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Title: The Little Fig-tree Stories

Author: Mary Hallock Foote

Release Date: February 24, 2022 [eBook #67485]

Language: English

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  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
  BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

  [Illustration: UP THE LADDER TO THE SCUTTLE (_Page 160_)]




  THE

  LITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES

  BY

  MARY HALLOCK FOOTE

  _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR_

  [Illustration: Decorative image with publisher info]


  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
  The Riverside Press, Cambridge
  1899




  COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY MARY HALLOCK FOOTE
  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.




  AUTHOR’S NOTE


These stories were originally published in the St. Nicholas Magazine,
and are reprinted here by kind permission of the Century Company.

The profits of the volume are dedicated to the Children’s Hospital of
San Francisco.




  CONTENTS


                                                PAGE

  FLOWER OF THE ALMOND AND FRUIT OF THE FIG        1

  THE LAMB THAT COULDN’T “KEEP UP”                17

  DREAM HORSES                                    32

  AN IDAHO PICNIC                                 44

  A VISIT TO JOHN’S CAMP                          92

  NOVEMBER IN THE CAÑON                          107

  THE GATES ON GRANDFATHER’S FARM                120

  THE GARRET AT GRANDFATHER’S                    144

  THE SPARE BEDROOM AT GRANDFATHER’S             167




THE

LITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES




FLOWER OF THE ALMOND AND FRUIT OF THE FIG


There is a garden on a hill slope between the snows of the Sierra
Nevada and the warm, rich valleys of the coast. It is in that region of
Northern California where the pine belt and the fruit belt interlace.
Both pine and fruit trees grow in that mountain garden, and there, in
the new moon of February, six young Almond trees burst into flower.

The Peach and Plum trees in the upper garden felt a glow of sympathy
with their forward sisters of the south, but the matronly Cherry trees
shook their heads at such an untimely show of blossoms. They foresaw
the trouble to come.

“The Almond trees,” they said, “will lose their fruit buds this year,
as they did last and the year before. Poor things, they are so
emotional! The first whisper of spring that wanders up the foothills
sets them all aflame; out they rush, with their hearts on their
sleeves, for the frosts to peck at. But what can one do? If you try
to reason with them, ‘Our parents and grandparents always bloomed in
February,’ they will tell you, ‘and _they_ did not lose their fruit
buds.’”

“The Almond trees come of very ancient stock,” said the Normandy
Pear, who herself bore one of the oldest names in France. “Inherited
tendencies are strong in people of good blood. One of their ancestors,
I have heard, was born in a queen’s garden in Persia, a thousand years
ago; and beautiful women, whose faces the sun never shone upon, wore
its blossoms in their hair. And as you probably know, their forefathers
are spoken of in the Bible.”

“A number of persons, my dear, are spoken of in the Bible who were no
better than they should be,” said the eldest Apple tree. “We go back to
the ‘Mayflower,’--that is far enough for us; and none of our family
ever dreamed of putting on white and pink in February. It would be
flying in the face of Providence.”

“White and pink are for Easter,” said the Pear tree, whose grandparents
were raised in a bishop’s garden. “I should not wish to put my blossoms
on in Lent.”

The Apple tree straightened herself stiffly.

“We do not keep the church fasts and feasts,” she said; “but every one
knows that faith without works is dead. What are these vain blossoms
that we put forth for a few days in the spring, without the harvest
that comes after?”

“Now the Apple tree is going to preach,” said the light-hearted Peach
tree, stepping on the Plum tree’s toes. “If we must have preaching, I
had rather listen to the Pines. They, at least, have good voices.”

“Those misguided Almonds are putting out all their strength in fleshly
flowers,” the Apple tree continued; “but how when the gardener comes
to look for his crop? We all know, as the Cherry trees said, what
happened last year and the year before. It cannot be expected that the
Master of the Garden will have patience with them forever.”

“The Master of the Garden!” Four young Fig trees, who stood apart and
listened in sorrowful silence to this talk of blossoms, repeated the
words with fear and trembling.

“How long,--how much longer,”--they asked themselves, “will he have
patience with us?”

It was now the third spring since they had been planted, but not one
of the four sisters had yet produced a single flower. With deep, shy
desire they longed to know what the flower of the fig might be like.
They were all of one age, and they had no parent tree to tell them.
They knew nothing of their own nature or race or history. Two seasons
in succession, a strange, distressful change had come upon them. They
had felt the spring thrills, and the sap mounting in their veins; but
instead of breaking out into pink and white flowers, like the happy
trees around them, ugly little hard green knobs had crept out of their
tender bark, and these had swollen and increased in size till they were
bowed with the burden of their deformity. Fruit this could not be, for
they had seen that fruit comes from a flower, and no sign of blossom or
bud had ever been vouchsafed them. When inquisitive hands came groping,
and feeling of the purple excrescences upon their limbs, they covered
them up in shame and tried to hide them with their broad green leaves.
In time they were mercifully eased of this affliction; but then the
frosts came, and the winter’s dull suspense, and then another spring’s
awakening to hope and fear.

“Perhaps we were not old enough before,” they whispered encouragement
to one another. “Blossoms no doubt are a great responsibility. Had we
had them earlier, we might have been foolish and brought ourselves to
blame, like the Almond trees. Let us not be impatient; the sun is warm,
but the nights are cold. Do not despair, dear sisters; we may have
flowers yet. And when they do come, no doubt they will be fair enough
to reward us for our long waiting.”

They passed the word on softly, even to the littlest Fig-tree sister
that stood in rocky ground close to the wall that shut the garden
in from the pine wood at its back. The Pines were always chanting
and singing anthems in the wood; but though the sound was beautiful,
it oppressed the little Fig tree, and filled her with melancholy.
Moreover, it was very dry in the ground where she stood, and a Fig tree
must have drink.

“Sisters, I am very thirsty!” she cried. “Have you a little, a very
little water that you could spare?”

The sister Fig trees had not much of anything to spare; they were
spreading and growing fast, and their own soil was coarse and stony.
The water that had so delicious a sound in coming seemed to leak away
before their eager rootlets had more than tasted it; still they would
have shared what they had, could they have passed it to their weaker
sister. But the water would not go uphill; it ran away down, instead,
and the Peach and Plum and Pear trees grew fat with what the Fig trees
lacked.

“Courage, little sister!” they called to the fainting young tree by the
wall. “The morning sun is strong, but soon the shadow of the wood will
reach us. Cover thy face and keep a good heart. When our turn shall
come, it will be thy turn too; one of us will not bloom without the
others.”

It was only February, and the Almond trees stood alone, without a rival
in their beauty. They stood in the proudest place in the garden, in
full view both from the road and from a high gallery that ran across
the front of the house where the Master of the Garden lived. The
house faced the west, and whenever the people came out to look at the
sunset they admired the beauty of the Almond trees, with their upright
shoots, tipped and starred with luminous blossoms, against the deep,
rich colors in the west; and when the west faded, as it did every
evening, a lamp on a high post by the gate, bigger and brighter than
the brightest star, was set burning,--“for what purpose,” thought the
Almond trees, “but to show our beauty in the night?” So they watched
through the dark hours, and felt the intoxication of the keen light
upon them, and marveled at their own shadows on the grass.

They were somewhat troubled because so many of their blossoms were
being picked; but the tree that stood nearest the house windows rose
on tiptoe, and behold! each gathered spray had been kept for especial
honor. Some were grouped in vases in the room, or massed against the
chimney-piece; others were set in a silver bowl in the centre of a
white table, under a shaded lamp, where a circle of people gazed at
them, and every one praised their delicate, sumptuous beauty.

But peepers as well as listeners sometimes learn unpleasant truths
about themselves.

“Aren’t we picking too many of these blossoms?” asked the lady of the
house. “I’m afraid we are wasting our almond crop.”

“Almond trees will never bear in this climate,” said the Master of the
Garden. “Better make the most of the blossoms while they last. The
frost will catch them in a week or two.”

So the mother and children gathered the blossoms recklessly,--to save
them, they said. Then a snow fall came, and those that had been left
on the trees were whiter than ever for one day, and the next day they
were dead. Each had died with a black spot at its core, which means the
death that has no resurrection in the fruit to come.

After the snow came rain and frost, and snow again. The white Sierra
descended and shook its storm cloak in the face of laughing Spring, and
she fled away downward into the warm valleys. Alas, the flatterer! But
the Almond trees alone had trusted her, and again their hope of fruit
was lost.

“Did we not say so?” muttered the Apple tree between her chattering
teeth. She was the most crabbed and censorious of the sisters, and by
her talk of fruit one might have supposed her own to be of the finest
quality; but this was not the case, and the gardener only that year had
been threatening, though she did not know it, to cut off her top and
graft her with a sweeter kind.

The leaves of the Almond tree are not beautiful, neither is her shape
a thing to boast of. When spring did at last come back to stay, the
Almonds were the plainest of all the trees. Their blossoms were like
bright candles burned to the socket, that would light no more; their
“corruptible crown” of beauty had passed to other heads. No one looked
at them, no one pitied them, except the Fig trees, who wondered which
had most cause to mourn,--they, who had never had a blossom, or the
Almond trees, who had risked theirs and lost them all before the time
of blossoms came.

The Fig trees’ reproach had not been taken away. While every tree
around them was dressed in the pride of the crop to come, they stood
flowerless and leafless, and burned with shame through all their barren
shoots.

When the Master of the Garden came with his children to look at them,
they hung their heads and were afraid.

“When will they blossom, like the other trees,” the children asked,
“and what sort of flower will _they_ bear?”

The Fig trees held their breath to hear the answer.

“A Fig tree has no flower, like the other fruit trees,” said the Master
of the Garden. “Its blossom is contained in the fruit. You cannot see
it unless you cut open the budding figs, and then you would not know it
was a flower.”

“What is the use of having blossoms, if no one ever sees them?” one of
the children asked.

“What is the use of doing good, unless we tell everybody and brag about
it beforehand?” the father questioned, smiling.

“I thought the best way was--you know--to do it in secret,” said the
child.

“That’s what we are taught; and some persons do good in that way, and
cover it up as if they were ashamed of it. And so the Fig tree doesn’t
tell anybody when it is going to bear fruit.”

The Fig trees had heard their doom. To the words that followed they had
not listened; nor would they have understood much more of it than the
child of its father’s meaning.

“What is this he calls our fruit?” they asked each other in fear and
loathing. “Was _that_ our fruit,--those green and purple swellings,
that unspeakable weight of ugliness? Will it come year after year, and
shall we never have a flower? The burden without the honor, without
the love and praise, that beauty brings. That is the beginning and the
end with us. Little sister, thou art happier than we, for soon thy
burden-bearing will be done. Uncover thy head and let the sunbeams slay
thee, for why should such as we encumber the ground!”

Trees that grow in gardens may have long memories and nature teaches
them a few things by degrees, but they can know little of what goes on
in the dwellings or the brains of men, or why one man should plant
and call it good and later another come and dig up the first man’s
planting. But so it happened in this garden. “The stone which the
builders rejected, the same was made the head of the corner.”

“These little Fig trees with their strange, great leaves,--why were
they put off here by themselves, I wonder?” A lady spoke who had lately
come to the cottage. She was the wife of the new Master of the Garden.
“I wish we had them where we could see them from the house,” she said.
“All the other trees are commonplace beside them.”

“They are not doing well here,” said her husband. “This one, you see,
is nearly dead. They must be transplanted, or we shall lose them all.”

Then followed talk which set the Fig trees a-tremble with doubt and
amazement and joy. They were to be moved from that arid spot,--where,
they knew not, but to some place of high distinction! They--the
little aliens who had stood nearest the wall and thirsted for a bare
existence--were to be called to the front of the garden and have honor
in the presence of all! The despised burden which they had called their
deformity they heard spoken of as the rarest fruit of the garden, and
themselves outvalued beyond all the other trees, for that, having so
little, they had done so much.

Beauty too was theirs, it appeared, as well as excellence, though they
could scarcely believe what their own ears told them; and they had
a history and a family as old as those of the Almond tree, who can
remember nothing that did not happen a thousand years ago and so has
never learned anything in the present.

But the Fig trees would have been deeply troubled at their promotion
could they have known what it was to cost their neighbors the Almond
trees.

“Two we will keep for the sake of their flowers, but the others must
go, and give room for the Figs.” So said the new Master, and so it
was done. The unfruitful Almond trees were dug up and thrown over the
wall,--all but the two whom their sisters had ransomed with their
lives; for beauty has its price in this world and there must be some
one to pay it.

When another spring came round, it was the little Fig tree that stood
in the bright corner where the splendor of the road lamp shone upon its
leaves all night. Its leaves were now as broad as a man’s outspread
hand, and its fruit was twice the size it had been the season before.

Its sister trees stood round and interlaced their boughs about it.

“Lean on us, little one,” they said, regarding it with pride.

“But you have your own load to bear.”

“We scarcely feel it,” said the happy trees.

This was true; for the burden that had seemed beyond their strength,
when their hearts were heavy with shame and despondency, they could
bear up lightly now, since they had learned its meaning and its worth.

The new Master’s children were so full of the joy of spring in that
mountain garden--for they too, like the little Fig trees, had been
transplanted from arid ground--they had no words of their own in which
to utter it. So their mother taught them some words from a song as old,
almost, as the oldest garden that was ever planted:--

“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers
appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the
voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth
her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.”

       *       *       *       *       *

“Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that
the spices thereof may flow out.”




THE LAMB THAT COULDN’T “KEEP UP”


Until Jack Gilmour was seven years old his home had been at his
grandfather’s house in a country “well wooded and watered,” as the
Dutch captain who discovered it described it to his king.

There was water in the river; there was water in the ponds that lay
linked together by falling streams among the hills above the mill;
there was water in the spring lot; there was water in the brook that
ran through the meadow across the road; there was water in the fountain
that plashed quietly all through the dark, close summer nights, when
not a leaf stirred, even of the weeping ash, and the children lay
tossing in their beds, with only their nightgowns covering them. And
besides all these living, flowing waters, there was water in the
cistern that lay concealed under the foundations of the house. Not one
of the grandchildren knew who had dug it, or cemented it, or sealed
it up, for children and children’s children to receive their first
bath from its waters. The good grandfather’s care had placed it there;
but even that fact the little ones took for granted, as they took the
grandfather himself,--as they took the fact that the ground was under
their feet when they ran about in the sunshine.

In an outer room, which had been a kitchen once (before Jack’s mother
was born), there was a certain place in the floor that gave out a
hollow sound, like that from the planking of a covered bridge, whenever
Jack stamped upon it. Somebody found him, one day, trying the echoes
on this queer spot in the floor, and advised him to keep off it. It
was the trapdoor which led down into the cistern; and although it was
solidly made and rested upon a broad ledge of wood--well, it had rested
there on that same ledge for many years, and it wasn’t a pleasant
thought that a little boy in kilts should be prancing about with only
a few ancestral planks between him and a hidden pit of water.

Once, when the trapdoor had been raised for the purpose of measuring
the depth of the water in the cistern, Jack had looked down and had
watched a single spot of light wavering over the face of the dark,
still pool. It gave him a strange, uncomfortable feeling, as if this
water were something quite unlike the outdoor waters, which reflected
the sky instead of the under side of a board floor. This water was
imprisoned, alone and silent; and if ever a sunbeam reached it, it was
only a stray gleam wandering where it could not have felt at home, and
must have been glad to leap out again when the sunbeam moved away from
the crack in the floor that had let it in.

That same night a thunderstorm descended; the chimneys bellowed, and
the rain made a loud trampling upon the roof. Jack woke and felt for
his mother’s hand. As he lay still, listening to the rain lessening to
a steady, quiet drip, drip, he heard another sound, very mysterious
in the sleeping house,--a sound as of a small stream of water falling
from a height into an echoing vault. His mother told him it was the
rain water pouring from all the roofs and gutters into the cistern, and
that the echoing sound was because the cistern was “low.” Next morning
the bath water was deliciously fresh and sweet; and Jack had no more
unpleasant thoughts about the silent, sluggish old cistern.

Now, there are parts of our country where the prayer “Give us this day
our daily water” might be added to the prayer “Give us this day our
daily bread;” unless we take the word “bread” to mean all that men and
women require to preserve life to themselves and their children. That
sad people of the East to whom this prayer was given so long ago could
never have forgotten the cost and value of water.

If you turn the pages of a Bible concordance to the word “water,”
you will find it repeated hundreds of times, in the language of
supplication, of longing, of prophecy, of awful warning, of beautiful
imagery, of love and aspiration. The history of the Jewish people in
their wanderings, their wars and temptations, to their final occupation
of the promised land, might be traced through the different meanings
and applications of this one word. It was bargained, begged, and fought
for, and was apportioned from generation to generation. We read among
the many stories of those thirsty lands how Achsah, daughter of Caleb
the Kenizzite, not content with her dowry, asked of her father yet
another gift, without which the first were valueless: “For thou hast
given me a south land; give me also springs of water. And Caleb gave
her the upper springs and the nether springs.”

Now, our little boy Jack was seven years old, and had to be taken more
than halfway across the continent before he learned that water is a
precious thing. He was taken to an engineer’s camp in a cañon of a
little, wild river that is within the borders of that region of the far
West known as the “arid belt.”

Well, there was water in this river; but after the placer-mining
began, in the month of May, and Moore’s Creek brought down the
“tailings” from the mines and mingled them with the current of the
river, its waters became as yellow as those of the famous Tiber as
it “rolls by the towers of Rome,”--yellow with silt, which is not
injurious; but it is not pleasant to drink essence of granite rock,
nor yet to wash one’s face in it. They made a filter and filtered it;
but every pailful had to be “packed,” as they say in the West, by the
Chinese cook and the cook’s assistant. Economy in the use of water
became no more than a matter of common consideration for human flesh.

In addition to the river there was a stream that came down the gulch
close beside the camp. This little stream was a spendthrift in the
spring and wasted its small patrimony of water; by the middle of summer
it had begun to economize, and by September it was a niggard,--letting
only a small dribble come down for those at its mouth to cherish in
pools or pots or pails, or in whatever it could be gathered. This
water of the gulch was frequently fouled by the range cattle that
came crowding down to drink, mornings and evenings. Dead leaves and
vegetation lay soaking in it, as summer waned. It was therefore
condemned for drinking, but served for bathing or for washing the camp
clothing, and was exceedingly precious by reason of its small and
steadily decreasing quantity.

One morning, late in July, Jack was fast asleep and dreaming. The
sun was hot on the great hills toward the east,--hills that had been
faintly green for a few weeks in the spring, but were now given up to
the mingled colors of the gray-green sagebrush and the dun-yellow soil.

