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The Desert and the Sown

by Mary Hallock Foote · English · Gutenberg #8219 · 354,364 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Desert and the Sown

Author: Mary Hallock Foote


        
Release date: June 1, 2005 [eBook #8219]
                Most recently updated: March 15, 2018

Language: English

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Produced by Eric Eldred, Clay Massei and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team








THE DESERT AND THE SOWN


By Mary Hallock Foote




CONTENTS


I. A COUNCIL OF THE ELDERS

II. INTRODUCING A SON-IN-LAW

III. THE INITIAL LOVE

IV. “A MAN THAT HAD A WELL IN HIS OWN COURT”

V. DISINHERITED

VI. AN APPEAL TO NATURE

VII. MARKING TIME

VIII. A HUNTER'S DIARY

IX. THE POWER OF WEAKNESS

X. THE WHITE PERIL

XI. A SEARCHING OF HEARTS

XII. THE BLOOD-WITE

XIII. CURTAIN

XIV. KIND INQUIRIES

XV. A BRIDEGROOM OF SNOW

XVI. THE NATURE OF AN OATH

XVII. THE HIDDEN TRAIL

XVIII.THE STAR IN THE EAST

XIX. PILGRIMS AND STRANGERS

XX. A STATION IN THE DESERT

XXI. INJURIOUS REPORTS CONCERNING AN OLD HOUSE

XXII. THE CASE STRIKES IN

XXIII.RESTIVENESS

XXIV. INDIAN SUMMER

XXV. THE FELL FROST

XXVI. PEACE TO THIS HOUSE




I


A COUNCIL OF THE ELDERS

It was an evening of sudden mildness following a dry October gale.
The colonel had miscalculated the temperature by one log--only one, he
declared, but that had proved a pitchy one, and the chimney bellowed
with flame. From end to end the room was alight with it, as if the
stored-up energies of a whole pine-tree had been sacrificed in the
consumption of that four-foot stick.

The young persons of the house had escaped, laughing, into the fresh
night air, but the colonel was hemmed in on every side; deserted by
his daughter, mocked by the work of his own hands, and torn between the
duties of a host and the host's helpless craving for his after-dinner
cigar.

Across the hearth, filling with her silks all the visible room in his
own favorite settle corner, sat the one woman on earth it most behooved
him to be civil to,--the future mother-in-law of his only child. That
Moya was a willing, nay, a reckless hostage, did not lessen her father's
awe of the situation.

Mrs. Bogardus, according to her wont at this hour, was composedly doing
nothing. The colonel could not make his retreat under cover of her real
or feigned absorption in any of the small scattering pursuits which
distract the female mind. When she read she read--she never “looked at
books.” When she sewed she sewed--presumably, but no one ever saw her
do it. Her mind was economic and practical, and she saved it whole, like
many men of force, for whatever she deemed her best paying sphere of
action.

It was a silence that crackled with heat! The colonel, wrathfully
perspiring in the glow of that impenitent stick, frowned at it like
an inquisitor. Presently Mrs. Bogardus looked up, and her expression
softened as she saw the energetic despair upon his face.

“Colonel, don't you always smoke after dinner?”

“That is my bad habit, madam. I belong to the generation that
smokes--after dinner and most other times--more than is good for us.”
 Colonel Middleton belonged also to the generation that can carry a
sentence through to the finish in handsome style, and he did it with a
suave Virginian accent as easy as his seat in the saddle. Mrs. Bogardus
always gave him her respectful attention during his best performances,
though she was a woman of short sentences herself.

“Don't you smoke in this room sometimes?” she asked, with a barely
perceptible sniff the merest contraction of her housewifely nostrils.

“Ah--h! Those rascally curtains and cushions! You ladies--women,
I should say--Moya won't let me say ladies--you bolster us up with
comforts on purpose to betray us!”

“You can say 'ladies' to me,” smiled the very handsome one before him.
“That's the generation _I_ belong to.”

The colonel bowed playfully. “Well, you know, I don't detect myself, but
there's no doubt I have infected the premises.”

“Open fires are good ventilators. I wish you would smoke now. If you
don't, I shall have to go away, and I'm exceedingly comfortable.”

“You are exceedingly charming to say so--on top of that last stick,
too!” The colonel had Irish as well as Virginian progenitors. “Well,” he
sighed, proceeding to make himself conditionally happy, “Moya will never
forgive me! We spoil each other shamefully when we're alone, but of
course we try to jack each other up when company comes. It's a great
comfort to have some one to spoil, isn't it, now? I needn't ask which it
is in your family!”

“The spoiled one?” Mrs. Bogardus smiled rather coldly. “A woman we had
for governess, when Christine was a little thing, used to say: 'That
child is the stuff that tyrants are made of!' Tyrants are made by the
will of their subjects, don't you think, generally speaking?”

“Well, you couldn't have made a tyrant of your son, Mrs. Bogardus. He's
the Universal Spoiler! He'll ruin my striker, Jephson. I shall have to
send the fellow back to the ranks. I don't know how you keep a servant
good for anything with Paul around.”

“Paul thinks he doesn't like to be waited on,” Paul's mother observed
shrewdly. “He says that only invalids, old people, and children have any
claim on the personal service of others.”

“By George! I found him blacking his own boots!”

Mrs. Bogardus laughed.

“But I'm paying a man to do it for him. It upsets my contract with that
other fellow for Paul to do his work. We have a claim on what we pay for
in this world.”

“I suppose we have. But Paul thinks that nothing can pay the price of
those artificial relations between man and man. I think that's the way
he puts it.”

“Good Heavens! Has the boy read history? It's a relation that began when
the world was made, and will last while men are in it.”

“I am not defending Paul's ideas, Colonel. I have a great sympathy with
tyrants myself. You must talk to him. He will amuse you.”

“My word! It's a ticklish kind of amusement when _we_ get talking. Why,
the boy wants to turn the poor old world upside down--make us all stand
on our heads to give our feet a rest. Now, I respect my feet,”--the
colonel drew them in a little as the lady's eyes involuntarily took the
direction of his allusion,--“I take the best care I can of them; but
I propose to keep my head, such as it is, on top, till I go under
altogether. These young philanthropists! They assume that the Hands and
the Feet of the world, the class that serves in that capacity, have got
the same nerves as the Brain.”

“There's a sort of connection,” said Mrs. Bogardus carelessly. “Some
of our Heads have come from the class that you call the Hands and Feet,
haven't they?”

The colonel admitted the fact, but the fact was the exception. “Why,
that's just the matter with us now! We've got no class of legislators.
I don't wish to plume myself, but, upon my word, the two services are
about all we have left to show what selection and training can do. And
we're only just getting the army into shape, after the raw material that
was dumped into it by the civil war.”

“Weren't you in the civil war yourself?”

“I was--a West Pointer, madam; and I was true to my salt and false to my
blood. But, the flag over all!--at the cost of everything I held dear
on earth.” After this speech the colonel looked hotter than ever and a
trifle ashamed of himself.

Mrs. Bogardus's face wore its most unobservant expression. “I don't
agree with Paul,” she said. “I wish in some ways he were more like other
young men--exercise, for instance. It's a pity for young men not to love
activity and leadership. Besides, it's the fashion. A young man might
as well be out of the world as out of the fashion. Blood is a strange
thing,” she mused.

The colonel looked at her curiously. In a woman so unfrank, her
occasional bursts of frankness were surprising and, as he thought, not
altogether complimentary. It was as if she felt herself so far removed
from his conception of her that she might say anything she pleased, sure
of his miscomprehension.

“He is not lazy intellectually,” said the colonel, aiming to comfort
her.

“I did not say he was lazy--only he won't do things except to what he
calls some 'purpose.' At his age amusement ought to be purpose enough.
He ought to take his pleasures seriously--this hunting-trip, for
instance. I believe, on the very least encouragement, he would give it
all up!”

“You mustn't let him do that,” said the colonel, warming. “All that
country above Yankee Fork, for a hundred miles, after you've gone fifty
north from Bonanza, is practically virgin forest. Wonderful flora
and fauna! It's late for the weeds and things, but if Paul wants game
trophies for your country-house, he can load a pack-train.”

Mrs. Bogardus continued to be amused, in a quiet way. “He calls them
relics of barbarism! He would as soon festoon his walls with scalps, as
decorate them with the heads of beautiful animals,--nearer the Creator's
design than most men, he would say.”

“He's right there! But that doesn't change the distinction between men
and animals. He is your son, madam--and he's going to be mine. But, fine
boy as he is, I call him a crank of the first water.”

“You'll find him quite good to Moya,” Mrs. Bogardus remarked
dispassionately. “And he's not quite twenty-four.”

“Very true. Well, _I_ should send him into the woods for the sake of
getting a little sense into him, of an every-day sort. He 'll take in
sanity with every breath.”

“And you don't think it's too late in the season for them to go out?”

There was no change in Mrs. Bogardus's voice, unconcerned as it was; yet
the colonel felt at once that this simple question lay at the root of
all her previous skirmishing.

“The guide will decide as to that,” he said definitely. “If it is, he
won't go out with them. They have got a good man, you say?”

“They are waiting for a good man; they have waited too long, I think.
He is expected in with another party on Monday, perhaps, Paul is to meet
the Bowens at Challis, where they buy their outfit. I do believe”--she
laughed constrainedly--“that he is going up there more to head them off
than for any other reason.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, it's very stupid of them! They seem to think an army post is part
of the public domain. They have been threatening, if Paul gives up the
trip, to come down here on a gratuitous visit.”

“Why, let them come by all means! The more the merrier! We will quarter
them on the garrison at large.”

“Wherever they were quartered, they would be here all the time. They are
not intimate friends of Paul's. _Mrs._ Bowen is--a very great friend.
He is her right-hand in all that Hartley House work. The boys are just
fashionable young men.”

“Can't they go hunting without Paul?”

“Wheels within wheels!” Mrs. Bogardus sighed impatiently. “Hunting trips
are expensive, and--when young men are living on their fathers, it
is convenient sometimes to have a third. However, Paul goes, I half
believe, to prevent their making a descent upon us here.”

“Well; I should ask them to come, or make it plain they were not
expected.”

“Oh, would you?--if their mother was one of the nicest women, and your
friend? Besides, the reservation does not cover the whole valley. Banks
Bowen talks of a mine he wants to look at--I don't think it will make
much difference to the mine! This is simply to say that I wish Paul
cared more about the trip for its own sake.”

“Well, frankly, I think he's better out of the way for the next
fortnight. The girls ought to go to bed early, and keep the roses in
their cheeks for the wedding. Moya's head is full of her frocks and
fripperies. She is trying to run a brace of sewing women; and all those
boxes are coming from the East to be 'inspected, and condemned' mostly.
The child seems to make a great many mistakes, doesn't she? About every
other day I see a box as big as a coffin in the hall, addressed to some
dry-goods house, 'returned by ----'”

“Moya should have sent to me for her things,” said Mrs. Bogardus. “I am
the one who makes her return them. She can do much better when she is
in town herself. It doesn't matter, for the few weeks they will be
away, what she wears. I shall take her measures home with me and set the
people to work. She has never been _fitted_ in her life.”

The colonel looked rather aghast. He had seldom heard Mrs. Bogardus
speak with so much animation. He wondered if really his household was so
very far behind the times.

“It's very kind of you, I'm sure, if Moya will let you. Most girls think
they can manage these matters for themselves.”

“It's impossible to shop by mail,” Mrs. Bogardus said decidedly. “They
always keep a certain style of things for the Western and Southern
trade.”

The colonel was crushed. Mrs. Bogardus rose, and he picked up her
handkerchief, breathing a little hard after the exertion. She passed
out, thanking him with a smile as he opened the door. In the hall she
stopped to choose a wrap from a collection of unconventional garments
hanging on a rack of moose horns.

“I think I shall go out,” she said. “The air is quite soft to-night. Do
you know which way the children went?” By the “children,” as the colonel
had noted, Mrs. Bogardus usually meant her daughter, the budding tyrant,
Christine.

“Fine woman!” he mused, alone with himself in his study. “Splendid
character head. Regular Dutch beauty. But hard--eh?--a trifle hard in
the grain. Eyes that tell you nothing. Mouth set like a stone. Never
rambles in her talk. Never speculates or exaggerates for fun. Never runs
into hyperbole--the more fool some other folks! Speaks to the point or
keeps still.”




II


INTRODUCING A SON-IN-LAW

The colonel's papers failed to hold him somehow. He rose and paced the
room with his short, stiff-kneed tread. He stopped and stared into the
fire; his face began to get red.

“So! Moya's clothes are not good enough. Going to set the people to
work, is she? Wants an outfit worthy of her son. And who's to pay for
it, by gad? Post-nuptial bills for wedding finery are going to hurt poor
little Moya like the deuce. Confound the woman! Dressing my daughter
for me, right in my own house. Takes it in her hands as if it were
her right, by----!” The colonel let slip another expletive. “Well,”
 he sighed, half amused at his own violence, “I'll write to Annie. I
promised Moya, and it's high time I did.”

Annie was the colonel's sister, the wife of an infantry captain,
stationed at Fort Sherman. She was a very understanding woman; at least
she understood her brother. But she was not solely dependent upon his
laggard letters for information concerning his private affairs. The
approaching wedding at Bisuka Barracks was the topic of most of the
military families in the Department of the Columbia. Moya herself had
written some time before, in the self-conscious manner of the newly
engaged. Her aunt knew of course that Moya and Christine Bogardus had
been room-mates at Miss Howard's, that the girls had fallen in love with
each other first, and with visits at holidays and vacations, when the
army girl could not go to her father, it was easily seen how the
rest had followed. And well for Moya that it had, was Mrs. Creve's
indorsement. As a family they were quite sufficiently represented in
the army; and if one should ever get an Eastern detail it would be very
pleasant to have a young niece charmingly settled in New York.

The colonel drew a match across the top bar of the grate and set it
to his pipe. His big nostrils whitened as he took a deep in-breath. He
reseated himself and began his duty letter in the tone of a judicious
parent; but, warming as he wrote, under the influence of Annie's
imagined sympathy, he presently broke forth with his usual arrogant
colloquialism.

“She might have had her pick of the junior officers in both branches.
And there was a captain of engineers at the Presidio, a widower, but an
awfully good fellow. And she has chosen a boy, full of transcendental
moonshine, who climbs upon a horse as if it were a stone fence, and has
mixed ideas which side of himself to hang a pistol on.

“I have no particular quarrel with the lad, barring his great burly
mouthful of a name, Bo--gardus! To call a child Moya and have her fetch
up with her soft, Irish vowels against such a name as that! She had a
fond idea that it was from Beauregard. But she has had to give that up.
It's Dutch--Hudson River Dutch--for something horticultural--a tree,
or an orchard, or a brush-pile; and she says it's a good name where it
belongs. Pity it couldn't have stayed where it belongs.

“However, you won't find him quite so scrubby as he sounds. He's very
proper and clean-shaven, with a good pair of dark, Dutch eyes, which he
gets from his mother; and I wish he had got her business ability with
them, and her horse sense, if the lady will excuse me. She runs the
property and he spends it, as far as she'll let him, on the newest
reforms. And there's another hitch!--To belong to the Truly Good
at twenty-four! But beggars can't be choosers. He's going to settle
something handsome on Moya out of the portion Madame gives him on his
marriage. My poor little girl, as you know, will get nothing from me but
a few old bits and trinkets and a father's blessing,--the same
doesn't go for much in these days. I have been a better dispenser than
accumulator, like others of our name.

“I do assure you, Annie, it bores me down to the ground, this
humanitarian racket from children with ugly names who have just chipped
the shell. This one owns his surprise that we _work_ in the army! That
our junior officers teach, and study a bit perforce themselves. His own
idea is that every West Pointer, before he gets his commission, should
serve a year or two in the ranks, to raise the type of the enlisted man,
and chiefly, mark you, to get his point of view, the which he is to
bear in mind when he comes to his command. Oh, we've had some pretty
arguments! But I suspect the rascal of drawing it mild, at this stage,
for the old dragon who guards his Golden Apple. He doesn't want to poke
me up. How far he'd go if he were not hampered in his principles by the
fact that he is in love, I cannot say. And I'd rather not imagine.”

The commandant's house at Bisuka Barracks is the nearest one to the
flag-pole as you go up a flight of wooden steps from the parade ground.
These steps, and their landings, flanked by the dry grass terrace of the
line, are a favorite gathering place for young persons of leisure at
the Post. They face the valley and the mountains; they lead past the
adjutant's office to the main road to town; they command the daily
pageant of garrison duty as performed at such distant, unvisited posts,
with only the ladies and the mountains looking on.

Retreat had sounded at half after five, for the autumn days grew short.
The colonel's orderly had been dismissed to his quarters. There was no
excuse, at this hour, for two young persons lingering in sentimental
corners of the steps, beyond a flagrant satisfaction in the shadow
thereof which covered them since the lighting of lamps on Officers' Row.

The colonel stood at his study window keeping his pipe alive with slow
and dreamy puffs. The moon was just clearing the roof of the men's
quarters. His eye caught a shape, or a commingling of shapes, ensconced
in an angle of the steps; the which he made out to be his daughter,
in her light evening frock with one of his own old army capes over her
shoulders, seated in close formation beside the only man at the Post who
wore civilian black.

The colonel had the feelings of a man as well as a father. He went back
to his letter with a softened look in his face. He had said too much; he
always did--to Annie; and now he must hedge a little or she would think
there was trouble brewing, and that he was going to be nasty about
Moya's choice.




III


THE INITIAL LOVE

“Let us be simple! Not every one can be, but we can. We can afford to
be, and we know how!”

Moya was speaking rapidly, in her singularly articulate tones. A reader
of voices would have pronounced hers the physical record of unbroken
health and constant, joyous poise.

“Hear the word of your prophet Emerson!” she brought a little fist down
upon her knee for emphasis, a hand several sizes larger closed upon it
and held it fast. “Hear the word--are you listening? 'Only _two_ in the
Garden walked and with Snake and Seraph talked.'”

The young man's answer was an instant's impassioned silence. Too close
it touched him, that vital image of the Garden. Then, with an effect of
sternness, he said,--

“Have we the right to do as we please? Have we the courage that comes of
right to cut ourselves off from all those calls and cries for help?”

“_I_ have,” said the girl; “I have just that right--of one who knows
exactly what she wants, and is going to get it if she can!”

He laughed at her happy insolence, with which all the youth and nature
in him made common cause.

“I shouldn't mind thinking about your Poor Man,” she tripped along, “if
he liked being poor, or if it seemed to improve him any; or if it were
only now and then. But there is so dreadfully much of him! Once we
begin, how should we ever think about anything else? He'd rise up and
sit down with us, and eat and drink with us, and tell us what to wear.
Every pleasure of our lives would be spoiled with his eternal 'Where do
_I_ come in?' It was simple enough in _that_ garden, with only those
two and nobody outside to feel injured. But we are those two, aren't
we? Isn't everybody--once in a life, and once only?” She turned her face
aside, slighting by her manner the excessive meaning of her words. “I
ask for myself only what I think I have a right to give you--my absolute
undivided attention for those first few years. They say it never lasts!”
 she hastened to add with playful cynicism.

Young Bogardus seemed incapable under the circumstances of any adequate
reply. Free as they were in words, there was an extreme personal shyness
between these proud young persons, undeveloped on the side of passion
and better versed in theories of life than in life itself. They had
separated the day after their sudden engagement, and their nearest
approaches to intimacy had been through letters. Naturally the girl was
the bolder, having less in herself to fear.

“That is what _I_ call being simple,” she went on briskly. “If you
think we can be that in New York, let us live there. _I_ could be simple
there, but not with you, sir! That terrible East Side would be shaking
its gory locks at us. We should feel that we did it--or you would! Then
good-by to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!”

“You are my life, liberty, and happiness, and I will be your almoner,”
 said Paul, “and dispense you”--

“Dispense _with_ me!” laughed the girl. “And what shall I be doing while
you are dispensing me on the East Side? New York has other sides. While
you go slumming with the Seraph, I shall be talking to the Snake! Now,
_do_ laugh!” she entreated childishly, turning her sparkling face to
his.

“Am I expected to laugh at that?”

“Well, what shall we do? Don't make me harden my heart before it has had
time to soften naturally. Give my poor pagan sympathies a little time to
ripen.”

“But you have lived in New York. Did you find it such a strain on your
sympathies?”

“I was a visitor; and a girl is not expected to have sympathies. But to
begin our home there: we should have to strike a note of some sort.
How if my note should jar with yours? Paul, dear, it isn't nice to
have convictions when one is young and going to be married. You know it
isn't. It's not poetic, and it's not polite, and it's a dreadful bore!”

The altruist and lover winced at this. Allowing for exaggeration, which
was the life of speech with her, he knew that Moya was giving him a bit
of her true self, that changeful, changeless self which goes behind all
law and “follows joy and only joy.” Her voice dropped into its sweetest
tones of intimacy.

“Why need we live in a crowd? Why must we be pressed upon with all this
fuss and doing? Doing, doing! We are not ready to do anything yet. Every
day must have its dawn;--and I don't see my way yet; I'm hardly awake!”

“Darling, hush! You must not say such things to me. For you only to look
at me like that is the most terrible temptation of my life. You make
me forget everything a man is bound--that I of all men am bound to
remember.”

