to proceed steadily. As the cabin grew in better
shape for occupancy each day, more pressing became the thought of how he
was going to find and meet the girl of his dream. Sometimes it seemed to
him that the proper way was to remain at home and go on with his work,
trusting her to come to him. At such times he was happy and gaily
whistled and sang:

     “Stay in your chimney corner,
          Don't roam the world about,
       Stay in your chimney corner,
          And your own true love will find you out.”


But there were other days while grubbing in the forest, battling with
roots in the muck and mire of the lake bank, staggering under a load
for two men, scarcely taking time to eat and sleep enough to keep his
condition perfect, when that plan seemed too hopeless and senseless to
contemplate. Then he would think of locking the cabin, leaving the drugs
to grow undisturbed by collecting, hiring a neighbour to care for his
living creatures, and starting a search over the world to find her.
There came times when the impulse to go was so strong that only the
desire to take a day more to decide where, kept him. Every time his mind
was made up to start the following day came the counter thought, what
if I should go and she should come in my absence? In the dream she came.
That alone held him, even in the face of the fact that if he left home
some one might know of and rifle the precious ginseng bed, carefully
tended these seven years for the culmination the coming fall would
bring. That ginseng was worth many thousands and he had laboured over
it, fighting worms and parasites, covering and uncovering it with the
changing seasons, a siege of loving labour.

Sometimes a few hours of misgiving tortured him, but as a rule he was
cheerful and happy in his preparations. Without intending to do it
he was gradually furnishing the cabin. Every few days saw a new piece
finished in the workshop. Each trip to Onabasha ended in the purchase of
some article he could see would harmonize with his colour plans for
one of the rooms. He had filled the flower boxes for the veranda with
delicate plants that were growing luxuriantly.

Then he designed and began setting a wild-flower garden outside her door
and started climbing vines over the logs and porches, but whatever he
planted he found in the woods or took from beds he cultivated. Many of
the medicinal vines had leaves, flowers, twining tendrils, and berries
or fruits of wonderful beauty. Every trip to the forest he brought back
a half dozen vines, plants, or bushes to set for her. All of them either
bore lovely flowers, berries, quaint seed pods, or nuts, and beside the
drive and before the cabin he used especial care to plant a hedge of
bittersweet vines, burning bush, and trees of mountain ash, so that
the glory of their colour would enliven the winter when days might be
gloomy.

He planted wild yam under her windows that its queer rattles might amuse
her, and hop trees where their castanets would play gay music with every
passing wind of fall. He started a thicket along the opposite bank of
Singing Water where it bubbled past her window, and in it he placed in
graduated rows every shrub and small tree bearing bright flower, berry,
or fruit. Those remaining he used as a border for the driveway from the
lake, so that from earliest spring her eyes would fall on a procession
of colour beginning with catkins and papaw lilies, and running through
alders, haws, wild crabs, dogwood, plums, and cherry intermingled with
forest saplings and vines bearing scarlet berries in fall and winter. In
the damp soil of the same character from which they were removed, in
the shade and under the skilful hand of the Harvester, few of these
knew they had been transplanted, and when May brought the catbirds and
orioles much of this growth was flowering quite as luxuriantly as the
same species in the woods.

The Harvester was in the store-house packing boxes for shipment. His
room was so small and orders so numerous that he could not keep large
quantities on hand. All crude stuff that he sent straight from the
drying-house was fresh and brightly coloured. His stock always was
marked prime A-No. 1. There was a step behind him and the Harvester
turned. A boy held out a telegram. The man opened it to find an order
for some stuff to be shipped that day to a large laboratory in Toledo.

His hands deftly tied packages and he hastily packed bottles and nailed
boxes. Then he ran to harness Betsy and load. As he drove down the hill
to the bridge he looked at his watch and shook his head.

“What are you good for at a pinch, Betsy?” he asked as he flecked the
surprised mare's flank with a switch. Belshazzar cocked his ears and
gazed at the Harvester in astonishment.

“That wasn't enough to hurt her,” explained the man. “She must speed up.
This is important business. The amount involved is not so much, but I do
love to make good. It's a part of my religion, Bel. And my religion has
so precious few parts that if I fail in the observance of any of them
it makes a big hole in my performances. Now we don't want to end a life
full of holes, so we must get there with this stuff, not because it's
worth the exertion in dollars and cents, but because these men patronize
us steadily and expect us to fill orders, even by telegraph. Hustle,
Betsy!”

The whip fell again and Belshazzar entered indignant protest.

“It isn't going to hurt her,” said the Harvester impatiently. “She may
walk all the way back. She can rest while I get these boxes billed and
loaded if she can be persuaded to get them to the express office on
time. The trouble with Betsy is that she wants to meander along the road
with a loaded wagon as her mother and grandmother before her wandered
through the woods wearing a bell to attract the deer. Father used to say
that her mother was the smartest bell mare that ever entered the forest.
She'd not only find the deer, but she'd make friends with them and lead
them straight as a bee-line to where he was hiding. Betsy, you must
travel!”

The Harvester drew the lines taut, and the whip fell smartly. The
astonished Betsy snorted and pranced down the valley as fast as she
could, but every step indicated that she felt outraged and abused. This
was the loveliest day of the season. The sun was shining, the air was
heavy with the perfume of flowering shrubs and trees, the orchards of
the valley were white with bloom. Farmers were hurrying back and forth
across fields, leaving up turned lines of black, swampy mould behind
them, and one progressive individual rode a wheeled plow, drove three
horses and enjoyed the shelter of a canopy.

“Saints preserve us, Belshazzar!” cried the Harvester. “Do you see that?
He is one of the men who makes a business of calling me shiftless. Now
he thinks he is working. Working! For a full-grown man, did you ever see
the equal? If I were going that far I'd wear a tucked shirt, panama hat,
have a pianola attachment, and an automatic fan.”

The Harvester laughed as he again touched Betsy and hurried to Onabasha.
He scarcely saw the delights offered on either hand, and where his
eyes customarily took in every sight, and his ears were tuned for
the faintest note of earth or tree top, to day he saw only Betsy and
listened for a whistle he dreaded to hear at the water tank. He climbed
the embankment of the railway at a slower pace, but made up time going
down hill to the city.

“I am not getting a blame thing out of this,” he complained to
Belshazzar. “There are riches to stagger any scientist wasting to-day,
and all I've got to show is one oriole. I did hear his first note and
see his flash, and so unless we can take time to make up for this on the
home road we will have to christen it oriole day. It's a perfumed golden
day, too; I can get that in passing, but how I loathe hurrying. I don't
mind planning things and working steadily, but it's not consistent with
the dignity of a sane man to go rushing across country with as much
appreciation of the delights offered right now as a chicken with its
head off would have. We will loaf going back to pay for this! And won't
we invite our souls? We will stop and gather a big bouquet of crab
apple blossoms to fill the green pitcher for her. Maybe some of their
wonderful perfume will linger in her room. When the petals fall we will
scatter them in the drawers of her dresser, and they may distil a faint
flower odour there. We could do that to all her furniture, but perhaps
she doesn't like perfume. She'll be compelled to after she reaches
Medicine Woods. Betsy, you must travel faster!”

The whip fell again and the Harvester stopped at the depot with a few
minutes to spare. He threw the hitching strap to Belshazzar, and ran
into the express office with an arm load of boxes.

“Bill them!” he cried. “It's a rush order. I want it to go on the
next express. Almost due I think. I'll help you and we can book them
afterward.”

The expressman ran for a truck and they hastily weighed and piled on
boxes. When the last one was loaded from the wagon, a heap more lying in
the office were added, pitched on indiscriminately as the train pulled
under the sheds of the Union Station.

“I'll push,” cried the Harvester, “and help you get them on.”

Hurrying as fast as he could the expressman drew the heavy truck through
the iron gates and started toward the train slowing to a stop, and the
Harvester pushed. As they came down the platform they passed the dining
and sleeping cars of the long train and were several times delayed
by descending passengers. Just opposite the day coach the expressman
narrowly missed running into several women leading small children and
stopped abruptly. A toppling box threatened the head of the Harvester.
He peered around the truck and saw they must wait a few seconds. He put
in the time watching the people. A gray-haired old man, travelling in a
silk hat, wavered on the top step and went his way. A fat woman loaded
with bundles puffed as she clung trembling a second in fear she would
miss the step she could not see. A tall, slender girl with a face coldly
white came next, and from the broken shoe she advanced, the bewildered
fright of big, dark eyes glancing helplessly, the Harvester saw that she
was poor, alone, ill, and in trouble. Pityingly he turned to watch her,
and as he gauged her height, saw her figure, and a dark coronet of hair
came into view, a ghastly pallor swept his face.

“Merciful God!” he breathed, “that's my Dream Girl!”

The truck started with a jerk. The toppling box fell, struck a passing
boy, and knocked him down. The mother screamed and the Harvester sprang
to pick up the child and see that he was not dangerously hurt. Then he
ran after the truck, pitched on the box, and whirling, sped beside the
train toward the gates of exit. There was the usual crush, but he could
see the tall figure passing up the steps to the depot. He tried to
force his way and was called a brute by a crowded woman. He ran down the
platform to the gates he had entered with the truck. They were automatic
and had locked. Then he became a primal creature being cheated of a
lawful mate and climbed the high iron fence and ran for the waiting
room.

He swept it at a glance, not forgetting the women's apartment and the
side entrance. Then he hurried to the front exit. Up the street leading
from the city there were few people and he could see no sign of the
slight, white-faced girl. He crossed the sidewalk and ran down the
gutter for a block and breathlessly waited the passing crowd on the
corner. She was not among it. He tried one more square. Still he could
not see her. Then he ran back to the depot. He thought surely he must
have missed her. He again searched the woman's and general waiting room
and then he thought of the conductor. From him it could be learned where
she entered the car. He ran for the station, bolted the gate while the
official called to him, and reached the track in time to see the train
pull out within a few yards of him.

“You blooming idiot!” cried the angry expressman as the Harvester ran
against him, “where did you go? Why didn't you help me? You are white as
a sheet! Have you lost your senses?”

“Worse!” groaned the Harvester. “Worse! I've lost what I prize most on
earth. How could I reach the conductor of that train?”

“Telegraph him at the next station. You can have an answer in a half
hour.”

The Harvester ran to the office, and with shaking hand wrote this
message:

“Where did a tall girl with big black eyes and wearing a gray dress take
your train? Important.”

Then he went out and minutely searched the depot and streets. He hired
an automobile to drive him over the business part of Onabasha for three
quarters of an hour. Up one street and down another he went slowly where
there were crowds, faster as he could, but never a sight of her. Then he
returned to the depot and found his message. It read, “Transferred to me
at Fort Wayne from Chicago.”

