HOME AGAIN
Twelve months works many a change on a changing frontier. Hazel found
this so. When she came to plan her route she found the G. T. P.
bridging the last gap in a transcontinental system, its trains
westbound already within striking distance of Fort George. She could
board a sleeping car at Granville and detrain within a hundred miles of
the ancient trading post--with a fast river boat to carry her the
remaining distance.
Fort George loomed up a jumbled area of houses and tents, log
buildings, frame structures yellow in their newness, strangers to paint
as yet. On every hand others stood in varying stages of erection.
Folks hurried about the sturdy beginning of a future greatness. And as
she left the boat and followed a new-laid walk of planks toward a
hotel, Jake Lauer stepped out of a store, squarely into her path.
His round face lit up with a smile of recognition. And Hazel, fresh
from the long and lonesome journey, was equally glad to set eyes on a
familiar, a genuinely friendly face.
"I am pleased to welgome you back to Gott's country, Mrs. Vagstaff," he
said. "Und let me carry dot suid case alretty."
They walked two blocks to the King's Hotel, where Lauer's family was
housed. He was in for supplies, he told her, and, of course, his wife
and children accompanied him.
"Not dat Gredda iss afraid. She iss so goot a man as I on der ranch
ven I am gone," he explained. "But for dem it iss a change. Und I
bring by der town a vaigonloat off bodadoes. By cosh, dem bodadoes iss
sell high."
It flashed into Hazel's mind that here was a Heaven-sent opportunity to
reach the cabin without facing that hundred miles in the company of
chance-hired strangers. But she did not broach the subject at once.
Instead, she asked eagerly of Bill. Lauer told her that Bill had
tarried a few days at the cabin, and then struck out alone for the
mines. And he had not said when he would be back.
Mrs. Lauer, unchanged from a year earlier, welcomed her with pleased
friendliness. And Jake left the two of them and the chubby kiddies in
the King's office while he betook himself about his business. Hazel
haled his wife and the children to her room as soon as one was assigned
to her. And there, almost before she knew it, she was murmuring
brokenly her story into an ear that listened with sympathy and
understanding. Only a woman can grasp some of a woman's needs. Gretta
Lauer patted Hazel's shoulder with a motherly hand, and bade her cheer
up.
"Home's the place for you, dear," she said smilingly. "You just come
right along with us. Your man will come quick enough when he gets
word. And we'll take good care of you in the meantime. La, I'm all
excited over it. It's the finest thing could happen for you both.
Take it from me, dearie. I know. We've had our troubles, Jake and I.
And, seeing I'm only six months short of being a graduate nurse, you
needn't fear. Well, well!"
"I'll need to have food hauled in," Hazel reflected. "And some things
I brought with me. I wish Bill were here. I'm afraid I'll be a lot of
bother. Won't you be heavily loaded, as it is?"
She recalled swiftly the odd, makeshift team that Lauer depended
on--the mule, lop-eared and solemn, "und Gretchen, der cow." She had
cash and drafts for over three thousand dollars on her person. She
wondered if it would offend the sturdy independence of these simple,
kindly neighbors, if she offered to supply a four-horse team and wagon
for their mutual use? But she had been forestalled there, she learned
in the next breath.
"Oh, bother nothing," Mrs. Lauer declared. "Why, we'd be ashamed if we
couldn't help a little. And far's the load goes, you ought to see the
four beautiful horses your husband let Jake have. You don't know how
much Jake appreciates it, nor what a fine man he thinks your husband
is. We needed horses so bad, and didn't have the money to buy. So Mr.
Wagstaff didn't say a thing but got the team for us, and Jake's paying
for them in clearing and plowing and making improvements on your land.
Honest, they could pull twice the load we'll have. There's a good
wagon road most of the way now. Quite a lot of settlers, too, as much
as fifty or sixty miles out. And we've got the finest garden you ever
saw. Vegetables enough to feed four families all winter. Oh, your old
cities! I never want to live in one again. Never a day have the
kiddies been sick. Suppose it is a bit out of the world? You're all
the more pleased when somebody does happen along. Folks is so
different in a new country like this. There's plenty for
everybody--and everybody helps, like neighbors ought to."
Lauer came up after a time, and Hazel found herself unequivocally in
their hands. With the matter of transporting herself and supplies thus
solved, she set out to find Felix Courvoiseur--who would know how to
get word to Bill. He might come back to the cabin in a month or so; he
might not come back at all unless he heard from her. She was smitten
with a great fear that he might give her up as lost to him, and plunge
deeper into the wilderness in some mood of recklessness. And she
wanted him, longed for him, if only so that she could make amends.
