Chapter 4

“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.