Part 4

Slowly he mounted the steps, and on the threshold he paused again. A long tendril of the Banksia swayed in the half-shadow, and surely his ears caught a suppressed sobbing breath. He made one step toward it.

"Francisca!"

"It is I, Señor," replied the melancholy voice of Francisco; and the boy came forward into the moonlight. "Did you wish anything, Señor?"

"Nothing," replied the Professor, mendaciously, his cheeks warm in the darkness.

"Good-night, Francisco!"

"Good-night, Señor!" returned the boy in the same melancholy tone.

Long after the Professor's light was extinguished, the lad lay watching the night away in the hammock.

The stamp of that vigil was on his face the next morning when he asked the Professor to advise him as to some orange-trees at the farther end of the ranch. The Professor, who had also passed a white night, gave a haggard consent. Francisca alone appeared fresh and smiling. The best artists do not adorn the stage.

There seemed nothing particular the matter with the grove, when they had reached it.

"Which are the trees in question?" asked the Professor, who at that moment wished all oranges in a climate much too tropical for them.

"Señor," replied Francisco, facing him—and it struck the Professor the boy had grown tall overnight—"do you love my sister?"

"Francisco!" exclaimed the Professor, violently, and the blood began to pound in his ears.

"I must know, Señor. When you spoke of an old friend, we thought, Francisca and I, of an old woman—and now here has come this young lady from your home, one of your people—and she calls you by your name, and you call her by hers. She has come because she cares for you, and you spend your time with her, and yet, Señor, you gave her back her rose and kept my sister's!"

There was a guilty movement of the Professor's hand toward his breast-pocket, instantly checked.

"When you came home last night you called my sister by name. Señor, this cannot be! I am not jealous; you have a right to love this other, but I must know. I do not say for a moment," he added, proudly, "that Francisca has thought of you, but she is very young. She might come to care, and—I will not have it so!"

"Francisco!" exclaimed the Professor again.

"We are poor now," said Francisco, lifting his head, "but my people were great people when yours, Señor—the Americans—were nobody!"

"Nonsense!" exclaimed the Professor, sharply, catching at a tangible point of remonstrance with relief. "My people were never 'nobody'—they were New Englanders."

Francisco bowed.

"Francisco," said the Professor, in a different tone, "I thought you loved me—I thought you trusted me."

"What has that to do with it, Señor?" inquired Francisco, sternly. "It is of my sister I think. If you do not love her you must go away at once."

"I will be answerable to your sister only," began the Professor.

"Pardon me, Señor, you will be answerable to _me_. I am the head of the family. Francisca is only a child," said this other child.

The Professor was silent. When he spoke, at last, he was answering himself rather than Francisco.

"I will go!"

Francisco winced, but did not flinch.

He made a gesture for the Professor to lead the way back, which the Professor did like a blind man. He could not have told whether his bitterness was toward the boy or himself. Half way he stopped.

"What am I to tell her?"

"You can have business—and she will understand."

The Professor ground his teeth, and going to his room, began grimly flinging things into his trunk. He was furious with Francisco, with himself, with the climate which could lead a man to this.

He ate his lunch in silence. So did Francisco. Men have these refuges. Francisca the woman, with a thread of speech, kept that silence from bursting. After lunch the Professor finished packing, wrote a brief note declining the Chair, and went down to buy his ticket. All the way down the landscape cried out to him.

As he left the station with his ticket in his hand he encountered Miss Dysart on the threshold with her purse in hers.

"What is the matter?" she exclaimed, after one glance. "Where are you going?"

"Home," answered the Professor. "I was coming to tell you."

Miss Dysart opened her lips, then closed them again, and turning without a word they walked on until the bend of the road threw them from the town into the country lane. There she stopped.

"_Why_ are you going? You must have reasons."

"I have reasons—" He stopped, smitten with the conscious absurdity that she who was his principal reason had scarcely crossed his mind all day.

"Business—it—it is impossible for me to stay," he wound up, lamely.

"_Why_ is it impossible?"

