Some people, examining the alternate ups and downs of life, have
thought to detect a rhythm in it: like every other expression of
energy, from heat to history, from sound to civilization, it moves,
they think, with a definite wave-length. The down and up, the hollow
of the wave and its crest, follow one another in rhythmical sequence.
It is an imaginary notion doubtless, though it applied to my life
aptly enough at this time apparently: the Toronto misery, the Island
happiness; the New York hell, the Backwoods heaven.
I think, when I wrote home the literal truth: “I can’t stand this
reporting life any longer. I’m off to the goldfields, and McCloy has
asked me to write articles for the paper,” there lay a vague idea in
me that these goldfields would prove somehow to be comic goldfields,
and that the expedition would be somewhere farcical. I was so eager,
so determined to go, that I camouflaged from myself every unfavourable
aspect of the trip. Green, being still my predominant colour, was
used freely in this camouflage. It was only afterwards I realized
how delightfully I fooled myself. Yet it was true, at the same time,
that a deep inner necessity drove irresistibly. The city life was
killing something in me, something in the soul: get out or go under,
was my feeling. How easy it would have been to go under was a daily
thought. Far better men than myself proved it all round me every week.
It seemed, indeed, the natural, obvious thing to do for an educated,
refined Englishman without character who found himself adrift from
home influences in this amazing city--to sink into the general scum
of failures and outcasts, to yield to one of the many anæsthetics New
York so lavishly provided, to find temporary relief, a brief wild-eyed
happiness, oblivion, then, not long afterwards, death.
The draw of the woods, the call of the open air, moreover, always
potent, had become insistent. Spring added its aching nostalgia that
burned like a fever in my veins.
Thus various influences, some positive, some negative, combined to make
me feel that anything was better than the drudgery of my wretched New
York life, and the goldfields merely offered a plausible excuse. If I
made blinkers with my own hands, I made them effectively at least. Deep
out of sight in the personality there hides, perhaps, some overseer
who, watching wisely the turns of fate, makes such blinkers, ensuring
their perfect fit as well....
There was a nice feeling, of course, that if one went to a goldfield,
one picked up gold. Shaking sand in a shining pan beside a rushing
river was a picture in the mind. There were wild men, friends and
enemies; there were Indians too; but also there were sunsets, tempests,
dawns and stars. It would be liberty and happiness. I should see the
moon rise in clear, sweet air above the rim of primæval woods. I should
cook bacon over an open fire of wood. There would be no grinning
Chinaman to pay for laundry....
The men with whom I was going were not entirely satisfactory. I knew
them slightly, for one thing; for another, the chief drawback, they
were going in a very different mood from mine. Their one object was
to make their fortunes. It was real gold, and not the glamour of
the wilderness, that called them; and in the Emigrant Sleeper, as
we journeyed towards Duluth, they sketched their plans with intense
enthusiasm: Paxton, the engineer, explained puzzlingly, with the aid
of matches, a trolley he would construct for bringing the ore from pit
to crusher, while R.M., with reckless immorality, enlarged upon the
profits he would derive from running a “joint” of desperate sort--“for
no one need know that my father’s a clergyman, and my uncle in the
House of Lords.”
Both men were shadows; they were not real; there was no companionship
in them for me, at any rate. That they were fellow-travellers for the
moment on a trip I did not care about making alone, was sufficient. I
would just as soon have gone with McCloy or a Tombs policeman.
What constitutes one person out of a hundred “real,” the other
ninety-nine shadows, is hard to define, but an instinct in me has ever
picked out that “real” one. With him or her I know instantly my life is
going to be unavoidably linked: through love or hate, through happiness
or trouble, perhaps through none of these, but with the conviction that
a service has to be rendered or accepted, a debt, as it were, to be
paid or received, a link at any rate that cannot be broken or evaded.
Such real people are to be counted on the fingers of one hand: R.M.
and Paxton were certainly not among them. Nor, for that matter, was my
friend Kay, who, I am reasonably positive, missed the train on purpose;
while, curiously enough, Boyde, that trivial criminal, _was_ among
them. Had Kay, for instance, done what that cheap ruffian did, I should
never have taken the trouble to arrest or punish him....