“Then I will keep on looking! Behold, I am Happiness, Selfishness, if
you like! I have come to stay. No, really, it's not nice of you to act
as if you were under higher orders. You are under my orders. What right
have we to choose each other if we are not to be better to each other
than to any one else?--if our lives belong to any one who needs us, or
our time and money, more than we need it ourselves? Why did you choose
me? Why not somebody pathetic--one of your Poor Things; or else save
yourself whole for all the Poor Things?”

“Now you are 'talking for victory,'” he smiled. “You don't believe we
must be as consistent as all that. Hearts don't have to be coddled
like pears picked for market. But I'm not preaching to you. The heavens
forbid! I'm trying to explain. You don't think this whole thing with me
is a pose? I know I'm a bore with my convictions; but how do we come by
such things?”

“Ah! How do I come not to have any, or to want any?” she rejoined.

“Once for all, let me tell you how I came by mine. Then you will know
just where and how those cries for help take hold on me.”

“I don't wish to know. Preserve me from knowing! Why didn't you choose
somebody different?”

He looked at her with all his passion in his eyes. “I did not choose.
Did you?”

“It isn't too late,” she whispered. Her face grew hot in the darkness.

“Yes; it is too late--for anything but the truth. Will you listen,
sweet? Will you let the nonsense wait?”

“Deeper and deeper! Haven't we reached the bottom yet?”

“Go on! It's the dearest nonsense,” she heard him say; but she detected
pain in his voice and a new constraint.

“What is it? What is the 'truth'?”

“Oh, it's not so dreadful. Only, you always put me in quite a different
class from where I belong, and I haven't had the courage to set you
right.”

“Children, children!” a young voice called, from the lighted walk above.
Two figures were going down the line, one in uniform keeping step beside
a girl in white who reefed back her skirts with one hand, the other was
raised to her hair which was blowing across her forehead in bewitching
disorder. Every gesture and turn of her shape announced that she was
pretty and gay in the knowledge of her power. It was Chrissy, walking
with Lieutenant Lane.

“Where are you--ridiculous ones? Don't you want to come with us?”

“'Now who were they?'” Paul quoted derisively out of the dark.

“We are going to Captain Dawson's to play Hearts. Come! Don't be
stupid!”

“We are not stupid, we are busy!” Moya called back.

“Busy! Doing what?”

“Oh, deciding things. We are talking about the Poor Man.”

“The poor men, she means.” Christine's high laugh followed the
lieutenant's speech, as the pair went on.

“He _is_ a bore!” Moya declared. “We can't even use him for a joke.”

“Speaking of Lane, dear?”

“The Poor Man. Are you sure that you've got a sense of humor, Paul?
Can't we have charity for jokes among the other poor things?”

Paul had raised himself to the step beside her. “You are shivering,” he
said, “I must let you go in.”

“I'm not shivering--I'm chattering,” she mocked. “Why should I go in
when we are going to be really serious?”

Paul waited a moment; his breath came short, as if he were facing a
postponed dread. “Moya, dear,” he began in a forced tone, “I can't help
my constraints and convictions that bore you so, any more than you can
help your light heart--God bless it--and your theory of class which to
me seems mediaeval. I have cringed to it, like the coward a man is when
he is in love. But now I want you to know me.”

He took her hand and kissed it repeatedly, as if impressing upon her
the one important fact back of all hypothesis and perilous efforts at
statement.

“Well, are you bidding me good-by?”

“You must give me time,” he said. “It takes courage in these days for
a good American to tell the girl he loves that his father was a hired
man.”

He smiled, but there was little mirth and less color in his face.

“What absurdity!” cried Moya. Then glancing at him she added quickly,
“_My_ father is a hired man. Most fathers who are worth anything are!”

“My father was because he came of that class. His father was one before
him. His mother took in tailoring in the village where he was born. He
had only the commonest common-school education and not much of that.
At eleven he worked for his board and clothes at my Grandfather Van
Elten's, and from that time he earned his bread with his hands. Don't
imagine that I'm apologizing,” Paul went on rapidly. “The apology
belongs on the other side. In New York, for instance, the Bogardus blood
is quite as good as the Bevier or the Broderick or the Van Elten; but
up the Hudson, owing to those chances or mischances that selected our
farming aristocracy for us, my father's people had slipped out of
their holdings and sunk to the poor artisan class which the old Dutch
landowners held in contempt.”

“We are not landowners,” said Moya. “What does it matter? What does any
of it matter?”

“It matters to be honest and not sail under false colors. I thought
you would not speak of the Poor Man as you do if you knew that I am his
son.”

“Money has nothing to do with position in the army. I am a poor man's
daughter.”

“Ah, child! Your father gives orders--mine took them, all his life.”

“My father has to take what he gives. There is no escaping 'orders.'
Even I know that!” said Moya. A slight shiver passed over her as she
spoke, laughing off as usual the touch of seriousness in her words.

“Why did you do that?” Paul touched her shoulder. “Is it the wind? There
is a wind creeping down these steps.” He improved the formation slightly
in respect to the wind.

“Listen!” said Moya. “Isn't that your mother walking on the porch?
Father, I know, is writing. She will be lonely.”

“She is never lonely, more or less. It is always the same loneliness--of
a woman widowed for years.”

“How very much she must have cared for him!” Moya sighed incredulously.
What a pity, she thought, that among the humbler vocations Paul's father
should have been just a plain “hired man.” Cowboy, miner, man-o'-war's
man, even enlisted man, though that were bad enough--any of these he
might have been in an accidental way, that at least would have been
picturesque; but it is only the possession of land, by whatsoever means
or title, that can dignify an habitual personal contact with it in the
form of soil. That is one of the accepted prejudices which one does not
meddle with at nineteen. “Youth is conservative because it is afraid.”
 Moya, for all her fighting blood, was traditionally and in social ways
much more in bonds than Paul, who had inherited his father's dreamy
speculative habit of thought, with something of the farm-hand's distrust
of society and its forms and shibboleth.

Paul's voice took a narrative tone, and Moya gave herself up to
listening--to him rather more, perhaps, than to his story.

Few young men of twenty-four can go very deeply into questions of
heredity. Of what follows here much was not known to Paul. Much that he
did know he would have interpreted differently. The old well at Stone
Ridge, for instance, had no place in his recital; and yet out of it
sprang the history of his shorn generation. Had Paul's mother grown up
in a houseful of brothers and sisters, governed by her mother instead
of an old ignorant servant, in all likelihood she would have married
differently--more wisely but not perhaps so well, her son would loyally
have maintained. The sons of the rich farmers who would have been her
suitors were men inferior to their fathers. They inherited the vigor and
coarseness of constitution, the unabashed materialism of that earlier
generation that spent its energies coping with Nature on its stony
farms, but the sons were spared the need of that hard labor which their
blood required. They supplied an element of force, but one of great
corruption later, in the state politics of their time.




IV


A MAN THAT HAD A WELL IN HIS OWN COURT

In the kitchen court called the “Airy” at Abraham Van Elten's, there
was one of those old family wells which our ancestors used to locate so
artlessly. And when it tapped the kitchen drain, and typhoid took the
elder children, and the mother followed the children, it was called the
will of God. A gloomy distinction rested on the house. Abraham felt the
importance attaching to any supreme experience in a community where life
runs on in the middle key.

A young doctor who had been called in at the close of the last case
went prying about the premises, asking foolish questions that angered
Abraham. It is easier for some natures to suffer than to change. If the
farmer had ever drunk water himself, except as tea or coffee, or mixed
with something stronger, he must have been an early victim, to his own
crass ignorance. He was a vigorous, heavy-set man, a grand field for
typhoid. But he prospered, and the young doctor was turned down with
the full weight and breadth of the Van Elten thumb, or the Broderick;
Abraham's build was that of his maternal grandmother, Hillotje
Broderick.

On the Ridge, which later developed into a valuable slate quarry,
there was a spring of water, cold and perpetual, flowing out of the
trap-formation. Abraham had piped this water down to his barns and
cattle-sheds; it furnished power for the farm-work. But to bring it to
the house, in obedience to the doctor's meddlesome advice, would be an
acknowledgment of fatal mistakes in the past; would raise talk and blame
among the neighbors, and do away with the honor of a special visitation;
would cost no trifle of money; would justify the doctor's interference,
and insult the old well of his father and his father's father, the
fountain of generations. To seal its mouth and bid its usefulness cease
in the house where it had ministered for upwards of a hundred years was
an act of desecration impossible to the man who in his stolid way loved
the very stones that lined its slimy sides. The few sentiments that had
taken hold on Abraham's arid nature went as deep as his obstinacy and
clung as fast as his distrust of new opinions and new men. The question
of water supply was closed in his house; but the well remained open and
kept up its illicit connection with the drain.

Old Becky, keeper of the widower's keys, had followed closely the
history of those unhappy “cases;” she had listened to discussions,
violent or suppressed, she had heard much talk that went on behind her
master's back.

Employers of that day and generation were masters; and masters are meant
to be outwitted. Emily, the youngest and last of the flock, was now a
child of four, dark like her mother, sturdy and strong like her father.
On an August day soon after the mother's funeral, Becky took her little
charge to the well and showed her a tumbler filled, with water not
freshly drawn.

“See them little specks and squirmy things?” Emmy saw them. She followed
their wavering motion in the glass as the stern forefinger pointed.
“Those are little baby snakes,” said Becky mysteriously. “The well is
full of 'em. Sometimes you can see 'em, sometimes you can't, but they're
always there. They never grow big down the well; it's too dark 'n' cold.
But you drink that water and the snakes will grow and wriggle and
work all through ye, and eat your insides out, and you'll die. Your
mother”--in a whisper--“she drunk that water, and she died. Your sister
Ruth, and Dirck, and Jimmy, they drunk it, and they died. Now if Emmy
wants to die”--Large eyes of horror fastened on the speaker's face.
“No--o, she don't want to die, the Loveums! She don't want Becky to have
no little girl left at all! No; we mustn't ever drink any of that bad
water--all full of snakes, ugh! But if Emmy's thirsty, see here! Here's
good nice water. It's going to be always here in this pail--same water
the little lambs drink up in the fields. Becky 'll take Emmy up on the
hill sometime and show where the little lambs drink.”

Grief had not clouded the farmer's oversight in petty things. He noticed
the innocent pail on the area bench, never empty, always specklessly
clean.

“What is this water?” he asked.

Becky was surly. “Drinking water. Want some?”

“What's it doing here all the time?”

“I set it there for Emmy. She can't reach up to the bucket.”

Abraham tasted the water suspiciously. The well-water was hard, with
a tang of iron. The spring soft, and less cold for its journey to the
barn.

“Where did you get this water?”

“Help yourself. There's plenty more.”

“Becky, where did this water come from? Out o' the well?”

Becky gave a snort of exasperation. “Sam Lewis brought it from the barn!
I'm too lame to be histin' buckets. I've got the rheumatiz' awful in my
back and shoulders, if ye want to know!”

“Becky, you're lying to me. You've been listening to what don't concern
you. Now, see here. You are not going to ask the men to carry water for
you. They've got something else to do. _There's_ your water, as handy as
ever a woman had it; use that or go without.”

Abraham caught up the pail and flung its contents out upon the grass,
scattering the hens that came sidling back with squawks of inquiring
temerity.

When next Emmy came for water, the old woman took her by the hand in
silence and led her into the dim meat-cellar, a half-basement with one
low window level with the grass. There was the pail, safe hidden behind
the soft-soap barrel.

“I had to hide it from your pa,” Becky whispered. “Don't you never let
him know you're afraid o' the well-water. He drunk it when he was a
little boy. He don't believe in the snakes. But _there wa'n't none
then_. It's when water gets old and rotten. You can believe what Becky
says. _She_ knows! But you mustn't ever tell. Your father 'd be as mad
as fire if he knowed I said anything about snakes. He'd send me right
away, and some strange woman would come, and maybe she'd whip Emmy.
Emmy want Becky to go?” Sobs, and little arms clinging wildly to Becky's
aproned skirts. “No, no! Well, she ain't goin'. But Emmy mustn't tell
tales or she might have to. Tattlers are wicked anyway. 'Telltale tit!
Your tongue shall be slit, and all the little dogs'--There! run now!
There's your poppy. Don't you never,--never!”

Emmy let her eyes be wiped, and with one long, solemn, secret look of
awed intelligence she ran out to meet her father. She did not love him,
and the smile with which she met him was no new lesson in diplomacy. But
her first secret from him lay deep in the beautiful eyes, her mother's
eyes, as she raised them to his.

“Ain't that wonderful!” said Becky, with a satisfied sigh, watching her.
“Safe as a jug! An' she not five years old!” For vital reasons she had
taught the child an ugly lesson. Such lessons were common enough in her
experience of family discipline. She never thought of it again.

That year which took Emmy's mother from her brought to the child her
first young companion and friend. Adam Bogardus came as chore-boy to
the farm,--an only child himself, and sensitive through the clashing
of gentle instincts with rough and inferior surroundings; brought up
in that depressed God-fearing attitude in which a widow not strong,
and earning her bread, would do her duty by an only son. Not a natural
fighter, she took what little combativeness he had out of him, and made
his school-days miserable--a record of humiliations that sunk deep and
drove him from his kind. He was a big, clumsy, sagacious boy, grave
as an old man, always snubbed and condescended to, yet always trusted.
Little Emmy made him her bondslave at sight. His whole soul blossomed in
adoration of the beautiful, masterful child who ordered him about as her
vassal, while slipping a soft little trustful hand in his. She trotted
at his heels like one of the lambs or chickens that he fed. She brought
him into perpetual disgrace with Becky, for wasting his time through her
imperious demands. She was the burden, the delight, the handicap, the
incentive, and the reward of his humble apprenticeship. And when he was
promoted to be one of the regular hands she followed him still, and got
her pleasure out of his day's work. No one had such patience to tell
her things, to wait for her and help her over places where her tagging
powers fell short. But though she bullied him, she looked up to him
as well. His occupations commanded her respect. He was the god of the
orchards and of the cider-making; he presided at all the functions of
the farm year. He was a perfect calendar besides of country sports in
their season. He swept the ice pools in the meadow for winter sliding,
after his day's work was done. He saved up paper and string for
kite-making in March. He knew when willow bark would slip for April's
whistles. In the first heats of June he climbed the tall locust-trees
to put up a swing in which she could dream away the perfumed hours.
At harvest she waited in the meadow for him to toss her up on the
hay-loads, and his great arms received her when she slid off in the
barn. She knelt at his feet on the bumping boards of the farm-wagon
while he braced himself like a charioteer, holding the reins above
her head. He threshed the nut-trees and routed marauding boys from her
preserves, and carved pumpkin lanterns to light her to her attic chamber
on cold November nights, where she would lie awake watching strange
shadows on the sloping roof, half worshiping, half afraid of her idol's
ugliness in the dark.

These were some of Paul's illustrations of that pastoral beginning, and
no doubt they were sympathetically close to the truth. He lingered
over them, dressing up his mother's choice instinctively to the little
aristocrat beside him.

When Emmy grew big enough to go to the Academy, three miles from the
farm, it was all in the day's work that Adam should take her and fetch
her home. He combined her with the mail, the blacksmith, and other
village errands. Whoever met her father's team on those long stony hills
of Saugerties would see his little daughter seated beside his hired man,
her face turned up to his in endless confiding talk. It was a face, as
we say, to dream of. But there were few dreamers in that little world.
The farmers would nod gravely to Adam. “Abraham's girl takes after her
mother; heartier lookin', though. Guess he'll need a set o' new tires
before spring.” The comments went no deeper.

Abraham was now well on in years; he made no visits, and he never drove
his own team at night. When his daughter began to let down her frocks
and be asked to evening parties, it was still Adam who escorted her.
He sat in the kitchen while she was amusing herself in the parlor. She
discussed her young acquaintances with him on their way home. The
time for distinctions had come, but she was too innocent to feel
them herself, and too proud to accept the standards of others. He was
absolutely honest and unworldly. He thought it no treachery to love her
for herself, and he believed, as most of us do, that his family was as
good as hers or any other.

It would be hard to explain the old man's obliviousness. Perhaps he had
forgotten his own youth; or class prejudice had gone so deep with him as
to preclude the bare thought of a child of his falling in love with one
of his “men.” His imagination could not so insult his own blood. But
when the awakening came, his passion of anger and resentment knew no
bounds. To discharge his faithless employee out of hand would be the
cripple throwing away his crutch. Though he called Adam _one_ of his
men, and though his pay was that of a common laborer, his duties had
long been of a much higher order. Abraham had made a very good bargain
out of the widow's son. Adam knew well that he could not be spared, and
pitied the old man's helpless rage. He took his frantic insults as part
of his senility, and felt it no unmanliness to appease it by giving his
promise that he would speak no more of love to Emmy while he was taking
her father's wages. But Emmy did not indorse this promise fully. To her
it looked like weakness, and implied a sort of patience which did
not become a lover such as she wished hers to be. The winter wore on
uncomfortably for all. Towards spring, Becky's last illness and passing
away brought the younger ones together again, and closer than before.
Adam kept his promise through days and nights of sickroom intimacy; but
though no word of love was spoken, each bore silent witness to what was
loveliest in the other, and the bond between them deepened.

Then spring came, and its restlessness was strong upon them both. But it
was Emmy to whom it meant action and rebellion.

They stood on the orchard hill one Sunday afternoon at the pause of the
year. Buds were swelling and the edges of the woods wore a soft blush
against the vaporous sky. The bare brown slopes were streaked with snow.
A floe of winter ice, grinding upon itself with the tide, glared yellow
as an old man's teeth in the setting sun. From across the river came
the thunder of a train, bound north, two engines dragging forty cars of
freight piled up by some recent traffic-jam; it plunged into a tunnel,
and they waited, listening to the monster's smothered roar. Out it
burst, its breath packed into clouds, the engines whooped, and round
the curve where a point of cedars cut the sky the huge creature unwound
itself, the hills echoing to its tread.

Emmy watched it out of sight, and breathed again. “Hundreds, hundreds
going every day! It seems easy enough for everybody else. Oh, if I were
a man!”

“What do you want I should do, Emmy?” Adam knew well what man she was
thinking of.

“_I_ want? Don't you ever want things yourself?”

“When I want a thing bad, I gen'ly think it's worth waiting for.”

“People don't get things by waiting. I don't know how you can stand
it,--to stay here year after year. And now you've tied yourself up with
a promise, and you know you cannot keep it!”

“I'm trying to keep it.”

“You couldn't keep it if you cared--really and truly--as some do!” She
dropped her voice hurriedly. “To live here and eat your meals day after
day and pass me like a stick or a stone!”

The slow blood burned in Adam's face and hammered in his pulses. His
blue eyes were bashful through its heat. “I don't feel like a stick nor
a stone. You know it, Emmy. You want to be careful,” he added gently.
“Would going away look as if I cared?”

“Why--why don't you ask me to go with you?” The girl tried to meet his
eyes. She turned off her question with a proud laugh.

“Be--careful, child! You know why I can't take you up on that. Would
you want we should leave him here alone--without even Becky? You're only
trying me for fun.”

“No; I am not!” Emmy was pale now. Her breast was rising in strong
excitement. “If we were gone, he would know then what you are worth to
him. Now, you're only Adam! He thinks he can put you down like a boy. He
won't believe I care for you. There's only one way to show him--that
is, if we do care. In one month he would be sending for us back. Then we
could come, and you would take your right place here, and be somebody.
You would not eat in the kitchen, then. Haven't you been like a son to
him? And why shouldn't he own it?”

“But if he won't? Suppose he don't send for us to come back?”

“Then you could strike out for yourself. What was Tom Madden, before
he went away to Colorado, or somewhere--where was it? And now everybody
stops to shake hands with him;--he's as much of a man as anybody. If you
could make a little money. That's the proof he wants. If you were rich,
you'd be all right with him. You know that!”

“I'd hate to think it. But I'll never be rich. Put that out of your
mind, Emmy. It don't run in the blood. I don't come of a money-making
breed.”

“What a silly thing to say! Of course, if you don't believe you can, you
can't. Who has made the money here for the last ten years?”

“It was his capital done it. It ain't hard to make money after you've
scraped the first few thousands together. But it's the first thousand
that costs.”

“How much have you got ahead?”

Adam answered awkwardly, “Eleven hundred and sixty odd.” He did not like
to talk of money to the girl who was the prayer, the inspiration, of his
life. It hurt him to be questioned by her in this sordid way.

“You earned it all, didn't you?”

“I've took no risks. Here was my home. He give me the chance and he
showed me how. And--he's your father. I don't like to talk about his
money, nor about my own, to you.”

“Oh, you are good, good! Nobody knows! But it's all wasted if you
haven't got any push--anything inside of yourself that makes people know
what you are. I wish I could put into you some of my _fury_ that I
feel when things get in my way! You have held yourself in too long. You
can't--_can't_ love a girl, and be so careful--like a mother. Don't you
understand?”

“Stop right there, Emmy! You needn't push no harder. I can let go
whenever you say so. But--do _you_ understand, little girl? Man and wife
it will have to be.”

Emmy did not shrink at the words. Her face grew set, her dark eyes full
of mystery fixed themselves on the slow-moving ice-floe grinding along
the shore.

