Part 3

When he came to the table in front of Hazen he took off his thick gloves. His hands were blue. He laid the gloves on the table and reached into an inner pocket of his torn coat and drew out a little cloth pouch and he fumbled into this and I heard the clink of coins. He drew out two quarters and laid them on the table before Hazen, and Hazen picked them up. I saw that Marshey’s fingers moved stiffly; I could almost hear them creak with the cold. Then he reached into the pouch again.

Something dropped out of the mouth of the little cloth bag and fell soundlessly on the table. It looked to me like a bill, a piece of paper currency. I was about to speak, but Hazen without an instant’s hesitation had dropped his hand on the thing and drawn it unostentatiously toward him. When he lifted his hand the money--if it was money--was gone.

Marshey drew out a little roll of worn bills. Hazen took them out of his hand and counted them swiftly.

“All right,” he said. “Eleven-fifty. I’ll give you a receipt. But you mind me, Doan Marshey, you get the rest before the month’s out. I’ve been too slack with you.”

Marshey, his dull eyes watching Hazen write the receipt, was folding the little pouch and putting it away. Hazen tore off the bit of paper and gave it to him. Doan took it and he said humbly: “Thank’e, sir.”

Hazen nodded.

“Mind now,” he exclaimed, and Marshey said: “I’ll do my best, Mr. Kinch.”

Then he turned and shuffled across the room and out into the hall and we heard him descending the stairs.

When he was gone I asked Hazen casually: “What was it that he dropped upon the table?”

“A dollar,” said Hazen promptly. “A dollar bill. The miserable fool!”

Hazen’s mental processes were always of interest to me.

“You mean to give it back to him?” I asked.

He stared at me and laughed. “No! If he can’t take care of his own money--that’s why he is what he is.”

“Still, it is his money.”

“He owes me more than that.”

“Going to give him credit for it?”

“Am I a fool!” Hazen asked me. “Do I look like so much of a fool?”

“He may charge you with finding it?”

“He loses a dollar; I find one. Can he prove ownership? Pshaw!” Hazen laughed again.

“If there is any spine in him he will lay the thing to you as a theft,” I suggested. I was not afraid of angering Hazen. He allowed me open speech; he seemed to find a grim pleasure in my distaste for him and for his way of life.

“If there were any backbone in the man he would not be paying me eighty dollars a year on a five-hundred-dollar loan--discounted.”

Hazen grinned at me triumphantly.

“I wonder if he will come back,” I said.

“Besides,” Hazen continued, “he lied to me. He told me the eleven-fifty was all he had.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “There is no doubt he lied to you.”

Hazen had a letter to write and he bent to it. I sat by the stove and watched him and considered. He had not yet finished the letter when we heard Marshey returning. His dragging feet on the stair were unmistakable. At the sound of his weary feet some tide of indignation surged up in me. I was minded to do violence to Hazen Kinch. But again a deeper impulse held my hand from the man.

Marshey came in and his weary eyes wandered about the room. They inspected the floor; they inspected me; they inspected Hazen Kinch’s table, and they rose at last humbly to Hazen Kinch.

“Well?” said Hazen.

“I lost a dollar,” Marshey told him. “I ’lowed I might have dropped it here.”

Hazen frowned.

“You told me eleven-fifty was all you had.”

“This here dollar wa’n’t mine.”

The money-lender laughed.

“Likely! Who would give you a dollar? You lied to me; or you’re lying now. I don’t believe you lost a dollar.”

Marshey reiterated weakly: “I lost a dollar.”

“Well,” said Hazen, “there’s no dollar of yours here.”

“It was to git medicine,” Marshey said. “It wa’n’t mine.”

Hazen Kinch exclaimed: “By God, I believe you’re accusing me!”

Marshey lifted both hands placatingly.

“No, Mr. Kinch. No, sir.” His eyes once more wandered about the room. “Mebbe I dropped it in the snow,” he said.

He turned to the door. Even in his slow shuffle there was a hint of trembling eagerness to escape. He went out and down the stairs. Hazen looked at me, his old face wrinkling mirthfully.

