Part 20

"I'll _try_ not to misuse them," Carter answered, brightening, a remark that plentifully illustrates his impatient feeling.

Agent and store-keeper helped him hitch; and as he headed the sorrels out on the Silver Creek trail--the trail that for him, as for Helen, was one long heartache--the agent drew a deduction from his sombre sternness.

"I heard that MacCloud an' Cummings were back. Je-hosh-a-phat! There'll be something doing if they cross his track."

Stepping out of his stable, after feeding the noon oats next day, Glaves "lifted up his eyes," in biblical phrase, and saw Carter "a long way off." A hot morning at the hay, and the loss of two sections of his mower-sickle by impact with a willow snag, did not tend to alleviate his natural crustiness. As he recognized the tall figure behind the sorrels, the hoar of his fifty winters seemed to settle in the lines of his weathered visage; his eye took the steely sparkle of river ice; his nod, when Carter reined in opposite, was curt as his answer.

"Your wife's address? Yes, I know it."

Forewarned by the store-keeper of the old man's bitterness, Carter was not surprised. "Meaning that you won't give it to me?"

"Not till I know as she wants you to have it."

Tone and manner were superlatively irritating, but the man had taken blood on his soul in Helen's defence, and Carter spoke quietly. "Don't you allow that she's a right to decide for herself?"

"Now, ain't that exac'ly what I said?"

It was not, but contradiction would merely inflame his obstinacy. At a loss how to proceed, Carter switched the heads, one by one, from a patch of tall brown pig-weeds, using his left hand, for the right was roughly tied up in his handkerchief. On his part Glaves looked steadily past him.

It was a beautiful day--sensuous, soft, one of the golden days when warm winds flirt among rustling grasses breathing the incense of smiling flowers. Heat hung in quivering waves along the horizon like an emanation from the hot, prolific earth over whose bosom birds, bumblebees, the little beasts of the prairies, came and went on errands of love and business with songs and twitterings. And there, in the midst of this joy of life, the grim old man bent frowning brows on Carter, who was lost in bitter meditation.

He was laboring under an unhappy sense of error, for his contumacy, determined absence, was not altogether a product of hurt pride. As he himself had dissolved their relations, it was Helen's privilege to renew them, and he had waited, yearning for her word. But now that he was dragged under the harrows of remorse, in an agony of pity for her, he stood before Glaves as in the presence of Nemesis, convicted of a huge mistake.

The initiative, after all, had lain with him. If he had owned to his fault, had apologized for his summary desertion, she could have been trusted to do the rest. Now he doubted that he was too late, for it was but reasonable to suppose that the trustee's determined opposition had origin with her. He squared his big shoulders to this burden of his own packing.

"Will you forward a letter?"

Frowning, Glaves answered without looking at him, "You kin leave your address."'

"But you will forward it?"

"If she wants it."

Carter flushed, but checked a sharp answer. "You ain't extending too much grace to a sinner."

"Any less than you extended her? What d' you expect of me that saw her name dragged in the mud, herself insulted--that took a life to save her body from violence? G--d d-- you!" His pent-up feelings exploded, and for three minutes thereafter hot speech bubbled like vitriol through his clinched teeth in scathing denunciation of Carter's remissness.

"Part of what you say being true, we'll pass the rest," the latter said, when the trustee had drained his phials of wrath. "Now--without conceding your right to withhold her address--will you forward some money?"

Glaves stared. He had expected a blow, a violent quarrel, at least; nay, had lusted for it. But he was too much of a man himself to mistake a just imperturbability for fear, while the mention of money checked his anger by switching his ideas. Jealous for her honor, he looked his suspicion. "Whose money?" But if accent and tone declared against the acceptance of favors, he took the proffered greenbacks after Carter explained that they covered her share of the cattle he and Morrill had owned in common--took them, that is, with a proviso.