She easily found Courvoiseur, a tall, spare Frenchman, past middle age.
Yes, he could deliver a message to Bill Wagstaff; that is, he could
send a man. Bill Wagstaff was in the Klappan Range.
"But if he should have left there?" Hazel suggested uneasily.
"'E weel leave weeth W'itey Lewees word of w'ere 'e go," Courvoiseur
reassured her. "An' my man, w'ich ees my bruzzer-law, w'ich I can mos'
fully trus', 'e weel follow 'eem. So Beel 'e ees arrange. 'E ees say
mos' parteecular if madame ees come or weesh for forward message, geet
heem to me queeck. _Oui_. Long tam Beel ees know me. I am for depend
always."
Courvoiseur kept a trader's stock of goods in a weather-beaten old log
house which sprawled a hundred feet back from the street. Thirty
years, he told her, he had kept that store in Fort George. She guessed
that Bill had selected him because he was a fixture. She sat down at
his counter and wrote her message. Just a few terse lines. And when
she had delivered it to Courvoiseur she went back to the hotel. There
was nothing now to do but wait. And with the message under way she
found herself impatient to reach the cabin, to spend the waiting days
where she had first found happiness. She could set her house in order
against her man's coming. And if the days dragged, and the great, lone
land seemed to close in and press inexorably upon her, she would have
to be patient, very patient.
Jake was held up, waiting for supplies. Fort George suffered a sugar
famine. Two days later, the belated freight arrived. He loaded his
wagon, a ton of goods for himself, a like weight of Hazel's supplies
and belongings. A goodly load, but he drove out of Fort George with
four strapping bays arching their powerful necks, and champing on the
bit.
"Four days ve vill make it by der ranch," Jake chuckled. "Mit der mule
und Gretchen, der cow, von veek it take me, mit half der loat."
Four altogether pleasant and satisfying days they were to Hazel. The
worst of the fly pests were vanished for the season. A crisp touch of
frost sharpened the night winds. Indian summer hung its mellow haze
over the land. The clean, pungent air that sifted through the forests
seemed doubly sweet after the vitiated atmosphere of town. Fresh from
a gridiron of dusty streets and stone pavements, and but stepped, as
one might say, from days of imprisonment in the narrow confines of a
railway coach, she drank the winey air in hungry gulps, and joyed in
the soft yielding of the turf beneath her feet, the fern and pea-vine
carpet of the forest floor.
It was her pleasure at night to sleep as she and Bill had slept, with
her face bared to the stars. She would draw her bed a little aside
from the camp fire and from the low seclusion of a thicket lie watching
the nimble flames at their merry dance, smiling lazily at the grotesque
shadows cast by Jake and his frau as they moved about the blaze. And
she would wake in the morning clear-headed, alert, grateful for the
pleasant woodland smells arising wholesomely from the fecund bosom of
the earth.
Lauer pulled up before his own cabin at mid-afternoon of the fourth
day, unloaded his own stuff, and drove to his neighbor's with the rest.
"I'll walk back after a little," Hazel told him, when he had piled her
goods in one corner of the kitchen.
The rattle of the wagon died away. She was alone--at home. Her eyes
filled as she roved restlessly from kitchen to living-room and on into
the bedroom at the end. Bill had unpacked. The rugs were down, the
books stowed in familiar disarray upon their shelves, the bedding
spread in semi-disorder where he had last slept and gone away without
troubling to smooth it out in housewifely fashion.
She came back to the living-room and seated herself in the big chair.
She had expected to be lonely, very lonely. But she was not. Perhaps
that would come later. For the present it seemed as if she had reached
the end of something, as if she were very tired, and had gratefully
come to a welcome resting place. She turned her gaze out the open door
where the forest fell away in vast undulations to a range of
snow-capped mountains purple in the autumn haze, and a verse that Bill
had once quoted came back to her:
"Oh, to feel the Wind grow strong
Where the Trail leaps down.
I could never learn the way
And wisdom of the Town."
She blinked. The town--it seemed to have grown remote, a fantasy in
which she had played a puppet part. But she was home again. If only
the gladness of it endured strong enough to carry her through whatever
black days might come to her there alone.
She would gladly have cooked her supper in the kitchen fireplace, and
laid down to sleep under her own roof. It seemed the natural thing to
do. But she had not expected to find the cabin livably arranged, and
she had promised the Lauers to spend the night with them. So presently
she closed the door and walked away through the woods.