“I know,” she assented slowly.

“I can't give you no farm, nor horses and carriages, nor help in the
kitchen. It's bucklin' right down with our bare hands--me outside and
you in? And you only eighteen. See what little hands--If I could do it
all!”

“Your promise is broken,” she whispered. “I made you break it. You will
have to tell him now, or--we must go.”

“So be!” said Adam solemnly. “And God do so to me and more also, if I
have to hurt my little girl,--Emmy--wife!”

He folded her in his great arms clumsily--the man she had said was like
a mother. He was almost as ignorant as she, and more hopeful than he had
dared to seem, as to their worldly chances. But the love he had for her
told him it was not love that made her so bold. The first touch of
such love as his would have made her fear him as he feared her. And the
subtle pain of this instinctive knowledge, together with that broken
promise, shackled the wings of his great joy. It was not as he had hoped
to win the crown of life.

Paul, it may be supposed, had never liked to think of his mother's
elopement. It had been the one hard point to get over in his conception
of his father, but he could never have explained it by such a scene as
this. It would have hampered him terribly in his tale had he dreamed of
it. He passed over the unfortunate incident with a romancer's touch, and
dwelt upon his grandfather's bitter resentment which he resented as
the son of his mother's choice. The Van Eltens and Brodericks all fared
hardly at the hands of their legatee.

It was not only in the person of a hireling who had abused his trust
that Abraham had felt himself outraged. There were old neighborhood
spites and feuds going back, dividing blood from blood--even brothers of
the same blood. There was trouble between him and his brother Jacob, of
New York, dating from the settlement of their father's, Broderick Van
Elten's, estate; and no one knows what besides that was private and
personal may have entered into it. It was years since they had met,
but Jacob kept well abreast of his brother's misfortunes. A bachelor
himself, with no children to lose or to quarrel with, it was not
displeasing to him to hear of the breaks in his brother's household.

“What, what, what! The last one left him,--run off with one of his men!
What a fool the man must be. Can't he look after his women folks better
than that? Better have lost her with the others. Two boys, and Chrissy,
and the girl--and now the last girl gone off with his hired man. Poor
Chrissy! Guess she had about enough of it. Things have come out pretty
much even, after all! There was more love and lickin's wasted on Abe.
Father was proudest of him, but he couldn't break him. Hi! but I've
crawled under the woodshed to hear him yell, and father would tan him
with a raw-hide, but he couldn't break him; couldn't get a sound out
of him. Big, and hard, and tough--Chrissy thought she knew a man; she
thought she took the best one.”

With slow, cold spite Jacob had tracked his brother's path in life
through its failures. Jacob had no failures, and no life.




V


DISINHERITED

Proud little Emmy, heiress no longer, had put her spirit into her
farm-hand and incited him to the first rebellion of his life. They
crossed the river at night, poling through floating ice, and climbed
aboard one of those great through trains whose rushing thunder had made
the girlish heart so often beat. This was long before the West Shore
Line was built. Neither of them had ever seen the inside of a Pullman
sleeper. Emmy could count the purchased meals she had eaten in her life;
she had never slept in a hotel or hired lodging till after her marriage.
Hardly any one could be so provincial in these days.

Adam Bogardus was a plodder in the West as he had been in the East. He
was an honest man, and he was wise enough not to try to be a shrewd one.
He tried none of the short-cuts to a fortune. Hard work suited him best,
and no work was too hard for his iron strength and patient resolution.
But it broke the spirit of a man in him to see his young wife's despair.
Poverty frightened and quelled her. The deep-rooted security of her old
home was something she missed every day of her makeshift existence. It
was degradation to live in “rooms,” or a room; to move for want of means
to pay the rent. She pined for the good food she had been used to. Her
health suffered through anxiety and hard work. She was too proud to
complain, but the sight of her dumb unacceptance of what had come to
her through him undoubtedly added the last straw to her husband's mental
strain.

       *       *       *       *       *

“It is hard for me to realize it as I once did,” said Paul, as the story
paused. “You make tragedy a dream. But there is a deep vein of tragedy
in our blood. And my theory is that it always crops out in families
where it's the keynote, as it were.”

“Never mind, you old care-taker! We Middletons carry sail enough to need
a ton or two of lead in our keel.”

“But, you understand?”--

“I understand the distinction between what I call your good blood, and
the sort of blood I thought you had. It explains a certain funny way you
have with arms--weapons. Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” said Paul coldly. “I hate a weapon. I am always ashamed of
myself when I get one in my hand.”

“You act that way, dear!”

“God made tools and the Devil made weapons.”

“You are civil to my father's profession.”

“Your father is what he is aside from his profession.”

“You are quite mistaken, Paul. My father and his profession are one.
His sword is a symbol of healing. The army is the great surgeon of the
nation when the time comes for a capital operation.”

“It grows harder to tell my story,” said Paul gloomily;--“the short and
simple annals of the poor.”

“Now come! Have I been a snob about my father's profession?”

“No; but you love it, naturally. You have grown up with its pomp and
circumstance around you. You are the history makers when history is most
exciting.”

“Go on with your story, you proud little Dutchman! When I despise you
for your farming relatives, you can taunt me with my history making.”

Paul was about two years old when his parents broke up in the Wood
River country and came south by wagon on the old stage-road to Felton.
Whenever he saw a “string-bean freighter's” outfit moving into Bisuka,
if there was a woman on the driver's seat, he wanted to take off his hat
to her. For so his mother sat beside his father and held him in her arms
two hundred miles across the Snake River desert. The stages have been
laid off since the Oregon Short Line went through, but there were
stations then all along the road.

One night they made camp at a lonely place between Soul's Rest and
Mountain Home. Oneman Station it was called; afterwards Deadman Station,
when the keeper's body was found one morning stiff and cold in his bunk.
He died in the night alone. Emily Bogardus had cause to hate the man
when he was living, and his dreary end was long a shuddering remembrance
to her, like the answer to an unforgiving prayer.

The station was in a hollow with bare hills around, rising to the
highest point of that rolling plain country. The mountains sink below
the plain, only their white tops showing. It was October. All the wild
grass had been eaten close for miles on both sides of the road, but over
a gap in the Western divide was the Bruneau Valley, where the bell-mare
of the team had been raised. In the night she broke her hopples and
struck out across the summit with the four mules at her heels. Towards
morning a light snow fell and covered their tracks. Adam was compelled
to hunt his stock on foot; the keeper refusing him a horse, saying he
had got himself into trouble before through being friendly with the
company's horses. He started out across the hills, expecting that the
same night would see him back, and his wife was left in the wagon camp
alone.

       *       *       *       *       *

“I know this story very well,” said Paul, “and yet I never heard it but
once, when mother decided I was old enough to know all. But every word
was bitten into me--especially this ugly part I am coming to. I wish
it need not be told, yet all the rest depends on it; and that such an
experience could come to a woman like my mother shows what exposure and
humiliation lie in the straightest path if there is no money to smooth
the way. You hear it said that in the West the toughest men will be
chivalrous to a woman if she is the right sort of a woman. I'm afraid
that is a romantic theory of the Western man.

“That night, before his team stampeded, as he sat by the keeper's fire,
father had made up his mind that the less they had to do with that man
the better. He may have warned mother; and she, left alone with the
brute, did not know the wisdom of hiding her fear and loathing of him.
He may have meant no more than a low kind of teasing, but her suffering
was the same.

“Father did not come. She dared not leave the camp. She knew no place to
go to, and in his haste, believing he would soon be with her again, he
had taken all their little stock of funds. But he had left her his gun,
and with this within reach of her hand in the shelter of the wagon hood,
without fire and without cooked food, she kept a sleepless watch.

“The stages came and went; help was within sound of her voice, but she
dared make no sign. The passengers were few at that season, always
men, on the best of terms with the keeper. He had threatened--well, no
matter--such a threat as a more sophisticated woman would have smiled
at. She was simple, but she was not weak. It was a moral battle between
them. There were hours when she held him by the power of her eye alone;
she conquered, but it nearly killed her.

“One morning a man jumped down from the stage whose face she knew. He
had recognized my father's outfit and he came to speak to her, amazed
to find her in that place alone. There was no need to put her worst fear
into words; he knew the keeper. He made the best he could of father's
detention, but he assured her, as she knew too well, that she could not
wait for him there. He was on his way East, and he took us with him as
far as Mountain Home. To this day she believes that if Bud Granger had
led the search, my father would have been found; but he went East to
sell his cattle, the snows set in, and the search party came straggling
home. The man, Granger, had left a letter of explanation, inclosing one
from mother to father, with the keeper. He bribed and frightened him,
but for years she used to agonize over a fear that father had come back
and the keeper had withheld the letter and belied her to him with some
devilish story that maddened him and drove him from her. Such a fancy
might have come out of her mental state at that time. I believe that
Granger left the letter simply to satisfy her. He must have believed my
father was dead. He could not have conceived of a man's being lost in
that broad country at that season; but my father was a man of hills and
farms, all small, compact. The plains were another planet to him.

“The letter was found in the keeper's clothing after his death; no
one ever came to claim it of his successor. Somewhere in this great
wilderness a tired man found rest. What would we not give if we knew
where!

“And she worked in a hotel in Mountain Home. Can you imagine it! Then
Christine was born and the multiplied strain overcame her. Strangers
took care of her children while she lay between life and death. She had
been silent about herself and her past, but they found a letter from one
of her old schoolmates asking about teachers' salaries in the West, and
they wrote to her begging her to make known my mother's condition to
her relatives if any were living. At length came a letter from
grandfather--characteristic to the last. The old home was there, for her
and for her children, but no home for the traitor, as he called father.
She must give him up even to his name. No Bogardus could inherit of a
Van Elten.

“She had not then lost all hope of father's return, and she never
forgave her father for trying to buy her back for the price of what she
considered her birthright. She settled down miserably to earn bread for
her children. Then, when hope and pride were crushed in her, and faith
had nothing left to cling to, there came a letter from Uncle Jacob, the
bachelor, who had bided his time. Out of the division in his brother's
house he proposed to build up his own; just as he would step in and buy
depreciated bonds to hold them for a rise. He offered her a home and
maintenance during his lifetime, and his estate for herself and her
children when he was through. There were no conditions referring to our
father, but it was understood that she should give up her own. This,
mainly, to spite his brother, yet under all there was an old man's plea.
She felt she could make the obligation good, though there might not be
much love on either side. Perhaps it came later; but I remember enough
of that time to believe that her children's future was dearly paid for.
Grandfather died alone, in the old rat-ridden house up the Hudson. He
left no will, to every one's surprise. It might have been his negative
way of owning his debt to nature at the last.

“That is how we came to be rich; and no one detects in us now the crime
of those early struggles. But my father was a hired man; and my mother
has done every menial thing with those soft hands of hers.” A softer one
was folded in his own. Its answering clasp was loyal and strong.

“Is _this_ the story you had not the courage to tell me?”

“This is the story I had the courage to tell you--not any too soon,
perhaps you think?”

“And do you think it needed courage?”

“The question is what you think. What are we to do with Uncle Jacob's
money? Go off by ourselves and have a good time with it?”

“We will not decide to-night,” said Moya, tenderly subdued. But, though
the story had interested and touched her, as accounting for her lover's
saddened, conscience-ridden youth, it was no argument against teaching
him what youth meant in her philosophy. The differences were explained,
but not abolished.

“It was spite money, remember, not love money,” he continued, reverting
to his story. “It purchased my mother's compliance to one who hated her
father, who forced her to listen, year after year, to bitter, unnatural
words against him. I am not sure but it kept her from him at the last;
for if Uncle Jacob had not stepped in and made her his, I can't help
thinking she would have found somehow a way to the soft place in his
heart. Something good ought to be done with that money to redeem its
history.”

“You must not be morbid, Paul.”

“That sounds like mother,” said Paul, smiling. “She is always jealous
for our happiness; because she lost her own, I think, and paid so
heavily for ours. She prizes pleasure and success, even worldly success,
for us.”

“I don't blame her!” cried Moya.

“No; of course not. But you mustn't both be against me, and Chrissy,
too. She is so, unconsciously; she does not know the pull there is on
me, through knowing things she doesn't dream of, and that I can never
forget.”

“No,” said Moya. “I am sure she is perfectly unconscious. We exchanged
biographies at school, and there was nothing at all like this in hers.
Why was she never told?”

“She has always been too strained, too excitable. Every least incident
is an emotion with her. When she laughs, her laugh is like a cry.
Haven't you noticed that? Startle her, and her eyes are the very eyes of
fear. Mother was wise, I think, not to pour those old sorrows into her
little fragile cup.”

“So she emptied them all into yours!”

“That was my right, of the elder and stronger. I wouldn't have missed
the knowledge of our beginnings for the world. What a prosperous fool
and ass I might have made of myself!”

“Morbid again,” said Moya. “You belong to your own day and generation.
You might as well wear country shoes and clothes because your father
wore them.”

“Still, if we have such a thing in this country as class, then you and I
do not belong to the same class except by virtue of Uncle Jacob's money.
Confess you are glad I am a Bevier and a Broderick and a Van Elten, as
well as a Bogardus.”

“I shall confess nothing of the kind. Now you do talk like a _nouveau_
Paul, dear,” said Moya, with her caressing eyes on his--they had paused
under the lamp at the top of the steps--“I think your father must have
been a very good man.”

“All our fathers were,” Paul averred, smiling at her earnestness.

“Yes, but yours in particular; because _you_ are an angel; and your
mother is quite human, is she not?--almost as human as I am? That
carriage of the head,--if that does not mean the world!”--

“She has needed all her pride.”

“I don't object to pride, myself,” said the girl, “but you dwell so upon
her humiliations. I see no such record in her face.”

“She has had much to hide, you must remember.”

“Well, she can hide things; but one's self must escape sometimes. What
has become of little Emily Van Elten who ran away with her father's
hired man? What has become of the freighter's wife?”

“She is all mother now. She brought us back to the world, and for our
sakes she has learned to take her place in it. Herself she has buried.”

“Yes; but which is--was herself?”

“And you cannot see her story in her face?”

“Not that story.”

“Not the crushing reserve, the long suspense, the silence of a sorrow
that even her children could not share?”

“I know her silence. Your mother is a most reticent woman. But is she
now the woman of that story?”

“I don't understand you quite,” said Paul. “How much are we ourselves
after we have passed through fires of grief, and been recast under the
pressure of circumstances! She was that woman once.”

“The saddest part of the story to me is, that your father, who loved her
so, and worked so hard for his family, should have served you all the
better by his death.”

“Oh, don't say that, dear! Who knows what is best? But one thing we do
know. The sorrow that cut my mother's life in two brought you and me
together. It rent the stratum on which I was born and raised it to the
level of yours, my lady!”

“I shall not forget,” whispered Moya with blissful irony, “that you are
the Poor Man's son!”




VI


AN APPEAL TO NATURE

The autumn days were shortening imperceptibly and the sunsets had
gained an almost articulate splendor: cloud calling unto cloud, the west
horizon signaling to the east, and answering again, while the mute dark
circle of hills sat like a council of chiefs with their blankets drawn
over their heads. Soon those blankets would be white with snow.

Behind the Post where the hills climb toward the Cottonwood Creek
divide, there is a little canon which at sunset is especially inviting.
It hastens twilight by at least an hour during midsummer, and in autumn
it leads up a stairway of shadow to the great spectacle of the day--the
day's departure from the hills.

The canon has its companion rivulet always coming down to meet the
stage-road going up. As this road is the only outlet hillward for all
the life of the plain, and as the tendency of every valley population is
to climb, one thinks of it as a way out rather than a way in. Higher up,
the stage-road becomes a pass cut through a wall of splintered cliffs;
and here it leads its companion, the brook, a wild dance over boulders,
and under culverts of fallen rock. At last it emerges on what is
called The Summit; and between are green, deep valleys where the little
ranches, fields and fences and houses, seem to have slid down to the
bottom and lie there at rest.

A party of young riders from the post had gone up this road one evening,
and two had come down, laughing and talking; but the other two remained
in the circle of light that rested on the summit. Prom where they sat
in the dry grass they could hear a hollow sound of moving feet as the
cattle wandered down through folds of the hills, seeking the willow
copses by the water. On the breast of her habit Moya wore the blossoms
of the wild evening primrose, which in this region flowers till the
coming of frost. They had been gathered for her on the way up, and as
she had waited for them, sitting her horse in silence, the brown owls
gurgled and hooted overhead from nest to nest in the crannies of the
rocks.

“You need not hold the horses,” she commanded, in her fresh voice.
“Throw my bridle over your saddle pommel and yours over mine.--There!”
 she said, watching the horses as they shuffled about interlinked. “That
is like half the marriages in this world. They don't separate and they
don't go astray, but they don't _get_ anywhere!”

“I have been thinking of those 'two in the Garden,'” mused Paul, resting
his dark, abstracted eyes on her. “Whether or no your humble servant has
a claim to unchallenged bliss in this world, there's no doubt about your
claim. If my plans interfere, I must take myself out of the way.”

“Oh, you funny old croaker!” laughed the girl. “Take yourself out of the
way, indeed! Haven't you chosen me to show you the way?”

“Moya, Moya!” said Paul in a smothered voice.

“I know what you are thinking. But stop it!” she held one of her crushed
blossoms to his lips. “What was this made for? Why hasn't it some work
to do? Isn't it a skulker--blooming here for only a night?”

“'Ripen, fall, and cease!'” Paul murmured.

“How much more am I--are you, then? The sum of us may amount to
something, if we mind our own business and keep step with each other,
and finish one thing before we begin the next. I will not be in a hurry
about being good. Goodness can take care of itself. What you need is to
be happy! And it's my first duty to make you so.”

“God knows what bliss it would be.”

“Don't say 'would be.'”

“God knows it is!”

“Then hush and be thankful!” There was a long hush. They heard the far,
faint notes of a bugle sounding from the Post.

“Lights out,” said Moya. “We must go.”

“You haven't told me yet where our Garden is to be,” he said.

“I will tell you on the way home.”

When they had come down into the neighborhood of ranches, and Bisuka's
lights were twinkling below them, she asked: “Who lives now in the
grandfather's house on the Hudson?”

“The farmer, Chauncey Dunlop.”

“Is there any other house on the place?”

“Yes. Mother built a new one on the Ridge some years ago.”

“What sort of a house is it?”

“It was called a good house once; but now it's rather everything it
shouldn't be. It was one of the few rash things mother ever did; build a
house for her children while they were children. Now she will not change
it. She says we shall build for ourselves, how and where we please.
Stone Ridge is her shop. Of course, if Chrissy liked it--But Chrissy
considers it a 'hole.' Mother goes up there and indulges in secret
orgies of economy; one man in the stable, one in the garden--'Economy
has its pleasures for all healthy minds.'”

“Economy is as delicious as bread and butter after too much candy. I
should love to go up to Stone Ridge and wear out my old clothes. Did any
one tell me that place would some day be yours?”

“It will be my wife's on the day we are married.”

“That is where your wife, sir, would like to live.”

“It is a stony Garden, dear! The summer people have their places nearer
the river. Our land lies back, with no view but hills. For one who has
the world before her where to choose, it strikes me she has picked out a
very humble Paradise.”

“Did you think my idea was to travel--a poor army girl who spends
her life in trunks? Do we ever buy a book or frame a picture without
thinking of our next move? As for houses, who am I that I should be
particular? In the Army's House are many mansions, but none that we
can call our own. Oh, I'm very primitive; I have the savage instinct to
gather sticks and stones, and get a roof over my head before winter sets
in.”

To such a speech as this there was but one obvious answer, as she rode
at his side, her appealing slenderness within reach of his arm. It did
not matter what thousands he proposed to spend upon the roof that should
cover her; it was the same as if they were planning a hut of tules or a
burrow in the snow.

“It is a poor man's country,” he said; “stony hillsides, stony roads
lined with stone fences. The chief crop of the country is ice and stone.
In one of my grandfather's fields there is a great cairn which Adam
Bogardus, they say, picked up, stone by stone, with his bare hands, and
carted there when he was fourteen years old. We will build them into the
walls of our new house for a blessing.”

“No,” said Moya. “We will let sleeping stones lie!”




VII


MARKING TIME

There was impatience at the garrison for news that the hunters had
started. Every day's delay at Challis meant an abridgment of the
bridegroom's leave, and the wedding was now but a fortnight away. It
began to seem preposterous that he should go at all, and the colonel
was annoyed with himself for his enthusiasm over the plan in the first
place. Mrs. Bogardus's watchfulness of dates told the story of her
thoughts, but she said nothing.

“Mamsie is restless,” said Christine, putting an arm around her mother's
solid waist and giving her a tight little hug apropos of nothing. “I
believe it's another case of 'mail-time fever.' The colonel says it
comes on with Moya every afternoon about First Sergeant's call. But
Moya is cunning. She goes off and pretends she isn't listening for the
bugle.”

“'First Sergeant or Second,' it's all one to me,” said Mrs. Bogardus. “I
never know one call from another, except when the gun goes off.”

“Mamsie! 'When the gun goes off!' What a civilian way of talking. You
are not getting on at all with your military training. Now let me give
you some useful information. In two seconds the bugle will call the
first sergeant--of each company--to the adjutant's office, and there
he'll get the mail for his men. The orderly trumpeter will bring it to
the houses on the line, and the colonel's orderly--beautiful creature!
There he goes! How I wish we could take him home with us and have him
in our front hall. Fancy the feelings of the maids! And the rage on the
noble brow of Parkins--awful Parkins. I should like to give his pride a
bump.”

