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[Illustration: UP THE LADDER TO THE SCUTTLE (_Page 160_)]
THE
LITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES
BY
MARY HALLOCK FOOTE
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR_
[Illustration: Decorative image with publisher info]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1899
COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY MARY HALLOCK FOOTE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
These stories were originally published in the St. Nicholas Magazine,
and are reprinted here by kind permission of the Century Company.
The profits of the volume are dedicated to the Children’s Hospital of
San Francisco.
CONTENTS
PAGE
FLOWER OF THE ALMOND AND FRUIT OF THE FIG 1
THE LAMB THAT COULDN’T “KEEP UP” 17
DREAM HORSES 32
AN IDAHO PICNIC 44
A VISIT TO JOHN’S CAMP 92
NOVEMBER IN THE CAÑON 107
THE GATES ON GRANDFATHER’S FARM 120
THE GARRET AT GRANDFATHER’S 144
THE SPARE BEDROOM AT GRANDFATHER’S 167
THE
LITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES
FLOWER OF THE ALMOND AND FRUIT OF THE FIG
There is a garden on a hill slope between the snows of the Sierra
Nevada and the warm, rich valleys of the coast. It is in that region of
Northern California where the pine belt and the fruit belt interlace.
Both pine and fruit trees grow in that mountain garden, and there, in
the new moon of February, six young Almond trees burst into flower.
The Peach and Plum trees in the upper garden felt a glow of sympathy
with their forward sisters of the south, but the matronly Cherry trees
shook their heads at such an untimely show of blossoms. They foresaw
the trouble to come.
“The Almond trees,” they said, “will lose their fruit buds this year,
as they did last and the year before. Poor things, they are so
emotional! The first whisper of spring that wanders up the foothills
sets them all aflame; out they rush, with their hearts on their
sleeves, for the frosts to peck at. But what can one do? If you try
to reason with them, ‘Our parents and grandparents always bloomed in
February,’ they will tell you, ‘and _they_ did not lose their fruit
buds.’”
“The Almond trees come of very ancient stock,” said the Normandy
Pear, who herself bore one of the oldest names in France. “Inherited
tendencies are strong in people of good blood. One of their ancestors,
I have heard, was born in a queen’s garden in Persia, a thousand years
ago; and beautiful women, whose faces the sun never shone upon, wore
its blossoms in their hair. And as you probably know, their forefathers
are spoken of in the Bible.”
“A number of persons, my dear, are spoken of in the Bible who were no
better than they should be,” said the eldest Apple tree. “We go back to
the ‘Mayflower,’--that is far enough for us; and none of our family
ever dreamed of putting on white and pink in February. It would be
flying in the face of Providence.”
“White and pink are for Easter,” said the Pear tree, whose grandparents
were raised in a bishop’s garden. “I should not wish to put my blossoms
on in Lent.”
The Apple tree straightened herself stiffly.
“We do not keep the church fasts and feasts,” she said; “but every one
knows that faith without works is dead. What are these vain blossoms
that we put forth for a few days in the spring, without the harvest
that comes after?”
“Now the Apple tree is going to preach,” said the light-hearted Peach
tree, stepping on the Plum tree’s toes. “If we must have preaching, I
had rather listen to the Pines. They, at least, have good voices.”
“Those misguided Almonds are putting out all their strength in fleshly
flowers,” the Apple tree continued; “but how when the gardener comes
to look for his crop? We all know, as the Cherry trees said, what
happened last year and the year before. It cannot be expected that the
Master of the Garden will have patience with them forever.”
“The Master of the Garden!” Four young Fig trees, who stood apart and
listened in sorrowful silence to this talk of blossoms, repeated the
words with fear and trembling.
“How long,--how much longer,”--they asked themselves, “will he have
patience with us?”
It was now the third spring since they had been planted, but not one
of the four sisters had yet produced a single flower. With deep, shy
desire they longed to know what the flower of the fig might be like.
They were all of one age, and they had no parent tree to tell them.
They knew nothing of their own nature or race or history. Two seasons
in succession, a strange, distressful change had come upon them. They
had felt the spring thrills, and the sap mounting in their veins; but
instead of breaking out into pink and white flowers, like the happy
trees around them, ugly little hard green knobs had crept out of their
tender bark, and these had swollen and increased in size till they were
bowed with the burden of their deformity. Fruit this could not be, for
they had seen that fruit comes from a flower, and no sign of blossom or
bud had ever been vouchsafed them. When inquisitive hands came groping,
and feeling of the purple excrescences upon their limbs, they covered
them up in shame and tried to hide them with their broad green leaves.
In time they were mercifully eased of this affliction; but then the
frosts came, and the winter’s dull suspense, and then another spring’s
awakening to hope and fear.
“Perhaps we were not old enough before,” they whispered encouragement
to one another. “Blossoms no doubt are a great responsibility. Had we
had them earlier, we might have been foolish and brought ourselves to
blame, like the Almond trees. Let us not be impatient; the sun is warm,
but the nights are cold. Do not despair, dear sisters; we may have
flowers yet. And when they do come, no doubt they will be fair enough
to reward us for our long waiting.”
