A LITTLE PERSONAL HISTORY
Hazel discarded the wet coat, and, drawing a chair up to the fire, took
off her sopping footgear and toasted her bare feet at the blaze. Her
clothing was also wet, and she wondered pettishly how in the world she
was going to manage with only the garments on her back--and those dirty
and torn from hacking through the brush for a matter of two weeks.
According to her standards, that was roughing it with a vengeance. But
presently she gave over thinking of her plight. The fire warmed her,
and, with the chill gone from her body, she bestowed a curious glance
on her surroundings.
Her experience of homes embraced only homes of two sorts--the
middle-class, conventional sort to which she had been accustomed, and
the few poorly furnished frontier dwellings she had entered since
coming to the hinterlands of British Columbia. She had a vague
impression that any dwelling occupied exclusively by a man must of
necessity be dirty, disordered, and cheerless. But she had never seen
a room such as the one she now found herself in. It conformed to none
of her preconceived ideas.
There was furniture of a sort unknown to her, tables and chairs
fashioned by hand with infinite labor and rude skill, massive in
structure, upholstered with the skins of wild beasts common to the
region. Upon the walls hung pictures, dainty black-and-white prints,
and a water color or two. And between the pictures were nailed heads
of mountain sheep and goat, the antlers of deer and caribou. Above
the fireplace spread the huge shovel horns of a moose, bearing across
the prongs a shotgun and fishing rods. The center of the
floor--itself, as she could see, of hand-smoothed logs--was lightened
with a great black and red and yellow rug of curious weave. Covering
up the bare surface surrounding it were bearskins, black and brown.
Her feet rested in the fur of a monster silvertip, fur thicker and
softer than the pile of any carpet ever fabricated by man. All around
the walls ran shelves filled with books. A guitar stood in one corner,
a mandolin in another. The room was all of sixteen by twenty feet, and
it was filled with trophies of the wild--and books.
Except for the dust that had gathered lightly in its owner's absence,
the place was as neat and clean as if the housemaid had but gone over
it. Hazel shrugged her shoulders. Roaring Bill Wagstaff became, if
anything, more of an enigma than ever, in the light of his dwelling.
She recollected that Cariboo Meadows had regarded him askance, and
wondered why.
He came in while her gaze was still roving from one object to another,
and threw his wet outer clothing, boy fashion, on the nearest chair.
"Well," he said, "we're here."
"Please don't forget, Mr. Wagstaff," she replied coldly, "that I would
much prefer not to be here."
He stood a moment regarding her with his odd smile. Then he went into
the adjoining room. Out of this he presently emerged, dragging a small
steamer trunk. He opened it, got down on his knees, and pawed over the
contents. Hazel, looking over her shoulder, saw that the trunk was
filled with woman's garments, and sat amazed.
"Say, little person," Bill finally remarked, "it looks to me as if you
could outfit yourself completely right here."
"I don't know that I care to deck myself in another woman's finery,
thank you," she returned perversely.
"Now, see here," Roaring Bill turned reproachfully; "see here--"
He grinned to himself then, and went again into the other room,
returning with a small, square mirror. He planted himself squarely in
front of her, and held up the glass. Hazel took one look at her
reflection, and she could have struck Roaring Bill for his audacity.
She had not realized what an altogether disreputable appearance a
normally good-looking young woman could acquire in two weeks on the
trail, with no toilet accessories and only the clothes on her back.
She tried to snatch the mirror from him, but Bill eluded her reach, and
laid the glass on the table.
"You'll feel a whole better able to cope with the situation," he told
her smilingly, "when you get some decent clothes on and your hair
fixed. That's a woman. And you don't need to feel squeamish about
these things. This trunk's got a history, let me tell you. A bunch of
simon-pure tenderfeet strayed into the mountains west of here a couple
of summers ago. There were two women in the bunch. The youngest one,
who was about your age and size, must have had more than her share of
vanity. I guess she figured on charming the bear and the moose, or the
simple aborigines who dwell in this neck of the woods. Anyhow, she had
all kinds of unnecessary fixings along, that trunkful of stuff in the
lot. You can imagine what a nice time their guides had packing that on
a horse, eh? They got into a deuce of a pickle finally, and had to
abandon a lot of their stuff, among other things the steamer trunk. I
lent them a hand, and they told me to help myself to the stuff. So I
did after they were out of the country. That's how you come to have a
wardrobe all ready to your hand. Now, you'd be awful foolish to act
like a mean and stiff-necked female person. You're not going to, are
you?" he wheedled. "Because I want to make you comfortable. What's
the use of getting on your dignity over a little thing like clothes?"