Mother and daughter were pacing the colonel's veranda, behind a partial
screen of rose vines--October vines fast shedding their leaves. Every
breeze shook a handful down, which the women's skirts swept with them as
they walked. Mrs. Bogardus turned and clasped Christine's arm above the
elbow; through the thin sleeve she could feel its cool roundness. It was
a soft, small, unmuscular arm, that had never borne its own burdens, to
say nothing of a share in the burdens of others.

“Get your jacket,” said the mother. “There is a chill in the air.”

“There is no chill in me,” laughed Christine. “You know, mamsie, you
aren't a girl. I should simply die in those awful things that you wear.
Did you ever know such a hot house as the colonel keeps!”

“The rooms are small, and the colonel is--impulsive,” Mrs. Bogardus
added with a smile.

“There is something very like him about his fire-making. I should know
by the way he puts on wood that he never would have “--Mrs. Bogardus
checked herself.

“A large bank account?” Christine supplied, with her quick wit, which
was not of a highly sensitive order.

“He has a large heart,” said her mother.

“And plenty of room for it, bless him! The slope of his chest is like
the roof of a house. The only time I envy Moya is when she lays her head
down on it and tries to meet her arms around him as if he were a tree,
and he strokes her hair as if his hand was a bough! If ever I marry a
soldier he shall be a colonel with a white mustache and a burnt-sienna
complexion, and a sword-belt that measures--what is the colonel's
waist-measure, do you suppose?”

Mrs. Bogardus listened to this nonsense with the smile of a silent
woman who has borne a child that can talk. Moya had often noticed how
uncritical she was of Christine's “unruly member.”

“It isn't polite to speak of waist-measures to middle-aged persons like
your mother and the colonel,” she said placidly. “You like it very much
out here?”

“Fascinating! Never had such a good time in my whole life.”

“And you like the West altogether? Would you like to live here?”

“Oh, if it came to living, I should want to be sure there was a way
out.”

“There generally is a way out of most things. But it costs something.”
 Mrs. Bogardus was so concise in her speech as at times to be almost
oracular.

“Army people are sure of their way out,” said Christine, “and I guess
they find it costs something.”

“Why do they buy so many books, I wonder? If I moved as often as they
do, I'd have only paper covers and leave them behind.”

“You are not a reader, mummy. You're a business woman. You look at
everything from the practical side.”

“And if I didn't, who would?” Mrs. Bogardus spoke with earnestness. “We
can't all be dreamers like Paul or privileged persons like you. There
has to be one in every family to say the things no one likes to hear and
do the things nobody likes to do.”

“We are the rich repiners and you are the household drudge!” Christine
shouted, laughing at her own wit.

“Hush, hush!” her mother smiled. “Don't make so much noise.”

“I should like to know who's to be the drudge in Paul's privileged
family. It doesn't strike me it's going to be Moya. And Paul only
drudges for people he doesn't know.”

“Moya is a girl you can expect anything of. She is a wonderful mixture
of opposites. She has the Irish quickness, and yet she has learned to
obey. She has had the freedom and the discipline of these little lordly
army posts. She is one of the few girls of her age who does not measure
everything from her own point of view.”

“Is that a dig at me, ma'am?”

At that moment Moya came out upon the porch.

She was very striking with the high color and brilliant eyes that
mail-time fever breeds. Christine looked at her with freshly aroused
curiosity, moved by her mother's unwonted burst of praise. The faintest
tinge of jealousy made her feel naughty. As Moya went down the board
walk, the colonel's orderly came springing up the steps to meet her with
the mail-bag. He saluted and turned off at an angle down the embankment
not to present his back to the ladies.

“Did you see that! He never raised his eyes. They are like priests. You
can't make them look at you.” Moya looked at Christine in amazement.
The man himself might have heard her. It was not the first time
this privileged guest had rubbed against garrison customs in certain
directions hardly worth mentioning. Moya hesitated. Then she laughed
a little, and said: “Only a raw recruity would look at an officer's
daughter, or any lady of the line.”

“Oh, you horrid little aristocrat! Well, I look at them, when they are
as pretty as that one, and I forgive them if they look at me.”

Moya turned and hovered over the contents of the mail-bag. In the
exercise of one of her prerogatives, it was her habit to sort its
contents before delivering it at the official door.

“All, all for you!” she offered a huge packet of letters, smiling, to
Mrs. Bogardus. It was faced with one on top in Paul's handwriting. “All
but one,” she added, and proceeded to open her own much fatter one in
the same hand. She stood reading it in the hall.

Mrs. Bogardus presently followed and remained beside her. “Could I speak
to your father a moment?” she asked.

“Certainly, I will call him,” said Moya.

“Wait: I hear him now.” The study door opened and Colonel Middleton
joined them. Mrs. Bogardus leading the way into the sitting-room, the
colonel followed her, and Moya, not having been invited, lingered in the
hall.

“Well, have the hunters started yet?” the colonel inquired in his breezy
voice, which made you want to open the doors and windows to give it
room. “Be seated! Be seated! I hope you have got a long letter to read
me.”

Mrs. Bogardus stood reflecting. “The day this letter was mailed they got
off--only two days ago,” she said. “Could I reach them, Colonel, with a
telegram?”

“Two days ago,” the colonel considered. “They must have made Yankee Fork
by yesterday. Today they are deep in the woods. No; I should say a man
on horseback would be your surest telegram. Is it anything important?”

“Colonel, I wish we could call them back! They have gone off, it seems
to me, in a most crazy way--against the judgment of every one who knows.
The guide, this man whom they waited for, refused, it appears, to go
out again with another party so late in the fall. But the Bowens were
determined. They insisted on making arrangements with another man. Then,
when 'Packer John,' they call him, heard of this, he went to Paul and
urged him, if he could not prevent the others from going, to give up the
trip himself. The Bowens were very much annoyed at his interference,
and with Paul for listening to him. And Paul, rather than make things
unpleasant, gave in. You know how young men are! What silly grounds are
enough for the most serious decisions when it is a question of pride or
good faith. The Bowens had bought their outfit on Paul's assurance that
he would go. He felt he could not leave them in the lurch. On that, the
guide suddenly changed his mind and said he would go with them sooner
than see them fall into worse hands. They were, in a way, committed to
the other man, so they took _him_ along as cook--the whole thing done in
haste, you see, and unpleasant feelings all around. Do you call that a
good start for a pleasure trip?”

“It's very much the way with young troops when they start
out--everything wrong end foremost, everybody mad with everybody else. A
day in the saddle will set their little tempers all right.”

“That isn't the point,” Mrs. Bogardus persisted gloomily. As she spoke,
the two girls came into the room and stood listening.

“What is the point, then?” Christine demanded. “Moya has no news; all
those pages and pages, and nothing for anybody or about anybody!”

“'Such an intolerable deal of sack to such a poor pennyworth of bread,'”
 the colonel quoted, smiling at Moya's bloated envelope.

“But what do you think?” Mrs. Bogardus recalled him. “Don't you think
it's a mistake all around?”

“Not at all, if they have a good man. This flat-footed fellow, John,
will take command, as he should. There is no danger in the woods at any
season unless the party gets rattled and goes to pieces for want of a
head.”

“Father!” exclaimed Moya. “You know there is danger. Often, things have
happened!”

“Why, what could happen?” asked Christine, with wide eyes.

“Many things very interesting could happen,” the colonel boasted
cheerfully. “That is the object of the trip. You want things to happen.
It is the emergency that makes the man--sifts him, and takes the chaff
out of him.”

“Take the chaff out of Banks Bowen,” Moya imprudently struck in, “and
what would you have left?” She had met Banks Bowen in New York.

“Tut, tut!” said the colonel. “Silence, or a good word for the
absent--same as the”--The colonel stopped short.

“You are so scornful about the other men, now you have chosen one!”
 Christine's face turned red.

“Why, Chrissy! You would not compare your brother to those men! Papa, I
beg your pardon; this is only for argument.”

“I don't compare him; but that's not to say all the other men are
chaff!” Christine joined constrainedly in the laugh that followed her
speech.

“You need not go fancying things, Moya,” she cried, in answer to a
quizzical look. “As if I hadn't known the Bowen boys since I was so
high!”

“You might know them from the cradle to the grave, my dear young lady,
and not know them as Paul will, after a week in the woods with them.”

The colonel had missed the drift of the girls' discussion. He was
considering, privately, whether he had not better send a special
messenger on the young men's trail. His assurances to the women left
a wide margin for personal doubt as to the prudence of the trip. Aside
from the lateness of the start, it was, undoubtedly, an ill-assorted
company for the woods. There was a wide margin also for suspense, as all
mail facilities ceased at Challis.




VIII


A HUNTER'S DIARY

Early in November, about a week before the hunters were expected home, a
packet came addressed to Moya. It was a journal letter from Paul, mailed
by some returning prospector chance encountered in the forest as the
party were going in. Moya read it aloud, with asterisks, to a family
audience which did not include her father.

“To-day,” one of the first entries read, “we halt at Twelve-Mile Cabin,
the last roof we shall sleep under. There are pine-trees near the cabin
cut off fifteen feet above the ground, felled in winter, John tells us,
_at the level of the snow!_

“These cabins are all deserted now; the tide of prospecting has turned
another way. The great hills that crowd one another up against the sky
are so infested and overridden by this enormous forest-growth, and the
underbrush is so dense, it would be impossible for a 'tenderfoot' to
gain any clear idea of his direction. I should be a lost man the moment
I ventured out of call. Woodcraft must be a sixth sense which we lost
with the rest of our Eden birthright when we strayed from innocence,
when we ceased to sleep with one ear on the ground, and to spell our way
by the moss on tree-trunks. In these solitudes, as we call them,
ranks and clouds of witnesses rise up to prove us deaf and blind. Busy
couriers are passing every moment of the day; and we do not see, nor
hear, nor understand. We are the stocks and stones. Packer John is our
only wood-sharp;--yet the last half of the name doesn't altogether fit
him. He is a one-sided character, handicapped, I should say, by some
experience that has humbled and perplexed him. Two and two perhaps
refused to make four in his account with men, and he gave up the
proposition. And now he consorts with trees, and hunts to live, not
to kill. He has an impersonal, out-door odor about him, such as the
cleanest animals have. I would as soon eat out of his dry, hard, cool
hand, as from a chunk of pine-bark.

“It is amusing to see him with a certain member of the party who tries
to be fresh with him. He has a disconcerting eye when he fixes it on a
man, or turns it away from one who has said a coarse or a foolish thing.

“'The jungle is large,' he seems to say, 'and the cub he is small. Let
him think and be still!'”

“Who is this 'certain member' who tries to be 'fresh'?” Christine
inquired with perceptible warmth.

“The cook, perhaps,” said Moya prudently.

“The cook isn't a 'member'!--Well, can't you go on, Moya? Paul seems to
need a lot of editing.” Moya had paused and was glancing ahead, smiling
to herself constrainedly.

“Is there more disparagement of his comrades?” Christine persisted.

“Christine, be still!” Mrs. Bogardus interfered. “Moya ought to have the
first reading of her own letter. It's very good of her to let us hear it
at all.”

“Oh dear, there's no disparagement. Quite the contrary! I'll go on with
pleasure if you don't mind.” Moya read hurriedly, laughing through her
words:--

“'If you were here, (Ah, _if_ you were here!) You should lend me an
ear--One at the least Of a pair the prettiest'--which is, within a foot
or two, the rhythm of 'Wood Notes.' Of course you don't know it!”

“This is a gibe at me,” Moya explained, “because I don't read Emerson.
'It is the very measure of a marching chorus,' he goes on to say, 'where
the step is broken by rocks and tree-roots;'--and he is chanting it
to himself (to her it was in the original) as they go in single file
through these 'haughty solitudes, the twilight of the gods!'”

“'Haughty solitudes'!” Christine derided.

Mrs. Bogardus sighed with impatience, and Moya's face became set. “Well,
here he quotes again,” she haughtily resumed. “Anybody who is tired of
this can be excused. Emerson won't mind, and I'm sure Paul won't!” She
looked a mute apology to Paul's mother, who smiled and said, “Go on,
dear. I don't read Emerson either, but I like him when Paul reads him
for me.”

“Well, I warn you there is an awful lot of him here!” Moya's voice was a
trifle husky as she read on.

“Old as Jove, Old as Love'”

“I thought Love was young!”--Christine in a whisper aside.

“'Who of me Tells the pedigree? Only the mountains old, Only the waters
cold, Only the moon and stars, My coevals are.'”

Moya sighed, and sank into prose again. “There is a gaudy yellow moss
in these woods that flecks the straight and mournful tree-trunks like a
wandering glint of sunlight; and there is a crêpe-like black moss that
hangs funeral scarfs upon the boughs, as if there had been a death in
the forest, and the trees were in line for the burial procession. The
grating of our voices on this supreme silence reminds one of 'Why will
you still be talking, Monsieur Benedick?--nobody marks you.'

“There are silences, and again there are whole symphonies of sound. The
winds smites the tree-tops over our heads, a surf-like roar comes up
the slope, and the yellow pine-needles fall across the deepest darks as
motes sail down a sunbeam. One wearies of the constant perpendicular,
always these stiff, columnar lines, varied only by the melancholy
incline where some great pine-chieftain is leaning to his fall supported
in the arms of his comrades, or by the tragic prostration of the 'down
timber'--beautiful straight-cut English these woodsmen talk.

“Last evening John and I sat by the stove in the men's tent, while the
others were in the cabin playing penny-ante with the cook (a sodden
brute who toadies to the Bowens, and sulks with John because he objected
to our hiring the fellow--an objection which I sustained, hence his
logical spite includes me). John was melting pine gum and elk tallow
into a dressing for our boots. I took a mean advantage of him, his hands
being in the tallow and the tent-flap down, and tried on him a little
of--now, don't deride me!--'Wood Notes.' It is seldom one can get the
comment of a genuine woodsman on Nature according to the poets.'”

Moya read on perfunctorily, feeling that she was not carrying her
audience with her, and longing for the time when she could take her
letter away and have it all to herself. If she stopped now, Christine,
in this sudden new freak of distrustfulness, would be sure to
misunderstand.

    “'For Nature ever faithful is
    To such as trust her faithfulness.
    When the forest shall mislead me,
    When the night and morning lie,
    When sea and land refuse to feed me,
    Will be time enough to die.

    Then will yet my Mother yield
    A pillow in her greenest field;
    Nor the June flowers scorn to cover
    The clay of their departed lover.'”

“That is beautiful,” Mrs. Bogardus murmured hastily. “Even I can
understand that.” Moya thanked her with a glance.

“And what did the infallible John say?” Christine inquired.

“John looked at me and smiled, as at a babbling infant”--

“Good for John!”

“Christine, be still!”

“John looked at me and smiled,” Moya repeated steadily. Nothing could
have stopped her now. She only hoped for some further scattering mention
of that “certain member” who had set them all at odds and spoiled what
should have been an hour's pure happiness. “'You'll get the pillow all
right,' he said. 'It might not be a green one, nor I wouldn't bank much
on the flowers; but you'll be tired enough to sleep without rocking
about the time you trust to Nature's tuckin' you in and puttin' victuals
in your mouth. I never _see_ nature till I came out here. I'd seen
pretty woods and views, that a young lady could take down with her
paints; but how are you going to paint that?'--he waved his tallow-stick
towards the night outside. 'Ears can't reach the bottom of that
stillness. That's creation before God ever thought of man. Long as I've
been in the woods, I never get over the feeling that there's _something
behind me_. If you go towards the trees, they come to meet you; if you
go backwards, they go back; but you can't sit down and sit still without
they'll come a-creeping up and creeping up, and crowding in'--

“He stirred his 'dope' awhile, and then he struck another note. 'I've
wintered alone in these mountains,' he said, 'and I've seen snowslides
pounce out of a clear sky--a puff and a flash and a roar; an' trees four
foot across snappin' like kindlin' wood--not because it hit 'em; only
the breath of it struck them; and maybe a man lying dead somewheres
under his cabin timbers. That's no mother's love-tap. Pillows and
flowers ain't in it. But it's good poetry,' he added condescendingly.

“I have not quoted him right, not being much of a snap-shot at dialect;
and his is an undefined, unclassifiable mixture. Eastern farm-hand and
Western ranchman, prospector, who knows what? His real language is in
his eye and his rare, pure smile. And just as his countenance expresses
his thoughts without circumlocution or attempt at effect, so his body
informs his clothing. Wind and rain have moulded his hat to his head,
his shoes grip the ground like paws; his buckskins have a surface like
a cast after Rodin. They are repousséed by the hard bones and sinews
underneath. I can think of nothing but the clothing of Millet's peasants
to compare with this exterior of John's. He is himself a peasant of the
woods. He has not the predatory instincts. If he could have his way, not
a shot would be fired by any of us for the mere idle sport of killing.
Shooting these innocent, fearless creatures, who have not learned that
we are here for their destruction, is too like murder and treachery
combined. Hunger should be our only excuse. My forbearance, or weakness,
is a sort of unspoken bond between us. But I am a peasant, too, you
know. I do not come of the lordly, arms-bearing blood. I shoot at a live
mark always under protest; and when I fairly catch the look in the great
eye of a dying elk or black-tail, it knocks me out for that day's hunt.”

“Paul is perfectly happy!” Christine broke in. “He has got one of his
beloved People to grovel to. They can sleep in the same tent and eat
from the same plate, if you like. Why, it's better than the East Side!
He'll be blood brother to Packer John before they leave the woods.”

Moya blushed with anger.

“You have said enough on that subject, Christine.” Mrs. Bogardus bent
her dark, keen gaze upon her daughter's face. “Come”--she rose. “Come
with me!”

Christine sat still. “Come!” her mother repeated sternly. “Moya,”--in
a different voice,--“your letter was lovely. Shall you read it to your
father?”

“Hardly,” said Moya, flushing. “Father does not care for descriptions,
and the woods are an old story to him.”

Mrs. Bogardus placed her hands on the girl's shoulders and gave her one
of her infrequent, ceremonious kisses, which, like her finest smile, she
kept for occasions too nice for words.




IX


THE POWER OF WEAKNESS

Christine followed her mother to their room, and the two faced each
other a moment in pale silence.

Mrs. Bogardus spoke first. “What does this mean?”--her breath came
short, perhaps from climbing the stairs. She was a large woman.

“What does what mean? I don't understand you, mother.”

“Ah, child, don't repulse me! Twice you and Moya have nearly quarreled
about those men. Why were you so rude to her? Why did you behave so
about her letter?”

“Paul is so intolerant! And the airs he puts on! If he is my own brother
I must say he's an awful prig about other men.”

“We are not discussing Paul. That is not the question now. Have you
anything to tell me, Christine?”

“To tell you?--about what, mother?” Christine spoke lower.

“You know what I mean. Which of them is it? Is it Banks?--don't say it
is Banks!”

“Mother, how can I say anything when you begin like that?”

“Have you any idea what sort of a man Banks Bowen really is? His father
supports him entirely--six years now, ever since he left the law school.
He does nothing, never will do anything. He has no will or purpose in
life, except about trifles like this hunting-trip. As far as I can see
he is without common sense.”

Christine stood by the dressing-table pleating the cover-frilling with
her small fingers that were loaded with rings. She pinched the folds
hard and let them go. “Why did no one ever say these things before?”

“We don't say things about the sons of our friends, unless we are
compelled to. They were implied in every way possible. When have I asked
Banks Bowen to the house except when everybody was asked! I would never
in the world have come out in Mr. Borland's car if I had known the
Bowens were to be of the party.”

“That made no difference,” said Christine loftily.

“It was all settled before then, was it?”

“Have I said it was settled, mother? He asked me if I could ever care
for him; and I said that I did--a little. Why shouldn't I? He does what
I like a man to do. I don't enjoy people who have wills and purposes. It
may be very horrid of me, but I wouldn't be in Moya's place for worlds.”

“You poor child! You poor, unhappy child!”

“Why am I unhappy? Has Paul added so much to our income since he left
college?”

“Paul does not make money; neither does he selfishly waste it. He has a
conscience in his use of what he has.”

“I don't see what conscience has to do with it. When it is gone it's
gone.”

“You will learn what conscience has to do with a man's spending if ever
you try to make both ends meet with Banks Bowen. I suppose he will go
through the form of speaking to me?”

“Mother dear! He has only just spoken to me. How fast you go!”

“Not fast enough to keep up with my children, it seems. Was it you,
Christine, who asked them to come here?”

Christine was silent.

“Where did you learn such ways?--such want of frankness, of delicacy, of
the commonest consideration for others? To be looking out for your own
little schemes at a time like this!” Mrs. Bogardus saw now what must
have been Paul's reason for doing what, with all her forced explanations
of the hunting-trip, she had never until now understood. He had taken
the alarm before she had, and done what he could to postpone this family
catastrophe.

Christine retreated to a deep-cushioned chair, and threw herself into
it, her slender hands, palm upwards, extended upon its arms. Total
surrender under pressure of cruel odds was the expression of her pointed
eyebrows and drooping mouth. She looked exasperatingly pretty and
irresponsibly fragile. Her blue-veined eyelids quivered, her breath came
in distinct pants.