The Professor looked at her and anathematised the climate again.

"I—really cannot explain, Mildred," he said. "But there are reasons why—I feel obliged to go."

Miss Dysart's cheeks flushed, and she looked a moment at the wide valley before them.

"I feel that you are making the mistake of your life," she said, in a low voice.

The Professor made a vague gesture.

"But you will not go," she said, quietly. "You will think better of it. You will not do yourself so much wrong."

"I shall go. I have bought my ticket."

"I will buy it of you. I was on the way to buy one myself."

"You were—!" He looked at her in his turn. "We shall travel together, then."

"We shall do nothing of the kind. What is the use? If you go back you will simply break down again. You have your work here. You love this country."

The Professor's eyes swept mutely over the valley and hills, and the girl watched him jealously.

"You love it more than New England," she said, with a touch of bitterness.

"Differently!" exclaimed the poor Professor; "differently!"

"You love it _more_," persisted the New England girl.

The Professor drew a long breath. "Can I help it? One is affection—fondness; the other—" He stopped abruptly.

Her lips were closed tightly.

"Oh, you will suffer intolerable homesickness—you are homesick _now_. And then it is _all_ of no use—Everard, you must stay; you must think better of it. Stay and take that Chair! There cannot be any business so pressing. It will be no use—not the slightest use for you to go."

In her earnestness she put her hand on his, but instantly withdrew it. Her troubled eyes looked straight into his, and the Professor's looked straightly back. But he shook his head, and suddenly she looked away.

"And you?"

"Oh, I," she answered, lightly; "I am a thorough-going dyed-in-the-wool New-Englander. I was brought up to go to church on Sunday and clean house twice a year, and have a proper respect for calling cards. I shall go on and join aunty at Santa Barbara, and get home in time for all my clubs and classes. Besides, I have been meaning to tell you, I am going to take a year in the College Settlement."

"A year in the College Settlement!" echoed the Professor, vaguely.

"Yes; that will suit me better than—this. Don't forget to send Francisco with the ticket! Good-by!"

She gave him her hand frankly, and once more their eyes encountered.

"If I had had a French grandmother, you see—it might have been different with me," she said with a touch of mirthfulness. "And _that_ at least is true," she concluded to herself, looking so straight ahead that she walked a space beyond the hotel without seeing.

The Professor, going in the opposite direction, went like a man under sentence.

That "intolerable homesickness" was already upon him; but he was determined to go. He, too, was a New Englander. It is a great thing to have inherited principles.

He was determined to go—all the way up under the hanging peppers—all the way beside the scented limes; nor did his determination falter as he turned into the accustomed path under the oranges, and the sight and perfume of a thousand roses stormed him all at once.

There in the wonted place Francisca sat, steadily drawing the threads with unsteady fingers. Her lips might be a little pale, but they smiled. Even the rose was not missing from her hair.

Francisco, perfectly miserable and perfectly proud, rose mutely from the steps to salute the Señor.

The Señor with two gentle hands lifted the boy from his path, and made two steps to the chair—one touch drew the lace from the brave fingers.

"Francisca," said the Professor. "Francisca—Francisca!"

This was the only explanation he ever made, but in fact it was a perfect statement of the case.

If it needed any elaboration it might be held to receive it when Francisca, stooping—long afterward—to recover the abused lace, picked up with it something else.

"What is this?" she said, a little puzzled.

"Oh, that," said the Professor, "that is Miss Dysart's ticket! She is going away to-morrow."

"Ah!" said Francisca only.

"Francisco is to take it to her, and by the way, where is the dear lad?" He made a movement to rise, but Francisca stopped him, raising his hand in hers.

Out on the twilight air already heavy with sweet odors, came floating the sound of a guitar, low, but inexpressibly joyous and tender.

Francisca's eyes filled with tears, but "_Caro_ Francisco!" she only said.

THE OLD HOME HAUNTS

By F. Colburn Clarke

There's a sound that rings in my ears to-day, That echoes in vague refrain, The ripple of water o'er smooth-washed clay, Where the wall-eyed pike and the black bass play, That makes me yearn, in a quiet way, For my old fly-rod again.