"I don't intend to," Hazel suddenly changed front. "I'll make myself
as comfortable as I can--particularly if it will put you to any
trouble."
"You're bound to scrap, eh?" he grinned. "But it takes two to build a
fight, and I positively refuse to fight with _you_."
He dragged the trunk back into the room, and came out carrying a great
armful of masculine belongings. Two such trips he made, piling all his
things onto a chair.
"There!" he said at last. "That end of the house belongs to you,
little person. Now, get those wet things off before you catch a cold.
Oh, wait a minute!"
He disappeared into the kitchen end of the house, and came back with a
wash-basin and a pail of water.
"Your room is now ready, madam, an it please you." He bowed with mock
dignity, and went back into the kitchen.
Hazel heard him rattling pots and dishes, whistling cheerfully the
while. She closed the door, and busied herself with an inventory of
the tenderfoot lady's trunk. In it she found everything needful for
complete change, and a variety of garments to boot. Folded in the
bottom of the trunk was a gray cloth skirt and a short blue silk
kimono. There was a coat and skirt, too, of brown corduroy. But the
feminine instinct asserted itself, and she laid out the gray skirt and
the kimono.
For a dresser Roaring Bill had fashioned a wide shelf, and on it she
found a toilet set complete--hand mirror, military brushes, and sundry
articles, backed with silver and engraved with his initials. Perhaps
with a spice of malice, she put on a few extra touches. There would be
some small satisfaction in tantalizing Bill Wagstaff--even if she could
not help feeling that it might be a dangerous game. And, thus arrayed
in the weapons of her sex, she slipped on the kimono, and went into the
living-room to the cheerful glow of the fire.
Bill remained busy in the kitchen. Dusk fell. The gleam of a light
showed through a crack in the door. In the big room only the fire gave
battle to the shadows, throwing a ruddy glow into the far corners.
Presently Bill came in with a pair of candles which he set on the
mantel above the fireplace.
"By Jove!" he said, looking down at her. "You look good enough to eat!
I'm not a cannibal, however," he continued hastily, when Hazel flushed.
She was not used to such plain speaking. "And supper's ready. Come
on!"
The table was set. Moreover, to her surprise--and yet not so greatly
to her surprise, for she was beginning to expect almost anything from
this paradoxical young man--it was spread with linen, and the cutlery
was silver, the dishes china, in contradistinction to the tinware of
his camp outfit.
As a cook Roaring Bill Wagstaff had no cause to be ashamed of himself,
and Hazel enjoyed the meal, particularly since she had eaten nothing
since six in the morning. After a time, when her appetite was
partially satisfied, she took to glancing over his kitchen. There
seemed to be some adjunct of a kitchen missing. A fire burned on a
hearth similar to the one in the living room. Pots stood about the
edge of the fire. But there was no sign of a stove.
Bill finished eating, and resorted to cigarette material instead of his
pipe.
"Well, little person," he said at last, "what do you think of this
joint of mine, anyway?"
"I've just been wondering," she replied. "I don't see any stove, yet
you have food here that looks as if it were baked, and biscuits that
must have been cooked in an oven."
"You see no stove for the good and sufficient reason," he returned,
"that you can't pack a stove on a horse--and we're three hundred odd
miles from the end of any wagon road. With a Dutch oven or two--that
heavy, round iron thing you see there--I can guarantee to cook almost
anything you can cook on a stove. Anybody can if they know how.
Besides, I like things better this way. If I didn't, I suppose I'd
have a stove--and maybe a hot-water supply, and modern plumbing. As it
is, it affords me a sort of prideful satisfaction, which you may or may
not be able to understand, that this cabin and everything in it is the
work of my hands--of stuff I've packed in here with all sorts of effort
from the outside. Maybe I'm a freak. But I'm proud of this place.
Barring the inevitable lonesomeness that comes now and then, I can be
happier here than any place I've ever struck yet. This country grows
on one."
"Yes--on one's nerves," Hazel retorted.
Bill smiled, and, rising, began to clear away the dishes. Hazel
resisted an impulse to help. She would not work; she would not lift
her finger to any task, she reminded herself. He had put her in her
present position, and he could wait on her. So she rested an elbow on
the table and watched him. In the midst of his work he stopped
suddenly.
"There's oceans of time to do this," he observed. "I'm just a wee bit
tired, if anybody should ask you. Let's camp in the other room. It's
a heap more comfy."
He put more wood on the kitchen fire, and set a pot of water to heat.
Out in the living-room Hazel drew her chair to one side of the hearth.