“You see?” he said.

I left him a little later and went out into the street. On the way to the hotel I stopped for a cigar at the drug store. Marshey was there, talking with the druggist.

I heard the druggist say: “No, Marshey, I’m sorry. I’ve been stung too often.”

Marshey nodded, humbly.

“I didn’t ’low you’d figure to trust me,” he agreed. “It’s all right. I didn’t ’low you would.”

It was my impulse to give him the dollar he needed, but I did not do it. An overpowering compulsion bade me keep my hands off in this matter. I did not know what I expected but I felt the imminence of the fates. When I went out into the snow it seemed to me the groan of the gale was like the slow grind of millstones, one upon the other.

I thought long upon the matter of Hazen Kinch before sleep came that night.

III

Toward morning the snow must have stopped; and the wind increased and carved the drifts till sunrise, then abruptly died. I met Hazen at the post office at ten and he said: “I’m starting home.”

I asked: “Can you get through?”

He laughed.

“I will get through,” he told me.

“You’re in haste.”

“I want to see that boy of mine,” said Hazen Kinch. “A fine boy, man! A fine boy!”

“I’m ready,” I said.

When we took the road the mare was limping. But she seemed to work out the stiffness in her knees and after a mile or so of the hard going she was moving smoothly enough. We made good time.

The day, as often happens after a storm, was full of blinding sunlight. The glare of the sun upon the snow was almost unbearable. I kept my eyes all but closed, but there was so much beauty abroad in the land that I could not bear to close them altogether. The snow clung to twigs and to fences and to wires, and a thousand flames glinted from every crystal when the sun struck down upon the drifts. The pine wood upon the eastern slope of Rayborn Hill was a checkerboard of rich color. Green and blue and black and white, indescribably brilliant. When we crossed the bridge at the foot of the hill we could hear the brook playing beneath the ice that sheathed it. On the white pages of the snow wild things had writ here and there the fine-traced tale of their morning’s adventuring. We saw once where a fox had pinned a big snowshoe rabbit in a drift.

Hazen talked much of that child of his on the homeward way. I said little. From the top of the Rayborn Hill we sighted his house and he laid the whip along the mare and we went down that last long descent at a speed that left me breathless. I shut my eyes and huddled low in the robes for protection against the bitter wind, and I did not open them again till we turned into Hazen’s barnyard, plowing through the unpacked snow.

When we stopped Hazen laughed.

“Ha!” he said. “Now, come in, man, and warm yourself and see the baby! A fine boy!”

He was ahead of me at the door; I went in upon his heels. We came into the kitchen together.

Hazen’s kitchen was also living room and bedroom in the cold of winter. The arrangement saved firewood. There was a bed against the wall opposite the door. As we came in a woman got up stiffly from this bed and I saw that this woman was Hazen’s wife. But there was a change in her. She was bleak as cold iron and she was somehow strong.

Hazen rasped at this woman impatiently: “Well, I’m home! Where is the boy?”

She looked at him and her lips moved soundlessly. She closed them, opened them again. This time she was able to speak.

“The boy?” she said to Hazen. “The boy is dead!”

The dim-lit kitchen was very quiet for a little time. I felt myself breathe deeply, almost with relief. The thing for which I had waited--it had come. And I looked at Hazen Kinch.

He had always been a little thin man. He was shrunken now and very white and very still. Only his face twitched. A muscle in one cheek jerked and jerked and jerked at his mouth. It was as though he controlled a desire to smile. That jerking, suppressed smile upon his white and tortured countenance was terrible. I could see the blood drain down from his forehead, down from his cheeks. He became white as death itself.

After a little he tried to speak. I do not know what he meant to say. But what he did was to repeat--as though he had not heard her words--the question which he had flung at her in the beginning. He said huskily: “Where is the boy?”

She looked toward the bed and Hazen looked that way; and then he went across to the bed with uncertain little steps. I followed him. I saw the little twisted body there. The woman had been keeping it warm, with her own body. It must have been in her arms when we came in. The tumbled coverings, the crushed pillows spoke mutely of a ferocious intensity of grief.