“Chicago baggage!” he cried, and hurried to the check room. He had lost
almost an hour. When he reached the room he found the officials busy and
unwilling to be interrupted. Finally he learned there had been a half
dozen trunks from Chicago. All were taken save two, and one glance at
them told the Harvester that they did not belong to the girl in gray.
The others had been claimed by men having checks for them. If she had
been there, the officials had not noticed a tall girl having a white
face and dark eyes. When he could think of no further effort to make he
drove to the hospital.

Doctor Carey was not in his office, and the Harvester sat in the
revolving chair before the desk and gripped his head between his hands
as he tried to think. He could not remember anything more he could
have done, but since what he had done only ended in failure, he was
reproaching himself wildly that he had taken his eyes from the Girl an
instant after recognizing her. Yet it was in his blood to be decent and
he could not have run away and left a frightened woman and a hurt child.
Trusting to his fleet feet and strength he had taken time to replace the
box also, and then had met the crowd and delay. Just for the instant it
appeared to him as if he had done all a man could, and he had not found
her. If he allowed her to return to Chicago, probably he never would. He
leaned his head on his hands and groaned in discouragement.

Doctor Carey whirled the chair so that it faced him before the Harvester
realized that he was not alone.

“What's the trouble, David?” he asked tersely.

The Harvester lifted a strained face.

“I came for help,” he said.

“Well you will get it! All you have to do is to state what you want.”

That seemed simplicity itself to the doctor. But when it came to putting
his case into words, it was not easy for the Harvester.

“Go on!” said the doctor.

“You'll think me a fool.”

The doctor laughed heartily.

“No doubt!” he said soothingly. “No doubt, David! Probably you are; so
why shouldn't I think so. But remember this, when we make the biggest
fools of ourselves that is precisely the time when we need friends, and
when they stick to us the tightest, if they are worth while. I've been
waiting since latter February for you to tell me. We can fix it, of
course; there's always a way. Go on!”

“Well I wasn't fooling about the dream and the vision I told you of
then, Doc. I did have a dream--and it was a dream of love. I did see a
vision--and it was a beautiful woman.”

“I hope you are not nursing that experience as something exclusive and
peculiar to you,” said the doctor. “There is not a normal, sane man
living who has not dreamed of love and the most exquisite woman who came
from the clouds or anywhere and was gracious to him. That's a part of a
man's experience in this world, and it happens to most of us, not once,
but repeatedly. It's a case where the wish fathers the dream.”

“Well it hasn't happened to me 'on repeated occasions,' but it did one
night, and by dawn I was converted. How CAN a dream be so real, Doc?
How could I see as clearly as I ever saw in the daytime in my most alert
moment, hear every step and garment rustle, scent the perfume of hair,
and feel warm breath strike my face? I don't understand it!”

“Neither does any one else! All you need say is that your dream was real
as life. Go on!”

“I built a new cabin and pretty well overturned the place and I've been
making furniture I thought a woman would like, and carrying things from
town ever since.”

“Gee! It was reality to you, lad!”

“Nothing ever more so,” said the Harvester.

“And of course, you have been looking for her?”

“And this morning I saw her!”

“David!”

“Not the ghost of a chance for a mistake. Her height, her eyes, her
hair, her walk, her face; only something terrible has happened since she
came to me. It was the same girl, but she is ill and in trouble now.”

“Where is she?”

“Do you suppose I'd be here if I knew?”

“David, are you dreaming in daytime?”

“She got off the Chicago train this morning while I was helping Daniels
load a big truck of express matter. Some of it was mine, and it was
important. Just at the wrong instant a box fell and knocked down a child
and I got in a jam----”

“And as it was you, of course you stopped to pick up the child and do
everything decent for other folks, before you thought of yourself, and
so you lost her. You needn't tell me anything more. David, if I find
her, and prove to you that she has been married ten years and has an
interesting family, will you thank me?”

“Can't be done!” said the Harvester calmly. “She has been married only
since she gave herself to me in February, and she is not a mother. You
needn't bank on that.”

“You are mighty sure!”

“Why not? I told you the dream was real, and now that I have seen her,
and she is in this very town, why shouldn't I be sure?”

“What have you done?”

The Harvester told him.

“What are you going to do next?”

“Talk it over with you and decide.”

The doctor laughed.

“Well here are a few things that occur to me without time for thought.
Talk to the ticket agents, and leave her description with them. Make it
worth their while to be on the lookout, and if she goes anywhere to find
out all they can. They could make an excuse of putting her address on
her ticket envelope, and get it that way. See the baggagemen. Post the
day police on Main Street. There is no chance for her to escape you. A
full-grown woman doesn't vanish. How did she act when she got off the
car? Did she appear familiar?”

“No. She was a stranger. For an instant she looked around as if she
expected some one, then she followed the crowd. There must have been an
automobile waiting or she took a street car. Something whirled her out
of sight in a few seconds.”

“Well we will get her in range again. Now for the most minute
description you can give.”

The Harvester hesitated. He did not care to describe the Dream Girl to
any one, much less the living, suffering face and poorly clad form of
the reality.

“Cut out your scruples,” laughed the doctor. “You have asked me to help
you; how can I if I don't know what kind of a woman to look for?”

“Very tall and slender,” said the Harvester. “Almost as tall as I am.”

“Unusually tall you think?”

“I know!”

“That's a good point for identification. How about her complexion, hair,
and eyes?”

“Very large, dark eyes, and a great mass of black hair.”

The doctor roared.

“The eyes may help,” he said. “All women have masses of hair these days.
I hope----”

“Her hair is fast to her head,” said the Harvester indignantly. “I saw
it at close range, and I know. It went around like a crown.”

The doctor choked down a laugh. He wanted to say that every woman's hair
was like a crown at present, but there were things no man ventured with
David Langston; those who knew him best, least of any. So he suggested,
“And her colouring?”

“She was white and rosy, a lovely thing in the dream,” said the
Harvester, “but something dreadful has happened. That's all wiped out
now. She was very pale when she left the car.”

“Car sick, maybe.”

“Soul sick!” was the grim reply.

Then Doctor Carey appeared so disturbed the Harvester noticed it.

“You needn't think I'd be here prating about her if I wasn't FORCED.
If she had been rosy and well as she was in the dream, I'd have made
my hunt alone and found her, too. But when I saw she was sick and in
trouble, it took all the courage out of me, and I broke for help. She
must be found at once, and when she is you are probably the first man
I'll want. I am going to put up a pretty stiff search myself, and if I
find her I'll send or get her to you if I can. Put her in the best ward
you have and anything money will do----”

The face of the doctor was growing troubled.

“Day coach or Pullman?” he asked.

“Day.”

“How was she dressed?”

“Small black hat, very plain. Gray jacket and skirt, neat as a flower.”

“What you'd call expensively dressed?”

The Harvester hesitated.

“What I'd call carefully dressed, but----but poverty poor, if you will
have it, Doc.”

Doctor Carey's lips closed and then opened in sudden resolution.

“David, I don't like it,” he said tersely.

The Harvester met his eye and purposely misunderstood him.

“Neither do I!” he exclaimed. “I hate it! There is something wrong with
the whole world when a woman having a face full of purity, intellect,
and refinement of extreme type glances around her like a hunted thing;
when her appearance seems to indicate that she has starved her body to
clothe it. I know what is in your mind, Doc, but if I were you I
wouldn't put it into words, and I wouldn't even THINK it. Has it been
your experience in this world that women not fit to know skimp their
bodies to cover them? Does a girl of light character and little brain
have the hardihood to advance a foot covered with a broken shoe? If I
could tell you that she rode in a Pullman, and wore exquisite clothing,
you would be doing something. The other side of the picture shuts you up
like a clam, and makes you appear shocked. Let me tell you this: No
other woman I ever saw anywhere on God's footstool had a face of more
delicate refinement, eyes of purer intelligence. I am of the woods, and
while they don't teach me how to shine in society, they do instil always
and forever the fineness of nature and her ways. I have her lessons so
well learned they help me more than anything else to discern the
qualities of human nature. If you are my friend, and have any faith at
all in my common sense, get up and do something!”

The doctor arose promptly.

“David, I'm an ass,” he said. “Unusually lop-eared, and blind in the
bargain. But before I ask you to forgive me, I want you to remember two
things: First, she did not visit me in my dreams; and, second, I did not
see her in reality. I had nothing to judge from except what you
said: you seemed reluctant to tell me, and what you did say
was----was----disturbing to a friend of yours. I have not the slightest
doubt if I had seen her I would agree with you. We seldom disagree,
David. Now, will you forgive me?”

The Harvester suddenly faced a window. When at last he turned, “The
offence lies with me,” he said, “I was hasty. Are you going to help me?”

“With all my heart! Go home and work until your head clears, then come
back in the morning. She did not come from Chicago for a day. You've
done all I know to do at present.”

“Thank you,” said the Harvester.

He went to Betsy and Belshazzar, and slowly drove up and down the
streets until Betsy protested and calmly turned homeward. The Harvester
smiled ruefully as he allowed her to proceed.

“Go slow and take it easy,” he said as they reached the country. “I want
to think.”

Betsy stopped at the barn, the white doves took wing, and Ajax screamed
shrilly before the Harvester aroused in the slightest to anything around
him. Then he looked at Belshazzar and said emphatically: “Now, partner,
don't ever again interfere when I am complying with the observances of
my religion. Just look what I'd have missed if I hadn't made good with
that order!”



CHAPTER VI. TO LABOUR AND TO WAIT

“We have reached the 'beginning of the end,' Ajax!” said the Harvester,
as the peacock ceased screaming and came to seek food from his hand.
“We have seen the Girl. Now we must locate her and convince her that
Medicine Woods is her happy home. I feel quite equal to the latter
proposition, Ajax, but how the nation to find her sticks me. I can't
make a search so open that she will know and resent it. She must have
all the consideration ever paid the most refined woman, but she also
has got to be found, and that speedily. When I remember that look on her
face, as if horrors were snatching at her skirts, it takes all the grit
out of me. I feel weak as a sapling. And she needs all my strength. I've
simply got to brace up. I'll work a while and then perhaps I can think.”

So the Harvester began the evening routine. He thought he did not want
anything to eat, but when he opened the cupboard and smelled the food he
learned that he was a hungry man and he cooked and ate a good supper. He
put away everything carefully, for even the kitchen was dainty and fresh
and he wanted to keep it so for her. When he finished he went into the
living-room, stood before the fireplace, and studied the collection of
half-finished candlesticks grouped upon it. He picked up several and
examined them closely, but realized that he could not bind himself to
the exactions of carving that evening. He took a key from his pocket and
unlocked her door. Every day he had been going there to improve upon his
work for her, and he loved the room, the outlook from its windows; he
was very proud of the furniture he had made. There was no paper-thin
covering on her chairs, bed, and dressing table. The tops, seats, and
posts were solid wood, worth hundreds of dollars for veneer.

