Part 8

"I suppose, Donahue," she apologized, "it isn't proper for a gypsy to wear rubbers. Probably I ought to go barefoot, but you won't please expect that, for a little while anyway. Now I hate to hurry your breakfast," she explained as she brought the bridle, "but you know Jimmie hasn't had any yet, and doesn't know where he's going to get any. And I strongly suspect that you're only pretending anyhow. I'm almost sure," she said peering sharply down into the bucket where Donahue was making a hurried business of snuffing up imaginary oats, "that you finished the last of your oats five minutes ago. Hold up your head, sir."

Donahue did not understand the spoken word. Mary Donahue had a way of slapping him sharply under the jaw at this juncture. But out of the corner of his eye he saw the bridle and raised his head cheerfully.

The harness was mean and sticky with the rain and the mildew of the night's dampness, and Jimmie had been none to expert in hanging it away so that it would come out right and convenient. But with much tugging and careful study and brave whistling in the rain, and more tugging, Donahue was finally backed into the shafts and the traces made fast. When all was ready and Augusta was about to climb into the wagon she noticed what seemed to be some entirely superfluous straps hanging down towards Donahue's hind feet.

They were, of course, the "hold-back" straps, to keep the wagon from bumping the horse's legs going down hill. Augusta could see no earthly use for them, but she knew they were out of place dangling down there. They gave Donahue a half dressed effect which she did not like. She wondered if she ought to consult Jimmie, but after more study she remembered triumphantly that they went around the shafts. She wound them around the shafts and buckled them up neatly. Knowing nothing of their importance or their purpose, she could not know that the proper fastening home of a hold-back strap to the shaft is a thing that must be learned, and learned young. Everything now looked right and neat, so she climbed up and fixed the driving curtain as Mary Donahue had shown her how to do.

"Do you think you'd better start," Jimmie objected through the inner curtain at the last minute. "I'd rather go hungry all day than to see you out there in the rain. I'm not hungry anyway."

"Why, who cares for a little rain. Giddap, Donahue," she sang out tightening up the reins.

Donahue picked his way soberly out through the trees and in spite of Augusta's tugging on the left hand rein to turn him up the road deliberately crossed to the spring.

"I didn't think you'd ever want water again," Augusta explained her oversight, "after last night."

Donahue took his accustomed morning draught, and, blowing the water from his nostrils, turned sedately and started up the road.

Jimmie sat upon his bunk, fully dressed, shivering miserably and trying to choke down the sound of his coughing. The wagon swayed along creaking and complaining as they climbed the grade. He rose to look out through the rear curtain at the gray, sodden day. He wished that Augusta could not hear his cough. He knew that it hurt her really more than it did him. And he wished, he wished, well--several things. As he stood there, thinking vaguely, dejectedly, he felt the wagon slip forward gently, and then there was a slight bump.

The wagon was yanked forward so roughly that he nearly fell out through the curtain. He caught himself and swaying back was pitched into his bunk. He scrambled up again and clutching desperately at the side of his bunk managed to get forward to the back of the driving seat. Tearing apart the curtain he tumbled into the seat and understood what was happening.

The hold-back straps had slipped loose, the wagon was bumping cruelly on Donahue's legs at every jump, and he was running away madly down a long hill.

The driving curtain had broken down in front of Augusta. She was down on her knees in the wet, her hair flying wildly about her, tugging despairingly at the reins over the dashboard, and praying:

"Oh, please, please, Donahue! What is it? What is it? Please, whoa. I don't care, but you'll hurt Jimmie Oh, please stop and don't hurt Jimmie!"

Then she turned to another quarter:

"Dear, dear God, and Mary Mother, please don't let Jimmie get hurt. It's my fault! You know I took him out this way. You know he didn't want to come," she appealed. "And I'll be so good. Oh, please don't let Jimmie be hurt!"

Wardwell slipped cautiously down and gathering her up braced her in the seat.