Hazen looked down at the little body. He made no move to touch it, but I heard him whisper to himself: “Fine boy.”

After a while he looked at the woman. She seemed to feel an accusation in his eyes. She said: “I did all I could.”

He asked: “What was it?”

I had it in me--though I had reason enough to despise the little man--to pity Hazen Kinch.

“He coughed,” said the woman. “I knew it was croup. You know I asked you to get the medicine--ipecac. You said no matter--no need--and you had gone.”

She looked out of the window.

“I went for help--to Anne Marshey. Her babies had had it. Her husband was going to town and she said he would get the medicine for me. She did not tell him it was for me. He would not have done it for you. He did not know. So I gave her a dollar to give him--to bring it out to me.

“He came home in the snow last night. Baby was bad by that time, so I was watching for Doan. I stopped him in the road and I asked for the medicine. When he understood, he told me. He had not brought it.”

The woman was speaking dully, without emotion.

“It would have been in time, even then,” she said. “But after a while, after that, baby died.”

I understood in that moment the working of the mills. And when I looked at Hazen Kinch I saw that he, too, was beginning to understand. There is a just mercilessness in an aroused God. Hazen Kinch was driven to questions.

“Why--didn’t Marshey fetch it?” he asked.

She said slowly: “They would not trust him--at the store.”

His mouth twitched, he raised his hands.

“The money!” he cried. “The money! What did he do with that?”

“He said,” the woman answered, “that he lost it--in your office; lost the money there.”

After a little the old money-lender leaned far back like a man wrenched with agony. His body was contorted, his face was terrible. His dry mouth opened wide.

He screamed!

IV

Halfway up the hill to my house I stopped to look back and all round. The vast hills in their snowy garments looked down upon the land, upon the house of Hazen Kinch. Still and silent and inscrutable.

I knew now that a just and brooding God dwelt among these hills.

OLD TANTRYBOGUS

I

To this day, when Chet McAusland tells the tale his voice becomes husky and his eyes are likely to fill--and, “It was murder,” he will say when he is done. “I felt like a murderer and that’s what I was. But it was too late then.” Sometimes his listeners are silent, appearing to agree with him. More often, those to whom he speaks seek to reassure him, for it is plain to any man that there is no murder in Chet, nor any malice nor anything but a very human large-heartedness toward every man and beast.

In Tantry’s time Chet was a bachelor living alone at his farm above Fraternity, cooking and caring for himself, managing well enough. He had been a granite cutter, a fisherman upon the Banks, a keeper of bees. Now he farmed his rocky hillside farm. He was a man of middle age--a small man with a firm jaw and a pair of bushy eyebrows and deep-set piercing eyes. When he laughed he had a way of setting his head firmly back upon his neck, his chin pressed down, and his laughter was robust and free and fine. I have spoken of his occupations; he had also avocations. All his life he had fished, had hunted, had traversed the forests far and wide. A man who loved the open, loved the woods, loved the very imprint of a deer’s hoof in the mud along the river. A good companion, open-hearted, with never an evil word for any man.

He was, as has been said, a bachelor; but this was not of Chet’s own choosing, as at least one person in Fraternity well knew. Old Tantrybogus knew also--knew even in the days when he was called young Job. He knew his mistress as well as he knew his master; knew her as truly as though she dwelt already at the farm upon the hill. Between her and Chet was his allegiance divided. None other shared it ever, even to the end.

Chet as a bachelor kept open house at his farm upon the hill and this was especially true when there was fishing or gunning to be had. A Rockland man came one October for the woodcock shooting. He and Chet found sport together and found--each in the other--a friend. The Rockland man had fetched with him a she dog of marvelous craft and from her next litter he sent a pup to Chet. In honor of the giver Chet called the dog Job. And Job--Old Tantrybogus that was to be--learned that the farm upon the hill was his world and his home.