They passed the word on softly, even to the littlest Fig-tree sister
that stood in rocky ground close to the wall that shut the garden
in from the pine wood at its back. The Pines were always chanting
and singing anthems in the wood; but though the sound was beautiful,
it oppressed the little Fig tree, and filled her with melancholy.
Moreover, it was very dry in the ground where she stood, and a Fig tree
must have drink.
“Sisters, I am very thirsty!” she cried. “Have you a little, a very
little water that you could spare?”
The sister Fig trees had not much of anything to spare; they were
spreading and growing fast, and their own soil was coarse and stony.
The water that had so delicious a sound in coming seemed to leak away
before their eager rootlets had more than tasted it; still they would
have shared what they had, could they have passed it to their weaker
sister. But the water would not go uphill; it ran away down, instead,
and the Peach and Plum and Pear trees grew fat with what the Fig trees
lacked.
“Courage, little sister!” they called to the fainting young tree by the
wall. “The morning sun is strong, but soon the shadow of the wood will
reach us. Cover thy face and keep a good heart. When our turn shall
come, it will be thy turn too; one of us will not bloom without the
others.”
It was only February, and the Almond trees stood alone, without a rival
in their beauty. They stood in the proudest place in the garden, in
full view both from the road and from a high gallery that ran across
the front of the house where the Master of the Garden lived. The
house faced the west, and whenever the people came out to look at the
sunset they admired the beauty of the Almond trees, with their upright
shoots, tipped and starred with luminous blossoms, against the deep,
rich colors in the west; and when the west faded, as it did every
evening, a lamp on a high post by the gate, bigger and brighter than
the brightest star, was set burning,--“for what purpose,” thought the
Almond trees, “but to show our beauty in the night?” So they watched
through the dark hours, and felt the intoxication of the keen light
upon them, and marveled at their own shadows on the grass.
They were somewhat troubled because so many of their blossoms were
being picked; but the tree that stood nearest the house windows rose
on tiptoe, and behold! each gathered spray had been kept for especial
honor. Some were grouped in vases in the room, or massed against the
chimney-piece; others were set in a silver bowl in the centre of a
white table, under a shaded lamp, where a circle of people gazed at
them, and every one praised their delicate, sumptuous beauty.
But peepers as well as listeners sometimes learn unpleasant truths
about themselves.
“Aren’t we picking too many of these blossoms?” asked the lady of the
house. “I’m afraid we are wasting our almond crop.”
“Almond trees will never bear in this climate,” said the Master of the
Garden. “Better make the most of the blossoms while they last. The
frost will catch them in a week or two.”
So the mother and children gathered the blossoms recklessly,--to save
them, they said. Then a snow fall came, and those that had been left
on the trees were whiter than ever for one day, and the next day they
were dead. Each had died with a black spot at its core, which means the
death that has no resurrection in the fruit to come.
After the snow came rain and frost, and snow again. The white Sierra
descended and shook its storm cloak in the face of laughing Spring, and
she fled away downward into the warm valleys. Alas, the flatterer! But
the Almond trees alone had trusted her, and again their hope of fruit
was lost.
“Did we not say so?” muttered the Apple tree between her chattering
teeth. She was the most crabbed and censorious of the sisters, and by
her talk of fruit one might have supposed her own to be of the finest
quality; but this was not the case, and the gardener only that year had
been threatening, though she did not know it, to cut off her top and
graft her with a sweeter kind.
The leaves of the Almond tree are not beautiful, neither is her shape
a thing to boast of. When spring did at last come back to stay, the
Almonds were the plainest of all the trees. Their blossoms were like
bright candles burned to the socket, that would light no more; their
“corruptible crown” of beauty had passed to other heads. No one looked
at them, no one pitied them, except the Fig trees, who wondered which
had most cause to mourn,--they, who had never had a blossom, or the
Almond trees, who had risked theirs and lost them all before the time
of blossoms came.
The Fig trees’ reproach had not been taken away. While every tree
around them was dressed in the pride of the crop to come, they stood
flowerless and leafless, and burned with shame through all their barren
shoots.
When the Master of the Garden came with his children to look at them,
they hung their heads and were afraid.
“When will they blossom, like the other trees,” the children asked,
“and what sort of flower will _they_ bear?”
The Fig trees held their breath to hear the answer.
“A Fig tree has no flower, like the other fruit trees,” said the Master
of the Garden. “Its blossom is contained in the fruit. You cannot see
it unless you cut open the budding figs, and then you would not know it
was a flower.”
“What is the use of having blossoms, if no one ever sees them?” one of
the children asked.
“What is the use of doing good, unless we tell everybody and brag about
it beforehand?” the father questioned, smiling.
“I thought the best way was--you know--to do it in secret,” said the
child.
“That’s what we are taught; and some persons do good in that way, and
cover it up as if they were ashamed of it. And so the Fig tree doesn’t
tell anybody when it is going to bear fruit.”
The Fig trees had heard their doom. To the words that followed they had
not listened; nor would they have understood much more of it than the
child of its father’s meaning.