“Perhaps you will not be troubled with my 'ways' for very many years,
mother. If you could feel my heart now! It jumps like something trying
to get out. It will get out some day. Have patience!”

“That is a poor way to retaliate upon your mother, Christine. Your
health is too serious a matter to trifle with. If you choose to make it
a shield against everything I say that doesn't please you, you can cut
yourself off from me entirely. I cannot beat down such a defense as
that. Anger me you never can, but you can make me helpless to help you.”

“I dare say it's better that I should never marry at all,” said
Christine, her eyes closed in resignation. “You never would like anybody
I like.”

“I shall say no more. You are a woman. I have protected you as far as
I was able on account of your weakness. I cannot protect you from the
weakness itself.”

Mrs. Bogardus rose. She did not offer to comfort her child with
caresses, but in her eyes as she looked at her there was a profound,
inalienable, sorrowing tenderness, a depth of understanding beyond
words.

“I know so well,” the dark eyes seemed to say, “how you came to be the
poor thing that you are!”

The constraint which she felt towards her mother threw Chrissy back upon
Moya. Being a lesser power, she was always seeking alliances. Moya had
put aside their foolish tiff as unworthy of another thought; she was
embarrassed when at bedtime Christine came humbly to her door, and
putting her arms around her neck implored her not to be cross with
her “poor pussy.” It was always the other person who was “cross” with
Christine.

“Nobody is cross with anybody, so far as I know,” said Moya briskly. A
certain sort of sentimentality always made her feel like whistling or
singing or asserting the commonplace side of life in some way.




X


THE WHITE PERIL

Mrs. Bogardus received many letters, chiefly on business, and these she
answered with manlike brevity, in a strong, provincial hand. They took
up much of her time, and mercifully, for it was now the last week in
November and the young men did not return.

The range cattle had been driven down into the valleys, deer-tracks
multiplied by lonely mountain fords; War Eagle and his brethren of the
Owyhees were taking council under their winter blankets. The nights were
still, the mornings rimy with hoarfrost. Fogs arose from the river and
cut off the bases of the mountains, converting the valley before sunrise
into the likeness of a polar sea.

“You have let your fire go out,” said the colonel briskly. He had
invaded the sitting-room at an unaccustomed hour, finding the lady at
her letters as usual. She turned and held her pen poised above her paper
as she looked at him.

“You did not come to see about the fire?” she said.

“No; I have had letters from the north. Would you step into my study a
moment?”

Moya was in her father's room when they entered. She had been weeping,
but at sight of Paul's mother she rose and stood picking at the
handkerchief she held, without raising her eyes.

“Don't be alarmed at Moya's face,” said the colonel stoutly. “Paul was
all right at last accounts. We will have a merry Christmas yet.”

“This is not from Paul!” Mrs. Bogardus fixed her eyes upon a letter
which she held at arm's length, feeling for her glasses. “It's not for
me--'_Miss_ Bogardus.'”

“Ah, well. I saw it was postmarked Lemhi--Fort Lemhi, you know. Sit
down, madam. Suppose I give you Mr. Winslow's report first--Lieutenant
Winslow. You heard of his going to Lemhi?”

“She doesn't know,” whispered Moya.

“True. Well, two weeks ago I gave Mr. Winslow a hunter's leave, as we
call it in the army, to beat up the trail of those boys. I thought it
was time we heard from them, but it wasn't worth while to raise a hue
and cry. He started out with a few picked men from Lemhi, the Indian
Reservation, you know. I couldn't have sent a better man; the thing
hasn't got into the local papers even. My object, of course, has been
to save unnecessary alarm. Mr. Winslow has just got back to Challis. He
rounded up the Bowen youths and the cook and the helper, in bad shape,
all of them, but able to tell a story. The details we shall get
later, but I have Mr. Winslow's report to me. It is short and probably
correct.”

“Was Paul not with them?” his mother questioned in a hard, dry voice.
“Where is he then?”

“He is in camp, madam, in charge of the wounded.”

“Dear father! if you would speak plain!” Moya whispered nervously.

“Certainly. There is nothing whatever to hide. We know now that on their
last day's hunt they met with an accident which resulted in a division
of the party. A fall of snow had covered the ice on the trails, and
the guide's horse fell and rolled on him--nature of his injuries not
described. This happened a day's journey from their camp at Ten-Mile
cabin, and the retreat with the wounded man was slow and of course
difficult over such a trail. They put together a sort of horse-litter
made of pine poles and carried him on that, slung between two mules
tandem. A beastly business, winding and twisting over fallen timber,
hugging the cañon wall, near a thousand feet down--'Impassable' the
trail is marked, on the government military maps. This first day's march
was so discouraging that at Ten Mile they called a council, and the
packer spoke up like a man. He disposed of his own case in this way. If
he were to live, they could send back help to fetch him out. If not,
no help would be needed. The snows were upon them; there was danger in
every hour's delay. It was insane to sacrifice four sound men for one,
badly hurt, with not many hours perhaps to suffer.”

A murmur from the mother announced her appreciation of the packer's
argument.

“It was no more than a man should do; but as to taking him at his word,
why, that's another question.” The colonel paused and gustily cleared
his throat. “They were up against it right then and there, and the party
split upon it. Three of them went on,--for help, as they put it,--and
Paul stayed behind with the wounded man.”

“Paul stayed--alone?” Mrs. Bogardus uttered with hoarse emphasis. “Was
not that a very strange way to divide? Among them all, I should think
they might have brought the man out with them.”

“Their story is that his injuries were such that he could not have borne
the pain of the journey. Rather an unusual case,” the colonel added
dryly. “In my experience, a wounded man will stand anything sooner than
be left on the field.”

“I cannot understand it,” Mrs. Bogardus repeated, in a voice of
indignant pain. “Such a strange division! One man left alone--to nurse,
and hunt, and cook, and keep up fires! Suppose the guide should die!”

“Paul was not _left_, you know,” the colonel said emphatically. “He
_stayed_. And I should be thankful in your place, madam, that my son was
the man who made that choice. But setting conduct aside, for we are not
prepared to judge, it is merely a matter of time our getting in there,
now that we know where he is.”

“How much time?” Mrs. Bogardus opened her ashen lips to say.

The colonel's face fell. “Mr. Winslow reports heavy snows for the past
week,--soft, clogging snow,--too deep to wade through and too soft to
bear. A little later, when the cold has formed a crust, our men can get
in on snowshoes. There is nothing for it but patience, Mrs. Bogardus,
and faith in the boy's endurance. The pluck that made him stay behind
will help him to hold out.”

Moya gave a hurt sob; the colonel stepped to the desk and stood there a
moment turning over his papers. Behind his back the mother sent a glance
to Moya expressive of despair.

“Do you know what happened to his father? Did he ever tell you?” she
whispered.

Moya assented; she could not speak.

“Twice, twice in a lifetime!” said the older woman.

With a gesture, Moya protested against this wild prophecy; but as Paul's
mother left the room she rushed upon her father, crying: “Tell _me_ the
truth! What do you think of it? Did you ever hear of such a dastardly
thing?”

“It was a rout,” said the colonel coolly. “They were in full flight
before the enemy.”

“What enemy? They deserted a wounded comrade, and a servant at that!”

“The enemy was panic,--panic, my dear. In these woods I've seen strong
men go half beside themselves with fear of something--the Lord knows
what! Then, add the winter and what they had seen and heard of that.
Anyway, you can afford to be easy on the other boys. The honors of the
day are with Paul--and the old packer, though it's all in the day's work
to him.”

“And you are satisfied with Paul, father?”

“He didn't desert his command to save his own skin.” The colonel smiled
grimly.

“When the men of the Fourth discovered those other fellows they had
literally sat down in the snow to die. Not a man of them knew how to
pack a mule. Their meat pack slipped, going along one of those high
trails, and scared the mule, and in trying to kick himself free the
beast fell off the trail--mule and meat both gone. They got tired of
carrying their stuff and made a raft to float it down the river, and
lost that! Paul has been much better off in camp than he would have been
with them. So cheer up, my girl, and think how you'd like to have your
bridegroom out on an Indian campaign!”

“Ah, but that would be orders! It's the uselessness that hurts. There
was nothing to do or to gain. He didn't want to go. Oh, daddy dear, I
made fun of his shooting,--I did! I laughed at his way with firearms.
Wretched fool and snob that I was! As if I cared! I thought of what
other people would say. You remember,--he went shooting up the gulch
with Mr. Lane, and when he hit but didn't kill he wouldn't--couldn't put
the birds out of pain. Jephson had to do it for him, and he told it in
barracks and the men laughed.”

“How did you know that! And what does it all amount to! Blame yourself
all you like, dear, if it does you any good, but don't make him out a
fool! There's not much that comes to us straight in this world--not
even orders, you'll find. But we have to take it straight and leave the
muddles and the blunders as they are. That's the brave man's courage and
the brave woman's. Orders are mixed, but duty is clear. And the boy
out there in the woods has found his duty and done it like a man. That
should be enough for any soldier's daughter.”

An hour passed in suspense. Moya was disappointed in her expectation of
sharing in whatever the letter from Fort Lemhi might contain. Christine
was in bed with a headache, her mother dully gave out, with no apparent
expectation that any one would accept this excuse for the girl's
complete withdrawal. The letter, she told Moya, was from Banks Bowen.
“There was nothing in it of consequence--to us,” she added, and
Moya took the words to mean “you and me” to the unhappy exclusion of
Christine.

Mrs. Bogardus's face had settled into lines of anxiety printed years
before, as the creases in an old garment, smoothed and laid away, will
reappear with fresh wear. Her plan was to go back to New York with
Christine, who was plainly unfit to bear a long siege of suspense. There
she could leave the girl with friends and learn what particulars could
be gathered from the Bowens, who would have arrived. She would then
return alone and wait for news at the garrison. That night, with Moya's
help, she completed her packing, and on the following day the wedding
party broke up.




XI


A SEARCHING OF HEARTS

Fine, dry snowflakes were drifting past the upper square of a window
set in a wall of logs. The lower half was obscured by a white bulk
that shouldered up against the sash in the likeness of a muffled figure
stooping to peer in.

Lying in his bunk against the wall, the packer watched this sentinel
snowdrift grow and become human and bold and familiar. His deep-lined
visage was reduced to its bony structure. The hand was a claw with
which he plucked at the ancient fever-crust shredding from his lips: an
occupation at once so absorbing and so exhausting that often the hand
would drop and the blankets rise upon the arch of the chest in a sigh of
retarded respiration. The sigh would be followed by a cough, controlled,
as in dread of the shock to a sore and shattered frame. The snow came
faster and faster until the dim, wintry pane was a blur. Millions of
atoms crossed the watcher's weary vision, whirling, wavering, driven
with an aimless persistence, unable to pause or to stop. And the blind
white snowdrift climbed, fed, like human circumstance, from disconnected
atoms impelled by a common law.

There were sounds in the cabin: wet wood sweating on hot coals; a step
that went to and fro. Outside, a snow-weighted bough let go its load and
sprang up, scraping against the logs. Some heavy soft thing slid off
the roof and dropped with a _chug_. Then the door, that hung awry like a
drooping eyelid, gave a disreputable wink, and the whole front gable of
the cabin loomed a giant countenance with a silly forehead and an evil
leer. Now it seemed that a hand was hurling snow against the door, as
a sower scatters grain,--snow that lay like beach sand on the floor, or
melted into a crawling pool--red in the firelight, red as blood!

These and other phantasms had now for an unmeasured time been tenants
of the packer's brain, sharing and often overpowering the reality of
the human step that went to and fro. To-day the shapes and relations of
things were more natural, and the step aroused a querulous curiosity.

“Who's there?” the sick man imagined himself to have said. A croaking
sound in his throat, which was all he could do by way of speech, brought
the step to his bedside. A young face, lightly bearded, and gaunt almost
as his own, bent over him. Large, black eyes rested on his; a hand with
womanish nails placed its fingers on his wrist.

“You are better to-day. Your pulse is down. I wouldn't try to talk.”

“Who's that--outside?”

“There is no one outside,” Paul answered, following the direction of his
patient's eyes. “That? That is only a snowdrift. It grows faster than I
can shovel it away.”

The packer had forgotten his own question. He dozed off, and presently
roused again as suddenly as he had slept. His utterance was clearer, but
not his meaning.

“What--you want to fetch me back for?”

“Back?” Paul repeated.

“I was most gone, wa'n't I?”

“Back to life, you mean? You came back of yourself. I hadn't much to do
with it.”

“What's been the matter--gen'ly speaking?”

“You were hurt, don't you remember? Something like wound fever set in.
The altitude is bad for fevers. You have had a pretty close call.”

“Been here all the time?”

“Have I been here?--yes.”

“'Lone?”

“With you. How is your chest? Does it hurt you still when you breathe?”

The sick man filled his lungs experimentally. “Something busted inside,
I guess,” he panted. “'Tain't no killing matter, though.”

Nourishment, in a tin cup, warm from the fire was offered him, refused
with a gesture, and firmly urged upon him. This necessitated another
rest. It was long before he spoke again--out of some remoter train of
thought apparently.

“Family all in New York?”

“My family? They were at Bisuka when I left them.”

“You don't _live_ West!”

“No. I was born in the West, though. Idaho is my native state.”

The patient fell to whimpering suddenly like a hurt child. He drew up
the blanket to cover his face. Paul, interpreting this as a signal for
more nourishment, brought the sad decoction,--rinds of dried beef cooked
with rice in snow water.

“Guess that'll do, thank ye. My tongue feels like an old buckskin
glove.”

“When I was a little fellow,” said the nurse, beguiling the patient
while he tucked the spoonfuls down, “I was like you: I wouldn't take
what the doctor ordered, and they used to pretend I must take it for
the others of the family,--a kind of vicarious milk diet, or gruel, or
whatever it was. 'Here's a spoonful for mother, poor mother,' they would
say; and of course it couldn't be refused when mother needed it so much.
'And now one for Chrissy'”--

“Who?”

“My sister, Christine. And then I'd take one for 'uncle' and one for
each of the servants; and the cupful would go down to the health of the
household, and I the dupe of my sympathies! Now you are taking this for
me, because it's nicer to be shut up here with a live man than a dead
one; and we haven't the conveniences for a first-class funeral.”

“You never took a spoonful for 'father,'--eh?”

Paul answered the question with gravity. “No. We never used that name in
common.”

“Dead was he?”

“I will tell you some time. Better try to sleep now.”

Paul returned the saucepan to the fire, after piecing out its contents
with water, and retired out of his patient's sight.

Again came a murmur, chiefly unintelligible, from the bunk.

“Did you ask for anything?”

The sick man heaved a worried sigh. “See what a mis'rable presumptuous
piece of work!” he muttered, addressing the logs overhead. “But that
Clauson--he wa'n't no more fit to guide ye than to go to heaven!
Couldn't 'a' done much worse than this, though!”

“He has done worse!” Paul came over to the bunk-side to reason on this
matter. “They started back from here, four strong men with all the
animals and all the food they needed for a six weeks' trip. We came in
in one. If they got through at all, where is the help they were to send
us?”

“Help!” The packer roused. “They helped themselves, and pretty frequent.
I said to them more than once--they didn't like it any too well: 'We
can't drink up here like they do down to the coast. The air is too
light. What a man would take with his dinner down there would fit him
out with a first-class jag up here, 'leven thousand above the sea!'”

“It's a waste of breath to talk about them--breath burns up food and we
haven't much to spare. We rushed into this trouble and we dragged you in
after us. We have hurt you a good deal more than you have us.”

The sick man groaned. He flung one hand back against the logs,
dislodging ancient dust that fell upon his corpse-like forehead. It was
carefully wiped away. Helpless tears stole down the rigid face.

“John,” said Paul with animation, “your general appearance just now
reminds me of those worked-out placer claims we passed in Ruby Gulch,
the first day out. The fever and my cooking have ground-sluiced you to
the bone.”

John smiled faintly. “Don't look very fat yourself. Where'd you git all
that baird on your face?”

“We have been here some time, you know--or you don't know; you have been
living in places far away from here. I used to envy you sometimes. And
other times I didn't.”

“You mean I was off my head?”

“At times. But more of the time you were dreaming and talking in your
dreams; seeing things out loud by the flash-light of fever.”

“Talking, was I? Guess there wa'n't much sense in any of it?” The hazard
was a question.

“A kind of sense,--out of focus, distorted. Some of it was opium. Didn't
you coax a little of his favorite medicine out of the cook?”

Packer John apologized sheepishly, “I cal'lated I was going to be left.
You put it up on me--making out you were off with the rest. _That_ was
all right. But I wa'n't going to suffer it out; why should I? A gunshot
would have cured me quicker, perhaps. Then some critter might 'a' found
me and called it murder. A word like that set going can hang a man. No,
I just took a little to deaden the pain.”

“The whole discussion was rather nasty, right before the man we were
talking about,” said Paul. “I wanted to get them off and out of hearing.
Then we had a few words.”

At intervals during that day and the next, Paul's patient expended his
strength in questions, apparently trivial. His eyes, whenever they were
open, followed his nurse with a shrinking intelligence. Paul was on his
guard.

“What day of the month do you make it out to be?”

“The second of December.”

“December!” The packer lay still considering. “Game all gone down?”

“I am not much of a pot-hunter,” said Paul. “There may be game, but I
can't seem to get it. The snow is pretty deep.”

“Wouldn't bear a man on snowshoes?”

“He would go out of sight.”

“Snowing a little every day?”

“Right along, quietly, for I don't know how many days! I think the sky
is packed with it a mile deep.”

“How much grub have we got?”

Paul gave a flattering estimate of their resources. The patient was not
deceived.

“Where's it all gone to? You ain't eat anything.”

“I've eaten a good deal more than you have.”

“I was livin' on fever.”

“You can't live on fever any longer. The fever has left you, and you'll
go with it if you don't obey your doctor.”

“But where's all the stuff _gone_ to?”

“There were four of them, and they allowed for some delay in getting
out,” Paul explained, with a sickly smile.

“Well, they was hogs! I knew how they'd pan out! That was why”--He
wearied of speech and left the point unfinished.

On the evening following, when the two could no longer see each other's
faces in the dusk, Paul spoke, controlling his voice:--

“I need not ask you, John, what you think of our chances?”

“I guess they ain't much worth thinking about.” The fire hissed and
crackled; the soft subsidence of the snow could be heard outside.

“We are 'free among the dead,' how does it go? 'Like unto them that are
wounded and lie in the grave.' What we say to each other here will stop
here with our breath. Let us put our memories in order for the last
reckoning. I think, John, you must, at some time in your life, have
known my father, Adam Bogardus? He was lost on the Snake River plains,
twenty-one years ago this autumn.”

Receiving no answer, the pale young inquisitor went on, choosing his
words with intense deliberation as one feeling his way in the dark.

“Most of us believe in some form of communication that we can't explain,
between those who are separated in body, in this world, but closely
united in thought. Do I make myself clear?”

There was a sound of deep breathing from the bunk; it produced a similar
conscious excitement in the speaker. He halted, recovered himself, and
continued:--

“After my father's disappearance, my mother had a distinct
presentiment--it haunted her for years--that something had happened to
him at a place called One Man Station. Did you ever know the place?”

“I might have.” The words came huskily.

“Father had left her at this place, and to her knowledge he never came
back. But she had this intimation--and suffered from it--that he did
come back and was foully dealt with there--wronged in body or mind. The
place had most evil associations for her; it was not strange she should
have connected it with the great disaster of her life. As you lay
talking to yourself in your fever, you took me back on that lost
trail that ended, as we thought, in the grave. But we might have been
mistaken. Is there anything it would not be safe for you and me to speak
of now? Do you know any tie between men that should be closer than the
tie between us? Any safer place where a man could lay off the secret
burdens of his life and be himself for a little while--before the end
answers all? I know you have a secret. I believe that a share of it
belongs to me.”

“We are better off sometimes if we don't get all that belongs to us,”
 said John gratingly.

“It doesn't seem to be a matter of choice, does it? If you were not
meant to tell me--what you have partly told me already--where is there
any meaning in our being here at all? Let us have some excuse for this
senseless accident. Do you believe much in accidents? How foolish”--Paul
sighed--“for you and me to be afraid of each other! Two men who have
parted with everything but the privilege of speaking the truth!”

The packer raised himself in his bunk slowly, like one in pain. He
looked long at the listless figure crouching by the fire; then he sank
back again with a low groan. “What was it you heared me say? Come!”

“I can't give you the exact words. The words were nothing. Haven't you
watched the sparks blow up, at night, when the wind goes searching over
the ashes of an old camp-fire? It was the fever made you talk, and
your words were the sparks that showed where there had been fire once.
Perhaps I had no right to track you by your own words when you lay
helpless, but I couldn't always leave you. Now I'd like to have my share
of that--whatever it was--that hurt you so, at One Man Station.”

“You ought to been a lawyer,” said the packer, releasing his breath.
There was less strain in his voice. It broke with feeling. “You put up a
mighty strong case for your way of looking at it. I don't say it's best.
There, if you will have it! Sonny--my son! It--it's like startin' a
snow-slide.”

The sick man broke down and sobbed childishly.