"Let me see," he mused, counting five of ten bills of one-hundred-dollar denomination. "You'd forty head of stock when Morrill died. Five hundred covers her share. Take these back." And to further argument he sternly answered, "I don't allow that she's looking for any presents from you."

"No, I don't allow that she is."

Sadness of look and tone caused Glaves to glance up quickly, but he did not relax in his grimness up to the moment that, having left his address, Carter drove away. Then a shade of doubt crept into his steel eyes. "If it had been myself--" he muttered; then as Helen's parting smile recurred in memory, he added: "No, damn him! Let him suffer!" But this was not the end. Pausing in his doorway as he went in to dinner, he saw the buckboard, small as a fly, crawl over a distant knoll, and by some association of ideas remembered Carter's hand and wondered why it was bandaged. And when he learned from Poole and Danvers, who called round for their mail that evening, his first small doubt was raised almost to the dimension of regret.

Since the charivari, Glaves's opinion of the remittance-man--as a fighting animal, at least--had risen above zero, and he lent first an indulgent, then a rapt ear to the boys' story. As he himself had prophesied, the piracy of the five-acre swamp brought Shinn out from his hiding, but the latter's evil fate arranged matters so that as he descended upon the remittance buccaneers from one end of the swamp, Carter appeared on the Lone Tree trail which cat-a-cornered the other. The result bubbled forth from the mouth of first one boy, then the other, in eager interruptions.

"Shade of my granny!" Danvers swore. "You never saw such a fight!"

"No preliminaries," Poole declared. "Carter just leaped from his buggy and went for him like a cat after a mouse."

"And little good it did him. He might have been a gopher in the paws of a grizzly."

"Lay like a dead man for a long half-hour--"

"And looked like a snake that had mixed with a streak of lightning."

"Blind, battered, bruised, we carried him home on his shield--that is, on our hay-rake--"

"And that poor squalid wife of his looked rather disgusted when she found that he wasn't dead."

While they thus poured the tale of Shinn's discomfiture into Glaves's thirsty ears, Carter rattled steadily on towards Lone Tree. Passing Flynn's, he had been tempted to put in, but remembered that the Irishman would be out at the hay, and so ran on and by the one person who could have furnished an approximation of Helen's address. For she had merely promised to write Jenny as soon as she was settled, as he had learned when he met the doctor, back-trailing alone, early that morning.

"But you'll surely find her at one of the hotels!" the agent called to him, on the platform of the freight-train that carried him away at midnight.

But Helen had gone straight to the trustee's sister. And having wasted two days scanning hotel registers, wandering the streets, he concluded that perhaps she had changed her mind and gone straight through to her friends back East. Charging his friends and financial backers to keep on with the search, however, he returned to his labors in that unenviable condition of mind which romanticist writers describe as "broken-hearted."

In a city of twenty thousand it ought not to be so very difficult to locate a young lady whose style and beauty drew the eyes of the street. But if the search failed, the cause inhered in other reasons than lack of diligence--in a reason that largely accounted for Glaves's reluctance to give her address. Sick at heart, hopeless for the future, she had sunk her surname with the bitter past; resumed her maiden name while keeping the married title. Even with Glaves's sister, a big, good-natured woman, she passed as a widow.

*XXV*

*THE SUNKEN GRADE*

The "Ragged Lands!" Seamed, rugged, broken, gloomy with dark spruce, sterile as a barren woman, they cumber the earth from Lake Nipissing a thousand miles westward to the edge of the prairies, and in all their weary length no stretch of meadow-land occurs. Pock-marked with sloughs, muskegs, black morasses, peppered with sand-hills that rise suddenly like eruptive boils in the sparse beard of its dwarf-growths, it is a wicked country, and was held accursed by trappers and Jesuit fathers who, of old, _portaged_ or paddled upon its borders. Yet in construction days men poured into its dark environs; one may still see Carter's camps, moss-grown, roofless, rotting by the right of way, for his line split a fifty-mile breadth from the western verge of that mighty forest.