“What is this he calls our fruit?” they asked each other in fear and
loathing. “Was _that_ our fruit,--those green and purple swellings,
that unspeakable weight of ugliness? Will it come year after year, and
shall we never have a flower? The burden without the honor, without
the love and praise, that beauty brings. That is the beginning and the
end with us. Little sister, thou art happier than we, for soon thy
burden-bearing will be done. Uncover thy head and let the sunbeams slay
thee, for why should such as we encumber the ground!”
Trees that grow in gardens may have long memories and nature teaches
them a few things by degrees, but they can know little of what goes on
in the dwellings or the brains of men, or why one man should plant
and call it good and later another come and dig up the first man’s
planting. But so it happened in this garden. “The stone which the
builders rejected, the same was made the head of the corner.”
“These little Fig trees with their strange, great leaves,--why were
they put off here by themselves, I wonder?” A lady spoke who had lately
come to the cottage. She was the wife of the new Master of the Garden.
“I wish we had them where we could see them from the house,” she said.
“All the other trees are commonplace beside them.”
“They are not doing well here,” said her husband. “This one, you see,
is nearly dead. They must be transplanted, or we shall lose them all.”
Then followed talk which set the Fig trees a-tremble with doubt and
amazement and joy. They were to be moved from that arid spot,--where,
they knew not, but to some place of high distinction! They--the
little aliens who had stood nearest the wall and thirsted for a bare
existence--were to be called to the front of the garden and have honor
in the presence of all! The despised burden which they had called their
deformity they heard spoken of as the rarest fruit of the garden, and
themselves outvalued beyond all the other trees, for that, having so
little, they had done so much.
Beauty too was theirs, it appeared, as well as excellence, though they
could scarcely believe what their own ears told them; and they had
a history and a family as old as those of the Almond tree, who can
remember nothing that did not happen a thousand years ago and so has
never learned anything in the present.
But the Fig trees would have been deeply troubled at their promotion
could they have known what it was to cost their neighbors the Almond
trees.
“Two we will keep for the sake of their flowers, but the others must
go, and give room for the Figs.” So said the new Master, and so it
was done. The unfruitful Almond trees were dug up and thrown over the
wall,--all but the two whom their sisters had ransomed with their
lives; for beauty has its price in this world and there must be some
one to pay it.
When another spring came round, it was the little Fig tree that stood
in the bright corner where the splendor of the road lamp shone upon its
leaves all night. Its leaves were now as broad as a man’s outspread
hand, and its fruit was twice the size it had been the season before.
Its sister trees stood round and interlaced their boughs about it.
“Lean on us, little one,” they said, regarding it with pride.
“But you have your own load to bear.”
“We scarcely feel it,” said the happy trees.
This was true; for the burden that had seemed beyond their strength,
when their hearts were heavy with shame and despondency, they could
bear up lightly now, since they had learned its meaning and its worth.
The new Master’s children were so full of the joy of spring in that
mountain garden--for they too, like the little Fig trees, had been
transplanted from arid ground--they had no words of their own in which
to utter it. So their mother taught them some words from a song as old,
almost, as the oldest garden that was ever planted:--
“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers
appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the
voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth
her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.”
* * * * *
“Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that
the spices thereof may flow out.”
THE LAMB THAT COULDN’T “KEEP UP”
Until Jack Gilmour was seven years old his home had been at his
grandfather’s house in a country “well wooded and watered,” as the
Dutch captain who discovered it described it to his king.
There was water in the river; there was water in the ponds that lay
linked together by falling streams among the hills above the mill;
there was water in the spring lot; there was water in the brook that
ran through the meadow across the road; there was water in the fountain
that plashed quietly all through the dark, close summer nights, when
not a leaf stirred, even of the weeping ash, and the children lay
tossing in their beds, with only their nightgowns covering them. And
besides all these living, flowing waters, there was water in the
cistern that lay concealed under the foundations of the house. Not one
of the grandchildren knew who had dug it, or cemented it, or sealed
it up, for children and children’s children to receive their first
bath from its waters. The good grandfather’s care had placed it there;
but even that fact the little ones took for granted, as they took the
grandfather himself,--as they took the fact that the ground was under
their feet when they ran about in the sunshine.
In an outer room, which had been a kitchen once (before Jack’s mother
was born), there was a certain place in the floor that gave out a
hollow sound, like that from the planking of a covered bridge, whenever
Jack stamped upon it. Somebody found him, one day, trying the echoes
on this queer spot in the floor, and advised him to keep off it. It
was the trapdoor which led down into the cistern; and although it was
solidly made and rested upon a broad ledge of wood--well, it had rested
there on that same ledge for many years, and it wasn’t a pleasant
thought that a little boy in kilts should be prancing about with only
a few ancestral planks between him and a hidden pit of water.
Once, when the trapdoor had been raised for the purpose of measuring
the depth of the water in the cistern, Jack had looked down and had
watched a single spot of light wavering over the face of the dark,
still pool. It gave him a strange, uncomfortable feeling, as if this
water were something quite unlike the outdoor waters, which reflected
the sky instead of the under side of a board floor. This water was
imprisoned, alone and silent; and if ever a sunbeam reached it, it was
only a stray gleam wandering where it could not have felt at home, and
must have been glad to leap out again when the sunbeam moved away from
the crack in the floor that had let it in.