Back to the old home haunts again, Back where the clear lake lies; Back through the woods Where the blackbird broods, Back to my rod and flies.

I'm longing to paddle the boat to-day, Through water-logged grass and reeds; Where the musk-rat swims, and the cat-tails sway; Where the air is cool, and the mist is gray; Where ripples dance in the same old way, Under the tangled weeds.

Back on the old oak log again, Back by the crystal brook; Back to the bait, And the silent wait, Back to my line and hook.

I wish I could wade by the water's edge, Where the fallen leaves drift by; Just to see, in the shadow of the ledge, How dark forms glide, like a woodman's wedge, Through driftwood piles and the coarse marsh sedge, And to hear the bittern cry.

Back where the tadpoles shift and sink, Back where the bull-frogs sob; Back just to float In the leaky boat, Back to my dripping bob.

Oh, it's just like this on each misty day, It's always the same old pain That struggles and pulls in the same old way To carry me off for a little stay By the water's edge, in sticky clay, To fish in the falling rain.

Back to my long black rubber boots, Back to my old patched coat; Back to my rod And the breath of God— Home—and my leaky boat.

THE EDUCATION OF PRAED

By Albert White Vorse

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HENRY MCCARTER.

Daniel Webster cut from the seal a morsel of meal eight inches long by two inches square. He crowded out of sight as much of the delicacy as his mouth and part of his œsophagus would hold—about six inches—and sliced off the visible two inches with a blow of his knife.

"I never knew before," commented Praed, "why the Eskimo nose was so snubby. I now see it all. It is a beautiful example of the law of survival. If you touch an Eskimo anywhere, you draw blood. The long-nosed men of the Stone Age slashed their skins at meal-times and died of hemorrhage. Only the short-nosed men could live. Even Daniel carves perilously close to his lovely snub—and if Daniel's nose were a little shorter it would be a cavity."

"Just so," I replied, indifferently. Praed's jaunty talk jarred upon me, and his superior tone toward the Eskimos displeased me. He was attached to the Relief Party as botanist. I believe he was a Professor of Natural History in some Western college. He had climbed a mountain in the Canadian Rockies, a minor peak, no difficult ascent. I am told that a carriage road has recently been opened to the summit. But the mountain was a virgin peak and bore a living glacier, and Praed wrote for the papers about it and made a great achievement of his exploit. Upon the strength of his reputation he assumed to direct the policy of the Relief Expedition, and when the leader refused to fall in with his views, Praed grumbled, and once or twice approached open insubordination. The leader, a modest fellow, took his unruly botanist quietly, but several members of the party told me the man worried him.

However, when it suited his purpose, Praed could be humble enough. He discovered my irritation at once and evidently thought to soothe it.

"Oh, come now, old fellow," he said. "Don't take your Eskimos too seriously; I admire them as much as you do. Here, Daniel—Dahlgren, how do you say 'I like you' in Husky-tongue?"

"_Iblee pee-yook amishuwa_," answered I, in the pidgin-Eskimo we had learned to use during our year in the Far North.

"_Iblee kumook amistwa_," repeated Praed. Daniel received the communication with that heavy gravity which had won him his nick-name; his birth-name was Meeoo. Praed shrugged his shoulders.

"I never shall learn the lingo," he sighed. "Tell him I am going to give him this knife."

"_Ooma pilletay iblee savik_," I translated.

Daniel received the knife without comment. I caught a flash of pleasure in his eye, but it escaped Praed.

"He doesn't seem very grateful," he said. "I despair of the aborigine. He has no sense of humor, no gratitude, apparently no more affection than his dogs. He is pure selfishness. He is homely, he is fearfully unclean—"

"Professor Praed," I interrupted, "you arrived in Greenland three days ago. After you have knocked about with these fellows for a month you will change your opinions. As for dirt, eight or nine months in every year that bay is skimmed over with a little matter of five or six feet of ice. Until your party came, there was not a hatchet in the tribe to cut baths. In winter all these little streams that you see disappear. The Husky has to melt ice for drinking-water, and that is no light affair for him. In summer, it's true, he might bathe; perhaps you would like to try it."

