Silver Jack threw aside his coat, and advanced. “You get out of my way,
or I’ll kick you out, like I done at Bay City.”
In an instant two blows were exchanged. The first marked Silver Jack’s
bronze-red face just to the left of his white eyebrow. The second sent
Richard Darrell gasping and sobbing into the snow-bank ten feet away.
He arose with the blood streaming from beneath his mustache. His eager,
nervous face was white; his chipmunk eyes narrowed; his great hands, held
palm backward, clutched spasmodically. With the stealthy motion of a cat
he approached his antagonist, and sprang. Silver Jack stood straight and
confident, awaiting him. Three times the aggressor was knocked entirely
off his feet. The fourth he hit against the cutter body, and his fingers
closed on the axe which all voyagers through the forest carry as a matter
of course.
“He’s gettin’ ugly. Come on, Hank!” cried Silver Jack.
The other man, with a long score to pay the walking boss, seized the iron
starting-bar, and descended. Out from the inscrutable white forest murder
breathed like a pestilential air. The two men talked about it easily,
confidently.
“You ketch him on one side, and I’ll come in on the other,” said the man
named Hank, gripping his short, heavy bar.
The forest lay behind; the forest, easily penetrable to a man in
moccasins. Richard Darrell could at any moment have fled beyond the
possibility of pursuit. This had become no mere question of a bar-room
fisticuff, but of life and death. He had begged abjectly from the pain
of a cuff on the ear; now he merely glanced over his shoulder toward
the safety that lay beyond. Then, with a cry, he whirled the axe about
his head and threw it directly at the second of his antagonists. The
flat of the implement struck heavily, full on the man’s forehead. He
fell, stunned. Immediately the other two precipitated themselves on the
weapons. This time Silver Jack secured the axe, while Darrell had to
content himself with the short, heavy bar. The strange duel recommenced,
while the horses, mildly curious, gazed through the steam of their
nostrils at their warring masters.
Overhead the ravens of the far north idled to and fro. When the three men
lay still on the trampled snow, they stooped, nearer and nearer. Then
they towered. One of the men had stirred.
Richard Darrell painfully cleared his eyes and dragged himself to a
sitting position, sweeping the blood of his shallow wound from his
forehead. He searched out the axe. With it he first smashed in the
whiskey jugs. Then he wrecked the cutter, chopping it savagely until it
was reduced to splinters and twisted iron. By the time this was done, his
antagonists were in the throes of returning consciousness. He stood over
them, dominant, menacing.
“You hit th’ back trail,” said he, “very quick! Don’t you let me see you
’round these diggings again.”
Silver Jack, bewildered, half stunned, not understanding this little
cowardly man who had permitted himself to be kicked from the saloon, rose
slowly.
“You stand there!” commanded Darrell. He opened a pocket-knife, and cut
the harness to bits, leaving only the necessary head-stalls intact.
“Now git!” said he. “Pike out!—fer Beeson Lake. Don’t you stop at no Camp
Twenty-eight!”
Appalled at the prospect of the long journey through the frozen forest,
Silver Jack and his companion silently led the horses away. As they
reached the bend in the trail, they looked back. The sun was just setting
through the trees, throwing the illusion of them gigantic across the
eye. And he stood there huge, menacing, against the light—the dominant
spirit, Roaring Dick of the woods, the incarnation of Necessity, the Man
defending his Work, the Foreman!
THE GRAY COLLIE
By Georgia Wood Pangborn
The steam had retired, clanking, from the radiator, withdrawing to the
cellar like the dragging chain of Marley’s ghost. The blue flame of a
Bunsen burner was the only light and heat left. Now and then the wind
flung handfuls of spiteful sleet at the window.
“I don’t know anything about ghosts,” said Henrietta, plaintively. “I’m
as bad in psychology as mathematics. I might tell about the gray collie,
but he was real. Don’t let that chocolate boil over, Isabel.”
Isabel poured out three steaming cups, thick and sweet, for in the young
twenties and late teens the appetite is still bizarre.
“I’ll tell it as it happened,” sighed Henrietta. “I don’t believe I could
make anything up to save my neck.”
She was small and sad-eyed, with a timid manner, and sat on a wolf-skin,
leaning one elbow on its head, which had green eyes of sinister slant,
and bristling ears.
