WINTER--AND A TRUCE
In line with Roaring Bill's forecast, the weather cleared for a brief
span, and then winter shut down in earnest. Successive falls of snow
overlaid the earth with a three-foot covering, loose and feathery in
the depths of the forest, piled in hard, undulating windrows in the
scattered openings. Daily the cold increased, till a half-inch layer
of frost stood on the cabin panes. The cold, intense, unremitting,
lorded it over a vast realm of wood and stream; lakes and rivers were
locked fast under ice, and through the clear, still nights the aurora
flaunted its shimmering banners across the northern sky.
But within the cabin they were snug and warm, Bill's ax kept the
woodpile high. The two fireplaces shone red the twenty-four hours
through. Of flour, tea, coffee, sugar, beans, and such stuff as could
only be gotten from the outside he had a plentiful supply. Potatoes
and certain vegetables that he had grown in a cultivated patch behind
the cabin were stored in a deep cellar. He could always sally forth
and get meat. And the ice was no bar to fishing, for he would cut a
hole, sink a small net, and secure overnight a week's supply of trout
and whitefish. Thus their material wants were provided for.
As time passed Hazel gradually shook off a measure of her depression,
thrust her uneasiness and resentment into the background. As a matter
of fact, she resigned herself to getting through the winter, since that
was inevitable. She was out of the world, the only world she knew, and
by reason of the distance and the snows there was scant chance of
getting back to that world while winter gripped the North. The spring
might bring salvation. But spring was far in the future, too far ahead
to dwell upon. As much as possible, she refrained from thinking,
wisely contenting herself with getting through one day after another.
And in so doing she fell into the way of doing little things about the
house, finding speedily that time flew when she busied herself at some
task in the intervals of delving in Roaring Bill's library.
She could cook--and she did. Her first meal came about by grace of
Roaring Bill's absence. He was hunting, and supper time drew nigh.
She grew hungry, and, on the impulse of the moment, turned herself
loose in the kitchen--largely in a mood for experiment. She had
watched Bill make all manner of things in his Dutch ovens, and observed
how he prepared meat over the glowing coals often enough to get the
hang of it. Wherefore, her first meal was a success. When Roaring
Bill came in, an hour after dark, he found her with cheeks rosy from
leaning over the fire, and a better meal than he could prepare all
waiting for him. He washed and sat down. Hazel discarded her
flour-sack apron and took her place opposite. Bill made no comment
until he had finished and lighted a cigarette.
"You're certainly a jewel, little person," he drawled then. "How many
more accomplishments have you got up your sleeve?"
"Do you consider ordinary cooking an accomplishment?" she returned
lightly.
"I surely do," he replied, "when I remember what an awful mess I made
of it on the start. I certainly did spoil a lot of good grub."
After that they divided the household duties, and Hazel forgot that she
had vowed to make Bill Wagstaff wait on her hand and foot as the only
penalty she could inflict for his misdeeds. It seemed petty when she
considered the matter, and there was nothing petty about Hazel Weir.
If the chance ever offered, she would make him suffer, but in the
meantime there was no use in being childish.
She did not once experience the drear loneliness that had sat on her
like a dead weight the last month before she turned her back on
Granville and its unhappy associations. For one thing, Bill Wagstaff
kept her intellectually on the jump. He was always precipitating an
argument or discussion of some sort, in which she invariably came off
second best. His scope of knowledge astonished her, as did his
language. Bill mixed slang, the colloquialisms of the frontier, and
the terminology of modern scientific thought with quaint impartiality.
There were times when he talked clear over her head. And he was by
turns serious and boyish, with always a saving sense of humor. So that
she was eternally discovering new sides to him.
The other refuge for her was his store of books. Upon the shelves she
found many a treasure-trove--books that she had promised herself to
read some day when she could buy them and had leisure. Roaring Bill
had collected bits of the world's best in poetry and fiction; and last,
but by no means least, the books that stand for evolution and
revolution, philosophy, economics, sociology, and the kindred sciences.
Bill was not orderly. He could put his finger on any book he wanted,
but on his shelves like as not she would find a volume of Haeckel and
another of Bobbie Burns side by side, or a last year's novel snuggling
up against a treatise on social psychology. She could not understand
why a man--a young man--with the intellectual capacity to digest the
stuff that Roaring Bill frequently became immersed in should choose to
bury himself in the wilderness. And once, in an unguarded moment, she
voiced that query. Bill closed a volume of Nietzsche, marking the
place with his forefinger, and looked at her thoughtfully over the book.