The comic opera touch began with Whitey racing down the platform waving
a bottle of rye whisky; it continued next morning when we picked up
R.M. at eight o’clock. Our train stopped at Hamilton, Ont., for five
minutes. We craned our heads out of the window and saw a party of
young fellows with flushed faces and singing voices, and on their
shoulders in the early sunshine the inert figure of a huge man without
a hat. They recognized me and heaved him into our compartment, where
he slept soundly for two hours until we had left Toronto far behind.
“Ouch! Ouch!” said Paxton--it was about all “engineer Paxton” ever did
say--“Is that R.M.?” They had never met before. We took the money out
of his pocket for safety’s sake, and it proved to be more than his
promised contribution. His friends had indeed given him a send-off, and
the all-night poker had proved lucrative.
It was a long, long journey to Duluth, with heartening glimpses from
the window, of river, lake and forest, all touched with “spring’s
delightful weather.” Shelley filled my head and heart. I saw dawn in
a vale of the Indian Caucasus, I saw Panthea, Asia, fleeting dryads
and troops of happy fauns. Out of New York City into this primæval
wilderness produced intoxication. No more cities of dreadful night for
me! The repressed, unrealized yearnings of many painful months burst
forth in a kind of rapture. Riches can never taste the treasures of
relief and change provided by the law of contrast. To be free to go
everywhere is tantamount to going nowhere, to be able to do everything
is to do nothing. Without school, holidays could have no meaning. The
intensity of escape, with all the gorgeous emotions it involves, is
hardly possible to the big bank-balances.
I thought of the overheated _Sun_ offices, and saw cool, silent woods;
of thronged canyon-streets between cliffs of buildings, and saw lonely
gorges where the deer stole down to drink in quiet pools; of Mrs.
Bernstein’s room, and saw green glades of beauty, a ceiling of blue
sky, walls of hemlock, spruce and cedar. The May sunlight made the
whole world sing, as the train rushed through the wilderness of the
Ontario Highlands. It woke a kind of lyrical delight in me. “The day
seemed one sent from beyond the skies, that shed to earth, above the
sun, a light of Paradise.” Paxton, with his puzzling matches, found me
absent-minded and irresponsive to his “ouch! ouch!” and R.M., suffering
from a bad “hang-over” headache, thought me unsympathetic toward his
disreputable joint.
More clearly than the matches, or the profit and loss figures of the
joint, I remember the three bullets lying on the palm of the engineer’s
fat open hand. His solemn gravity depressed R.M. It infected me a
little too. Why in the world should he be so serious? “If we fail,
boys,” said the engineer laconically, as he looked down with grim
significance at the three bullets, “I for one--shall not return.” He
put a bullet in his pocket, he handed one to R.M., the third he passed
to me. “Is it a deal?” he asked, speaking as one who had come to the
end of his tether, which, indeed, perhaps really was the case. We
pocketed our bullets anyhow, and told him gravely: “Yes, it’s a deal.”
We shook hands on it.
It was all in the proper spirit of gold-seeking adventure, begad! and
the comic-opera touch, so far as I was concerned, had not yet quite
fully appeared. I had cut loose from everything. I felt as though I
were jumping off the rim of the planet into unknown space. It was
a delightful, reckless, half naughty, half childish, feeling. “To
hell with civilization!” was its note. At the back of the mind lay
a series of highly-coloured pictures: Men made fortunes in a night,
human life was cheap, six-shooters lay beside tin mugs at camp-fire
breakfasts, and bags of “dust” were tossed across faro-tables from one
desperado in a broad-brimmed hat to another who was either an Oxford
don _incognito_, or an unfrocked clergyman, or a younger son concealing
tragic beauty in an over-cultured heart, with perhaps an unclaimed
title on his strawberry-marked skin. R.M., too, was forever talking
about staking claims: “We’ll get grub-staked by some fellow.... If
we only pan a few ounces per day it’ll mean success ...” to all of
which Paxton emitted his “Ouch! Ouch!” as a strong man who said little
because he preferred action to words.
