Chapter 11

WINTER--AND A TRUCE

In line with Roaring Bill's forecast, the weather cleared for a brief span, and then winter shut down in earnest. Successive falls of snow overlaid the earth with a three-foot covering, loose and feathery in the depths of the forest, piled in hard, undulating windrows in the scattered openings. Daily the cold increased, till a half-inch layer of frost stood on the cabin panes. The cold, intense, unremitting, lorded it over a vast realm of wood and stream; lakes and rivers were locked fast under ice, and through the clear, still nights the aurora flaunted its shimmering banners across the northern sky.

But within the cabin they were snug and warm, Bill's ax kept the woodpile high. The two fireplaces shone red the twenty-four hours through. Of flour, tea, coffee, sugar, beans, and such stuff as could only be gotten from the outside he had a plentiful supply. Potatoes and certain vegetables that he had grown in a cultivated patch behind the cabin were stored in a deep cellar. He could always sally forth and get meat. And the ice was no bar to fishing, for he would cut a hole, sink a small net, and secure overnight a week's supply of trout and whitefish. Thus their material wants were provided for.

As time passed Hazel gradually shook off a measure of her depression, thrust her uneasiness and resentment into the background. As a matter of fact, she resigned herself to getting through the winter, since that was inevitable. She was out of the world, the only world she knew, and by reason of the distance and the snows there was scant chance of getting back to that world while winter gripped the North. The spring might bring salvation. But spring was far in the future, too far ahead to dwell upon. As much as possible, she refrained from thinking, wisely contenting herself with getting through one day after another.

And in so doing she fell into the way of doing little things about the house, finding speedily that time flew when she busied herself at some task in the intervals of delving in Roaring Bill's library.

She could cook--and she did. Her first meal came about by grace of Roaring Bill's absence. He was hunting, and supper time drew nigh. She grew hungry, and, on the impulse of the moment, turned herself loose in the kitchen--largely in a mood for experiment. She had watched Bill make all manner of things in his Dutch ovens, and observed how he prepared meat over the glowing coals often enough to get the hang of it. Wherefore, her first meal was a success. When Roaring Bill came in, an hour after dark, he found her with cheeks rosy from leaning over the fire, and a better meal than he could prepare all waiting for him. He washed and sat down. Hazel discarded her flour-sack apron and took her place opposite. Bill made no comment until he had finished and lighted a cigarette.

"You're certainly a jewel, little person," he drawled then. "How many more accomplishments have you got up your sleeve?"

"Do you consider ordinary cooking an accomplishment?" she returned lightly.

"I surely do," he replied, "when I remember what an awful mess I made of it on the start. I certainly did spoil a lot of good grub."

After that they divided the household duties, and Hazel forgot that she had vowed to make Bill Wagstaff wait on her hand and foot as the only penalty she could inflict for his misdeeds. It seemed petty when she considered the matter, and there was nothing petty about Hazel Weir. If the chance ever offered, she would make him suffer, but in the meantime there was no use in being childish.

She did not once experience the drear loneliness that had sat on her like a dead weight the last month before she turned her back on Granville and its unhappy associations. For one thing, Bill Wagstaff kept her intellectually on the jump. He was always precipitating an argument or discussion of some sort, in which she invariably came off second best. His scope of knowledge astonished her, as did his language. Bill mixed slang, the colloquialisms of the frontier, and the terminology of modern scientific thought with quaint impartiality. There were times when he talked clear over her head. And he was by turns serious and boyish, with always a saving sense of humor. So that she was eternally discovering new sides to him.

The other refuge for her was his store of books. Upon the shelves she found many a treasure-trove--books that she had promised herself to read some day when she could buy them and had leisure. Roaring Bill had collected bits of the world's best in poetry and fiction; and last, but by no means least, the books that stand for evolution and revolution, philosophy, economics, sociology, and the kindred sciences. Bill was not orderly. He could put his finger on any book he wanted, but on his shelves like as not she would find a volume of Haeckel and another of Bobbie Burns side by side, or a last year's novel snuggling up against a treatise on social psychology. She could not understand why a man--a young man--with the intellectual capacity to digest the stuff that Roaring Bill frequently became immersed in should choose to bury himself in the wilderness. And once, in an unguarded moment, she voiced that query. Bill closed a volume of Nietzsche, marking the place with his forefinger, and looked at her thoughtfully over the book.