On the day after Carter's return from Winnipeg the westering sun gilded a long scar, brown with the sere of felled trees, that shore thirty miles of forest. Ten more miles and this, his right of way, would debouch on the Park Lands, a day's drive southward from Silver Creek; at its other end fifty miles of prairie grading would carry it down to the American border. Northerly, the cut was masked in rolling smoke of burning brush; but where, farther south, the spruce mantle had been torn from the bosom of mother earth, it gaped yellow as a gangrened wound. Over this earth-sore men and teams swarmed with the buzz and movement of flies, coming and going about a steam-digger that bit hungry mouthfuls from the bowels of a sand-hill and spat them, with hoarse coughing, upon a train of flat-cars. Beyond them a pile-driver sputtered nervously upon a lean trestle; and still farther south a track gang laid and spiked rails with furious energy, adding their quota of noise to the roar that combined with heat and dust to produce a miniature inferno.

Dipping still lower, the sun poked a golden finger down a thin survey-line that slit the forest at the head of the right of way, and touched into flame the yellow head of a young man who sat on a log near Carter. There slim poplar-brake enclosed a mossy dell, into which the frenzy of work and noise came faintly as the hum of a passing bee. It was, indeed, so cool and pleasant that the surveyor shrugged unwillingly when the advancing shadows emphasized Carter's remark that it was "time to be moving."

"What a demon of unrest!" he laughed. "Can't keep still for five minutes."

His mock disgust drew Carter's smile. "That's all very well--for you. When your transit is cased, you're done. I have a few hundred men to look after."

"Oh, confound them!" the other said. "I'll never make a philosopher of you." And as, shouldering his transit, he followed, he commented humorously on Carter's tiresome energy, affirming that he was reminded of a steam-engine that had slipped its governors. "Couldn't be more grovellingly industrious if you were qualifying for a headline on a child's copy-book. Early to bed, early to rise, makes your boss healthy, wealthy, and wise," he misquoted. And as, a few minutes later, they came out upon wood-choppers who were driving the right of way into the forest, he grimaced, "More misguided zeal."

For all his sarcasm, his eyes betrayed his appreciation, and as, pausing, they looked on, his face lit up with professional pride. Following the choppers, sawyers were cutting sizable timber into logs, piling small trees with the brush; behind them a stumping outfit practised rough dentistry upon the road-bed. All were putting in the last "licks" of a good day's work; the air whistled of falling trees, hummed to the ringing saws; the woods echoed laughter, shouts, cheery curses.

"Good boys," Carter murmured. "Regular whales. Jest eat it up, don't they?"

"Peculiar idiosyncrasy." The surveyor resumed his chaffing. "They ought to have eased up while you were away. Can't account for it, unless--yes, it's beans! Beans, sir! You feed them beans and they work or--die. Query: What effect would a bean diet have on a philosopher? Ugh! I must avoid them."

"No"--Carter indicated a figure, gigantic in the loom of the smoke, "it's not beans; it's Bender. Without him we'd have plenty converts to your theory."

"And now tired nature pities them."

In their coincidence, the last red ray might have signalled Bender's shrill whistle, or _vice versa_. Anyway, sudden silence fell like a mantle over the clearing. While choppers and sawyers cached tools under brush away from rusting dews, teamsters dropped bows and yokes, and all followed the patient ox-teams down the right of way.

"Joking aside," the surveyor said, as they fell in behind, "what has life for these fellows? Ill-fed, worse clothed, only an occasional spree breaks the monotony of grinding toil."

Carter's nod was non-committal. "They work hard--yes, but then work is only terrible to the young and shiftless; your grown man loves it."

"If congenial."