I, meanwhile, had no accurate information to supply, though I was the
promoter of the expedition. I paraded the newspaper accounts. They were
of little use. Nothing, in fact, was of any use. We were in different
worlds. _They_ were in an Emigrant Sleeper skirting the shores of Lake
Superior. _I_ was on the look-out for the Witch of Atlas, wandering
through the pine forest of the Cascine near Pisa, dreaming in the
Indian Caucasus, or watching Serchio’s stream. Even “Ouch! Ouch!” could
not keep me in Ontario for long.
It all lies down the wrong end of that ever-lengthening telescope now,
our trip to the Rainy River Gold Fields. Happy, careless, foolish days
of sunlight, liberty, wood-smoke and virgin wilderness. Useless days,
of course, yet sweetly perfumed as in a dream of fairyland. I revelled
in them. New York was still close enough to lend them some incredible
glamour by contrast. That no gold came our way was nothing, that the
days came to an end was bitter. Fading into mist, behind veils of blue
smoke, yet lit by sheets of burning sunshine, lies the faint outline
still. Each year drops another gauze curtain over an entrancing and
ridiculous adventure that for my companions was disappointingly empty,
but to me was filled to the brim with wonder and delight. A few sharp
pictures, rather disconnected, defy both veils and curtains, set
against a dim background of wild forest, a blue winding river with
strange red shores, swift rapids, and cosy camp-fires at dawn, at
sunset, beneath the stars, beneath the moon. The stillness of those
grand woods is unforgettable; the voice of the river was unceasing,
yet broke no silence; the smells of balsam, resinous pitch-pine, cedar
smoke rise like incense above the memory of it all.
Duluth was all agog with excitement, and in every shop-window hung
blue-prints of the El Dorado we were bound for. Two big-bladed
hunting-knives, a second-hand Marlin rifle for $8, a Smith and Wesson
revolver, were our weapons. I already had a six-shooter, given to me
by the Tombs Court police. It had killed a negro, and I had reported
the murder trial resulting. Three blankets had to be bought, a canoe,
and provisions for the week’s trip down the Vermilion River--tea,
bacon, flour, biscuits, salt and sugar. R.M. had a small “A” tent with
him large enough to hold three; an old, high-prowed bark canoe was
purchased from an Indian for $6; but our money did not run to Hudson
Bay blankets, and the cheap, thin coverings we bought proved poor
protection in those frosty nights of early May.
We picked up a guide too, a half-breed named Gallup. He was going
to Rainy Lake City in any case, and agreed to show us the portages
and rapids for two dollars a day each way. He justified his name. He
galloped. He had a slim-nosed Maine cedar-wood canoe that oiled along
into the daily head-wind with easy swiftness, whereas R.M. and myself
in our high-prowed craft found progress slow and steering a heavy toil.
The wind caught our big bows like a sail. Gallup, moreover, sizing us
up as English greenhorns, expected good food and lots of whisky, and,
getting neither, vented his spleen on us as best he could. His natural
evil temper grew steadily worse. There were several ways in which he
could have revenge. He used them all. By “losing his way” down branch
streams he made the journey last eight days instead of five, yet he
went so fast in his neat-nosed craft that it was all R.M. and I could
do to keep him in sight at all. The sunlight flashing on his paddle two
or three miles ahead, the canoe itself a mere dark speck in the dazzle
of water, was all we usually had to guide us. Paxton, weary, much
thinner than he had been, useless as a paddler, lay in the bottom of
the canoe, leaving all the work to Gallup. And Gallup did it, even with
this dead freight against him. To our injunction to make the fellow
go slower, his “Ouch! Ouch!” was quite ineffective. I was careful to
keep the provisions in my own canoe, so that we could not lose him
altogether, and he was faithful in one thing, that he waited for us at
the rapids and portages.
What did it matter? The head wind held steadily day after day, blowing
from the north-west through a cloudless sky. Everything sparkled,
the air was champagne; such a winding river of blue I had never seen
before. Every tree wore little fingers of bright fresh green. There was
exhilaration and wonder at every turn. Burned by the hot sun and wet by
the flying spray, our hands swelled till the knuckles disappeared, then
cracked between the joints till they bled.
