Chapter 5

"Gee, Buck!" he drawled, prodding the near ox lightly in the ribs. And the team lurched to the right to avoid a markedly obtrusive boulder. "Haw, Bright!" he ejaculated a minute later, flicking with his whip the off shoulder of the farther ox. And with sprawling legs and swaying of hind-quarters the team swerved obediently to the left, shunning a mire-hole that would have taken in the wheel to the hub. Presently, coming to a swampy spot that stretched all the way across the road, the youth seated himself sidewise on the narrow tongue connecting the fore and hind axles, and drove his team dry-shod.

It was a slow and creaking progress; but there seemed to be no hurry, and the youth dreamed gloomily on his jolting perch. His eyes took no note of the dark-mossed, scrubby hillocks, the rough clearings blackened with fire, the confused and ragged woods, as they crept past in sombre procession. But suddenly, as the cart rounded a turn in the road, there came into view the figure of a girl travelling in the same direction. The young man slipped from his perch and prodded up the oxen to a brisk walk.

As the noise of the team approached her, the girl looked around. She was good to see, with her straight, vigorous young figure in its blue-gray homespun gown. Her hair, in color not far from that of the red ox, was rich and abundant, and lay in a coil so gracious that not even the tawdry millinery of her cheap "store" hat could make her head look quite commonplace. Her face was freckled, but wholesome and comely. A shade of displeasure passed over it as she saw who was behind her, and she hastened her steps perceptibly. But presently she remembered that she had a good five miles to go ere she would reach her destination; and she realized that she could not hope to escape by flight. With a pout of vexation she resigned herself to the inevitable, and dropped back into her former pace. Immediately the ox-team overtook her.

As the oxen slowed up she stepped to the right to let them pass, and then walked on, thus placing the cart between herself and her undesired companion. The youth looked disconcerted by these tactics, and for a few moments could find nothing to say. Then, dropping his long white lashes sheepishly, he murmured, "Good-day, Liz."

"Well, Jim-Ed!" replied the girl, coolly.

"Won't ye set on an' let me give ye a lift home?" he asked, with entreaty in his voice.

"No," she said, with finality: "I'd ruther walk."

Not knowing how to answer this rebuff, he tried to cover his embarrassment by exclaiming authoritatively, "Haw, Bright!" whereupon the team slewed to the left and crowded him into the ditch.

Soon he began again.

"Ye _might_ set on, Liz," he pleaded.

"Yes, I _might_," said she, with what she considered rather withering smartness; "but I ain't a-goin' to."

"Ye'll be tired afore ye git home," he persisted, encouraged by finding that she would talk back at him.

"James-Ed A'ki'son," she declared, with emphasis, "if ye think I'm a-goin' to be beholden to _you_ fer a lift home, ye're mistaken, that's all."

After this there was silence for some time, broken only by the rattling and bumping of the cart, and once by the whir of a woodcock that volleyed across the road. Young Atkinson chewed the cud of gloomy bewilderment. At length he roused himself to another effort.

"Liz," said he, plaintively, "y' ain't been like ye used to, sence ye come back from the States."

"Ain't I?" she remarked, indifferently.

"No, Liz, ye ain't," he repeated, with a sort of pathetic emphasis, as if eager to persuade himself that she had condescended to rebut his accusation. "Y' ain't been like ye used to at all. Appears like as if ye thought us folks in the Settlement wasn't good enough fer ye now."

At this the girl tossed her head crossly.

"It appears like as if ye wanted to be back in the States ag'in," he continued, in a voice of anxious interrogation.

"My lands," exclaimed the girl, "but ye're green!"