That same night a thunderstorm descended; the chimneys bellowed, and
the rain made a loud trampling upon the roof. Jack woke and felt for
his mother’s hand. As he lay still, listening to the rain lessening to
a steady, quiet drip, drip, he heard another sound, very mysterious
in the sleeping house,--a sound as of a small stream of water falling
from a height into an echoing vault. His mother told him it was the
rain water pouring from all the roofs and gutters into the cistern, and
that the echoing sound was because the cistern was “low.” Next morning
the bath water was deliciously fresh and sweet; and Jack had no more
unpleasant thoughts about the silent, sluggish old cistern.
Now, there are parts of our country where the prayer “Give us this day
our daily water” might be added to the prayer “Give us this day our
daily bread;” unless we take the word “bread” to mean all that men and
women require to preserve life to themselves and their children. That
sad people of the East to whom this prayer was given so long ago could
never have forgotten the cost and value of water.
If you turn the pages of a Bible concordance to the word “water,”
you will find it repeated hundreds of times, in the language of
supplication, of longing, of prophecy, of awful warning, of beautiful
imagery, of love and aspiration. The history of the Jewish people in
their wanderings, their wars and temptations, to their final occupation
of the promised land, might be traced through the different meanings
and applications of this one word. It was bargained, begged, and fought
for, and was apportioned from generation to generation. We read among
the many stories of those thirsty lands how Achsah, daughter of Caleb
the Kenizzite, not content with her dowry, asked of her father yet
another gift, without which the first were valueless: “For thou hast
given me a south land; give me also springs of water. And Caleb gave
her the upper springs and the nether springs.”
Now, our little boy Jack was seven years old, and had to be taken more
than halfway across the continent before he learned that water is a
precious thing. He was taken to an engineer’s camp in a cañon of a
little, wild river that is within the borders of that region of the far
West known as the “arid belt.”
Well, there was water in this river; but after the placer-mining
began, in the month of May, and Moore’s Creek brought down the
“tailings” from the mines and mingled them with the current of the
river, its waters became as yellow as those of the famous Tiber as
it “rolls by the towers of Rome,”--yellow with silt, which is not
injurious; but it is not pleasant to drink essence of granite rock,
nor yet to wash one’s face in it. They made a filter and filtered it;
but every pailful had to be “packed,” as they say in the West, by the
Chinese cook and the cook’s assistant. Economy in the use of water
became no more than a matter of common consideration for human flesh.
In addition to the river there was a stream that came down the gulch
close beside the camp. This little stream was a spendthrift in the
spring and wasted its small patrimony of water; by the middle of summer
it had begun to economize, and by September it was a niggard,--letting
only a small dribble come down for those at its mouth to cherish in
pools or pots or pails, or in whatever it could be gathered. This
water of the gulch was frequently fouled by the range cattle that
came crowding down to drink, mornings and evenings. Dead leaves and
vegetation lay soaking in it, as summer waned. It was therefore
condemned for drinking, but served for bathing or for washing the camp
clothing, and was exceedingly precious by reason of its small and
steadily decreasing quantity.
One morning, late in July, Jack was fast asleep and dreaming. The
sun was hot on the great hills toward the east,--hills that had been
faintly green for a few weeks in the spring, but were now given up to
the mingled colors of the gray-green sagebrush and the dun-yellow soil.
They would have been hills of paradise, could rain have fallen upon
them as often as it falls upon the cedar-crowned knolls of the Hudson;
for these hills are noble in form and of great size,--a family of
giants as they march skyward, arm in arm and shoulder to shoulder,--and
the sky above them is the sky we call “Italian.” The “down-cañon
wind,” that all night long had swept the gulch from its source in the
hills to its mouth in the river, had fainted dead away in the heat of
the sun. Presently the counter wind from the great hot plains would
begin to blow, but this was the breathless pause between.
The flies were tickling Jack’s bare legs and creeping into the neck
of his nightgown, where the button was off, as usually it is from a
seven-year-old’s nightgown. He was restless, “like a dog that hunts in
dreams,” for he was taking the old paths again that once he had known
so well.
From the eastern hills came the mingled, far-off bleating, the
ululation of a multitude of driven sheep. The sound had reached Jack’s
dreaming ear. Suddenly his dream took shape, and for an instant he was
a happy boy.
He was “at home” in the East. It was sheep-washing time, the last week
in May; the apple orchards were a mass of bloom and the deep, old,
winding lanes were sweet with their perfume. Jack was hurrying up the
lane by the Long Pond to the sheep-washing place, where the water came
down from the pond in a dark, old, leaky, wooden flume, and was held
in a pool into which the sheep were plunged by twos and by threes,
squeezed and tumbled about and lifted out to stagger away under the
apple trees and dry their heavy fleeces in the sun. Jack was kicking in
his sleep, when his name was called by a voice outside the window and
he woke. Nothing was left of the dream, with all its sweets of sight
and sound and smell, but the noise of the river’s continuous wrestle
with the rocks of the upper bend, and that far-off multitudinous clamor
from over the sun-baked hills.
