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[Illustration: "For God's sake give me suthin' to eat."]
THE GIRL FROM TIM'S PLACE
THE GIRL FROM TIM'S PLACE
BY CHARLES CLARK MUNN
Author of "Pocket Island," "Uncle Terry,"
"The Hermit," "Rockhaven."
ILLUSTRATED BY FRANK T. MERRILL
New York
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
Published, March, 1906.
Copyright, 1906, by LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.
All rights reserved.
The Girl from Tim's Place.
INTRODUCTION
When we leave the world's busy haunts and penetrate the primal solitude
of a vast wilderness, a new realm peopled by mystic genii opens to
us. Each sombre gorge, where twisted roots clasp the moss-coated walls,
discloses fabled gnomes and dryads. Nymphs and naiads outline their
shadowy forms in the mist of every cascade. Elfin sprites dance in
the ripples of a laughing brook, and brownies scamper away over the
leaf-swept hilltops.
A wondrous Presence, multiform, omnipresent, and ever fascinating, meets
us on every hand, and there in those magic aisles and sombre glades,
where man seems far away and God very near, Nature sits enthroned.
It is with the hope that a few of my readers may feel this forest-born
mood, and in its poetic spirit forget worldly cares, that I have written
the story of "The Girl from Tim's Place."
THE AUTHOR.
ILLUSTRATIONS
"For God's sake give me suthin' to eat"
(_Frontispiece_) 23
All the goblin forms and hideous shapes of Old
Tomah's fancy were rushing and leaping about 21
Nearer and nearer that unconscious girl it crept! 123
He grasped and struck at this enemy in a blind
instinct of self-preservation 195
"Won't you please give me a lift an' a chance
to earn my vittles for a day or two?" 260
"Thank God, little gal, I've found what belongs
to ye" 272
"Quit takin' on so, girlie," he said 325
"I did mean to hate you, but I--I can't" 416
PART I
CHIP MCGUIRE
CHAPTER I
Chip was very tired. All that long June day, since Tim's harsh, "Come,
out wid ye," had roused her to daily toil, until now, wearied and
disconsolate, she had crept, barefoot, up the back stairs to her room,
not one moment's rest or one kindly word had been hers.
Below, in the one living room of Tim's Place, the men were grouped
playing cards, and the medley of their oaths, their laughter, the thump
of knuckles on the bare table, and the pungent odor of pipes, reached
her through the floor cracks. Outside the fireflies twinkled above the
slow-running river and along the stump-dotted hillside. Close by, a
few pigs dozed contentedly in their rudely constructed sty.
A servant to those scarce fit for servants, a menial at the beck and call
of all Tim's Place, and laboring with the men in the fields, Chip, a
girl of almost sixteen, felt her soul revolt at the filth, the brutality,
the coarse existence of those whose slave she was.
And what a group they were!
First, Tim Connor, the owner and master of this oasis in the wilderness,
sixty miles from the nearest settlement; his brother Mike, as coarse;
their wives and a half a dozen children who played with the pigs,
squealed as often for food, and were left to grow up the same way;
and Pierre Lubec, the hired man, completed the score.
There was another transient resident here, an old Indian named Tomah,
who came with the snow, and deserted his hut below on the river bank when
spring unlocked that stream.
Two occasional visitors also came here, both even more objectionable
to Chip than Tim and his family. One was her father, known to her to be
an outlaw and escaped murderer in hiding; the other a half-breed named
Bolduc, but known as One-eyed Pete, a trapper and hunter whose abode
was a log cabin on the Fox Hole, ten miles away. His face was horribly
scarred by a wildcat's claws; one eye-socket was empty; his lips,
chin, and protruding teeth were always tobacco-stained. For three months
now, he had made weekly calls at Tim's Place, in pursuit of Chip. His
wooing, as might be expected, had been a persistent leering at her with
his one sinister eye, oft-repeated innuendoes and insinuations of
lascivious nature, scarce understood by her, with now and then attempted
familiarity. These advances had met with much the same reception once
accorded him by the wildcat.
Both these visitors were now with the group below. That fact was of
no interest to Chip, except in connection with a more pertinent one--a
long conference she had observed between them that day. What it was
about, she could not guess, and yet some queer intuition told her that it
concerned her. Ordinarily, she would have sought sleep in her box-on-legs
bed; now she crouched on the floor, listening.
For an hour the game and its medley of sounds continued; then
cessation, the tramp of heavily shod feet, the light extinguished,
and finally--silence. A few minutes of this, and then the sound of
whispered converse, low yet distinct, reached Chip from outside.
Cautiously she crept to her window.
"I gif you one hunerd dollars now, for ze gal," Pete was saying, "an'
one hunerd more when you fotch her."
"It's three hundred down, I've told ye, or we don't do business,"
was her father's answer, in almost a hiss.
A pain like a knife piercing her heart came to Chip.
"But s'pose she run away?" came in Pete's voice.
"What, sixty miles to a settlement? You must be a damn fool!"
"An' if she no mind me?"
"Wal, thrash her then; she's yours."
"But I no gif so much," parleyed Pete; "I gif you one-feefty now, an'
one hunerd when she come."