To the young man this seemed such an irrelevant remark that he was silent for some time, striving to fathom its significance. As his head sank lower and lower, and he seemed to lose himself completely in joyless revery, the girl shot occasional glances at him out of the corners of her eyes. She had spent the preceding winter in a factory in a crude but stirring little New England town, and had come back to Nova Scotia ill content with the monotony of life in the backwoods seclusion of Wyer's Settlement. Before she went away she had been, to use the vernacular of the Settlement, "keepin' company with Jim-Ed A'ki'son;" and now, to her, the young man seemed to unite and concentrate in his person all that she had been wont to persuade herself she had outgrown. To be sure, she not seldom caught herself dropping back comfortably into the old conditions. But these symptoms stirred in her heart an uneasy resentment, akin to that which she felt whenever--as would happen at times--she could not help recognizing that Jim-Ed and his affairs were not without a passing interest in her eyes.

Now she began to grow particularly angry at him because, as she thought, "he hadn't nothing to say fer himself." Sadly to his disadvantage, she compared his simplicity and honest diffidence with the bold self-assertion and easy familiarity of the young fellows with whom she had come in contact during the winter. Their impertinences had offended her grievously at the time, but, woman-like, she permitted herself to forget that now, in order to accentuate the deficiencies of the man whom she was unwilling to think well of.

"My lands!" she reiterated to herself, with accumulated scorn, "but _ain't_ he green? He--why, he wouldn't know a 'lectric car from a waterin'-cart. An' _soft_, too, takin' all my sass 'thout givin' me no lip back, no more 'n if I was his mother!"

But the young man presently broke in upon these unflattering reflections. With a sigh he said slowly, as if half to himself,--

"Lands, but I used to set a powerful store by ye, Liz!"

He paused; and at that "used to" the girl opened her eyes with angry apprehension. But he went on,--

"An' I set still more store by ye now, Liz, someways. Seems like I jest couldn't live without ye. I always did feel as how ye was too good, a sight too good, fer me, an' you so smart; an' now I feel it more 'n ever, bein' 's ye've seen so much of the world like. But, Liz, I _don't_ allow as it's right an' proper fer even you to look down the way ye do on the place ye was born in an' the folks ye was brung up with."

"My!" thought the girl to herself, "he's got some spunk, after all, to git off such a speech as that, an' to rake me over the coals, too!"

But aloud she retorted, "Who's a-lookin' down on anybody, Jim-Ed A'ki'son? An', anyways, _you_ ain't the whole of Wyer's Settlement, be ye?"

The justice of this retort seemed to strike the young man with great force.

"That's so," he acknowledged, gloomily. "'Course I ain't. An' I s'pose I hadn't oughter said what I did."

Then he relapsed into silence. For half a mile he slouched on without a syllable, save an occasional word of command addressed to the team. Coming to another boggy bit of road, he seated himself dejectedly on the cart, and apparently would not presume to again press unwelcome assistance upon his fellow-way-farer. Quite uncertain whether to interpret this action as excess of humility or as a severe rebuke, the girl picked her way as best she could, flushed with a sense of injury.

When the mud was passed, the young man absent-mindedly, kept his seat. Beginning to boil with indignation, the girl speedily lost her confident superiority, and felt humiliated. She did not know exactly what to do. She could not continue to walk humbly beside the cart. The situation was profoundly altered by the mere fact that the young man was riding. She tried to drop behind; but the team had an infinite capacity for loitering. At last, with head high in the air, she darted ahead of the team, and walked as fast as she could. Although she heard no orders given by their driver, she knew at once that the oxen had quickened their pace, and that she was not leaving them behind.

Presently she found herself overtaken; whereupon, with swelling heart and face averted, she dropped again to the rear. She was drawing perilously near the verge of that feminine cataclysm, tears, when Fate stepped in to save her from such a mortification.

Fate goes about in many merry disguises. At this juncture she presented herself under the aspect of two half-tipsy commercial travellers driving a single horse in a light open trap. They were driving in from the Settlement, in haste to reach the hotel at Bolton Corners before nightfall. The youth hawed his team vigorously till the nigh wheels were on the other side of the ditch, leaving a liberal share of the road for them to pass in.