To-night he folded his arms and stood on the sill hesitating. While
she was a dream, he had loved to linger in her room. Now that she was
reality, he paused. In one golden May day the place had become sacred.
Since he had seen the Girl that room was so hers that he was hesitating
about entering because of this fact. It was as if the tall, slender form
stood before the chest of drawers or sat at the dressing table and he
did not dare enter unless he were welcome. Softly he closed the door and
went away. He wandered to the dry-house and turned the bark and roots on
the trays, but the air stifled him and he hurried out. He tried to work
in the packing room, but walls smothered him and again he sought the
open.

He espied a bundle of osier-bound, moss-covered ferns that he had found
in the woods, and brought the shovel to transplant them; but the
work worried him, and he hurried through with it. Then he looked for
something else to do and saw an ax. He caught it up and with lusty
strokes began swinging it. When he had chopped wood until he was very
tired he went to bed. Sleep came to the strong, young frame and he awoke
in the morning refreshed and hopeful.

He wondered why he had bothered Doctor Carey. The Harvester felt able
that morning to find his Dream Girl without assistance before the day
was over. It was merely a matter of going to the city and locating a
woman. Yesterday, it had been a question of whether she really existed.
To-day, he knew. Yesterday, it had meant a search possibly as wide
as earth to find her. To-day, it was narrowed to only one location so
small, compared with Chicago, that the Harvester felt he could sift
its population with his fingers, and pick her from others at his first
attempt. If she were visiting there probably she would rest during the
night, and be on the streets to-day.

When he remembered her face he doubted it. He decided to spend part
of the time on the business streets and the remainder in the residence
portions of the city. Because it was uncertain when he would return,
everything was fed a double portion, and Betsy was left at a livery
stable with instructions to care for her until he came. He did not know
where the search would lead him. For several hours he slowly walked the
business district and then ranged farther, but not a sight of her. He
never had known that Onabasha was so large. On its crowded streets he
did not feel that he could sift the population through his fingers, nor
could he open doors and search houses without an excuse.

Some small boys passed him eating bananas, and the Harvester looked at
his watch and was amazed to find that the day had advanced until two
o'clock in the afternoon. He was tired and hungry. He went into a
restaurant and ordered lunch; as he waited a girl serving tables smiled
at him. Any other time the Harvester would have returned at least a
pleasant look, and gone his way. To-day he scowled at her, and ate in
hurried discomfort. On the streets again, he had no idea where to go and
so he went to the hospital.

“I expected you early this morning,” was the greeting of Doctor Carey.
“Where have you been and what have you done?”

“Nothing,” said the Harvester. “I was so sure she would be on the
streets I just watched, but I didn't see her.”

“We will go to the depot,” said the doctor. “The first thing is to keep
her from leaving town.”

They arranged with the ticket agents, expressmen, telegraphers, and, as
they left, the Harvester stopped and tipped the train caller, offering
further reward worth while if he would find the Girl.

“Now we will go to the police station,” said the doctor.

“I'll see the chief and have him issue a general order to his men to
watch for her, but if I were you I'd select a half dozen in the down
town district, and give them a little tip with a big promise!”

“Good Lord! How I hate this,” groaned the Harvester.

“Want to find her by yourself?” questioned his friend.

“Yes,” said the Harvester, “I do! And I would, if it hadn't been for
her ghastly face. That drives me to resort to any measures. The
probabilities are that she is lying sick somewhere, and if her comfort
depends on the purse that dressed her, she will suffer. Doc, do you know
how awful this is?”

“I know that you've got a great imagination. If the woods make all men
as sensitive as you are, those who have business to transact should stay
out of them. Take a common-sense view. Look at this as I do. If she was
strong enough to travel in a day coach from Chicago; she can't be so
very ill to-day. Leaving life by the inch isn't that easy. She will be
alive this time next year, whether you find her or not. The chances are
that her stress was mental anyway, and trouble almost never overcomes
any one.”

“You, a doctor and say that!”

“Oh, I mean instantaneously----in a day! Of course if it grinds away
for years! But youth doesn't allow it to do that. It throws it off, and
grows hopeful and happy again. She won't die; put that out of your
mind. If I were you I would go home now and go straight on with my work,
trusting to the machinery you have set in motion. I know most of the
men with whom we have talked. They will locate her in a week or less.
It's their business. It isn't yours. It's your job to be ready for her,
and have enough ahead to support her when they find her. Try to realize
that there are now a dozen men on hunt for her, and trust them. Go back
to your work, and I will come full speed in the motor when the first man
sights her. That ought to satisfy you. I've told all of them to call me
at the hospital, and I will tell my assistant what to do in case a call
comes while I am away. Straighten your face! Go back to Medicine Woods
and harvest your crops, and before you know it she will be located. Then
you can put on your Sunday clothes and show yourself, and see if you can
make her take notice.”

“Idiot!” exclaimed the Harvester, but he started home. When he arrived
he attended to his work and then sat down to think.

“Doc is right,” was his ultimate conclusion. “She can't leave the city,
she can't move around in it, she can't go anywhere, without being seen.
There's one more point: I must tell Carey to post all the doctors to
report if they have such a call. That's all I can think of. I'll
go to-night, and then I'll look over the ginseng for parasites, and
to-morrow I'll dive into the late spring growth and work until I haven't
time to think. I've let cranesbill get a week past me now, and it can't
be dispensed with.”

So the following morning, when the Harvester had completed his work at
the cabin and barn and breakfasted, he took a mattock and a big hempen
bag, and followed the path to the top of the hill. As it ran along the
lake bank he descended on the other side to several acres of cleared
land, where he raised corn for his stock, potatoes, and coarser garden
truck, for which there was not space in the smaller enclosure close the
cabin. Around the edges of these fields, and where one of them sloped
toward the lake, he began grubbing a variety of grass having tall stems
already over a foot in height at half growth. From each stem waved four
or five leaves of six or eight inches length and the top showed forming
clusters of tiny spikelets.

“I am none too early for you,” he muttered to himself as he ran the
mattock through the rich earth, lifting the long, tough, jointed root
stalks of pale yellow, from every section of which broke sprays of fine
rootlets. “None too early for you, and as you are worth only seven cents
a pound, you couldn't be considered a 'get-rich-quick' expedient, so
I'll only stop long enough with you to gather what I think my customers
will order, and amass a fortune a little later picking mullein flowers
at seventy-five cents a pound. What a crop I've got coming!”

The Harvester glanced ahead, where in the cleared soil of the bank grew
large plants with leaves like yellow-green felt and tall bloom stems
rising. Close them flourished other species requiring dry sandy soil,
that gradually changed as it approached the water until it became
covered with rank abundance of short, wiry grass, half the blades of
which appeared red. Numerous everywhere he could see the grayish-white
leaves of Parnassus grass. As the season advanced it would lift
heart-shaped velvet higher, and before fall the stretch of emerald would
be starred with white-faced, green-striped flowers.

“Not a prettier sight on earth,” commented the Harvester, “than just
swale wire grass in September making a fine, thick background to set off
those delicate starry flowers on their slender stems. I must remember to
bring her to see that.”

His eyes followed the growth to the water. As the grass drew closer
moisture it changed to the rank, sweet, swamp variety, then came
bulrushes, cat-tails, water smartweed, docks, and in the water blue flag
lifted folded buds; at its feet arose yellow lily leaves and farther out
spread the white. As the light struck the surface the Harvester imagined
he could see the little green buds several inches below. Above all arose
wild rice he had planted for the birds. The red wings swayed on the
willows and tilted on every stem that would bear their weight, singing
their melodious half-chanted notes, “O-ka-lee!”

Beneath them the ducks gobbled, splashed, and chattered; grebe and coot
voices could be distinguished; king rails at times flashed into sight
and out again; marsh wrens scolded and chattered; occasionally a
kingfisher darted around the lake shore, rolling his rattling cry and
flashing his azure coat and gleaming white collar. On a hollow tree
in the woods a yellow hammer proved why he was named, because he
carpentered industriously to enlarge the entrance to the home he was
excavating in a dead tree; and sailing over the lake and above the woods
in grace scarcely surpassed by any, a lonesome turkey buzzard awaited
his mate's decision as to which hollow log was most suitable for their
home.

The Harvester stuffed the grass roots in the bag until it would hold no
more and stood erect to wipe his face, for the sun was growing warm. As
he drew his handkerchief across his brow, the south wind struck him with
enough intensity to attract attention. Instantly the Harvester removed
his hat, rolled it up, and put it into his pocket. He stood an instant
delighting in the wind and then spoke.

“Allow me to express my most fervent thanks for your kindness,” he said.
“I thought probably you would take that message, since it couldn't mean
much to you, and it meant all the world to me. I thought you would carry
it, but, I confess, I scarcely expected the answer so soon. The only
thing that could make me more grateful to you would be to know exactly
where she is: but you must understand that it's like a peep into Heaven
to have her existence narrowed to one place. I'm bound to be able to
say inside a few days, she lives at number----I don't know yet, on
street----I'll find out soon, in the closest city, Onabasha. And I know
why you brought her, South Wind. If ever a girl's cheeks need fanning
with your breezes, and painting with sun kisses, I wouldn't mind, since
this is strictly private, adding a few of mine; if ever any one needed
flowers, birds, fresh air, water, and rest! Good Lord, South Wind, did
you ever reach her before you carried that message? I think not! But
Onabasha isn't so large. You and the sun should get your innings there.
I do hope she is not trying to work! I can attend to that; and so there
will be more time when she is found, I'd better hustle now.”

He picked up the bag and returned to the dry-house, where he carefully
washed the roots and spread them on the trays. Then he took the same
bag and mattock and going through the woods in the opposite direction
he came to a heavy growth in a cleared space of high ground. The bloom
heads were forming and the plant was half matured. The Harvester dug a
cylindrical, tapering root, wrinkling lengthwise, wiped it clean, broke
and tasted it. He made a wry face. He stood examining the white wood
with its brown-red bark and, deciding that it was in prime condition, he
began digging the plants. It was common wayside “Bouncing Bet,” but the
Harvester called it “soapwort.” He took every other plant in his way
across the bed, and when he digged a heavy load he carried it home,
stripped the leaves, and spread them on trays, while the roots he
topped, washed, and put to dry also. Then he whistled for Belshazzar and
went to lunch.