“Take it quietly! Oh, take it quietly!” Paul shivered. “I have known it
a long time.”

Hours later they were still awake, the packer in his bunk, Paul in his
blankets by the winking brands. The pines were moving, and in pauses of
the wind they could hear the incessant soft crowding of the snow.

“When they find us here in the spring,” said the packer humbly, “it
won't matter much which on us was 'Mister' and which was 'John.'”

“Are you thinking of that!” Paul answered with nervous irritation. “I
thought you had lived in the woods long enough to have got rid of all
that nonsense!”

“I guess there was some of it where you've been living.”

“We are done with all that now. Go to sleep,--Father.” He pronounced
the word conscientiously to punish himself for dreading it. The darkness
seemed to ring with it and give it back to him ironically. “Father!”
 muttered the pines outside, and the snow, listening, let fall the
word in elfin whispers. Paul turned over desperately in his blankets.
“Father!” he repeated out loud. “Do _you_ believe it? Does it do you any
good?”

“I wouldn't distress myself, one way or t' other, if it don't come
natural,” the packer spoke, out of his corner in the darkness. “Wait
till you can feel to say it. The word ain't nothing.”

“But do you feel it? Is it any comfort to you at all?”

“I ain't in any hurry to feel it. We'll get there. Don't worry. And
s'pose we don't! We're men. Man to man is good enough for me.”

Paul spent some wakeful hours after that, trying not to think of Moya,
of his mother and Christine. They were of another world,--a world that
dies hard at twenty-four. Towards morning he slept, but not without
dreams.

He was in the pent-road at Stone Ridge. It was sunset and long shadows
striped the lane. A man stood, back towards him, leaning both arms on
the stone fence that bounds the lane to the eastward,--a plain farmer
figure, gazing down across the misty fields as he might have stood a
hundred times in that place at that hour. Paul could not see his face,
but something told him who it must be. His heart stood still, for he saw
his mother coming up the lane. She carried something in her hand covered
with a napkin, and she smiled, walking carefully as if carrying a treat
to a sick child. She passed the man at the fence, not appearing to have
seen him.

“Won't you speak to him, mother? Won't you speak to”--He could not utter
the name. She looked at him bewildered. “Speak? who shall I speak to?”
 The man at the fence had turned and he watched her, or so Paul imagined.
He felt himself choking, faint, with the effort to speak that one word.
Too late! The moment passed. The man whom he knew was his father, the
solemn, quiet figure, moved away up the road unquestioned. He never
looked back. Paul grew dizzy with the lines of shadow; they stretched on
and on, they became the ties of a railroad--interminable. He awoke,
very faint and tired, with a lost feeling and the sense upon him of some
great catastrophe. The old man was sleeping deeply in his bunk, a ray
of white sunlight falling on his yellow features. He looked like one who
would never wake again. But as Paul gazed at him he smiled, and sighed
heavily. His lips formed a name; and all the blood in Paul's body dyed
his face crimson. The name was his mother's.




XII


THE BLOOD-WITE

A few hours seemed days, after the great disclosure. Both men had
recoiled from it and were feeling the strain of the new relation. Three
times since their first meeting the elder had adjusted himself quietly
to a change in the younger's manner to him. First there had been
respectful curiosity in the presence of a new type, combined with the
deference due a leader and an expert in strange fields. Then indignant
partisanship, pity, and the slight condescension of the nurse. This had
hurt the packer, but he took it as he accepted his physical downfall.
The last change was hardest to bear; for now the time was short, and, as
Paul himself had said, they were in the presence of the final unveiling.

So when Paul made artificial remarks to break the pauses, avoiding his
father's eye and giving him neither name nor title, the latter became
silent and lay staring at the logs and picking at his hands.

“If I was hunting up a father,” he said to himself aloud one day, “I'd
try to find a better lookin' one. I wouldn't pa'm off on myself no such
old warped stick as I be.” The remark seemed a tentative one.

“I had the choice, to take or leave you,” Paul responded. “You were an
unconscious witness. Why should I have opened the subject at all?”

Both knew that this answer was an evasion. By forcing the tie they had
merely marked the want of ease and confidence between them. As “Packer
John” Paul could have enjoyed, nay, loved this man; as his father, the
sum and finality of his filial dreams, the supplanter of that imaginary
husband of his mother's youth, the thing was impossible. And the father
knew it and did not resent it in the least, only pitied the boy for
his needless struggle. He was curious about him, too. He wanted to
understand him and the life he had come out of: his roundabout way of
reaching the simplest conclusions; his courage in argument, and his
personal shying away from the truth when found. More than all he longed
for a little plain talk, the exile's hunger for news from home. It
pleased him when Paul, rousing at this deliberate challenge, spoke up
with animation, as if he had come to some conclusion in his own mind. It
could not be expected he would express it simply. The packer had become
used to his oddly elaborate way of putting things.

“If we had food enough and time, we might afford to waste them
discussing each other's personal appearance. _I_ propose we talk to some
purpose.”

“Talking sure burns up the food.” The packer waited.

“I wish I knew what my father was doing with himself, all those years
when his family were giving him the honors of the dead.”

“I warned ye about this pumping out old shafts. You can't tell what
you'll find in the bottom. I suppose you know there are things in this
world, Boy, a good deal worse than death?”

“Desertion is worse. It is not my father's death I want explained, it
is his life, your life, in secret, these twenty years! Can you explain
that?”

The packer doubled his bony fist and brought it down on the bunk-side.
“Now you talk like a man! I been waiting to hear you say that. Yes, I
can answer that question, if you ain't afeard of the answer!”

“I am keeping alive to hear it!” said Paul in a guarded voice.

“You might say you're keeping me alive to tell it. It's a good thing to
git off of one's mind; but it's a poor thing to hand over to a son. All
I've got to leave ye, though: the truth if you can stand it! Where do
you want I should begin?”

“At the night when you came back to One Man Station.”

“How'd you know I come back?”

“You were back there in your fever, living over something that happened
in that place. There was a wind blowing and the door wouldn't shut. And
something had to be lifted,”--the old man's eyes, fixed upon his son,
took a look of awful comprehensions,--“something heavy.”

“Yes; great Lord, it was heavy! And I been carrying it ever since!” His
chest rose as if the weight of that load lay on it still, and his breath
expired with a hoarse “haugh.” “I got out of the way because it was _my_
load. I didn't want no help from them.” He paused and sat picking at his
hands. “It's a dreadful ugly story. I'd most as soon live it over again
as have to tell it in cold blood. I feel sometimes it _can't be!_”

“You need not go back beyond that night. I know how my mother was left,
and what sort of a man you were forced to leave her with. Was it--the
keeper?”

“That's what it was. That was the hard knot in my thread. Nothing
wouldn't go past that. Some, when they git things in a tangle, they just
reach for the shears an' cut the thread. I wa'n't brought up that way.
I was taught to leave the shears alone. So I went on stringin' one year
after another. But they wouldn't join on to them that went before. There
was the knot.”

“It was between you and him--and the law?” said Paul.

“You've got it! I was there alone with it,--witness an' judge an' jury;
I worked up my own case. Manslaughter with extenuatin' circumstances,
I made it--though he was more beast than man. I give myself the outside
penalty,--imprisonment for life. And I been working out my sentence
ever since. The Western country wa'n't home to me then--more like a big
prison. It's been my prison these twenty-odd years, while your mother
was enjoying what belonged to her, and making a splendid job of your
education. If I had let things alone I might have finished my time out:
but I didn't, and now the rest of it's commuted--for the life of my
son!”

“Don't put it that way! I am no lamb of sacrifice. Why, how can we let
things alone in this world! Should I have stood off from this secret and
never asked my father for his defense?”

“Do you mean to say a boy like you can take hold of this thing and
understand it?”

“I can,” said Paul. “I could almost tell the story myself.”

“Put it up then!” said the packer. The fascination of confession was
strong upon him.

“You had been out in the mountains--how long?”

“Two days and three nights, just as I left camp.”

“You were crazed with anxiety for us. You came back to find your camp
empty, the wife and baby gone. You had reason to distrust the keeper.
Not for what he did--for what you knew he meant to do.”

“For what he meant and tried to do. I seen it in his eye. The devil that
wanted him incited him to play with me and tell me lies about my wife.
She scorned the brute and he took his mean revenge. He kep' back her
letter, and he says to me, leerin' at me out of his wicked eyes, 'Your
livestock seems to be the strayin' kind. The man she went off with
give me that,'--he lugged a gold piece out of his clothes and showed
me,--'give me that,' he says, 'to keep it quiet.' He kep' it quiet! Half
starved and sick's I was, the strength was in me. But vengeance in the
hand of a man, it cuts both ways, my son! His bunk had a sharp edge
to it like this. He fell acrost it with my weight on top of him and he
never raised up again. There wasn't a mark on him. His back was broke.
He died slow, his eyes mocking me.

“'You fool,' he says. 'Go look in that coat hangin' on the wall.' I
found her letter there inside of one from Granger. He watched me read it
and he laughed. 'Now, go tell her you've killed a man!' He knew I didn't
come of a killin' breed. There was four hours to think it over. Four
hours! I thought hard, I tell you! 'T was six of one and half a dozen of
t' other 'twixt him and me, but I worked it back 'n' forth a good long
while about her. First, taking her away from her father, an old man
whose bread I'd eat. She was like a child of my own raising. I always
had felt mean about that. We'd had bad luck from the start,--my
luck,--and now disgrace to cap it all. Whether I hid it or told her and
stood my trial, I'd never be a free man again. There he lay! And a sin
done in secret, it's like a drop of nitric acid: it's going to eat its
way out--and in!

“I knew she'd have friends enough, once she was quit of me. That was the
case between us. The thing that hurt me most was to put her letter
back where I found it, and leave it, there with him. Her little cry to
me--and I couldn't come! I read the words over and over, I've said 'em
to myself ever since. I've lived on them. But I had to leave the letter
there to show I'd never come back. I put it back after he was dead.

“The sins of the parents shall be visited,--when it's in the blood! But
I declare to the Almighty, murder wa'n't in my blood! It come on me like
a stroke of lightning hits a tree, and I had a clear show to fall alone.

“That's the answer. Maybe I didn't see all sides of it, but there never
was no opening to do different, after that night. Now, you've had an
education. I should be glad to hear your way of looking at it?”

“I should think you might stand your trial, now, before any judge or
jury, in this world or the next,” Paul answered.

“There is only one Judge.” The packer smiled a beautiful quiet smile
that covered a world of meanings. “What a man re'ly wants, if he'd own
up it, is a leetle shade of partiality. Maybe that's what we're all
going to need, before we git through.”

Paul was glad to be saved the necessity of speech, and he felt the swift
discernment with which the packer resumed his usual manner. “Got any
more of that stuff you call soup? Divide even! I won't be made no baby
of.”

“We might as well finish it up. It's hardly worth making two bites of a
cherry.”

“Call this 'cherry'! It's been a good while on the bough. What's it
mostly made of?”

“Rind of bacon, snow water,--plenty of water,--and a tablespoonful of
rice.”

“Good work! Hungry folks can live on what the full bellies throw away.”

“Oh, I can save. But there comes a time when you can't live by saving
what you haven't got.”

“That's right! Well, let's talk, then, before the bacon-rind fades out
of us.”

The packer's face and voice, his whole manner, showed the joy of a soul
that has found relief. Paul was not trying now to behave dutifully; they
were man to man once more. The quaint, subdued humor asserted itself,
and the narrator's speech flowed on in the homely dialect which
expressed the man.

“I stayed out all that winter, workin' towards the coast. One day, along
in March, I fetched a charcoal burner's camp, and the critter took me in
and nursed my frost-bites and didn't ask no questions, nor I of him. We
struck up a trade, my drivin' stock, mostly skin and bone, for a show in
his business. He wa'n't gettin' rich at it, that was as plain as the hip
bones on my mules. I kep' in the woods, cuttin' timber and tendin' kiln,
and he hauled and did the sellin'. Next year he went below to Portland
and brought home smallpox with him. It broke out on him on the road. He
was a terrible sick man. I buried him, and waited for my turn. It didn't
come. I seemed kind o' insured. I've been in lots of trouble since then,
but nothing ever touched me till now. I banked on it too strong, though.
I sure did! My pardner was just such another lone bird like me. If
he had any folks of his own he kep' still about them. So I took his
name--whether it was his name there's no knowing. Guess I've took full
as good care of it as he would. 'Hagar?' folk would say, sort o' lookin'
me over. 'You ain't Jim Hagar.' No, but I was John, and they let it go
at that.

“I heard of your mother that summer, from a prospector who came up past
my camp. He'd wintered in Mountain Home. He told me my own story, the
way they had it down there, and what straits your mother was in. I had
scraped up quite a few dollars by then, and was thinking how I'd shove
it into a bank like an old debt coming to Adam Bogardus. I was studying
how I was going to rig it. There wasn't any one who knew me down there,
so I felt safe to ventur' a few inquiries. What I heard was that she'd
gone home to her folks and was as well off as anybody need be. That
broke me all up at first. I must have had a sneakin' notion that maybe
some day I could see my way to go back to her, but that let me out
completely. I quit then, and I've stayed quit. The only break I made was
showin' up here at the 'leventh hour, thinking I could be some use to my
son!”

“It was to be,” said Paul. “For years our lives have been shaping
towards this meeting. There were a thousand chances against it. Yet here
we are!”

“Here we are!” the packer repeated soberly. “But don't think that I lay
any of my foolishness on the Almighty! Maybe it was meant my son should
close my eyes, but it's too dear at the price. Anybody would say so, I
don't care who.”

“But aside from the 'price,' is it something to you?”

“More--more than I've got words to say. And yet it grinds me, every
breath I take! Not that I wish you'd done different--you couldn't and be
a man. I knew it even when I was kickin' against it. Oh, well! It ain't
no use to kick. I thought I'd learned something, but I ain't--learned--a
thing!”




XIII


CURTAIN

A greater freedom followed this confession, as was natural. It became
the basis for lighter confidences and bits of autobiography that came to
the surface easily after this tremendous effort at sincerity. Paul found
that he could speak even of the family past, into which by degrees he
began to fit the real man in place of that bucolic abstraction which
had walked the fields of fancy. He had never dared to actuate the “hired
man,” his father, on a basis of fact. He knew the speech and manners of
the class from which he came,--knew men of that class, and talked with
them every summer at Stone Ridge; but he had brooded so deeply over the
tragic and sentimental side of his father's fate as to have lost sight
of the fact that he was a man.

Reality has its own convincing charm, not inconsistent with plainness or
even with commonness. To know it is to lose one's taste for toys of
the imagination. Paul, at last, could look back almost with, a sense of
humor at the doll-like progenitor he had played with so long. But when
it came to placing the real man, Adam Bogardus, beside that real woman,
once his wife, their son could but own with awe that there is mercy in
extinction, after all; in the chance, however it may come to us, for
slipping off those cruel disguises that life weaves around us.

In the strange, wakeful nights, full of starvation dreams, he saw his
mother as she would look on state occasions in the hostess's place at
her luxurious table; the odor of flowers, the smell of meats and wines,
tantalized and sickened him. Christine would come in her dancing frocks,
always laughing, greedy in her mirth; but Moya, face to face, he could
never see. It was torture to feel her near him, a disembodied embrace.
Passionate panegyrics and hopeless adjurations he would pour out to
that hovering loveliness just beyond his reach. The agony of
frustration would waken him, if indeed it were sleep that dissolved his
consciousness, and he would be irritable if spoken to.

The packer broke in, one morning, on these unnerving dreams. “You
wouldn't happen to have a picture of her along with you?”

Paul stared at him.

“No, of course you wouldn't! And I'd be 'most afeard to look at it, if
you had. She must have changed considerable. Time hasn't stood still
with her any more than the rest of us.”

“I have no picture of my mother,” Paul replied.

The packer saw that his question had jarred; he had waited weeks to ask
it. He passed it off now with one of his homely similes. “If you was to
break a cup clean in two, and put the halves together again while the
break was fresh, they'd knit so you wouldn't hardly see a crack. But you
take one half and set it in the chainy closet and chuck the other half
out on the ash-heap,--them halves won't look much like pieces of the
same cup, come a year or two. The edges won't jine no more than the lips
of an old cut that's healed without stitches. No; married folks they
grow together or they grow apart, and they're a-doing of the one or the
other every minute of the time, breaks or no breaks. Does she go up to
the old place summers?”

“Not lately, except on business,” said Paul. “A company was formed to
open slate quarries on the upper farm, a good many years ago. They are
worth more than all the land forty times over.”

“I always said so; always told the old man he had a gold mine in that
ridge. Was this before he died?”

“Long after. It was my mother's scheme mainly. She controls it now. She
is a very strong business woman.”

“She got her training, likely, from that uncle in New York. He had the
business head. The old man had no more contrivance than one of the bulls
in his pastures. He could lock horns and stay there, but it wa'nt no
trouble to outflank him. More than once his brother Jacob got to the
windward of him in a bargain. He was made a good deal like his own land.
Winters of frost it took to break up that ground, and sun and rain to
meller it, and then't was a hatful of soil to a cartful of stone. The
plough would jump the furrows if you drew it deep. My arms used to ache
as if they'd been pounded, with the jar of them stones. They used to
tell us children a story how Satan, he flew over the earth a-sowing
it with rocks and stones, and as he was passing over our county a hole
bu'st through his leather apron and he lost his whole load right slam
there. I could 'a' p'inted out the very spot where the heft on it fell.
Ten Stone meadow, so-called. Ten million stone! I was pickin' stone in
that field all of one summer when I was fifteen year old. We built a
mile of fence with it.

“Them quarries must have brought a mint of money into the country.
Different sort of labor, too. Well, the world grows richer and poorer
every year. More difference every year between the way rich folks and
poor folks live. I wouldn't know where I belonged, 't ain't likely, if
I was to go back there. I'd be way off! One while I used to think a
good deal about going back, just to take a look around. It comes over
me lately like hunger and thirst. I think about the most curious things
when I'm asleep--foolish, like a child! I can smell all the good home
smells of a frosty morning: apple pomace, steaming in the barnyard;
sausage frying; Becky scouring the brass furnace-kittle with salt and
vinegar. Killin' time, you know--makes you think of boiling souse and
head-cheese. You ever eat souse?” The packer sucked in his breath with a
lean smile. “It ain't best to dwell on it. But you can't help yourself,
at night. I can smell Becky's fresh bread, in my dreams, just out of the
brick oven. Never eat bread cooked in a stove till I came out here. I
never drunk any water like that spring on the ridge. Last night I was
back there, and the maples were all yellow like sunshine. Once it
was spring, and apple-blooms up in the hill orchard. And little Emmy,
a-setting on the fence, with her bunnit throwed back on her neck.
'Addy!' she called, way across the lot; 'Addy, come, help me down!' She
was a master hand for venturin' up on places, but she didn't like the
gettin' down.

“Well, she 'a learned the ups and downs by this time. She don't need
Addy to help her. I'd have helped a big sight more if I had kep' my
distance. It's a thing so con-demned foolish and unnecessary--I can't be
reconciled to it noway!”

“You see only one side of it,” said Paul. Unspeakable thoughts had kept
pace with his father's words. “Nothing that happens, happens through
us--or to us--alone. There was a girl I knew, outside. She was as happy,
when I knew her first, as you say my mother used to be. Then she met
some one--a man--and the shadow of his life crossed hers. He would have
wrapped her up in it and put out her sunshine if he had stayed in the
same world. Now she can be herself again, after a while. It cannot take
long to forget a person you have known only a little over a year.”

The packer rose on one elbow. He reached across and shook his son.

“Where is that girl? Answer me! Take your face out of your hands!”

“At Bisuka Barracks. She is the commandant's daughter. I came out to
marry her.”

“What possessed ye not to tell me?”

“Why should I tell you? We buried the wedding-day months back, in the
snow.”

“Boy, boy!” the packer groaned.

“What difference can it make now?”

“_All_ the difference--all the difference there is! I thought you were
out here touring it with them fool boys and they were all the chance
you had for help outside. You suppose her father is going to see her git
left? _They_'ll get in here, if they have to crawl on their bellies or
climb through the tree-limbs. They know how! And we've wasted the grub
and talked like a couple of women!”

“Oh, don't--don't torment me!” Paul groaned. “It was all over. Can't you
leave the dead in peace!”

“We are not the dead! I 'most wish we were. Boy, I've got a big word to
say to you about that. Come closer!” The packer's speech hoarsened and
failed. They could only hear each other breathe. Then it seemed to the
packer that his was the only breath in the darkness. He listened. A
faint cheer arose in the forest and a crashing of the dead underlimbs of
the pines.

He turned frantically upon his son, but no pledge could be extorted now.
Paul's lips were closed. He had lost consciousness.




XIV


KIND INQUIRIES

The colonel's drawing-room was as hot as usual the first hour after
dinner, and as usual it was full of kindly participant neighbors who had
dropped in to repeat their congratulations on the good news, now almost
a week old. Mrs. Bogardus had not come down, and, though asked after by
all, the talk was noticeably freer for her absence.

Mrs. Creve, in response to a telegram from her brother, had arrived from
Fort Sherman on the day before, prepared for anything, from frozen feet
to a wedding. She had spent the afternoon in town doing errands for
Moya, and being late for dinner had not changed her dress. There never
was such a “natural” person as aunt Annie. At present she was addressing
the company at large, as if they were all her promising children.