"Well," he said, "there are one or two good and sufficient reasons, to
which you, of course, may not agree. First, though, I'll venture to
assert that your idea of the nature and purpose of life as we humans
know and experience it is rather hazy. Have you ever seriously asked
yourself why we exist as entities at all? And, seeing that we do find
ourselves possessed of this existence, what constrains us to act along
certain lines?"
Hazel shook her head. That was an abstraction which she had never
considered. She had been too busy living to make a critical analysis
of life. She had the average girl's conception of life, when she
thought of it at all, as a state of being born, of growing up, of
marrying, of trying to be happy, and ultimately--very remotely--of
dying. And she had also the conventional idea that activity in the
world, the world as she knew it, the doing of big things in a public or
semi-public way, was the proper sphere for people of exceptional
ability. But why this should be so, what law, natural or fabricated by
man, made it so she had never asked herself. She had found it so, and
taken it for granted. Roaring Bill Wagstaff was the first man to cross
her path who viewed the struggle for wealth and fame and power as other
than inevitable and desirable.
"You see, little person," he went on, "we have some very definite
requirements which come of the will to live that dominates all life.
We must eat, we must protect our bodies against the elements, and we
need for comfort some sort of shelter. But in securing these
essentials to self-preservation where is the difference, except in
method, between the banker who manipulates millions and the post-hole
digger on the farm? Not a darned bit, in reality. They're both after
exactly the same thing--security against want. If the post-hole
digger's wants are satisfied by two dollars a day he is getting the
same result as the banker, whose standard of living crowds his big
income. Having secured the essentials, then, what is the next urge of
life? Happiness. That, however, brings us to a more abstract question.
"In the main, though, that's my answer to your question. Here I can
secure myself a good living--as a matter of fact, I can easily get the
wherewithal to purchase any luxuries that I desire--and it is gotten
without a petty-larceny struggle with my fellow men. Here I exploit
only natural resources, take only what the earth has prodigally
provided. Why should I live in the smoke and sordid clutter of a town
when I love the clean outdoors? The best citizen is the man with a
sound mind and a strong, healthy body; and the only obligation any of
us has to society is not to be a burden on society. So I live in the
wilds the greater part of the year, I keep my muscles in trim, and I
have always food for myself and for any chance wayfarer--and I can look
everybody in the eye and tell them to go to the fiery regions if I
happen to feel that way. What business would I have running a grocery
store, or a bank, or a real-estate office, when all my instincts rebel
against it? What normal being wants to be chained to a desk between
four walls eight or ten hours a day fifty weeks in the year? I'll bet
a nickel there was many a time when you were clacking a typewriter for
a living that you'd have given anything to get out in the green fields
for a while. Isn't that so?"
Hazel admitted it.
"You see," Bill concluded, "this civilization of ours, with its
peculiar business ethics, and its funny little air of importance, is a
comparatively recent thing--a product of the last two or three thousand
years, to give it its full historic value. And mankind has been a
great many millions of years in the making, all of which has been spent
under primitive conditions. So that we are as yet barbarians, savages
even, with just a little veneer. Why, man, as such, is only beginning
to get a glimmering of his relation to the universe. Pshaw, though! I
didn't set out to deliver a lecture on evolution. But, believe me,
little person, if I thought that any great good or happiness would
result from my being elsewhere, from scrapping with my fellows in the
world crush, I'd be there with both feet. Do you think you'd be more
apt to care for me if I were to get out and try to set the world afire
with great deeds?"
"That wasn't the question," she returned distantly, trying, as she
always did, to keep him off the personal note.
"But it is the question with me," he declared. "I don't know why I let
you go on flouting me." He reached over and caught her arm with a grip
that made her wince. The sudden leap of passion into his eyes
quickened the beat of her heart. "I could break you in two with my
hands without half trying--tame you as the cave men tamed their women,
by main strength. But I don't--by reason of the same peculiar feeling
that would keep me from kicking a man when he was down, I suppose.
Little person, why can't you like me better?"
"Because you tricked me," she retorted hotly. "Because I trusted you,
and you used that trust to lead me farther astray. Any woman would
hate a man for that. What do you suppose--you, with your knowledge of
life--the world will think of me when I get out of here?"