As he passed down the road to the cabin his face was a study of
conflicting emotions, and his eyes had a far away appearance of deep
thought. Every tree of his stretch of forest was rustling fresh leaves
to shelter him; dogwood, wild crab, and hawthorn offered their flowers;
earth held up her tribute in painted trillium faces, spring beauties,
and violets, blue, white, and yellow. Mosses, ferns, and lichen
decorated the path; all the birds greeted him in friendship, and
sang their purest melodies. The sky was blue, the sun bright, the air
perfumed for him; Belshazzar, always true to his name, protected every
footstep; Ajax, the shimmering green and gold wonder, came up the hill
to meet him; the white doves circled above his head. Stumbling half
blindly, the Harvester passed unheeding among them, and went into the
cabin. When he came out he stood a long time in deep study, but at last
he returned to the woods.

“Perhaps they will have found her before night,” he said. “I'll harvest
the cranesbill yet, because it's growing late for it, and then I'll see
how they are coming on. Maybe they'd know her if they met her, and maybe
they wouldn't. She may wear different clothing, and freshen up after her
trip. She might have been car sick, as Doc suggested, and appear very
different when she feels better.”

He skirted the woods around the northeast end and stopped at a big bed
of exquisite growth. Tall, wiry stems sprang upward almost two feet in
height; leaves six inches across were cut in ragged lobes almost to the
base, and here and there, enough to colour the entire bed a delicate
rose or sometimes a violet purple, the first flowers were unfolding. The
Harvester lifted a root and tasted it.

“No doubt about you being astringent,” he muttered. “You have enough
tannin in you to pucker a mushroom. By the way, those big, corn-cobby
fellows should spring up with the next warm rain, and the hotels and
restaurants always pay high prices. I must gather a few bushels.”

He looked over the bed of beautiful wild alum and hesitated.

“I vow I hate to touch you,” he said. “You are a picture right now, and
in a week you will be a miracle. It seems a shame to tear up a plant for
its roots, just at flowering time, and I can't avoid breaking down half
I don't take, getting the ones I do. I wish you were not so pretty! You
are one of the colours I love most. You remind me of red-bud, blazing
star, and all those exquisite magenta shades that poets, painters, and
the Almighty who made them love so much they hesitate about using them
lavishly. You are so delicate and graceful and so modest. I wish she
could see you! I got to stop this or I won't be able to lift a root. I
never would if the ten cents a pound I'll get out of it were the only
consideration.”

The Harvester gripped the mattock and advanced to the bed. “What I must
be thinking is that you are indispensable to the sick folks. The steady
demand for you proves your value, and of course, humanity comes first,
after all. If I remain in the woods alone much longer I'll get to the
place where I'm not so sure that it does. Seems as if animals, birds,
flowers, trees, and insects as well, have their right to life also. But
it's for me to remember the sick folks! If I thought the Girl would get
some of it now, I could overturn the bed with a stout heart. If any one
ever needed a tonic, I think she does. Maybe some of this will reach
her. If it does, I hope it will make her cheeks just the lovely pink of
the bloom. Oh Lord! If only she hadn't appeared so sick and frightened!
What is there in all this world of sunshine to make a girl glance around
her like that? I wish I knew! Maybe they will have found her by night.”

The Harvester began work on the bed, but he knelt and among the damp
leaves from the spongy black earth he lifted the roots with his fingers
and carefully straightened and pressed down the plants he did not take.
This required more time than usual, but his heart was so sore he could
not be rough with anything, most of all a flower. So he harvested the
wild alum by hand, and heaped large stacks of roots around the edges of
the bed. Often he paused as he worked and on his knees stared through
the forest as if he hoped perhaps she would realize his longing for her,
and come to him in the wood as she had across the water. Over and
over he repeated, “Perhaps they will find her by night!” and that so
intensified the meaning that once he said it aloud. His face clouded and
grew dark.

“Dealish nice business!” he said. “I am here in the woods digging flower
roots, and a gang of men in the city are searching for the girl I love.
If ever a job seemed peculiarly a man's own, it appears this would be.
What business has any other man spying after my woman? Why am I not down
there doing my own work, as I always have done it? Who's more likely to
find her than I am? It seems as if there would be an instinct that
would lead me straight to her, if I'd go. And you can wager I'll go fast
enough.”

The Harvester appeared as if he would start that instant, but with lips
closely shut he finally forced himself to go on with his work. When he
had rifled the bed, and uprooted all he cared to take during one season,
he carried the roots to the lake shore below the curing house, and
spread them on a platform he had built. He stepped into his boat and
began dashing pails of water over them and using a brush. As he worked
he washed away the woody scars of last year's growth, and the tiny buds
appearing for the coming season.

Belshazzar sat on the opposite bank and watched the operation; and Ajax
came down and, flying to a dead stump, erected and slowly waved his
train to attract the sober-faced man who paid no heed. He left the roots
to drain while he prepared supper, then placed them on the trays, now
filled to overflowing, and was glad he had finished. He could not cure
anything else at present if he wanted to. He was as far advanced as he
had been at the same time the previous year. Then he dressed neatly and
locking the Girl's room, and leaving Belshazzar to protect it, he went
to Onabasha.

“Bravo!” cried Doctor Carey as the Harvester entered his office. “You
are heroic to wait all day for news. How much stuff have you gathered?”

“Three crops. How many missing women have you located?”

The doctor laughed. There was no sign of a smile on the face of the
Harvester.

“You didn't really expect her to come to light the first day? That would
be too easy! We can't find her in a minute.”

“It will be no surprise to me if you can't find her at all. I am not
expecting another man to do what I don't myself.”

“You are not hunting her. You are harvesting the woods. The men you
employ are to find her.”

“Maybe I am, and maybe I am not,” said the Harvester slowly. “To me
it appears to be a poor stick of a man who coolly proceeds with money
making, and trusts to men who haven't even seen her to search for the
girl he loves. I think a few hours of this is about all my patience will
endure.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know,” said the Harvester. “But you can bank on one thing
sure----I'm going to do something! I've had my fill of this. Thank you
for all you've done, and all you are going to do. My head is not clear
enough yet to decide anything with any sense, but maybe I'll hit on
something soon. I'm for the streets for a while.”

“Better go home and go to bed. You seem very tired.”

“I am,” said the Harvester. “The only way to endure this is to work
myself down. I'm all right, and I'll be careful, but I rather think I'll
find her myself.”

“Better go on with your work as we planned.”

“I'll think about it,” said the Harvester as he went out.

Until he was too tired to walk farther he slowly paced the streets of
the city, and then followed the home road through the valley and up the
hill to Medicine Woods. When he came to Singing Water, Belshazzar heard
his steps on the bridge, and came bounding to meet him. The Harvester
stretched himself on a seat and turned his face to the sky. It was a
deep, dark-blue bowl, closely set with stars, and a bright moon shed a
soft May radiance on the young earth. The lake was flooded with light,
and the big trees of the forest crowning the hill were silver coroneted.
The unfolding leaves had hidden the new cabin from the bridge, but the
driveway shone white, and already the upspringing bushes hedged it in.
Insects were humming lazily in the perfumed night air, and across the
lake a courting whip-poor-will was explaining to his sweetheart just
how much and why he loved her. A few bats were wavering in air hunting
insects, and occasionally an owl or a nighthawk crossed the lake.
Killdeer were glorying in the moonlight and night flight, and cried in
pure, clear notes as they sailed over the water. The Harvester was tired
and filled with unrest as he stretched on the bridge, but the longer
he lay the more the enfolding voices comforted him. All of them were
waiting and working out their lives to the legitimate end; there was
nothing else for him to do. He need not follow instinct or profit by
chance. He was a man; he could plan and reason.

The air grew balmy and some big, soft clouds swept across the moon. The
Harvester felt the dampness of rising dew, and went to the cabin. He
looked at it long in the moonlight and told himself that he could see
how much the plants, vines, and ferns had grown since the previous
night. Without making a light, he threw himself on the bed in the
outdoor room, and lay looking through the screening at the lake and sky.
He was working his brain to think of some manner in which to start a
search for the Dream Girl that would have some probability of success to
recommend it, but he could settle on no feasible plan. At last he fell
asleep, and in the night soft rain wet his face. He pulled an oilcloth
sheet over the bed, and lay breathing deeply of the damp, perfumed air
as he again slept. In the morning brilliant sunshine awoke him and he
arose to find the earth steaming.

“If ever there was a perfect mushroom day!” he said to Belshazzar. “We
must hurry and feed the stock and ourselves and gather some. They mean
real money.”



CHAPTER VII. THE QUEST OF THE DREAM GIRL

The Harvester breakfasted, fed the stock, hitched Betsy to the spring
wagon, and went into the dripping, steamy woods. If anyone had asked him
that morning concerning his idea of Heaven, he never would have dreamed
of describing a place of gold-paved streets, crystal pillars, jewelled
gates, and thrones of ivory. These things were beyond the man's
comprehension and he would not have admired or felt at home in such
magnificence if it had been materialized for him. He would have told
you that a floor of last year's brown leaves, studded with myriad flower
faces, big, bark-encased pillars of a thousand years, jewels on every
bush, shrub, and tree, and tilting thrones on which gaudy birds almost
burst themselves to voice the joy of life, while their bright-eyed
little mates peered questioningly at him over nest rims----he would have
told you that Medicine Woods on a damp, sunny May morning was Heaven.
And he would have added that only one angel, tall and slender, with the
pink of health on her cheeks and the dew of happiness in her dark eyes,
was necessary to enter and establish glory. Everything spoke to him that
morning, but the Harvester was silent. It had been his habit to talk
constantly to Belshazzar, Ajax, his work, even the winds and perfumes;
it had been his method of dissipating solitude, but to-day he had no
words, even for these dear friends. He only opened his soul to beauty,
and steadily climbed the hill to the crest, and then down the other side
to the rich, half-shaded, half-open spaces, where big, rough mushrooms
sprang in a night similar to the one just passed.

He could see them awaiting him from afar. He began work with rapid
fingers, being careful to break off the heads, but not to pull up the
roots. When four heaping baskets were filled he cut heavily leaved
branches to spread over them, and started to Onabasha. As usual,
Belshazzar rode beside him and questioned the Harvester when he politely
suggested to Betsy that she make a little haste.

“Have you forgotten that mushrooms are perishable?” he asked. “If we
don't get these to the city all woodsy and fresh we can't sell them.
Wonder where we can do the best? The hotels pay well. Really, the
biggest prices could be had by----”

Then the Harvester threw back his head and began to laugh, and
he laughed, and he laughed. A crow on the fence Joined him, and a
kingfisher, heading for Loon Lake, and then Belshazzar caught the
infection.

