Part 2

“But there is no need of this,” father replied, as, clearing his throat and wiping his nose, he tried to look severe and judicial, (dear Dad! how well I know this particularly impossible and fleeting expression of yours)—“I got you the promise of work at Mrs. Pippin’s only last week, to do a few light errands and keep her in split kindlings for three square meals a day, and pay in money by the hour for tinkering and carpentering, and you only stayed one morning! Man alive! you are intelligent! why can’t you work? The day is over when hereabout men can live like wild-fowl!”

“Doctor Russell,” said the Markis, speaking slowly and raising a lean forefinger solemnly, “did you ever try to keep Mis’s Pippin in kettlewood for three square meals a day, likewise her opinion o’ you thrown in for pepper, and talk o’ waiting hell fire for mustard, with only one door to the woodshed and her a-standin’ in it? Not but the meals was square enough, that was jest it,—they was too square, they wouldn’t swaller! Give me a man’s job and I’ll take a brace and try it for the Major here, but who takes one of us takes both, savvy? Beside, when Mis’s Pippin was Luella Green she liked to dance ter my fiddlin’, and now she don’t like ter think o’t and seein’ me reminds her!”

Here father broke down and laughed, he confesses, and with the change of mood came the remembrance that the son of the rich Van Camps of the Bluffs, whose sporting possessions dot the country from Canada to Florida, needed a man to tend his boat house that lay further round the bay, and to take him occasionally to the ducking grounds at the crucial moment of wind and weather. Thus far, though several landsmen had attempted it, no one had kept the job long owing to its loneliness, and the fact that they lacked the outdoor knack, for the pay was liberal.

In a few words father told of the requirements. Shaking the sand from his garments the Markis stood up, new light in his eyes,—“What! that yaller boat house round the bend, with all the contraptions and the tankboat painted about ’leven colours that Jason built? I’d better get to work smart in the mornin’ and weather her up a bit, it ’ud scare even a twice-shot old squaw the way it is! The weather is softenin’; come to-morrow there’ll be plenty o’ birds comin’ in and we’ll soon learn him how to fetch home a show of ’em, which is what most o’ them city chaps wants more’n the eatin’,—won’t we, Maje? Yes, Doc, I’ll take the ockerpation straight and honourable and won’t go back on you! Go home with you for supper and the night? That’s kindly, we _air_ some used up, that’s so! And something in advance of pay to-morrow? and he’ll let me raise a shingle and pick up what I can takin’ other folks fishin’ and shootin’ when he don’t need me? and he’ll most likely supply me clothes,—a uniform like a yacht sailor’s, you say? Well, I suppose these old duds are shabby, but me and they’s kept company this long time and wild-fowl’s particular shy o’ new things, and the smell of them I reckon! Weathered things is mostly best to my thinkin’, likewise friends, Doc!”

When young Van Camp, arriving at the shore one day at dawn for his first expedition, saw his new employee and his aged dog, he shuddered visibly and for a moment inwardly questioned father’s sanity; but having been about with half-breed guides too much to judge the outdoor man by mere externals, he laughed good-naturedly and abandoned himself to the tender mercies of the Markis and the Major, saying lightly as he glanced at the faded sweater and soft hat, “It’s cold down here; I’m sending you a reefer and some better togs to-morrow.”

So the three went out across the still-water to the ducking grounds and brought back such a bunch before the fog closed in the afternoon that Van Camp clapped the Markis on the back and declared the Major must be a Mascot, and that he deserved the finest sort of collar!

“A Mascot! that’s what he is, in addition to being the wisest smell-dog on the shore!” affirmed the Markis solemnly, the eyelid on the off side drooping drolly. “All he has to do is to smell the tide when it turns flood, and he knows jest where the ducks’ll bed next night!” All of which Van Camp, Junior, believed, because it seemed suitable that the dog he hired with the man should be superlatively something; and next day there arrived, together with the reefer, a yacht captain’s cap, a set of oil-skins, and a great tin of tobacco,—a broad brass-studded collar, such as bull-dogs wear, but an ornament unknown to self-respecting “smell-dogs” even if, like the Major, they were _bar sinister_.