They would have been hills of paradise, could rain have fallen upon
them as often as it falls upon the cedar-crowned knolls of the Hudson;
for these hills are noble in form and of great size,--a family of
giants as they march skyward, arm in arm and shoulder to shoulder,--and
the sky above them is the sky we call “Italian.” The “down-cañon
wind,” that all night long had swept the gulch from its source in the
hills to its mouth in the river, had fainted dead away in the heat of
the sun. Presently the counter wind from the great hot plains would
begin to blow, but this was the breathless pause between.

The flies were tickling Jack’s bare legs and creeping into the neck
of his nightgown, where the button was off, as usually it is from a
seven-year-old’s nightgown. He was restless, “like a dog that hunts in
dreams,” for he was taking the old paths again that once he had known
so well.

From the eastern hills came the mingled, far-off bleating, the
ululation of a multitude of driven sheep. The sound had reached Jack’s
dreaming ear. Suddenly his dream took shape, and for an instant he was
a happy boy.

He was “at home” in the East. It was sheep-washing time, the last week
in May; the apple orchards were a mass of bloom and the deep, old,
winding lanes were sweet with their perfume. Jack was hurrying up the
lane by the Long Pond to the sheep-washing place, where the water came
down from the pond in a dark, old, leaky, wooden flume, and was held
in a pool into which the sheep were plunged by twos and by threes,
squeezed and tumbled about and lifted out to stagger away under the
apple trees and dry their heavy fleeces in the sun. Jack was kicking in
his sleep, when his name was called by a voice outside the window and
he woke. Nothing was left of the dream, with all its sweets of sight
and sound and smell, but the noise of the river’s continuous wrestle
with the rocks of the upper bend, and that far-off multitudinous clamor
from over the sun-baked hills.

“Jack, come out!” said the voice of Jack’s big cousin. “They are going
to ‘sheep’ us. There’s a band of eight thousand coming!”

There was a great scattering of flies and of bedclothes, as Jack
leaped out. He wasted no regrets upon the past,--one isn’t so foolish
as that at seven years old,--but was ready for the joys of the
present. Eight thousand sheep, or half that number (allowing for a big
cousin’s liberal computation), were a sight worth seeing. As to being
“sheeped,” what was there in an engineer’s camp to “sheep,” unless the
eight thousand woolly range-trotters should trot over tents and house
roofs and stovepipes and all, like Santa Claus’s team of reindeer!

Jack was out of bed and into his clothes in a hurry, and off over the
hill with his cousin, buttoning the buttons of his “star” shirt waist
on the way.

The “band” was pouring over the hill slopes in all directions, making
at full speed for the river. The hills themselves seemed to be dizzily
moving. The masses of distant small gray objects swarmed, they drifted,
they swam, with a curious motionless motion. They looked like nothing
more animated than a crop of gray stones, nearly of a size, spreading
broadly over the hills and descending toward the river with an impulse
which seemed scarcely more than the force of gravitation.

The dogs were barking, the shepherds were racing and shouting to head
off the sheep and check their speed, lest the hundreds behind should
press upon the hundreds in front and force them out into deep water.
The hot air throbbed with the tumult.

When the thirst of every panting throat had been slaked and the band
began to scatter along the hill slopes, the boys went forward to speak
with the sheepmen.

A few moments afterward both lads were returning to the camp on a run,
to ask permission to accept from the shepherds the gift of a lamb that
couldn’t “keep up” with the band. It had run beside its mother as
far as its strength would carry it, and then it had fallen and been
trampled; and there it must lie unless help could revive it. A night on
the hills, with the coyotes about, would finish it.

Permission was given, and breakfast was a perfunctory meal for the
children by reason of the lamb lying on the strip of shade outside.
After breakfast they sopped its mouth with warm milk, they sponged
it with cold water, they tried to force a spoonful of mild stimulant
between its teeth. They hovered and watched for signs of returning
life. The lamb lay with its eyes closed; its sides, that were
beginning to swell, rose and sank in long, heavy gasps. Once it moved
an ear, and the children thought it must be “coming to.” Upon this
hopeful sign they began at once to make plans for the lamb’s future
life and joys with them in the cañon.

It should be led down to the river, night and morning, to drink; it
should have bran soaked in milk; it should nibble the grass on the
green strip; they would build it a house, for fear the coyotes should
come prowling about at night; it should follow them up the gulch and
over the hills, and race with them in the evenings on the river beach,
as “Daisy,” the pet fawn, had done--until something happened to her
(the children never knew what), and the lovely creature disappeared
from the cañon and out of their lives forever.

[Illustration: THE LAMB THAT COULDN’T KEEP UP]

When the strip of morning shadow was gone, they lifted the lamb
tenderly and carried it to the strip of afternoon shadow on the other
side of the house; and still it took no notice of the water or the
milk, or of all the children’s care, nor seemed to hear that they were
planning a happy life for it, if only it would get well.

When twilight came, and still it had not moved, the children held
anxious consultation on the subject of their neighbors, the coyotes;
but their father assured them there would be no danger, so near to the
house; and it seemed a pity to disturb the poor lamb.

When the cool night wind began to blow down the cañon again, and the
children were asleep, the lamb made its last effort. It is the instinct
of all dumb creatures to keep upon their feet as long as they can
stand; for when they have fallen the herd has no compassion,--or it
may be that its comrades press around the sufferer out of curiosity or
mistaken sympathy, and so trample it out of existence without meaning
the least harm. The little nursling of the range obeyed this instinct
in its last moments,--struggled to its feet and fell, a few steps
farther on; and the lamb that couldn’t keep up was at rest.

No more toiling over hills and mountains and across hot valleys, packed
in the midst of the band, breathing the dust, stunned with the noise,
always hungry, almost always athirst, baked by the sun, chilled by the
snow, driven by the wind,--drifting on, from mountain to river, from
river to plain.

This one, out of eight thousand, could rest at last, on cool grass,
with the peace and the silence and the room of a summer night around it.

The band slept upon the hills that night; the next morning they crossed
the gulch above the camp, and drank up by the way _all_ the water of
the little stream. Not another drop was seen for days. At length it
gathered strength enough to trickle down again, but it was necessary
to dip it up and let it stand in casks to settle before it was fit for
use; and meanwhile the Chinamen carriers did double duty.

Those eastern hills in spring had been covered with wild flowers,--the
moss pink, lupines both white and blue, wild phlox, the small yellow
crocus, beds of tiny sweet-scented wild pansies, the camas flower, and
a tall-stemmed, pale lilac lily,--the queen of the hill garden. But
when spring came again, the old pathways were like an ash heap. The
beautiful hill garden was a desert.

When these great sheep bands pass over the country, from range to
range, from territory to territory, they devour not only the vegetation
of one year, but the seeds, the roots, and, with these, the promise of
the next.

It is the migration of the Hungry and the Thirsty; and a cry goes out
against them, like the cry of Moab when the children of Israel camped
within its borders:--

“Surely this multitude will lick up all that is round about us.”




DREAM-HORSES


There is a little girl who hangs upon her mother’s chair, getting her
head between her mother’s work and the light, and begs for pictures.

She expects her mother to make these pictures on some bit of paper
treasured for the purpose which she offers, with a book to rest it
on, and a stubby pencil notched with small toothmarks, the record of
moments of perplexity when Polly was making her own pictures.

It is generally after a bad failure of her own that she comes to her
mother. The pang of disappointment with her own efforts is apt to
sharpen her temper a little; it does not make Polly more patient with
her mother’s mistakes that she makes mistakes herself. But between
critic and artist, with such light as the dark lantern of a little
girl’s head permits to fall upon the paper, the picture gets made
somehow, and before it is finished Polly’s heart will be so full of
sunshine that she will insist upon comparisons most flattering to the
feelings of her artist, between their different essays at the same
subject.

It is a subject they are both familiar with; and it is wonderful,
considering the extent of Polly’s patronage, that her artist’s work
does not better itself.

It is always a picture of a young person on horseback,--a young person
about the age of Polly, but much handsomer and more grown-up looking.
And the horse must be a pony with a flowing mane and tail, and his legs
must be flung out, fore and aft, so that in action he resembles one of
those “crazy-bugs” (so we children used to call them) that go scuttling
like mad things across the still surface of a pond. In other respects
he may be as like an ordinary pony as mamma and the stubby pencil can
make him. But the young person on the pony must be drawn in profile,
because Polly cannot make profiles, except horses’ profiles; her young
persons always look straight out of the picture as they ride along, and
the effect, at full speed, on a horse with his legs widely extended
from his body, is extremely gay and nonchalant.

With the picture in her hand, the little girl will go away by herself
and proceed to “dream and to dote.”

She lives in a horsey country. Horses in troops or “bands” go past
by the trails, on the one side of the river or the other. Sometimes
they ford where the water is breast-high over the bar. It is wild and
delicious to hear the mares whinnying to their foals in midstream, and
the echo of their voices, with the rushing of the loud water pent among
the hills.

Often the riders who are in charge of the band encamp for the night
on the upper bend of the river, and the red spark of their camp-fire
glows brightly about the time the little girl must be going to bed;
for it is in spring or fall the bands of horses go up into the hills
or down into the valleys, or off, one does not know where,--to a
“round up,” perhaps, where each stockman counts his own, and puts his
brand on the young colts. Over the hills, where Polly and her big
brother go wild-flower hunting, horses wander loose and look down from
the summits, mere specks, like black mice, against the sky; they are
plainly to be seen from miles away, for there is not a tree anywhere
upon these hills. Sometimes a single horse, the chieftain of a troop,
will stand alone on a hilltop and take a look all the wide country
round, and call, in his splendid voice like “sounding brass,” to
the mares and colts that have scattered in search of alkali mud to
lick, or just to show, perhaps, that they are able to get on without
his lordship. He will call, and if his troop do not answer, he will
condescend to go a little way to meet them, halting and inquiring with
short whinnies what they are about. Sometimes, in spite of discipline,
they will compel him to go all the way to meet them; for even a horse
soon tires of dignity on a hilltop all alone, with no one to see how it
becomes him.

Polly likes to meet stray horses on her walks, close enough to see
their colors and tell which are the pretty ones, the ones she calls
hers. They stare at her from under breezy forelocks, and no doubt think
themselves much finer creatures than little girls who have only two
feet to go upon. And the little girl thinks so, too,--or so it would
seem; for every evening after sunset when she runs about the house
bareheaded she plays she is a horse herself. And not satisfied with
being a horse, she plays she is a rider, too. Such a complex ideal as
that surely never came into the brain of a “cayuse,” for all his big
eyes and his tangle of hair which Polly thinks so magnificent.

The head and the feet of Polly and her tossing locks are pure horse;
that is evident at a glance as she prances past the window. But the
clinched, controlling hands are the hands of the rider,--a thrilling
combination on a western summer evening, when the brassy sunset in the
gate of the cañon is like a trumpet-note, and the cold, pink light on
the hills is as keen as a bugle-call, and the very spirit of “boots and
saddles” is in the wind that gustily blows up from the plains, turning
all the poplars white, and searching the quiet house from room to room
for any laggard stay-indoors.

Within a mile of the house, in the cañon which Polly calls home, there
is a horse ranch in a lovely valley opening toward the river. All
around it are these treeless hills that look so barren and feed so
many wild lives. The horses have a beautiful range, from the sheltered
valley up the gulches to the summits of the hills and down again to the
river to drink. The men live in a long, low cabin, attached to a corral
much bigger than the cabin, and have an extremely horsey time of it.

I shouldn’t be surprised if it were among Polly’s dreams to be one
of a picked company of little-girl riders, in charge of a band of
long-tailed ponies, just the right size for little girls to manage;
to follow the ponies over the hills all day, and at evening to fetch
water from the river and cook their own little-girl suppers in the
dingy cabin by the corral; to have envious visits from other little
girls, and occasionally to go home and tell mother all about it.

Now, in this country of real horses there were not many play-horses,
and these few not of the first quality. Hobby-horses in the shops of
the town were most trivial in size, meant only for riders of a very
tender age. Some of them were merely heads of horses, fastened to a
seat upon rockers, with a shelf in front to keep the inexperienced
rider in his place.

There were people in the town, no doubt, who had noble rocking-horses
for their little six-year-olds, but they must have sent for them on
purpose; the storekeepers did not “handle” this variety.

So Polly’s papa, assisted by John Brown, the children’s most delightful
companion and slave and story-teller, concluded to build a hobby-horse
that would outdo the hobby-horse of commerce. (Brown was a modest,
tender-hearted man, who had been a sailor off the coast of Norway,
among the islands and fiords, a miner where the Indians were “bad,” a
cowboy, a ranchman; and he was now irrigating the garden and driving
the team in the cañon.)

Children like best the things they invent and make themselves, and
plenty of grown people are children in this respect; they like their
own vain imaginings better than some of the world’s realities.

But Polly’s rocking-horse was no “vain thing,” although her father and
John did have their own fun out of it before she had even heard of it.

His head wasn’t “made of pease-straw,” nor his tail “of hay,” but in
his own way he was quite as successful a combination.

His eyes were two of Brother’s marbles. They were not mates, which was
a pity, as they were set somewhat closely together so you couldn’t help
seeing them both at once; but as one of them soon dropped out it didn’t
so much matter. His mane was a strip of long leather fringe. His tail
was made up of precious contributions extorted from the real tails
of Billy and Blue Pete and the team-horses, and twined most lovingly
together by John, the friend of all the parties to the transfer.

The saddle was a McClellan tree, which is the framework of a kind of
man’s saddle; a wooden spike, fixed to the left side of it and covered
with leather, made a horn, and the saddle-blanket was a Turkish towel.

It was rainy weather, and the cañon days were short, when this unique
creation of love and friendship--which are things more precious, it is
to be hoped, even than horseflesh--took its place among Polly’s idols,
and was at once clothed on with all her dreams of life in action.

When she mounted the hobby-horse she mounted her dream-horse as well;
they were as like as Don Quixote’s helmet and the barber’s basin.

She rode him by firelight in the last half-hour before bedtime. She
rode him just after breakfast in the morning. She “took” to him when
she was in trouble, as older dream-riders take to _their_ favorite
“hobbies.” She rocked and she rode, from restlessness and wretchedness
into peace, from unsatisfied longings into temporary content, from bad
tempers into smiles and sunshine.

She rode out the winter, and she rode in the wild and windy spring. She
got well of the measles pounding back and forth on that well-worn seat.
She took cold afterward, before the winds grew soft, experimenting with
draughts in a corner of the piazza.

Now that summer gives to her fancies and her footsteps a wider range,
the hard-worked hobby gets an occasional rest. (Often he is to be seen
with his wooden nose resting on the seat of a chair which is bestrewed
with clover blossoms, withered wild-roses, and bits of grass; for
Polly, like other worshipers of graven images, believes that her idol
can eat and drink and appreciate substantial offerings.) But when the
dream grows too strong, the picture too vivid,--not mamma’s picture,
but the one in the child’s heart,--she takes to the saddle again, and
the horsehair switch and the leather fringes float upon the wind, and
her fancies mount, far above the lava bluffs that confine her vision.

Will our little girl-riders be as happy on their real horses, when they
get them, as they are upon their dream-horses? Is the actual possession
of “back hair” and the wearing of long petticoats more blissful than
the knot, hard-twisted, of the ends of a silk handkerchief, which the
child-woman binds about her brows when she walks--like Troy’s proud
dames whose garments sweep the ground--in the skirt of her mother’s
“cast-off gown”?

It depends upon the direction these imperious dream-horses will take
with our small women. Will the rider be in bondage to the steed? Heaven
forbid! for dream-horses make good servants but very bad masters. Will
they bear her fast and far, and will she keep a quiet eye ahead and a
constant hand upon the rein? Will they flag and flounder down in the
middle-ways, where so many of us have parted with our dream-steeds and
taken the footpath, consoled to find that we have plenty of company and
are not altogether dismayed? The dream-horses carry their child-riders
beyond the mother’s following, so that the eyes and the heart ache with
straining after the fleeting vision.

It is better she should not see too much nor too far along the way they
go, since “to travel joyfully is better than to arrive.”

If only they could know their own “blessedness” while the way is long
before them!




AN IDAHO PICNIC


At the camp in the cañon they had a cow. It is true she sometimes broke
away and went off with the herds on the range and had to be chased
on horseback and caught with a lasso. They had chickens,--all that
were left them from night raids by the coyotes;[1] and a garden, the
products of which they shared with the jack-rabbits and the gophers.
But the supply wagon brought fresh fruit from the town, ten miles away,
and new butter from the valley ranches. There were no mosquitoes,
no peddlers, no tramps, no book agents, no undesirable neighbor’s
children, whom one cannot scare away as one may the neighbor’s dogs
and chickens when they creep through the fence, but must be civil
to for the sake of peace and good-will,--which are good things in a
neighborhood.

Jack Gilmour worked at his crude inventions in the shop, and was
allowed to use grown-up tools under certain not too hard conditions;
and Polly rode up and down the steep path to the river beach on
the shoulders of the young assistant engineers--and assistant
everything-elses. The mother was waited on and spoiled, as women are in
camp; she was even invited to go fishing with her husband and Mr. Dane,
one of the young assistants-in-general. It was a dull time for work
in the camp, and there were good care-takers with whom Mrs. Gilmour
could trust the children. The boy was the elder. He was learning those
two most important elements of a boy’s education, up to nine years,
according to Sir Walter Scott,--to ride and to speak the truth. But he
was only eight, and perhaps was not quite perfect in either.

He watched the three happy ones ride away, and as they turned on the
hilltop and waved good-by to the little figure on the trail below, he
was longing, with all the strength of desire an eight-year-old heart
can know, for the time to come when he too should climb the hills and
wave his hand against the sky before turning the crest, where he had so
often stood and felt so small, gazing up into those higher hills that
locked the last bright bend of the river from sight.

They were to go up Charcoal Creek; they were to cross the “Divide;”
they were to go down Grouse Creek on the other side and camp on some
unknown bit of the river’s shore.

The boy went stumbling back down the dusty path to his unfinished work
in the shop,--the engine for a toy elevated road he was making. But the
painfully fashioned fragments of his plan had no meaning for eyes that
still saw only the hills against the morning sky, and the three happy
ones riding away.

