Chapter 2

They went up a path, past a garden, fenced with woven wire, through which the chickens looked longingly. Under some sashes forming a primitive greenhouse, lettuce and radishes were making good headway. Nothing else had come up, though there were many beds, with small slips of board, like miniature tombstones, showing what had been planted. The stables and cow-barn were all under one roof, and would accommodate several horses and a few cows. There was hay and fodder in a lot adjoining, and a few ordinary farm implements, a plow, a harrow, and a cultivator in a shed addition.

"Do you know what it is for?" she asked mischievously, as he pulled out the plow.

"Do you think I never remembered the granger vote in my ambitions?" he answered. "I can plow, and I have planted and snapped corn, and cut fodder, and dug potatoes--I wonder if there are any here?"

"Yes," she answered; "in the cellar, at least a bushel, mostly gone to eyes, but I forget how thick to cut them. If we were only 'The Swiss Family Robinson,'" she went on, "we should find yams and pineapples and oranges and sugar-cane and bananas coming up between the rocks. As it is, I am thankful to the congressman who sent the peas and morning-glories."

"There is only about enough wheat and corn to plant fifteen acres," Adam said, making a rough calculation in his mind. "I will plow a little over that, so as to have a patch for the potatoes, and get it ready as soon as possible."

"I know how to plant corn and potatoes," she said eagerly. "Just as soon as you get part of the land ready, I will begin. You didn't know I was brought up on a ranch, did you? I never was very fond of recalling it. It is a perpetual round of conditions unlike any theory ever heard of." She shrugged her shoulders, and stopped at the rude table under the porch to crumb some slices of what looked like a kind of cornbread.

"What is it?" he asked curiously.

"That is to enable us to make light of our troubles," she replied solemnly. "Or, for thy more sweet understanding it is, or at least I hope it will be, yeast. I found a Twin Brothers yeast cake, and from it, behold the brethren! I know that raised bread is unhealthy, and that to get the worth of your money you ought to eat the bran also, and that the best bread, from the hygienic standpoint, is made from wheat-paste, and is about the consistency of sole leather; but even if yeast does shorten our lives, I don't know that I shall give it up on that account."

The planting of their crops took several weeks, and was very hard work, for neither of them was an expert farmer. When the corn and wheat came up there were almost no weeds, and the stand was better than usual for sod land; but they were kept busy warding off the horses and cattle that preferred the fresh young corn and wheat to the indifferent natural grass.

"I thought," she said wearily, after driving away the intruders for the third time,--"I thought fences were a sign of civilization, but they seem to be the first necessity of the wilderness."

She was sitting on a rock, fanning her flushed face with her sombrero, when Adam came to her assistance.

"You should have waited," he said. "I was coming, but I had to hitch the team." He turned and looked at her, and laughed boyishly. "The run hasn't hurt you," he said; "you look like a wild rose. I believe I shall call you so; may I? I can't call you by the old name."

She colored hotly, then turned quite pale, and there was a touch of reserve in her voice as she answered rather too indifferently, "If you choose, still I think, O Adam Crusoe, that Friday or Robinson would be a better name."

"We'll compromise on Robin," he said. "A rose by any other name is just as sweet."

"I wish we had a fence," she said turning the subject hastily.

"We have," he answered. "If we were to build one ourselves, it would have to be of rocks, but Nature has provided a magnificent stone barrier. We have only to drive the animals we are not using through the gateway, and fasten that little wooden concern after them. There is good pasture outside, and if we need them we can go after them. Lassie will look after Daisy and Lily, won't you, little dog? I will go and open the gate and drive them through. You help Lassie keep those two back."

She stood undecidedly, and he turned and said gently, "I will come back without passing through the gateway. I will never pass it without you. I wouldn't dare. Now see how nicely Lassie will conduct this round-up."