"Well," he said, "there are one or two good and sufficient reasons, to which you, of course, may not agree. First, though, I'll venture to assert that your idea of the nature and purpose of life as we humans know and experience it is rather hazy. Have you ever seriously asked yourself why we exist as entities at all? And, seeing that we do find ourselves possessed of this existence, what constrains us to act along certain lines?"

Hazel shook her head. That was an abstraction which she had never considered. She had been too busy living to make a critical analysis of life. She had the average girl's conception of life, when she thought of it at all, as a state of being born, of growing up, of marrying, of trying to be happy, and ultimately--very remotely--of dying. And she had also the conventional idea that activity in the world, the world as she knew it, the doing of big things in a public or semi-public way, was the proper sphere for people of exceptional ability. But why this should be so, what law, natural or fabricated by man, made it so she had never asked herself. She had found it so, and taken it for granted. Roaring Bill Wagstaff was the first man to cross her path who viewed the struggle for wealth and fame and power as other than inevitable and desirable.

"You see, little person," he went on, "we have some very definite requirements which come of the will to live that dominates all life. We must eat, we must protect our bodies against the elements, and we need for comfort some sort of shelter. But in securing these essentials to self-preservation where is the difference, except in method, between the banker who manipulates millions and the post-hole digger on the farm? Not a darned bit, in reality. They're both after exactly the same thing--security against want. If the post-hole digger's wants are satisfied by two dollars a day he is getting the same result as the banker, whose standard of living crowds his big income. Having secured the essentials, then, what is the next urge of life? Happiness. That, however, brings us to a more abstract question.

"In the main, though, that's my answer to your question. Here I can secure myself a good living--as a matter of fact, I can easily get the wherewithal to purchase any luxuries that I desire--and it is gotten without a petty-larceny struggle with my fellow men. Here I exploit only natural resources, take only what the earth has prodigally provided. Why should I live in the smoke and sordid clutter of a town when I love the clean outdoors? The best citizen is the man with a sound mind and a strong, healthy body; and the only obligation any of us has to society is not to be a burden on society. So I live in the wilds the greater part of the year, I keep my muscles in trim, and I have always food for myself and for any chance wayfarer--and I can look everybody in the eye and tell them to go to the fiery regions if I happen to feel that way. What business would I have running a grocery store, or a bank, or a real-estate office, when all my instincts rebel against it? What normal being wants to be chained to a desk between four walls eight or ten hours a day fifty weeks in the year? I'll bet a nickel there was many a time when you were clacking a typewriter for a living that you'd have given anything to get out in the green fields for a while. Isn't that so?"

Hazel admitted it.

"You see," Bill concluded, "this civilization of ours, with its peculiar business ethics, and its funny little air of importance, is a comparatively recent thing--a product of the last two or three thousand years, to give it its full historic value. And mankind has been a great many millions of years in the making, all of which has been spent under primitive conditions. So that we are as yet barbarians, savages even, with just a little veneer. Why, man, as such, is only beginning to get a glimmering of his relation to the universe. Pshaw, though! I didn't set out to deliver a lecture on evolution. But, believe me, little person, if I thought that any great good or happiness would result from my being elsewhere, from scrapping with my fellows in the world crush, I'd be there with both feet. Do you think you'd be more apt to care for me if I were to get out and try to set the world afire with great deeds?"

"That wasn't the question," she returned distantly, trying, as she always did, to keep him off the personal note.

"But it is the question with me," he declared. "I don't know why I let you go on flouting me." He reached over and caught her arm with a grip that made her wince. The sudden leap of passion into his eyes quickened the beat of her heart. "I could break you in two with my hands without half trying--tame you as the cave men tamed their women, by main strength. But I don't--by reason of the same peculiar feeling that would keep me from kicking a man when he was down, I suppose. Little person, why can't you like me better?"

"Because you tricked me," she retorted hotly. "Because I trusted you, and you used that trust to lead me farther astray. Any woman would hate a man for that. What do you suppose--you, with your knowledge of life--the world will think of me when I get out of here?"