“You know who Artaxerxes was?”
“Artaxerxes,” they recited, “was your old wolf-hound who was really
benevolent, but everybody was afraid of him, and when he wagged his
tail it waved like a cat’s, sinuously, instead of swinging in a clubby,
careless way, as a dog’s should.”
“He was white with gray spots,” mused Henrietta; “I suppose his family in
Siberia looked like that to match the snow when they went out hunting,
and he was shaggy and soft.
“We chained him the night the circus came to town. He heard a lion roar
as the train went by at three o’clock, and, at first, I thought we had
another lion in the barn. Gracious! If he hadn’t been chained he would
have been over the wall and chased that lion to the station.
“I went down to soothe him and see if his chain had given in any of
its links. I never saw him so out of temper. Finally he consented to
lie down, though he grumbled about it, and the tip of his tail kept
twitching, not wagging. He hardly ever wagged it.
“He worried all that day. ‘Don’t you know there are bears and lions and
tigers and wolves out there?’ he’d say—‘Isn’t it my business to protect
you from such things? Do let me go and kill a few. I’ll come right back!’
“We supposed he would stop worrying when the circus went, but instead,
he got worse. He explained how it was his business to find out what
had become of all those animals. In the evenings, as soon as he was
unchained, he would march up and down inside the wall, holding his nose
to the wind and every now and then making a low impatient sound in his
throat, as if he were worried about something and making plans.
“One morning Farmer Grosman came to our house, very fierce: ‘Your dog’s
been killing my sheep.’ We explained that he never got over the six-foot
wall, but nothing would do. If he hadn’t done it, who had? If we did not
shoot him, he would, and so on.
“Papa was very polite. He said he regretted that he could allow no
shooting on the place except what he did himself. ‘You are certainly
entitled to shoot any dog or dogs which you may discover molesting your
sheep, and I shall exercise the same prerogative in protecting my dog.’
“He said it with that deprecating smile of his—I believe he smiled
deprecatingly when he got cut off from his men at Antietam, and fought
his way out of a lot of rebels who tried to make him prisoner. He hated
Grosman, who was the meanest man in town and starved his horses.
“The man went off growling, and said he’d see the Mayor. We chained Artie
up that night. In the morning we found his cat, dead, with a half-eaten
piece of poisoned meat beside it. Artie thought everything of that cat.
He had carried it around in his mouth ever since it was a little kitten.
He always had to have his cat, the way a child has to have a doll. Any
other cat he’d have sighted half a mile away and chased. But that one was
his own, and anything it did was all right. It’s all in being acquainted.
Papa sat up all the next night with a shotgun. We heard that the people
from the French quarter of the village insisted that Artie got over the
wall at night and roamed around and got into mischief. They said they
heard him howling up on Mount Phelim, and talked a great deal about what
they were going to do to him and us. Those Canucks would have it that he
was a man-wolf, and could change about from one thing to another. You
can’t argue with them, when they get a notion like that.
“One morning Pete Lancto, who mows the lawn, said he had seen the devil,
and that he was like a shaggy dog.
“‘Probably it _was_ a dog!’ I said. But he told a lot of lies about
smelling brimstone and flames coming out of its eyes.
“I said: ‘I guess you were _tenet_’ (that’s their word for ‘tight’).
“But he hadn’t touched a drop, and had only been to get a new salt
codfish at the store.
“‘Well, anyway, if it smelt of brimstone, it wasn’t Artie.’
“But that idiot said: ‘The devil, he can smell brimstone when he wants
to—_je pense que oui_!’
“So I let him alone. You can’t argue with a man who hasn’t any premises
to argue from.
“It was my work to go to the village for the mail. I went after supper,
about sunset, or a little later.
“The road curves along the side of Mount Phelim, which is not much of a
mountain, but rather too big for a hill. When you look south it is as if
the trees stood on each others’ heads, and there are wide, open spaces,
like a park, so that you can see between the trunks, only by the road the
underbrush is thick like a hedge. But on the north side of the road you
don’t want to tumble off, for the Powasket runs below, hidden under the
tops of trees, so that you only know it’s there from the sound. When I
was little, I used to be afraid of that road, because a Canuck nurse-girl
had scared me with stories of bears and catamounts and Indians.
“That was why papa had me go for the mail. He never could stand cowards.
