Chapter 20

BLUE FLANNEL AND CORDUROY

The world was snow-bound--all that small world which lay between the hills in the valley at Thirty-Mile. For two days it had been snowing, great flakes so plume-like that they seemed almost artificial, making one think of the blizzards which originate high in theatre-flies under the sovereignty of a stage-hand who sweats at his task of controlling the elements. For two days it snowed so heavily that all work moved but intermittently at the up-river camp; and then, two days before Christmas, the mercury dropped sharply into the bulbs and the weather cleared.

Stephen O'Mara, standing at a window of his cabin late in the afternoon, peering out upon that cold white world, was wondering if she would have found it as wonderful as it seemed to him at that moment; he was wondering whether he would have to break a fresh trail himself, upon snow-shoes, if he were to join Fat Joe and Garry in town for the holiday, when a team of horses came toiling into view far across the snow. It was Big Louie, sitting huge and stolid upon his load of supplies, coming in a whole day late and cracking his long lash over the glossy backs of the bays which the lash was never allowed to touch. Behind him another sledge appeared in turn, with two figures on the seat, but even at that distance they looked neither so huge nor so stolidly reconciled to the bite of the wind. Fallon was driving; Shayne was beating his arms across his chest. And the second team was fagged and caked with frozen lather. Big Louie had been breaking trail for twelve bitterly hard hours, but his animals were still far from spent--not so tired in fact but what they could throw forward their heads and nicker at the sight of warm stables. Big Louie loved horses as he loved nothing else in his whole dull world. Sober he fed them bits of sugar, with strange throat-sounds which they must have understood, it seemed; drunk he threatened the life of any man who might chance to maltreat them. That was the reason Steve had made Big Louie his head-teamster only two weeks before.

From his window he watched the heavy loads crawl up to the store-house door; he watched the drivers throw tarpaulins over the boxes and knew that they were too weary to unload that night. And he was still there at the frosted pane when the three men, Big Louie still plowing ahead, hove into view again from the direction of the stables and came straight toward his own shack. He opened the door and bade them enter before they had had a chance to knock. The swagger in the shoulders of two of them told him what to expect. Big Louie was only clumsy, as usual.

"You did well to make it," he told the latter, kindly, as he always addressed him. His nod to the others, who reeked of white whiskey, was in part a question, in no wise a welcome. "Well?" he asked.

Apparently there had been a conference beforehand, for there was no hesitancy on the part of Fallon, who had been ordained spokesman.

"We've come for our time," he growled.

Steve nodded gravely.

"I see," he murmured. "May I ask what's your grievance, this time."

They were the satellites of Harrigan. Because of that he had kept them all where his eyes could find them at times. And even though their arch-leader in discontent had not crossed his path in many days he listened now to an echo of Harrigan's activities.

"They're offering three a day in the Reserve camps." Fallon should not have gloated. "Three a day and a bonus for the high week cut. We're going back to the river."

"I see," again observed Steve. "Are they guaranteeing this wage for as long as you want to work."

Apparently they had decided, too, that there should be no bargaining.

"We want our time," Fallon reiterated. "This is going to be a man's year on the river!"

"You, also?" Steve inquired of Shayne.

That worthy gloated too.

"Yes, me also," he came back, "an' a hundred others, before the ice goes out."

Big Louie he had given up for lost long before that, and yet it was with Big Louie that Steve made a sincere effort.

"I'd like to have you stay, Louie," he faced the third man. "I need you, for you can do more with horses than any man I know. You are worth three a day to me. Do you care to think it over?"

Big Louie's eyes had been mournful when he stumbled in out of the cold. They were that now. He started to turn toward the window for a look at the stables, and then thought better of it. Resolutely, for him, he shook his head.

"I am done--me," he muttered. "I work for no company that will leave honest men to starve."

It was hopeless from the start, yet Steve tried again.

"I can promise you work as long as you are able to hold a rein," he offered, but he moved nearer the door while he was speaking. "That is all I can promise."

