A BRIEF TIME OF PLANNING
"What day of the month is this, Bill?" Hazel asked.
"Haven't the least idea," he answered lazily. "Time is of no
consequence to me at the present moment."
They were sitting on the warm earth before their cabin, their backs
propped comfortably against a log, watching the sun sink behind a
distant sky-line all notched with purple mountains upon which snow
still lingered. Beside them a smudge dribbled a wisp of smoke
sufficient to ward off a pestilential swarm of mosquitoes and black
flies. In the clear, thin air of that altitude the occasional voices
of what bird and animal life was abroad in the wild broke into the
evening hush with astonishing distinctness--a lone goose winged above
in wide circles, uttering his harsh and solitary cry. He had lost his
mate, Bill told her. Far off in the bush a fox barked. The evening
flight of the wild duck from Crooked Lake to a chain of swamps passed
intermittently over the clearing with a sibilant whistle of wings. To
all the wild things, no less than to the two who watched and listened
to the forest traffic, it was a land of peace and plenty.
"We ought to go up to the swamps to-morrow and rustle some duck eggs,"
Bill observed irrelevantly--his eyes following the arrow flight of a
mallard flock. But his wife was counting audibly, checking the days
off on her fingers.
"This is July the twenty-fifth, Mr. Roaring Bill Wagstaff," she
announced. "We've been married exactly one month."
"A whole month?" he echoed, in mock astonishment. "A regular calendar
month of thirty-one days, huh? You don't say so? Seems like it was
only day before yesterday, little person."
"I wonder," she snuggled up a little closer to him, "if any two people
were ever as happy as we've been?"
Bill put his arm across her shoulders and tilted her head back so that
he could smile down into her face.
"They have been a bunch of golden days, haven't they?" he whispered.
"We haven't come to a single bump in the road yet. You won't forget
this joy time if we ever do hit real hard going, will you, Hazel?"
"The bird of ill omen croaks again," she reproved. "Why should we come
to hard going, as you call it?"
"We shouldn't," he declared. "But most people do. And we might. One
never can tell what's ahead. Life takes queer and unexpected turns
sometimes. We've got to live pretty close to each other, depend
absolutely on each other in many ways--and that's the acid test of
human companionship. By and by, when the novelty wears off--maybe
you'll get sick of seeing the same old Bill around and nobody else.
You see I've always been on my good behavior with you. Do you like me
a lot?"
His arm tightened with a quick and powerful pressure, then suddenly
relaxed to let her lean back and stare up at him tenderly.
"I ought to punish you for saying things like that," she pouted. "Only
I can't think of any effective method. Sufficient unto the day is the
evil thereof--and there is no evil in _our_ days."
"Amen," he whispered softly--and they fell to silent contemplation of
the rose and gold that spread in a wonderful blazon over all the
western sky.
"Twenty-fifth of July, eh?" he mused presently. "Summer's half gone
already. I didn't realize it. We ought to be stirring pretty soon,
lady."
"Let's stir into the house, then," she suggested. "These miserable
little black flies have found a tender place on me. My, but they're
bloodthirsty insects."
Bill laughed, and they took refuge in the cabin, the doorways and
windows of which were barricaded with cotton mosquito net against the
winged swarms that buzzed hungrily without. Ensconced in the big chair
by the fireplace, with Bill sprawled on the bearskin at her feet, Hazel
came back to his last remark.
"Why did you say it was time for us to be stirring, Billum?"
"Because these Northern seasons are so blessed short," he answered.
"We ought to try and do a little good for ourselves--make hay while the
sun shines. We'll needa da mon'."
"Needa fiddlesticks," she laughed. "What do we need money for? It
costs practically nothing to live up here. Why this sudden desire to
pursue the dollar? Besides, how are you going to pursue it?"
"Go prospecting," he replied promptly. "Hit the trail for a place I
know where there's oodles of coarse gold, if you can get to it at low
water. How'd you like to go into the Upper Naas country this fall,
trap all winter, work the sand bars in the spring, and come out next
fall with a sack of gold it would take a horse to pack?"
Hazel clapped her hands.
"Oh, Bill, wouldn't that be fine?" she cried. Across her mind flashed
a vivid picture of the journey, pregnant with adventure, across the
wild hinterlands--they two together. "I'd love to."