“Begorry! The very idea!” cried the Harvester. “'Heaven helps them
that help themselves.' Now you just watch us manoeuvre for assistance,
Belshazzar, old boy! Here we go!”

Then the laugh began again. It continued all the way to Onabasha and
even into the city. The Harvester drove through the most prosperous
street until he reached the residence district. At the first home
he stopped, gave the lines to Belshazzar, and, taking a basket of
mushrooms, went up the walk and rang the bell.

“All groceries should be delivered at the back door,” snapped a pert
maid, before he had time to say a word.

The Harvester lifted his hat.

“Will you kindly tell the lady of the house that I wish to speak with
her?”

“What name, please?”

“I want to show her some fine mushrooms, freshly gathered,” he answered.

How she did it the Harvester never knew. The first thing he realized was
that the door had closed before his face, and the basket had been picked
deftly from his fingers and was on the other side. After a short time
the maid returned.

“What do you want for them, please?”

The last thing on earth the Harvester wanted to do was to part with
those mushrooms, so he took one long, speculative look down the hall and
named a price he thought would be prohibitive.

“One dollar a dozen.”

“How many are there?”

“I count them as I sell them. I do not know.”

The door closed again. Presently it opened and the maid knelt on the
floor before him and counted the mushrooms one by one into a dish pan
and in a few minutes brought back seven dollars and fifty cents. The
chagrined Harvester, feeling like a thief, put the money in his pocket,
and turned away.

“I was to tell you,” said she, “that you are to bring all you have to
sell here, and the next time please go to the kitchen door.”

“Must be fond of mushrooms,” said the disgruntled Harvester.

“They are a great delicacy, and there are visitors.” The Harvester ached
to set the girl to one side and walk through the house, but he did not
dare; so he returned to the street, whistled to Betsy to come, and went
to the next gate. Here he hesitated. Should he risk further snubbing at
the front door or go back at once. If he did, he only would see a maid.
As he stood an instant debating, the door of the house he just had
left opened and the girl ran after him. “If you have more, we will take
them,” she called.

The Harvester gasped for breath.

“They have to be used at once,” he suggested.

“She knows that. She wants to treat her friends.”

“Well she has got enough for a banquet,” he said. “I--I don't usually
sell more than a dozen or two in one place.”

“I don't see why you can't let her have them if you have more.”

“Perhaps I have orders to fill for regular customers,” suggested the
Harvester.

“And perhaps you haven't,” said the maid. “You ought to be ashamed not
to let people who are willing to pay your outrageous prices have them.
It's regular highway robbery.”

“Possibly that's the reason I decline to hold up one party twice,” said
the Harvester as he entered the gate and went up the walk to the front
door.

“You should be taught your place,” called the maid after him.

The Harvester again rang the bell. Another maid opened the door, and
once more he asked to speak with the lady of the house. As the girl
turned, a handsome old woman in cap and morning gown came down the
stairs.

“What have you there?” she asked.

The Harvester lifted the leaves and exposed the musky, crimpled, big
mushrooms.

“Oh!” she cried in delight. “Indeed, yes! We are very fond of them. I
will take the basket, and divide with my sons. You are sure you have no
poisonous ones among them?”

“Quite sure,” said the Harvester faintly.

“How much do you want for the basket?”

“They are a dollar a dozen; I haven't counted them.”

“Dear me! Isn't that rather expensive?”

“It is. Very!” said the Harvester. “So expensive that most people don't
think of taking over a dozen. They are large and very rich, so they go a
long way.”

“I suppose you have to spend a great deal of time hunting them? It does
seem expensive, but they are fresh, and the boys are so fond of them.
I'm not often extravagant, I'll just take the lot. Sarah, bring a pan.”

Again the Harvester stood and watched an entire basket counted over and
carried away, and he felt the robber he had been called as he took the
money.

At the next house he had learned a lesson. He carpeted a basket with
leaves and counted out a dozen and a half into it, leaving the remainder
in the wagon. Three blocks on one side of the street exhausted his
store and he was showered with orders. He had not seen any one that even
resembled a dark-eyed girl. As he came from the last house a big, red
motor shot past and then suddenly slowed and backed beside his wagon.

“What in the name of sense are you doing?” demanded Doctor Carey.

“Invading the residence district of Onabasha,” said the Harvester.
“Madam, would you like some nice, fresh, country mushrooms? I guarantee
that there are no poisonous ones among them, and they were gathered this
morning. Considering their rarity and the difficult work of collecting,
they are exceedingly low at my price. I am offering these for five
dollars a dozen, madam, and for mercy sake don't take them or I'll have
no excuse to go to the next house.”

The doctor stared, then understood, and began to laugh. When at last he
could speak he said, “David, I'll bet you started with three bushels and
began at the head of this street, and they are all gone.”

“Put up a good one!” said the Harvester. “You win. The first house I
tried they ordered me to the back door, took a market basket full away
from me by force, tried to buy the load, and I didn't see any one save a
maid.”

The doctor lay on the steering gear and faintly groaned.

The Harvester regarded him sympathetically. “Isn't it a crime?” he
questioned. “Mushrooms are no go. I can see that!----or rather they are
entirely too much of a go. I never saw anything in such demand. I must
seek a less popular article for my purpose. To-morrow look out for me.
I shall begin where I left off to-day, but I will have changed my
product.”

“David, for pity sake,” peeped the doctor.

“What do I care how I do it, so I locate her?” superbly inquired the
Harvester.

“But you won't find her!” gasped the doctor.

“I've come as close it as you so far, anyway,” said the Harvester. “Your
mushrooms are on the desk in your office.”

He drove slowly up and down the streets until Betsy wabbled on her legs.
Then he left her to rest and walked until he wabbled; and by that time
it was dark, so he went home.

At the first hint of dawn he was at work the following morning. With
loaded baskets closely covered, he started to Onabasha, and began where
he had quit the day before. This time he carried a small, crudely
fashioned bark basket, leaf-covered, and he rang at the front door with
confidence.

Every one seemed to have a maid in that part of the city, for a freshly
capped and aproned girl opened the door.

“Are there any young women living here?” blandly inquired the Harvester.

“What's that of your business?” demanded the maid.

The Harvester flushed, but continued, “I am offering something
especially intended for young women. If there are none, I will not
trouble you.”

“There are several.”

“Will you please ask them if they would care for bouquets of violets,
fresh from the woods?”

“How much are they, and how large are the bunches?”

“Prices differ, and they are the right size to appear well. They had
better see for themselves.”

The maid reached for the basket, but the Harvester drew back.

“I keep them in my possession,” he said. “You may take a sample.”

He lifted the leaves and drew forth a medium-sized bunch of long-stemmed
blue violets with their leaves. The flowers were fresh, crisp, and
strong odours of the woods arose from them.

“Oh!” cried the maid. “Oh, how lovely!”

She hurried away with them and returned carrying a purse.

“I want two more bunches,” she said. “How much are they?”

“Are the girls who want them dark or fair?”

“What difference does that make?”

“I have blue violets for blondes, yellow for brunettes, and white for
the others.”

“Well I never! One is fair, and two have brown hair and blue eyes.”

“One blue and two whites,” said the Harvester calmly, as if matching
women's hair and eyes with flowers were an inherited vocation. “They are
twenty cents a bunch.”

“Aha!” he chortled to himself as he whistled to Betsy. “At last we have
it. There are no dark-eyed girls here. Now we are making headway.”

Down the street he went, with varying fortune, but with patience and
persistence at every house he at last managed to learn whether there was
a dark-eyed girl. There did not seem to be many. Long before his store
of yellow violets was gone the last blue and white had disappeared. But
he calmly went on asking for dark-eyed girls, and explaining that all
the blue and white were taken, because fair women were most numerous.

At one house the owner, who reminded the Harvester of his mother,
came to the door. He uncovered and in his suavest tones inquired if
a brunette young woman lived there and if she would like a nosegay of
yellow violets.

“Well bless my soul!” cried she. “What is this world coming to? Do
you mean to tell me that there are now able-bodied men offering at our
doors, flowers to match our girls' complexions?”

“Yes madam?” said the Harvester gravely, “and also selling them as fast
as he can show them, at prices that make a profit very well worth while.
I had an equal number of blue and white, but I see the dark girls are
very much in the minority. The others were gone long ago, and I now have
flowers to offer brunettes only.”

“Well forever more! And you don't call that fiddlin' business for a big,
healthy, young man?”

The Harvester's gay laugh was infectious.

“I do not,” he said. “I have to start as soon as I can see, tramp long
distances in wet woods and gather the violets on my knees, make them
into bunches, and bring them here in water to keep them fresh. I have
another occupation. I only kill time on these, but I would be ashamed to
tell you what I have gotten for them this morning.”

“Humph! I'm glad to hear it!” said the woman. “Shame in some form is a
sign of grace. I have no use for a human being without a generous supply
of it. There is a very beautiful dark-eyed girl in the house, and I will
take two bunches for her. How much are they?”

“I have only three remaining,” said the Harvester. “Would you like to
allow her to make her own selection?”

“When I'm giving things I usually take my choice. I want that, and that
one.”

“As my stock is so nearly out, I'll make the two for twenty,” said the
Harvester. “Won't you accept the last one from me, because you remind me
just a little of my mother?”

“I will indeed,” said she. “Thank you very much! I shall love to have
them as dearly as any of the girls. I used to gather them when I was a
child, but I almost never see the blue ones any more, and I don't know
as I ever expected to see a yellow violet again as long as I live. Where
did you get them?”

“In my woods,” said the Harvester. “You see I grow several members of
the viola pedata family, bird's foot, snake, and wood violet, and three
of the odorata, English, marsh, and sweet, for our big drug houses. They
use the flowers in making delicate tests for acids and alkalies.
The entire plant, flower, seed, leaf, and root, goes into different
remedies. The beds seed themselves and spread, so I have more than
I need for the chemists, and I sell a few. I don't use the white and
yellow in my business; I just grow them for their beauty. I also sell my
surplus lilies of the valley. Would you like to order some of them for
your house or more violets for to-morrow?”

“Well bless my soul! Do you mean to tell me that lilies of the valley
are medicine?”

The Harvester laughed.

“I grow immense beds of them in the woods on the banks of Loon Lake,”
 he said. “They are the convallaris majallis of the drug houses and I
scarcely know what the weak-hearted people would do without them. I use
large quantities in trade, and this season I am selling a few because
people so love them.”

“Lilies in medicine; well dear me! Are roses good for our innards too?”

Then the Harvester did laugh.