But Roaring Bill had collected himself, and sat smiling, and made no
reply. He looked at her thoughtfully for a few seconds, then resumed
his reading of the Mad Philosopher, out of whose essays he seemed to
extract a great deal of quiet amusement.
A day or two after that Hazel came into the kitchen and found Bill
piling towels, napkins, and a great quantity of other soiled articles
on an outspread tablecloth.
"Well," she inquired, "what are you going to do with those?"
"Take 'em to the laundry," he laughed. "Collect your dirty duds, and
bring them forth."
"Laundry!" Hazel echoed. It seemed rather a far-fetched joke.
"Sure! You don't suppose we can get along forever without having
things washed, do you?" he replied. "I don't mind housework, but I do
draw the line at a laundry job when I don't _have_ to do it. Go
on--get your clothes."
So she brought out her accumulation of garments, and laid them on the
pile. Bill tied up the four corners of the tablecloth.
"Now," said he, "let's see if we can't fit you out for a more or less
extended walk. You stay in the house altogether too much these days.
That's bad business. Nothing like exercise in the fresh air."
Thus in a few minutes Hazel fared forth, wrapped in Bill's fur coat, a
flap-eared cap on her head, and on her feet several pairs of stockings
inside moccasins that Bill had procured from some mysterious source a
day or two before.
The day was sunny, albeit the air was hazy with multitudes of floating
frost particles, and the tramp through the forest speedily brought the
roses back to her cheeks. Bill carried the bundle of linen on his
back, and trudged steadily through the woods. But the riddle of his
destination was soon read to her, for a two-mile walk brought them out
on the shore of a fair-sized lake, on the farther side of which loomed
the conical lodges of an Indian camp.
"You sabe now?" said he as they crossed the ice. "This bunch generally
comes in here about this time, and stays till spring. I get the squaws
to wash for me. Ever see Mr. Indian on his native heath?"
Hazel never had, and she was duly interested, even if a trifle shy of
the red brother who stared so fixedly. She entered a lodge with Bill,
and listened to him make laundry arrangements in broken English with a
withered old beldame whose features resembled a ham that had hung
overlong in the smokehouse. Two or three blanketed bucks squatted by
the fire that sent its blue smoke streaming out the apex of the lodge.
"Heap fine squaw!" one suddenly addressed Bill. "Where you ketchum?"
Bill laughed at Hazel's confusion. "Away off." He gestured southward,
and the Indian grunted some unintelligible remark in his own tongue--at
which Roaring Bill laughed again.
Before they started home Bill succeeded in purchasing, after much talk,
a pair of moccasins that Hazel conceded to be a work of art, what with
the dainty pattern of beads and the ornamentation of colored porcupine
quills. Her feminine soul could not cavil when Bill thrust them in the
pocket of her coat, even if her mind was set against accepting any
peace tokens at his hands.
And so in the nearing sunset they went home through the frost-bitten
woods, where the snow crunched and squeaked under their feet, and the
branches broke off with a pistol-like snap when they were bent aside.
A hundred yards from the cabin Bill challenged her to a race. She
refused to run, and he picked her up bodily, and ran with her to the
very door. He held her a second before he set her down, and Hazel's
face whitened. She could feel his breath on her cheek, and she could
feel his arms quiver, and the rapid beat of his heart. For an instant
she thought Roaring Bill Wagstaff was about to make the colossal
mistake of trying to kiss her.
But he set her gently on her feet and opened the door. And by the time
he had his heavy outer clothes off and the fires started up he was
talking whimsically about their Indian neighbors, and Hazel breathed
more freely. The clearest impression that she had, aside from her
brief panic, was of his strength. He had run with her as easily as if
she had been a child.
After that they went out many times together. Bill took her hunting,
initiated her into the mysteries of rifle shooting, and the
manipulation of a six-shooter. He taught her to walk on snowshoes,
lightly over the surface of the crusted snow, through which otherwise
she floundered. A sort of truce arose between them, and the days
drifted by without untoward incident, Bill tended to his horses,
chopped wood, carried water. She took upon herself the care of the
house. And through the long evenings, in default of conversation, they
would sit with a book on either side of the fireplace that roared
defiance to the storm gods without.
And sometimes Hazel would find herself wondering why Roaring Bill
Wagstaff could not have come into her life in a different manner. As
it was--she never, _never_ would forgive him.