Part 13

Then Augusta, after she had waved in answer to his call, did an odd thing. She dropped her pack, which had been slung front and back over her shoulder, and went down from the path to the brook. From where he ran Jimmie could not see her, but he knew what she was doing. She was washing her face, to hide things.

She was back in the path and had taken up her pack when Jimmie reached her.

"I sold Donahue," she announced. "I got a hundred dollars for him. Of course, I had to _give_ the wagon away with him. But it would really have been absurd of us to try to feed him through the winter when he wouldn't be of any use to us at all."

Her voice was cool and so matter of fact that for the instant Jimmie wondered. Was it possible that she did not care? That she really was thinking of the money? He took the bag of bundles away from her and stretching his arm about her they fell into step together. But, for the first time within his memory, he felt Augusta stiffen away from him.

He was surprised and a little inclined to resent her coolness. Unaccountably he found himself in a very bad temper and with no possible excuse for it. If he spoke he felt certain that they would quarrel and that he would be wholly and shamefully to blame. He did not speak, but there was a muttering resentment of something stirring up in him. It persisted, until he thought of Augusta as he had seen her coming trudging out of the dusk like some deserted, forlorn little squaw upon the trail. Then his natural insight came to him, and he knew, as well as if he had walked with her, that Augusta had cried bitterly all the way, and that she was now hardening herself against his sympathy lest she should break down and let him see what her day's work had cost her.

He understood now. And the thought of Augusta facing the dreary winter here without her pet and friend made him feel very bitterly the having to accept the sacrifice from her. Surely Augusta must know how he appreciated the sacrifice. But he could not tell her. He could not say a word, for all the time his mind was biting in upon itself and he was mumbling, "Wouldn't it be nice now if I were to speak up and say just what's the simple truth--'I'm awfully sorry, Augusta, but of course you had to have the money to feed me all winter.' That _would_ sound pretty, and comforting, wouldn't it!"

Because he was as ignorant of Augusta as all fairly good men will always be of women, he did not know that Augusta wanted him to say nothing of the kind. What she did want him to do was to take her forcibly in his arms and _tell_ her that he understood all that it meant to her. Like all men who think quickly and deeply he did not know the value of the spoken word, to a woman. He did not know that, while intuition and understanding are very well within certain limits, there are certain things which to a woman are never true until she hears them spoken in so many words.

They walked on in a silence that grew every moment more painful, until Wardwell knew that he could bear it no longer. He must say something. At random he said the very worst thing, naturally.

"I had no idea," he ventured, "that anybody would be wanting to buy horses at this time of year."

"Nobody did want to buy. Mr. Gamblin was sorry for me, I guess, and bought him, for speculation, he said. I'll feel obliged to give back the money if he isn't able to sell him again."

"Oh, it was Gamblin, was it?" said Jimmie grumpily. He was not concerned with Augusta's problem in ethics. He had somebody to blame now, and he was furiously angry with Jethniah Gamblin. What business had that old schemer to take Augusta at her word in that way?

They came to the house in silence and prepared and ate a meal that was the most cheerless and dreary that these two had ever eaten together. When it was over and the things were cleared away Jimmie settled into his chair by the table lamp, took up pad and pencil and pretended to believe that he was going to work.

Augusta busied herself for a little while, doing unnecessary things about the fire, and then stole miserably away to the little curtained corner where her hammock hung.

She had started out in the morning with the glow of sacrifice burning clear and sweet in her heart. And now it was night, dark night. Her sturdy friend, her faithful confidante was gone. She had basely sold him because she was afraid he would eat too much. Men would pass him from one hard hand to another, and he would be beaten for the sin of being old. Meanwhile, she would save lumps of sugar and quarts of oats. And Jimmie did not care.

The glow of her sacrifice was cold and dead and the ashes of it were in her hair.

In the morning Jimmie awakened to the fact that he was alone in the room. He had not heard Augusta go out. Or was it that she had just this instant gone and that her going had stirred him out of deep sleep. He dressed hastily, wondering at his excitement. She had run out to see Donahue. She often did that the very first thing in the morning. But there was no Donahue out there any more, he remembered. And he hurried still more.