“I imagine the roses you know go into perfumes mostly,” he answered.
“They do make medicine of Canadian rock rose and rose bay, laurel, and
willow. I grow the bushes, but they are not what you would consider
roses.”

“I wonder now,” said the woman studying the Harvester closely, “if you
are not that queer genius I've heard of, who spends his time hunting and
growing stuff in the woods and people call him the Medicine Man.”

“I strongly suspect madam, I am that man,” said the Harvester.

“Well bless me!” cried she. “I've always wanted to see you and here when
I do, you look just like anybody else. I thought you'd have long hair,
and be wild-eyed and ferocious. And your talk sounds like out of a book.
Well that beats me!”

“Me too!” said the Harvester, lifting his hat. “You don't want any
lilies to-morrow, then?”

“Yes I do. Medicine or no medicine, I've always liked 'em, and I'm going
to keep on liking them. If you can bring me a good-sized bunch after the
weak-kneed----”

“Weak-hearted,” corrected the Harvester.

“Well 'weak-hearted,' then; it's all the same thing. If you've got any
left, as I was saying, you can fetch them to me for the smell.”

The Harvester laughed all the way down town. There he went to Doctor
Carey's office, examined a directory, and got the names of all the
numbers where he had sold yellow violets. A few questions when the
doctor came in settled all of them, but the flower scheme was better.
Because the yellow were not so plentiful as the white and blue, next day
he added buttercups and cowslips to his store for the dark girls. When
he had rifled his beds for the last time, after three weeks of almost
daily trips to town, and had paid high prices to small boys he set
searching the adjoining woods until no more flowers could be found, he
drove from the outskirts of the city one day toward the hospital, and as
he stopped, down the street came Doctor Carey frantically waving to him.
As the big car slackened, “Come on David, quick! I've seen her!” cried
the doctor.

The Harvester jumped from the wagon, threw the lines to Belshazzar, and
landed in the panting car.

“For Heaven's sake where? Are you sure?”

The car went speeding down the street. A policeman beckoned and cried
after it.

“It won't do any good to get arrested, Doc,” cautioned the Harvester.

“Now right along here,” panted Doctor Carey. “Watch both sides sharply.
If I stop you jump out, and tell the blame policemen to get at their
job. The party they are hired to find is right under their noses.”

The Harvester began to perspire. “Doc, don't you think you should tell
me? Maybe she is in some store. Maybe I could do better on foot.”

“Shut up!” growled the doctor. “I am doing the best I know.”

He hurried up the street for blocks and back again, and at last stopped
before a large store and went in. When he returned he drove to the
hospital and together they entered the office. There he turned to the
Harvester.

“It isn't so hard to understand you now, my boy,” he said. “Shades of
Diana, but she'll be a beauty when she gets a little more flesh and
colour. She came out of Whitlaw's and walked right to the crossing. I
almost could have touched her, but I didn't notice. Two girls passed
before me, and in hurrying, a tall, dark one knocked off one of your
bunches of yellow violets. She glanced at it and laughed, but let
it lay. Then your girl hesitated stooped and picked it up. The crazy
policeman yelled at me to clear the crossing and it didn't hit me for a
half block how tall and white she was and how dark her eyes were. I was
just thinking about her picking up the flowers, and that it was queer
for her to do it, when like a brick it hit me, THAT'S DAVID'S GIRL! I
tried to turn around, but you know what Main Street is in the middle
of the day. And those idiots of policemen! They ordered me on, and I
couldn't turn for a street car coming, so I called to one of them that
the girl we wanted was down the street, and he looked at me like an
addle-pate and said, 'What girl? Move on or you'll get in a jam here.'
You can use me for a football if I don't go back and smash him. Paid him
five dollars myself less than two weeks ago to keep his eyes open. 'TO
KEEP HIS EYES OPEN!'” panted the doctor, shaking his fist at David. “Yes
sir! 'To keep his eyes open!' And he motioned for things to come along,
and so I lost her too.”

“I think we had better go back to the street,” said the Harvester.

“Oh, I'd been back and forth along that street for nearly an hour before
I gave up and came here to see if I could find you, and we've hunted it
an hour more! What's the use? She's gone for this time, but by gum, I
saw her! And she was worth seeing!”

“Did she appear ill to you?”

The doctor dropped on a chair and threw out his hands hopelessly.

“This was awful sudden, David,” he said. “I was going along as I told
you, and I noticed her stop and thought she had a good head to wait a
second instead of running in before me, and there came those two girls
right under the car from the other side. I only had a glimpse of her as
she stooped for the flowers. I saw a big braid of hair, but I was half a
block away before I got it all connected, and then came the crush in the
street, and I was blocked.”

The doctor broke down and wiped his face and expressed his feelings
unrestrainedly.

“Don't!” said the Harvester patiently. “It's no use to feel so badly,
Doc. I know what you would give to have found her for me. I know you did
all you could. I let her escape me. We will find her yet. It's glorious
news that she's in the city. It gives me heart to hear that. Can't you
just remember if she seemed ill?”

The doctor meditated.

“She wasn't the tallest girl I ever saw,” he said slowly, “but she was
the tallest girl to be pretty. She had on a white waist and a gray skirt
and black hat. Her eyes and hair were like you said, and she was plain,
white faced, with a hue that might possibly be natural, and it might be
confinement in bad light and air and poor food. She didn't seem sick,
but she isn't well. There is something the matter with her, but it's not
immediate or dangerous. She appeared like a flower that had got a little
moisture and sprouted in a cellar.”

“You saw her all right!” said the Harvester, “and I think your diagnosis
is correct too. That's the way she seemed to me. I've thought she needed
sun and air. I told the South Wind so the other day.”

“Why you blame fool!” cried the doctor. “Is this thing going to your
head? Say, I forgot! There is something else. I traced her in the store.
She was at the embroidery counter and she bought some silk. If she ever
comes again the clerk is going to hold her and telephone me or get her
address if she has to steal it. Oh, we are getting there! We will have
her pretty soon now. You ought to feel better just to know that she is
in town and that I've seen her.”

“I do!” said the Harvester. “Indeed I do!”

“It can't be much longer,” said the doctor. “She's got to be located
soon. But those policemen! I wouldn't give a nickel for the lot! I'll
bet she's walked over them for two weeks. If I were you I'd discharge
the bunch. They'd be peacefully asleep if she passed them. If they'd let
me alone, I'd have had her. I could have turned around easily. I've been
in dozens of closer places.”

“Don't worry! This can't last much longer. She's of and in the city or
she wouldn't have picked up the flowers. Doc, are you sure they were
mine?”

“Yes. Half the girls have been tricked out in yours the past two weeks.
I can spot them as far as I can see.”

“Dear Lord, that's getting close!” said the Harvester intensely. “Seems
as if the violets would tell her.”

“Now cut out flowers talking and the South Wind!” ordered the doctor.
“This is business. The violets prove something all right, though. If she
was in the country, she could gather plenty herself. She is working at
sewing in some room in town, either over a store or in a house. If she
hadn't been starved for flowers she never would have stopped for them on
the street. I could see just a flash of hesitation, but she wanted them
too much. David, one bouquet will go in water and be cared for a week.
Man, it's getting close! This does seem like a link.”

“Since you say it, possibly I dare agree with you,” said the Harvester.

“How near are you through with that canvass of yours?”

“About three fourths.”

“Well I'd go on with it. After all we have got to find her ourselves.
Those senile policemen!”

“I am going on with it; you needn't worry about that. But I've got to
change to other flowers. I've stripped the violet beds. There's quite
a crop of berries coming, but they are not ripe yet, and a tragedy to
pick. The pond lilies are just beginning to open by the thousand. The
lake border is blue with sweet-flag that is lovely and the marsh pale
gold with cowslips. The ferns are prime and the woods solid sheets of
every colour of bloom. I believe I'll go ahead with the wild flowers.”

“I would too! David, you do feel better, don't you?”

“I certainly do, Doctor. Surely it won't be long now!”

The Harvester was so hopeful that he whistled and sang on the return to
Medicine Woods, and that night for the first time in many days he sat
long over a candlestick, and took a farewell peep into her room before
he went to bed.

The next day he worked with all his might harvesting the last remnants
of early spring herbs, in the dry-room and store-house, and on furniture
and candlesticks.

Then he went back to flower gathering and every day offered bunches of
exquisite wood and field flowers and white and gold water lilies from
door to door.

Three weeks later the Harvester, perceptibly thin, pale, and worried
entered the office. He sank into a chair and groaned wearily.

“Isn't this the bitterest luck!” he cried. “I've finished the town. I've
almost walked off my legs. I've sold flowers by the million, but I've
not had a sight of her.”

“It's been almost a tragedy with me,” said the doctor gloomily. “I've
killed two dogs and grazed a baby, because I was watching the sidewalks
instead of the street. What are you going to do now?”

“I am going home and bring up the work to the July mark. I am going to
take it easy and rest a few days so I can think more clearly. I don't
know what I'll try next. I've punched up the depot and the policemen
again. When I get something new thought out I'll let you know.”

Then he began emptying his pockets of money and heaping it on the table,
small coins, bills, big and little.

“What on earth is that?”

“That,” said the Harvester, giving the heap a shove of contempt, “that
is the price of my pride and humiliation. That is what it cost people
who allowed me to cheek my way into their homes and rob them, as one
maid said, for my own purposes. Doc, where on earth does all the money
come from? In almost every house I entered, women had it to waste, in
many cases to throw away. I never saw so much paid for nothing in all my
life. That whole heap is from mushrooms and flowers.”

“What are you piling it there for?”

“For your free ward. I don't want a penny of it. I wouldn't keep it, not
if I was starving.”

“Why David! You couldn't compel any one to buy. You offered something
they wanted, and they paid you what you asked.”

“Yes, and to keep them from buying, and to make the stuff go farther, I
named prices to shame a shark. When I think of that mushroom deal I can
feel my face burn. I've made the search I wanted to, and I am satisfied
that I can't find her that way. I have kept up my work at home between
times. I am not out anything but my time, and it isn't fair to plunder
the city to pay that. Take that cussed money and put it where I'll never
see or hear of it. Do anything you please, except to ask me ever to
profit by a cent. When I wash my hands after touching it for the last
time maybe I'll feel better.”

“You are a fanatic!”

“If getting rid of that is being a fanatic, I am proud of the title. You
can't imagine what I've been through!”

“Can't I though?” laughed the doctor. “In work of that kind you get into
every variety of place; and some of it is new to you. Never mind! No one
can contaminate you. It is the law that only a man can degrade himself.
Knowing things will not harm you. Doing them is a different matter. What
you know will be a protection. What you do ruins----if it is wrong. You
are not harmed, you are only disgusted. Think it over, and in a few days
come back and get your money. It is strictly honest. You earned every
cent of it.”

