THE FIRES OF SPRING
There came a day when the metallic brilliancy went out of the sky, and
it became softly, mistily blue. All that forenoon Hazel prowled
restlessly out of doors without cap or coat. There was a new feel in
the air. The deep winter snow had suddenly lost its harshness. A
tentative stillness wrapped the North as if the land rested a moment,
gathering its force for some titanic effort.
Toward evening a mild breeze freshened from the southwest. The tender
blue of the sky faded at sundown to a slaty gray. Long wraiths of
cloud floated up with the rising wind. At ten o'clock a gale whooped
riotously through the trees. And at midnight Hazel wakened to a sound
that she had not heard in months. She rose and groped her way to the
window. The encrusting frost had vanished from the panes. They were
wet to the touch of her fingers. She unhooked the fastening, and swung
the window out. A great gust of damp, warm wind blew strands of hair
across her face. She leaned through the casement, and drops of cold
water struck her bare neck. That which she had heard was the dripping
eaves. The chinook wind droned its spring song, and the bare boughs of
the tree beside the cabin waved and creaked the time. Somewhere
distantly a wolf lifted up his voice, and the long, throaty howl
swelled in a lull of the wind. It was black and ghostly outside, and
strange, murmuring sounds rose and fell in the surrounding forests, as
though all the dormant life of the North was awakening at the seasonal
change. She closed the window and went back to bed.
At dawn the eaves had ceased their drip, and the dirt roof laid bare to
the cloud-banked sky. From the southwest the wind still blew strong
and warm. The thick winter garment of the earth softened to slush, and
vanished with amazing swiftness. Streams of water poured down every
depression. Pools stood between the house and stable. Spring had
leaped strong-armed upon old Winter and vanquished him at the first
onslaught.
All that day the chinook blew, working its magic upon the land. When
day broke again with a clearing sky, and the sun peered between the
cloud rifts, his beams fell upon vast areas of brown and green, where
but forty-eight hours gone there was the cold revelry of frost sprites
upon far-flung fields of snow. Patches of earth steamed wherever a
hillside lay bare to the sun. From some mysterious distance a lone
crow winged his way, and, perching on a near-by tree-top, cawed raucous
greeting.
Hazel cleared away the breakfast things, and stood looking out the
kitchen window. Roaring Bill sat on a log, shirt-sleeved, smoking his
pipe. Presently he went over to the stable, led out his horses, and
gave them their liberty. For twenty minutes or so he stood watching
their mad capers as they ran and leaped and pranced back and forth over
the clearing. Then he walked off into the timber, his rifle over one
shoulder.
Hazel washed her dishes and went outside. The cabin sat on a benchlike
formation, a shoulder of the mountain behind, and she could look away
westward across miles and miles of timber, darkly green and merging
into purple in the distance. It was a beautiful land--and lonely. She
did not know why, but all at once a terrible feeling of utter
forlornness seized her. It was spring--and also it was spring in other
lands. The wilderness suddenly took on the characteristics of a
prison, in which she was sentenced to solitary confinement. She
rebelled against it, rebelled against her surroundings, against the
manner of her being there, against everything. She hated the North,
she wished to be gone from it, and most of all she hated Bill Wagstaff
for constraining her presence there. In six months she had not seen a
white face, nor spoken to a woman of her own blood. Out beyond that
sea of forest lay the big, active world in which she belonged, of which
she was a part, and she felt that she must get somewhere, do something,
or go mad.
All the heaviness of heart, all the resentment she had felt in the
first few days when she followed him perforce away from Cariboo
Meadows, came back to her with redoubled force that forenoon. She went
back into the house, now gloomy without a fire, slumped forlornly into
a chair, and cried herself into a condition approaching hysteria. And
she was sitting there, her head bowed on her hands, when Bill returned
from his hunting. The sun sent a shaft through the south window, a
shaft which rested on her drooping head. Roaring Bill walked softly up
behind her and put his hand on her shoulder.
"What is it, little person?" he asked gently.
She refused to answer.
"Say," he bent a little lower, "you know what the Tentmaker said:
"'Come fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter garment of Repentance fling;
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter--and the Bird is on the Wing.'
"Life's too short to waste any of it in being uselessly miserable.
Come on out and go for a ride on Silk. I'll take you up on a
mountainside, and show you a waterfall that leaps three hundred feet in
the clear. The woods are waking up and putting on their Easter
bonnets. There's beauty everywhere. Come along!"
She wrenched herself away from him.
"I want to go home!" she wailed. "I hate you and the North, and
everything in it. If you've got a spark of manhood left in you, you'll
take me out of here."
Roaring Bill backed away from her. "Do you mean that? Honest Injun?"
he asked incredulously.
"I do--I do!" she cried vehemently. "Haven't I told you often enough?
I didn't come here willingly, and I won't stay. I will not! I have a
right to live my life in my own way, and it's not this way."
"So," Roaring Bill began evenly, "springtime with you only means
getting back to work. You want to get back into the muddled rush of
peopled places, do you? For what? To teach a class in school, or to
be some business shark's slave of the typewriter at ten dollars a week?
You want to be where you can associate with fluffy-ruffle, pompadoured
girls, and be properly introduced to equally proper young men. Lord,
but I seem to have made a mistake! And, by the same token, I'll
probably pay for it--in a way you wouldn't understand if you lived a
thousand years. Well, set your mind at rest. I'll take you out. I'll
take you back to your stamping-ground if that's what you crave. Ye
gods and little fishes, but I have sure been a fool!"
He sat down on the edge of the table, and Hazel blinked at him, half
scared, and full of wonder. She had grown so used to seeing him calm,
imperturbable, smiling cheerfully no matter what she said or did, that
his passionate outbreak amazed her. She could only sit and look at him.
He got out his cigarette materials. But his fingers trembled, spilling
the tobacco. And when he tore the paper in his efforts to roll it, he
dashed paper and all into the fireplace with something that sounded
like an oath, and walked out of the house. Nor did he return till the
sun was well down toward the tree-rimmed horizon. When he came back he
brought in an armful of wood and kindling, and began to build a fire.
Hazel came out of her room. Bill greeted her serenely.
"Well, little person," he said, "I hope you'll perk up now."
"I'll try," she returned. "Are you really going to take me out?"
Bill paused with a match blazing in his fingers.
"I'm not in the habit of saying things I don't mean,"' he answered
dryly. "We'll start in the morning."
The dark closed in on them, and they cooked and ate supper in silence.
Bill remained thoughtful and abstracted. He slouched for a time in his
chair by the fire. Then from some place among his books he unearthed a
map, and, spreading it on the table, studied it a while. After that he
dragged in his kyaks from outside, and busied himself packing them with
supplies for a journey--tea and coffee and flour and such things done
up in small canvas sacks.
And when these preparations were complete he got a sheet of paper and a
pencil, and fell to copying something from the map. He was still at
that, sketching and marking, when Hazel went to bed.
By all the signs and tokens, Roaring Bill Wagstaff slept none that
night. Hazel herself tossed wakefully, and during her wakeful moments
she could hear him stir in the outer room. And a full hour before
daylight he called her to breakfast.