Although there was obviously no reason for her going to the empty stable, he still expected to find her there. The door of the stable was shut, but as he came nearer he heard the sound of singing. It was the same little song that Augusta was singing that day when he came home and found her practicing on the typewriter, but there was another sound mingling with the song now. It was like nothing but the rythmic, rapid tapping of little feet upon a bare floor. Could Augusta be in a mood for singing and dancing after last night?

Jimmie turned cautious and stole away from the door of the stable, around to the side where there were seams in the stable wall. He would not have thought of spying upon Augusta. But he was worried now. There was something almost hysterical in the sound of the merry little song and the patter of the dancing feet. He knew that she had been deeply hurt last night and that she had been too quiet about it. And there had been a time when he was very much afraid of the effect upon her of any strong suppressed emotion.

"Gyp, Gyp me little horse? "_Gyp-Gyp_, again sir."--

The song broke freshly upon him as he gained a view of the interior of the barn. To his eyes, blinking in the bright morning light, it was almost dark within. But a single bar of strong sunlight from a little window right over where Jimmie stood went in and fell directly upon the little figure of his wife dancing in the middle of the floor.

The effect was as though she had thought of an audience and had staged a spotlight on herself as she sang and danced. But Jimmie knew that she had not thought of any such thing. Her little face was as white as a hunted banshee's. Though her feet pattered lightly as summer raindrops on a roof, yet there was pain in them; as though she danced upon the grave of something dear to her. Her song was not loud, but the happy little lilt in it was a lie. For, to Wardwell who partly understood and partly guessed, it was nothing but a wail and a heart-break. And he was dimly aware that he was not likely, either in this life or anywhere else, to suffer anything more bitter than those moments standing there watching and listening.

The dance broke off suddenly, not because it was finished but because Augusta could no longer keep up the pretence.

She ran over to Donahue's stall and leaning her arms on the partition she buried her face in them and began to cry wildly. But it was only for a moment. Then she raised her head with a brave, challenging shake and said steadily:

"That's all. That's the last, Donahue. Jimmie doesn't care. And I'll never, never let him see how much I cared!"

Wardwell understood now, to the full.

He knew that he should go to her now and try to tell her how much he did care. But just then something sneered within him and laughed at the idea of his "going to her and mumbling about how much he cared, and yet accepting her sacrifice all the time." No, he could not talk to her about it. He must do something to show that he did care, that could not mawkishly take this from her. He must get her pet back for her before he could talk to her. He hurried back into the house and lighted the fire.

When Augusta came in it was evident that she had again visited the brook. She was clear eyed and smiling and her face gave no sign that it had been swept by anything harsher than the sweet cool breath of the morning.

"I was down by the brook," she said, truthfully, "and I saw your fire. From the looks of the smoke, I thought you were trying to burn the house."

"Where there's smoke there's fire. The more smoke the more fire," he said cheerfully, opening a window to let out some of the smoke.

"It doesn't follow," Augusta argued.

"Besides, I'm going hunting."

"Again? Didn't you hunt all day yesterday?"

"No. I followed a fox. It wasn't hunting. It was gambling. But I've got a system worked out to beat him. I figured it out during the night that, at the rate he was going when I saw him last, he will in about three quarters of an hour from now be just turning on his first lap around the world. I shall be at the turn waiting for him."

"I hope he shows a proper sense of his engagements," said Augusta politely. "It would be annoying if he stopped for a drink or anything on the way. But I wish you had timed the meeting to come off before you filled the house quite so full of smoke. I like to smell the tang of wood smoke. But I don't like to eat it."

They ate a hearty and a cheerful breakfast, and Jimmie prepared for instant departure.

"I may be gone all day," he announced, "It'd be just like the scalawag to fool me and go around the other way."

"It's probably a stray dog, anyway," she teased after him as he started up the hill.