As he went toward the gateway, her eyes followed him with a look he would hardly have comprehended, it was so full of relief and gratitude. He understood and reassured her without noticing her fears or smiling at her weakness. Every day and many times she thanked God that, of all the men who might have been left by this modern deluge, it was Adam who had been with her and was with her in this terrible experience.

III

It might be months, or years, or days, I kept no count,--I took no note.

BYRON.

They had been on the island nearly four months. The corn was waving in the soft breeze, and the sun shone down hotly. Indoors sweet corn was boiling in the same pot with new potatoes, while in an improvised milk-boiler on coals, at one side of the fireplace, peas were simmering. The table was spread, and there was white bread and jersey butter and raspberries. Adam, with Lassie's puppies crawling over him, sat in the doorway, and watched Robin put the finishing touches to their Sunday dinner.

His apparel was somewhat picturesque, and he had a brown and thoroughly healthy look. Robin was dressed in a costume of blue denims. The skirt was rather short, and the waist was a blouse, finished at the throat with a broad collar that turned away from a neck still white in spite of much sunlight. Their months of roughing it had not harmed them, and only the intense sadness in Adam's eyes, the pathetic droop of Robin's mouth, when they thought themselves unobserved, told a story different from that of pastoral content.

Their meal was unusually silent. Sometimes they fell into long lapses of silence; there was so much not to say. In all the weeks of the past they had worked, almost feverishly, allowing as little time as possible for thought, and never speaking of what was oftenest in their minds. Much of the time Adam seemed to be in a dream, only half realizing the flight of time, that made hope more and more hopeless. Robin said nothing. One would not seek to console the sky with phrases if all the stars were wiped out. She half reproached herself at times for the peace, the something akin to happiness, that had crept into her life. She had long before grown very weary of the world and all it had to offer.

She was stung at the sight of Adam's quiet face, with the repressed suffering that had somehow touched it with a beauty it had not possessed, and she said impetuously, "Let us go out, Adam; let us go quite away somewhere, and talk. There is so much I want to ask you, but I have not dared."

He looked up with such a hurt expression that she went on quickly, "Not that; I mean I couldn't. I have been afraid to put things in words. They grow so much more real then. But now I am afraid to keep my thoughts longer."

They went past the wheat and corn fields, through a narrow cañon that led them to a valley they had never seen before. It was very beautiful, and the play of the sunlight on the high walls of rock, the murmur of the stream below them, the trembling aspens, the white peaks in the distance, made a scene worthy their attention, but they were blind to it.

They sat down on a broad stone seat; presently Adam said, "Now, tell me; tell me how it seems to you."

"No," she answered, "you must tell me. What has happened to us, Adam? Where are we, and why were we left?"

"God knows," he said reverently.

"Do you think it possible," she said slowly, "that we are dead?"

"Oh, I don't know!" he broke out, with a return to something of his old childlike impatience. "Sometimes I think it is all a dream, and directly I shall wake up and find myself in my dingy old law office. But you are not a dream. These mountains are not a dream. Lassie barking down below there is not a dream; and these callous spots on my hands are real enough in all conscience, and no dream could last so long. Sometimes I think we have been hypnotized and carried off and left on an island somewhere. Sometimes--do you remember the man who computed the vast number of 'mysterious disappearances,' and formed a theory that the earth was being sorted out before the opening of the last vial, or some such stuff? Do you think we can be simply another disappearance?"

"I don't know," she said. "It seems easier to believe that, easier to believe anything than that the whole world has disappeared."

"Then I think sometimes," he went on, "that there are evil powers,--I know this sounds as if I had lost my mind, and maybe I have, I'm not sure of anything,--but it seems as if there might be an explanation if we believed in genii who have power over us. Perhaps you and I, who so often found fault with the poor old earth, are being punished by banishment from it. Perhaps we are being prepared for some great work. I haven't very much religion, and yet I suppose I do believe in a divine purpose back of things, a directing power that wastes nothing. I have tried to think why this thing should come upon us, you and me, of all the world; and while it seems an evil thing, a terrible and overwhelming disaster, when I realize that it might have befallen me alone, then just the fact that you are here makes it seem almost good. Do you understand?"