At first he used to sneak along behind me, and when I got hysterical
would saunter up as if he were just out for a walk, and show me how
pretty the sunset was over toward Canada, or cluck for squirrels to come
out and see what we wanted, or take me up into the woods a little to find
Indian pipes like caryatides holding up dead leaves. So it wasn’t very
long before I grew to love the walk, and the sound of the wind in the
trees, even when it was dark. I got quite friendly with the squirrels,
and used to leave little piles of nuts as I went to the village, and when
I came back they would be all gone. There aren’t many squirrels up there
that can afford pecans and Brazil-nuts. I suppose they wondered till
their heads ached why I left them around so carelessly.
“But when I grew to like it at night, papa began to object. A good many
times when I’ve been sitting on the edge of the road swinging my feet
over the Powasket, watching the last color going out beyond Canada, and
listening to the owls and frogs and things, he has come to meet me and
grumbled about ‘going to extremes.’ But I had him, you see, and only
laughed. Hadn’t he trained me to do it?
“So about that time he got me Artaxerxes for a chaperone, and he was
a good deal of a nuisance, for the village folk disliked him from the
first. When they whistled to their own dogs to get them out of his way,
how could he tell they weren’t calling to him? And when he’d turn to see
what they wanted, they’d think he was coming after them and run, which
was nonsense.
“We were keeping Artie chained that week of the sheep-killing fuss.
How he hated it! When I stepped upon the horse-block to mount Pixie—I
rode most of that week, and he knew I never took him when I took Pixie,
because he had a nasty way of snapping at her nose, not meaning anything,
but it got on her nerves dreadfully—and when I mounted Pixie and shook
my crop at him, he would stand up at the end of his chain, his fore
paws beating the air and his tongue hanging out, because he was choking
himself so hard; and I’ve often thought he looked more unattractive that
way with his one head than any picture of Cerberus with three.
“It was particularly hard on him now that his cat was dead. We had got
him a new kitten, but it wasn’t broken in yet, and couldn’t understand
that he didn’t mean anything when he carried it around in his mouth.
“It was that evening that I saw the gray collie the first time. There
were long streaks of late sunlight reaching up into the mountain and he
was so mixed up in the light and shadow that it was only by chance I saw
him at all, he was so like the tree trunks and bowlders; but he happened
to be in a place that I knew all about, because it was where papa and I
had often sat, and I knew no gray patch of anything belonged just there.
It was like finding an animal in one of those old puzzle-pictures, where
they’re all mixed up in the branches.
“I reined up and whistled, and called him every name I could think of,
but he did not stir, so that I almost thought my eyes were wrong after
all; but there was no mistaking those pointed ears cocked toward me. I
thought he might be the sheep-killer, though he was such an aristocratic
creature, for what can you expect of a dog that’s lost and hungry and
unhappy? I’d probably steal something myself if I felt that way. I knew
that nobody in our part of the country owned such a dog as that, and I
wondered if his master were dead up there on the mountain. There are so
many queer accidents—but it was the closed season. The more I wondered,
the queerer it seemed.
“All of a sudden, Pixie snorted and plunged so that I was almost thrown,
for I wasn’t expecting it, and was leaning over with a loose rein and my
arm out toward the collie. I had trusted that mare like my own sister,
and had believed her a sensible soul, but she never stopped until she
reached the barn, sweating and trembling like anything.
“I was so out of patience that I left her at home with Artie the next
time I went for the mail. I planned as I went through the woods how I
would make the collie’s acquaintance and bring him home, and how he and
Artie would strike up a friendship. They were both such splendid fellows
and so lonely. I thought a good deal about it, how I’d manage, for I
knew that if I wasn’t careful they’d be more likely to kill each other
first—like Balin and Balan, you know—and make up afterward.
“I didn’t meet the collie until I was coming back. It was twilight, and
the moon was rather narrow to see by. There was a rustle and snapping in
the bushes at the side of the road.
“‘Nice fellow!’ I said, and stopped. I could make out the silhouette of
his ears cocked toward me, and a little glimmer where his eyes were.
‘Poor old chap,’ I said, ‘did you lose your folks?’ But he wouldn’t say a
word, and backed off when I went toward him, so finally I went on, hoping
he would follow, and he did, but slyly, so I could hardly be sure it was
he, keeping beside me in the underbrush.