Jimmie went over the brow of the hill out of sight of the house. When he was safe from observation he hid his gun securely in the hollow hole of a tree, and, skirting away around the hills out of sight of the sugar camp and the road, he made his way as fast as his legs could carry him toward Jethniah Gamblin's place of business.

He found the United States post office closed and locked at nine o'clock in the morning, and there was no one in sight. He banged and rattled roughly at the door, for in the course of his morning's walk he had worked up a grievance against Jethniah and by this time he was blaming him for everything that had happened. There was a cautious movement within the store and Jimmie saw a head appear near the window from an ambuscade of flour sacks. The door was slowly opened, a matter of inches, and Jimmie squeezed his way in.

"What kind of a--?" Jimmie began upon his argument. But Jethniah shut and bolted the door and retreated to an inner citadel behind the barricade of post office boxes.

"What's the idea?" Jimmie inquired. "Have you been tapping the postal revenues, or is it merely the county sheriff that's coming for you."

But Mr. Gamblin had no heart for badinage. He sat down heavily and groaned:

"Just like a post in the mud!"

Jimmie, looking around, saw that the door which led from the store into Mr. Gamblin's living establishment was shut and barred. He guessed, correctly, that the store was a fortress under close siege. There was an old overcoat and a store blanket over the back of Jethniah's chair. It was fairly deducible that Mr. Gamblin had spent the night in that chair. The old man's face bore out the conclusion.

Wardwell suddenly found that his indignation at the old man over yesterday's bargain had disappeared. He was convinced that the buying of the horse from Augusta had brought down vengeance on Jethniah's head, from "that bitter voiced old woman," as he recalled her. Certainly Mr. Gamblin did look punished.

"I came down about the horse," he said, as Jethniah offered no explanation of the situation. "I don't believe you were very keen on the bargain, anyway. And the fact is that my wife misses the horse a whole lot. Of course, a deal's a deal. But if I put it that my wife didn't know how badly she was going to miss her pet, and if I offer you ten dollars over what you paid for him I thought maybe you might let me have the horse back."

Mr. Gamblin struggled to his feet and ejaculated:

"Damn ten dollars! But if you'll only take your cross-eyed, knock-kneed, horn-swoggled shin plaster of a horse, and that calico travellin' house of a wagon away where my wife'll never see them again, why maybe I can get into my own house again!"

Jimmie laughed. He knew that the old man's anger was not really against Donahue. It was probably the first chance he had had for a good many hours to say a few words, and Wardwell sympathised with him.

Just then the door leading into the house was rattled violently. It was plain that the old gentleman's raised voice had penetrated the door.

"Well," said Jimmie hastily, "I haven't got the money with me now, but I think I can get it before night. And you'll let me have the horse?"

"Any whang-doodled thing you like!" said the old man devoutly, as he reconnoitred towards the door and opened it for Wardwell. "Only get the things away from here before I get violent!"

Wardwell started for the railroad station and telegraph office. It was mid-afternoon before he had an answer to the wire which he sent. And it was later still before the unwilling and suspicious operator grudgingly counted out to him the money for which the message called. But before dark he was back at Jethniah Gamblin's and had handed the latter his money, out in the open yard where a certain unmentioned person might see that this was a bona fide transaction.

Donahue clattered contentedly up the track along by the brook, while Jimmie glowed with the triumph of achievement.

If he had known anything of women, he would have known that he had that day committed the one sin which a woman never forgives a man. And he would already have begun to tremble against the day when he would inevitably be found out. But he did not know anything about women.

Augusta, worried and lonesome, had left the light burning in the house, for it was now dark, and had wandered up toward the hill over which Jimmie had gone in the morning. She heard the well remembered rattle of the wagon coming up through the trees and came running down, wondering.

She met Donahue squarely in the light from the open door and rushed at him with a little whimper of joy. The old horse reached his head down over her shoulder and actually hugged her to him.

Wardwell came down from the wagon, and was kissed without questions. The questions would come later.