But the drummers were not satisfied with this. After a glance at the bashful face and dejected attitude of the young man on the ox-cart, they decided that they wanted the whole road. When their horse's head almost touched the horns of the off ox, they stopped.

"Get out of the way there!" cried the man who held the reins, insolently.

At any other time Jim-Ed would have resented the town man's tone and words; just now he was thinking about the way Liz had changed.

"I've gi'n ye the best half o' the road, mister," he said, deprecatingly, "'n' I can't do no better fer ye than that."

"Yes, you can, too," shouted the driver of the trap; "you can give us the whole road. It won't hurt your old cart to go out in the stumps, but _we_ ain't going to drive in the ditch, not by a jugful. Get over, I tell you, and be quick about it."

To this the youth made no immediate reply; but he began to forget about the girl, and to feel himself growing hot. As for the girl, she had stepped to the front, resolved to "show off" and to make very manifest to the city men her scorn for her companion. Her cheeks and eyes were flaming, and the drummers were not slow to respond to the challenge which she flashed at them from under her drooped lids.

"Ah, there, my beauty!" said the driver, his attention for a moment diverted from the question of right of way. His companion, a smallish man in striped trousers and fawn-colored overcoat, sprang lightly out of the trap, with the double purpose of clearing the road and amusing himself with Liz. The saucy smile with which she met him turned into a frown, however, as he began brutally kicking the knees of the oxen to make them stand over.

The patient brutes crowded into the ditch.

"Whoa, there! Gee, Buck! gee, Bright!" ordered the youth, and the team lurched back into the road. At the same time he stepped over the cart-beam and came forward on the off side of the team.

"Ye'd better quit that, mister!" he exclaimed, with a threatening note in his voice.

"Give the lout a slap in the mouth, and make him get out of the way," cried the man in the trap.

But the man in the fawn-colored overcoat was busy. Liz was much to his taste.

"Jump in and take a ride with us, my pretty," said he.

But Liz shrank away, regretting her provocative glances now that she saw the kind of men she had to do with.

"Come, come," coaxed the man, "don't be shy, my blooming daisy. We'll drive you right in to the Corners and set up a good time for you." And, grasping her hand, he slipped an arm about her waist and tried to kiss her lips. As she tore herself fiercely away, she heard the man in the trap laugh loud approval. She struck at her insulter with clenched hand; but she did not touch him, for just then something happened to him. The long arm of the youth went out like a cannon-ball, and the drummer sprawled in the ditch. He nimbly picked himself up and darted upon his assailant, while the man in the trap shouted to him encouragingly,--

"Give it to him pretty, Mike."

But the young countryman caught him by the neck with long, vise-like fingers, inexorable, and, holding him thus helpless at arm's length, struck him again heavily in the ribs, and hurled him over the ditch into a blueberry thicket, where he remained in dazed discretion.

Though of a lamb-like gentleness on ordinary occasions, the young countryman was renowned throughout the Settlement for the astonishing strength that lurked in his lean frame. At this moment he was well aroused, and Liz found herself watching him with a consuming admiration. He no longer slouched, and his pale eyes, like polished steel, shot a menacing gleam. He stepped forward and took the horse by the bridle.

"Now," said he to the driver, "I've gi'n ye half the road, an' if ye can't drive by in that I'm a-going to lead ye by, 'thout no more nonsense."

"Let go that bridle!" yelled the driver, standing up and lashing at him with the whip.

One stroke caught the young man down the side of the face, and stung. It was a rash stroke.

"Hold the horse's head, Liz," he cried; and, leaping forward, he reached into the trap for his adversary. Heeding not at all the butt end of the whip which was brought down furiously upon his head, he wrenched the driver ignominiously from his seat, spun him around, shook him as if his had been a rag baby, and hurled him violently against a rotten stump on the other side of the ditch. The stump gave way, and the drummer splashed into a bog hole.