I steered. R.M. sat in the bows. Paddling hour after hour against
the wind became a mechanical business the muscles attended to
automatically. The mind was free to roam. The loneliness was magical,
for it was a peopled loneliness. A start at dawn, half an hour for
lunch, and camp at sunset was the day’s routine. Usually we were too
exhausted to cook the dwindling bacon, make the fire, put up the tent.
What did it matter? Nothing mattered. Each mile was a mile of delight
farther from New York. The trip might last months for all I cared.
We cursed Gallup behind his back and to his face. He never even
answered. His sulky silence broke only round the evening fire, when
he would tell us appalling tales of murder, violence and sudden death
about the goldfields whither we were bound. It was another form of
revenge. The desperadoes, cutthroats, and wild hairy men generally who
awaited us, _us_ especially since we were English, hardly belonged to
our happy planet. Yet he knew them at first hand, knew them even by
name. They would all be on the look-out for us. Against several, for
he had his friendly impulses, he warned us in particular. Were we good
shots and quick on the trigger? The man who pulled first, he reminded
us, had the drop on the other fellow. There was a “stiff” named Morris
who was peculiarly deadly, Morris, a Canadian, who had killed his man
in a saloon brawl across the river and had skipped over the border into
Minnesota. Morris would be interested in “guys” like us. He described
him in detail. We looked forward to Morris.
They were cheery camp-fire stories Gallup told us nightly. We crawled
into our chilly tent, wondering a little, each in his own thin blanket,
what these hairy men were going to do to “guys like us.” We did not
wonder long. Sleep came like a clap. At dawn, the wind just rising,
and the chipmunks dropping fir-cones on to our tent with miniature
reports, the hairy men were all forgotten. It was impossible to hold
an ugly thought of any kind. The river sang at our feet, the sky was
pearl and rose, the air was sharply perfumed with smells of forest and
wood-smoke, and glimpses of sunrise shone everywhere between the trees;
trees that stretched without a break five hundred miles to the shores
of James Bay in the arctic seas.
We gulped our tea and bacon, packed tent and blankets, split open the
cracks in our swollen hands, and launched the canoes upon a crystal
river that swirled along in eddies and sheets of colour. Sometimes
it narrowed to a couple of hundred yards between rugged cliffs where
the water raced towards a rapid, sometimes it broadened into wide,
lake-like spaces; there were reaches of placid calm; there were
stretches white with tumbling foam. The sun blazed down; we turned
a sharp bend and surprised a deer; a porcupine waddled up against a
pine-stem; a fish leaped in a golden pool; birds flashed and vanished;
there was a silence, a stillness beyond all telling. Nuggets, gold
dust, hairy men, six-shooters--nothing mattered!
It was, indeed, this loneliness, this entire absence of all other human
signs, that gradually betrayed the truth. Where was the stream of
frenzied gold-seekers? Where was the rush the papers mentioned? Beyond
a few stray Indians on the fourth day, we saw no living being. Gallup’s
tales of terror began to lose their sting. Of real information he
vouchsafed no single item. But who wanted real information? Rainy Lake
City might be the legendary city of gold that lies beyond the mirages
of the Lybian desert, for all I cared. The City of New York was out of
sight. That was the important thing.
The series of wild, lonely camps lie blurred in the composite outline
of a single camp; eight dawns combine into one; I remember clear
night-skies ablaze with brilliant stars; I remember the moon rising
behind the black wall of forest across the water. All night the river
sang and whispered. Police courts and Mrs. Bernstein’s room hid far
away in the dim reaches of some former life. Behind these, again, lay a
shadowy, forgotten Kent. There were haunting faces, veiled by distance,
for a strange remoteness curtained the past with unreality. The wonder
of the present dominated. These woods, this river, ruled the world, and
somewhere in the heart of that old forest the legendary Wendigo, whose
history I wrote later in a book, had its awful lair.
Owing to Gallup’s trick of lengthening the journey, our food gave out,
but with fish, venison and partridge it was impossible to starve. The
last-named, a grouse actually, perches in the branches, waiting to be
shot; a bullet must take its head off or it is useless for the pot but
whizzing bullets do not disturb it, and several birds, sitting close
together, can be picked off _seriatim_. Some dried sturgeon we found,
too, on an island--an Indian sturgeon fishery--where great odorous
strips were hanging in the sun. The braves were away, and the squaw
left in charge was persuaded to sell us slabs of this excellent meat.