"Generally is. You see, there's always something that a fellow thinks he can do a bit better than any one else--Bill, there, planes his stumps; Ole, that big Swede, is chain lightning on a cant-hook; Michigan Red rides a log down a rapid like a ballet-dancer, and has Jehu beat out on the reins; Big Hans lifts more'n any other man in camp. Summing it, from whip-cracking to stable-cleaning every job has its professor, who gets a heap of fun out of proving his title. Looking a bit closer, these chaps get more sunshine, fresh air, and sleep than your city workers, and if the grub is rough they ain't bothered none with indigestion. Hans finds a flavor in his beans that your big financial gun doesn't get out of his canvas-back. As for amusement, the regular lumber-jack does blow a year's salary on a week's bust, as you say; but most of these are farmers, some of 'em neighbors of mine. If they're rushed in summer they have time to burn in winter, and what of socials, dances, picnics, they strike a fair balance with pleasure."

"But what is ahead of them?"

Carter shrugged. "Death, of course; in the mean time, hard work, harder living, a family, and a mortgage to keep 'em from oversleep. But they'll breathe clean and live clean, work in the sun and outlive two generations of city people. Barring accidents, they'll average fourscore years, and so, when the last word is said, I don't know but that happiness lies down instead of up the ladder."

The surveyor curiously studied his thoughtful face. "You are climbing?"

But Carter was equal to the contradiction. "We was talking of averages--"

"_Were_," the other interrupted.

Grimacing, Carter repeated: "_Were_ talking of averages. The exception gets his fun climbing, and don't find out how much of a fool he is till he looks down from the top."

"_Doesn't_," the other put in, and Carter resaid the word.

The corrections sprang from a compact that was now as old as their acquaintance. A graduate in engineering, the young fellow was widely read and cultured far beyond the needs of his profession, and as they talked, smoking, in their office-tent of evenings, his allusions to and illustrations from the realms of science, literature, art had given Carter glimpses of Helen's world, a universe in which touch, taste, smell, sight, and other things gave place to feeling, memory, perception. And so he had been stimulated to conscious attempts at improvement.

"I feel like a two-year-old!" he had exclaimed one evening early in their acquaintance. "I 'd like to know more of that. D' you suppose I could get that book in town? An' say, if you catch me straddling the traces--manners, speech, an' so forth--I wish you'd lam me one. Of course I'm pretty set, but if I could just tone down a bit on a few of the big things, the little ones might slip by unnoticed."

In the nature of things a construction-camp is bound to suffer a chronic drouth of news, and in default of other subjects Carter's marital troubles had received exhaustive and analytical treatment at the hands of the Silver Creek men and others. Filtering through many strata, enough of the gossip had reached the surveyor to inform him of the motive under this rough appeal, and he readily consented. So, in their talks thereafter, he had trimmed out the wilder growths of Carter's speech, giving rule and reason, for, as he laughingly assured him, his big pupil had an uncanny appetite for underlying law.

"Now 'tain't reasonable to suppose that you have to learn all the individual cases," he would say, when the surveyor tripped him on some expression; "what's the law of it?" And he would offer humorous opinions on the eccentricities of the tongue. "The darn language seems to have grown from wild seed, an' though Lindley Murray--ain't that his name?--lopped a bit here an' pruned a bit there, he couldn't straighten the knarls and twists in the trunks. An' I don't know but that it's as well that way Leave them grammarians alone, an' they'd clip an' trim the language till it was tame as the cypress hedges that my old aunt uster shape into crowing roosters, gillypots, an' pilaster pillars at home back East." In saying which he touched a profound etymological truth that is altogether ignored by the scientific inventors of universal languages.

One who had not seen him for some months--Helen, for instance--could not have failed, this evening, to notice how his faithful delving in that wild orchard had begun to bring forth fruit in his speech. Evincing fewer "aint's," it had more "ings," and even attained, on occasion, to correct usage in "number" of verbs. Equally forcible, as full of curt figures, its epigrammatic quality had gained rather than lost by better expression.

The silence which had fallen between them endured till they came in sight of the camp, a string of tents and log-cabins under the eaves of the forest. Then the surveyor pointed out a girl who was watching the tired stream from the door of the nearest tent.

