I
It was heavy sledding on the Upper Ottanoonsis trail. The two
lumbermen were nearing the close of the third day of the hard four
days' haul in from the Settlements to the camp. At the head of the
first team, his broad jaw set and his small grey eyes angry with
fatigue, trudged the big figure of Red McWha, choosing and breaking a
way through the deep snow. With his fiery red head and his large red
face, he was the only one of his colouring in a large family so dark
that they were known as the "Black McWhas," and his temper seemed to
have been chronically soured by the singularity of his type. But he
was a good woodsman and a good teamster, and his horses followed
confidently at his heels like dogs. The second team was led by a tall,
gaunt-jawed, one-eyed lumberman named Jim Johnson, but invariably
known as "Walley." From the fact that his blind eye was of a peculiar
blankness, like whitish porcelain, he had been nicknamed "Wall-Eye";
but, owing to his general popularity, combined with the emphatic
views he held on that particular subject, the name had been mitigated
to Walley.
The two were hauling in supplies for Conroy's Camp, on Little
Ottanoonsis Lake. Silently, but for the clank and creak of the
harness, and the soft "thut, thut" of the trodden snow, the little
procession toiled on through the soundless desolation. Between the
trees--naked birches and scattered, black-green firs--filtered the
lonely, yellowish-violet light of the fading winter afternoon. When
the light had died into ghostly grey along the corridors of the
forest, the teams rounded a turn of the trail, and began to descend
the steep slope which led down to Joe Godding's solitary cabin on the
edge of Burnt Brook Meadows. Presently the dark outline of the cabin
came into view against the pallor of the open clearing.
But there was no light in the window. No homely pungency of wood-smoke
breathed welcome on the bitter air. The cabin looked startlingly
deserted.
"Whoa!" commanded McWha, sharply, and glanced round at Johnson with an
angry misgiving in his eyes. The teams came to a stop with a shiver of
all their bells.
Then, upon the sudden stillness, arose the faint sound of a child's
voice, crying hopelessly.
"Something wrong down yonder!" growled McWha, his expectations of a
hot supper crumbling into dust.
As he spoke, Walley Johnson sprang past him and went loping down the
hill with long, loose strides like a moose.
Red McWha followed very deliberately with the teams. He resented
anything emotional. And he was prepared to feel himself aggrieved.
When he reached the cabin door the sound of weeping had stopped.
Inside he found Walley Johnson on his knees before the stove,
hurriedly lighting a fire. Wrapped in his coat, and clutching his arm
as if afraid he might leave her, stood a tiny, flaxen-haired child,
perhaps five years old. The cabin was cold, almost as cold as the
snapping night outside. Along the middle of the floor, with bedclothes
from the bunk heaped awkwardly upon it in the little one's efforts to
warm it back to responsive life, sprawled rigidly the lank body of Joe
Godding.
Red McWha stared for a moment in silence, then stooped, examined the
dead man's face, and felt his breast.
"Deader'n a herring!" he muttered.
"Yes! the poor old shike-poke!" answered Johnson, without looking up
from his task.
"Heart?" queried McWha, laconically.
Johnson made no reply till the flame caught the kindling and rushed
inwards from the open draught with a cordial roar. Then he stood up.
"Don' know about that," said he. "But he's been dead these hours and
hours! An' the fire out! An' the kid most froze! A sick man like he
was, to've kept the kid alone here with him that way!" And he glanced
down at the dead figure with severe reprobation.
"Never was much good, that Joe Godding!" muttered McWha, always
critical.
As the two woodsmen discussed the situation, the child, a
delicate-featured, blue-eyed girl, was gazing up from under her mop of
bright hair, first at one, then at the other. Walley Johnson was the
one who had come in answer to her long wailing, who had hugged her
close, and wrapped her up, and crooned over her in his pity, and
driven away the terrors. But she did not like to look at him, though
his gaunt, sallow face was strong and kind.
People are apt to talk easy generalities about the intuition of
children! As a matter of fact, the little ones are not above judging
quite as superficially and falsely as their elders. The child looked
at her protector's sightless eye, then turned away and sidled over to
McWha with one hand coaxingly outstretched. McWha's mouth twisted
sourly. Without appearing to see the tiny hand, he deftly evaded it.
Stooping over the dead man, he picked him up, straightened him out
decently on his bunk, and covered him away from sight with the
blankets.
"Ye needn't be so crusty to the kid, when she wants to make up to ye!"
protested Walley, as the little one turned back to him with a puzzled
look in her tearful blue eyes.
"It's all alike they be, six, or sixteen, or sixty-six!" remarked
McWha, sarcastically, stepping to the door. "I don't want none of 'em!