In a deep, clear pool some half-dozen living monsters, hooked by the
nose, turned slowly round and round, waiting the moment of their death.
The island was interesting for another reason--it was an Indian canoe
factory. Here the Redskins built their craft of birchbark, and a dozen
canoes in various stages of completion lay in the broiling sun.... To
me it was all visible romance, adventure, wonder in the heart of an
unspoilt spring, with Hiawatha round the next big bend. Paxton and R.M.
took another view....
On the eighth night--our last, had we known it--there was an
“incident.” Gallup had been unusually silent and extra offensive all
day, had “galloped” at top speed, had refused to answer a single
question, and the idea came to us all three simultaneously that he was
not losing his way with the mere object of more money, but was taking
us out of our route with a more sinister purpose. We depended on the
fellow entirely; words or violence were equally useless; we were quite
helpless. He was convinced we carried money, for no three Englishmen
of our type would make such a trip without it. What was easier, we
whispered to one another, than to murder us and bury our bodies in the
trackless, lonely forest? We watched him....
That night, exhausted to the bone, we camped on a point of wooded shore
against the sunset. Across the broad reach of water, three miles away
perhaps, was an Indian encampment. Pointed wigwams and the smoke of
many fires were visible; voices were audible in the distance. The wind
had died down as usual with the sun. A deep hush lay over the scene.
And, hardly had we landed, almost too weary to drag ourselves up the
bank, when Gallup stepped back into his Maine canoe and pushed off
downstream without a word. He stood upright; he did not sit or kneel.
His figure was outlined one minute against the red sky, the next his
silhouette merged into the dark forest beyond. He disappeared.
He had gone, we agreed, for one of two reasons: to get food, or to
return in the dark and pick us off, much as we picked off the grouse
from the branches. We inclined towards the latter theory--and kept eyes
and ears wide open. We made a diminutive fire in a hollow, lest we be
too visible in the surrounding darkness. We listened, watched, and
waited. It was already dusk. The night fell quickly. River and forest
became an impenetrable sheet of blackness, our tiny fire, almost too
small to cook on, the only speck of light. The stars came out, peeping
through the branches. There was no wind. We shivered in the cold,
listening for every slightest sound ... and the hours passed.
“He’ll wait till we’re asleep,” said R.M., keeping his eyes open with
the greatest difficulty. Paxton fingered his revolver and mumbled
“Ouch! Ouch!”
Only the cold prevented us falling asleep, as, weapons in hand, we took
turns to watch and listen. Had we the right to fire the instant we saw
a figure? Should we wait till the scoundrel made a sign? We discussed
endlessly in whispers. Though no wind stirred the branches, the noises
in that “silent” forest never ceased, because no forest ever is, or can
be, really silent. The effort of listening produced them by the dozen.
On every side twigs snapped and dry wood crackled. Soft, stealthy
footsteps were everywhere on the pine-needles. Canoes landed higher up
and lower down; paddles dripped out in the river as someone approached;
sometimes two or three dim figures crouched low on the shore, sometimes
only one. Finally, for safety’s sake, we let the fire go out altogether.
Armed to the teeth, we were still shivering in the cold darkness well
on into the night, and at some distance from the dying embers, when
suddenly--we nearly screamed--there was a sound of a voice. It was a
man’s voice; he was angry; he was cursing. A flame shot up beneath the
trees. We saw Gallup on his knees blowing up the hemlock coals. He had
landed, pulled his canoe on to the bank, and come up to within a few
yards of where we stood without our hearing the faintest sound. He said
no word. He cooked himself no food. He just made a huge fire, spread
his blanket beside the comforting blaze, curled up, and fell asleep. We
soon followed his example. Probably he had enjoyed a square meal with
the Indians, then sauntered home to bed.... Next day we reached Rainy
Lake City, paid him off, and saw him push off upstream in his Maine
canoe without having uttered a single word. He just counted the dollar
bills and vanished.