Nothing cows a man more quickly than a shaking combined with a ducking. Without a word the drummer hauled himself out of the slop and walked sullenly forward. His companion joined him; and Liz, leading the horse and trap carefully past the cart, delivered them up to their owners with a sarcastic smile on her lips. Then she resumed her place beside the cart, the young man flicked the oxen gently, and the team once more got slowly under way.

As the discomfited drummers climbed into their trap, the girl, in the ardor of her suddenly adopted hero-worship, could not refrain from turning around again to triumph over them. When the men were fairly seated, and the reins gathered up for prompt departure, the smaller man turned suddenly and threw a large stone, with vindictive energy and deadly aim.

"Look out!" shrieked the girl; and the young countryman turned aside just in time to escape the full force of the missile. It grazed the side of his head, however, with such violence as to bring him to his knees, and the blood spread throbbing out of the long cut like a scarlet veil. The drummers whipped their horse to a gallop, and disappeared.

The girl first stopped the team, with a true country-side instinct; and she was at the young man's side, sobbing with anxious fear, just as he staggered blindly to his feet. Seating him on the cart, she proceeded to stanch the bleeding with the edge of her gown. Observing this, he protested, and declared that the cut was nothing. But she would not be gainsaid, and he yielded, apparently well content under her hands. Then, tearing a strip from her colored cotton petticoat, she gently bound up the wound, not artistically, perhaps, but in every way to his satisfaction.

"If ye hadn't gi'n me warnin', Liz, that there stun'd about fixed me," he remarked.

The girl smiled happily, but said nothing.

After a long pause he spoke again.

"Seems to me ye're like what ye used to, Liz," said he, "only nicer, a sight nicer; an' y' used to be powerful nice. I allow there couldn't _be_ another girl so nice as you, Liz. An' what ever's made ye quit lookin' down on me, so sudden like?"

"Jim-Ed," she replied, in a caressing tone, "ef y' _ain't_ got no paper collar on, ner no glas' di'mon' pin, I allow ye're a _man_. An' maybe--maybe ye're the _kind_ of man I _like_, Jim-Ed."

To even such genuine modesty as Jim-Ed's this was comprehensible. Shyly and happily he reached out his hand for hers. They were both seated very comfortably on the cart-beam, so he did not consider it necessary to move. Side by side, and hand in hand, they journeyed homeward in a glorified silence. The oxen appeared to guide themselves very fairly. The sunset flushed strangely the roadside hillocks. The nighthawks swooped in the pale zenith with the twang of smitten chords. And from a thick maple on the edge of a clearing a hermit-thrush fluted slowly over and over his cloistral ecstasy.

A Tragedy of the Tides.

This is the story of the fate that befell Lieutenant Henry Crewe and Margaret Neville, his betrothed, who disappeared from the infant city of Halifax on the afternoon of September 18th, 1749. The facts were gathered by one Nicholas Pinson from the mouths of Indians more or less concerned, from members of the Neville family, and from much sagacious conjecture; and woven, with an infinite deal of irrelevant detail, into a narrative which has been rigorously condensed in the present rendering. The industrious Pinson's manuscript, with all its attenuated old French characters, its obscure abbreviations, and its well-bred contempt for orthographical accuracy, might perhaps be found even yet in the Provincial archives at Halifax. At least, if any one be curious to examine this story in the original, just as M. Pinson wrote it, he may search the archives of Halifax with a reasonable surety that the manuscript is as likely to be found there as anywhere else.

There was a faint, opaline haze in the afternoon air, and in the still waters of the harbor the low hills, with their foliage lightly touched in bronze and amethyst and amber, were faithfully reproduced. Into a hollow between two knolls wooded with beech trees, ran a shallow cove, its clear waters edged with sand of a tender, greenish gray. Close to the water's edge stood the lovers, and across the silence they could hear, pulsating dimly, the hammers of them that were building the city.