"It won't be all smooth sailing," he warned. "It's a long trip and a
hard one, and the winter will be longer and harder than the trip. We
won't have the semi-luxuries we've got here in this cabin. Not by a
long shot. Still, there's a chance for a good big stake, right in that
one trip."
"But why the necessity for making a stake?" she inquired thoughtfully,
after a lapse of five minutes. "I thought you didn't care anything
about money so long as you had enough to get along on? And we surely
have that. We've got over two thousand dollars in real money--and no
place to spend it--so we're compelled to save."
Bill blew a smoke ring over his head and watched it vanish up toward
the dusky roof beams before he answered.
"Well, little person," said he, "that's very true, and we can't
truthfully say that stern necessity is treading on our heels. The
possession of money has never been a crying need with me. But I hadn't
many wants when I was playing a lone hand, and I generally let the
future take care of itself. It was always easy to dig up money enough
to buy books and grub or anything I wanted. Now that I've assumed a
certain responsibility, it has begun to dawn on me that we'd enjoy life
better if we were assured of a competence. We can live on the country
here indefinitely. But we won't stay here always. I'm pretty much
contented just now. So are you. But I know from past experience that
the outside will grow more alluring as time passes. You'll get
lonesome for civilization. It's the most natural thing in the world.
And when we go out to mix with our fellow humans we want to meet them
on terms of worldly equality. Which is, to say with good clothes on,
and a fat bank roll in our pocket. The best is none too good for us,
lady. And the best costs money. Anyway, I'll plead guilty to
changing, or, rather, modifying my point of view--getting married has
opened up new vistas of pleasure for us that call for dollars. And
last, but not least, old girl, while I love to loaf, I can only loaf
about so long in contentment. Sabe? I've got to be doing _something_;
whether it was profitable or not has never mattered, just so it was
action."
"I sabe, as you call it," Hazel smiled. "Of course I do. Only lazy
people like to loaf all the time. I love this place, and we might stay
here for years and be satisfied. But--"
"But we'd be better satisfied to stay if we knew that we could leave it
whenever we wanted to," he interrupted. "That's the psychology of the
human animal, all right. We don't like to be coerced, even by
circumstances. Well, granted health, one can be boss of old Dame
Circumstance, if one has the price in cold cash. It's a melancholy
fact that the good things of the world can only be had for a
consideration."
"If you made a lot of money mining, we could travel--one could do lots
of things," she reflected. "I don't think I'd want to live in a city
again. But it would be nice to go there sometimes."
"Yes, dear girl, it would," Bill agreed. "With a chum to help you
enjoy things. I never got much fun out of the bright lights by
myself--it was too lonesome. I used to prowl around by myself with an
analytical eye upon humanity, and I was always bumping into a lot of
sordidness and suffering that I couldn't in the least remedy, and it
often gave me a bad taste in my mouth. Then I'd beat it for the
woods--and they always looked good to me. The trouble was that I had
too much time to think, and nothing to do when I hit a live town. It
would be different now. We can do things together that I couldn't do
alone, and you couldn't do alone. Remains only to get the wherewithal.
And since I know how to manage that with a minimum amount of effort,
I'd like to be about it before somebody else gets ahead of me. Though
there's small chance of that."
"We'll be partners," said she. "How will we divide the profits,
Billum?"
"We'll split even," he declared. "That is, I'll make the money, and
you'll spend it."
They chuckled over this conceit, and as the dusk closed in slowly they
fell to planning the details. Hazel lit the lamp, and in its yellow
glow pored over maps while Bill idly sketched their route on a sheet of
paper. His objective lay east of the head of the Naas proper, where
amid a wild tangle of mountains and mountain torrents three turbulent
rivers, the Stikine, the Skeena, and the Naas, took their rise. A
God-forsaken region, he told her, where few white men had penetrated.
The peaks flirted with the clouds, and their sides were scarred with
glaciers. A lonesome, brooding land, the home of a vast and
seldom-broken silence.
"But there's all kinds of game and fur in there," Bill remarked
thoughtfully. "And gold. Still, it's a fierce country for a man to
take his best girl into. I don't know whether I ought to tackle it."
"We couldn't be more isolated than we are here," Hazel argued, "if we
were in the arctic. Look at that poor woman at Pelt House. Three
babies born since she saw a doctor or another woman of her own color!