"Hold tight, dear," he commanded. "We'll be all right." And he braced himself to saw on the reins.

But Donahue by this time had the bit in his teeth, and so far as any effect of the reins was concerned Jimmie might as well have been pulling at the dashboard. The horse had no check rein. His head was down, his back flattened out, and he was running like a frightened dog, the wagon jolting down wickedly on his legs at every few jumps.

Jimmie knew that he was as frightened and as powerless as the girl crouching beside him. If he jumped with her, they would be hurt or killed. If they stayed and hung on the horse would surely stumble or the wagon would slew off the road--he looked down the winding stretch of the road and counted the curves and wondered at which one of them they would be thrown over the bank--or they would meet some heavy truck and be crushed.

The crazed fright of the horse came back to the hearts of the two behind him. The mad Rap-a-rap, Rap-a-rap of his frantic feet on the hard road, the wild careening of the wagon, the loud pumping of blood in their throats took from them all sense and thought as the rain beat unfelt upon their faces and trees and rocks and fences whirled drunkenly by.

Augusta was hugging closely now while Jimmie sawed mechanically at the reins, and he heard her praying quietly. His heart stopped beating as he looked down a sudden dip of the road below them and saw a country railroad crossing.

Beyond the tracks the road ran up a hill again. If he could only cross safely, he could stop the horse there where the incline of the hill would hold the wagon back from hitting him.

But because this was all an ordered nightmare, Wardwell heard, just where in a nightmare he would expect to hear it, the whistle of a train. He tried to drag the powerful crazed horse to the side of the road, to overturn the wagon if he must. But he might as well have tried to turn the oncoming engine.

Augusta saw the train coming toward the crossing, as they were coming. She did not cry out, only snuggled a little closer and waited. Then with one last mad dip the horse struck the tracks, and the wagon leaped across in front of the grinding engine.

A gray faced man leaning out of the cab of the engine yelled crazily at them, but they did not hear. Donahue ran on up the hill, until he seemed to miss something. The wagon was not hitting him any more. Then he became conscious of the tugging at his jaw. He slowed down to a weak-kneed stumbling trot, then to a walk, and stopped, shaking and panting.

Wardwell sat a while holding Augusta tight, for now she was crying bitterly in great gasping sobs.

When he had petted and quieted her back to something like herself, he started to get down to fix the hold-backs. He was shaking weakly himself and as he reached his foot down to the step his hand caught something for support. It was the handle of the brake.

He stumbled to his feet on the ground, and turning back, his hand still on the handle of the brake, he broke out into a hysterical laugh.

"Oh Jimmie, don't!" said Augusta, frightened anew.

"Augusta," he said solemnly, "don't ever marry a fool again."

"What--what--?"

"This," he explained, "is a brake, to stop the wagon. If I hadn't been a fool and lost my head I'd have thought of that brake and stopped us right at the start.

"But, anyhow, I think this is enough. We had better go back to the city, where people are paid to take care of us."

Augusta sat a little while thinking, while Jimmie fixed the hold-backs.

"Jimmie," she said simply, "do you think we'll ever go through anything worse than that?"

"No, my dear, we will not."

"Then we've passed the worst, already," she announced calmly. "Let us go and find your breakfast."

V

In the pearl dawn of a lovely July morning Augusta lay in her hammock, happily lazy and wide awake looking up at the line of the hills, watching the rosy light from the sun as it flushed color up into the pale eastern sky. Were these the hills of desire, she wondered, thinking vaguely of the words that had come to her while she studied the cards at the gypsy girl's bidding. The long, sun-drenched, dusty days upon the road, the sudden violent storms, the meetings with people who thought her so queer a gypsy, all had swept into a distant past the impression of that evening a month ago. A happy, busy month it had been, full of new things to be learned, of old, half forgotten things to be remembered, of careful explanations to people who did not listen; and three black, fearful days when Jimmie had been so bad that they could not move, days and especially nights when she had sat crouching beside him and had felt her faith and her dear high hope slipping from her and had frankly feared that he was dying.