Bill sprawled on the bearskin robe with another cigarette in his
fingers.
"No," he began, after a long silence, "this country doesn't get on
one's nerves--not if one is a normal human being. You'll find that.
When I first came up here I thought so, too; it seemed so big and empty
and forbidding. But the more I see of it the better it compares with
the outer world, where the extremes of luxury and want are always in
evidence. It began to seem like home to me when I first looked down
into this little basin. I had a partner then. I said to him: 'Here's
a dandy, fine place to winter.' So we wintered--in a log shack sixteen
foot square that Silk and Satin and Nigger have for a stable now. When
summer came my partner wanted to move on, so I stayed. Stayed and
began to build for the next winter. And I've been working at it ever
since, making little things like chairs and tables and shelves, and
fixing up game heads whenever I got an extra good one. And maybe two
or three times a year I'd go out. Get restless, you know. I'm not
really a hermit by nature. Lord, the things I've packed in here from
the outside! Books--I hired a whole pack train at Ashcroft once to
bring in just books; they thought I was crazy, I guess. I've quit this
place once or twice, but I always come back. It's got that home feel
that I can't find anywhere else. Only it has always lacked one
important home qualification," he finished softly. "Do you ever build
air castles?"
"No," Hazel answered untruthfully, uneasy at the trend of his talk.
She was learning that Bill Wagstaff, for all his gentleness and
patience with her, was a persistent mortal.
"Well, I do," he continued, unperturbed. "Lots of 'em. But mostly
around one thing--a woman--a dream woman--because I never saw one that
seemed to fit in until I ran across you."
"Mr. Wagstaff," Hazel pleaded, "won't you please stop talking like
that? It isn't--it isn't--"
"Isn't proper, I suppose," Bill supplied dryly. "Now, that's merely an
error, and a fundamental error on your part, little person. Our
emotion and instincts are perfectly proper when you get down to
fundamentals. You've got an artificial standard to judge by, that's
all. And I don't suppose you have the least idea how many lives are
spoiled one way and another by the operation of those same artificial
standards in this little old world. Now, I may seem to you a lawless,
unprincipled individual indeed, because I've acted contrary to your
idea of the accepted order of things. But here's my side of it: I'm in
search of happiness. We all are. I have a few ideals--and very few
illusions. I don't quite believe in this thing called love at first
sight. That presupposes a volatility of emotion that people of any
strength of character arc not likely to indulge in. But--for instance,
a man can have a very definite ideal of the kind of woman he would like
for a mate, the kind of woman he could be happy with and could make
happy. And whenever he finds a woman who corresponds to that ideal
he's apt to make a strenuous attempt to get her. That's pretty much
how I felt about you."
"You had no right to kidnap me," Hazel cried.
"You had no business getting lost and making it possible for me to
carry you off," Bill replied. "Isn't that logic?"
"I'll never forgive you," Hazel flashed. "It was treacherous and
unmanly. There are other ways of winning a woman."
"There wasn't any other way open to me." Bill grew suddenly moody.
"Not with you in Cariboo Meadows. I'm taboo there. You'd have got a
history of me that would have made you cut me dead; you may have had
the tale of my misdeeds for all I know. No, it was impossible for me
to get acquainted with you in the conventional way. I knew that, and
so I didn't make any effort. Why, I'd have been at your elbow when you
left the supper table at Jim Briggs' that night if I hadn't known how
it would be. I went there out of sheer curiosity to take a look at
you--maybe out of a spirit of defiance, too, because I knew that I was
certainly not welcome even if they were willing to take my money for a
meal. And I came away all up in the air. There was something about
you--the tone of your voice, the way your proud little head is set on
your shoulders, your make-up in general--that sent me away with a
large-sized grouch at myself, at Cariboo Meadows, and at you for coming
in my way."
"Why?" she asked in wonder.
"Because you'd have believed what they told you, and Cariboo Meadows
can't tell anything about me that isn't bad," he said quietly. "My
record there makes me entirely unfit to associate with--that would have
been your conclusion. And I wanted to be with you, to talk to you, to
take you by storm and make you like me as I felt I could care for you.
You can't have grown up, little person, without realizing that you do
attract men very strongly. All women do, but some far more than
others."
"Perhaps," she admitted coldly. "Men have annoyed me with their
unwelcome attentions. But none of them ever dared go the length of
carrying me away against my will. You can't explain or excuse that."