Chet’s farm, numbering some eighty acres, included meadows that cut thirty or forty tons of hay; it included ample pasturage for a dozen cows; and it ran down to the George’s River behind the barn, through a patch of hardwood growth that furnished Chet with firewood for the cutting--a farm fairly typical of Fraternity. No man might grow rich upon its fruits, but any man with a fair measure of industry could draw a pleasant living from it and find time for venturing along the brooks for trout or through the alder runs after woodcock or into the swamps for deer, according to the season. From the wall that bounds the orchard you may look down to where the little village lies along the river. A dozen or so of houses, each scrupulously neat and scrupulously painted; a white church with its white spire rising above the trees; the mill straddling the river just below the bridge, and a store or two. Will Bissell’s store is just above the bridge, serving as market place and forum. The post office is there, and there after supper the year round Fraternity foregathers.

In Fraternity most men own dogs; not the cross-bred and worthless brutes characteristic of small towns in less favored countrysides, but setters of ancient stock or hounds used to the trail of fox or rabbit. Now and then you will see a collie or a pointer, though these breeds are rare. Utilitarian dogs--dogs which have tasks to do and know their tasks and do them.

Most men in Fraternity own or have owned some single wonderful dog of which they love to tell--a dog above all other dogs for them, a dog whose exploits they lovingly recount. And it was to come to pass that Job, better known as Old Tantrybogus, should be such a dog to Chet McAusland.

II

Your true setter is born, not made. The instincts of his craft are a part of his birthright. Nevertheless they must be guided and cultivated and developed. There are men whose profession it is to train bird dogs, or as the phrase goes, to break them. With some of these men it is a breaking indeed, for they carry a lash into the field, nor spare to use it. Others work more gently to a better end. But any man may make his dog what he will if he have patience coupled with the gift of teaching the dog to understand his wishes.

Chet decided to train Job himself. He set about it when the pup was some six months old, at a season when winter was settling down upon the farm and there were idle hours on his hands. He had kept as trophies of the gunning season just past the head and the wings of a woodcock. These he bound into a ball of soft and woolly yarn and on a certain day he called Job to his knee and made him sniff and smell this ball until the puppy knew the scent of it. Job wished to tear and rend the pleasantly soft and yielding plaything, but Chet forbade this by stern word, backed by restraining hand, till the pup seemed to understand.

Then he looped about the dog’s neck a stout cord and he held this cord in his hand, the pup at his feet, while he tossed the woolen ball across the kitchen floor. The pup turned and leaped after the ball.

Before he could make a second jump Chet said sharply, “Whoa!”

And he snubbed the cord he held so that Job was brought up short in a tumbling heap, his toe nails scratching on the floor.

Chet got up and crossed and picked up the ball; he returned to his chair, called the pup to his knee, tossed the ball again. Again Job darted after it and again Chet said, “Whoa,” and checked Job with the cord. At which the puppy, with the utmost singleness of purpose, caught the cord in his mouth, squatted on the floor and set about gnawing his bonds in two. Chet laughed at him, called him in, fetched the ball, and tried again.

After Chet had checked him half a dozen times with voice and string the pup sat on its small haunches, looked at Chet with his head on one side and wrinkled its furry brow in thought. And Chet repeated slowly over and over:

“Whoa, Job! Whoa! Whoa!”

The lesson was not learned on the first day or the second or the third. But before the week was gone Job had learned this much: That when Chet said “Whoa” he must stop, or be stopped painfully. Being a creature of intelligence, Job thereafter stopped; and when he was sure the pup understood, Chet applauded him and fed him and made much of him.

One day in the middle of the second week, Job having checked at the word of command, Chet waited for a moment and then said, “Go on!”

Job looked round at Chet, and the man motioned with his hand and repeated, “Go on, Job!”

The pup a little doubtfully moved toward where lay the woolly ball. When he was within a yard of it Chet said again, “Whoa!”

When he stopped this time he did not look back at Chet but watched the ball, and Chet after a single glance threw back his head and laughed aloud and cried to himself, “Now ain’t that comical?”

For Job, a six-months’ puppy, was on his first point. Head low and flattened, nose on a line toward the ball, legs stiff, tail straight out behind with faintly drooping tip, the pup was motionless as a graven dog--a true setter in every line.