"Yes," she said quickly. "I have felt just so. When, at first, I felt as if I should curse God and die, I had only to remember you to fall on my knees for thankfulness. Even if a dozen other people had been left instead, no one would have understood as you have. Oh, I would infinitely rather be alone with you than in the utter loneliness of the society of a lot of men and women who would drive me mad with their complaints and inefficiency. I don't know whether it is a dream, or heaven or hell, or the work of some black magic; I only know that if it is a punishment it has been commuted, in that you share it. And yet how selfish that sounds, as selfish as love itself. I ought to wish you were in a better, happier place, where you could carry out your ambitions--" She stopped, and her eyes filled.

"Don't mind," he said grimly. "If that is selfishness, I am selfish to the core. I have gone over the whole list, and I don't know any one I would rather sacrifice to companionship with me in this exile than you. My parents were old; they could never have borne the shock. My sisters would be unhappy without their families; my women friends could none of them have met the exigencies of such an existence as you have; and as for men, by this we would all have been barbarians together. You have kept me sane and alive, for that matter."

"But are we sane?" she said slowly, "I think I could stand it if I only knew we were sane and alive. It is the feeling that I don't know anything, that this valley, these mountains, may fade like the baseless fabric of a dream. And sometimes I think that it may be real, all real but you, and that I shall find myself here all alone, dead or alive, sane or mad. God! how horrible it is!"

"That thought has never troubled me," he said. "Whatever has put us in this dream together will keep us together to the end. You have not wanted me to go far away from you, so we have worked together; I have even let you do work that was unfit for you because I knew you would prefer it. You were more frank about it, but you didn't feel any more strongly than I did. I couldn't, I can't bear to have you out of my sight."

"Have you ever thought that it may be so?" she asked hesitatingly.

"What? That it isn't a dream, and that we are sane and alive? Yes, I have thought of that too. If it be true, how universal is the destruction? We know now, pretty well, from the time that has passed,--by the way, how long is it?" He stopped with a sudden dazed look, and turned to her.

"It was the first of May," she said softly. "Now it is nearly the last of August."

"Four months!" he said in a shocked tone. "I did not realize it; I must have been worse stunned than I thought. In that case it seems as if there can't be anything left of this continent, unless it be detached peaks here and there, where other mountain ranges have been. There may be other men and women waiting as we wait for a sail, a sign, a message, and they do not know any more than we do whence it is to come. The alteration in the climate has convinced me that the waters on our West are those of the Pacific; it has been so warm and pleasant. I have tried to imagine what kind of a winter we may expect, or will the winter of our discontent be made glorious summer--"

"By three crops of strawberries, like California?" she interrupted.

"Perhaps," he said, smiling. "As to the East, that may be the Atlantic, or the Gulf; it seems more probable that it is the latter. The St. Lawrence district was said to be the oldest section of this continent, and it is reasonable to suppose the earth's crust thickest there, and along the mountain ranges. I suppose the continent has gone to make another layer, a stratum, on top of the pliocene, and after awhile the waters will subside, or some volcanic action will raise up a new continent. If there are any ships anywhere, on any seas, they will search every degree of latitude and longitude. Our flag floats, did float, all over this globe; if it still flies anywhere, we shall see it again."

"If I did," she said irreverently, "I should feel sure we were in heaven. It was beautiful before, but what wouldn't it mean now, Adam? But have you any one left on earth; if this continent is all gone, who would look for you? There are people of my blood, or there were, but they did not even know of my existence."

"There is not a soul," he answered. "Indeed, in this country it would have been one chance in ten million. You might have done it," he said, half jestingly, "but you are here."

"Yes," she echoed; "I am here. Adam, how long will it be before you are satisfied that no one is left, no one in the sense of any civilized people, with a country and means of circumnavigation?"