The morrow was New Year’s day, and the day after, just at evening, the Markis, clad in a trim sailor suit from cap to trousers, was seen sauntering down the village street toward the cross-roads at the Centre, where his tangled trails to and from the two saloons had before-times often puzzled the Major’s acute sense of smell. Behind the Markis loped the Major with drooping tail and the heavy collar, too large for his lean neck, hanging about his ears. But had not his master fastened the hateful thing upon him? That was reason enough for wearing it, at least for the time being!

Slowly the Markis passed the two saloons and nonchalantly entered the market, where he carefully selected a whole bologna and a ham! Crossing to the grocery he bought a month’s provisions to be sent to “Van Camp’s Boat House, for Capt’n Burney!” Then pulling on a fresh corn-cob pipe in leisurely fashion he stopped at the paint shop, from whence he took a sign board, that he carried, letters toward him; next he repassed the saloons and gradually gained the wooded lane that skirts the marsh meadows.

Once under cover he pulled off the new reefer, wrapped it around the board, and began to run, never pausing until he gained the boat house.

Throwing open the door he quickly stripped off the new stiff, confining garments, and slipped eel-like into loose trousers and the gray sweater that made him one with the seaweed and the sands. Then drawing the old soft hat well down to his very eyes he opened the tool chest that stood under the window and, taking therefrom gimlet, screw eyes, and hooks, he mounted an empty box, and proceeded to fasten the sign he had brought over the door. When it hung exactly even and to his liking, he walked backward, slowly surveying his handiwork, talking to the dog meanwhile. “What do you think of that, Maje? You and me hev got a business, we hev! employment with a name to it! Don’t yer remember what she said? No, you wasn’t the dog, though; ’twere old Dave, yer granddad! There’ll be jest two o’ us in the business, man and dog. You know the saying as two’s a company. Onct maybe I’d chose a woman partner! when they’re young wimmen’s prettier, but fer age give me er dog! Dogs is more dependable, likewise they don’t talk back, eh, Maje?”

On the swinging white board, edged with bright blue, in blue letters he read these words aloud, slowly, and with deep-drawn satisfaction:—

THE MARKIS AND THE MAJOR.

Decoys and Fishing Tackle to Rent. Sailing, Gunning, Fishing and Retrieving done with Neatness and Dispatch.

Reëntering the boat house he gazed about with a sigh of perfect content, dropped into the ship-shaped bunk that was his bed, hat still on his head, and stretching himself luxuriously, said to the Major, who crouched beside, “I reckoned we’d hev ter make a change long first o’ the year, and I reckon we _hev_!” The coffee-pot upon the new stove in the far corner brooded comfortably and gave little gasps before being fully minded to excite itself to boiling, while the wild blood, even a few drops of which often makes its owners think such long, long thoughts that stretch back to the dawn of things, coursed evenly on its way until a delicious sleep, such as had been unknown for months, laid its fingers on the eyelids of the Markis.

Cautiously the Major rose to his feet, looked about the room narrowly, sniffed the floor and then the air, shook his head and pawed persistently until the heavy new collar slipped over his ears and clattered to the floor. For a moment, minded to lie down again, he paused, sniffed the fresh air from the open window in the corner, then lifting the offending collar carefully in his mouth he gripped it firmly and crossed the room, jumped for the open sash, missed, tried again, and disappeared in the boat house shadows.

A loon laughed far out on the water, and the Major trembled guiltily. Gaining the beach crest he kept on to tide-water mark, where, digging deep, he buried the offending bit of leather, covering it well, kicking backward at it, dog fashion, with snorts of contemptuous satisfaction. Then trotting gaily back he entered by the window, and soon two rhythmic snores, added to the bubbling of the overboiling coffee-pot, told that the Markis and the Major slept the peaceful winter sleep, while the sharp crescent moon of January slipped past the window, lingering over still-water to cover the bedded wild-fowl with a silver sheet.