VIII

"This was the time the Divil was goin' through Athlone," John McQuade announced, giving the explanation before the fact.

"I remember," Wardwell agreed politely. "He went through 'in standing leaps.'"

McQuade and Jimmie were telling lies in a corner of the sugar house.

It was the first "sugaring off" of the season. McQuade's three sons and two hired men had been in the camp ten days now, breaking roads through the settling snow, scalding out sap buckets and boiling pans, and tapping trees. Jimmie and Augusta, in wonder and ignorance, had watched the men going from tree to tree with augers, boring out a hole in each, into which they drove the wooden spout, and hung the tin bucket beneath. They stood among the bare trees on a southerly slope of the hills where the late March sun of a lovely morning beat warm and strong, and they saw a miracle.

Neither of them had more than half believed that sap would actually run from trees that stood stark and apparently dead. But, as they stood there feeling the drawing warmth of the sun in their own veins, it happened. In the breathless hush of the morning a single drop from a tree near them struck upon the resounding bottom of the dry bucket like the stroke of a little bell. It was a signal.

Up and down the sunny slope another and another and a hundred other echoes of the little bell rang out until the many sounds merged themselves into a single tinkling chorus, and the sap of earth was running free!

Mother nature was not dead. She had slept, and now she was stirring to feed the hungry world. Jimmie and Augusta looked at each other half shyly, as though they had spied upon a Mystery.

That was four days ago, and since then, all day long, the deliberate, unworried oxen had wallowed belly deep through the melting snow, only approximately responsive to excited shouts of "jee" and "haw," dragging on the rough low sledges the hogsheads into which the men emptied the buckets of sap from the trees. Night and day the great brick furnace that ran full length down the middle of the sugar house had roared. Jimmie and Augusta had kept open fire in the front of it during the bitterest of the winter, and Jimmie had many times complained that his back was broken carrying wood for it. But where he had carried armfuls, the furnace now demanded cords. It raced and danced and panted in a furious race with the running sap, for the sap must be boiled down to syrup almost as fast as it ran.

Already they had seen the dark, thick syrup poured into the cans and sealed. And having eaten of it, Jimmie and Augusta, used to the article that is sold in bottles in our cities as pure maple syrup, wondered what must become of this kind which they had now tasted. For certainly nobody that they had ever known had been rich enough to buy any of it.

But they had seen what they were told were the best batches of the syrup put aside for the "sugaring off." The term meant nothing to either of them, for they had never heard of it before. But the constant reference to it and the careful timing of everything that went on in the camp with a sole regard for this event soon made them look towards it as eagerly as if they had been a sugar hungry boy and girl in the camp waiting for nothing but the great day.

Today McQuade had come for the event. And with him had come Fan McQuade, his wife. She was a tall, slender woman, unmistakably a daughter of women who a hundred years ago and more trailed from Vermont over into our North Country. There was strength and unspent beauty in her face, and in spite of the argument of her three mighty sons she seemed entirely too young to be a mate for John McQuade. Her face was grave and there was a thrifty tidiness about her person and her speech that made you wonder how she had ever come to marry a man like McQuade.

Of course, twenty years after the fact, you have the same wonder as to why almost any woman married her particular man. And most of them will tell you, in what they think are moments of truth telling, that they quarreled with the right man, and just took this one for spite. All of which is probably just as true--and no more so--as it is true that distant fields are greener than the ones we are treading now.

But Augusta did wonder, on sight, how this grave faced woman had given herself to the happy-go-lucky young greenhorn that John McQuade probably had been twenty-five years ago. She wondered, until she heard Fan McQuade laugh. It was a surprised, and surprising, burst of pure merriment, beginning with a startled chuckle and ringing out into a clear peal of sheer joy in fun. Then Augusta understood it all. This girl of a sober race was not herself a fun maker, but she loved to be made laugh. McQuade had made her laugh. And he had then blarneyed his way into her heart, past religious and racial and temperamental differences and barriers that would have stopped a thoughtful man.