Those nights of sinking fear seemed very far off this morning as she lay and looked at Jimmie stretched out along the length of the wagon on the other side, sleeping as smoothly and easily as a child. She could see that the skin still stretched drum tight over his temple hollows and she knew that there were still hollows under his big bony shoulders into which her two hands would fit. But she no longer feared these things, for she could see the vital tan of sun and wind creeping up across his face and driving away the hated pallor and she knew that this was the sign of life for him.

She smiled as she thought of the efforts she had wasted in trying to tell people the truth of why they were on the road in this way. She loved the freedom of the road, but she did not want to be taken too literally for a gypsy. So she was careful to explain to the farmer's wives to whom she went to buy eggs and milk and in the little village stores where she stopped for meat and bread that she had nothing to trade in the gypsy way, that she was just like anybody's wife travelling in this way for her husband's health. They believed her--everybody always believed Augusta on sight. But on returning to the wagon it was often to find Jimmie eloquently discoursing from the step of the wagon to a moderate sized crowd of people--Where _did_ they come from? She would wonder horrified--upon the universal merits of a certain gypsy remedy which had come down to him through a wonderful and ever varying procession of lineal antecedents, and which he was presently going to bestow, at a nominal price, upon this distinguished and intelligent audience.

Humiliated and angry, afraid that she would laugh and yet wanting to cry, Augusta would jump up into her seat and drive brusquely off, Jimmie swaying on the step and waving apologies for his untimely departure. To her shame, he actually did sell three bottles of cod liver oil, which he had himself refused to take. When, however, she caught him dressing up as hair restorer the bottle of harness oil which Mary Donahue's care had provided, Augusta asserted genuine authority and this outlet of his genius was stopped.

But in the matter of horse trading she found that she had no influence whatever. With a cheery hail and a wave of the arm he would stop anybody who drove a horse and proceed to ask pertinent and leading questions about the horse which the other person drove. And if he could but awaken in his listener's eye the faintest gleam of our American rural passion he would be down on the ground instantly, walking around the stranger's horse, squinting severely at him, cataloguing his points in technical terms wonderfully misplaced, with a dispassionate, steady flow of bewildering language, until his listener in sheer self defense turned the inquiry upon Donahue.

Jimmie would then throw up his head, one ear cocked in the air in that way he had, as though some new and interesting fact had been brought to his attention. Then he would talk of Donahue.

On ordinary days, when Jimmie was in no more than his usual good strain of talk, Donahue was only a pure blooded Arabian bay from a race of desert horses, whose breed and pedigree had been guarded jealously through a thousand years by Jimmie's own forbears. But when Jimmie was having a good day Donahue was apotheosized. He, Donahue, was in fact a lineal descendant of the fay white horses that used to run wild under the lakes in Ireland in the days of the giants. Jimmie reminded his listener truculently that Colonel Roosevelt had written all about these things in his studies of the Irish Sagas, and he dared him to admit that he had not read anything of it. Our rural people do not like to admit complete ignorance of any given thing. They generally agreed that they "had heard something about it."

That was enough for Jimmie's case. Donahue's rusty color proved the matter--Those horses would certainly have turned rusty after all that water.

It was in vain that Augusta explained to Jimmie that these people really thought him crazy, and that they only listened to him and humored him because they were afraid that he would turn violent. Not argument, nor ridicule, nor even tears could break him from his mania of proposing to trade Donahue to every person who drove a horse and who could be persuaded to stop and listen to him. And Augusta could only sit in her place, smothering her laughter and her anger until he was willing to break off his farce and drive on.