"Those are all very well as excuses," responded Praed; "but they don't remove facts. Your dear friends are disgustingly soiled. And I am going to accept your invitation to take a bath."

He did accept it. He said he was accustomed to cold water, every morning (implying in his tone, that he feared I wasn't); that he had been baptized in the Susquehanna River through a hole in the ice, and that he guessed he could stand a summer sea in Greenland. He took off his clothes, swam out to a berg, grounded some forty feet off the beach, climbed hurriedly upon the ice, and danced up and down and shouted until we put off in a boat and rescued him. For three days afterward he shivered under blankets and drank up the little store of whiskey that remained in our supplies.

I was not sorry that this object-lesson had occurred. Our expedition had lived for nineteen months among the Eskimos. Two or three of us, whose chief duty was hunting, had learned to know the Innuit as one knows brothers. In a savage land you choose your friends, not because they can judge a picture or say witty things about their neighbors, but because they will go through any emergency by your side. More than once Daniel or one and another of our Eskimo comrades had saved us from death; more than once we had interposed between a Husky and the Kokoia. It was not pleasant to hear the cock-a-whoop members of the Relief Party, with their amateur knowledge of Arctic conditions, classify our comrades among the Greenland fauna.

But the Relief Party got on well with the Eskimos. They had a cargo of knives, hatchets, saws, needles, scissors, wooden staves, and all things that represent wealth to the Innuit. These things they distributed freely among the settlements; it was but natural that they should win the hearts of the Husky-folk.

Praed reappeared after his chill with a triumphant air, bearing bead necklaces and mirrors—for trading, he said. The Eskimos, however, shook their heads at these gewgaws, and Praed had to fall back upon useful articles. He obtained for himself the office of chief distributor, and waxed popular in the tribe.

One day, a fortnight or so after the episode of the bath, Daniel's wife, Megipsu, came running up the beach.

"The man with gifts is at my tupik. He desires something. I do not understand him. Will you come?"

I found Praed holding out the skirt of his coat toward Megipsu's little daughter.

"Like this," he was repeating. "Make me a coat. Scion of a savage race, if I had you at home, I should chastise you. You are stupid."

The child stared blankly at him.

"What is it, Professor Praed?" I asked.

His face turned red, and his reply came hesitatingly.

"Well, you see," he said, "your Greenland climate is not what I expected. When the wind is quiet, everything is warm. When the gale comes up in the afternoon, it is cold. Now the—the fur clothes; their odor is as the odor of abattoirs. At first I didn't comprehend the evident joy you have in them. But, on the whole, you seem so comfortable in all weathers, that I thought I'd try a suit myself. You see, I don't like to be lumbered with a leather jacket all the time."

"Hm!" reflected I, "Praed is learning his Greenland." All I suggested, however, was that if he minded the smell he might carry his leather coat out with him and leave it upon a rock until he should need it.

"And have it stolen," he said, with a glance of pity.

I perceived that he had a great deal of Greenland yet to learn. The most northern Eskimos do not steal. I arranged with Megipsu for a sealskin suit, however, to cost two pairs of scissors, a packet of sail-needles, a hunting-knife, a cracker-box, and Praed's wooden signal-whistle, which Megipsu fancied. In a week the Professor appeared in the silvery clothes. He was highly enthusiastic. I listened patiently while he explained the garments.

"You see, when it is warm," he said, "I can loosen the draw-string and throw back the hood, and a draught of air comes in from the bottom and goes out at the neck and carries off the perspiration. When the wind rises, snap! I haul in the draw-string, cover my head, and I am hermetically sealed. Not a chill can touch me."

"Precisely," I agreed. I had been wearing Eskimo clothes for a year and two months. "I understand," I added, "that you are going oogsook-hunting with Meeoo."

"Yes," he laughed. "I'm going to show the untutored savage the superiority of the rifle over the harpoon."