Ye kin look out for 'er! I'm for the horses."
"Don't talk out so loud," admonished the little one. "You'll wake
Daddy. Poor Daddy's sick!"
"Poor lamb!" murmured Johnson, folding her to his great breast with a
pang of pity. "No; we won't wake daddy. Now tell me, what's yer
name?"
"Daddy called me Rosy-Lilly!" answered the child, playing with a
button on Johnson's vest. "Is he gettin' warmer now? He was so cold,
and he wouldn't speak to Rosy-Lilly."
"Rosy-Lilly it be!" agreed Johnson. "Now we jest won't bother daddy,
him bein' so sick! You an' me'll git supper."
The cabin was warm now, and on tiptoe Johnson and Rosy-Lilly went
about their work, setting the table, "bilin' the tea," and frying the
bacon. When Red McWha came in from the barn, and stamped the snow from
his feet, Rosy-Lilly said "Hush!" laid her finger on her lip, and
glanced meaningly at the moveless shape in the bunk.
"We mus' let 'im sleep, Rosy-Lilly says," decreed Johnson, with an
emphasis which penetrated McWha's unsympathetic consciousness, and
elicited a non-committal grunt.
When supper was ready, Rosy-Lilly hung around him for a minute or two
before dragging her chair up to the table. She evidently purposed
paying him the compliment of sitting close beside him and letting him
cut her bacon for her. But finding that he would not even glance at
her, she fetched a deep sigh, and took her place beside Johnson. When
the meal was over and the dishes had been washed up, she let Johnson
put her to bed in her little bunk behind the stove. She wanted to kiss
her father for good-night, as usual; but when Johnson insisted that to
do so might wake him up, and be bad for him, she yielded tearfully;
and they heard her sobbing herself to sleep.
For nearly an hour the two men smoked in silence, their steaming feet
under the stove, their backs turned towards the long, unstirring shape
in the big bunk. At last Johnson stood up and shook himself.
"Well," he drawled, "I s'pose we mus' be doin' the best we kin fer
poor old Joe."
"He ain't left us no ch'ice!" snapped McWha.
"We can't leave him here in the house," continued Johnson, irresolutely.
"No, no!" answered McWha. "He'd ha'nt it, an' us, too, ever after,
like as not. We got to give 'im lumberman's shift, till the Boss kin
send and take 'im back to the Settlement for the parson to do 'im up
right an' proper."
So they rolled poor Joe Godding up in one of the tarpaulins which
covered the sleds, and buried him deep in the snow, under the big elm
behind the cabin, and piled a monument of cordwood above him, so that
the foxes and wild cats could not disturb his lonely sleep, and
surmounted the pile with a rude cross to signify its character. Then,
with lighter hearts, they went back to the cabin fire, which seemed to
burn more freely now that the grim presence of its former master had
been removed.
"Now what's to be done with the kid--with Rosy-Lilly?" began Johnson.
Red McWha took his pipe from his mouth, and spat accurately into the
crack of the grate to signify that he had no opinion on that important
subject.
"They do say in the Settlements as how Joe Godding hain't kith nor kin
in the world, savin' an' exceptin' the kid only," continued Johnson.
McWha nodded indifferently.
"Well," went on Johnson, "we can't do nawthin' but take her on to the
camp now. Mebbe the Boss'll decide she's got to go back to the
Settlement, along o' the fun'ral. But mebbe he'll let the hands keep
her, to kinder chipper up the camp when things gits dull. I reckon
when the boys sees her sweet face they'll all be wantin' to be
guardeens to her."
McWha again spat accurately into the crack of the grate.
"I ain't got no fancy for young 'uns in camp, but ye kin do ez ye
like, Walley Johnson," he answered grudgingly. "Only I want it
understood, right now, I ain't no guardeen, an' won't be, to nawthin'
that walks in petticoats! What I'm thinkin' of is the old cow out
yonder, an' them hens o' Joe's what I seen a-roostin' over the
cowstall."
"Them's all Rosy-Lilly's, an' goes with us an' her to camp to-morrer,"
answered Johnson with decision. "We'll tell the kid as how her daddy
had to be took away in the night because he was so sick, an' couldn't
speak to nobody, an' we was goin' to take keer o' her till he gits
back! An' that's the truth," he added, with a sudden passion of
tenderness and pity in his tone.
At this hint of emotion McWha laughed sarcastically. Then knocking out
his pipe, he proceeded to fill the stove for the night, and spread his
blanket on the floor beside it.
"If ye wants to make the camp a baby-farm," he growled, "don't mind
me!"