"I'm not attempting excuses," Bill made answer. "There are two things
I never do--apologize or bully. I dare say that's one reason the
Meadows gives me such a black eye. In the first place, the confounded,
ignorant fools did me a very great injustice, and I've never taken the
trouble to explain to them wherein they were wrong. I came into this
country with a partner six years ago--a white man, if ever one
lived--about the only real man friend I ever had. He was known to have
over three thousand dollars on his person. He took sick and died the
second year, at the head of the Peace, in midwinter. I buried him;
couldn't take him out. Somehow the yarn got to going in the Meadows
that I'd murdered him for his money. The gossip started there because
we had an argument about outfitting while we were there, and roasted
each other as only real pals can. So they got it into their heads I
killed him, and tried to have the provincial police investigate. It
made me hot, and so I wouldn't explain to anybody the circumstances,
nor what became of Dave's three thousand, which happened to be five
thousand by that time, and which I sent to his mother and sister in New
York, as he told me to do when he was dying. When they got to hinting
things the next time I hit the Meadows, I started in to clean out the
town. I think I whipped about a dozen men that time. And once or
twice every season since I've been in the habit of dropping in there
and raising the very devil out of sheer resentment. It's a wonder some
fellow hasn't killed me, for it's a fact that I've thrashed every man
in the blamed place except Jim Briggs--and some of them two or three
times. And I make them line up at the bar and drink at my expense, and
all that sort of foolishness.
"That may sound to you like real depravity," he concluded, "but it's a
fact in nature that a man has to blow the steam off his chest about
every so often. I have got drunk in Cariboo Meadows, and I have raised
all manner of disturbances there, partly out of pure animal spirits,
and mostly because I had a grudge against them. Consequently I really
have given them reason to look askance at any one--particularly a nice
girl from the East--who would have anything to do with me. If they
weren't a good deal afraid of me, and always laying for a chance to do
me up, they wouldn't let me stay in the town overnight. So you can see
what a handicap I was under when it came to making your acquaintance
and courting you in the orthodox manner."
"You've made a great mistake," she said bitterly, "if you think you've
removed the handicap. I've suffered a great deal at the hands of men
in the past six months. I'm beginning to believe that all men are
brutes at heart."
Roaring Bill sat up and clasped his hands over his knees and stared
fixedly into the fire.
"No," he said slowly, "all men are not brutes--any more than all women
are angels. I'll convince you of that."
"Take me home, then," she cried forlornly. "That's the only way you
can convince me or make amends."
"No," Bill murmured, "that isn't the way. Wait till you know me
better. Besides, I couldn't take you out now if I wanted to without
exposing you to greater hardships than you'll have to endure here. Do
you realize that it's fall, and we're in the high latitudes? This snow
may not go off at all. Even if it does it will storm again before a
week. You couldn't wallow through snow to your waist in
forty-below-zero weather."
"People will pass here, and I'll get word out," Hazel asserted
desperately.
"What good would that do you? You've got too much conventional regard
for what you term your reputation to send word to Cariboo Meadows that
you're living back here with Roaring Bill Wagstaff, and won't some one
please come and rescue you." He paused to let that sink in, then
continued: "Besides, you won't see a white face before spring; then
only by accident. No one in the North, outside of a few Indians, has
ever seen this cabin or knows where it stands."
She sat there, dumb, raging inwardly. For the minute she could have
killed Roaring Bill. She who had been so sure in her independence
carried, whether or no, into the heart of the wilderness at the whim of
a man who stood a self-confessed rowdy, in ill repute among his own
kind. There was a slumbering devil in Miss Hazel Weir, and it took
little to wake her temper. She looked at Bill Wagstaff, and her breast
heaved. He was responsible, and he could sit coolly talking about it.
The resentment that had smoldered against Andrew Bush and Jack Barrow
concentrated on Roaring Bill as the arch offender of them all. And
lest she yield to a savage impulse to scream at him, she got up and ran
into the bedroom, slammed the door shut behind her, and threw herself
across the bed to muffle the sound of her crying in a pillow.
After a time she lifted her head. Outside, the wind whistled gustily
around the cabin corners. In the hushed intervals she heard a steady
pad, pad, sounding sometimes close by her door, again faintly at the
far end of the room. A beam of light shone through the generous
latchstring hole in the door. Stealing softly over, she peeped through
this hole. From end to end of the big room and back again Roaring Bill
paced slowly, looking straight ahead of him with a fixed, absent stare,
his teeth closed on his nether lip. Hazel blinked wonderingly. Many
an hour in the last three months she had walked the floor like that,
biting her lip in mental agony. And then, while she was looking, Bill
abruptly extinguished the candles. In the red gleam from the hearth
she saw him go into the kitchen, closing the door softly. After that
there was no sound but the swirl of the storm brushing at her window.