He learned more about Greenland upon that expedition. There was a floe, perhaps a mile wide, anchored near the mouth of the bay by half a dozen grounded bergs. To this floe the Eskimo and the white man set forth in kayaks. It was midnight when they left and we were asleep, but the Huskies at the village told us that the Professor couldn't manage his canoe, and finally had to permit Daniel to tow him.

Next night they returned with a seal. The Professor had many words of praise for a country where the sun never sets and there is no loss of working-time, but nothing to say about the hunting. At last he confessed that Daniel had killed the seal.

"The _phoca barbata_ is a wary animal," he protested. "He will not permit a white face to approach. Two or three of the creatures were taking sun-baths upon the floe, but before I could creep within shooting distance they flopped into the water—a most ungraceful gait. All Arctic animals seem to be clumsy. I fired at one seal and I think I hit him, but he, too, dived. At last I resigned the rifle to Daniel. The savage squirmed over the ice like a worm. When the seals lifted their heads, Daniel lifted his. It is not surprising that he deceived them. His black muzzle looks precisely like that of the seal, and he wears a seal's fur. But his methods would never do in civilization. It took him half a day to crawl across that ice-floe."

"But he shot the seal," someone put in.

"No," replied the Professor. "That's just the point. He wormed himself along until he could almost reach the creature, and then sprang upon it and clubbed it to death with the butt."

I do not think Praed fully appreciated the marvellous adroitness of the hunter, nor the thoughtfulness of the man in saving a cartridge. He never seemed to comprehend that a charge of powder and bullet is worth more to an Eskimo than a diamond is to a bride at home. However, he began after that to treat the Huskies somewhat as if they were human beings.

His complete enlightenment as to the Eskimo character came all in a blaze at the end of our stay in Greenland. Our work there was done. Our explorations had been successful, our scientific collections were almost completed. There were only the loose ends to be gathered up.

The Professor had seen some desirable flowers in a valley across a glacier. Near that same glacier, in the preceding summer, I, who was acting as mineralogist of the main party, had piled a few specimens in a cranny to be carried to camp later, and I thought I might as well have them. We started forth together. Daniel and one or two other Huskies went with us for comradeship.

At the edge of the glacier we halted. It was a stupendous thing, crawling through a gap in the hills down into the sea like a section of the Midgard serpent. Halfway up the flank, I remember, there was a round hole, and out of it spouted a waterfall, red with basaltic mud. One of the Æsir might have made such a wound with his spear.

The back of the monster was rugged with crevasses.

"You can't cross here," I counselled. "You'd better try farther up, where it's smoother. I'll climb the cliff and take an observation, while you wait here and eat your luncheon. It doesn't do to hurry too much in Greenland."

I was almost an hour making my way up the crags to a point where I could take a bird's-eye view of the mass of ice. It was not a wide glacier—the cliffs opposite were not more than four miles away—but the great number of icebergs it threw off bore witness to the rapidity of its motion.

Suddenly, almost below me upon the blue-white ice, appeared four or five black figures. They emerged out of a cleft near the edge and marched steadily toward the centre of the glacier. The surface beyond them and upon either hand was criss-crossed with blue crevasses. Glints from the shining icicles hanging down their sides darted up to me as I stood, a mile away. It was very picturesque, but I had no heart for enjoyment.

"The man is crazy!" I burst out and scrambled down the rough stones to overtake him.

In a quarter of an hour I had reached the bottom of the gorge, between the glacier and the mountain. A furious torrent roared along the side of the ice, but a few pinnacles of rock protruding out of the stream gave foothold to cross. Opposite my landing-place a huge blue cleft in the ice, with a gradually rising peak, furnished easy ascent to the surface.

As soon as my head was clear of the cleft, I saw one of the Eskimos running toward me. I hastened to meet him.

"Pra' has fallen!" cried the man. "The ice has eaten him. He has gone to sleep forever."

"Damnation!" I shouted. "Run to the ship. Tell all the white men to come and bring a rope!"