This first trip led to a second and longer one, to the fishing-grounds
up the river, by the trail on the opposite shore. Jack heard his
father and Mr. Dane talking one morning at the breakfast-table about
riding down to Turner’s and getting a pack-animal and some more riding
animals,--and mamma was going again! What good times the grown-ups did
have! And John Brown, Jack’s particular crony from the men’s camp, was
going, to cook and take care of the animals. This word “animal” is used
in the West to describe anything that is ridden or “packed,”--horse,
mule, Indian pony, or “burro.” It is never applied to cattle or
unbroken horses on the range; these are “stock.”

The party were to take a tent and stay perhaps a week, if no word came
from the home camp to call them back.

Jack slipped away from the table and went out and hung upon the railing
of a footbridge that crossed the brook. Beside learning how to ride
and to speak the truth, Jack was learning to whistle. He was practicing
this last more persistently, perhaps, than either of the more important
branches of knowledge,--let us hope because there was more need of
practice; for he was as yet very far from being a perfect whistler. It
was but a melancholy, tuneless little note in which he gave vent to his
feelings, as he watched the trickling water.

“I’d like to take the boy,” his father was that moment saying at the
breakfast-table in the cook-tent, “if we had anything he could ride.”
And then he added, smiling, “There’s Mrs. O’Dowd.” The smile went
around the table.

Mrs. O’Dowd, or “Peggy,” as she was variously called, was a gray donkey
of uncertain age and mild but inflexible disposition who sometimes
consented to carry the children over the hills at a moderate pace,
her usual equipment being a side-saddle, which did not fit her oval
figure (the curves of which turned the wrong way for beauty); so the
side-saddle was always slipping off, obliging the children to slide
down and “cinch up.”

The engineer’s house was built against a hill; from the end of the
upper piazza a short bridge, or gang-plank, joined the hill and met a
steep trail which led upward to the tents, the garden, the road to the
lower camp, the road up the bluffs, and all the rest of the children’s
world beyond the gulch. One of their favorite exercises with Mrs.
O’Dowd was to ride her down the trail, and try to force her over this
gang-plank. She would put her small feet cautiously one before the
other, hanging her great white head and sniffing her way. The instant
her toes touched the resonant boards of the bridge, she stopped, and
then the exercises began. Mrs. O’Dowd’s gravity and resignation, in the
midst of the children’s laughing and shouting and pulling and whacking,
was most edifying to see; but she never budged. She saw the darlings of
the household dance back and forth before her in safety; the engineers
in their big boots would push past her and tramp over the bridge. Mrs.
O’Dowd was a creature of fixed habits. Useless, flighty children, and
people with unaccountable ways of their own might do as they liked; it
had never been her habit to trust Mrs. O’D. on such a place as that,
and she never did.

“Yes, the boy might ride Peggy,” said Jack’s father. “He could keep her
up with John and the pack-mule, if not with us.”

“Oh, I should not want him behind with the men,” said Jack’s
mother,--“and those high trails! If he’s to go over such places, he
must ride where you can look after his saddle-girths.” She could hear
Jack’s disconsolate whistle as she spoke. “I hope he does not hear us,”
she said. “It would break his heart to think he is going, and be left
behind after all.”

“If the boy’s heart is going to break as easily as that, it is time it
was toughened,” said his father, but not ungently. “I should tell him
there is a chance of his going; but if it can’t be managed, he must not
whine about it.”

Jack went to bed by himself, except on Sunday nights; then his mother
went with him, and saw that he laid his clothes in a neat pile on the
trunk by his bed,--for in a camp bedroom trunks sometimes take the
place of chairs,--and heard him say his prayers, and sometimes they
talked together a little while before she kissed him good-night. That
night was Sunday night, and Jack’s mother asked him, while she watched
his undressing, if it ever made him dizzy to stand on high places and
look down. Jack did not seem to know what that feeling was like; and
then she asked him how far he had ever ridden on Mrs. O’Dowd at one
time. Jack thought he had never ridden farther than Mr. Hensley’s
ranch--that was three miles away, six miles in all, going and coming;
but he had rested at the ranch, and had walked for a part of the
journey when his sister Polly had resolved to ride by herself, instead
of behind him, holding on to his jacket.

It made his mother very happy to tell the boy that the next day, if
nothing happened to prevent, he was to set out with the fishing party
for a week’s camping up the river. She knew how, in his reticent
child’s heart, he had envied them. He was seated on the side of his
bed, emptying the beach sand out of his stockings, when she told him.
He said nothing at first, and one who did not know his plain little
face as his mother knew it might have thought he was indifferent. She
took a last look at him, before leaving the room. It seemed but a very
little while ago that the close-cropped whity-brown head on the pillow
had been covered with locks like thistle-down, which had never been
touched with the scissors; that the dark little work-hardened hands
(for Jack’s play was always work) lying outside the sheet had been
kissed a dozen times a day for joy of their rosy palms and dimples. And
to-morrow the boy would put on spurs,--no, not _spurs_, but _a_ spur,
left over from the men’s accoutrements,--and he would ride--to be sure
it was only Mrs. O’Dowd, but no less would the journey be one of the
landmarks in his life. And many older adventurers than Jack have set
out in this way on their first emprise,--not very heroically equipped,
except for brave and joyous dreams and good faith in their ability to
keep the pace set by better-mounted comrades.

Jack woke next morning with a delightful feeling that this day was
not going to be like any other day he had known. Preparations for
the journey had already begun. In the cook-tent two boxes were being
filled with things to eat and things to cook them with. These were to
be covered with canvas, roped, and fastened, one on each side of the
pack-mule’s pack-saddle. On the piazza, saddle-bags were being packed;
guns, ammunition, fishing-rods, rubber coats, and cushions were being
collected in a heap for John to carry down to the beach to be ferried
across the river, where the man from Turner’s horse-ranch was already
waiting with the animals. The saddle-horses and Mrs. O’Dowd were to
cross by the ford above the rapids. The boat went back and forth two
or three times, and in the last load went Jack and his mother and
Polly in the care of one of the young engineers. The stir of departure
had fired Polly’s imagination. It was not mamma saying good-by to
Polly,--it was Polly saying good-by to mamma, before riding off with
“bubba” on an expedition of their own. She was telling about it, in a
soft, joyous recitative, to any one who had time to listen. The man
from Turner’s had brought, for Mrs. Gilmour to ride, a mule he called a
lady’s animal, but remarked that for his own use he preferred one that
would go. Mrs. Gilmour thought that she did, too; so the side-saddle
was changed from the “lady’s animal” to the mule that “would go.”

The pack-mule was “packed,” the men’s horses were across the ford,
mamma had kissed Polly, two pairs and a half of spurs were jingling
impatiently on the rocks,--but where was Mrs. O’Dowd?

She was dallying at the ford,--she was coy about taking to the water.
Sticks and straps and emphatic words of encouragement had no effect
upon her. She had unfortunately had time to make up her mind, and she
had made it up not to cross the river. She was persuaded finally, by
means of a “lass’ rope” around her neck. Everybody was laughing at her
subdued way of making herself conspicuous, delaying the whole party and
meekly implying that it was everybody’s fault but her own.

The camp of the engineers was on a little river of Idaho that rises
in the Bitter-root range of the Rocky Mountains, and flows into the
swift, silent current of the great Snake River, which flows into the
Columbia, which flows into the Pacific; so that the waters of this
little inland river see a great deal of grand and peculiar scenery
on their way to the ocean. But the river as it flows past the camp
is still very young and inexperienced. Its waters have carried no
craft larger than a lumberman’s pirogue, or the coffin-shaped box the
Chinese wood-drivers use for a boat. Its cañons have never echoed to
a locomotive’s scream; it knows not towns nor villages; not even a
telegraph pole has ever been reared on its banks. It is just out of
the mountains, hurrying down through the gate of its last cañon to the
desert plains. But young and provincial as it is, it has an ancestral
history very ancient and respectable, if mystery and tragedy and
years of reticence can give dignity to a family history. The river’s
story has been patiently recorded on the tablets of the black basalt
bluffs that face each other across its channel. Their language it is
not given to everybody to read. The geologists tell a wonderful tale
which they learned from those inscriptions on the rocks. They do not
say how many years ago, but long enough to have given a very ancient
name to our river,--had there been any one living at that time to
call it by a name,--it met with a fearful obstruction, a very dragon
in its path, which threatened to devour it altogether, or to scatter
it in little streams over the face of the earth. A flood of melted,
boiling-hot lava burst up suddenly in the river’s bed, making it to
boil like a pot, and crowded into the granite gorges through which the
river had found its way, half filling them. It was a battle between the
heavens and the earth,--the stream of molten rock, blinding hot from
the caverns beneath the earth’s crust, meeting the sweet cool waters
from the clouds that troop about the mountains or hide their tops in
mist and snow. The life-giving flood prevailed over that which brought
only defacement and death. The sullen lava flux settled, shrank, and
hardened at last, fitting into the granite gorges as melted lead fits
the mould into which it is poured. The waters kept flowing down, never
resting till they had worn a new channel in the path of the old one,
only narrower and deeper, down through the intruding lava. When the
river was first known to men, wherever its course lay through a granite
gorge the granite was seen to be lined in places, often continuously
for miles, with black lava rock, or basalt, standing in lofty palisades
with deeply scarred and graven fronts and with long slides of crumbled
rock at their feet, descending to the level of the river.

Another part of the river’s story has been toilsomely written in
the trails that wind along its shores, worn by the feet of men and
animals. Whose feet were the first to tread them, and on what errands?
This is the part of the river’s story some of us would like best to
know. But this the geologist cannot tell us.

It was one of these hunters’, miners’, cowboys’, packers’, ranchmen’s
trails the fishing-party followed on its way up the river. Through the
cañon they wound along the base of the lava bluffs; then entered a
crooked fold of the hills called Sheep Gulch, passing through willow
thickets, rattling over the pebbles of a summer-dried stream, losing
the breeze and getting more than they wanted of the sun. Sheep Gulch
is one of the haunts of grouse, wood-doves, and “cotton-tails” (as
the little gray rabbits are called to distinguish them from the tall
leaping “jack-rabbits” of the sage-brush plains, which are like the
English hare).

Above Turner’s horse-ranch, Sheep Gulch divides into two branches; up
one of these goes the old Idaho City road. Where the gulch divides
there is a disused cabin, (which Jack remembered afterward because
there they saw some grouse which they didn’t get,) and there they left
the trail for the old stage-road. As they climbed the little divide
which separates the waters (when there are any) of Sheep Gulch from
those of Moore’s Creek, they were met by a fresh breeze which cooled
their hot faces and seemed to welcome them to the hills. The hills were
all around them now,--the beautiful mountain pastures, golden with
their wind-sown harvest of wild, strong-stemmed grasses. As the grass
becomes scarce on the lower ranges the herds of cattle climb to the
higher, along the spiral trails they make in grazing, taking always,
like good surveyors, the easiest upward grade.

In the fall the cattle-men send out their cowboys, or “riders,” to
drive the herds down from these highest ranges, where snow falls early,
and to collect them in some valley chosen for the autumn “round-up.”

At Giles’s ranch, on the divide, the party halted to cinch up and to
ask a drink all around from the spring which every traveler who has
tasted it remembers.

The women of the household--a slender, dark-haired daughter and a
stout, fair, flushed mother with a year-old baby--were busy, baby and
all, in an outdoor kitchen, a delightful-looking place, part light and
part shadow, and full of all manner of tools and rude conveniences that
told of cheerful, busy living and making the best of things. They were
preparing for the coming, next week, of the threshers,--a yearly event
of consequence at a ranch,--fifteen men with horses for their machines
and saddle-horses besides, all to be fed and lodged at the ranch. In
the corral behind the big new barn, there were stacks of yellow and
stacks of green, and between them a hay press, painted pink, which one
could see as far as one could see Giles’s. Altogether it was lovely at
Giles’s; but they were building a new house,--which, of course, they
had a perfect right to do. But whoever stops there next year will find
them all snugly roofed and gabled and painted white; and it is to be
feared the outdoor kitchen, with its dim corners full of “truck” and
its lights and shadows, will be seen no more.

The old stage-road went gayly along a bit of high plain, and then,
without the slightest hesitation or circumlocution, dropped off into
the cañon of Moore’s Creek. These reckless old pioneer roads give one
a vivid idea of the race for possession of a new mining-camp, and of
the pluck it took to win. At the “freeze-out” stage-passengers probably
got out and walked, and the driver “rough-locked” the wheels; but the
horsemen of that new country doubtless took a fresh hitch on their
cinches and went jouncing down the breakneck grade, with countenances
as calm as those of the illustrious riders of bronze and marble horses
we see in the public squares, unless they were tired of the saddle and
walked down to rest themselves,--never their horses.

Jack’s short legs were getting numb with pressing the saddle, and he
was glad to walk, and to linger on his way down the wild descent
into the cañon. It was the middle of September; Moore’s Creek had
not more than enough water left to float the “Chinaman’s drive” of
cord-wood, cut higher up on its banks. Its waters, moreover, were
turbid with muddy tailings emptied into them from the sluice-boxes of
the placer-miners who had been working all summer on the bars. Above
Moore’s Creek the water of the river is clear as that of a trout-stream
and iridescent with reflections from sky and shore; but after its union
with that ill-fated stream it is obliged to carry the poor creek’s
burden, and its own bright waters thenceforth wear the stain of labor.
A breath of coolness, as of sunless rocks and damp, spicy shade, came
up to them from the cañon; and a noise of waters, mingled with queer,
discordant cries. It was dinner-time at the Chinamen’s camp and word
was being passed up stream, from man to man, calling the wood-drivers
to leave their work. They were not the sleek-braided, white-bloused,
silk-sashed Chinese of the house-servant variety. They had wild black
hair, rugged, not fat, sleepy faces, and little clothing except the
boots,--store boots, in which a Chinaman is queerer than in anything
except a store hat. They struggled with the jam of cord-wood as if it
were some sort of water-prey they had hunted down, and were now meeting
at bay, spearing, thrusting, hooking with their long boat-hooks,
skipping from rock to rock in midstream, hoarse with shouting.

The party had now left the stage-road and turned down the pack-trail
along the creek toward its junction with the river. The pack-trail here
crosses the creek by a bridge high above the stream; the bridge was
good enough, but it was a question whether Mrs. O’Dowd, with her known
prejudices, could be induced to go over it. It was quickly decided to
get a “good ready,” as Jack said, and hustle the old lady down the
trail between two of the horses and crowd her on the bridge before she
had time to make up that remarkable mind of hers. This simple plan was
carried out with enthusiasm on the part of all but Mrs. O’D. herself.

Soon after leaving Giles’s, they had met a wagon-load of people
townward bound from Gillespie’s, the beautiful river ranch above
Moore’s Creek. Mr. Gilmour had stopped them to inquire if a pack-animal
and two riding animals, mules or horses, could be sent from the ranch
up to the fishing-camp, on a day set for the journey home; for the
mules from Turner’s were to go back that same day, to start the next
day but one, as part of a pack-train bound for Atlanta.

The people in the wagon “couldn’t say.” Most of the horses were
out on the range; those at the ranch were being used for hauling
peaches to town, fording Moore’s Creek and the river, and scaling the
“freeze-out.” But Mr. Gillespie himself was at home; the travelers had
better stop on the way up and find out.

So, after crossing the bridge and gaining the good trail along the
river-bank, Mr. Dane spurred on ahead and forded the river, to make
the necessary inquiries at the ranch. Gillespie’s is on the opposite
side of the river from the packer’s trail. It is most beautiful with
the sun in the western sky, its hills and water-front of white beech
and pine trees all in shadow, and a broad reflection floating out into
the river at its feet.

The sun was still high and the shadows were short; but the river ranch
was a fair picture of a frontier home as they looked back at it passing
by on the other side,--the last home they should see on the wild way
they were taking.

The trail went winding up and up, and still higher, until they were
far above the river and could see, beyond the still reflections that
darkened it by Gillespie’s, the white-whipped waters of the rapids
above. And the higher they went, the more hills beyond hills rose along
the horizon widening their view.

Mr. Dane had rejoined the party, with a satisfactory report from
the ranch. He rode ahead on his blue-roan Indian pony twirling his
_romál_, a long leathern strap attached to the bridle, the end divided
like a double whip-lash by means of which and a pair of heavy blunt
spurs “Blue Pete” and his rider had come to a perfect understanding.
Blue Pete was a sulky little brute, with a broad white streak down his
nose and a rather vicious eye, but he was tough and unsensitive and
minded his business.

Next came Jack’s mamma on the “mule that would go”--with a will, as
far as Turner’s,--but after that needed the usual encouragement; a
gentle-paced creature though, and sure-footed on a bad trail. Then came
Jack on Mrs. O’Dowd. The poor old girl had been vigorously cinched and
it wasn’t becoming to her figure; but those were bad places for a
saddle to turn, even with an active, eight-year-old boy on it.

The boy was deeply content, gazing about him at the river, the hills,
the winding trail ahead, and serenely poking up Mrs. O’Dowd with his
one spur in response to the packer’s often-repeated command to “Keep
her up!” When Mrs. O’Dowd refused to be kept up Jack’s father made
a rush at her--a kind of business his good horse Billy must have
despised, for Billy had points that indicated better blood than that
which is usually found in the veins of those tough little “rustlers” of
the desert and the range. He loved to lead on a hard trail, with his
long, striding walk, his cheerful, well-opened eyes to the front. He
was gentle, but he was also scornful; he was not a “lady’s animal;” he
had a contempt for paltry little objectless canters over the hills with
limp-handed women and children flopping about on his back. He liked
to feel there was work ahead; a long climb and a bad trail did not
frighten him; he looked his best when he was breasting a keen ascent
with the wind of the summit parting his thin forelock, his ears pointed
forward, his breath coming quick and deep, his broad haunches working
under the saddle. Poor work indeed he must have thought it, hustling
a lazy, sulky old donkey along a trail that was as nothing to his own
sinewy legs.

After Billy came the pack-mule, driven by the man from Turner’s,
a square-jawed, bronzed young fellow, mounted also on a mule and
conversing amicably with John Brown. The lunch-bag had been passed
down the line, but there was no halt, except for water at the crossing
of a little gulch. The trail wound in and out among the spurs of the
hills and up and down the rock-faced heights. They passed a roofless
cabin, once the dwelling of some placer-miners, and farther on the
half-obliterated ditch they had built leading to the deserted bars,
where a few gray, warped sluice-boxes were falling to pieces in the sun.

Between two and three o’clock they came in sight of some large
pine-trees, sheltering a half circle of white sand beach that sloped
smoothly to the river. Above the pines a granite cliff rose, two
hundred and fifty feet of solid rock against a hill five hundred or
more feet higher, that shut off the morning sun. Between the cliff and
the lava bluffs opposite, the eastern and western shadows nearly met
across the river. There were deep, still pools among the rocks near
shore, where the large trout congregate. Below the shadowed bend, the
river spread out again suddenly in the sunlight that flashed white as
silver on the ripples of a gravelly bar. This was the spot chosen at
sight for the fishing-camp.