"You'll give what I say, and be quick about it, or I'll take her out
to-morrow, and you'll never see her again; so fork over."
"And you fotch her to-morrow?"
"Yes, I told you." And so the bargain was concluded.
Only a moment more, while Chip sat numb and dazed, then came the sound of
footsteps, as the two men separated, and then silence over Tim's Place.
And yet, what a horror for Chip! Sold like a horse or a pig to this
worse than disgusting half-breed, and on the morrow to be taken--no,
dragged--to the half-breed's hut by her hated father.
Hardly conscious of the real intent and object of this purchase, she yet
understood it dimly. Life here was bad enough--it was coarse, unloved,
even filthy, and yet, hard as it was, it was a thousand times better
than slavery with such an owner.
And now, still weak and trembling from the shock, she raised her head
cautiously and peeped out of the window. A faint spectral light from
the rising moon outlined the log barn, the two log cabins, and pigsty,
which, with the frame house she was in, comprised Tim's Place. Above
and beyond where the forest enclosed the hillside, it shone brighter,
and as Chip looked out upon the ethereal silvered view, away to the
right she saw the dark opening into the old tote road. Up this they
had brought her, eight years before. Never since had she traversed it;
and yet, as she looked at it now, an inspiration born of her father's
sneer came to her.
It was a desperate chance, a foolhardy step--a journey so appalling,
so almost hopeless, she might well hesitate; and yet, escape that way was
her one chance. Only a moment longer she waited, then gathering her few
belongings--a pair of old shoes, the moccasins Old Tomah had given her, a
skirt and jacket fashioned from Tim's cast-off garments, a fur cap,
and soft felt hat--she thrust them into a soiled pillow-case and crept
down the stairs.
Once out, she looked about, listened, then darted up the hillside,
straight for the tote road entrance. Here she paused, put on her
moccasins, and looked back.
The moon, now above the tree-tops, shone full upon Tim's Place,
softening and silvering all its ugliness and all its squalor. Away to
the left stood Tomah's hut, across the river, a shining path bright
and rippled.
In spite of the awful dread of her situation and the years of her hard,
unpaid, and ofttimes cursed toil, a pang of regret now came to her. This
was her home, wretched as it was. Here she had at least been fed and
warmed in winters, and here Old Tomah had shown her kindness. Oh, if
he were only in his hut now, that she might go and waken him softly,
and beg him to take her in his canoe and speed down the river!
But no! only her own desperate courage would now avail, and realizing
that this look upon Tim's Place was the last one, she turned and fled
down the path. Sixty miles of stony, bush-encumbered, brier-grown,
seldom-travelled road lay ahead of her! Sixty miles of mingled swamp,
morass, and rock-ribbed hill! Sixty miles through the sombre silence
and persistent menace of a wilderness, peopled only by death-intending
creatures, yellow-eyed and sharp-fanged!
With only a sickening, soul-nauseating fate awaiting her at Tim's
Place, and her sole escape this almost insane flight, she sped on. The
faint, spectral rifts of moonlight through interlaced fir and spruce
as often deceived as aided her; bending boughs whipped her, bushes
and logs tripped her, sharp stones and pointed sticks bit her; she
hurried over hillocks, wallowed through sloughs and dashed into tangles
of briers, heedless of all except her one mad impulse to escape.
Soon the ever present menace of a wilderness assailed her,--the yowl
of a wildcat close at hand; in a swamp, the sharp bark of a wolf; on a
hillside above her, the hoot of an owl; and when after two hours of this
desperate flight had exhausted her and she was forced to halt, strange
creeping, crawling things seemed all about.
And now the erratic, fantastic belief of Old Tomah returned to her. With
him the forest was peopled by a weird, uncanny race, sometimes visible
and sometimes not--"spites," he called them, and they were the souls
of both man and beast; sometimes good, sometimes evil, according as
they had been in life, and all good or ill luck was due to their ghostly
influences. They followed the hunter and trapper day and night, luring
him into safety or danger, as they chose. They were everywhere, and in
countless numbers, ready and sure to avenge all wrongs and reward all
virtues. They had a Chieftain also, a great white spectre who came forth
from the north in winter, and swept across the wilderness, spreading
death and terror.
Many times at Tim's Place, Chip had sat enthralled on winter evenings,
while Old Tomah described these mystic genii. They were so real to him
that he made them real to her, and now, alone in this vast wilderness,
spectral in the faint moonlight and filled with countless terrors, they
returned in full force. On every side she could see them, creeping,
crawling, through the undergrowth or along the interlaced boughs above
her. She could hear the faint hiss of their breath in the night wind,
see the gleam of their little eyes in dark places--they were crossing
the path in front of her, following close behind, and gathering about
her from every direction.
Beneath bright sunlight, a vast wilderness is at best a place peopled
by many terrors. Its solitude seems uncanny, its shadow fearsome, its
silence ominous. The creaking of limbs moving in the breeze sounds like
the shriek of demons; the rush of winds becomes the hiss of serpents.