“Jack, come out!” said the voice of Jack’s big cousin. “They are going
to ‘sheep’ us. There’s a band of eight thousand coming!”
There was a great scattering of flies and of bedclothes, as Jack
leaped out. He wasted no regrets upon the past,--one isn’t so foolish
as that at seven years old,--but was ready for the joys of the
present. Eight thousand sheep, or half that number (allowing for a big
cousin’s liberal computation), were a sight worth seeing. As to being
“sheeped,” what was there in an engineer’s camp to “sheep,” unless the
eight thousand woolly range-trotters should trot over tents and house
roofs and stovepipes and all, like Santa Claus’s team of reindeer!
Jack was out of bed and into his clothes in a hurry, and off over the
hill with his cousin, buttoning the buttons of his “star” shirt waist
on the way.
The “band” was pouring over the hill slopes in all directions, making
at full speed for the river. The hills themselves seemed to be dizzily
moving. The masses of distant small gray objects swarmed, they drifted,
they swam, with a curious motionless motion. They looked like nothing
more animated than a crop of gray stones, nearly of a size, spreading
broadly over the hills and descending toward the river with an impulse
which seemed scarcely more than the force of gravitation.
The dogs were barking, the shepherds were racing and shouting to head
off the sheep and check their speed, lest the hundreds behind should
press upon the hundreds in front and force them out into deep water.
The hot air throbbed with the tumult.
When the thirst of every panting throat had been slaked and the band
began to scatter along the hill slopes, the boys went forward to speak
with the sheepmen.
A few moments afterward both lads were returning to the camp on a run,
to ask permission to accept from the shepherds the gift of a lamb that
couldn’t “keep up” with the band. It had run beside its mother as
far as its strength would carry it, and then it had fallen and been
trampled; and there it must lie unless help could revive it. A night on
the hills, with the coyotes about, would finish it.
Permission was given, and breakfast was a perfunctory meal for the
children by reason of the lamb lying on the strip of shade outside.
After breakfast they sopped its mouth with warm milk, they sponged
it with cold water, they tried to force a spoonful of mild stimulant
between its teeth. They hovered and watched for signs of returning
life. The lamb lay with its eyes closed; its sides, that were
beginning to swell, rose and sank in long, heavy gasps. Once it moved
an ear, and the children thought it must be “coming to.” Upon this
hopeful sign they began at once to make plans for the lamb’s future
life and joys with them in the cañon.
It should be led down to the river, night and morning, to drink; it
should have bran soaked in milk; it should nibble the grass on the
green strip; they would build it a house, for fear the coyotes should
come prowling about at night; it should follow them up the gulch and
over the hills, and race with them in the evenings on the river beach,
as “Daisy,” the pet fawn, had done--until something happened to her
(the children never knew what), and the lovely creature disappeared
from the cañon and out of their lives forever.
[Illustration: THE LAMB THAT COULDN’T KEEP UP]
When the strip of morning shadow was gone, they lifted the lamb
tenderly and carried it to the strip of afternoon shadow on the other
side of the house; and still it took no notice of the water or the
milk, or of all the children’s care, nor seemed to hear that they were
planning a happy life for it, if only it would get well.
When twilight came, and still it had not moved, the children held
anxious consultation on the subject of their neighbors, the coyotes;
but their father assured them there would be no danger, so near to the
house; and it seemed a pity to disturb the poor lamb.
When the cool night wind began to blow down the cañon again, and the
children were asleep, the lamb made its last effort. It is the instinct
of all dumb creatures to keep upon their feet as long as they can
stand; for when they have fallen the herd has no compassion,--or it
may be that its comrades press around the sufferer out of curiosity or
mistaken sympathy, and so trample it out of existence without meaning
the least harm. The little nursling of the range obeyed this instinct
in its last moments,--struggled to its feet and fell, a few steps
farther on; and the lamb that couldn’t keep up was at rest.
No more toiling over hills and mountains and across hot valleys, packed
in the midst of the band, breathing the dust, stunned with the noise,
always hungry, almost always athirst, baked by the sun, chilled by the
snow, driven by the wind,--drifting on, from mountain to river, from
river to plain.
This one, out of eight thousand, could rest at last, on cool grass,
with the peace and the silence and the room of a summer night around it.
The band slept upon the hills that night; the next morning they crossed
the gulch above the camp, and drank up by the way _all_ the water of
the little stream. Not another drop was seen for days. At length it
gathered strength enough to trickle down again, but it was necessary
to dip it up and let it stand in casks to settle before it was fit for
use; and meanwhile the Chinamen carriers did double duty.
Those eastern hills in spring had been covered with wild flowers,--the
moss pink, lupines both white and blue, wild phlox, the small yellow
crocus, beds of tiny sweet-scented wild pansies, the camas flower, and
a tall-stemmed, pale lilac lily,--the queen of the hill garden. But
when spring came again, the old pathways were like an ash heap. The
beautiful hill garden was a desert.