Perhaps Fallon believed that Big Louie was weakening; perhaps he felt that the situation was too highly dramatic to be wasted, for he made a wide flourish with one hand.

"We want our time, and we want it now," he threatened. "We're going to show you who bosses this river, before we're done with you!"

Fallon shouldn't have gloated; he shouldn't have threatened. And Shayne shouldn't have smiled. Steve had slipped the latch loose. Now he swung open the door.

"Call for your time at the Morrison office," he said evenly, "and if you're going--why, go!"

By collar and belt he swung him back and drove him sprawling into a drift.

"Are you in a hurry, too, Shayne?" he asked pleasantly, and Shayne buried his head beside Fallon's in the snow. Then Steve closed the door carefully and turned again to Big Louie.

"Louie," he said, "I make it a rule to urge no man who does not wish to stay. If it needs persuasion to keep you, I do not want you here. But you are running with the wrong crowd, Louie; you'll learn it someday--but someday may be too late."

The big, dreamy-eyed man was hardly listening, but he gestured toward the door. And Steve treated his departure kindly, as he had always treated his presence. Outside where Shayne and Fallon had picked themselves up, Big Louie hesitated and fumbled in his pocket with a cold-cramped hand. He delivered the letter which had been entrusted to him, before he went down the hill. There are many men like Big Louie who are pitifully faithful until events outstrip their intellects. Steve was sorry for him; and a half hour later, after he had read Miss Sarah's prim note requesting his presence at dinner at seven-thirty, Christmas eve, he grew sorrier still while he watched the ill-assorted trio meet once more, blanket-packs upon their backs and snow-shoes on their feet. Big Louie had joined the other two from the direction of the stables. There were words between them, for Steve saw the huge man's arm lift to strike Shayne to the ground, and then drop harmlessly back to his side. And Steve knew what that bit of pantomime meant. Big Louie had been to bid his team good-bye. There was a smudge of brown sugar across his coat, though the watcher was too far away to see that. But he knew that Big Louie had been crying, knew that Shayne had smiled. It was the second time that Shayne had smiled that evening--his second bad mistake. Long after they had disappeared into the north toward the Reserve Company's camps, Steve wondered that it had not cost him his life.

Miss Sarah's note which had been almost a week on the way was very primly correct, but the inevitable postscript which under-ran it sounded a more intimate note.

"We are not excessively formal as a rule, Stephen," she wrote, "so a dinner jacket will be adequate. As I am expecting two other guests besides your friends, Mr. Morgan and Garrett Devereau, I must ask you to let no business matters interfere with your promptness."

Steve dared not let himself wonder who those other guests would prove to be, Miriam Burrell, he knew, had already written Garry that this was to be the saddest Christmas, and the merriest, that she had ever known, giving as respective reasons her inability to be with him, and the fact that she was so entirely his. Because he would not let himself hope this time he was not disappointed, or at least so he told himself, when he found only Dexter Allison with Caleb, the next afternoon near six. And on a sudden thought his eyes went roving around the room then, looking for Archibald Wickersham; but Miss Sarah gave him no time for a protracted scrutiny.

"Your room is ready, Stephen," she told him, and steered him toward the stairs. "You have an hour in which to dress--and you know already that I am old-maidenishly strict."

Surely Archibald Wickersham was the other guest whom they were expecting. Allison's very presence argued that. Yet Steve's nose played him a startling trick as he mounted upward. He could have sworn that he smelled that faint perfume which always made him remember, now, his first letter from her; had he not been afraid to hope he would have been positive that there was a flurry of skirts retreating above him. But he knew that she could not have come. He knew it! And then, three-quarters of an hour later, when he had dressed and turned again to the stairway, she was there at the foot of the flight, waiting for him to appear. In a little low pink satin gown that made rounded her slenderness--made her appear even smaller than she was--she gave him an elaborate courtesy from the main floor, and flung up at him her laughter.

"Merry Christmas, Sir Galahad," she called.