II THE STALLED TRAIN

=FEBRUARY=—THE COON MOON

He was no kin to the man of Whittier’s eulogy, though he might well have been; Jim Bradley was only the conductor on the milk freight that fussed and fumed its way down the valley of the Moosatuck every evening, at intervals leaving the single track road of the Sky Line to rest upon the sidings while a passenger train or the through express took right of way.

To Miranda Banks, however, Bradley seemed a hero as he sprang from the caboose, swinging his lantern, when his train took the switch and halted on the side track below the calf pastures.

To be sure his claim to heroism had, so far, rested upon the fact that both he and his vocation moved. In Hattertown very few people or things had moved these ten years past; they had groped as being between daylight and dark. The beginning of this twilight period was when the trade that gave the town both its name and reason for being, owing to change of methods and market, vanished across the low gentian meadows of the Moosatuck to install itself anew in Bridgeton, fifteen miles away. The empty factory, long and vainly offered for sale, became a storage place for the hay that speculators bought on the field from the somnolent hillside farmers and held for the winter market. At the same time the hay gave the building a good reputation among the travelling brotherhood of the back roads, who work a week and tramp on again (an entirely distinct clan from the hoboes who follow the railroad through villages and alternate thieving with stolen rides upon freight trains), and the factory became a wayfarers’ lodging-house, until gradually the unpainted boards turned black and the building grew hollow-eyed as its window panes were shattered.

When man wholly forsook it, swallows and swifts brought primitive life to it again, the one nesting against its warped rafters, the others lining the chimney, now free from plaster and very hospitable, with their bracketed homes, until their flocks pouring forth from its mouth at dawn and swirling and settling at evening, seemed in the distance a curling column of smoke.

The row of cheap wooden houses where the factory hands had lived, had also mouldered away and joined the general ruin, only a starved grape-vine or rose-bush telling that they had once been homes; until, at the time I first saw the place, the most depressing of all palls seemed over it,—the shadow of a dead industry.

It was an October morning when Lavinia Cortright and I drove up into the hill country with father, who went to see a woman who had applied for a free bed in the Bridgeton hospital, an aunt of Miranda Banks, she afterward proved to be; and while father went into the little farm-house, that had bright geraniums in the windows and wore more of a general air of thrift than any of those we had passed in the last mile of our uphill ride, Lavinia and I sauntered along the road and finally settled ourselves on a tumble-down stone wall in the midst of a wild grape-vine whose fruit was black with sun-ripeness and bore the moist bloom of the first light frost.

As we gazed idly over the fields toward the river, that seemed, as we looked down upon it, to filter through the glowing branches of the swamp maples, washing their colours with it, rather than to flow between banks of earth, we sipped the pure wild grape wine where alone it may be found,—between the skin and pulp of the grape itself, a few drops to each globe,—and fell to moralizing.

“You like to find a reason for everything, Barbara,” said Lavinia Cortright, after a long pause; “can you tell me exactly why the country hereabout seems so desolate and impossible? It has all the colour and atmosphere of the perfect autumn landscape, and yet the idea of living here would be appalling.”

I had been thinking the same thing as Lavinia spoke; there was something in the very wind that blew over the ruined factory settlement that was deterrent; funerals might take place there, but how could enough impetus ever exist to cause weddings or christenings?

At this moment the door of a small building, the schoolhouse at the cross-roads immediately below, opened, and a dozen or more children rushed out pell-mell, followed by the slim form of a young woman, evidently the teacher, who closed the door and prepared to take a cross cut through the fields, the worn track leading up to the pasture bars close to where we were sitting. No bell, no whistle, no exodus of labourers from the fields to mark the noon hour, the impulsive rush of childhood breaking bounds was the only clock.