She remembered one awful day in the Mohawk Valley between Little Falls and Herkimer when he had stopped in succession, and labored with, a candidate for Congress, who foolishly tried to sow the good political seed which was quickly blown away in the breeze of Jimmie's zeal, with a butcher, with a jolly old farmer who declared that if he had Jimmie's tongue he would go on the road himself, with a capable spinster who drove a smart horse and plainly showed that she would have liked to crack her whip at Jimmie's ear, with a veterinary surgeon--with whom he nearly came to blows, and with a minister of the Gospel.

Now their way was quieter, for they had left the main travelled roads at Remsen and were faring straight into the heart of the hills. "You can follow the M. & M. from Remsen," Mary Donahue had told Augusta. "We never go that way, for there's no people much and the roads are rough. But that's where the sick people all go. And you'll be all right. Just keep somewhere not too far from the railroad. There's always some kind of a road, and you can't get lost when you're not going anywhere in particular anyway."

Augusta had as yet no definite plans. She had not indeed thought of the need of any plans. Never had two birds set forth on flight into the northland with less thought of the end of the summer than Augusta and Jimmie had taken of where they might be when the nip of chilly nights should come to warn them that the summer was over. Augusta had thought only of a long, long summer of happy drifting before the end of which Jimmie would somehow be wonderfully cured. And beyond that point her thought had not gone.

With the sight of the solid hills before her, into which they had been slowly climbing for some days, it seemed that the future was suddenly drawing up to them with a sharpened, stiffened outline. The hills looked so definite and decided that it seemed almost an impertinence to go wandering at will among them without object or settled purpose. Their very stillness and the steady, ordered lines of them as they tiered up, hill behind hill, to meet the rising sun, reminded Augusta that even here the rule of order of the world held good. People must not go on too long trusting to the future just because the future is a vague thing and far away.

The days along the road had taught her many things, and here where they were almost in the big woods her eyes and ears were being sharpened in the silences to learn and to understand the life of the little wild things that rustled and scuttled through the grass and twittered in the tree-tops and called sleepily to each other in the twilight.

Last night at dusk she had walked out on a bridge over a swampy creek and had seen a muskrat jump from the tall grass of the bank into the water and swim in a straight line, only the tip of his nose showing above the water, right to his house. Then she had thought only of how swiftly and quietly he had slipped away. Now she remembered that the largest part of his wild wisdom was that he had a home to get into and that he knew just where it was.

And yesterday she had seen a dog chasing another dog--Jimmie said it was a woodchuck, but she had no great faith in Jimmie's wood lore. It was too universal, too impromptu and, alas! too agreeable and accomodating. The woodchuck--if Jimmie was right--had vanished suddenly in the middle of a bare, open field. He had a place to go to and he knew just where it was.

Even the melancholy owls who spread pessimism through the night were probably hooting each on his own doorstep.

She and Jimmie were not fitted with the instincts of these little wild things, to have a refuge always at hand against the storm that was sure to come.

And she had noticed that the smaller these wild things were the better they were equipped, in their apparent helplessness, to escape danger. The little meadow bird building her nest in the open field was the very color of the grass that stood up above her. And the busy woodpecker was invisible against the bark of the tree where he worked for his living.

Looking up at the suggestive strength of the hills Augusta thought how little and how unready people were in this great world that knew so well its own laws and how to take care of itself. And of all people she was sure that she and Jimmie were the least equipped, the least ready for the test of life in the swift sweeping changes that nature's order brings.

A little worried frown came clouding down over the morning light in Augusta's face and a sharp little crease of trouble set itself straight down in the middle of her forehead.

A new sound came now striking persistently at her attention and lifting finally, by a fresh interest, the worried frown. For many minutes she had been listening intermittently and subconsciously to what was evidently a connubial argument in a tree-top. Two birds were talking about her, or at least Augusta took the argument to herself and had been translating it idly into unconscious words while her thoughts were busy elsewhere.

An energetic, housewifely voice had been complaining insistently:

"Why _don't_ she get _up_-ee? "Why _don't_ she get _up_-ee?"