“Nobody talks about their star in these days. I used to have a star. I
forget which it was. I know it was a pretty lucky one. Now I trust in
Providence and the major and wear thick shoes.” She exhibited the shoes,
a particularly large and sensible kind which she imported from the East.
Everybody laughed and longed to embrace her. “Has Moya got a star?” she
asked seriously.

“The whole galaxy!” a male voice replied. “Doesn't the luck prove it?”

“Moya has got a 'temperament,'” said Doctor Fleming, the Post surgeon.
“That's as good as having a star. You know there are persons who attract
misfortune just as sickly children catch all the diseases that are
going. I knew that boy was sure to be found. Anything of Moya's would
be.”

“So you think it was Moya's 'temperament' that pulled him out of the
snow?” said the colonel, wheeling his chair into the discussion.

“How about Mr. Winslow's temperament? I prefer to leave a little of the
credit to him,” said Moya sweetly.

A young officer, who had been suffering in the corner by the fire,
jumped to his feet and bowed, then blushed and sat down again,
regretting his rashness. Moya continued to look at him with steadfast
friendliness. Winslow had led the rescue that brought her lover home.
A glow of sympathy united these friends and neighbors; the air was
electrical and full of emotion.

“I suppose no date has been fixed for the wedding?” Mrs. Dawson, on the
divan, murmured to Mrs. Creve. The latter smiled a non-committal assent.

“I should think they would just put the doctor aside and be married
anyhow. My husband says he ought to go to a warmer climate at once.”

“My dear, a young man can't be married in his dressing-gown and
slippers!”

“No! It's not as bad as that?”

“Well, not quite. He's up and dressed and walks about, but he doesn't
come down to his meals,--he can eat so very little at a time, and
it tires him to sit through a dinner. It isn't one of those ravenous
recoveries. It went too far with him for that.”

“His mother was perfectly magnificent through it all, they say.”

“Have you seen much of Mrs. Bogardus?”

“No; we left them alone, poor things, when the pinch came. But I used to
see her walking the porch, up and down, up and down. Moya would go off
on the hills. They couldn't walk together! That was after Miss Chrissy
went home. Her mother took her back, you know, and then returned alone.
Perfectly heroic! They say she dressed every evening for dinner as
carefully as if she were in New York, and led the conversation. She used
to make Moya read aloud to her--history, novels--anything to pretend
they were not thinking. The strain must have begun before any of us
knew. The colonel kept it so quiet. What is the dear man doing with your
bonnet?”

The colonel had plucked his sister's walking-hat, a pert piece of
millinery froward in feathers, from the trunk of the headless Victory,
where she had reposed it in her haste before dinner.

“Mustn't be disrespectful to the household Lar,” he kindly reminded her.

“Where am I to put my hats, then? I shall wear them on my head and come
down to breakfast in them. Moya, dear, will you please rescue my hat?
Put it anywhere, dear,--under your chair. There is not really a place
in this house to put a thing. A wedding that goes off on time is bad
enough, but one that hangs on from month to month--and doesn't even take
care of its clothes! Forgive me, dear! The clothes are very pretty.
I open a bureau-drawer to put away my middle-aged bonnet--a puff of
violets! A pile of something white, and, behold, a wedding veil! There
isn't a hook in the closet that doesn't say, 'Standing-room only,' and
the standing-room is all stood on by a regiment of new shoes.”

“My dear woman, go light on our sore spots. We are only just out of the
woods.”

“Isn't it bad to coddle your sore spots, Doctor? Like a saddle-gall,
ride them down!” Mrs. Creve and Dr. Fleming exchanged a friendly smile
on the strength of this nonsense. On the doctor's side it covered a
suspicion: “'The lady, methinks, protests too much'!” The colonel, too,
was restless, and Moya's sweet color came and went. She appeared to be
listening for steps or sounds from some other part of the house.

The men all rose now as Mrs. Bogardus entered; one or two of the ladies
rose also, compelled by something in her look certainly not intended.
She was careful to greet everybody; she even crossed the room and gave
her hand to Lieutenant Winslow, whom she had not seen since the night of
his return. The doctor she casually passed over with a bow; they had met
before that day. It was in the mind of each person present not of the
family, and excepting the doctor, to ask her: 'How is your son this
evening?' But for some reason the inquiry did not come off.

The company began suddenly to feel itself _de trop_. Mrs. Dawson, who
had come under the doctor's escort, glanced at him, awaiting the moment
when it would do to make the first move.

“I hear you lost a patient from the hospital yesterday?” said Lieutenant
Winslow, at the doctor's side.

“_From_, did you say? That's right! He was to have been operated on
to-day.” The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

“What!”

“Two broken ribs. One grown fast to the lung.”

“Wh-ew!”

“He just walked out. Said I had ordered him to have fresh air. There was
a new hall-boy, a greenhorn.”

“He can't go far in that shape, can he?”

“Oh, there's no telling. The constitution of those men is beyond
anything. You can't kill him. He'll suffer of course, suffer like an
animal, and die like one--away from the herd. Maybe not this time,
though.”

“Was he afraid of the operation?”

“I can't say. He did not seem to be either afraid or anxious for help.
Not used to being helped. He would be taken to the Sisters' Hospital.
Wouldn't come up here as the guest of the Post, not a bit! I believe
from the first he meant to give us the slip, and take his chance in his
own way.”

“Did you hear,”--Mrs. Creve spoke up from the opposite side of the room
under that hypnotic influence by which a dangerous topic spreads,--“did
you hear about the poor guide who ran away from the hospital to escape
from our wicked doctor here? What a reputation you must have, Doctor!”

“All talk, my dear; town gossip,” said the colonel. “You gave him his
discharge, didn't you, Doctor?” The colonel looked hard at the medical
officer; he had prepared the way for a statement suited to a mixed
company, including ladies. But Doctor Fleming stated things usually to
suit himself.

“There was a man who left the Sisters' Hospital rather informally
yesterday. I won't say he is not just as well off to-day as if he had
stayed.”

“Who was it? Was it our man, father?”

“The doctor has more than one patient at the hospital.” Colonel
Middleton looked reproachfully at the doctor, who continued to put aside
as childish these clumsy subterfuges. “I think you ladies frightened him
away with your attentions. He knew he was under heavy liabilities for
all your flowers and fancy cookery.”

“Attentions! Are we going to let him die on the road somewhere?” cried
Moya.

“Miss Moya?” Lieutenant Winslow spoke up with a mixture of embarrassment
and resolution to be heard, though every voice in the room conspired
against him. “Those men are a big fraternity. They have their outfitting
places where they put in for repairs. Packer John had his blankets sent
to the Green Meadow corral. They know him there. They say he had money
at one of the stores. They all have a little money cached here and
there. And they _can't_ get lost, you know!”

Moya's eyes shone with a suspicious brightness.

    “'When the forest shall mislead me;
    When the night and morning lie.'”

She turned her swimming eyes upon Paul's mother, who would be sure to
remember the quotation.

Mrs. Bogardus remained perfectly still, her lips slightly parted. She
grew very pale. Then she rose and walked quickly to the door.

“Just a breath of cold air!” she panted. The doctor, Moya, and Mrs.
Creve had followed her into the hall. Moya placed herself on the settle
beside her and leaned to support her, but she sat back rigidly with her
eyes closed. Mrs. Creve looked on in quiet concern. “Let me take you
into the study, Mrs. Bogardus!” the doctor commanded. “A glass of water,
Moya, please.”

“How is she? What is it? Can we do anything?” The company crowded
around Mrs. Creve on her return to the drawing-room. She glanced at
her brother. There was no clue there. He stood looking embarrassed and
mystified. “It is only the warm welcome we give our friends,” she said
aloud, smiling calmly. “Mrs. Bogardus found the room too hot. I think I
should have succumbed myself but for that little recess in the hall.”

The colonel attacked his fire. He thought he was being played with.
Things were not right in the house, and no one, not the doctor, or even
Annie, was frank with him. His kind face flushed as he straightened up
to bid his guests good-night.

“Well, if it's not anything serious, you think. But you'll be sure
to let us know?” said Mrs. Dawson. “Well, good-night, Mrs. Creve.
_Good_-night, Colonel! You'll say good-night to Moya? Do let us know if
there is anything we can do.”

Dr. Fleming was in the hall looking for his cape. The colonel touched
him on the shoulder. “Don't be in a hurry, Doctor. Mrs. Dawson will
excuse you.”

“I don't think you need me any more to-night. Moya is with Mrs.
Bogardus. She is not ill. The room was a little close.”

“Never mind the _room_! Come in here. I want a word with you.”

The doctor laughed oddly, and obeyed.

“Annie, you needn't leave us.”

“Why, thank you, dear boy! It's awfully good of you,” Annie mocked him.
“But I must go and relieve Moya.”

“I don't believe you are wanted in there,” said Doctor Fleming.

“It's more than obvious that I'm not in here.”

“Oh, do sit down,” said the teased colonel.

The fire sulked and smoked a trifle with its brands apart. Doctor
Fleming leaned forward upon his knees and regarded it thoughtfully. The
colonel sat fondling the tongs. In a deep chair Mrs. Creve lay back and
shaded her face with the end of her lace scarf. By her manner she might
have been alone in the room, yet she was keenly observant of the men,
for she felt that developments were taking place.

“What is the matter with your patient upstairs, Doctor?” the colonel
began his cross-examination. Doctor Fleming raised his eyebrows.

“He's had nothing to eat to speak of for six weeks, at an altitude”--

“Yes; we know all that. But he's twenty-four years old. They made an
easy trip back, and he has been here a week, nearly. He's not as strong
as he was when they brought him in, is he?”

“That was excitement. You have to allow for the reaction. He has had
a shock to the entire system,--nerves, digestion,--must give him time.
Very nervous temperament too much controlled.”

“Make it as you like. But I'm disappointed in his rallying powers,
unless you are keeping something back. A boy with the grit to do what he
did, and stand it as he did--why isn't he standing it better now?”

“We are all suffering from reaction, I think,” said Mrs. Creve
diplomatically; “and we show it by making too much of little things.
Tom, we oughtn't to keep the doctor up here talking nonsense. He wants
to go to bed.”

“_I_'m not talking nonsense,” said the doctor. “I should be if I
pretended there was anything mysterious about that boy's case upstairs.
He has had a tremendous experience, say what you will; and it's pulled
him down nervously, and every other way. He isn't ready or able to
talk of it yet. And he knows as soon as he comes down there'll be forty
people waiting to congratulate him and ask him how it was. I don't
wonder he fights shy. If he could take his bride by the hand and walk
out of the house with her I believe he could start to-morrow; but if
there must be a wedding and a lot of fuss”--

Mrs. Creve nodded her head approvingly. The three had risen and stood
around the hearth, while the colonel put the brands delicately together
with the skill of an old campaigner. The flames breathed again.

“I don't offer this as a professional opinion,” said the doctor. “But a
case like his is not a disease, it's a condition”--

“Of the mind, perhaps?” the colonel added significantly. He glanced at
Mrs. Creve. “You've thought about that, Doctor? The letter his mother
consulted you about?”

“Have you been worrying about that, Colonel? Why didn't you say so?
There is nothing in it whatever. Why, it's so plain a case the other
way--any one can see where the animus comes from!”

“Now you _are_ getting mysterious, and I'm going to bed!” said Mrs.
Creve.

“No; we're coming to the point now,” said the colonel.

“What is it you want Bogardus to do?” asked Doctor Fleming. “Want him to
get up and walk out of the house as my patient did at the hospital? Dare
say he could do it, but what then? Will you let me speak out, Colonel?
No regard to anybody's feelings? Now, this may be gossip, but I think
it has a bearing on the case upstairs. I'm going to have it off my mind
anyhow! When Mrs. Bogardus came to see the guide,--Packer John,--day
before yesterday, was it?--he asked to see her alone. Said he had
something particular to say to her about her son. We thought it a queer
start, but she was willing to humor him. Well, she wasn't in there above
ten minutes, but in that time something passed between them that hit
her very hard, no doubt of that! Now, Bogardus holds his tongue like
a gentleman as to what happened in the woods. He doesn't mention
his comrades' names. And the packer has disappeared; so he can't be
questioned. Seems to me a little bird told me there was an attachment
between one of those Bowen boys and Miss Christine?

“Now we, who know what brutes brute fear will make of men, are not going
to deny that those boys behaved badly. There are some things that can't
be acknowledged among men, you know, if there is a hole to crawl out of.
Cowardice is one of them. Well then, they lied, that's the whole of
it. The little boys lied. They wrote Mrs. Bogardus a long letter from
Lemhi,”--the doctor was reviewing now for Mrs. Creve's benefit,--“when
they first got out. They probably judged, by the time they had had,
that Paul and the packer would never tell their own story. Very well: it
couldn't hurt Paul, it might be the saving of them, if they could show
that something had queered him in the woods. They asked his mother
if she had heard of the effects of altitude upon highly sensitive
organizations. They recounted some instances--I will mention them later.
One of the boys is a lawyer, isn't he? They are a pair of ingenious
youths. Bogardus, they claim, avoided them almost from the time they
entered the woods,--almost lived with the packer, behaved like a crank
about the shooting. Whereas they had gone there to kill things, he made
it a personal matter whenever they pursued this intention in a natural
and undisguised manner. He had pangs, like a girl, when the creatures
expired. He hated the carcases, the blood--forgive me, Mrs. Creve. In
short, he called the whole business butchery.”

“Do you make _that_ a sign of lunacy?” Mrs. Creve flung in.

“I am quoting, you know.” The doctor smiled indulgently. “They declare
that they offered--even begged--to stay behind with him, one of them, at
least, but he rejected their company in a manner so unpleasant that they
saw it would only be courting a quarrel to remain. And so, treating him
perforce like a child _or_ a lunatic _pro tem._, and having but little
time to decide in, they cut loose and hurried back for help. This is the
tale, composed on reflection. They said nothing of this to Winslow--to
save publicity, of course! Mrs. Bogardus's lips are doubly sealed, for
her son's sake and for the sake of the young scamp who is to be her
son, by and by! I saw she winced at my opinion, which I gave her
plainly--brutally, perhaps. And she asked me particularly to say
nothing, which I am particularly not doing.

“This, I think, you will find is the bitter drop in the cup of rejoicing
upstairs. And they are swallowing it in silence, those two, for the sake
of the little girl and the old friends in New York. Of course she has
kept from Paul that last shot in the back from those sweet boys! The
packer had some unruly testimony he was bursting with, which he had
sense enough to keep for her alone, and she doesn't want the case to
spread. It is singular how a man in his condition could get out of
the way as suddenly as he did. You might think he'd been taken up in a
cloud.”

“Doctor, what do you mean by such an insinuation as that?”

“Colonel, have I insinuated anything? Did I say she had oiled the wheels
of his departure?”

“Come, come! You go too far!”

“Not at all. That's your own construction. I merely say that I am not
concerned about that man's disappearance. I think he'll be looked after,
as a valuable witness should be.”

“Well,” the colonel grumbled uneasily, “I don't like mysteries myself,
and I don't like family quarrels nor skeletons at the feasts of old
friends. But I suppose there must be a drop in every cup. What were your
altitude cases, Doctor?”

“The same old ones; poor Addison, you know. All those stories they tell
an Easterner. As I pointed out to Mrs. Bogardus, in every case there was
some predisposing cause. Addison had been too long in the mountains, and
he was frightfully overworked; short of company officers. He came to me
about an insect he said had got into his ear; buzzed, and bothered him
day and night. The story got to the men's quarters. They joked about the
colonel's 'bug.' I knew it was no joke. I condemned him for duty, but
the Sioux were out. They thought at Washington no one but Addison could
handle an Indian campaign. He was on the ground, too. So they sent him
up higher where it was dry, with a thousand men in his hands. I knew
he'd be a madman or a dead man in a month! There were a good many of the
dead! By Jove! The boys who took his orders and loved the old fellow and
knew he was sending them to their death! Well for him that he'll never
know.”

“The 'altitude of heartbreak,'” sighed Mrs. Creve. The phrase was her
own, for many a reason deeply known unto herself, but she gave it the
effect of a quotation before the men.

“Then you think there is no 'altitude' in ours?”

“No; nor 'heartbreak' either,” said the doctor, helping himself to one
of the colonel's cigars. “But I don't say there isn't enough to keep a
woman awake nights, and to make those young men avoid the sight of each
other for a time. Thanks, I won't smoke now. I'm going to take a look at
Mrs. Bogardus as I go out.”




XV


A BRIDEGROOM OF SNOW

The doctor had taken his look, feeling a trifle guilty under his
patient's counter gaze, yet glad to have relieved the good colonel's
anxiety. If he loved to gossip, at least he was particular as to whom he
gossiped with.

Moya closed the door after him and silently resumed her seat. Mrs.
Bogardus helped herself to a sip of water. She was struggling with a
dry constriction of the throat, and Moya protested a little, seeing the
effort that it cost her to speak, even in the hoarse, unnatural tone
which was all the voice she had left.

“I want to finish now,” she said, “and never speak of this again. It was
I who accused them first--and then I asked him:--if there was anything
he could say in their defense, to say it, for Chrissy's sake! 'I will
never break bread with them again,' said he,--'either Banks or Horace.
I will not eat with them, or drink with them, or speak with them again!'
Think of it! How are we to live? How are they to inhabit the same
city? He thinks I have been weak. I am weak! The only power I have is
through--the property. Banks will never marry a poor girl. But that
would be a dear-bought victory. Let her keep what faith in him she can.
No; in families, the ones who can control themselves have to give in--to
those who can't. If you argue with Christine she simply gives way, and
then she gets hysterical, and then she is ill. It's a disease. Mothers
know how their children--Christine was marked--marked with trouble! I
am thankful she has any mind at all. She needs me more than Paul does. I
cannot be parted from my power to help her--such as it is.”

“When she is Banks Bowen's wife she will need you more than ever!” said
Moya.

“She will. I could prevent the marriage, but I am afraid to. I am
afraid! So, as the family is cut in two--in three, for I--” Mrs. Bogardus
stopped and moistened her lips again. “So--I think you and Paul had
better make your arrangements and go as soon as you can wherever it
suits you, without minding about the rest of us.”

Moya gave a little sobbing laugh. “You don't expect me to make the first
move!”

“Doesn't he say anything to you--anything at all?”

“He is too ill.”

“He is not ill!” Mrs. Bogardus denied it fiercely. “Who says he is ill?
He is starved and frozen. He is just out of the grave. You must be good
to him, Moya. Warm him, comfort him! You can give him the life he needs.
Your hands are as soft as little birds. They comfort even me. Oh, don't
you understand!”

“Of course I understand!” Moya answered, her face aflame. “But I cannot
marry Paul. He has got to marry me.”

“What nonsense that is! People say to a girl: 'You can't be too cold
before you are married or too kind after!' That does not mean you and
Paul. If you are not kind to him _now_, you will make a great mistake.”

“He is not thinking of marriage,” said Moya. “Something weighs on him
all the time. I cannot ask him questions. If he wanted to tell me he
would. That is why I come downstairs and leave him. But he won't come
down! Is it not strange? If we could believe such things I would say a
Presence came with, him out of that place. It is with him when I find
him alone. It is in his eyes when he looks at me. It is not something
past and done with, it is here--now--in this house! _What_ is it? What
do _you_ believe?”

The eyes she sought to question hardened under her gaze. Here, too, was
a veil. Mrs. Bogardus sat with her hands clasped in her lap. She was
motionless, but the creaking of her silks could be heard as her bosom
rose and fell. After a moment she said: “Paul's tray is on the table in
the dining-room. Will you take it when you go up?”

Moya altered her own manner instantly. “But you?” she hesitated. “I must
not crowd you out of all your mother privileges. You have handed over
everything to me.”

“A mother's privilege is to see herself no longer needed. I can do
nothing more for my son”--her smile was hard--“except take care of his
money.”

“Paul's mother!”

“My dear, do you suppose we mind? It is a very great privilege to be
allowed to step aside when your work is done.”

“Paul's _mother!_” Moya insisted.

Mrs. Bogardus rose. “You don't remember your own mother, my dear. You
have an exaggerated idea of the--the importance of mothers. They are
only a temporary arrangement.” She put out her hands and the girl's
cheek touched hers for an instant; then she straightened herself and
walked calmly out of the room. Moya remained a little longer, afraid
to follow her. “If she would not smile! If she would do anything but
smile!”

Paul was walking about his room, half an hour later, when Moya stopped
outside his door. She placed the tray on a table in the hall. The door
was opened from within. Paul had heard his mother go up before, heard
her pause at the stairs, and, after a silence, enter her own room.

“She knows that I know,” he said to himself. “That knowledge will be
always between us; we can never look each other in the face again.” To
Moya he endeavored to speak lightly.

“It sounded very gay downstairs to-night. You must have had a houseful.”

“I have been with your mother the last hour,” answered Moya, vaguely on
the defensive. Since Paul's return there had been little of the old free
intercourse in words between them, and without this outlet their mutual
consciousness became acute. Often as they saw each other during the day,
the keenest emotion attached to the first meeting of their eyes.