A bald eagle perched on a turret of the lava bluffs across the river
watched the party descending the trail. At the report of a rifle
echoing among the rocks, he rose and wheeled away over the pine-trees
without hurrying himself or dropping a single feather in acknowledgment
of the shot. It was a dignified, rather scornful retreat.

Where the trail hugs the cliff closest on its way around the bend, it
passes under a big overhanging rock. No one, I am sure, ever rode under
it for the first time without looking up at the black crack between
it and the cliff, and wondering how far up the crack goes, and when
the huge mass will fall. There is a story that the Bannock braves,
following this trail on the war-path, always fired a passing arrow up
into the crack,--perhaps out of the exuberance of youth and war-paint,
perhaps to propitiate the demon of the rocks, lest he should drop one
of his superfluous boulders on their feathered heads. The white men who
followed the trail after the Indians had left it, amused themselves by
shooting at the arrows and dislodging them from the crack. The story
must be true, because there are no arrows left in the crack! Jack
stared up at it many times, and never could see one.

       *       *       *       *       *

So now they were at home for a week in the wilderness. Jack followed
Brown about as he was “making camp,” cutting tent-pegs and poles
and putting up the old A-tent, which had seen service in the army
and in many frontier camps since it was “condemned” and sold at
quartermaster’s sale.

The man from Turner’s had taken another bite of lunch and returned with
his animals. He bade Jack to watch for him as he passed the camp, day
after to-morrow, with his mule-train for Atlanta.

The kitchen was unpacked down on the beach and the fireplace chosen,--a
big, wedge-shaped rock,--in the lee of which John built a fire, not
for warmth, but for the sake of a good bed of coals for cooking. Mrs.
Gilmour was resting in the tent, under the pine-trees. Mr. Gilmour had
gone up the river to catch some trout for supper.

After four o’clock the sun left the river bank, but all the colors were
distinct and strong,--the white beach, the dark pine boughs against the
sky, the purple colors in the rocks, and the spots of pale green and
yellow lichen on them, the changing tints in the dark water swinging
smoothly around the bend and then flashing out into a broad sheet of
silvery sparkles over the bar. It was as if it went gravely around the
shadowy bend, and then broke out laughing in the bright light.

As it grew darker, the kitchen fire began to glow red against the big
gray rock. In front of it John was stooping to heap coals on the lid
of the bake-kettle, where the bread was spread in a thin, round cake
for cooking.

There were three big trout for supper and four or five little ones. The
big ones were a noble weight to tell of, but the little ones tasted the
best when they were taken out of the bake-kettle on hot tin plates and
served with thin slices of bacon and camp bread.

The horses had been turned loose up the trail but now came wandering
back, Billy leading, followed by Pete, who was hobbled but managed to
keep up with him, and Mrs. O’Dowd meandering meekly in the rear. They
were on their way home, having decided that was the best place to pass
the night, but John turned them back. After supper he watered them at
the river and took them up the trail to a rudely fenced inclosure on
the bluffs, where there was better pasture.

Sleepy-time for Jack came very soon after supper, but as the tent was
some distance from the camp-fire,--a lonesome bedroom for a little boy
to lie in by himself,--he was rolled up in a blanket and allowed to
sleep by the camp-fire. The last thing he could remember was the sound
of the river and the wind in the great pine boughs overhead and voices
around him talking about the stars that could be seen in the night
sky between the fire-illumined tree branches. The great boughs moved
strangely in the hot breath of the fire that lit them from below. The
sky between looked black as ink and the stars blazed far and keen.
John was washing up the dishes on his knees by the light of a candle
fastened in a box set upon end to shield it from draughts. Jack watched
the light shining up into his face and on his hands as he moved them
about. It seemed as if he had slept but a moment, when they were
shaking him and trying to stand him on his feet and he was stumbling
along to the tent with his father’s arm around him.

How they crawled about in the low tent, by the light of a candle
fastened by its own drippings to a stone, and took off a few clothes
and put on more (for the September nights were cold); how cosy it was,
lying down in his blankets inside the white walls of the tent with the
curtain securely tied against the wind, with his father close beside
him and his father’s gun on the outside within reach of an outstretched
hand; how the light went out and the river sounded on and some twigs
scraped against the tent in the wind,--this is about all Jack can
remember of his first night under canvas.

The morning was gray and cold. The sun had been up several hours before
it was seen in the camp. Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Dane were out with the
earliest light for trout. Jack was the next to leave the tent and go
shivering down to the river to wash, and then run to warm his red hands
and button his jacket at the kitchen fire, where John was again cooking
bread. John and Mr. Dane had slept on the beach with only the pine
boughs for a roof and saddle-bags for a pillow.

When Mrs. Gilmour appeared, last of all, Jack was just finishing his
second chunk of last night’s bread, leaning against the angle of the
rock fireplace out of the smoke that made a pale blue wavering flight
upward and aslant the dark pine boughs.

The fishermen had returned with trout, but not a surfeit of trout, for
breakfast. The bread was taken out of the bake-kettle and the trout put
in to plump up in their own steam over the coals. The coffee smelled
deliciously in the sweet, cold air. The broiled ham was welcome,
even after a first course of trout, and Jack was good for a third
of bread and honey. He could use his fingers and wipe up the honey
with the broken bread until his tin plate shone, not to speak of his
countenance, and nobody observed him except to smile.

But something had happened that morning besides breakfast. Mr. Dane had
lost a tremendous trout, after playing him a long time and tiring him
out. He had been fishing from a rock, with deep water all around him.
The big fish seemed quite still and tame as he was drawn in, but as his
tail touched the rock, with a frantic rebound he made one last plunge
for the water and got off. If there had been but a beach to land him on!

Then, a man had been shot the evening before at Atlanta, the big
mining-camp of the Saw-tooth range; and another man riding a tired
horse had passed the camp at daybreak, on his way to Boise for a
surgeon. The horse he had started with from Atlanta had given out about
twenty miles from that place; he had walked ten or fifteen miles along
the mountain trail in the darkness before he could get another horse.
He wished to change this for one of the horses from the fishing-camp,
but they were back on the bluffs and he concluded to go on and change
at Gillespie’s. He had traveled about fifty miles that night, on
horseback and on foot, over a trail that some of us would not enjoy
riding over by daylight.

His wife and their young child were at his horse-ranch away back on
the hills, alone, except for some of the cowboys. He had gone up to
Atlanta to attend the ball. The man who had been shot was a stranger to
him,--had a brother in Boise, he believed. He had breathed his horse a
moment while he talked to John and took a bite of something to eat, and
then went on his way.

It was strange to think that all this was part of those dark hours of
the night that had passed so peacefully to the sleepers on the river
beach,--the miners’ ball, the shooting, the night ride in haste, the
wife waiting at the lonely ranch in the hills for her husband’s return.

The day passed with fishing and sketching and eating, and beauty of
sunlight and shadow on rocks and trees and river.

Brown had built a table and placed boxes around it for seats. The
gray rock fireplace had got well blackened, and the camp had taken on
a homelike look. Jack had gone for a glorious walk up the trail with
Brown, to see if the fence on the bluffs was all right, and if there
was a way down to the river from the bluffs by which the horses could
go down to drink. There was one, a rather obscure way; but Billy was
clever, and Pete was a “rustler,” and Mrs. O’Dowd could be relied upon
to follow the lead of her betters. But they did not seem to be eating,
and Jack fancied they looked homesick in their high pasture, as if the
scenery did not console them for being sent off so far from camp.

That second day Mr. Gilmour went fishing alone down the river. John
was gathering firewood; the boy and his mother were in the tent; Mr.
Dane sat in the doorway, tending a little fire he had made outside, and
reading aloud, while Mrs. Gilmour made a languid sketch of him, in his
red-hooded blanket robe. Mr. Dane was the first to hear a shout from
down the river. He threw off the red robe, seized a rifle, and ran down
the shore in the direction Mr. Gilmour had taken. The shout meant, to
him, game of a kind that could not be tackled with a fly-rod.

In a moment or two he came running back for more cartridges. Mr.
Gilmour had met a black bear, and they were going after him. John
followed with the axe. Some time passed, but no shots were heard. At
last the men came back, warm and merry, though disappointed of their
game. The bear had got away. It was tantalizing to think how fat and
sleek he must have been, after his summer in the mountains. There would
be no bear-steaks for supper that night, and no glossy dark skin to
carry back in triumph to the home camp and spread before next winter’s
hearth wherever the house-fires might be lighted.

Mr. Gilmour had been walking down the trail when he saw the bear ahead
of him, crossing the high flat toward the trail and making straight
for the river. If both had continued to advance, there would have been
a meeting, and as Mr. Gilmour was armed only with a fly-rod and a
pistol, he preferred the meeting should be postponed. Then he stopped
and shouted for Dane. The bear came on, and Mr. Gilmour fell back,
leisurely, he said, toward camp. He did not care to bring his game in
alive, he said, without giving the camp due warning, so he shouted
again. It was the second shout Dane had heard. The way of his retreat
led him down into a little gulch, where he lost sight of the bear.

It did not take very long to tell the story of the hunt, and then Mr.
Gilmour went back to his fishing. The sun came out. The fire in front
of the tent was a heap of smoking ashes; the magazine story palled; the
sketch was pronounced not worth finishing; and then the pack-train for
Atlanta came tinkling and shuffling down the trail. Fourteen sleek,
handsome mules, with crisp, clipped manes, like the little Greek horses
on ancient friezes, passed in single file between a man riding ahead
on the “bell-mare,” and another bringing up the rear of the train,
swinging his leathern “blind” as he rode. This one was the man from
Turner’s. He had met Mr. Gilmour farther down the river, and heard the
story about the bear, and offered to leave his dog, which he said was
a good bear-dog. But the dog wouldn’t be left, and so the picturesque
freight-train went its way, under the Indian’s rock, and up the steep
climb beyond. High above the river they could be seen, footing with
neat steps the winding trail, their packs swinging and shuffling with
a sidelong motion, in time to the regular pace, while the bell sounded
fainter and fainter.

Bear stories were told by the camp-fire that night; and Mr. Dane slept
with his rifle handy, and John with an axe. John said he was a better
shot with an axe than with a rifle. Jack thought he should dream of
bears, but he didn’t. The next morning he went with John Brown up to
the high pasture to bring down one of the horses. Brown was to ride
down to Gillespie’s and make sure of transportation for the party home,
the next day but one.

Jack had the happiness of riding Billy barebacked down the trail,
following John on Pete, Mrs. O’Dowd, as usual, in the rear. Mr. Gilmour
was surprised to see all the animals coming down, and he noticed at
once how hollow and drooping the horses looked. John explained that
they had evidently not been able to find the trail leading down to the
river, and had been without water all the time they had been kept
upon the bluffs. He could see by their tracks where they had wandered
back and forth along the edge of the bluffs, seeking a way down. How
glad they must have been of that deep draught from the river, that
had mocked them so long with the sound of its waters! No one liked to
find fault with Brown, who was faithful and tender-hearted; and it was
stupid of horses, used to the range, not to have gone back from the
bluffs and followed the fence until they found the outlet to the river.
They quickly revived with water and food, which they could once more
enjoy now that their long thirst was quenched. Brown rode Pete down to
Gillespie’s, and returned in the afternoon with word that Mr. Gillespie
himself would come for the party on Saturday, with the outfit required.

The evening was cool and cloudy; twilight came on early, and Brown
cooked supper with the whole family gathered around his fire, hungrily
watching him. There was light enough from the fire, mingled with the
wan twilight on the beach, by which to eat supper. John was filling
the tin cups with coffee, when horses’ feet were heard coming down
the trail from the direction of Boise. A man on a gray horse stopped
under the Indian’s rock and looking down on the group on the beach
below asked what was “the show for a bite of something to eat.” He was
invited to share what there was, and throwing the bridle loose on his
horse’s neck he dropped out of the saddle and joined the party at the
table.

He was the man from Atlanta, returning from his errand to Boise. No
doctor had been willing to go up from Boise, so he said, and the
friends of the wounded man had telegraphed to C--, and a doctor had
gone across from there. The messenger had stayed over a day in Boise to
rest, and was now on his way home to his ranch in the hills. He gave
the details of the shooting,--the usual details, received with the
usual comments and speculations as to the wounded man’s recovery,--then
the talk turned upon sport, and bear stories and fish stories were in
order. The man from Atlanta knew what good hunting was, from his own
account. He told how he had struck a bear track about as big as a man’s
hand in the woods and followed it some distance, thinking it was “about
his size,” and all of a sudden he had come upon a fresh track about as
big--he picked up the cover of the bake-kettle--“as big as that.” Then
he turned around and came home. It was suggested (after the man from
Atlanta had gone) that the big track he saw was where the bear had _sat
down_.

It was now deep dusk in the woods; only the latest and palest sky
gleams touched the water. The stranger included the entire party in
his cordial invitation to stop at his place if they ever got so far up
the river, mounted his horse and quickly disappeared up the trail. He
expected to reach his home some time that night.

The next day was the last in camp. It was still gray, cold weather, and
the tent among the pine-trees looked inviting, with a suggestion of a
fire outside; but there were sketches to be finished and last walks to
be taken and a big mess of trout to be caught to take home. Jack had
a little enterprise of his own to complete,--the filling of a tin can
Brown had given him with melted pine gum, which hardened into clear,
solid resin. The can was nearly full, and Jack had various experiments
in his mind which he intended to try with it on his return. Brown had
told him it would make an excellent boot-grease mixed with tallow--and
if he _should_ want to make a pair of Norwegian snowshoes next winter,
it would be just the thing to rub on the bottom of the wood to make it
slip easily over the snow.

Brown was going back on the hills to try to get some grouse and the boy
was allowed to go with him. They tramped off together, and the walk was
one of the memorable ones in Jack’s experience; but Jack’s mother would
not have been so contented in his absence, had she known they were
coming home by way of Deer Gulch, one of the most likely places in the
neighborhood of the camp for a meeting with a bear.

Mr. Gilmour was the enthusiast about fishing, and so it happened that
Mr. Dane was generally the one to stay about camp if John were off
duty. The fishing should have been good, but it was not, partly because
the Chinese placer-miners on the river had a practice of emptying the
deep pools of trout by means of giant-powder, destroying a hundred
times as many fish as they ate. The glorious fishing was higher up the
river and in its tributaries, the mountain streams. However, not a day
had passed without one meal of trout at least, and many of the fish
were of great size, and an enthusiast like Mr. Gilmour cares for the
sport, not for the fish!

The last camp-fire, Jack thought, was the best one of all; it was built
farther down the beach, since a change of wind had made the corner by
the rock fireplace uncomfortable. A big log, rolled up near the fire on
its wind-ward side, made an excellent settle-back, the seat of which
was the sand with blankets spread over it. The company sat in a row
facing the fire, and Mrs. Gilmour was provided with a tin plate for a
hand-screen. Perhaps they all were rather glad they were going home
to-morrow. Mrs. Gilmour wanted to see Polly, the sand floor of the tent
was getting lumpy, and they all were beginning to long for the wider
outlook and the fuller life of the home camp at headquarters. Beautiful
as the great pine-trees, the sheltered beach, and the shadows on the
water had looked to them after their long, hot ride over the mountain
trail, there were always the granite cliff on one side and the lava
bluffs on the other, and no far-off lines for the eye to rest upon.
People who have lived in places where there is a great deal of sky and
a wide horizon are never long contented in nooks and corners of the
earth, however lovely their detail may be.

At all events, the talk was gayer that last night by the camp-fire
than any night except the first one of their stay. At last one of
the company--the smallest one--slid quietly out of sight among the
blankets, and no more was heard of him until the time came to dig him
out, and restore him to consciousness.

After Mr. and Mrs. Gilmour and Jack--poor little sleepy Jack--had gone
down the shore to their tent, Mr. Dane and Brown rolled the log settle
upon the fire. It burned all night, and there were brands left with
which to light the kitchen fire.

Breakfast was a sort of “clean-up,” as the miners say. The last of the
ham, the last of the honey, one trout, left over from last night’s
supper which the company quarreled about, each in turn refusing
it,--even Jack, who seldom refused anything in the eating line,--and
leaving it finally for John, who perhaps suspecting there was something
wrong with it threw it out upon the beach.

After breakfast everybody fell to packing, except Jack, who roamed
around, with his leggings and his one spur on, watching for Mr.
Gillespie and the animals.

Mrs. Gilmour had finished her small share of the packing, and with Jack
climbed up among the rocks in the shadow of the cliff. Mr. Gillespie
had arrived and on the beach below he and Brown were loading the
pack-horse with the camp stuff.

The two boxes in which the kitchen was packed went up first, one on
each side of the pack-saddle, set astride the horse’s back, and in
shape something like a saw-horse. The boxes were balanced and made fast
with ropes. The roll of blankets filled the space between them; an axe
was poked in, or a fishing-pole protruded from the heap; more blankets
went up, then the tent was spread over all and the load securely roped
into place,--Mr. Gillespie and Brown, one on either side, pulling
against each other, and the patient old horse being squeezed between.

Mr. Gillespie had brought the usual “lady’s animal” for Mrs. Gilmour to
ride which, in the West always means an article of horseflesh which no
man would care to bestride, but on which it will do to “pack” women and
children about.

The chief event of the journey home was the fording of the river, once
above Gillespie’s and once below, thus avoiding the highest and hottest
part of the trail which they would pass at midday. Neither Jack nor his
mother had ever forded a stream on horseback before. The sun was high,
the breeze was strong, the river bright and noisy. Giddily rippling and
sparkling, it rushed past the low willows along its shore.

Mrs. O’Dowd was whacked into her place in the line between Billy and
the lady’s animal, and kept her feet, if not her temper. And so, in due
time, they arrived at the home ford and the ferry.

Brown and Mr. Gillespie took the animals across the ford, but the
others were glad to exchange the saddle for the boat. Polly, in a
fresh, white frock, with her hair blown over her cheeks, was watching
from the hilltop, and came flying down the trail to meet them. Every
one said how Polly had grown, and how fair she looked--and the house,
which they called a camp for its rudeness, looked quite splendid with
its lamps and books and curtains, to the sunburnt, dusty, _real_
campers; and as Jack said, it did seem good to sit in a chair again. It
was noticeable, however, that Jack sat lightly in chairs for several
days after the ride home; but he had not flinched nor whined, and
everybody acknowledged that he had won his single spur fairly well for
an eight-year-old.