And Chet laughed aloud.

This laughter was a mistake, for at the sound the pup leaped forward, the cord slipped through Chet’s fingers and the dog caught the woolly ball and began to worry it. Chet, still laughing, took the ball from him, caressed him, praised him and ended the lesson for that day. And by so doing he permitted the birth in Job of one fault which he would never be able to overcome. The pup supposed he had been applauded for capturing the woolly ball and that notion would never altogether die in his dog brain. Job would break shot, as the gunners say, till the end of his days.

III

By October of his second year Job was sufficiently educated to be called a good working dog. He would stop at the word of command; he would swerve to right or left at a hand gesture; he would come to heel; he would point and hold his point as long as the bird would lie. He was a natural retriever, though Chet had to correct a tendency to chop the object that was retrieved. The man did this by thrusting through and through the woolen teaching ball a dozen long darning needles. When the dog, retrieving this ball, closed his jaws too harshly these needles pricked his tender mouth. He learned to lift the ball as lightly as a feather; he developed a mouth as soft as a woman’s hand; and even in his second year he would at command retrieve an egg which Chet rolled across the kitchen floor and never chip the shell.

His one fault, his trick of breaking shot, was buttressed and built into the dog’s very soul by an incident which occurred in his first year’s hunting. He and Chet left the farmhouse one afternoon and started down through the fringe of woodland toward the river. It was near sunset. Chet had his gun, and as he expected, they found game; Chet had ample warning when he saw Job stiffen at half point, his tail twitching. He watched until the dog began to move forward with slow steps, and he said to himself, “He’s roding a pa’tridge. I knew there’d be one here.”

Job’s head was high, evidence in itself that he had located partridge rather than woodcock. Chet skirted the fringe in the open land, studying the ground well ahead of the dog, alert for the burst of drumming wings. He moved quietly and Job moved among the trees, his feet stirring the leaves. The dog was tense; so was the man. And presently the dog froze again, this time in true point, tail rigid as an iron bar.

Chet knew that meant the partridge had squatted, would run no more. Forced to move now, the bird would fly. He waited for a long half minute, but the partridge waited also. So Chet, rather than walk in among the trees and spoil his chance for a shot, stooped to pick up a stone, intending to toss it in and frighten the bird to wing.

When he stooped, out of position to shoot, he heard the drum of pinions and saw rise not one partridge but two. They swept across the open below him, unbelievably swift, and Chet whipped up his gun and fired once and then again. And never a feather fell. The birds on set wings glided out of his sight into the edge of an evergreen growth down the hill where it would be hopeless to try for a shot at them again.

And Job pursued them. As the birds rose the dog had raced forward. As they disappeared among the tops of the low hemlocks the dog went out of sight after them. Ejecting the empty shells from his gun, Chet swore at himself for his poor shooting and swore at Job for breaking shot and loudly commanded the dog to return. Job did not do so; did not even respond when Chet put his whistle to his lips and blew. So the man started after the dog, whose bell he could faintly hear, and promised to find Job and teach him a thing he needed to know. He started toward the cover, whistling and shouting for Job to come to heel.

When he was half way across the open Job did emerge from the shelter of the evergreens, and he came toward Chet at a swift trot, head held high. Chet started to abuse him. And then when the dog was still half a dozen rods away he saw that Job carried a cock partridge in his mouth. The bird, wounded unto death, had flown to the last wing beat far into the wood. And Job pursuing had found the game and was fetching it in.

For consistency’s sake and for the dog’s sake Chet should still have punished Job--should still have made him understand that to break shot was iniquity. But--Chet was human and much too warm-hearted to be a disciplinarian. Perhaps he is not to be blamed for praising Job after all. Certainly the man did praise the dog, so that Job’s dog brain was given again to understand that if he chased a bird and caught it he would be applauded. The fault dwelt in him thereafter.

“I tried to break him all his life,” Chet will say. “I put a rope on him and a choke collar and I shook him up--everything I knew. It wan’t no good. But it was my fault in the beginning. I never really blamed Old Tantry--never could.”

IV