"A year," he answered, "perhaps more, but a year anyhow. I shall not give up hope until then."

IV

How gladly would I meet Mortality my sentence, and be earth Insensible! How glad would lay me down As in my mother's lap!

MILTON.

The corn hardened, and the wheat ripened, and was harvested in truly primeval fashion. Adam cut the wheat with a scythe, and Robin followed him, binding it as best she could. They shocked it together, and then began hauling it to the barn with the horses and bob-sleds, their only vehicle. The stacking was weary work and progressed slowly. Adam watched his co-worker toil over the sheaves, and then took them from her and pitched them on the stack haphazard.

"You shall not bother over it any more," he said, "not if we live on hominy all winter. Have you ever been in Mexico? Well, Hawaii was called the land of poco tempo, but Mexico was the land of mañana. There isn't any work there for the work's sake. I mean there wasn't, and we can take a lesson from them. We need not hurry; the legislature will not meet this winter, and there will be no grand opera before spring. Daisy and Lily shall do our work for us. We will find a bit of hard, smooth ground, and then we will not muzzle the cows that tread out the grain."

"Willingly," gasped Robin, climbing down from her slippery eminence on top of the load of grain; "but do you think we are going to have any winter?"

"That is pre-eminently one of the things that no fellow can find out," he answered. "In a dream you are likely to have any kind of weather, and on a submerged planet we have no precedents at hand to tell us what to expect. By replanting the vegetables right along we have had a perpetual crop. As long as we have this kind of weather things will grow, and I suppose we would better let them. Shut in as we are, it doesn't seem likely that any very fearful winds are apt to trouble us; and if there is a wet season, on this slope we shall have good drainage. If the worst comes to the worst, there's the tunnel. Could you make that cheerful and homelike?"

Robin smiled rather sadly. "It will do to put the grain in," she said, and they walked on silently.

The spot finally selected for the threshing floor was brushed as clean as twig brooms would make it, and the wheat spread out upon it. Adam and Lassie drove the cows over it leisurely, and between times Adam experimented on a flail. When he finally had one that answered the purpose, and found he could use it without fracturing his skull, the cows were released, and he went on with the work. Seated on a boulder close by, her sombrero tipped well over her eyes, Robin fanned the grain, and converted it into a coarse cracked wheat with a venerable coffee-mill.

"I will make you a Mexican mill, when I get through with this," said Adam, "but you cannot use it, because it is too hard work; I shall have to be the miller. It is a rather simple affair, and dates from before the days of Noah; it is made with two stones, sandstone preferred, the lower of which is hollowed out bowl-fashion, with a hole in the centre; the upper stone is rounding, and fits in the bowl, and has a hole in it about four inches from the edge, in which a stout wooden handle is inserted, with which to turn it. The two stones are ground together until they become smooth. Then they are placed on four other stones as rests, and a blanket or cloth is spread underneath to catch the meal. The grain is poured around the edge of the upper stone, and works down. It makes a very tolerable flour."

"How handy you are!" she said. "Isn't it a good thing we hadn't civilized the whole world to such a degree that only patent high-grade flour was used? Where should we be now without the simple devices of the good people of the Stone Age, and their survivors on whom we looked down with so much scorn?"

The snapping of the corn was an easier matter, and it was piled in the tunnel till they should be ready to shell it. Then Adam did what he called his "fall plowing," and left the bare brown sod to lie fallow.

So far as possible, they had retained the manners and customs of the world that had left them. There was a tolerable supply of clothing, and a good deal more household linen than could have been expected. Robin concluded that the owners of the cabin had not been long married, and the bride, knowing to what kind of a place she was coming, had thought more of her house than of herself. All the feminine garments had to be re-fashioned. Robin made her skirts short enough for mountain climbing, and dreading the time when her one pair of shoes should give out, she wore sandals fashioned from yucca leaves by Adam's clever fingers. As the hair-pins lost themselves, she braided her hair in a long queue, the curling ends of which fell far below her waist.