"Listen," said the man, as he drew the girl closely to him and kissed her on the forehead; "those are the strokes that are making a home for _us_."

The girl lifted her lips for a kiss that never reached them. The man was seized from behind, a dark hand covered his mouth; and Lieutenant Henry Crewe, his sword unstirred in its scabbard, found himself pinioned hand and foot, ere he had time to realize that other arms were about him than those of the woman he loved. With her it fared in like fashion, save that before they covered her mouth she found time for one long piercing cry. It was heard by those who were working on the city palisades; but no man could tell the direction whence it came. Presently a search party set out for the thick woods lying a little north of west from the city; but in the mean time the Indians had carried their captives northeastward to the lakes, and were making all speed on the Fundy coast by way of the Shubenacadie trail.

Henry Crewe was a tall man, and well sinewed, and for a brief space he strove so fiercely with his bonds that his fair skin flushed well-nigh purple, and his lips, under the yellow mustache, curled apart terribly, like those of a beast at bay. Unable to endure the anguish of his effort, Margaret averted her eyes, for she knew the hopelessness of it. Like all the Nevilles of Nova Scotia to this day, the girl was somewhat spare of form and feature, with dark hair, a clear, dark skin, and eyes of deep color that might be either gray or green. Her terrible cry had been far less the utterance of a blind terror than a deliberate signal to the garrison at the fort, and so complete was her self-control that when Crewe presently met her gaze his brain grew clearer, he forgot the derision in the Indians' painted faces, ceased his vain struggles, and bent all his thought to the task of finding means of deliverance.

The captives were thrown into canoes and paddled swiftly to the head of the long basin which runs inland for miles from the head of the harbor. At the beginning of the portage their feet were unbound, and their mouths set free from the suffocating gags.

"Oh, Margaret! Margaret! To think I should have brought you to this!" exclaimed Crewe in a harsh voice, the moment his lips were free.

The girl had confidence in her lover's power to find some way of protecting her, in case no help should come from the city. Her sole thought now was to show herself brave, and in no way to embarrass his judgment. Before she could answer, however, the leader of the band struck Crewe across the mouth with the flat of his hatchet, as a hint that he should keep silence. Had Crewe been alone, bound as he was, he would have felled his assailant with a blow of the foot; but for Margaret's sake he forced himself to endure the indignity tamely, though his blue eyes flamed with so dangerous a light that the Indian raised his hatchet again in menace. The girl's heart bled under the stroke and at sight of the wounded mouth, but she prudently abstained from speech. Only she spoke one word in a low voice that said all things to her lover's ear, the one word "Beloved!"

To the chief now spoke one of the band in the Micmac tongue:--

"Why not let the paleface talk to his young squaw? It will be the more bitter for them at the last!"

"No," said the chief, grinning; "it is as death to the palefaces to keep silence. But they shall have time to talk at the last."

Throughout the long journey, which was continued till midnight under the strong light of a moon just at the full, the lovers held no converse save in the mute language of eye and gesture, and that only during the rough marches from one lake to another. The greater part of the journey was by canoe. At night they were lashed to trees some way apart, and separated by the camp-fire. Crewe dared not address a word to Margaret lest he should anger his captors into doing him some injury that might lessen his powers of thought or action, and the girl, seeing that no immediate gain could be had from speech, dreaded to be smitten on the mouth in a way that might disfigure her in her lover's eyes. Only at times, when a wind would blow the smoke and flame aside, she looked across the camp-fire into the young man's face, and in the look and in the smile of the steady lips he read not only an unswerving courage, but also a confidence in his own resourceful protection, which pierced his heart with anguish. All night he pondered schemes of rescue or escape, until his brain reeled and his soul grew sick before the unsolvable problem. He could move neither hand nor foot, and just before dawn he sank to sleep in his bonds. Then for the waking girl the loneliness became unspeakable, and her lips grew ashen in the first light of the dawn.