[1] Poisoned meat was laid near the chicken-house one night after
the coyotes had carried off some fine young Plymouth Rocks (with a
baleful instinct they always picked out the best of the fowls), and was
eaten by them. Two of the robbers were found next day, dead, by the
irrigation ditch, where they had crept to quench their thirst, and one
was afterward seen, from time to time, in the sage-brush, a hairless
spectre. The coyote mothers no doubt told their babies of this gruesome
outcast as a warning, not against chicken-stealing, which must be one
of the coyote virtues, but against poison and other desperate arts of
man.




A VISIT TO JOHN’S CAMP


John Brown had concluded to “quit work and go to mining.” Not that
mining is not work; but a man doesn’t get so tired working for himself,
choosing his own hours and resting when he pleases, as he does working
in another man’s time. It is like picking tame blackberries inside the
garden fence for the family table, and picking wild blackberries in the
fields and hedgerows and eating as one goes. Every boy knows how that
is; and some of these good-natured, wandering, Western men are very
like big boys.

John was still the teamster at the engineers’ camp in the cañon. He
had been a sailor in his native Northern seas. He had been a fisherman
of the Skager Rack; and more than once, by his own story, he had been
driven out to sea, when drifting from his trawls, and picked up by one
of the numerous vessels of the fishing-fleet that is always lying off
or on the entrance to the strait. He had been a teamster on the plains
where the Indians were “bad.” Once, when crossing the great Snake River
plains, he had picked up a curious stone shaped by the Indians which he
recognized as a “sinker,” such as he himself had made and used on the
fishing-grounds of the far North. John had a little ranch of his own,
and he owned half a house. The other half of the house was on the land
of the adjoining settler. The two men had taken up preëmption claims,
side by side, and to save expense had built a joint-dwelling on the
boundary line between the two claims. Each man lived in his own side
of the house--the half that rested on his land. John had lived six
months on his claim, as the law requires before a settler can secure
a title to his land. He was now working to get the money to improve
it into a farm. He was a bit of a carpenter; and in many odd ways he
was clever with his hands, as fishermen and sailors almost always are.
Jack Gilmour possessed a riding-whip, such as the cowboys call a
“quirt,” which John had braided for him, with skill and economy, out
of leather thongs cut from scraps of waste leather, old boot-legs, or
saddle-straps, discarded by the camps.

Such a companion as this, so experienced and variously gifted, and
so uniformly gentle, was sure to be missed. Jack found the cañon a
much duller place without his friend. He and Charley Moy, the Chinese
cook, used to discourse about John, and recount his virtues, much as
we linger over praises of the dead--although John’s camp was but five
miles away, and he himself in good health, for all any one knew to the
contrary.

After a while, Jack got permission to ride up the river to John’s camp
and pay him a visit; and he was to be allowed to make the trip alone.
Jack had been promoted, since his fishing expedition of two summers
before, from a donkey and one spur to a pony of his own, a proper boy’s
saddle, and two spurs, all in consequence of his advancing years and
the increasing length of his legs. The pony was called “Lollo,” for
just when he came the children had been reading “Jackanapes,” and
the new pony, like the pony in the story, was “red-haired.” He had
belonged, not to the gypsies, but to the Indians, who had broken and
branded him. One of his ears was clipped, and the brand on his flank
was a circle with a bar through the centre. He had the usual thick mane
and tail of a “cayuse,” a white nose, and four white feet.

Now, there is an ancient rhyme which says:

  “One white foot, buy him;
  Two white feet, try him;
  Three white feet, deny him;
  Four white feet and a white nose,
  Take off his hide and give him to the crows!”

But Lollo shook the dust of the trail from his four white feet, in
defiance of the crows; nor was he ever known to hide the light of his
white nose under a bushel, except when there were oats in the bottom of
it.

Jack’s mother advised him to make sure of his lunch by taking it with
him, in case John might be absent from the camp in the hills. But for
some reason (it is very difficult to know a boy’s real reasons) Jack
preferred to take the chances of the trip without provisions.

His father told him that when he had ridden as far as John Turner’s,
by the river trail, he must take the upper trail which runs along the
bluffs.

As it turned out, this was mistaken advice. The upper trail was not a
good one, as Jack soon discovered; and in certain places, where it was
highest and steepest above the river, it had been nearly rubbed out by
the passage of herds of stock, crowding and climbing past one another
and sliding over the dry and gritty slope.

In one spot it disappeared as a footing altogether, and here Jack was
obliged to dismount and creep along on all fours, Lollo following as he
could. A horse can go, it is said, wherever a man can go without using
his hands. As Jack used his hands it was hardly fair to expect Lollo to
follow; but the pony did so. These Western horses seem as ready as the
men to risk themselves on dangerous trails, and quite as sure of what
they are about.

What with all these ups and downs, the breeze on the bluffs, and the
natural state of a boy’s appetite about midday, Jack was hoping that
lunch would be ready at John’s camp by the time he reached it; and it
is possible that he wished he had not been so proud, and had taken a
“bite” in his pocket, as his mother advised him.

John’s camp was in a gulch where a cool stream came down from the
hills. There were shade and grass and flowers in the season of flowers.
The prospect-holes were higher up beneath the basalt bluffs which rise
like palisades along the river. Earlier prospectors had driven tunnels,
such as prisoners dig under the foundations of a wall, some extending a
few feet, some farther, under the base of the bluffs. John was pushing
these burrows farther still and “panning out” the dirt he obtained in
his progress.

Jack soon found the sluice-boxes that John had built, and the “head” he
had made by damming the little stream, but he could not find John nor
John’s camp.

He argued with himself that John would not be likely to “make camp”
below the pool of water; it was clear and cold, much better for
drinking than the murky river water. His searching, therefore, was all
up the gulch instead of down toward the river; but nowhere could he
discover a sign of John nor of his belongings.

Jack’s mother asked him afterwards, when he told his story, why he did
not call or make a noise of some kind. He said that he did whistle, but
the place was so “still and lonesome” that he “did not like the sound
of it.”

His hope now was that John might be at work in one of the tunnels under
the bluffs. So he climbed up there; and by this time he was quite
empty and weak-hearted with hunger. He had a fine view of the river
and its shores, rising or sinking as the bluffs came to the front, or
gave place to slopes of dry summer pastures. There was a strong wind
blowing up there, and the black lava rocks in the sun were like heated
ovens. The wind and the river’s faint ripple, so far below, were the
only sounds he could hear. There were no living sounds of labor, or of
anything that was human or homelike.

At the entrance to one of the tunnels he saw John’s canvas overalls,
his pick and shovel, a gold-pan, and a wheelbarrow of home
construction. Jack examined the latter and saw that the only shop-made
part of it was the wheel, an old one which John must have found, and
that John by his own ingenuity had added the other parts out of such
materials as he could find.

The sight of these things, lying unused and unclaimed by their owner,
made Jack feel more dismal than ever. The overalls, in particular, were
like a picture of John himself. The whole place began to seem strange
and awesome.

Jack crept into the short tunnels, where it was light even at the far
end; and he saw nothing there, either to explain or to add to his
fears. But the long tunnel was as black as night. Into that he dared
not go.

He looked once more at the dreary little heap of tools and clothing,
and with an ache that was partly in his heart, partly no doubt in the
empty region of his stomach, he climbed down again into the gulch,
mounted Lollo and rode away.

When he came to the bad place on the trail, he slid down, keeping ahead
of Lollo, who shuffled along cautiously behind him. Lollo would not
have stepped on Jack, but he might have slipped and fallen on him.
However, a cayuse on a bad trail attends strictly to business, and is
quite safe if he can keep but two of his feet on firm ground.

If Jack’s father had known about that place on the trail he never
would have sent Jack by that way; and it was well that his mother had
no notion of it. As it was, they were merely surprised to see the boy
returning about the middle of the hottest part of the afternoon, and
were not a little sorry for his disappointment when they heard the
story of the trip.

Mrs. Gilmour shared the boy’s anxiety about John; and Charley Moy,
while he was giving Jack his dinner, told some very painful stories of
miners done away with on their solitary claims for the sake of their
supposed earnings. Mr. Gilmour said there might be a dozen explanations
of John’s absence; and, moreover, that Jack hadn’t found the camp at
all, and the camp should be there, or some sign of its having been
there must remain to indicate the spot.

Still the boy could not dismiss his fears, until two or three days
later John himself stopped at the cañon, on his way to town, not only
alive but in excellent health and spirits.

He told Jack that he _had_ been at his camp all the time the boy was
searching for him; but the camp was at the mouth of the gulch, close to
the river, where he had found a spring of pure cold water. Very near
the spring was a miner’s shanty, deserted but still quite habitable.
The advantages of house and spring together had decided John to camp
there, instead of higher up and nearer to his ditches. He urged Jack
to make the trip again, and in a week or so the boy repeated his visit.

This time he did not take the upper trail. John said that that trail
was only used at high water in the spring, when the river rose above
the lower trail.

The lower trail along the river bank was safe and pleasant, and not
so hot as the upper one; and this time there were no adventures.
Adventures do very well to tell of afterward, but they do not always
make a happy journey.

John was at home, and seemed very glad to see the boy. He took him
up on the bluffs to show him his workings, and Jack found it very
different, up there by the tunnels,--not at all strange and anxious. He
did not mind the dark tunnel a bit, with John’s company and a candle to
guide him.

John showed him the under surface of the bluffs, exposed where he had
undermined them and scraped away the dirt. These lava bluffs were once
a boiling flood of melted rock. The ground it flowed over and rested
upon after it cooled had been the bed of a river. In its soft state
the lava had taken the impression of the surface of the river-bed,
and after it cooled the forms remained the same; so that the under
surface of these ancient bluffs was like a plaster cast of the ancient
river-bed. The print could be seen of stones smoothed by water, and
some of the stones were still embedded in the lava crust.

Now this river came down from the mountains, where every prospector
in Idaho knows there is plenty of gold for those who can discover it.
John argued that the old river-bed must have had, mixed with its sand,
fine gold for which no one had ever prospected. The new bed which the
river had worn for itself at the foot of the bluffs probably contained
quite as much gold, sunk between stones or lodged in potholes in the
rocks (as it lodges against the riffles in a sluice-box), but no one
could hope to get _that_ gold, for the water which covered it. The old
river-bed was covered only with rock, which “stays put” while you dig
beneath it.

So, on the strength of this ingenious theory, John was digging where
the other theorists had dug before him. He was not getting rich, but
he was “making wages” and enjoying himself in the pleasant camp in the
gulch; and as yet he had not found any of the rich holes.

He made a great feast in the boy’s honor. The chief dish was stewed
grouse, rolled up in paste and boiled like dumplings. Jack said those
grouse dumplings were about the best eating he had ever “struck.” They
also had potatoes, baked in the ashes, and canned vegetables and stewed
apples and baking-powder biscuits and honey; and to crown the feast,
John made a pot of strong black coffee and sweetened it very sweet.

But here the guest was in a quandary. He refused the coffee, because
he was not allowed to drink coffee at home; but he could see that his
refusal made John uncomfortable, for there was no milk; there was
nothing else that he could offer the boy to drink but water, and water
seemed very plain at a feast.

Jack wondered which was worse--for a boy to break a rule without
permission, or to seem to cast reproach upon a friend’s entertainment
by refusing what was set before him. He really did not care for the
coffee; it looked very black and bitter; but he cared so much for John
that it was hard to keep on refusing. Still, he did refuse, but he did
not tell John his reason. Somehow he didn’t think that it would sound
manly for a big boy, nearly twelve years old, to say he was forbidden
to drink coffee.

Afterward he told his mother about it, and asked her if he had done
right. His mother’s opinion was that he had, but that he might have
done it in a better way by telling John his reason for refusing the
coffee. Then there would have been no danger of John’s supposing that
the boy refused because he did not like that kind of coffee.

Jack’s little problem set his mother thinking how often we do what
is right, at some cost to ourselves, perhaps, but do it in such an
awkward, proud way, that we give pain to others and so undo the value
of our honest effort to be good; and how, in the matter of feasts, it
is much easier in our time for a guest to decline anything that does
not suit him in the way of eating and drinking than it used to be long
ago, when a gentleman was thought not to have “dined” unless he had
both eaten and drunk more than was good for him; and how, in the matter
of rules, it is only little silly boys who are ashamed to confess
that they are not their own masters. The bravest and wisest men have
been keepers of simple rules in simple matters, and in greater ones
respecters of a loving Intelligence above their own, whose laws they
were proud to obey.

The courage that displays itself in excesses is happily no longer the
fashion; rather the courage that keeps modestly within bounds, and can
say “no” without offense to others.




NOVEMBER IN THE CAÑON


The long season of fair autumn weather was drawing to a close.
Everybody was tired of sunshine; there had been nearly six months of
it, and the face of nature in southern Idaho was gray with dust. A dark
morning or a cloudy sunset was welcome, even to the children, who were
glad of the prospect of any new kind of weather.

But no rain came. The river had sunk so low in its bed it barely
murmured on the rocks, like a sleeper disturbed in his dream. When the
children were indoors, with windows shut and fire crackling, they could
hear no sound of water; and this cessation of a voice inseparable from
the life of the cañon added to the effect of waiting which belonged to
these still fall days.

The talk of the men was of matters suited to the season. It was said
the Chinamen’s wood-drive had got lodged in Moore’s Creek on its way
to the river, there being so little water in the creek this year, and
might not get down at all, which would be almost a total loss to the
Chinamen. Charley Moy knew the boss Chinaman of the “drive,” and said
that he had had bad luck now two seasons running.

The river was the common carrier between the lumber-camps in the
mountains and the consumers of wood in the towns and ranches below.
Purchasers who lived on the river-bank were accustomed to stop their
winter’s supply of firewood as it floated by. It was taken account
of and paid for when the owners of the drive came to look up their
property.

Every year three drives came down the river. Goodwin’s log-drive came
first, at high water, early in the summer. The logs were from twelve to
twenty feet long. Each one was marked with the letters M H. These were
the first two of Mr. Goodwin’s initials, and were easily cut with an
axe; the final initial, G, being difficult to cut in this rude way,
was omitted; but everybody knew that saw-logs marked M H belonged to
Goodwin’s drive. They looked like torpedo-boats as they came nosing
along with an ugly rolling motion through the heavy current.

The men who followed this first drive were rather a picked lot for
strength and endurance, but they made slow progress past the bend in
the cañon. Here a swift current and an eddy together combined to create
what is called a jam. The loggers were often seen up to their waists in
water for hours, breaking up the jam and working the logs out into the
current. When the last one was off the men would get into their boat--a
black, flat-bottomed boat, high at stem and stern like a whaleboat--and
go whooping down in mid-current like a mob of schoolboys upon some
dangerous sort of lark. These brief voyages between the jams must have
been the most exciting and agreeable part of log-driving.

After Goodwin’s drive came the Frenchmen’s cord-wood drive; and last of
all, when the river was lowest, came the Chinamen’s drive, making the
best of what water was left.

There is a law of the United States which forbids that an alien
shall cut timber on the public domain. A Chinaman, being an alien
unmistakably and doubly held as such in the West, cannot therefore
cut the public timber for his own immediate profit or use; but he can
take a contract to furnish it to a white dealer in wood, at a price
contingent upon the safe delivery of the wood. But if the river should
fail to bring it in time for sale, the cost of cutting and driving, for
as far as he succeeds in getting it down, is a dead loss to the Chinese
contractor, and the wood belongs to whoever may pick it out of the
water when the first rise of the creek in spring carries it out.

The Chinese wood-drivers are singular, wild-looking beings. Often at
twilight, when they camped on the shore below the house, the children
would hover within sight of the curious group the men made around their
fire--an economical bit of fire, sufficient merely to cook the supper
of fish and rice.

All is silence before supper, in a camp of hungry, wet white men, but
the Chinamen were always chattering. The children were amused to see
them “doing” their hair like women,--combing out the long, black,
witch-locks in the light of the fire and braiding them into pigtails,
or twisting them into “Psyche knots.” They wore several layers of
shirts and sleeveless vests, one over another, long waterproof
boots drawn up over their knees, and always the most unfitting of
hats perched on top of the coiled braids or above the Psyche knots.
Altogether, take them wet or dry, on land or in the water, no male or
female of the white race could show anything in the way of costume to
approach them.

The cloudy weather continued. The nights grew sharper, and the men said
it was too cold for rain; if a storm came now it would bring snow.
There was snow already upon the mountains and the high pastures, for
the deer were seeking feeding-grounds in the lower, warmer gulches,
and the stock had been driven down from the summer range to winter in
the valleys.

One afternoon an old man, a stranger, was seen coming down the gulch
back of the house, followed by a pack-horse bearing a load. The gulch
was now all yellow and brown, and the man’s figure was conspicuous for
the light, army-blue coat he wore--the overcoat of a private soldier.
He “hitched” at the post near the kitchen door, and uncovering his load
showed two fat haunches of young venison which he had brought to sell.

No peddler of the olden time, unstrapping his pack in the lonely
farmhouse kitchen, could have been more welcome than this stranger with
his wild merchandise to the children of the camp. They stood around so
as not to miss a word of the conversation while Charley Moy entertained
him with the remnants of the camp lunch. The old buckskin-colored horse
seemed as much of a character as his master. Both his ears were cropped
half off, giving a sullen and pugilistic expression to his bony head.
There was no more arch to his neck than to the handle of a hammer. His
faded yellow coat was dry, matted and dusty as the hair of a tramp who
sleeps in haymows. Without bit or bridle, he followed his master like
a dog. In the course of conversation it appeared that the cropped ears
were not scars of battle nor marks of punishment, but the record of a
journey when he and his master were caught out too late in the season,
and the old horse’s ears had both been frozen.

The children were surprised to learn that their new acquaintance was a
neighbor, residing in a dugout in Cottonwood Gulch, only three miles
away. They knew the place well, had picnicked there one summer day,
and had played in the dugout. Had not Daisy, the pet fawn, when they
had barred him out of the dugout because he filled up the whole place,
jumped upon the roof and nearly stamped it in?--like Samson pulling
down the pillars of the temple? But no one had been living there then.
The old man said he used the dugout only in winter. It was his town
house. In summer he and the old horse took their freedom on the hills,
hunting and prospecting for mineral--not so much in the expectation
of a fortune as from love of the chances and risks of the life. Was
it not lonely in Cottonwood Gulch when the snows came? the children
asked. Sometimes it was lonely, but he had good neighbors: the boys at
Alexander’s (the horse-ranch) were down from the summer range, and they
came over to his place of an evening for a little game of cards, or he
went over to their place. He would be very glad, however, of any old
newspapers or novels that might be lying around camp; for he was short
of reading-matter in the dugout.