"Why, there's Dorothy! She threatened to make the chief bring her down, but I didn't think she'd make it. Come along and I'll introduce you."

As, however, he mended his pace, Carter fell behind, and the sadness which had become habitual to his face deepened. He had heard the young fellow speak of this girl, his _fiancee_; and though in color and appearance she was the opposite of Helen, the swish of her skirts as she came to meet them, suggestion of perfume, the hundred elusive delicacies that make up a well-bred girl's personality, recalled his wife and oppressed him with a vivid sense of loss.

Her voice, rich and low in its tones as Helen's, strengthened the impression. "Dad said 'No,'" she laughed, after the introduction. "But--"

"Wilful woman will have her way," a voice declared from the interior of the tent; then the chief engineer, a hale man of fifty, appeared in the doorway. "Mosquitoes, alkali water, nothing would scare her." He was going on with inquiries of the health of a bridge that had developed rheumatic tendencies in its feet, when she laughingly interrupted:

"Come, dad, no business till after supper. I have already scraped acquaintance with the cook, and he says we are to come at once. So run along, little boys, and get ready."

"Wash our dirty faces, to put it plainly," the surveyor echoed her happy laugh. "Be it known unto you, fair lady, that ablutions are held to be effeminate, unnecessary, if not immoral, in construction work. However, in view of your hypersensitiveness, we will do violence to our inclinations. Come on, Carter--we for the tub."

But from a dozen yards she called him back. "This is the man you wrote me of? I knew him at once. What a splendid fellow!"

"Gorgeous!" he returned her whisper. "His wife must be a queer sort."

"Not necessarily." She added, with thoughtful intuition: "The possibilities are so many. Your friend is handsome and has a good face, but we girls are more complex than our mothers. While they were satisfied with good temper and good provision, we demand sympathy of taste and habit; that we touch without friction at a hundred points of contact. Tall as Mr. Carter is, he may fall short of such a standard."

Bending, her lover gazed admiringly into her earnest eyes. "Such a little wisehead! And did I pass in this difficult examination?"

Carter's back was turned, the cook-house door had just closed on the last teamster, her father had gone back to his calculations, so her answer was sweet as satisfactory.

When, half an hour later, the four entered the cook-house, two cookees were laying the table under one eagle eye of the cook, the other being on a roast that he was liberally basting. "Hain't you got no nose?" he answered Carter's question; but he smiled as, sniffing its rich odor, Dorothy said: "It's venison! And I'm so hungry!"

"Sure!" he corroborated. "Cree hunter brought in a quarter of moose this afternoon."

Pleased with her discernment, he seated her at the head of a table which he himself had scoured with sand to a snowy whiteness while the cookees were grinding a summer's tarnish from iron knives and spoons. Her tin plate reflected a smile that he would willingly have paid for in turkey and truffles, but lacking these, he served baked potatoes with the venison, hot biscuit, cake a hand's-breadth thick, and with a flourish set the crowning delicacy of camp life, a can of condensed cream, beside her tin coffee-cup. Then he packed the cookees outside to peel the morrow's potatoes that her appetite might not suffer from their admiring glances, an act which they classified as tyranny and ascribed to evil motives.

"She's a right smart gal," he added, after imparting a few privacies anent their birth and breeding from the door-step. "None a' your picking sort. Knows good cooking when she sees it, she does." Then he left them to digest a last piece of information that the evolution of their ancestors had been arrested in a low and bestial stage.

That supper figured as an epoch in Carter's life, because it marked a definite conscious change in his feeling towards his wife. With all men thought is more or less chaotic. Filtering slowly from feeling under pressure of experience, it remains fluid, turgid, until some specific act--it may be of a very ordinary nature--clears and precipitates it into the moulds of fixed opinion. So, though material of a sounder, more reasonable judgment of Helen had been gathering in his mind these months, injured pride had held it in abeyance--in suspension, as it were--until now that recent disappointment had left him peculiarly susceptible to impression, a resolvent was added; that occurred which precipitated his thought.