And a somewhat sleepy, tolerant, patently male, voice answered back good naturedly:

"Let'er _sleep_, let'er _sleep_."

The colloquy had rambled intermittently into other matters, but Augusta felt guiltily sure that the energetic housewife in the treetop had an eye upon her, for every little while she brought the dialogue back to

"Why _don't_ she get _up_-ee? "Why _don't_ she get _up_-ee?"

And male laziness answered comfortably:

"Let'er _sleep_, let'er _sleep_."

The sound that now broke off her half listening reverie was a short, plunking noise of something dropping into the little pond near which the wagon stood. Could it be that some boy on the hill at the other side was throwing stones into the pond.

She turned on her shoulder to watch the surface of the pond. Certainly there were the ripples spreading out in gentle waving circles from a centre at which something must have fallen into the pond. As her eye followed the waving circle toward the farther bank, right in the line of her vision there sprang straight out of the mirrored water a beautiful, tapering, black, silver and green body, that seemed to hang suspended an instant in a glistening arch and then dropped like a silver knife, without a splash, and was gone.

Augusta lay for a moment staring bewildered at the spot where the vision had disappeared.

Then she sprang for her dressing curtain and began to scuffle into her clothes. "If that fish would only wait!"

Jimmie had bought fish lines at a country store the other day and had rigged a pole after the manner that he had learned during boyhood summers in the country. Yesterday he had persisted in stopping to fish this stream lower down at a place that looked promising. And Augusta had jeered good-naturedly at him, and even Donahue had kicked, when the only result had been that they were all horridly bitten by great black flies.

Now yesterday's scepticism was forgotten. Jimmie should have fish for breakfast!--she knew how he sometimes loathed the milk and eggs that she forced upon him. But even this was an afterthought. She had seen her prey, and the fever of the hunt was tingling in her fingers as she tore the pole loose from its fastenings on the top of the wagon and grabbed a bit of pork rind for bait, jabbing it on to the hook as she ran down to the pond and around to the side where she had seen the bass.

Probably she expected him to be there waiting for her, for when she had looked sharply at the place where he had disappeared, and could see nothing, she did not know what to do.

She remembered that Jimmie had just dropped the bait to the surface and drawn it up again slowly, here and there at random without knowing whether there was a fish near or not. Obviously, Jimmie's way had been wrong, for he had caught nothing; and how could he expect to catch a fish if he didn't know where the fish was?

She decided to wait and see if he would not come up again. He did. Away at the farthest bend of the pond she heard the swish of his body as he leaped and was in time to see the silver flash of him shooting down into the water.

She started to run around the bank, but an instinct of primitive wiliness caught her and, instead, she dropped down flat and motionless in the grass at the very edge of the bank. That fish was hers. She knew it with a sudden fierceness of possession which if she had been able to think of herself would have shocked her. She would have fought the world with teeth and nails for him. But she knew that she would not get him by running after him. She would wait and make him come to her. Slowly and carefully she let the pole out over the water, the bait swinging gently just above the surface.

The sun was shining down past her shoulders as she lay there watching fiercely, and she was surprised to see the bottom of the pond clearly outlined in rocks and sand. It was her first real sight of sun-shot water in the hills, and to her whose city experience had told her that all ponds were dark and bottomless it would, at any other time, have been wonderful. Now it only meant that she would have that fish if she had to go into the pond after him. There was only one fish, she thought; so the contest was narrowed down to the personal bitterness of a duel.

She saw a thin dark line shoot across a bed of white sand. Could that be merely a fish swimming, that streak of playing lightning that had crossed again, under her fascinated eyes?

He had seen the shadow of the bait moving on the surface of the water, and he was, for a reason about which Augusta knew nothing, even more excited than the tensely nerved girl who watched for him, her head now leaning out over the bank, the weight of half her body resting on one elbow that dug a socket for itself in the dirt at the extreme edge of the bank.