When these great sheep bands pass over the country, from range to
range, from territory to territory, they devour not only the vegetation
of one year, but the seeds, the roots, and, with these, the promise of
the next.
It is the migration of the Hungry and the Thirsty; and a cry goes out
against them, like the cry of Moab when the children of Israel camped
within its borders:--
“Surely this multitude will lick up all that is round about us.”
DREAM-HORSES
There is a little girl who hangs upon her mother’s chair, getting her
head between her mother’s work and the light, and begs for pictures.
She expects her mother to make these pictures on some bit of paper
treasured for the purpose which she offers, with a book to rest it
on, and a stubby pencil notched with small toothmarks, the record of
moments of perplexity when Polly was making her own pictures.
It is generally after a bad failure of her own that she comes to her
mother. The pang of disappointment with her own efforts is apt to
sharpen her temper a little; it does not make Polly more patient with
her mother’s mistakes that she makes mistakes herself. But between
critic and artist, with such light as the dark lantern of a little
girl’s head permits to fall upon the paper, the picture gets made
somehow, and before it is finished Polly’s heart will be so full of
sunshine that she will insist upon comparisons most flattering to the
feelings of her artist, between their different essays at the same
subject.
It is a subject they are both familiar with; and it is wonderful,
considering the extent of Polly’s patronage, that her artist’s work
does not better itself.
It is always a picture of a young person on horseback,--a young person
about the age of Polly, but much handsomer and more grown-up looking.
And the horse must be a pony with a flowing mane and tail, and his legs
must be flung out, fore and aft, so that in action he resembles one of
those “crazy-bugs” (so we children used to call them) that go scuttling
like mad things across the still surface of a pond. In other respects
he may be as like an ordinary pony as mamma and the stubby pencil can
make him. But the young person on the pony must be drawn in profile,
because Polly cannot make profiles, except horses’ profiles; her young
persons always look straight out of the picture as they ride along, and
the effect, at full speed, on a horse with his legs widely extended
from his body, is extremely gay and nonchalant.
With the picture in her hand, the little girl will go away by herself
and proceed to “dream and to dote.”
She lives in a horsey country. Horses in troops or “bands” go past
by the trails, on the one side of the river or the other. Sometimes
they ford where the water is breast-high over the bar. It is wild and
delicious to hear the mares whinnying to their foals in midstream, and
the echo of their voices, with the rushing of the loud water pent among
the hills.
Often the riders who are in charge of the band encamp for the night
on the upper bend of the river, and the red spark of their camp-fire
glows brightly about the time the little girl must be going to bed;
for it is in spring or fall the bands of horses go up into the hills
or down into the valleys, or off, one does not know where,--to a
“round up,” perhaps, where each stockman counts his own, and puts his
brand on the young colts. Over the hills, where Polly and her big
brother go wild-flower hunting, horses wander loose and look down from
the summits, mere specks, like black mice, against the sky; they are
plainly to be seen from miles away, for there is not a tree anywhere
upon these hills. Sometimes a single horse, the chieftain of a troop,
will stand alone on a hilltop and take a look all the wide country
round, and call, in his splendid voice like “sounding brass,” to
the mares and colts that have scattered in search of alkali mud to
lick, or just to show, perhaps, that they are able to get on without
his lordship. He will call, and if his troop do not answer, he will
condescend to go a little way to meet them, halting and inquiring with
short whinnies what they are about. Sometimes, in spite of discipline,
they will compel him to go all the way to meet them; for even a horse
soon tires of dignity on a hilltop all alone, with no one to see how it
becomes him.
Polly likes to meet stray horses on her walks, close enough to see
their colors and tell which are the pretty ones, the ones she calls
hers. They stare at her from under breezy forelocks, and no doubt think
themselves much finer creatures than little girls who have only two
feet to go upon. And the little girl thinks so, too,--or so it would
seem; for every evening after sunset when she runs about the house
bareheaded she plays she is a horse herself. And not satisfied with
being a horse, she plays she is a rider, too. Such a complex ideal as
that surely never came into the brain of a “cayuse,” for all his big
eyes and his tangle of hair which Polly thinks so magnificent.
The head and the feet of Polly and her tossing locks are pure horse;
that is evident at a glance as she prances past the window. But the
clinched, controlling hands are the hands of the rider,--a thrilling
combination on a western summer evening, when the brassy sunset in the
gate of the cañon is like a trumpet-note, and the cold, pink light on
the hills is as keen as a bugle-call, and the very spirit of “boots and
saddles” is in the wind that gustily blows up from the plains, turning
all the poplars white, and searching the quiet house from room to room
for any laggard stay-indoors.
Within a mile of the house, in the cañon which Polly calls home, there
is a horse ranch in a lovely valley opening toward the river. All
around it are these treeless hills that look so barren and feed so
many wild lives. The horses have a beautiful range, from the sheltered
valley up the gulches to the summits of the hills and down again to the
river to drink. The men live in a long, low cabin, attached to a corral
much bigger than the cabin, and have an extremely horsey time of it.