Just as he had paused there a half-score of years before, Stephen O'Mara paused now, with Caleb and Miss Sarah again gazing up at him. It was the first time Sarah Hunter had seen the grown-up Steve in conventional black and white; her emotions were much the same as they had been on that remoter day. But Steve did not even see her glowing face below him in that instant, nor Caleb's, nor that of Allison either, who watching Steve's eyes, had suddenly ceased to smile. Caleb knew what his sister's thoughts were, however, for he was recalling that black velvet suit with silver buttons himself. While Steve and Barbara were shaking hands he gained her ear in whispered admiration.

"Sarah," he commented, "Sarah, you are clever!"

Miss Sarah was on the point of taking Dexter Allison's arm to lead the way to table. Her reply was tuned to Caleb's ear alone.

"She had thought of him in terms of blue flannel and corduroy long enough," she said. "If you please, Dexter--Stephen, do you and Barbara want any dinner?"

Those two were still shaking hands. Steve, who was only dimly aware of the fact that Garry and Fat Joe had arrived, the latter guilty of his first dinner jacket and enormously proud of his guilt, stood looking at Barbara while she was chattering at him, without hearing distinctly a word she spoke. Miss Sarah's question helped to bring him back.

"You look as though I were a wraith," the girl accused him. "Am I so pale after a few weeks of sophisticated city air?"

But her man had taken command of himself again, by then.

"I thought you looked like--shall I tell you what I thought?"

"Most certainly," she was forced to insist. "Wasn't it a bald enough invitation for a pretty speech?"

"I thought you looked like a small pink bon-bon," responded Steve leisurely, and while the rest laughed at her discomfiture, Fat Joe leaned over and nudged Garry.

"What'd I tell you?" he demanded. "What'd I tell you? Say, ain't he working well to-night?"

But for once Joe had himself been misled into premature enthusiasm such as he had decried in Garry. For if Barbara had, in Miss Sarah's phrase, been thinking of Steve in terms of blue flannels and corduroy, until then, before the dinner ended she was aware of a difference in the attitude of this man who loved her, too great to be explained by the clothes he wore. The very light in his eyes, whenever she contrived to catch him gazing at her, convinced her of what was behind his new restraint; and then, immediately, perversely, she set herself to break it down by those very methods best calculated to strengthen it. More than once that evening Dexter Allison withdrew from the general conversation to watch the play of his daughter's glances upon O'Mara's tanned face; several times he fell to chewing his lip as was his custom when deeply perplexed. Complications scarcely ever troubled Dexter Allison. He was beginning to awake to one now which already worried him more than he cared to admit.

There was no keeping the girl within doors after dinner was over. She ran upstairs and changed into moccasins and white blanket coat, and skirt that barely met the moccasin tops half-way. And Steve, who had changed too and was waiting for her when she came down, had knotted a crimson scarf about the middle of his belted jacket to match the white one twisted about her throat. With much approval Miss Sarah noted, while she watched them away on snow shoes, the bit of color it added to his soberer garb; she promised herself to recall it to Caleb at some future date. Caleb had very pronounced views regarding the lack of vanity in men's dress. But for the time being she was content to go upstairs and be alone with her campaigning.

The man and girl climbed far that night in quite unbroken silence. They had reached the crest of the first hill and stopped with the higher ridges in front of them, black bulks filigreed with white, before Barbara decided that she would have to make him talk.

"Aren't you going to say anything at all?" she challenged then.

She needed no explanation of his mood. To a woman there is no subtler flattery than a man's dumb acknowledgement of her unattainability. He talked when she bade him talk, but she was not positive whether she was vexed or not because their conversation was of common-place things: The work he was doing, upon which he was aggravatingly reticent, or the severity of the last storm, or the amazing clarity of the night. Certainty, however, was hers that he was no longer sure of himself--that he was fighting silently against a growing conviction that she was beyond his reach.

It made her very happily sad, somehow, and when Steve told her about Big Louie and his horses, the sadness became a lump in her throat, and a blur in her eyes which the man could not help but see.