The woman disappeared in a dip of the land, and then presently her head emerged from it and the whole figure appeared again walking between the deep green bayberry bushes that make the dark patches in the waste hillside fields. She walked without either energy or fatigue, looking neither to the right nor left; the freckled face, tending to thinness, interested me from the first glance, for though it wore very little expression, it was in no wise vacant; the chin was firm, and there was a good space between the eyes, which opened wide and had none of the squinting shrewdness I have met with in my wanderings with father among remote rural communities. It was an unawakened face, and as I began to wonder what could ever come to give it the vital touch, she reached the bars and seeing us for the first time, paused, scrutinized us slowly, and then said with a tinge of irritation in the tone:—

“I wish you wouldn’t spoil those grapes, I’m going to spice them on Saturday. I should have done it last week, but they are always better for a touch of frost.”

I straightway disentangled myself from the vine with a guilty feeling, and murmured the usual apology of the roadside depredators; that is, when they deign to make excuses, about the grapes being wild and not knowing that they belonged to any one, but my words fell upon deaf ears.

“There were full ten pounds of grapes here this morning, but with what you’ve eaten and more that you’ve shaken off, there isn’t more than six pounds left. How came you up here, anyhow? Nobody ever passes this way; even the mail-man turns ’round below at four corners. I’m Randy Banks.”

This gave me my chance to explain father’s errand. “Do you think Dr. Russell can get Aunt Lucy in?” she asked, eagerness bringing a pretty colour to her cheeks. “It isn’t the care of her we mind, Ma and I,” she added hastily, “but it’s the loneliness for her of days in winter when I’m at school and Ma out nursing mebbe; being chair-tied at best, there’s just nothing to break the time, for nothing ever happens.”

“Now that you have the Rural Free Delivery, you get your mail and papers every day without having to go down to the Hattertown post-office,” I said, trying to find a cheerful loophole.

“That’s no advantage to us, rather the other way. When town was alive and we drove down to the post-office, even if we had no mail, and we never do except the newspaper, somebody else had and maybe opened it right there and told the news for the sake of talking it over with some one else. Then market and store were in the same building and chances were you’d be reminded of something you needed by seeing it, or maybe a bit of fresh meat would look tempting and be sold reasonable, too, if it was near week-end. But to go to that box at cross-roads, though it’s only a step, and find it empty, it’s as lonesome and strange as a draught coming from a shut-up room.”

Then as she realized that she was in a way complaining of her lot to a stranger, a thing that the etiquette of the entire hill country quite forbade, she broke off, and turning toward the house, said in a perfectly unembarrassed way: “Won’t you come in? Mother will have dinner ready. She’d be pleased to see you. I have to hurry back to school to-day, for the committee man is coming to see if the old stove can be mended or if we must have a new one, for it’s never done well since Joel Fanton put a shotgun cartridge in it last winter.” Then we went in, wondering if events would ever so shape themselves that she would become an active factor on a wider path than that between the corner school and the old farm-house.

It was three years before I saw Miranda again; meanwhile, a far-away city had thrown a lariat of steel across country, and it had encircled Hattertown; a railway that ran down the valley needed a southern outlet. The survey ran by the ruined factory, and rounding Nob Hill, crossed the river below the Banks’ farm, and disappeared on trestles over “calf pastures,” a name given strangely enough to many a bit of waste river meadow, as if calves did not need the best of material to become successful cows.

At the sound of the first locomotive whistle, announcing that the branch road was a thing accomplished and neither a scare nor a phantom boom, the Rip Van Winkles awoke and rubbed their eyes. They had slept a half-famished sleep. Rather than push and plan a way to sell their produce, they had ceased producing.

The Sky Line Railroad had come. Cruft’s store was rented as a temporary station and the name Hattertown appeared in dazzling white letters on the black sign over the door. In one room were scales for weighing freight and a baggage truck, in the other, a ticket booth took the place of the old post-boxes, while on a shelf behind the little window, a telegraph instrument ticked and told the doings of the outer world to the only man in the neighbourhood that could interpret it. Time-tables were tacked above the two benches in a corner that made the waiting-room, but the greatest excitement of all was contained in a great _poster_ that was not only stuck in conspicuous places in all the settlements along the line, but put in the mail-boxes as well, announcing that a milk train would be run nightly, Sundays included, and urging all farmers, if they had no milk to market, to make immediate arrangements for producing that commodity.