There was always a pile of old periodicals and “picture papers” on
Charley Moy’s ironing-table; he was proud to contribute his entire
stock on hand to the evening company in the dugout. The visitor then
modestly hinted that he was pretty tired of wild meat: had Charley such
a thing as the rough end of a slab of bacon lying around, or a ham bone
to spare? A little mite of lard would come handy, and if he could let
him have about five pounds of flour, it would be an accommodation, and
save a journey to town. These trifles he desired to pay for with his
venison; but that was not permitted, under the circumstances.

Before taking his leave the old hunter persuaded Polly to take a
little tour on his horse, up and down the poplar walk, at a slow and
courteous pace. Polly had been greatly interested in her new friend
at a distance, but this was rather a formidable step toward intimacy.
However, she allowed herself to be lifted upon the back of the old
crop-eared barbarian, and with his master walking beside her she paced
sedately up and down between the leafless poplars.

The old man’s face was pale, notwithstanding the exposure of his life;
the blood in his cheek no longer fired up at the touch of the sun. His
blue coat and the yellow-gray light of the poplar walk gave him an
added pallor. Polly was a pink beside him, perched aloft in her white
bonnet and ruffled pinafore.

The old sway-backed horse sulked along, refusing to “take any hand” in
such a trifling performance. He must have felt the insult of Polly’s
babyish heels dangling against his weather-beaten ribs, that were
wont to be decorated with the pendent hoofs and horns of his master’s
vanquished game.

Relations between the family and their neighbor in the dugout continued
to be friendly and mutually profitable. The old ex-soldier’s venison
was better than could be purchased in town. Charley Moy saved the
picture papers for him, and seldom failed to find the half of a pie,
a cup of cold coffee, or a dish of sweets for him to “discuss” on the
bench by the kitchen door. Discovering that antlers were prized in
camp, he brought his very best pair as a present, bearing them upon his
shoulders, the furry skull of the deer against his own, back to back,
so that in profile he was double-headed, man in front and deer behind.

But the young men of the camp were ambitious to kill their own venison.
The first light dry snow had fallen, and deer-tracks were discovered
on the trails leading to the river. A deer was seen by John Brown and
Mr. Dane, standing on the beach on the farther side, in a sort of
cul-de-sac formed by the walls of the lava bluffs as they approached
the shore. They fired at and wounded him, but he was not disabled from
running. His only way of escape was by the river in the face of the
enemy’s fire. He swam in a diagonal line down stream, and assisted by
the current gained the shore at a point some distance below, which his
pursuers were unable to reach in time to head him off.

They followed him over the hills as far and fast as legs and wind could
carry them, but lost him finally, owing to the dog Cole’s injudicious
barking, when the policy of the men would have been to lie quiet and
let the deer rest from his wound. By his track in the snow they saw
that his left hind foot touched the ground only now and then. If Cole
had pressed him less hard the deer would have lain down to ease his
hurt, the wound would have stiffened and rendered it difficult for him
to run, and so he might have met his end shortly, instead of getting
away to die a slow and painful death.

They lost him, and were reproached for it, needlessly, by the women of
the family. One Saturday morning, when Mr. Dane was busy in the office
over his notebooks, and Jack’s mother was darning stockings by the
fire, Jack came plunging in to say that John Brown was trying to head
off a deer that was swimming down the river--and would Mr. Dane come
with his rifle, quick?

Below the house a wire-rope suspension bridge for foot passengers only
spanned the river at its narrowest point, from rock to rock of the
steep shore. Mr. Dane looked out and saw John Brown running to and fro
on this bridge, waving his arms, shouting, and firing stones at some
object above the bridge that was heading down stream. Mr. Dane could
just see the small black spot upon the water which he knew was the
deer’s head. He seized his gun and ran down the shore path. Discouraged
in his attempt to pass the bridge, the deer was making for the shore,
when Mr. Dane began firing at him. A stranger now arrived upon the
scene, breathless with running; he was the hunter who had started
the game and chased it till it had taken to the river. The deer was
struggling with the current in midstream, uncertain which way to turn.
Headed off from the bridge and from the nearest shore, he turned and
swam slowly toward the opposite bank. The women on the hill were nearly
crying, the hunt seemed so hopeless for the deer and so unfair: three
men, two of them with guns, combined against him, and the current so
swift and strong! It was Mr. Dane’s bullet that ended it. It struck
the deer as he lifted himself out of the water on the rocks across the
river.

The venison was divided between the stranger who started the game and
the men of the camp who cut off its flight and prevented its escape.

The women did not refuse to eat of it, but they continued to protest
that the hunt “was not fair;” or, in the phrase of the country, that
the deer “had no show at all.”




THE GATES ON GRANDFATHER’S FARM


Little Eastern children, transplanted in their babyhood to the far
West, have to leave behind them grandfathers and grandmothers, and all
the dear old places associated with those best friends of childhood.

Of our cañon children, Jack was the only one who could remember
grandfather’s house, although Polly had romanced about it so much that
she thought she could remember. Polly was born there, but as she was
taken away only eighteen months afterward, it’s hardly likely that she
knew much about it. And Baby was born in the cañon, and never in her
life had heard the words grandpapa or grandmamma spoken in the second
person.

For the sake of these younger ones, deprived of their natural right
to the possession of grandparents, the mother used to tell everything
she could put into words and that the children could understand about
the old Eastern home where her own childhood was spent, in entire
unconsciousness of any such fate as that which is involved in the words
“Gone West.”

The catalogue of grandfather’s gates always pleased the children,
because in the cañon there were no gates, but the great rock gate of
the cañon itself, out of which the river ran shouting and clapping its
hands like a child out of a dark room into the sunlight, and into which
the sun took a last peep at night under the red curtain of the sunset.

Grandfather’s gates were old gates long before Jack began to kick out
the toes of his shoes against them, or practice with their wooden
latches and latchpins. Most of them had been patched and strengthened
in weak places by hands whose work in this world was done. Each had its
own particular creak, like a familiar voice announcing as far as it
could be heard which gate it was that was opening; and to Jack’s eyes,
each one of the farm gates had a distinct and expressive countenance
of its own, which he remembered as well as he did the faces of the men
who worked in the fields.

Two or three of them were stubborn obstacles in his path, by reason
of queer, unmanageable latches that wouldn’t shove, or weights that
a small boy couldn’t lift, or a heavy trick of yawing at the top and
dragging at the bottom, so that the only way to get through was to
squeeze through a wedge-shaped opening where you scraped the side of
your leg and generally managed to catch some part of your clothing on a
nail or on a splinter. Others fell open gayly on a down-hill grade, but
you had to tug yourself crimson in order to heave them shut again. Very
few of those heavy old field gates seemed to have been intended for the
convenience of boys. The boy on grandfather’s farm who opened a gate
was expected to shut it. If he neglected to do so he was almost sure to
hear a voice calling after him, “Hey, there! Who left that gate open?”
So on the whole it was no saving of time to slip through, besides
being a strain on one’s reputation with the farm hands.

Some of the gates were swinging and creaking every day of the year;
others were silent for whole months together; others, like the road
gate, stood open always and never creaked, and nobody marked them,
except that the children found them good to swing upon when the grass
was not too long.

The road gate had once been a smart one, with pickets and gray paint,
but it had stood open so many years with the grass of summer after
summer cumbering its long stride that no one ever thought of repainting
it, any more than they would of decorating the trunk of the Norway
spruce which stood nearest to it, between it and the fountain that had
ceased to play and had been filled up with earth and converted into a
flower bed.

The road gate being always open, it follows that the garden gate was
always shut. The garden was divided from the dooryard by the lane
that went past the house to the carriage-house and stable. Visitors
sometimes spoke of the lane as the “avenue,” and of the dooryard as the
“lawn;” but these fine names were never used by grandfather himself,
nor by any of the household, nor were they appropriate to the character
of the place. The dooryard grass was left to grow rather long before it
was cut, like grandfather’s beard before he would consent to have it
trimmed. Dandelions went to seed and clover-heads reddened. Beautiful
things had time to grow up and blossom in that rich, dooryard grass,
before it was swept down by the scythe and carried away in wheelbarrow
loads to be fed to the horses. It was toward night, generally, that the
men wheeled it away, and the children used to follow load after load
to the stable, to enjoy the horses’ enjoyment of it. They always felt
that the dooryard grass belonged to them, and yielded it, at the cost
of many a joy, as their own personal contribution to those good friends
of theirs in the stable--Nelly and Duke and Dan and Nelly’s colt (which
was generally a five-year-old before it ceased to be called “the
colt”).

The garden gate was a small one, of the same rather smart pattern as
the road gate. The grapevine which grew inside the fence--and over,
and under, and through it--had superadded an arch of its tenderest,
broadest, most luminous leaves, which spanned the gate-posts, uplifted
against the blue sky, and was so much more beautiful toward the middle
of summer than any gate could be, that no one ever looked at the little
garden gate at all, except to make sure that it was shut.

It had a peculiar, lively click of the latch, which somehow suggested
all the pleasures of the garden within. The remembrance of it recalls
the figure of John, the gardener, in his blue denim blouse, with a
bunch of radishes and young lettuces in his clean, earthy hands. He
would take a few steps out of his way to the fountain (it had not then
been filled up), and wash the tender roots, dip the leaves and shake
them, before presenting his offering in the kitchen.

There was another figure that often came and went when the garden gate
clicked: the little mother, the children’s grandmother, in her morning
gingham and white apron and garden hat, and the gloves without fingers
she wore when she went to cut her roses. Sometimes she wore no hat,
and the sun shone through her muslin cap. It came to a point just
above her forehead, and was finished with a bunch of narrow ribbon,
pale straw-color or lavender. Her face in the open sunlight or under
the shade of her hat had the tender fairness of one of her own faintly
tinted tea-roses. Young girls and children’s faces may be likened to
flowers, but that fairness of the white soul shining through does not
belong to youth. The soul of a mother is hardly in full bloom until her
cheek begins to sink a little and grow soft with age.

The garden was laid out on an old-fashioned plan, in three low
terraces, each a single step above the other. A long, straight walk
divided the middle terrace, extending from the gate to the seat
underneath the grapevine and pear-tree; and another long, straight path
crossed the first one at right angles from the blackberry bushes at the
top of the garden to the arbor-vitæ hedge at the bottom. The borders
were of box, or polyanthus, or primroses, and the beds were filled with
a confusion of flowers of all seasons, crowding the spaces between the
rose-bushes; so that there where literally layers of flowers, the ones
above half hiding, half supporting the ones beneath, and all uniting to
praise the hand of the gardener that made them grow. Some persons said
the garden needed systematizing; that there was a waste of material
there. Others thought its charm lay in its careless lavishness of
beauty--as if it took no thought for what it was or had, but gave with
both hands and never counted what was left.

It was certain you could pick armfuls, apronfuls, of flowers there, and
never miss them from the beds or the bushes where they grew.

The hedge ran along on top of the stone wall that guarded the
embankment to the road. In June, when the sun lay hot on the whitening
dust, Jack used to lean with his arms deep in the cool, green, springy
mass of the hedge, his chin barely above its close-shorn twigs, and
stare at the slow-moving tops of the tall chestnut-trees across the
meadow, and dream of journeys and of circuses passing, with band
wagons and piebald horses and tramp of elephants and zebras with stiff
manes. How queer an elephant would look walking past the gate of Uncle
Townsend’s meadow!

When the first crop of organ-grinders began to spread along the country
roads, Jack, atilt like a big robin in the hedge, would prick his ear
at the sound of a faint, whining sweetness, far away at the next house
but one. After a silence he would hear it again in a louder strain, at
the very next house; another plodding silence, and the joy had arrived.
The organ-man had actually perceived grandfather’s house, far back as
it was behind the fir-trees, and had stopped by the little gate at the
foot of the brick walk. Then Jack races out of the garden, slamming
the gate behind him, across the dooryard and up the piazza steps, to
beg a few pennies to encourage the man. He has already turned back his
blanket and adjusted his stick. Will grandmother please hurry? It takes
such a long time to find only four pennies, and the music has begun!

All the neighbors’ children have followed the man, and are congregated
about him in the road below. Looks are exchanged between them and Jack,
dangling his legs over the brink of the wall, but no words are wasted.

Then come those moments of indecision as to the best plan of bestowing
the pennies. If you give them too soon, the man may pack up the rest
of his tunes and go away; if you keep them back too long, he may get
discouraged and go, anyhow. Jack concludes to give two pennies at the
close of the first air, and make the others apparent in his hands. But
the organ-man does not seem to be aware of the other two pennies in
reserve. His melancholy eyes are fixed on the tops of the fir-trees
that swing in a circle above Jack’s head, as he sits on the wall.
“Poor man,” Jack thinks, “he is disappointed to get only two pennies!
He thinks, perhaps, I am keeping the others for the next man. How good
of him to go on playing all the same!” He plays all his tunes out
to the end. Down goes the blanket. Jack almost drops the pennies in
his haste to be in time. The man stumps away down the road, and Jack
loiters up the long path to the house, dreamy with the droning music,
and flattered to the soul by the man’s thanks and the way he took off
his hat when he said good-day. Nobody need try to make Jack believe
that an organ-grinder can ever be a nuisance.

The road gate, the garden gate, and the gate at the foot of the path
were the only gates that ever made any pretense to paint. The others
were of the color that wind and weather freely bestow upon a good piece
of old wood that has never been planed.

Jack became acquainted with the farm gates one by one, as his knowledge
of the fields progressed. At first, for his short legs, it was a long
journey to the barn. Here there was a gate which he often climbed
upon but never opened; for within its protection the deep growl of the
old bull was often heard, or his reddish-black head, lowering eye, and
hunched shoulders were seen emerging from the low, dark passage to the
sheds into the sunny cattle-yard. Even though nothing were in sight
more awful than a clucking hen, that doorway, always agape and always
dark as night, was a bad spot for a small boy to pass, with the gate of
retreat closed behind him and the gate of escape into the comfortable,
safe barnyard not yet open.

The left-hand gate, on the upper side of the barn, was the children’s
favorite of all the gates. The barn was built against a hill, and the
roof on the upper side came down nearly to the ground. The children
used to go through the left-hand gate when, with one impulse, they
decided, “Let’s go and slide on the roof!” This was their summer
coasting. Soles of shoes were soon so polished that the sliders were
obliged to climb up the roof on hands and knees. It was not good for
stockings, and in those days there were no “knee-protectors;” mothers’
darning was the only invention for keeping young knees inside of
middle-aged stockings that were expected to “last out” the summer.

It was a blissful pastime, to swarm up the roof and lie, with one’s
chin over the ridge-pole, gazing down from that thrilling height upon
the familiar objects in the peaceful barnyard. Then to turn round
carefully and get into position for the glorious, downward rush over
the gray, slippery shingles! It could not have been any better for
the shingles than for the shoes and stockings; but no one interfered.
Perhaps grandfather remembered a time when he, too, used to slide on
roofs, and scour the soles of his shoes and polish the knees of his
stockings.

The upper gate had another, more lasting attraction; it opened
into the lane that went up past the barn into the orchards--the
lovely, side-hill orchards. Grandfather’s farm was a side-hill farm
altogether, facing the river, with its back to the sunset. If you
sat down comfortably, adjusting yourself to the slope of the ground,
the afternoon shadows stretched far before you; you saw the low blue
mountains across the river, and the sails of sloops tacking against the
breeze. One orchard led to another, through gaps in the stone fences,
and the shadow of one tree met the shadow of its neighbor, across
those long, sun-pierced aisles. The trees bent this way and that, and
shifted their limbs under the autumn’s burden of fruit. The children
never thought of eating a whole apple, but bit one and threw it away
for another that looked more tempting, and so on till their palates
were torpid with tasting. Then they were swung up on top of the cold
slippery loads and jolted down the lane to that big upper door that
opened into the loft where the apple bins were. Here the wagon stopped
with a heavy creak. Some one picked up a child and swung it in at the
big door; some one else caught it and placed it safely on its feet at
one side; and then the men began a race,--the one in the wagon bent
upon filling a basket with apples and hoisting it in at the door,
faster than the man inside could carry it to the bin and empty it and
return for the next.

These bins held the cider apples. The apples for market were brought
down in barrels from the orchards, and then the wagon load of apples
and children went through still another gate that led to another short
lane under more apple-trees, to the fruit-house, where, in the cool,
dim cellar that smelled of all deliciousness, the fruit was sorted
and boxed or barreled for market. And in the late afternoon, or after
supper, if the children were old enough to stay up so late, they were
allowed to ride on the loads of fruit to the steamboat landing.

It is needless to say that this gate, which led to the fruit cellar,
was one Jack very early learned to open. In fact, it was so in
the habit of being opened that it had never acquired the trick of
obstinacy, and gave way at the least pull.

When Jack was rather bigger, he was allowed to cross the road with his
cousin, a boy of his own age, and open the gate into Uncle Townsend’s
meadow. This piece of land had been many years in his grandfather’s
possession but it was still called by the name of its earlier owner.
Names have such a persistent habit of sticking in those long-settled
communities where there is always some one who remembers when staid old
horses were colts and gray-haired men were boys, and when the land your
father was born on was part of his grandfather’s farm on the ridge.

A brook, which was also the waste-way from the mill, ran across Uncle
Townsend’s meadow. Sometimes it overflowed into the grass and made wet
places, and in these spots the grass was of a darker color, and certain
wild flowers were finer than anywhere else; also weeds, among others
the purple, rank “skunk’s cabbage,” which the children admired, without
wishing to gather.

Water-cresses clung to the brookside; in the damp places the largest,
whitest bloodroot grew; under the brush along the fences and by the
rocks grew the blue-eyed hepatica, coral-red columbine, and anemones,
both pure white and those rare beauties with a pale pink flush.
Dog-tooth violets, wild geraniums, Solomon’s seal, Jack-in-the-pulpit,
came in due season, and ferns of every pattern of leaf and scroll.
Later, when the wet places were dry, came the tall fire-lilies and
brown-eyed Rudbeckias, “ox-eyed daisies” the children called them,
together with all the delicate, flowering grass-heads and stately
bulrushes and patches of pink and white clover,--and all over the
meadow there was a sleepy sound of bees, and shadows with soft edges
lost in deep waves of grass.