“If you ever speak of it again or force it on me I'll take it home and
throw it into the lake.”

He went after Betsy and slowly drove to Medicine Woods. Belshazzar,
on the seat beside him, recognized a silent, disappointed master
and whimpered as he rubbed the Harvester's shoulder to attract his
attention.

“This is tough luck, old boy,” said the Harvester. “I had such hopes and
I worked so hard. I suffered in the flesh for every hour of it, and I
failed. Oh but I hate the word! If I knew where she is right now, Bel,
I'd give anything I've got. But there's no use to wail and get sorry
for myself. That's against the law of common decency. I'll take a swim,
sleep it off, straighten up the herbs a little, and go at it again, old
fellow; that's a man's way. She's somewhere, and she's got to be found,
no matter what it costs.”



CHAPTER VIII. BELSHAZZAR'S RECORD POINT

The Harvester set the neglected cabin in order; then he carefully and
deftly packed all his dried herbs, barks, and roots. Next came carrying
the couch grass, wild alum, and soapwort into the store-room. Then
followed July herbs. He first went to his beds of foxglove, because
the tender leaves of the second year should be stripped from them at
flowering time, and that usually began two weeks earlier; but his bed
lay in a shaded, damp location and the tall bloom stalks were only in
half flower, their pale lavender making an exquisite picture. It paid
to collect those leaves, so the Harvester hastily stripped the amount he
wanted.

Yarrow was beginning to bloom and he gathered as much as he required,
taking the whole plant. That only brought a few cents a pound, but it
was used entire, so the weight made it worth while.

Catnip tops and leaves were also ready. As it grew in the open in dry
soil and the beds had been weeded that spring, he could gather great
arm loads of it with a sickle, but he had to watch the swarming bees. He
left the male fern and mullein until the last for different reasons.

On the damp, cool, rocky hillside, beneath deep shade of big forest
trees, grew the ferns, their long, graceful fronds waving softly. Tree
toads sang on the cool rocks beneath them, chewinks nested under gnarled
roots among them, rose-breasted grosbeaks sang in grape-vines clambering
over the thickets, and Singing Water ran close beside. So the Harvester
left digging these roots until nearly the last, because he so disliked
to disturb the bed. He could not have done it if he had not been forced.
All of the demand for his fern never could be supplied. Of his products
none was more important to the Harvester because this formed the basis
of one of the oldest and most reliable remedies for little children. The
fern had to be gathered with especial care, deteriorated quickly, and no
staple was more subject to adulteration.

So he kept his bed intact, lifted the roots at the proper time,
carefully cleaned without washing, rapidly dried in currents of hot
air, and shipped them in bottles to the trade. He charged and received
fifteen cents a pound, where careless and indifferent workers got ten.

On the banks of Singing Water, at the head of the fern bed, the
Harvester stood under a gray beech tree and looked down the swaying
length of delicate green. He was lean and rapidly bronzing, for he
seldom remembered a head covering because he loved the sweep of the wind
in his hair.

“I hate to touch you,” he said. “How I wish she could see you before I
begin. If she did, probably she would say it was a sin, and then I never
could muster courage to do it at all. I'd give a small farm to know
if those violets revived for her. I was crazy to ask Doc if they were
wilted, but I hated to. If they were from the ones I gathered that
morning they should have been all right.”

A tree toad dared him to come on; a chipmunk grew saucy as the Harvester
bent to an unloved task. If he stripped the bed as closely as he dared
and not injure it, he could not fill half his orders; so, deftly and
with swift, skilful fingers and an earnest face, he worked. Belshazzar
came down the hill on a rush, nose to earth and began hunting among the
plants. He never could understand why his loved master was so careless
as to go to work before he had pronounced it safe. When the fern bed was
finished, the Harvester took time to make a trip to town, but there
was no word waiting him; so he went to the mullein. It lay on a sunny
hillside beyond the couch grass and joined a few small fields, the only
cleared land of the six hundred acres of Medicine Woods. Over rocks and
little hills and hollows spread the pale, grayish-yellow of the green
leaves, and from five to seven feet arose the flower stems, while
the entire earth between was covered with rosettes of young plants.
Belshazzar went before to give warning if any big rattlers curled in the
sun on the hillside, and after him followed the Harvester cutting leaves
in heaps. That was warm work and he covered his head with a floppy old
straw hat, with wet grass in the crown, and stopped occasionally to
rest.

He loved that yellow-faced hillside. Because so much of his reaping lay
in the shade and commonly his feet sank in dead leaves and damp earth,
the change was a rest. He cheerfully stubbed his toes on rocks, and
endured the heat without complaint. It appeared to him as if a member of
every species of butterfly he knew wavered down the hillside. There were
golden-brown danais, with their black-striped wings, jetty troilus with
an attempt at trailers, big asterias, velvety black with longer trails
and wide bands of yellow dots. Coenia were most numerous of all and to
the Harvester wonderfully attractive in rich, subdued colours with a
wealth of markings and eye spots. Many small moths, with transparent
wings and noses red as blood, flashed past him hunting pollen.
Goldfinches, intent on thistle bloom, wavered through the air trailing
mellow, happy notes behind them, and often a humming-bird visited the
mullein. On the lake wild life splashed and chattered incessantly, and
sometimes the Harvester paused and stood with arms heaped with leaves,
to interpret some unusually appealing note of pain or anger or some very
attractive melody. The red-wings were swarming, the killdeers busy, and
he thought of the Dream Girl and smiled.

“I wonder if she would like this,” he mused.

When the mullein leaves were deep on the trays of the dry-house he began
on the bloom and that was a task he loved. Just to lay off the beds in
swaths and follow them, deftly picking the stamens and yellow petals
from the blooms. These he would dry speedily in hot air, bottle, and
send at once to big laboratories. The listed price was seventy-five
cents a pound, but the beautiful golden bottles of the Harvester always
brought more. The work was worth while, and he liked the location and
gathering of this particular crop: for these reasons he always left
it until the last, and then revelled in the gold of sunshine, bird,
butterfly, and flower. Several days were required to harvest the mullein
and during the time the man worked with nimble fingers, while his brain
was intensely occupied with the question of what to do next in his
search for the Girl.

When the work was finished, he went to the deep wood to take a peep at
acres of thrifty ginseng, and he was satisfied as he surveyed the big
bed. Long years he had laboured diligently; soon came the reward. He had
not realized it before, but as he studied the situation he saw that
he either must begin this harvest at once or employ help. If he waited
until September he could not gather one third of the crop alone.

“But the roots will weigh less if I take them now,” he argued, “and I
can work at nothing in comfort until I have located her. I will go on
with my search and allow the ginseng to grow that much heavier. What a
picture! It is folly to disturb this now, for I will lose the seed of
every plant I dig, and that is worth almost as much as the root. It is
a question whether I want to furnish the market with seed, and so raise
competition for my bed. I think, be jabbers, that I'll wait for this
harvest until the seed is ripe, and then bury part of a head where I dig
a root, as the Indians did. That's the idea! The more I grow, the more
money; and I may need considerable for her. One thing I'd like to know:
Are these plants cultivated? All the books quote the wild at highest
rates and all I've ever sold was wild. The start grew here naturally.
What I added from the surrounding country was wild, but through and
among it I've sown seed I bought, and I've tended it with every care.
But this is deep wood and wild conditions. I think I have a perfect
right to so label it. I'll ask Doc. And another thing I'll go through
the woods west of Onabasha where I used to find ginseng, and see if I
can get a little and then take the same amount of plants grown here,
and make a test. That way I can discover any difference before I go to
market. This is my gold mine, and that point is mighty important to me,
so I'll go this very day. I used to find it in the woods northeast of
town and on the land Jameson bought, west. Wonder if he lives there yet.
He should have died of pure meanness long ago. I'll drive to the river
and hunt along the bank.”

Early the following morning the Harvester went to Onabasha and stopped
at the hospital for news. Finding none, he went through town and several
miles into the country on the other side, to a piece of lowland lying
along the river bank, where he once had found and carried home to reset
a big bed of ginseng. If he could get only a half pound of roots
from there now, they would serve his purpose. He went down the bank,
Belshazzar at his heels, and at last found the place. Many trees had
been cut, but there remained enough for shade; the fields bore the
ragged, unattractive appearance of old. The Harvester smiled grimly
as he remembered that the man who lived there once had charged him for
damage he might do to trees in driving across his woods, and boasted to
his neighbours that a young fool was paying for the privilege of doing
his grubbing. If Jameson had known what the roots he was so anxious to
dispose of brought a pound on the market at that time, he would have
been insane with anger. So the Harvester's eyes were dancing with fun
and a wry grin twisted his lips as he clambered over the banks of
the recently dredged river, and looked at its pitiful condition and
straight, muddy flow.

“Appears to match the remainder of the Jameson property,” he said. “I
don't know who he is or where he came from, but he's no farmer. Perhaps
he uses this land to corral the stock he buys until he can sell it
again.”

He went down the embankment and began to search for the location where
he formerly had found the ginseng. When he came to the place he stood
amazed, for from seed, roots, and plants he had missed, the growth had
sprung up and spread, so that at a rapid estimate the Harvester thought
it contained at least five pounds, allowing for what it would shrink on
account of being gathered early. He hesitated an instant, and thought
of coming later; but the drive was long and the loss would not amount
to enough to pay for a second trip. About taking it, he never thought
at all. He once had permission from the owner to dig all the shrubs,
bushes, and weeds he desired from that stretch of woods, and had paid
for possible damages that might occur. As he bent to the task there did
come a fleeting thought that the patch was weedless and in unusual shape
for wild stuff. Then, with swift strokes of his light mattock, he lifted
the roots, crammed them into his sack, whistled to Belshazzar, and going
back to the wagon, drove away. Reaching home he washed the ginseng,
and spread it on a tray to dry. The first time he wanted the mattock
he realized that he had left it lying where he had worked. It was an
implement that he had directed a blacksmith to fashion to meet his
requirements. No store contained anything half so useful to him. He had
worked with it for years and it just suited him, so there was nothing to
do but go back. Betsy was too tired to return that day, so he planned
to dig his ginseng with something else, finish his work the following
morning, and get the mattock in the afternoon.

“It's like a knife you've carried for years, or a gun,” muttered the
Harvester. “I actually don't know how to get along without it. What made
me so careless I can't imagine. I never before in my life did a trick
like that. I wonder if I hurried a little. I certainly was free to
take it. He always wanted the stuff dug up. Of all the stupid tricks,
Belshazzar, that was the worst. Now Betsy and a half day of wasted time
must pay for my carelessness. Since I have to go, I'll look a little
farther. Maybe there is more. Those woods used to be full of it.”