The Widow Banks had three cows. A dealer in Bridgeton had tried to buy them late in the autumn when fodder was at a premium, but she had withstood temptation and taken the risk of wintering them; if she had not, Miranda would never have met Jim Bradley during the negotiations for the transportation to the city of the polished tin can that cost the little teacher many days’ pay, and was regarded by her as a speculation as wild and daring as any gambler staking his all on a throw of dice, nor would this story have found its way into father’s note-book.

Jim Bradley came of good up-country stock, but the yeast of desire to see the world had led him upon the shining road, freight brakeman first and now conductor. Visiting New York every other day, he seemed a travelled man of the world to Miranda, whose outside life was bounded by two trips a year to Bridgeton and the paragraphs upon racial traits, habits and customs, exports and imports contained in the Geography which she had heard droned and mispronounced annually for the five seasons she had taught at the corners.

A year had passed, and now when Jim Bradley ran his train into the siding at Hattertown, he could not have told which light he saw first, the railway signal or the well-trimmed lamp in the Widow Banks’ kitchen; this light, being always kept bright and clear, was lit at sunset with the regularity of a lighthouse beacon, the reflector improvised from a tin plate being turned so that the welcoming rays met the milk train as it rounded the hills and left solid ground for the trestles between eight and half-past every evening.

As the whistle of the eight-fifteen morning train spelt _school_ to Miranda, so the whistle of the milk freight, one long and two short, not only spelled but shouted _Jim Bradley_, and as a matter of course, she took her hand lantern if the night was dark, or else trusted to the moon and stars and following the now well-worn path through the corn patch to “calf pastures,” reached the low shed by the water-tank almost at the moment that the engine gave its final puff, and Jim Bradley swung himself from the caboose and seeing that his rear lights were properly set, promptly forgot his train for an interval ranging from twenty minutes to perhaps half an hour, when traffic on the through express was heavy.

Widow Banks had long since announced to inquiries both of the really interested and maliciously curious order, that Randy and Jim Bradley were keeping company, though, at the same time, regretting with a sigh that his business didn’t allow of evenings spent in the austere “fore room” where the one visible eye of the departed deacon’s portrait done in air brush crayon, might witness the courting. Neither was it possible for Randy to exhibit him to the neighbours in a bright and shining buggy with a blue bow tied to the whip, of a Sunday afternoon, nor had they the chance for the same reason to judge of his capacity at prayer-meeting.

If either Randy or Jim had been questioned as to their relations to each other, they would have been speechless upon the subject. Neither had given the matter a thought, and therefore neither was worried by the mazes of material analysis.

Miranda simply obeyed a call that made the spot where Jim Bradley was the only possible place for her to be between eight and half past; but when the train left the siding, crossed the bridge over the Moosatuck and disappeared, she returned to the house and gave her mind up to the correction of the smeared papers whereon the youth of Hattertown were struggling along the Arithmetic road, and in striving to prepare for the puzzling questions that the school’s bad boy might spring upon her on the morrow.

Jim regarded matters much in the same way, that is, all through that spring, summer, and autumn. When winter set in and the siding grew chilly, the tank shed with its little stove became the only shelter, for, without realizing why, it never occurred to the man that the caboose with its bunk and litter of flags and lanterns was the place for Randy.

One night she noticed that Jim had a heavy cold, and the next evening she brought with her a basket in which a little pot of hot coffee and a generous wedge of equally fresh-baked mince pie kept each other warm. Jim smiled at Randy with a glance in which feigned indifference and indulgence struggled, as by way of table-cloth she spread the napkin that covered the basket, on a barrel top and motioned for him to eat, saying as she handed him a paper of sugar, “I didn’t know how you like your coffee sweetened, so I brought some sugar along.”

In some way the steam from that tin kettle as he looked across it, altered the perspective of his existence and changed his terminal; for the first time he wished that Hattertown was at one end or the other of the route instead of a brief turnout in the middle.