The little house was kept as neat and clean as if it were headquarters for all the labor-saving inventions in the world, and their meals were as well served as if a corps of servants had been in attendance. They were simple, and often a little monotonous, as meals must be where there is nothing save what grows on one's own plantation. They had no tea, coffee, sugar, spices, or foreign fruits. However, the hardship of manual labor and plain food would cure most cases of dyspepsia, and they did not suffer.

One day early in December, Robin woke to the consciousness of a steady drip, drip of rain, accompanied by an indescribably mournful wind. In the other room she heard Adam piling on the logs, and shivered. Perhaps the winter had come. It had been hard enough when there was plenty of work, and the free outdoor life; if they should become prisoners, how should they, how would _he_ endure it? She dressed quickly, and met his cheery "good-morning" in kind, and over their breakfast they discussed the possibility of this storm being the first of many. They decided that they must get the corn into such shape that the tunnel would be available for the hapless cattle, or even for themselves, if need be.

"We will go up there and shell corn all day," said Adam. "It isn't really cold, and you can wrap up a bit. I wish I had thought to take a lot of stone into the tunnel to build a bin at the end to put the corn in. I don't know how we are to manage it."

She disappeared into the bedroom and came back presently with a few grain sacks. When Adam opened the door he was nearly ready to abandon his plan.

"You will be wet through," he said; "I cannot let you go."

"Then you cannot go either," she answered.

"But I must," he said. She was standing by him, hardly reaching his shoulder, the sacks over her head. Catching her up in his arms, he banged the door behind them, and ran up the slope to the tunnel, where he deposited her laughing, and shaking the water from her curly hair. As he had said, it was not cold, and they sat down near the mouth of the tunnel, turned the tops of their sacks back over corncobs, and shelled the corn in silence. At last a little sigh from Robin made Adam look up quickly. Her hands were bleeding.

"Robin," he cried angrily, "how can you be so cruel! I don't want you to do this work; there is no need. I forgot to watch you; besides, I know you are tired. You did not sleep last night; I heard you moving about."

"Then you did not sleep either," she responded quickly.

He flushed through the tan, and scooping some dry leaves together into a bed, took off his coat and folded it for a pillow.

"Lie down and rest a little now," he said, "while I go down to the house and see what I can find for lunch. Then you can have a good sleep this afternoon."

He was gone several minutes, and when he came back with some sandwiches in a tin bucket, and a dozen scarlet radishes dripping in his hand, he stopped appalled. Robin was at the extreme end of the tunnel, sitting on the ground, laughing and crying and talking extravagant nonsense. Had she really gone mad, at last? Adam put down the bucket, and walked toward her unsteadily. She did not stir, but went on chattering in the same absurd way, until she saw him; then she cried excitedly, "Oh, look! it's kittens, real little tame kittens, though their mother won't come near me yet. She is over in that corner."

Adam saw her green eyes, and though distrustful she was not unfriendly. Emptying the bucket, he ran down to the sheds, and came back with some milk which he poured into the top of the pail, and set down before the kittens. They lapped it eagerly, and as the two human beings withdrew discreetly, the cat crept out of her corner and joined in the feast. When it was over, Robin took possession of one tiny ball of fur, and Adam of another, while they made their own meal. Then Robin curled up among the dead leaves, and slept like a child.

It was growing dusk when Adam awoke from his day-dreams. The tunnel looked like a small grain elevator. On one side Robin still slept, but the old cat was nestled contentedly at her feet, and the kittens were playing sleepily over her.

"What is she dreaming?" Adam asked wearily. "All day I have sat here and dreamed dreams that can never come true. I know it; I feel it. I told her a year, but I am as sure now as I shall be in six years, that there is no hope. The watch-fire is out to-night,--the first night in eight months. I shall re-light it for her sake; not that she is any more deceived than I, but she will be happier to believe me still hopeful. What will be the end of it all? How can it end?"