I shouldn’t be surprised if it were among Polly’s dreams to be one
of a picked company of little-girl riders, in charge of a band of
long-tailed ponies, just the right size for little girls to manage;
to follow the ponies over the hills all day, and at evening to fetch
water from the river and cook their own little-girl suppers in the
dingy cabin by the corral; to have envious visits from other little
girls, and occasionally to go home and tell mother all about it.
Now, in this country of real horses there were not many play-horses,
and these few not of the first quality. Hobby-horses in the shops of
the town were most trivial in size, meant only for riders of a very
tender age. Some of them were merely heads of horses, fastened to a
seat upon rockers, with a shelf in front to keep the inexperienced
rider in his place.
There were people in the town, no doubt, who had noble rocking-horses
for their little six-year-olds, but they must have sent for them on
purpose; the storekeepers did not “handle” this variety.
So Polly’s papa, assisted by John Brown, the children’s most delightful
companion and slave and story-teller, concluded to build a hobby-horse
that would outdo the hobby-horse of commerce. (Brown was a modest,
tender-hearted man, who had been a sailor off the coast of Norway,
among the islands and fiords, a miner where the Indians were “bad,” a
cowboy, a ranchman; and he was now irrigating the garden and driving
the team in the cañon.)
Children like best the things they invent and make themselves, and
plenty of grown people are children in this respect; they like their
own vain imaginings better than some of the world’s realities.
But Polly’s rocking-horse was no “vain thing,” although her father and
John did have their own fun out of it before she had even heard of it.
His head wasn’t “made of pease-straw,” nor his tail “of hay,” but in
his own way he was quite as successful a combination.
His eyes were two of Brother’s marbles. They were not mates, which was
a pity, as they were set somewhat closely together so you couldn’t help
seeing them both at once; but as one of them soon dropped out it didn’t
so much matter. His mane was a strip of long leather fringe. His tail
was made up of precious contributions extorted from the real tails
of Billy and Blue Pete and the team-horses, and twined most lovingly
together by John, the friend of all the parties to the transfer.
The saddle was a McClellan tree, which is the framework of a kind of
man’s saddle; a wooden spike, fixed to the left side of it and covered
with leather, made a horn, and the saddle-blanket was a Turkish towel.
It was rainy weather, and the cañon days were short, when this unique
creation of love and friendship--which are things more precious, it is
to be hoped, even than horseflesh--took its place among Polly’s idols,
and was at once clothed on with all her dreams of life in action.
When she mounted the hobby-horse she mounted her dream-horse as well;
they were as like as Don Quixote’s helmet and the barber’s basin.
She rode him by firelight in the last half-hour before bedtime. She
rode him just after breakfast in the morning. She “took” to him when
she was in trouble, as older dream-riders take to _their_ favorite
“hobbies.” She rocked and she rode, from restlessness and wretchedness
into peace, from unsatisfied longings into temporary content, from bad
tempers into smiles and sunshine.
She rode out the winter, and she rode in the wild and windy spring. She
got well of the measles pounding back and forth on that well-worn seat.
She took cold afterward, before the winds grew soft, experimenting with
draughts in a corner of the piazza.
Now that summer gives to her fancies and her footsteps a wider range,
the hard-worked hobby gets an occasional rest. (Often he is to be seen
with his wooden nose resting on the seat of a chair which is bestrewed
with clover blossoms, withered wild-roses, and bits of grass; for
Polly, like other worshipers of graven images, believes that her idol
can eat and drink and appreciate substantial offerings.) But when the
dream grows too strong, the picture too vivid,--not mamma’s picture,
but the one in the child’s heart,--she takes to the saddle again, and
the horsehair switch and the leather fringes float upon the wind, and
her fancies mount, far above the lava bluffs that confine her vision.
Will our little girl-riders be as happy on their real horses, when they
get them, as they are upon their dream-horses? Is the actual possession
of “back hair” and the wearing of long petticoats more blissful than
the knot, hard-twisted, of the ends of a silk handkerchief, which the
child-woman binds about her brows when she walks--like Troy’s proud
dames whose garments sweep the ground--in the skirt of her mother’s
“cast-off gown”?
It depends upon the direction these imperious dream-horses will take
with our small women. Will the rider be in bondage to the steed? Heaven
forbid! for dream-horses make good servants but very bad masters. Will
they bear her fast and far, and will she keep a quiet eye ahead and a
constant hand upon the rein? Will they flag and flounder down in the
middle-ways, where so many of us have parted with our dream-steeds and
taken the footpath, consoled to find that we have plenty of company and
are not altogether dismayed? The dream-horses carry their child-riders
beyond the mother’s following, so that the eyes and the heart ache with
straining after the fleeting vision.
It is better she should not see too much nor too far along the way they
go, since “to travel joyfully is better than to arrive.”
If only they could know their own “blessedness” while the way is long
before them!
AN IDAHO PICNIC
At the camp in the cañon they had a cow. It is true she sometimes broke
away and went off with the herds on the range and had to be chased
on horseback and caught with a lasso. They had chickens,--all that
were left them from night raids by the coyotes;[1] and a garden, the
products of which they shared with the jack-rabbits and the gophers.