What's a winter by ourselves compared to that. And _she_ didn't think
it so great a hardship. Don't you worry about me, Mr. Bill. I think
it will be fun. I'm a real pioneer at heart. The wild places look
good to me--when you're along."
She received her due reward for that, and then, the long twilight
having brought the hour to a lateness that manifested itself by sundry
yawns on their part, they went to bed.
With breakfast over, Bill put a compass in his pocket, after having
ground his ax blade to a keen edge.
"Come on," said he, then; "I'm going to transact some important
business."
"What is it?" she promptly demanded with much curiosity.
"This domicile of ours, girl," he told her, while he led the way
through the surrounding timber, "is ours only by grace of the
wilderness. It's built on unsurveyed government land--land that I have
no more legal claim to than any passing trapper. I never thought of it
before--which goes to show that this double-harness business puts a
different face on 'most everything. But I'm going to remedy that. Of
course, it may be twenty years before this country begins to settle up
enough so that some individual may cast a covetous eye on this
particular spot--but I'm not going to take any chances. I'm going to
formally stake a hundred and sixty acres of this and apply for its
purchase. Then we'll have a cinch on our home. We'll always have a
refuge to fly to, no matter where we go."
She nodded appreciation of this. The cabin in the clearing stood for
some of those moments that always loom large and unforgettable in every
woman's experience. She had come there once in hot, shamed anger, and
she had come again as a bride. It was the handiwork of a man she loved
with a passion that sometimes startled her by its intensity. She had
plumbed depths of bitterness there, and, contrariwise, reached a point
of happiness she had never believed possible. Just the mere
possibility of that place being given over to others roused in her a
pang of resentment. It was theirs, hers and Bill's, and, being a
woman, she viewed its possession jealously.
So she watched with keen interest what he did. Which, in truth, was
simple enough. He worked his way to a point southeast of the clearing
till they gained a little rise whence through the treetops they could
look back and see the cabin roof. There Bill cut off an eight-inch
jack pine, leaving the stump approximately four feet high. This he
hewed square, the four flat sides of the post facing respectively the
cardinal points of the compass. On one smoothed surface Bill set to
work with his pocketknife. Hazel sat down and watched while he busied
himself at this. And when he had finished she read, in deep-carved
letters:
W. WAGSTAFF'S S. E. CORNER.
Then he penned on a sheet of letter paper a brief notice to the effect
that he, William Wagstaff, intended to apply for the purchase of the
land embraced in an area a half mile square, of which the post was the
south-east corner mark. This notice he fastened to the stump with a
few tacks, and sat down to rest from his labors.
"How long do you suppose that will stay there, and who is there to read
it, if it does?" Hazel observed.
"Search me. The moose and the deer and the timber wolves, I guess,"
Bill grinned. "The chances are the paper won't last long, with winds
and rains. But it doesn't matter. It's simply a form prescribed by
the Land Act of British Columbia, and, so long as I go through the
legal motions, that lets me out. Matter of form, you know."
"Then what else do you have to do?"
"Nothing but furnish the money when the land department gets around to
accept my application," he said. "I can get an agent to attend to all
the details. Oh, I have to furnish a description of the land by
natural boundaries, to give them an idea of about where it's situated.
Well, let's take a look at our estate from another corner."
This, roughly ascertained by sighting a line with the compass and
stepping off eight hundred and eighty yards, brought them up on a knoll
that commanded the small basin of which the clearing was practically in
the center.
"Aha;" Bill exclaimed. "Look at our ranch, would you; our widespread
acres basking in the sun. A quarter section is quite a chunk. Do you
know I never thought much about it before, but there's a piece of the
finest land that lies outdoors. I wasn't looking for land when I
squatted there. It was a pretty place, and there was hay for our
horses in that meadow, and trout in the creek back of the cabin. So I
built the old shack largely on the conveniences and the natural beauty
of the spot. But let me tell you, if this country should get a
railroad and settle up, that quarter section might produce all the
income we'd need, just out of hay and potatoes. How'd you like to be a
farmer's wife, huh?"
"Fine," she smiled. "Look at the view--it isn't gorgeous. It's--it's
simply peaceful and quiet and soothing. I hate to leave it."
"Better be sorry to leave a place than glad to get away," he answered
lightly. "Come on, let's pike home and get things in order for the
long trail, woman o' mine. I'll teach you how to be a woodland
vagabond."