"It is too bad," he said slowly. "I have been sorrier for him myself, since his going, than I've been over anything for years. I do not know just why, but I'm afraid for him. The others--" He stopped there, catching himself before he had said too much. "I could always tell Big Louie how I wanted a thing done, and know without one little bit of doubt that he would stick to my orders. But that is the trouble with his kind. Because he has no initiative of his own, he has to depend upon the ideas which other men supply him. And there is no guarantee whether they will be good or bad ideas."

From the first he talked fitfully that night. On other occasions she had noticed how his mind seemed to veer, whimsically, from one topic to another with little apparent continuity of thought, only to swing back again, just when she was beginning to feel that she had lost the thread of inference, to point his argument with parallels that were new and delightful wisdoms to her ears. But to-night his grave-voiced divergences, oftener than not, left her thoughts behind his thoughts.

"It is a very easy country to get lost in," he next remarked, when he had had to insist that his sense of direction, and not hers, should be the one to be trusted. "He was never able to go fifty rods into the brush himself, without getting completely turned around, and he was born in these hills, at that."

Then he had to tell her that it was Big Louie to whom he was referring, before she understood quite what he meant. But he abandoned that trend, freakishly, the very next moment.

"It doesn't seem complicated," he pondered. "To a man who has come into the world with his sense of north and south and east and west all safely relegated to his backbone instead of having to depend upon the flighty functions of his brain for his guide, it's about the simplest thing there is. He finds his way without thinking about the lay of the land, or moss on the trees, or the sun or stars. But the other one--the one who has to stop and reason that he must travel so many miles to the west to reach home in the afternoon, because he came that many in the morning--why, he even gets to doubting his compass, until night catches him without a roof over his head and no wood collected for a camp-fire."

Long before then she had learned how sensitive a thing was his spirit--and she wanted him to go on.

"It must be a terrible thing to--to know that one is lost." Her hands were buried deep in her pockets; she found it hard to keep pace with his stride. "I am always afraid of the night noises in the woods."

It was the girl in her which had spoken at which he smiled, but his smile was absent-minded.

"That is very strange, too," he accepted her lead, after contemplating it for a time. "It is always the one who can't trust his compass who loses his head, once he knows he's mixed up. Big Louie was that way. He was lost once, for two days, before we found him; he was half mad with terror and pretty near dead with fatigue. He had been running in a big circle for hours, and we had to corner him before he would see that we were friends. He'd been listening to the night noises, you see; dwelling on the blackness and the silence and his lack of a fire, until his brain was no longer any use to him."

"What should one do?" she asked him faintly, when she knew that he was waiting for her to speak. Yet his answer persisted in adding to that word-image which his mind was molding.

"Quit letting yourself look back over your shoulder, to see if anything is following you!" He was suddenly gruff, and she knew that he was talking at himself. "Quit dwelling on the crackle in the brush, and the darkness, and the things you are afraid to fear. The wise man stops when he knows he's lost his bearings; he busies himself collecting wood for a fire, if not to keep the chill from his body by exercise, then because it keeps his mind off himself. And he sleeps if he can. Anyhow he lies quiet and rests. And when morning comes he uses his reason better for having rested, if his instincts still play him false. He has a look at the stars before daybreak; he watches the sun come up, and he holds a straight line by the height of land, or by the river flow, and he hits familiar country soon."

This time the girl did not interrupt him. She was watching his face.

"And that doesn't apply just to one little corner of the woods, or one little corner of life, either, does it?" he mused. "When a man's instinct fails him, he can stop and get his bearings back; when he's afraid he can kindle a fire within him, always, if he'll only rustle around before it gets too dark to search for fuel. But at that it isn't so very easy, in life, to get one's bearings straight again. It's stormy, some nights, maybe, and the stars don't shine; sometimes day dawns cloudy and the sun is not advertising its location too strongly. Instinct has always been strong in me, but there have been times, too, when I have had to hold my eyes mighty steady on some object far beyond me, to keep my line dead straight." He stopped short and faced her. "You would be afraid, yes," he told her, "but you would try hard to discipline yourself. You would never go rushing blindly into a worse tangle, spending your strength and breaking your sanity down. Big Louie is a child; discipline is wasted on him. And--and I have always been able to find my way myself."