But Roaring Bill had collected himself, and sat smiling, and made no reply. He looked at her thoughtfully for a few seconds, then resumed his reading of the Mad Philosopher, out of whose essays he seemed to extract a great deal of quiet amusement.

A day or two after that Hazel came into the kitchen and found Bill piling towels, napkins, and a great quantity of other soiled articles on an outspread tablecloth.

"Well," she inquired, "what are you going to do with those?"

"Take 'em to the laundry," he laughed. "Collect your dirty duds, and bring them forth."

"Laundry!" Hazel echoed. It seemed rather a far-fetched joke.

"Sure! You don't suppose we can get along forever without having things washed, do you?" he replied. "I don't mind housework, but I do draw the line at a laundry job when I don't _have_ to do it. Go on--get your clothes."

So she brought out her accumulation of garments, and laid them on the pile. Bill tied up the four corners of the tablecloth.

"Now," said he, "let's see if we can't fit you out for a more or less extended walk. You stay in the house altogether too much these days. That's bad business. Nothing like exercise in the fresh air."

Thus in a few minutes Hazel fared forth, wrapped in Bill's fur coat, a flap-eared cap on her head, and on her feet several pairs of stockings inside moccasins that Bill had procured from some mysterious source a day or two before.

The day was sunny, albeit the air was hazy with multitudes of floating frost particles, and the tramp through the forest speedily brought the roses back to her cheeks. Bill carried the bundle of linen on his back, and trudged steadily through the woods. But the riddle of his destination was soon read to her, for a two-mile walk brought them out on the shore of a fair-sized lake, on the farther side of which loomed the conical lodges of an Indian camp.

"You sabe now?" said he as they crossed the ice. "This bunch generally comes in here about this time, and stays till spring. I get the squaws to wash for me. Ever see Mr. Indian on his native heath?"

Hazel never had, and she was duly interested, even if a trifle shy of the red brother who stared so fixedly. She entered a lodge with Bill, and listened to him make laundry arrangements in broken English with a withered old beldame whose features resembled a ham that had hung overlong in the smokehouse. Two or three blanketed bucks squatted by the fire that sent its blue smoke streaming out the apex of the lodge.

"Heap fine squaw!" one suddenly addressed Bill. "Where you ketchum?"

Bill laughed at Hazel's confusion. "Away off." He gestured southward, and the Indian grunted some unintelligible remark in his own tongue--at which Roaring Bill laughed again.

Before they started home Bill succeeded in purchasing, after much talk, a pair of moccasins that Hazel conceded to be a work of art, what with the dainty pattern of beads and the ornamentation of colored porcupine quills. Her feminine soul could not cavil when Bill thrust them in the pocket of her coat, even if her mind was set against accepting any peace tokens at his hands.

And so in the nearing sunset they went home through the frost-bitten woods, where the snow crunched and squeaked under their feet, and the branches broke off with a pistol-like snap when they were bent aside.

A hundred yards from the cabin Bill challenged her to a race. She refused to run, and he picked her up bodily, and ran with her to the very door. He held her a second before he set her down, and Hazel's face whitened. She could feel his breath on her cheek, and she could feel his arms quiver, and the rapid beat of his heart. For an instant she thought Roaring Bill Wagstaff was about to make the colossal mistake of trying to kiss her.

But he set her gently on her feet and opened the door. And by the time he had his heavy outer clothes off and the fires started up he was talking whimsically about their Indian neighbors, and Hazel breathed more freely. The clearest impression that she had, aside from her brief panic, was of his strength. He had run with her as easily as if she had been a child.

After that they went out many times together. Bill took her hunting, initiated her into the mysteries of rifle shooting, and the manipulation of a six-shooter. He taught her to walk on snowshoes, lightly over the surface of the crusted snow, through which otherwise she floundered. A sort of truce arose between them, and the days drifted by without untoward incident, Bill tended to his horses, chopped wood, carried water. She took upon herself the care of the house. And through the long evenings, in default of conversation, they would sit with a book on either side of the fireplace that roared defiance to the storm gods without.

And sometimes Hazel would find herself wondering why Roaring Bill Wagstaff could not have come into her life in a different manner. As it was--she never, _never_ would forgive him.