Paul was unnerved by his sudden recall from death to life. Its contrasts
were overwhelming to his starved senses: from the dirt and dearth and
grimy despair of his burial hutch in the snow to this softly lighted,
close-curtained room, warm and sweet with flowers; from the gaunt,
unshaven spectre of the packer and his ghostly revelations, to Moya,
meekly beautiful, her bright eyes lowered as she trailed her soft skirts
across the carpet; Moya seated opposite, silent, conscious of him
in every look and movement. Her lovely hands lay in her lap, and the
thought of holding them in his made him tremble; and when he recalled
the last time he had kissed her he grew faint. He longed to throw
off this exhausting self-restraint, but feared to betray his helpless
passion which he deemed an insult to his soul's worship of her.

And she was thinking: “Is this all it is going to mean--his coming
home--our being together? And I was almost his wife!”

“So it was my mother you were talking to in the study? I thought I heard
a man's voice.”

“It was the doctor. Your mother was not quite herself this evening. He
came in to see her, but he does not think she is ill. 'Rest and change,'
he says she needs.”

Paul gave the words a certain depth of consideration. “Are you as well
as usual, Moya?”

“Oh, I am always well,” she answered cheerlessly. “I seem to thrive on
anything--everything,” she corrected herself, and blushed.

The blush made him gasp. “You are more beautiful than ever. I had
forgotten that beauty is a physical fact. The sight of you confuses me.”

“I always told you you were morbid.” Moya's happy audacity returned.
“Now, how long are you going to sit and think about that?”

“Do I sit and think about things?” His reluctant, boyish smile, which
all women loved, captured his features for a moment. “It is very rude of
me.”

“Suppose I should ask you what you are thinking about?”

“Ah! I am afraid you would say 'morbid' again.”

“Try me! You ought to let me know at once if you are going to break out
in any new form of morbidness.”

“I wish it might amuse you, but it wouldn't. Let me put you a
case--seriously.”

Moya smiled. “Once we were serious--ages ago. Do you remember?”

“Do I remember!”

“Well? You are you, and I am I, still.”

“Yes; and as full of fateful surprises for each other.”

“I bar 'fateful'! That word has the true taint of morbidness.”

“But you can't 'bar' fate. Listen: this is a supposing, you know.
Suppose that an accident had happened to our leader on the way home--to
your Lieutenant Winslow, we'll say”--

“_My_ lieutenant!”

“Your father's--the regiment's--Lieutenant Winslow 'of ours.' Suppose we
had brought him back in a state to need a surgeon's help; and without a
word to any one he should get up and walk out of the hospital with his
hurts not healed, and no one knew why, or where he had gone? There would
be a stir about it, would there not? And if such a poor spectre of a
bridegroom as I were allowed to join the search, no one would think it
strange, or call it a slight to his bride if the fellow went?”

“I take your case,” said Moya with a beaming look. “You want to go after
that poor man who suffered with you.”

“Who went with us to save us from our own headstrong folly, and would
have died there alone”--

“Yes; oh, yes!--before you begin to think about yourself, or me. Because
he is nobody 'of ours,' and no one seems to feel responsible, and we go
on talking and laughing just the same!”

“Do they talk of this downstairs?”

“To-night they were talking--oh, with such philosophy! But how came you
to know it?”

Paul did not answer this question. “Then”--he drew a long breath,--“then
you could bear it, dear?--the comment, even if they called it a slight
to you and a piece of quixotic lunacy? Others will not take my case,
remember.”

“What others?”

“They will say: 'Why doesn't he send a better man? He is no trailer.' It
is true. Money might find him and bring him back, but all the money
in the world could not teach him to trust his friends. There is a
misunderstanding here which is too bitter to be borne. It is hard to
explain,--the intimacy that grows up between men placed as we were. But
as soon as help reached us, the old lines were drawn. I belonged with
the officers, he with the men. We could starve together, but we could
not eat together. He accepted it--put himself on that basis at once.
He would not come up here as the guest of the Post. He is done with us
because he thinks we are done with him. And he knows that I must know
his occupation is gone. He will never guide nor pack a mule again.”

“Your mother and my father, they will understand. What do the others
matter?”

“I must tell you, dear, that I do not propose to tell them--especially
them--why I go. For I am going. I must go! There are reasons I cannot
explain.” He sighed, and looked wildly at Moya, whose smile was becoming
mechanical. “I hate the excuse, but it will have to be said that I go
for a change--for my health. My health! Great God! But it's 'orders,'
dear.”

“Your orders are my orders. You are never going anywhere again without
me,” said Moya slowly. Her smile was gone. She stood up and faced him,
pale and beautiful. He rose, too, and stooped above her, taking her
hands and gazing into her full blue eyes arched like the eyes of angels.

“I thought she was a girl! But she is a woman,” he said in a voice of
caressing wonder. “A woman, and not afraid!”

“I am afraid. I will not be left--I will not be left again! Oh, you
won't take me, even when I offer myself to you!”

“Don't--don't tempt me!” Paul caught her to him with a groan. “You don't
know me well enough to be afraid of _me!_”

“You! You will not let me know you.”

“Oh, hush, dear--hush, my darling! This isn't thinking. We must think
for our lives. I must take care of you, precious. We don't know where
this search may take us, or where it will end, or what the end will be.”
 He kissed the sleeve of her dress, and put her gently from him, so that
he could look her in the eyes. She gave him her full pure gaze.

“It is the poor man again. You said he would spoil our lives.”

“He is _our_ poor man. You didn't go out of your way to find him. And
your way is mine.”

“It is so heavenly to be convinced! Who taught you to see things at a
glance,--things I have toiled and bungled over and don't know now if I
am right! _Who_ taught you?”

“Do you think I stood still while you were away! Oh, my heart was sifted
out by little pieces.”

“You shall sift mine. You shall tell me what to do. For I know nothing!
Not even if I may dare to take this angel at her word!”

“I knew you would not take me!” the girl whispered wildly. “But I shall
go.”




XVI


THE NATURE OF AN OATH

“Your tray! It is after ten o'clock. Your 'angel' is a bad nurse.” Moya
brought the tray and set it on a little stand beside Paul's chair. He
watched her shy, excited preparations as she moved about, conscious of
his eyes. The saucepan staggered upon the coals and they both sprang
to save the broth, and pouring it she burnt her thumb a little, and he
behaved quite like any ordinary young man. They were ecstatic to find
themselves at ease with each other once more. Moya became disrespectful
to her charge; such sweet daring looked from her eyes into his as made
him riotous with joy.

“Won't you take some with me?” He turned the cup towards her and watched
her as she sipped.

“'It was roast with fire,'” he pronounced softly and dreamily, 'because
of the dreadful pains. It was to be eaten with bitter herbs'”--

“What _are_ you saying?”--

“'To remind them of their bondage.'”

“I object to your talking about bondage and bitter herbs when you are
eating aunt Annie's delicious consommé.”

He gravely sipped in turn, still with his eyes in hers. “Can you
remember what you were doing on the second of November?”

“Can I remember!”

“Yes; tell me. I have a reason for asking.”

“Tell _me_ the reason first.”

“May we have a little more fire, darling? It gives me chills to think of
that day. It was the last of my wretched pot-hunting. There was nothing
to hunt for--the game had all gone down, but I did not know that.
Somewhere in the woods, a long way from the cabin, it began to occur to
me that I should not make shelter that night. A fool and his strength
are soon parted. It was a little hollow with trees all around so deep
that in the distance their trunks closed in like a wall. Snow can make
a wonderful silence in the woods. I seemed to hear the thoughts of
everybody I loved in the world outside. There had been a dullness over
me for weeks. I could not make it true that I had ever been happy--that
you really loved me. All that part of my life was a dream. Now, in that
silence suddenly I felt you! I knew that you cared. It was cruel to
die so if you did love me! It brought the 'pang and spur'! I fought the
drowsiness that was taking away my pain. I had begun to lean on it as
a comfortable breast. I woke up and tore myself away from that siren
sleep. It was my darling,--her love that saved me. Without that thought
of you, I never would have stirred again. Where were you, what were you
thinking that brought you so close to me?”

“Ah,” said Moya in a whisper. “I was in that room across the hall,
alone. They were good to me that day; they made excuses and left me to
myself. In the afternoon a box came,--from poor father,--white roses,
oh, sweet and cold as snow! I took them up to that room and forced
myself to go in. It was where my things were kept, the trunks half
packed, all the drawers and closets full. And my wedding dress laid
out on the bed. We girls used to go up there at first and look at the
things, and there was laughing and joking. Sometimes I went up alone and
tried on my hats before the glass, and thought where I should be when
I wore them, and--Well! all that stopped. I dreaded to pass the door.
Everything was left just as it was; the shutters open, the poor dress
covered with a sheet on the bed. The room was a death-chamber. I went
in. I carried the roses to my dead. I drew down the sheet and put my
face in that empty dress. It was my selfish self laid out there--the
girl who knew just what she wanted and was going to get it if she could.
Happiness I dared not even pray for--only remembrance--everlasting
remembrance. That we might know each other again when no more life
was left to part us--_my_ life. It seemed long to wait, but that was
my--marriage vow. I gave you all I could, remembrance, faith till
death.”

“Then you are my own!” said Paul, his face transformed. “God was our
witness. Life of my life--for life and death!” Solemnly he took a
bridegroom's kiss from her lips.

“How do _you_ know that it is life that parts?”

“Speak so I can understand you!” Moya cried. “Ah, if I might! A man
must not have secrets from his wife. Secrets are destruction, don't you
think?”

Moya waited in silence.

“Now we come to this bondage!” He let the words fall like a load from
his breast. “This is a hideous thing to tell you, but it will cut us
apart unless you know it. It compels me to do things.” He paused, and
they heard a door down the passage open,--the door of his mother's room.
A step came forward a few paces. Silence; it retreated, and the door
closed again stealthily.

“She has not slept,” Paul murmured. “Poor soul, poor soul! Now, in what
I am going to say, please listen to the facts, Moya dear. Try not to
infer anything from my way of putting things. I shall contradict myself,
but the facts do that.

“The--the guide--John, we will call him, had a long fever in the woods.
It would come on worse at night, and then--he talked--words, of a
shocking intimacy. They say that nothing the mind has come in contact
with under strong emotion is ever lost, no matter how long in the past.
It will return under similar excitement. This man had kept stored away
in his mind, under some such pressure, the words of a woman's message,
a woman in great distress. Over and over, as his pulse rose, countless
times he would repeat that message. I went out of the hut at night and
stood outside in the snow not to hear it, but I knew it as well as he
did before we got through. Now, this was what he said, word for word.

“'Do not blame me, my dear husband. I have held out in this place as
long as I can. Don't wait for anything. Don't worry about anything. Come
back to me with your bare hands. Come!--to your loving Emmy!'

“'Come, come!' he would shout out loud. Then in another voice he would
whisper, 'Come back to me with your bare hands!' And he would stare at
his hands and his face would grow awful.”

Moya drew a long sigh of scared attention.

“Those words were all over the cabin walls. I heard them and saw them
everywhere. There was no rest from them. I could have torn the roof down
to stop his talking, but the words it was not possible to forget. And
where was the horror of it? Was not this what we had asked, for years,
to know?”

“You need not explain to me,” said Moya, shuddering.

“Yes; but all one's meanest motives were unearthed in a place like that.
Would I have felt so with a different man? Some one less uncouth? Was it
the man himself, or his”--

“Paul, if anything could make you a snob, it would be your deadly fear
of being one!”

“Well, if they had found us then, God knows how that fight would have
ended. But I won it--when there was nothing left to fight for. I owned
him--in the grave. We owned each other and took a bashful sort of
comfort in it, after we had shuffled off the 'Mister' and 'John.' I grew
quite fond of him, when we were so near death that his English didn't
matter, or his way of eating. I thought him a very remarkable man,
you remember, when he was just material for description. He was, he is
remarkable. Most remarkable in this, he was not ashamed of his son.”

“Do please let that part alone. I want to know what he was doing, hiding
away by himself all these years? I believe he is an impostor!”

“We came to that, of course; though somehow I forgave him before he
could answer the question. In the long watch beside him I got very close
to him. It was not possible to believe him a deserter, a sneak. Can you
take my word for his answer? It was given as a death-bed confession and
he is living.”

“I would take your word for anything except yourself!” Moya did not
smile, or think what she was saying.

“That answer cleared him, in my mind, with something over to the credit
of blind, stupid heroism. He is not a clever man. But, speaking as one
who has teen face to face with the end of things, I can say that I know
of no act of his that should prevent his returning to his family--if he
had a family--not even his deserting them for twenty years. _If_, I say!

“When the soldiers found us we were too far gone to realize the issue
that was upon us. He was the first to take it in. It was on the march
home, at night, he touched me and began speaking low in our corner of
the tent. 'As we came in here, so we go out again, and so we stay,' he
said. I told him it could not be. To suppress what I had learned would
make the whole of life a lie, a coward's lie. That knowledge belonged to
my mother. I must render it up to her. To do otherwise would be to treat
her like a child and to meddle with the purposes of God. 'No honest man
robs another of his secrets,' he said. He was very much excited. She
was the only one now to be considered--and what did I know about God's
purposes? He refused to take my scruples into consideration, except such
as concerned her. But, after a long argument, very painful, weak as we
were and whispering in the dark, he yielded this much. If I were bent on
digging up the dead, as he called it, it must be done in such a way as
to leave her free. Free she was in law, and she must be given a chance
to claim her freedom without talk or publicity. Absolute secrecy he
demanded of me in the mean time. I begged him to see how unfair it was
to her to bring her face to face with such a discovery without one word
of preparation, of excuse for him. She would condemn him on the very
fact of his being alive. So she would, he said, if she were going
to judge him; not if she felt towards him as--as a wife feels to her
husband. It was that he wanted to know. It was that or nothing he would
have from her. 'Bring me face to face with her alone, and as sudden as
you like. If she knows me, I am the man. And if she wants me back, she
will know me--and that way I'll come and no other way.' Was not that
wonderful? A gentleman could hardly have improved on that. Whatever
feeling he might be supposed to have towards her in the matter we
could never touch upon. But I think he had his hopes. That decision was
hanging over us--and I trembled for her. Day before yesterday, was it, I
persuaded her to see the sick guide. She wondered why I was faint as
she kissed me good-by. I ought to have prepared her. It was a horrible
snare. And yet he meant it all in delicacy, a passionate consideration
for her. Poor fool. How could I prepare _him!_ How could he keep
pace with the changes in her! After all, it is externals that make
us,--habits, clothes. Great God! Things you could not speak of to a
naked soul like him. But he would have it 'straight,' he said--and
straight he got it. And he is gone; broke away like an animal out of
a trap. And I am going to find him, to see at least that he has a roof
over his head. God knows, he may not die for years!”

“She has got years before her too.”

“She!--What am I saying! We have plunged into those damnable inferences
and I haven't given you the facts. Wait. I shall contradict all this in
a moment. I thought, she must have done this for her children. She
must be given another chance. And I approached the thing on my very
knees--not to let her know that I knew, only to hint that I was not
unprepared, had guessed--could meet it, and help her to meet the
problems it would bring into our lives. Help her! She stood and faced
me as if I had insulted her. 'I have been your father's widow for
twenty-two years. If that fact is not sacred to you, it is to me. Never
dare to speak of this to me again!'”

“Ah,” said Moya in a long-drawn sigh, “then she did not”--

“Oh, she did, explicitly! For I went on to speak of it. It was my last
chance. I asked her how she--we--could possibly go through with it; how
with this knowledge between us we could look each other in the face--and
go on living.

“'Put this hallucination out of your mind,' she said. 'That man and I
are strangers.'”

“Was that--would you call that a lie?” asked Moya fearfully.

“You can see your answer in her face. I do not say that hers was the
first lie. It must always be foolish, I think, to evade the facts of
life as we make them for ourselves. He refused to meet his facts, from
the noblest motives;--but now I'm tangling you all up again! Rest your
head here, darling. This is such a business! It is a pity I cannot tell
you his whole story. Half the meaning of all this is lost. But--here is
a solemn declaration in writing, signed John Hagar, in which this man we
are speaking of says that Adam Bogardus was his partner, who died in the
woods and was buried by his hand; that he knew his story, all the scenes
and circumstances of his life in many a long talk they had together, as
well as he knew his own. In his delirium he must have confused himself
with his old partner, and half in dreams, he said, half in the crazy
satisfaction of pretending to himself he had a son, he allowed the
delusion to go on; saw it work upon me, and half feared it, half
encouraged it. Afterwards he was frightened at the thought of meeting
my mother, who would know him for an impostor. His seeming scruples were
fear of exposure, not consideration for her. This was why he guarded
their interview so carefully. 'No harm's been done,' he says, 'if you'll
act now like a sensible man. I'll be disappointed in you if you make
your mother any trouble about this. You've treated me as square as any
man could treat another. Remember, I say so, and think as kindly as
you can of a harmless, loony old impostor'--and he signs himself 'John
Hagar,'--which shows again how one lie leads to another. We go to find
'John Hagar.'”

“Have you shown your mother this letter? You have not? Paul, you will
not rob her of her just defense!”

“I will not heap coals of fire on her head! This letter simply completes
his renunciation, and he meant it for her defense. But when a man signs
himself 'John Hagar' in the handwriting of my father, it shows that
somebody is not telling the truth. I used to pore over the old farm
records in my father's hand at Stone Ridge in the old account books
stowed away in places where a boy loves to poke and pry. I know it as
well as I know yours. Do you suppose she would not know it? When a man
writes as few letters as he does, the handwriting does not change.” Paul
laid the letter upon the coals. “It is the only witness against her, but
it loses the case.”

“She never could have loved him. I never believed she did!” said Moya.

“She thinks she can live out this deep-down, deliberate--But it will
kill her, Moya. Her life is ended from this on. How could I have
driven her to that excruciating choice! I ought to have listened to him
altogether or not at all. There is a hell for meddlers, and the ones who
meddle for conscience' sake are the deepest damned, I think.”

Moya came and wreathed her arm in his, and they paced the room in
silence. At length she said, “If we go to find John Hagar, shall we not
be meddling again? A man who respects a woman's freedom must love his
own. It is the last thing left him. Don't hunt him down. I believe
nothing could hurt him now like seeing you again.”

“He shall not see me unless he wants to, but he shall know where I stand
on this question of the Impostor. It shall be managed so that even he
can see I am protecting her. No, call himself what he will, the tie
between him and me is another of those facts.”

“But do you love him, Paul?”

“Oh--I cannot forget him! He is--just as he used to be--'poor father out
there in the cold.' We must find him and comfort him somehow.”

“For our own peace of mind? Forgive me for arguing when everything is so
difficult. But he is a man--a brave man who would rather be forever out
in the cold than be a burden. Do not rob him of his right to _be_ John
Hagar if he wants to, for the sake of those he loves. You do not tell me
it was love, but I am sure it was, in some mistaken way, that drove him
into exile. Only love as pure as his can be our excuse for dragging him
back. He did not want shelter and comfort from her. Only one thing. Have
we got that to give him?”

“Well then, I go for my own sake--it is a physical necessity; and I go
for hers. She has put it out of her own power to help him. It will ease
her a little to know I am trying to reach him in his forlorn disguise.”

“But you were not going to tell her?”

“In words, no. But she will understand. There is a strange clairvoyance
between us, as if we were accomplices in a crime!”

Moya reflected silently. This search which Paul had set his heart upon
would equally work his own cure, she saw. Nor could she now imagine for
themselves any lover's paradise inseparable from this moral tragedy,
which she saw would be fibre of their fibre, life of their life. A
family is an organism; one part may think to deny or defy another, but
with strange pains the subtle union exerts itself; distance cannot break
the thread.

They kissed each other solemnly like little children on the eve of a
long journey full of awed expectancy.

Mrs. Bogardus stood holding her door ajar as Moya passed on her way
downstairs. “You are very late,” she uttered hoarsely. “Is nothing
settled yet?”

“Everything!” Moya hesitated and forced a smile, “everything but where
we shall go. We will start--and decide afterwards.”

“You go together? That is right. Moya, you have a genius for happiness!”

“I wish I had a genius for making people sleep who lie awake hours in
the night thinking about other people!”

“If you mean me, people of my age need very little sleep.”

“May I kiss you good-night, Paul's mother?”

“You may kiss me because I am Paul's mother, not because I do not
sleep.”

Moya's lips touched a cheek as white and almost as cold as the frosted
window-panes through which the moon was glimmering. She thought of the
icy roses on her wedding dress.

Downstairs her father was smoking his bedtime cigar. Mrs. Creve, very
sleepy and cosy and flushed, leaned over the smouldering bed of coals.
She held out her plump, soft hand to Moya.

“Come here and be scolded! We have been scolding you steadily for the
last hour.”

“If you want that young man to get his strength back, you'd better not
keep him up talking half the night,” the colonel growled softly. “Do you
see what time it is?”

Moya knelt and leaned her head against her father. She reached one hand
to Mrs. Creve. They did not speak again till her weak moment had passed.
“It will be very soon,” she said, pressing the warm hand that stroked
her own. “You will help me pack, aunt Annie; and then you'll stay--with
father? I know you are glad to have me out of the way at last!”




XVII


THE HIDDEN TRAIL

Because they had set forth on a grim and sorrowful quest, it need not
be supposed t

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