She knew now toward what point he had been talking. Mentally he had been wandering, as Big Louie once wandered in the flesh, in a wide circle that fetched up again against that doubt in himself which was hurting her, even while it was making her happy. He had taken the example of Big Louie and applied it to his own life, and suddenly the girl realized how infinitely greater was his philosophy thereof than was hers.

"I shall try to remember that," she answered soberly. "If ever I am lost I--I shall try to wait confidently for daylight, and keep my eyes to the fore."

She was near to tears when he stooped and knelt in the snow to tighten a thong slipping from one webbed foot. Below them stretched a plain of shimmering frost-points, bounded by inscrutable walls of black timber. Somewhere within the warmer heart of a swamp a fox yapped hungrily; somewhere within her own heart his whimsical discourse had awakened a sense of the mystery of his wilderness--its friendship for those who love it--its implacable enmity for those who do not understand. And he looked up just when that emotion came flooding into her face.

"It is wonderful--wonderful--wonderful!" she breathed, throwing out both arms with that ecstatic impulsiveness which he knew so well. "Now I know why you said men always return to it, once they have felt its spell."

"You are lovelier than you know!" came back from him, almost gruffly again; and she could not parry with lightness so swift and strained a speech.

"You always tell me very pretty things," was all she could think of to say in reply.

But then, rising, he flung back his head and shook himself as if throwing off a burden too restraining and irksome. He laughed aloud, and from that minute until he loosed her feet from the snowshoes he was more like her "blue flannel and corduroy" lover again. But his attack no longer made her fear herself.

"If I cared for you, yes," he made her admit before he would let her go in that night. "If I cared for you, my engagement to no man could stand in the way. But that is the reason I know I do not care."

She had seen him grave with doubt that night; seen him fight to shake it off. There was doubt in his answer now.

"Because I am not----" But he could not force himself to ask it.

"Because I could never care as you would demand the woman should care who marries you."

She wanted to help him a little, she didn't know just why. Pity is a very dangerous emotion, when pity is not sought.

"You are loving me that way this minute," he said, but his words were dogged. "Loving me more than you know."

There was neither reference to her letter nor mention of that night at Thirty-Mile when she had stolen out to bid him good-bye. Other long tramps followed, on other pale and zero nights, but his attitude remained much the same. Whimsically at times he shared his innermost thoughts with her; always he told her that he cared, with a gentleness in the telling that made it hard for her to listen. Barbara least of all realized what those days were doing to her, but before that week had run its course even Caleb's eyes were opened to the change in Steve.

"I told you so," he said, but he took no delight in recommending it to his sister's attention. "If he didn't know it before, she's taught him this trip that he hasn't a chance."

"Your sensation is ancient history, Cal," was all she would reply.

And even though, so far as Steve's peace of mind was concerned, Miss Sarah's scheming had not helped at all, that tiny lady still chose to view her activities complacently the day Barbara took leave of her again.

"Write me every detail of your plans," Miss Sarah ordered her. "Proxy bridal preparations are better than none, my dear, and I am madly interested."

At the last minute Barbara bobbed her dark head in reply.

"I will," she promised meekly. And then, wide eyes vague with fear: "Aunt Sarah, I--I'm not sure that I want to be--married at all!"

* * * * * *

"You will be coming back," he told her again the day he put her on the train. "You will be back in the spring?"

It was his old, hopeful challenge, with all the hope left out.

"I think so," she faltered in return. "I mean to come and see the completion of your work, if father will let me." She knew a moment of confusion. "I wonder, many nights, if you are safe, up here in the hills."

Indeed, Miss Sarah had made progress, though the surface indications were small. The girl would never think of him again simply in terms of blue flannel and corduroy. But that was not the most disturbingly vivid memory which she carried away with her.

"I love you," he framed the words silently as the train was pulling out, and although their positions were reversed, the moment was so reminiscent of that day when he had leaned out of her father's switch engine cab and asked if she wanted a ride, that it made her throat ache.

She waved a small gloved hand to him on the platform.

She did not want to go.