However, Augusta reflected, it must have been well with them, for McQuade was still able to make his Fan laugh. She laughed now as she overheard the unfolding of McQuade's tale to Jimmie.

"The Divil was lookin' for a man by the name of Barney McGonigle," McQuade stated gravely, while Wardwell listened with the professional interest and envy of a brother artist.

"Now, this man McGonigle, as I understand it, was a man with a weakness. 'Twas known that he tasted spirits. He had been drunk for two weeks. At the latter end of that time, as luck would have it, he was a little bit wide of his bearings. He wandered into an Orange Lodge.

"The stairway going up to the Lodge room was guarded with a drawn sword, of course. But McGonigle came _down_. He'd been resting on the roof of the place.

"When McGonigle came in the Lodge was on its feet and they were in the solemn act of repeating three times: 'To hell with the Pope.'

"There was some little excitement when McGonigle came in without knockin', and he was fairly on his way to being thrown through the window before the Grand Master could rap for order.

"There was but one of two things to be done. Either McGonigle must be killed outright. Or he must repeat: 'To hell with the Pope,' as they did.

"McGonigle bein' an agreeable man be nature, an' his principles bein' far demoralized in drink, agreed to say it.

"Had they watched him closer they might have seen that he stopped a little before the last word.

"But, after all, McGonigle was a good neighbor, and, barrin' the Seventeenth of March an' the Twelvth of July, a good friend. Along with that, he was the only journeyman farrier in the town. I misdoubt they were only too glad to have him say it any way at all, and be rid of him.

"When McGonigle came down past the drawn sword into the sunshine he was thirsty, for water. He went down to the lough, thinkin' to drink at least the half of it.

"In the middle of the first dhrink, the Divil leapt down to the brink of the lough and stood forninst McGonigle.

"'A word with you, Misther McGonigle,' says the Divil, polite, but firm.

"McGonigle lifted one eye from his dhrinkin' and saw the Divil confrontin him in the shape of a big black horse with saddle and stirrups on him, but no bridle.

"'I need me breath for me dhrinkin',' says McGonigle.

"'Nevertheless,' says the Divil.

"'Gluggle, gluggle, gluggle,' says McGonigle, taking another pull at the lough.

"With that, the Divil lost his temper, an' he stamped an' he lepped till he shook the whole town, an' he shook all the impudence out of poor McGonigle.

"'Get on me back,' commands the Divil.

"An' poor McGonigle, with the courage of the whiskey dead in him, an his belly squishin' full o' lake water, had no more gumption than to do as he was bid.

"Then it was that the Divil went bumping through Athlone in standin' lepps, as you've heard. He was tryin' to frighten McGonigle, for he was not sure whether he had him truly in his power.

"'Ye said it,' accused the Divil, boundin' high around a sharp corner.

"'I said what?' demands McGonigle circumstantial. He knew right well that the Divil would never dare repeat the Orangemen's invocation. For McGonigle in his sober moments was a well read man, and, with a moderate amount of dhrink in him, he was a theologian.

"'Come now, Barney me boy,' says the Divil, wheedlin' snarefully, 'ye said it, an' ye know ye said it, an' I know ye said it. So where's the use o' denyin'?'

"'I said,' says McGonigle, speakin' careful an' precise--'To be sure I said part of it under me breath, but I said it--I said: 'To hell with the _Anti_-pope'.'

"Now the Anti-pope, as you must know," McQuade explained, "the Anti-pope was the Divil himself.

"Then there _was_ a too-ru! The Divil was that mad that he stood still and lepped straight up an' down. An' he was so enraged at McGonigle that he got his foot up into the stirrup beside McGonigle's, as though he was tryin' to come up at him.

"'Glory be!' says McGonigle, lookin' down between prayers. 'Look at the Omadhon tryin' to get on his own back!'

"But, as McGonigle looked down he saw things. He was an expert farrier, an' he knew that that was no proper foot for a right horse. And, at this point, he was enough of a theologian to remember that once a man sees the Divil's cloven hoof he is not lost yet.