But the supply wagon brought fresh fruit from the town, ten miles away,
and new butter from the valley ranches. There were no mosquitoes,
no peddlers, no tramps, no book agents, no undesirable neighbor’s
children, whom one cannot scare away as one may the neighbor’s dogs
and chickens when they creep through the fence, but must be civil
to for the sake of peace and good-will,--which are good things in a
neighborhood.
Jack Gilmour worked at his crude inventions in the shop, and was
allowed to use grown-up tools under certain not too hard conditions;
and Polly rode up and down the steep path to the river beach on
the shoulders of the young assistant engineers--and assistant
everything-elses. The mother was waited on and spoiled, as women are in
camp; she was even invited to go fishing with her husband and Mr. Dane,
one of the young assistants-in-general. It was a dull time for work
in the camp, and there were good care-takers with whom Mrs. Gilmour
could trust the children. The boy was the elder. He was learning those
two most important elements of a boy’s education, up to nine years,
according to Sir Walter Scott,--to ride and to speak the truth. But he
was only eight, and perhaps was not quite perfect in either.
He watched the three happy ones ride away, and as they turned on the
hilltop and waved good-by to the little figure on the trail below, he
was longing, with all the strength of desire an eight-year-old heart
can know, for the time to come when he too should climb the hills and
wave his hand against the sky before turning the crest, where he had so
often stood and felt so small, gazing up into those higher hills that
locked the last bright bend of the river from sight.
They were to go up Charcoal Creek; they were to cross the “Divide;”
they were to go down Grouse Creek on the other side and camp on some
unknown bit of the river’s shore.
The boy went stumbling back down the dusty path to his unfinished work
in the shop,--the engine for a toy elevated road he was making. But the
painfully fashioned fragments of his plan had no meaning for eyes that
still saw only the hills against the morning sky, and the three happy
ones riding away.
This first trip led to a second and longer one, to the fishing-grounds
up the river, by the trail on the opposite shore. Jack heard his
father and Mr. Dane talking one morning at the breakfast-table about
riding down to Turner’s and getting a pack-animal and some more riding
animals,--and mamma was going again! What good times the grown-ups did
have! And John Brown, Jack’s particular crony from the men’s camp, was
going, to cook and take care of the animals. This word “animal” is used
in the West to describe anything that is ridden or “packed,”--horse,
mule, Indian pony, or “burro.” It is never applied to cattle or
unbroken horses on the range; these are “stock.”
The party were to take a tent and stay perhaps a week, if no word came
from the home camp to call them back.
Jack slipped away from the table and went out and hung upon the railing
of a footbridge that crossed the brook. Beside learning how to ride
and to speak the truth, Jack was learning to whistle. He was practicing
this last more persistently, perhaps, than either of the more important
branches of knowledge,--let us hope because there was more need of
practice; for he was as yet very far from being a perfect whistler. It
was but a melancholy, tuneless little note in which he gave vent to his
feelings, as he watched the trickling water.
“I’d like to take the boy,” his father was that moment saying at the
breakfast-table in the cook-tent, “if we had anything he could ride.”
And then he added, smiling, “There’s Mrs. O’Dowd.” The smile went
around the table.
Mrs. O’Dowd, or “Peggy,” as she was variously called, was a gray donkey
of uncertain age and mild but inflexible disposition who sometimes
consented to carry the children over the hills at a moderate pace,
her usual equipment being a side-saddle, which did not fit her oval
figure (the curves of which turned the wrong way for beauty); so the
side-saddle was always slipping off, obliging the children to slide
down and “cinch up.”
The engineer’s house was built against a hill; from the end of the
upper piazza a short bridge, or gang-plank, joined the hill and met a
steep trail which led upward to the tents, the garden, the road to the
lower camp, the road up the bluffs, and all the rest of the children’s
world beyond the gulch. One of their favorite exercises with Mrs.
O’Dowd was to ride her down the trail, and try to force her over this
gang-plank. She would put her small feet cautiously one before the
other, hanging her great white head and sniffing her way. The instant
her toes touched the resonant boards of the bridge, she stopped, and
then the exercises began. Mrs. O’Dowd’s gravity and resignation, in the
midst of the children’s laughing and shouting and pulling and whacking,
was most edifying to see; but she never budged. She saw the darlings of
the household dance back and forth before her in safety; the engineers
in their big boots would push past her and tramp over the bridge. Mrs.
O’Dowd was a creature of fixed habits. Useless, flighty children, and
people with unaccountable ways of their own might do as they liked; it
had never been her habit to trust Mrs. O’D. on such a place as that,
and she never did.
“Yes, the boy might ride Peggy,” said Jack’s father. “He could keep her
up with John and the pack-mule, if not with us.”
“Oh, I should not want him behind with the men,” said Jack’s
mother,--“and those high trails! If he’s to go over such places, he
must ride where you can look after his saddle-girths.” She could hear
Jack’s disconsolate whistle as she spoke. “I hope he does not hear us,”
she said. “It would break his heart to think he is going, and be left
behind after all.”
“If the boy’s heart is going to break as easily as that, it is time it
was toughened,” said his father, but not ungently. “I should tell him
there is a chance of his going; but if it can’t be managed, he must not
whine about it.”