Of course the brook did not stop at the meadow. It went on gurgling
over the stones, dark under the willows; but there were no more gates.
The brook left the home fields and took its own way across everybody’s
land to the river. That was a long walk, which Jack took only when he
was much older.

Another journey, which he grew up to by degrees, was that one to the
upper barn. How many times over did he repeat his instructions before
he was allowed to set out: “Go up the hill, past the mill, until you
come to the first turn to the left. Turn up that way and follow the
lane straight on”--but this was a figure of speech, for no one could go
straight on who followed that lane--“till you come to the three gates.
Be sure to take the left-hand one of the three. Then you are all right.
That gate opens into the lane that goes past the upper barn.”

Near the upper barn were three sugar-maples--the only ones on the place
that yielded sap; and in one of the neighboring fields there was a very
great walnut-tree, second in size only to the old chestnut-tree in the
burying-ground which was a hundred and fifty years old and bigger round
the body than three children clasping hands could span.

Those up-lying fields were rather far away for daily rambles. Jack knew
them less and so cared less for them than for the home acres, which
were as familiar to him as the rooms of grandfather’s house.

But when grandfather’s children were children, the spring lambs
wintered at the upper barn; and beauteous creatures they were by the
following spring, with broad foreheads and curly forelocks and clear
hazel eyes and small mouths just made for nibbling from the hand.
Often, of a keen April morning, when the thawed places in the lane
were covered with clinking ice, the children used to trudge at their
father’s side to see the lambs get their breakfast of turnips, chopped
in the dark cold hay-scented barn, while the hungry creatures bleated
outside and crowded against the door.

Half the poetry of the farm life went into the care of the sheep and
the anxieties connected with them. They were a flock of Cotswolds,
carefully bred from imported stock. Their heavy fleeces made them the
most helpless of creatures when driven hard or worried by the dogs, and
every neighbor’s dog was a possible enemy.

On moonlight nights in spring, when watch-dogs are restless, and
vagabond dogs are keen for mischief, the spirit of the chase would
get abroad. The bad characters would lead on the dogs of uncertain
principles, and now and then one of unspotted reputation, and the evil
work would begin. When the household was asleep, a knock would be heard
upon the window, and the voice of one hoarse with running would give
the alarm:--

“The dogs are after the sheep!”

The big brother would get down his shot-gun, and the father would hunt
for the ointments, the lantern, and the shears (for cutting the wool
away from bleeding wounds), and together they hurried away--the avenger
and the healer. Next day, more than one of the neighbors’ children
came weeping, to identify a missing favorite. Sometimes the innocent
suffered for being found in company with the guilty. There were hard
feelings on both sides. Even the owners of dogs caught with the marks
of guilt upon them disputed the justice of a life for a life.

There is one more gate, and then we come to the last one--the gate of
the burying-ground.

A path went over the hill which divided grandfather’s house from that
of his elder brother, whose descendants continued to live there after
him. Uncle Edward’s children were somewhat older, and his grandchildren
were younger than grandfather’s children; but though slightly
mismatched as to ages the two households were in great accord. The path
crossed the “line fence” by a little gate in the stone wall, and this
was the gate of family visiting.

That way the mothers went of an afternoon with their sewing, or the
last new magazine, or the last new baby; or in the morning to borrow
a cupful of yeast, or to return the last loan of a bowlful of rice,
or to gather ground-ivy (it grew in Uncle Edward’s yard, but not in
grandfather’s) to make syrup for an old cough. That way came the
groups, of a winter evening, in shawls and hoods, creaking over the
snow with lantern-light and laughter to a reading circle, or to one of
those family reunions which took place whenever some relative from a
distance was visiting in the neighborhood. Along that path went those
dear women in haste, to offer their help in sudden, sharp emergencies;
and with slower steps again when all was over, they went to sit with
those in grief, or to consult about the last services for the dead.

That was the way the young people took on their walks in summer--the
stalwart country boys and their pretty city cousins in fresh muslins,
with light, high voices, pitched to the roar of the street. That way
went the nutting parties in the fall and the skating parties in winter.
All the boys and girls of both houses grew up opening and shutting that
gate on one errand or another, from the little white-headed lad with
the mail, to the soldier cousin coming across to say good-by.

Between the two neighboring homes was the family burying-ground: all
this pleasant intercourse went on with the silent cognizance and
sympathy, as it were, of the forefathers who trod the path no more.
The burying-ground was by far the best spot for a resting-place on
either of the farms,--in a hollow of the hills, with a stone fence
all round, draped as if to deaden sounds with heavy festoons of
woodbine. Above the gray granite and white marble tombstones, rose the
locust-trees, tall and still. The beds of myrtle, underneath, were
matted into a continuous carpet of thick, shining leaves which caught
the sunlight at broad noon with a peculiar pale glister like moonlight.
The chestnut-tree stood a little apart, with one great arm outstretched
as if calling attention, or asking for silence. Yet no child ever
hushed its laughter as it passed the little gate with the gray pickets,
overhung by a climbing rose, which opened into the burying-ground;
and when, in the autumn, the old chestnut-tree dropped its nuts, the
children never hesitated to go in that way and gather them because of
the solemn neighborhood. They had grown up in the presence of these
memorials of the beloved dead. But no one ever opened that gate without
at least a momentary thoughtfulness. No one ever slammed it, in anger
or in haste. And so it became a dumb teacher of reverence--a daily
reminder to be quiet, to be gentle, for the sake of those at rest on
the other side of the wall.




THE GARRET AT GRANDFATHER’S


The rooms at grandfather’s house had been used so long, they were
almost human themselves. Each room had a look of its own, when you
opened the door, as expressive as a speaking countenance.

“Come in, children dear!” the sunny sitting-room always seemed to say.

“Sit still and don’t talk too much, and don’t handle the things on the
tables,” said the large, gleaming, dim-lighted parlors.

“Dear me, what weather this is!” grumbled the poky back entry where the
overshoes and waterproofs and wood-boxes were kept.

“There’s a piece--of cake--in the cupboard for you,” quietly ticked the
dining-room clock, its large face looking at no one in particular.

But of all the rooms in that house, upstairs or down, not one had the
strangeness, the mysterious nod and beck and whisper, of the murky old
garret.

“Hark, what was that?” it would seem to creak; and then there was
silence. “Hush! I’ll tell you a story,” it sometimes answered.

Some of its stories were true, but I should not like to vouch for all
of them.

What a number of queer things it kept hidden away under the eaves that
spread wide, a broad-winged cloak of shadows! What a strange eye it
had, its one half-moon window peering at you from the high, peaked
forehead of the gable.

The garret door was at the far end of the long upper hall; from it the
stairs (and how they did creak!) led up directly out of the cheerful
daylight into that uncarpeted wilderness where it was always twilight.

It was the younger children’s business to trot on errands, and they
were not consulted as to where or when they should go. Grown people
seem to forget how early it gets dark up garret in winter, and how far
away the house noises sound with all the doors shut between.

When the children were sent up garret for nuts,--for Sunday dessert
with mince pie and apples, or to pass around with cider in the
evening,--they were careful to leave the stair door open behind them;
but there was little comfort in that, for all the people were two
flights down and busy with their own concerns.

Downstairs in the bright western chambers nobody thought of its being
late, but up garret, under the eaves, it was already night. Thick ice
incrusted the half-moon window, curtaining its cold ray that sadly
touched an object here and there, and deepened the neighboring gloom.

The autumn nut harvest was spread first upon sheets on the garret floor
to dry, and then it was garnered in the big, green bathtub which had
stood, since the children could remember, over against the chimney, to
the right of the gable window. This tub was for size and weight the
father of all bathtubs. It was used for almost anything but the purpose
for which it was intended.

In summer, when it was empty, the children played “shipwreck” in it;
it was their life-boat, and they were cast away on the high seas. Some
rowed for dear life, with umbrellas and walking-sticks, and some made
believe to cry and call for help,--for that was their idea of the
behavior of a shipwrecked company; and some tramped on the bulging tin
bottom of the tub, which yielded and sprang back with a loud thump,
like the clank of oars. It was very exciting.

In winter it was the granary. It held bushels and bushels of nuts, and
its smooth, out-sloping sides defeated the clever little mice who were
always raiding and rummaging among the garret stores.

Well, it seemed a long distance to the timid little errand girl, from
the stairs, across the garret floor to that bathtub. “Noiseless as fear
in a wide wilderness,” she stepped. Then, what a shock it was, when the
first loud handfuls of nuts bumped upon the bottom of the pail! The
nuts were pointed and cold as lumps of ice; they hurt the small hands
that shoveled them up in haste, and a great many handfuls it took to
fill the pail.

Hanging from the beams that divided the main garret from the eaves,
dangled a perfectly useless row of old garments that seemed to be there
for no purpose but to look dreadful. How they might have appeared in
a different light cannot be said; there seemed to be nothing wrong
with them when the women took them down at house-cleaning time and
shook and beat them about; they were as empty as sacks, every one. But
in that dim, furtive light, seen by over-shoulder glimpses they had
the semblance of dismal malefactors suffering the penalty of their
crimes. Some were hooded and seemed to hang their heads upon their
sunken breasts; all were high-shouldered wretches with dangling arms
and a shapeless, dreary suggestiveness worse than human. The most
objectionable one of the lot was a long, dark weather-cloak, worn
“about the twenties,” as old people say. It was of the fashion of that
“long red cloak, well brushed and neat,” which we read of in John
Gilpin’s famous ride.

But the great-grandfather’s cloak was of a dark green color, and not
well brushed. It had a high, majestic velvet collar, hooked with a
heavy steel clasp and chain; but for all its respectable and kindly
associations, it looked, hanging from the garret rafters, just as much
a gallows-bird as any of its ruffian company.

The children could not forgive their great-grandfather for having had
such a sinister-looking garment, or for leaving it behind him to hang
in the grim old garret and frighten them. Solemn as the garret looked,
no doubt this was one of its jokes: to dress itself up in shadows
and pretend things to tease the children, as we have known some real
persons to do. It certainly was not fair, when they were up there all
alone.

The scuttle in the roof was shut, in winter, to keep out the snow. A
long ladder led up to it from the middle garret, and close to this
ladder stood another uncanny-looking object--the bath-closet.

The family had always been inveterate bathers, but surely this shower
bath must have capped the climax of its cold-water experiments.

It was contrived so that a pail of water, carried up by the scuttle
ladder and emptied into a tilting vessel on top of the closet, could be
made to descend on a sudden in a deluge of large drops upon the head of
the person inside. There was no escape for that person; the closet gave
him but just room to stand up under the infliction, and once the pail
was tilted, the water was bound to come.

The children thought of this machine with shivering and dread. They had
heard it said--perhaps in the kitchen--that their little grandmother
had “nearly killed herself” in that shower bath, till the doctor
forbade her to use it any more.

Its walls were screens of white cotton cloth, showing a mysterious
opaque glimmer against the light, also the shadowy outlines of some
objects within which the children could not account for. The narrow
screen door was always shut, and no child ever dreamed of opening it
or of meddling with the secrets of that pale closet. It was enough to
have to pass it on lonesome errands, looming like a “sheeted ghost” in
the garret’s perpetual twilight.

The garret, like some of the great foreign churches, had a climate of
its own; still and dry, but subject to extremes of heat and cold. In
summer it was the tropics, in winter the frozen pole.

But it had its milder moods also,--when it was neither hot nor cold,
nor light nor dark; when it beamed in mellow half-tones upon its
youthful visitors, left off its ugly frightening tricks, told them
“once upon a time” stories, and even showed them all its old family
keepsakes.

These pleasant times occurred about twice every year, at the spring and
fall house-cleaning, when the women with brooms and dust-pans invaded
the garret and made a cheerful bustle in that deserted place.

The scuttle hole in the roof was then open, to give light to the
cleaners, and a far, bright square of light shone down. It was as if
the garret smiled.

All the queer old things, stowed away under the eaves, behind boxes and
broken furniture and stoves and rolls of carpets, were dragged forth;
and they were as good as new discoveries to the children who had not
seen them nor heard their stories since last house-cleaning time.

There was the brass warming-pan, with its shining lid full of holes
like a pepper-box. On this warming-pan, as a sort of sled, the children
used to ride by turns--one child seated on, or in, the pan, two others
dragging it over the floor by the long, dark wood handle.

And there were the pattens “which step-great-grandmother Sheppard
brought over from England;” one pair with leather straps and one with
straps of cotton velvet, edged with a tarnished gilt embroidery. The
straps were meant to lace over a full-grown woman’s instep, but the
children managed somehow to keep them on their feet, and they clattered
about, on steel-shod soles, with a racket equal to the midnight clatter
of Santa Claus’s team of reindeer.

There was a huge muff of dark fur, kept in a tall blue paper bandbox;
the children could bury their arms in it up to the shoulder. It had
been carried by some lady in the time of short waists and scant skirts
and high coat collars; when girls covered their bare arms with long kid
gloves and tucked their little slippered toes into fur-lined foot-muffs
and went on moonlight sleighing parties, dressed as girls dress
nowadays for a dance.

One of these very same foot-muffs (the moths had once got into it)
led a sort of at-arm’s-length existence in the garret, neither quite
condemned nor yet allowed to mingle with unimpeachable articles of
clothing. And there was a “foot-stove” used in old times on long
drives in winter or in the cold country meeting-houses. They were
indefatigable visitors and meeting-goers,--those old-time Friends.
Weather and distance were nothing thought of; and in the most troublous
times they could go to and fro in their peaceful character, unmolested
and unsuspected, though no doubt they had their sympathies as strong as
other people’s.

A china bowl is still shown, in one branch of grandfather’s family,
which one of the great-aunts, then a young woman, carried on her
saddle-bow through both the British and Continental lines, from her
old home on Long Island to her husband’s house on the west bank of the
Hudson above West Point.

No traveling member of the society ever thought of “putting-up” for the
night anywhere but at a Friend’s house. Journeys were planned in stages
from such a Friend’s house to such another one’s, or from meeting to
meeting. In days when letter postage was dear and newspapers were
almost unknown, such visits were keenly welcome, and were a chief means
by which isolated country families kept up their communication with the
world.

There were many old-fashioned household utensils in the garret, the use
of which had to be explained to the children; and all this was as good
as history, and more easily remembered than much that is written in
books.

There was the old “Dutch oven” that had stood in front of roaring
hearth-fires in days when Christmas dinners were cooked without
the aid of stoves or ranges. And there were the iron firedogs, the
pot-hooks and the crane which were part of the fireplace furniture. And
the big wool-wheel for the spinning of yarn, the smaller and lady-like
flax-wheel, and the tin candle moulds for the making of tallow candles;
and a pleasure it must have been to see the candles “drawn,” when the
pure white tallow had set in the slender tubes and taken the shape of
them perfectly,--each candle, when drawn out by the wick, as cold and
hard and smooth as alabaster. And there was the “baby-jumper” and the
wicker “runaround,” to show that babies had always been babies--just
the same restless little pets then as now--and that mother’s and
nurse’s arms were as apt to get tired.

The garret had kept a faithful family record, and hence it told of
sickness and suffering as well as of pleasure and business and life and
feasting.

A little old crutch, padded by some woman’s hand with an attempt to
make it handsome as well as comfortable, stood against the chimney on
the dark side next the eaves. It was short enough for a child of twelve
to lean upon. It had seen considerable use, for the brown velvet pad
was worn quite thin and gray. Had the little cripple ever walked again?
With what feelings did the mother put that crutch away up-garret when
it was needed no more? The garret did not say how that story of pain
had ended; or whether it was long or short. The children never sought
to know. It was one of the questions which they did not ask: they knew
very little about pain themselves, and perhaps they did not fully enter
into the meaning of that sad little relic.

Still less did they understand the reverence with which the
house-cleaning women handled a certain bare wooden frame, neither
handsome nor comfortable looking. It had been made to support an
invalid in a sitting posture in bed; and the invalid for whom it was
provided, in her last days, had suffered much from difficulty of
breathing, and had passed many weary hours, sometimes whole nights,
supported by this frame. It had for those who knew its use the
sacredness of association with that long ordeal of pain, endured with
perfect patience and watched over with constant love.

But these were memories which the little children could not share. When
their prattling questions touched upon the sore places, the wounds in
the family past, they were not answered, or were put aside till some
more fitting occasion, or until they were old enough to listen with
their hearts.

Under the eaves there was an old green chest whose contents, year after
year, the children searched through in the never-failing hope that
they should find something which had not been there the year before.
There were old account-books with their stories of loss and gain which
the children could not read. There were bundles of old letters which
they were not allowed to examine. There were “ink-portraits,” family
profiles in silhouette, which they thought very funny, especially in
the matter of coat collars and “back hair.” There were schoolgirl
prizes of fifty years ago; the schoolgirls had grown into grandmammas,
and some were dead. There was old-fashioned art-work, paintings on
velvet or satin; boxes covered with shells; needlebooks and samplers
showing the most exemplary stitches in colors faded by time. There
were handsomely bound volumes of “Extracts,” containing poems and long
passages of elegant prose copied in pale-brown ink, in the proper
penmanship of the time. And there was a roll of steel-plate engravings
which had missed the honor of frames; and of these the children’s
favorite picture was one called The Wife.

It is some time since I have seen that picture; I may be wrong about
some of the details. But as I remember her, the wife was a long-necked
lady with very large eyes, dressed in white, with large full sleeves
and curls falling against her cheek. She held a feather hand-screen,
and she was doing nothing but look beautiful and sweetly attentive to
her husband, who was seated on the other side of the table and was
reading aloud to her by the light of an old-fashioned astral lamp.

This, of course, was the ideal wife, so thought the little girls. Every
other form of wifehood known to them was more or less made up of sewing
and housework and everyday clothes. Even in the family past, it had the
taint of the Dutch oven and the spinning-wheel and the candle moulds
upon it. They looked at their finger-tips; no, it was not likely theirs
would ever grow to be long and pointed like hers. _The_ wife no one of
them should ever be--only _a_ wife perhaps, with the usual sewing-work,
and not enough white dresses to afford to wear one every evening.

It took one day to clean the garret and another to put things away.
Winter clothing had to be brushed and packed in the chests where it was
kept; the clothes closet had to be cleaned; then its door was closed
and locked. The last of the brooms and dust-pans beat a retreat, the
stair door was shut, and the dust and the mystery began to gather as
before.

But summer, though no foe to dust, was a great scatterer of the garret
mysteries. Gay, lightsome summer peeped in at the half-moon window and
smiled down from the scuttle in the roof. Warm weather had come, the
sash that fitted the gable window was taken out permanently. Outdoor
sounds and perfumes floated up. Athwart the sleeping sunbeams golden
dust motes quivered, and bees from the garden sailed in and out on
murmuring wing.