“When I reached the open, and looked back, he was standing in a faint
patch of moonlight, in the middle of the road, looking after me with his
head down a little, something the way people look at you under their
eyebrows when they’re trying to understand.
“I whistled and called, but it was no use. He stood there as long as I
did, and I finally went on without him. But I couldn’t get him off my
mind. It seemed such a wild, lonesome life for a dog that must have been
brought up in a pleasant home, with regular meals and a fireplace to
lie in front of, and probably a girl like me to take him walking. And
it seemed as if it must be something queer and tragic to send him off
that way by himself. I thought more and more how some young fellow might
be lying dead up there on the mountain. I made up a whole story about
it that evening. And that night I dreamed I had the collie and found a
collar hidden in his ruff, and was trying to read his name on it—but you
know how hard it is to read anything in a dream; you look at a letter and
it changes to something else, or dances off to one side. Then he seemed
to be telling me a long story, the way animals do in dreams, but when I
woke up it turned into nonsense.
“I knew he would meet me the next evening, and so I took some of Artie’s
dog-biscuit with me, and while the collie padded along the other side of
the bushes, tried to reach some through to him, but he wouldn’t touch
it, though once he sniffed a little very daintily, and then blew out his
breath, as dogs do when they’ve found out all they want to know about a
smell. He kept right beside me. As we neared the opening he grew bolder,
frisked across the road in front and came up from the other side. As I
pretended to pay no attention, he came close behind and touched my elbow,
hardly enough to say so, but I felt his breath warm through my sleeve.
“When I came out into the open moonlight he stood as he had before at the
edge of the woods, and watched me out of sight. I couldn’t believe that
he was the sheep-killer, he seemed so gentle and timid, but I didn’t dare
speak of him to any one—it would have seemed like betraying a trust—for I
knew that in other people’s minds, if they found out that he was there,
it would lie between him and Artie, and as Artie was out of the question,
they would take it out in killing the collie anyhow. I felt something the
way Southern girls do in novels, when they’re hiding a handsome Union
soldier.
“The next evening I started as usual, but just as I got to the woods,
Artie came tearing after me, dragging a yard of chain and pretending he
thought I wanted him! I could have slapped him, but took it out in being
sarcastic, with words he couldn’t understand, and hitched his chain to my
belt, so that if he started to be impolite to the other fellow, I could
have something to say about it.
“We reached the post-office safely enough, but I was glad he was tight
to my belt, for some rough men looked at us in that ugly, suspicious way
and said ‘sheep-killer’ once or twice, and ‘loup-garou.’ So I really felt
safer when we reached the woods, in spite of dreading the meeting between
Artie and the collie.
“But I didn’t hear or see anything of him until we were half-way through,
and then, so far off it might have been on top of the mountain, I heard
him howl—not exactly a howl, but a queer cry, as if he were calling to
something at a distance, kind of sorrowful, but fierce, too. It went down
my back like a chip of ice—but I’d hardly heard it when Artie roared in
answer, and I was being carried up that mountain at the end of his chain
like a cart after a runaway horse.
“And I had thought I could hold him! Gracious! I tried to catch at the
branches, but they broke. We went through a patch of blackberries, and
there was a mucky little spring, where I fell in the mud and scared the
frogs, and I think it must have been half-way up Phelim, where I finally
caught tight hold of a tree trunk and my belt broke and Artie went on as
if he didn’t know the difference. I don’t know how long it was before I
got my breath and began to think. Then I heard them—away off at the top,
the frogs singing between as peaceful as could be—but I heard that wicked
snarling and knew they were at it—Balin and Balan—and that they were so
well matched it was likely to be the death of both, unless I could stop
it. I followed the sound and climbed after, though I was all weak and
trembling. You can see on my hands now how the thorns had scratched, and
my clothes were heavy and sticky with mud. It seemed ages before I got
there. I think I was crying.
“I knew I couldn’t do anything, but I picked up the heaviest stick I
could find, though all the sticks you can pick up in the woods are as
rotten and light as powder. They didn’t seem to know I was there. They
were in a little open space, and the moonlight lit up their eyes now and
then. I could see that the collie was a more tremendous fellow than I had
thought—and then—all of a sudden—I knew!