According to this programme, the next afternoon the Harvester again
walked down the embankment of the mourning river and through the ragged
woods to the place where the ginseng had been. He went forward, stepping
lightly, as men of his race had walked the forest for ages, swerving to
avoid boughs, and looking straight ahead. Contrary to his usual custom
of coming to heel in a strange wood, Belshazzar suddenly darted around
the man and took the path they had followed the previous day. The animal
was performing his office in life; he had heard or scented something
unusual. The Harvester knew what that meant. He looked inquiringly at
the dog, glanced around, and then at the earth. Belshazzar proceeded
noiselessly at a rapid pace over the leaves: Suddenly the master saw the
dog stop in a stiff point. Lifting his feet lightly and straining his
eyes before him, the Harvester passed a spice thicket and came in line.

For one second he stood as rigid as Belshazzar. The next his right arm
shot upward full length, and began describing circles, his open
palm heavenward, and into his face leapt a glorified expression of
exultation. Face down in the rifled ginseng bed lay a sobbing girl. Her
frame was long and slender, a thick coil of dark hair; bound her head. A
second more and the Harvester bent and softly patted Belshazzar's head.
The beast broke point and looked up. The man caught the dog's chin in a
caressing grip, again touched his head, moved soundless lips, and waved
toward the prostrate figure. The dog hesitated. The Harvester made the
same motions. Belshazzar softly stepped over the leaves, passed around
the feet of the girl, and paused beside her, nose to earth, softly
sniffing.

In one moment she came swiftly to a sitting posture.

“Oh!” she cried in a spasm of fright.

Belshazzar reached an investigating nose and wagged an eager tail.

“Why you are a nice friendly dog!” said the trembling voice.

He immediately verified the assertion by offering his nose for a kiss.
The girl timidly laid a hand on his head.

“Heaven knows I'm lonely enough to kiss a dog,” she said, “but suppose
you belong to the man who stole my ginseng, and then ran away so fast he
forgot his----his piece he digged with.”

Belshazzar pressed closer.

“I am just killed, and I don't care whose dog you are,” sobbed the girl.

She threw her arms around Belshazzar's neck and laid her white face
against his satiny shoulder. The Harvester could endure no more. He took
a step forward, his face convulsed with pain.

“Please don't!” he begged. “I took your ginseng. I'll bring it back
to-morrow. There wasn't more than twenty-five or thirty dollars' worth.
It doesn't amount to one tear.”

The girl arose so quickly, the Harvester could not see how she did it.
With a startled fright on her face, and the dark eyes swimming, she
turned to him in one long look. Words rolled from the lips of the man in
a jumble. Behind the tears there was a dull, expressionless blue in the
girl's eyes and her face was so white that it appeared blank. He began
talking before she could speak, in an effort to secure forgiveness
without condemnation.

“You see, I grow it for a living on land I own, and I've always gathered
all there was in the country and no one cared. There never was enough in
one place to pay, and no other man wanted to spend the time, and so
I've always felt free to take it. Every one knew I did, and no one ever
objected before. Once I paid Henry Jameson for the privilege of cleaning
it from these woods. That was six or seven years ago, and it didn't
occur to me that I wasn't at liberty to dig what has grown since. I'll
bring it back at once, and pay you for the shrinkage from gathering it
too early. There won't be much over six pounds when it's dry. Please,
please don't feel badly. Won't you trust me to return it, and make good
the damage I've done?”

The face of the Harvester was eager and his tones appealing, as he
leaned forward trying to make her understand.

“Certainly!” said the Girl as she bent to pat the dog, while she
dried her eyes under cover of the movement. “Certainly! It can make no
difference!”

But as the Harvester drew a deep breath of relief, she suddenly
straightened to full height and looked straight at him.

“Oh what is the use to tell a pitiful lie!” she cried. “It does make a
difference! It makes all the difference in the world! I need that money!
I need it unspeakably. I owe a debt I must pay. What----what did I
understand you to say ginseng is worth?”

“If you will take a few steps,” said the Harvester, “and make yourself
comfortable on this log in the shade, I will tell you all I know about
it.”

The girl walked swiftly to the log indicated, seated herself, and
waited. The Harvester followed to a respectful distance.

“I can't tell to an ounce what wet roots would weigh,” he said as easily
as he could command his voice to speak with the heart in him beating
wildly, “and of course they lose greatly in drying; but I've handled
enough that I know the weight I carried home will come to six pounds at
the very least. Then you must figure on some loss, because I dug
this before it really was ready. It does not reach full growth until
September, and if it is taken too soon there is a decrease in weight. I
will make that up to you when I return it.”

The troubled eyes were gazing on his face intently, and the Harvester
studied them as he talked.

“You would think, then, there would be all of six pounds?

“Yes,” said the Harvester, “closer eight. When I replace the shrinkage
there is bound to be over seven.”

“And how much did I understand you to say it brought a pound?”

“That all depends,” answered he. “If you cure it yourself, and dry it
too much, you lose in weight. If you carry it in a small lot to the
druggists of Onabasha, probably you will not get over five dollars for
it.”

“Five?”

It was a startled cry.

“How much did you expect?” asked the Harvester gently.

“Uncle Henry said he thought he could get fifty cents a pound for all I
could find.”

“If your Uncle Henry has learned at last that ginseng is a salable
article he should know something about the price also. Will you tell
me what he said, and how you came to think of gathering roots for the
market?”

“There were men talking beneath the trees one Sunday afternoon about old
times and hunting deer, and they spoke of people who made money long ago
gathering roots and barks, and they mentioned one man who lived by it
yet.”

“Was his name Langston?”

“Yes, I remember because I liked the name. I was so eager to earn
something, and I can't leave here just now because Aunt Molly is very
ill, so the thought came that possibly I could gather stuff worth money,
after my work was finished. I went out and asked questions. They said
nothing brought enough to make it pay any one, except this ginseng
plant, and the Langston man almost had stripped the country. Then uncle
said he used to get stuff here, and he might have got some of that. I
asked what it was like, so they told me and I hunted until I found that,
and it seemed a quantity to me. Of course I didn't know it had to be
dried. Uncle took a root I dug to a store, and they told him that it
wasn't much used any more, but they would give him fifty cents a pound
for it. What MAKES you think you can get five dollars?”

“With your permission,” said the Harvester.

He seated himself on the log, drew from his pocket an old pamphlet,
and spreading it before her, ran a pencil along the line of a list of
schedule prices for common drug roots and herbs. Because he understood,
his eyes were very bright, and his voice a trifle crisp. A latent anger
springing in his breast was a good curb for his emotions. He was closely
acquainted with all of the druggists of Onabasha, and he knew that not
one of them had offered less than standard prices for ginseng.

“The reason I think so,” he said gently, “is because growing it is the
largest part of my occupation, and it was a staple with my father before
me. I am David Langston, of whom you heard those men speak. Since I was
a very small boy I have lived by collecting herbs and roots, and I get
more for ginseng than anything else. Very early I tired of hunting other
people's woods for herbs, so I began transplanting them to my own. I
moved that bed out there seven years ago. What you found has grown since
from roots I overlooked and seeds that fell at that time. Now do you
think I am enough of an authority to trust my word on the subject?”

There was not a change of expression on her white face.

“You surely should know,” she said wearily, “and you could have no
possible object in deceiving me. Please go on.”

“Any country boy or girl can find ginseng, gather, wash, and dry it, and
get five dollars a pound. I can return yours to-morrow and you can cure
and take it to a druggist I will name you, and sell for that. But if you
will allow me to make a suggestion, you can get more. Your roots are now
on the trays of an evaporating house. They will dry to the proper degree
desired by the trade, so that they will not lose an extra ounce in
weight, and if I send them with my stuff to big wholesale houses I deal
with, they will be graded with the finest wild ginseng. It is worth more
than the cultivated and you will get closer eight dollars a pound for it
than five. There is some speculation in it, and the market fluctuates:
but, as a rule, I sell for the highest price the drug brings, and, at
times when the season is very dry, I set my own prices. Shall I return
yours or may I cure and sell it, and bring you the money?”

“How much trouble would that make you?”

“None. The work of digging and washing is already finished. All that
remains is to weigh it and make a memorandum of the amount when I sell.
I should very much like to do it. It would be a comfort to see the money
go into your hands. If you are afraid to trust me, I will give you the
names of several people you can ask concerning me the next time you go
to the city.”

She looked at him steadily.

“Never mind that,” she said. “But why do you offer to do it for a
stranger? It must be some trouble, no matter how small you represent it
to be.”

“Perhaps I am going to pay you eight and sell for ten.”

“I don't think you can. Five sounds fabulous to me. I can't believe
that. If you wanted to make money you needn't have told me you took it.
I never would have known. That isn't your reason!”

“Possibly I would like to atone for those tears I caused,” said the
Harvester.

“Don't think of that! They are of no consequence to any one. You needn't
do anything for me on that account.”

“Don't search for a reason,” said the Harvester, in his gentlest tones.
“Forget that feature of the case. Say I'm peculiar, and allow me to do
it because it would be a pleasure. In close two weeks I will bring you
the money. Is it a bargain?”

“Yes, if you care to make it.”

“I care very much. We will call that settled.”

“I wish I could tell you what it will mean to me,” said the Girl.

“If you only would,” plead the Harvester.

“I must not burden a stranger with my troubles.”

“But if it would make the stranger so happy!”

“That isn't possible. I must face life and bear what it brings me
alone.”

“Not unless you choose,” said the Harvester. “That is, if you will
pardon me, a narrow view of life. It cuts other people out of the joy of
service. If you can't tell me, would you trust a very lovely and gentle
woman I could bring to you?”

“No more than you. It is my affair; I must work it out myself.”

“I am mighty sorry,” said the Harvester. “I believe you err in that
decision. Think it over a day or so, and see if two heads are not better
than one. You will realize when this ginseng matter is settled that you
profited by trusting me. The same will hold good along other lines, if
you only can bring yourself to think so. At any rate, try. Telling a
trouble makes it lighter. Sympathy should help, if nothing can be done.
And as for money, I can show you how to earn sums at least worth your
time, if you have nothing else you want to do.”

The Girl bent toward him.

“Oh please do tell me!” she cried eagerly. “I've tried and tried to find
some way ever since I have been here, but every one else I have met says
I can't, and nothing seems to be worth anything. If you only would tell
me something I could do!”

“If you will excuse my saying so,” said the Harvester, “it appeals to

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/349