If a thunderstorm came up suddenly, then there was a fine race up two
flights of stairs!--and whoever reached the scuttle ladder first had
the first right to climb it, and to pull in the shutter that covered
the scuttle hole. There was time, perhaps, for one breathless look down
the long slope of bleached shingles,--at the tossing treetops, the
meadow grass whipped white, the fountain’s jet of water bending like
a flame and falling silent on the grass, the neighbor’s team hurrying
homeward, and the dust rising along the steep upward grade of the
village road.

Then fell the first great drop--another, and another; the shutter hid
the storm-bright square of sky, and down came the rain--trampling on
the shingles, drumming in the gutters, drowning the laughing voices
below; and suddenly the garret grew cool, and its mellow glow darkened
to brown twilight.

Under the gable window there stood for many years a white pine box,
with a front that let down on leather hinges. It was very clean inside
and faintly odorous. The children called it the bee-box, and they had a
story of their own to account for the tradition that this box had once
held rich store of honey in the comb.

A queen bee, they said, soaring above the tops of the cherry-trees in
swarming-time, had drifted in at the garret window with all the swarm
in tow; and where her royal caprice had led them, the faithful workers
remained and formed a colony in the bee-box, and, like honest tenants,
left a quantity of their sweet wares behind to pay for their winter’s
lodging.

There may have been some truth in this story, but the honey was long
since gone, and so were the bees. The bee-box, in the children’s
time, held only files of old magazines packed away for binding. Of
course they never were bound; and the children who used to look at
the pictures in them, grew into absent-minded girls with half-lengths
of hair falling into their eyes when they stooped too low over their
books,--as they always would, to read. The bee-box was crammed till the
lid would no longer shut. And now the dusty pages began to gleam and
glow, and voices that all the world listened to spoke to those young
hearts for the first time in the garret’s stillness.

The rapt young reader, seated on the garret floor, never thought of
looking for a date, nor asked, “Who tells this story?” Those voices
were as impersonal as the winds and the stars of the summer night.

It might have been twenty years, it might have been but a year before,
that Lieutenant Strain led his brave little band into the deadly tropic
wilderness of Darien. It is doubtful if those child-readers knew why
he was sent, by whom, or what to do. The beginning of the narrative
was in a “missing number” of the magazine. It mattered not; they read
from the heart, not from the head. It was the toils, the resolves, the
sufferings of the men that they cared about,--their characters and
conduct under trial. They agonized with “Truxton” over his divided
duty, and they wept at his all but dying words:--

“Did I do right, Strain?”

They worshiped, with unquestioning faith, at the shrine of that
factitious god of battles, Abbot’s “Napoleon.” With beating hearts and
burning cheeks they lived in the tragic realism of “Witching Times.”
“Maya, the Princess,” and “The Amber Gods,” “In a Cellar,” “The South
Breaker,” stormed their fresh imaginations, and left them feverishly
dreaming; and there in the garret’s tropic warmth and stillness they
first heard the voice of the great master who gave us Colonel Newcome,
and who wrought us to such passionate sympathy with the fortunes of
Clive and Ethel. And here, too, the last number was missing, and for a
long time the young readers went sorrowing for Clive, and thinking that
he and Ethel had been parted all their lives.

These garret readings were frequently a stolen joy, but perhaps
“mother” was in the secret of the bee-box, and did not search very
closely or call very loud when a girl was missing, about the middle of
the warm, midsummer afternoons.

About midsummer the sage was picked and spread upon newspapers upon the
garret floor to dry. That was a pleasant task. Children are sensitive
to the touch of beauty connected with their labors. Their eyes lingered
with delight upon the color, the crêpe-like texture of the fragrant
sage, bestrewing the brown garret floor with its delicate life already
wilting in the dry, warm air.

“September winds should never blow upon hops,” the saying is; therefore
the hops for a whole year’s yeast-making were gathered in the wane of
summer; and here, too, was a task that brought its own reward. The
hops made a carpet for the garret floor, more beautiful even than the
blue-green sage; and as the harvest was much larger, so the fair living
carpet spread much wider. It was a sight to see, in the low light of
the half-moon window, all the fragile pale green balls, powdered to the
heart’s core with gold-colored pollen--a field of beauty spread there
for no eye to see. Yet it was not wasted. The children did not speak
of what they felt, but nothing that was beautiful, or mysterious, or
stimulating to the fancy in those garret days, was ever lost. It is
often the slight impressions that, like the “scent of the roses,” wear
best and most keenly express the past.

No child ever forgot the physiognomy of those rooms at grandfather’s:
the mid-afternoon stillness when the sun shone on the lemon-tree, and
its flowers shed their perfume on the warm air of the sitting-room;
the peculiar odor of the withering garden when October days were
growing chill; the soft rustle of the wind searching among the dead
leaves of the arbor; the cider-mill’s drone in the hazy distance; the
creaking of the loaded wagons; the bang of the great barn doors when
the wind swung them to.

No child of all those who have played in grandfather’s garret ever
forgot its stories, its solemn, silent make-believes, the dreams they
dreamed there when they were girls, or the books they read.




THE SPARE BEDROOM AT GRANDFATHER’S


It was the hour for fireside talks in the cañon: too early, as dusk
falls on a short December day, for lamps to be lighted; too late to
snatch a page or two more of the last magazine, by the low gleam that
peered in the western windows.

Jack had done his part in the evening’s wood-carrying, and now was
enjoying the fruits of honest toil, watching the gay red flames that
becked and bowed up the lava-rock chimney. The low-ceiled room, with
its rows of books, its guns and pipes and idols in Zuñi pottery,
darkled in corners and glowed in spots, and the faces round the
hearth were lighted as by footlights, in their various attitudes of
thoughtfulness.

“Now, what is _that_?” cried Jack’s mamma, putting down the fan screen
she held, and turning her head to listen.

It was only the wind booming over the housetop, but it had found a new
plaything; it was strumming with a free hand and mighty on the long,
taut wires that guyed the wash-shed stovepipe. The wash-shed was a
post-script in boards and shingles hastily added to the main dwelling
after the latter’s completion. It had no chimney, only four feet of
pipe projecting from the roof, an item which would have added to the
insurance had there been any insurance. The risk of fire was taken
along with the other risks, but the family was vigilant.

Mrs. Gilmour listened till she sighed again. The wind, she said,
reminded her of a sound she had not thought of for years,--the whirring
of swallows’ wings in the spare bedroom chimney at home.

“Swallows in the chimney?” cried Jack, suddenly attentive. “How could
they build fires then, without roasting the birds?”

“The chimneys were three stories high, and the swallows built near
the top, I suppose. They had the sky and the stars for a ceiling to
their dark little bedrooms. In spring there was never more than a
blaze of sticks on the hearth--not that, unless we had visitors to
stay. Sometimes a young swallow trying to fly fell out of the nest and
fluttered across the hearth into the room. That was very exciting to us
children. But at house-cleaning time a great bag of straw was stuffed
up the chimney’s throat to save the hearth from falling soot and dried
mud and the litter from the nests. It was a brick hearth painted red,
and washed always with milk to make it shine. The andirons were such as
you will see in the garret of any good old house in the East,--fluted
brass columns with brass cones on top.

“It was in summer, when the bird colony was liveliest, that we used to
hear the beating of wings in the chimney,--a smothered sound like the
throbbing of a steamer’s wheels far off in a fog, or behind a neck of
land.”

Jack asked more questions; the men seemed not inclined to talk, and
the mother fell to remembering aloud, speaking sometimes to Jack, but
often to the others. All the simple features of her old Eastern home
had gained a priceless value, as things of a past gone out of her life
which she had scarcely prized at the time. She was half jealous of her
children’s attachment to the West, and longed to make them know the
place of the family’s nativity, through such pictures of it as her
memory could supply.

But her words meant more to herself than to any that listened.

“Did we ever sleep in that bedroom with the chimney-swallows?” asked
Jack. He was thinking, What a mistake to stop up the chimney and cut
off communication with such jolly neighbors as the swallows!

Yes, his mother said; he had slept there, but before he could remember.
It was the winter he was three years old, when his father was in
Deadwood.

There used to be such beautiful frost-pictures on the eastern window
panes; and when the sun rose and the fire was lighted and the pictures
faded, a group of little bronze-black cedars appeared, half a mile
away, topping the ridge by the river, and beyond them were the solemn
blue hills. Those hills and the cedars were as much a part of a
winter’s sunrise on the Hudson as the sun himself.

Jack used to lie in bed and listen for the train, a signal his mother
did not care to hear, for it meant she must get up and set a match
to the fire, laid overnight in the big-bellied, air-tight stove that
panted and roared on its four short legs, shuddering in a transport of
sudden heat.

When the air of the room grew milder, Jack would hop out in his wrapper
and slippers, and run to the north window to see what new shapes the
fountain had taken in the night.

The jet of water in winter was turned low, and the spray of it froze
and piled above the urn, changing as the wind veered and as the sun
wasted it. On some mornings it looked like a weeping white lady in a
crystal veil; sometimes a Niobe group, children clinging to a white,
sad mother, who clasped them and bowed her head. When the sun peeped
through the fir-trees, it touched the fountain statuary with sea tints
of emerald and pearl.

Had Jack been old enough to know the story of Undine, he might have
fancied that he saw her, on those winter mornings, and I am sure he
would have wanted to fetch her in and warm her and dry her icy tears.

The spare-room mantelpiece was high. Jack could see only the tops
of things upon it, even by walking far back into the room; but of a
morning, mounted on the pillows of the great four-poster, he could
explore the mantel’s treasures, which never varied nor changed places.
There was the whole length and pattern of the tall silver-plated
candlesticks and the snuffers in their tray; the Indian box of
birch-bark overlaid with porcupine quills, which held concealed riches
of shells and coral and dark sea beans; there was the centre vase
of Derbyshire spar, two dolphins wreathing their tails to support a
bacchante’s bowl crowned with grape leaves. In winter this vase held
an arrangement of dried immortelles, yellow and pink and crimson,
and some that verged upon magenta and should have been cast out as an
offense to the whole; but grandmother had for flowers a charity that
embraced every sin of color they were capable of. When her daughters
grew up and put on airs of superior taste, they protested against these
stiff mementos; but she was mildly inflexible; she continued to gather
and to dry her “everlastings,” with faithful recognition of their
prickly virtues. She was not one to slight old friends for a trifling
mistake in color, though Art should put forth her edict and call them
naught.

In the northeast corner of the room stood a great invalid chair,
dressed, like a woman, in white dimity that came down to the floor
all round. The plump feather cushion had an apron, as little Jack
called it, which fell in neat gathers in front. The high stuffed sides
projected, forming comfortable corners where a languid head might rest.

Here the pale young mothers of the family “sat up” for the first time
to have their hair braided, or to receive the visits of friends; here,
in last illnesses, a wan face sinking back showed the truth of the
doctor’s verdict.

White dimity, alternating with a dark-red reps in winter, covered the
seats of the fiddle-backed mahogany chairs. White marseilles or dimity
covers were on the washstand, and the tall bureau had a swinging glass
that rocked back against the wall and showed little Jack a picture of
himself walking into a steep background of the room--a small chap in
kilts, with a face somewhat out of drawing and of a bluish color; the
floor, too, had a queer slant like the deck of a rolling vessel. But
with all its faults, this presentation of himself in the glass was an
appearance much sought after by Jack, even to the climbing on chairs to
attain it.

When grandmother came to her home as a bride, the four-poster was
in full panoply of high puffed feather-bed, valance and canopy and
curtains of white dimity, “English” blankets, quilted silk comforter,
and counterpane of heavy marseilles, in a bygone pattern. No pillow
shams were seen in the house; its fashions never changed. The best
pillow-cases were plain linen, hemstitched,--smooth as satin with much
use, as Jack’s mother remembered them,--and the slender initials, in an
old-fashioned hand, above the hem, had faded sympathetically to a pale
yellow-brown.

Some of the house linen had come down from great-grandmother’s
trousseau. It bore her maiden initials, E. B., in letters that were
like the marking on old silver of that time; the gracious old Quaker
names, sacred to the memory of gentle women and good housewives whose
virtues would read like the last chapter of Proverbs, the words of King
Lemuel, the prophecy which his mother taught him.

It was only after the daughters of the house grew up and were married
and came home on visits with their children, that the spare bedroom
fell into common use, and new fashions intruded as the old things wore
out.

When Jack’s mother was a child, it still kept its solemn and festal
character of birth and marriage and death chamber; and in times less
vital it was set apart for such guests as the family delighted to
honor. Little girls were not allowed to stray in there by themselves;
even when sent to the room on errands, they went and came with a
certain awe of the empty room’s cold dignity.

But at the semi-annual house-cleaning, when every closet and bureau
drawer resigned itself to the season’s intrusive spirit of research,
the spare room’s kindly mysteries were given to the light. The children
could look on and touch and handle and ask questions; and thus began
their acquaintance with such relics as had not been consigned to the
darker oblivion of the garret, or suffered change through the family
passion for “making over.”

In the bottom drawer of the bureau was the “body” of grandmother’s
wedding gown. The narrow skirt had served for something useful,--a
cradle quilt, perhaps, for one of the babies. Jack could have put the
tiny dress waist into one of his trousers’ pockets with less than
their customary distention. It was a mere scrap of dove-colored silk,
low necked, and laced in the back. Grandmother must have worn over her
shoulders one of the embroidered India muslin capes that were turning
yellow in that same drawer.

The dress sleeves were “leg o’ mutton,” but these, too, had been
sacrificed in some impulse of mistaken economy.

There was the high shell comb, not carved, but a solid piece of shell
which the children used to hold up to the light to see the colors glow
like a church window. There were the little square-toed satin slippers,
heelless, with flat laces that crossed over the instep; and there were
the flesh-colored silk stockings and white embroidered wedding shawl.

Little grandmother must have been rather a gay Friend; she never wore
the dress, as did her mother, who put on the “plain distinguishing cap”
before she was forty. She dressed as one of the “world’s people,” but
always plainly, with a little distance between herself and the latest
fashion. She had a conscientious scorn of poor materials. Ordinary
self-respect would have prevented her wearing an edge of lace that was
not “real,” or a stuff that was not all wool, if wool it professed to
be, or a print that would not “wash;” and her contempt for linen that
was part cotton, for silk that was part linen, or velvet with a “cotton
back,” was of a piece with her truthfulness and horror of pretense.

Among the frivolities in the lower drawer was a very dainty little
nightcap, embroidered mull or some such frailness; the children used to
tie it on over their short hair, framing the round cheeks of ten and
twelve years old. It was the envelope for sundry odd pieces of lace,
“old English thread,” and yellow Valenciennes, ripped from the necks
and sleeves of little frocks long outgrown.

The children learned these patterns by heart; also the scrolls and
garlands on certain broad collars and cuffs of needlework which always
looked as if something might be made of them; but nothing was, although
Jack’s mamma was conscious of a long felt want in doll’s petticoats,
which those collars would have filled to ecstasy.

In that lower drawer were a few things belonging to grandmother’s
mother, E. B. of gracious memory. There were her gauze
neck-handkerchiefs, and her long-armed silk mitts which reported her
a “finer woman” than any of her descendants of the third generation,
since not a girl of them all could show an arm that would fill out
these cast coverings handsomely from wrist to biceps.

And there was a bundle of her silk house shawls, done up in one
of the E. B. towels, lovely in color and texture as the fair,
full grandmotherly throat they once encircled. They were plain,
self-fringed, of every shade of white that was not white.

There they lay and no one used them; and after a while it began to
seem a waste to the little girls who had grown to be big girls. The
lightest minded of them began to covet those sober vanities for their
own adornment. Mother’s scruples were easily smiled away; so the old
Quaker shawls came forth and took their part in the young life of the
house--a gayer part, it would be safe to say, than was ever theirs
upon the blessed shoulders of E. B. One or two of them were made into
plaited waists to be worn with skirts and belts of the world’s fashion.
And one soft cream-white shawl wrapped little Jack on his first journey
in this world; and afterward on many journeys, much longer than that
first one “from the blue room to the brown.”

No advertised perfumes were used in grandmother’s house, yet the things
in the drawers had a faint sweet breath of their own. Especially it
lingered about those belongings of her mother’s time--the odor of
seclusion, of bygone cleanliness and household purity.

The spare bedroom was at its gayest in summer-time, when, after the
daughters of the house grew up, young company was expected. Swept
and dusted and soberly expectant, it waited, like a wise but prudent
virgin, with candles unlighted and shutters darkened. Its very colors
were cool and decorous, white and green and dark mahogany polish, door
knobs and candlesticks gleaming, andirons reflected in the dull-red
shine of the hearth.

After sundown, if friends were expected by the evening boat, the
shutters were fastened back, and the green Venetian blinds raised,
to admit the breeze and a view of the garden and the grass and the
plashing fountain. Each girl hostess visited the room in turn on a
last, characteristic errand,--one with her hands full of roses, new
blown that morning; another to remove the sacrificed leaves and broken
stems which the rose-gatherer had forgotten; and the mother last of all
to look about her with modest pride, peopling the room with the friends
of her own girlhood, to be welcomed there no more.

Then, when the wagon drove up, what a joyous racket in the hall; and
what content for the future in the sound of heavy trunks carried
upstairs!

If only one girl guest had come, she must have her particular friend
of the house for a bedfellow; and what in all the world did they not
talk of, lying awake half the summer night in pure extravagance of
joy--while the fountain plashed and paused, and the soft wind stirred
in the cherry-trees, and in the moonlit garden overblown roses dropped
their petals on the wet box-borders.

Visitors from the city brought with them--besides new books, new
songs, sumptuous confectionery and the latest ideas in dress--an odor
of the world; something complex rich and strange as the life of the
city itself. It spread its spell upon the cool, pure atmosphere of
the Quaker home, and set the light hearts beating and the young heads
dreaming.

In after years came the Far West, with its masculine incense of camps
and tobacco and Indian leather and soft-coal smoke. It arrived in
company with several pieces of singularly dusty male baggage; but it
had not come to stay.

For a few days of confusion and bustle it pervaded the house, and then
departed, on the “Long Trail,” taking little Jack and his mother away.
And in the chances and changes of the years that followed, they were
never again to sleep in the spare bedroom at grandfather’s.




  ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
  BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO.

  The Riverside Press

  CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.




Transcriber’s Notes

Page 9: “a snow flaw came” changed to “a snow fall came”

Page 66: “those were bad places, for” changed to “those were bad places
for”

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