Vague terrors assail one on every hand, and the rustle of each dry
leaf, or breaking of every twig, becomes the footfall of a savage
beast. We advance only with caution, oft halting to look and listen. A
stern, defiant _Presence_ seems everywhere confronting us, and the weird
mysticism of Nature bids us beware. By night this invisible Something
becomes of monstrous proportions. Ghosts fashion themselves out of each
rift of light, and every rock, thick-grown tree-top, or dark shadow
becomes a goblin.
To Chip, educated only in the fantastic lore of Old Tomah, these terrors
now became insanity-breeding. She could not turn back--better death
among the spites than slaving to the half-breed; and so, faint from
awful fear, gasping from miles of running, she stumbled on. And now a
little hope came, for the road bent down beside the river, and its low
voice seemed a word of cheer. Into its cool depths she could at least
plunge and die, as a last resort.
Soon an opening showed ahead, and a bridge appeared. Here, for the first
time, on this vantage point, she halted. How thrice blessed those knotted
logs now seemed! She hugged and patted them in abject gratitude. She
crawled to the edge and looked over into the dark, gurgling water. Up
above lay a faint ripple of silver. Here, also, she could see the
moon almost at the zenith, and a few flickering stars.
A trifle of courage and renewal of hope now came. Her face and hands were
scratched and bleeding, clothing torn, feet and legs black with mud. But
these things she neither noticed nor felt--only that blessed bridge of
logs that gave her safety, and the moon that bade her hope.
Then she began to count her chances. This landmark told her that five
miles of her desperate journey had been covered and she was still alive.
She began to calculate. How soon would her escape be discovered, and
who would pursue her? Only Pete, her purchaser, she felt sure, and
there was a possible chance that he might return to his cabin before
doing so. Or perhaps he might sleep late, and thus give her one or two
hours more of time.
[Illustration: All the goblin forms and hideous shapes of Old Tomah's
fancy were rushing and leaping about.]
And now she began to review the usual morning movements at Tim's
Place--Tim the first one up, calling her, then going out to milking; the
others, slower to arise, getting out and about their special duties.
Pete, she knew, always slept in one of the two empty log cabins which
were first built there. Her father slept in the other or in the barn.
Neither would be called, she knew--it was get around in time for
breakfast at Tim's Place or go hungry. And so she speculated on her
chances of early pursuit. Here on this bridge she now meant to remain
until the first sign of dawn, then push on again with all speed. She
already had a five-mile start, she was weary, footsore, and still faint
from the awful terrors of her flight; to go on meant to rush into the
swarm of spites once more, and so she lay inert on the hard logs
watching, listening, calculating.
And now cheered by this trifling hope and lessening sense of danger,
her past life came back. Her childhood in a far-off settlement; the
home always in a turmoil from the strange men and women ever coming and
going; the drinking, swearing, singing, at all hours of the night, her
constant fear of them and wonder who they were and why they came. There
were other features of this disturbed life: frequent quarrels between
her father and mother; curses, tears, and sometimes blows, until at
last after a night more hideous than any other her mother had taken her
and fled. Then came a long journey to another village and a new life
of peace and quietness. Here it was all so different--no red-shirted men
to be afraid of, no loud-voiced women drinking with them. She became
acquainted with other children of her own age, was sent to school and
taken to church. Here, also, her mother began to smile once more, and
look content. For two years, and the only ones Chip cared to recall,
she had been a happy schoolgirl, and then came a sudden, tragic end to
it all. Of that she never wished to think. It was all so horrible, and
yet so mercifully brief.
The one friend life held, her mother, had been brought home, wounded
to death amid the whirring wheels of the mill where she worked; there
were a few hours of agonized dread as her life ebbed away, a whisper or
two of love and longing, and then the sad farewell made doubly awful by
her father's frowning face and harsh voice. At its ending, and in spite
of her fears and tears, she was now borne away by him. For days they
journeyed deeper and deeper into a vast wilderness, to halt at last at
Tim's Place.
Like a dread dream it all came back now, as she lay there on this one
flat spot of security--the bridge--and listened to the river's low
murmur.
The moon was lowering now. Already the shadow of the stream's bordering
trees had reached her. First the stars vanished, then the moon faded
into a dim patch of light, finally that disappeared, a chill breeze
swept down from a neighboring mountain, and the trees began to moan
and creak. Then a fiercer blast swept through the forest, the great
firs and spruces bent and groaned and screamed. Surely the spites were
gathering in force again, and this was their doing.
Once more she began to hear them creeping, crawling, over the bridge.
They spit, they snarled, they growled. The darkness grew more intense,
no longer could the river's course be seen, but only a black chasm.
All through her mad flight the wilderness had been ghostly and spectral
in the moonlight; now it had become lost in inky blackness, yet alive
with demoniac voices. All the goblin forms and hideous shapes of Old
Tomah's fancy were rushing and leaping about. Now high up in the
tree-tops, now deep in the hollows, they screamed and shrieked and moaned.
And now, just as this fierce battle of sound and spectral shape was at
its worst, and Chip, a hopeless, helpless mite of humanity, crouched low
upon the bridge, suddenly a vicious growl reached her, and raising her
head she saw at the bridge's end two gleaming eyes!