“And because I knew I didn’t even try to pull Artie away when he got the
other fellow by the throat, and held him down, while he got weaker and
weaker. I looked at him there in the moonlight, and cried, and wondered
how I’d been so stupid.
“While I sat there wringing my hands and waiting for Artie to let go,
some men came up and turned a bull’s-eye lantern on me, and seemed so
astonished they couldn’t do anything but swear, though each would try to
shut the other up, now and then, saying there ‘was a lady present.’
“One of them seemed to think it was funny, and explained what they had
said to each other, the way people always do for animals or babies.
‘Siberian wolf and Siberian wolf-hound! Must ’a seemed kin’ o’ natural
for them fellers to meet up. ‘Beg pardon,’ says the wolf, ‘ain’t I seen
you before?’—and says the pup, ‘I don’t know, but you’re certainly the
chap my mammy told me to lick if ever I come acrost you, and, by thunder,
I’ll do it!’ Which he did. ‘Will you be so kind, Miss, when your little
terrier there has quite finished, to call him off? It’d be rayther
indelicate for a stranger to interfere.’
“The other man seemed sorry. ‘Nothing left but his pelt, which is some
chewed, but could be mended up into a real elegant rug, which the young
lady might be pleased to accept.’”
Henrietta thoughtfully scratched the ears of the rug, and ran her fingers
over the rows of beautiful teeth. “This is the collie.”
“But sometimes I wonder just what he had in mind when I felt his breath
on my elbow. Most people would say that he was thinking how convenient I
would be some evening when no sheep was handy, but I’m not sure. At the
time I supposed he was sad and lonesome, and glad of my company. A wolf,
after all, is a good deal of a person. He was so frightfully solitary,
you see—nobody to answer his gathering cry—half a world away from his own
people.”
THE FORE-ROOM RUG
By Kate Douglas Wiggin
Diadema, wife of Jot Bascom, was sitting at the window of the village
watch-tower, so called because it commanded a view of nearly everything
that happened in Pleasant River; those details escaping the physical eye
being supplied by faith and imagination working in the light of past
experience. She sat in the chair of honor, the chair of choice, the
high-backed rocker by the southern window, in which her husband’s mother,
old Mrs. Bascom, had sat for thirty years, applying a still more powerful
intellectual telescope to the doings of her neighbors. Diadema’s seat
had formerly been on the less desirable side of the little light-stand,
where Priscilla Hollis was now installed.
Mrs. Bascom was at work on a new fore-room rug, the former one having
been transferred to Miss Hollis’s chamber; for, as the teacher at the
brick schoolhouse, a graduate of a Massachusetts normal school and
the daughter of a deceased judge, she was a boarder of considerable
consequence. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon, and the two women were
alone. It was a pleasant, peaceful sitting-room, as neat as wax in every
part. The floor was covered by a cheerful patriotic rag carpet woven
entirely of red, white, and blue rags, and protected in various exposed
localities by button rugs—red, white, and blue disks superimposed one on
the other.
Diadema Bascom was a person of some sentiment. When her old father,
Captain Dennett, was dying, he drew a wallet from under his pillow, and
handed her a twenty-dollar bill to get something to remember him by.
This unwonted occurrence burned itself into the daughter’s imagination,
and when she came as a bride to the Bascom house she refurnished the
sitting-room as a kind of monument to the departed soldier, whose sword
and musket were now tied to the wall with neatly hemmed bows of bright
red cotton.
The chair cushions were of red-and-white glazed patch, the turkey wings
that served as hearth brushes were hung against the white-painted
chimney-piece with blue skirt braid, and the white shades were finished
with home-made scarlet “tossels.” A little whatnot in one corner was
laden with the trophies of battle. The warrior’s brass buttons were
strung on a red picture cord and hung over his daguerreotype on the upper
shelf; there was a tarnished shoulder strap, and a flattened bullet that
the captain’s jealous contemporaries swore _he_ never stopped, unless
he got it in the rear when he was flying from the foe. There was also
a little tin canister in which a charge of powder had been sacredly
preserved. The scoffers, again, said that “the cap’n put it in his musket
when he went into the war, and kep’ it there till he come out.” These
objects were tastefully decorated with the national colors. In fact, no
modern æsthete could have arranged a symbolic symphony of grief and glory
with any more fidelity to an ideal than Diadema Bascom, in working out
her scheme of red, white, and blue.