Rainy Lake City was a few acres roughly cleared from the primæval
forest, yet with avenues cut through the dense trees to indicate
streets where tramcars were to run at some future date. River, lake
and forest combined to make an enchanting scene. There were perhaps
a hundred men there. There was gold, but there was no gold-dust, no
shining pans to sift the precious sand; in a word, no placer-mining. It
was all quartz; machinery to crush the quartz had to be dragged in over
the ice in the winter. Capital was essential, large lumps of capital.
A word of inquiry in New York could have told me this. I felt rather
guilty, but very happy. Paxton and R.M. were philosophical. No word of
blame escaped their lips. They had the right to curse me, whereas both
played the part of Balaam. Even at the time I thought this odd. Neither
of them seemed to care a straw. “We’ll stake a claim,” said R.M. at
intervals. Perhaps both were so pleased to have arrived safely that
they neither grumbled nor abused me. The truth was that, like myself,
though for rather different reasons, both of them were relieved to be
“away from home.” The engineer, I discovered later, was glad that
1,500 miles lay between him and New York City.
We pitched our tent by the shore and proceeded to investigate. Living
cost little. It was sunny weather, it was spring. One company was
already sinking a shaft and working a small crusher; there were shacks
and shanties everywhere; the “city” was as peaceful as the inside of
St. Paul’s Cathedral; we saw no hairy men, but we saw mosquitoes. With
the first warm nights these pests emerged for the season in their
millions; they were very large and very hungry; they hung in the air
like clouds of smoke; they welcomed us; as R.M. said, they had probably
written the newspaper accounts that advertised the place. We had no
netting. They stung the bears blind; they would have stung a baby to
death, had there been any babies, except ourselves, to sting. The only
gold we saw was a lump, valued at $5,000, lying beside a revolver on
the counter of the Bank of Montreal’s shack. The clerk allowed us to
hold it for a second each. It was the only gold we touched.... We
investigated, as mentioned; we wandered about; we fished and shot,
we rubbed Indian stuff over our faces to keep the mosquitoes off; we
enjoyed happy, careless, easy days, bathing in ice-cold water, basking
in hot sunshine, resting, loafing, and spinning yarns with all and
sundry round our camp-fires. After New York it was a paradise, and but
for the mosquitoes, we could have dressed in fig leaves.
Except for the question of having enough money to get out again before
the iron winter set in towards October, we might have spent the whole
summer there. We decided to leave while it was still possible. To
paddle a hundred and fifty miles against the stream was not attractive.
We would do the trip on foot. Selling tent and canoe to the clerk in
the bank, we set out across the Twenty-Six Mile Portage one day towards
the end of June. A party of five men, also bound for Duluth, joined us,
and one of them was--Morris.
Those happy, unproductive goldfields! That untenanted Rainy Lake City
where no tramcars ever ran, nor faro-tables flourished! Morris, the
hairy desperado! In the dismal New York days that followed they seemed
to belong to some legendary Golden Age. Romance and adventure, both
touched with comedy, went hand in hand, beauty and liberty heightening
some imagined radiance. Wasted time, of course, but for that very
reason valuable beyond computation. Stored memories are stored energy
that may prove the raw material of hope in days that follow after. Even
Morris, the “stiff,” and cut-throat, played his little part in the
proper spirit. There was a price on his head in Canada. We watched him
closely; we watched his partners too. The Twenty-Six Mile Portage cut
off an immense bend of the Vermilion River, running through the depths
of trackless, gloomy forest the whole way. Nothing was easier than to
“mix us up with the scenery” as a phrase of those parts expressed it.
Especially must we be on our guard at night. One of us must always
only pretend to sleep. Our former mistake about Gallup need not make
us careless. A natural instinct to dramatize the expedition might have
succeeded better if Morris, the villain, had not sometimes missed his
cue and failed to realize the importance of his rôle.
The scenery, at any rate, was right. The weather broke the very day
we started, and the region justified its translated Indian name. A
drenching rain fell sousing on the world. With our heavy packs we made
slow progress, crawling in single file beneath the endless dripping
trees, soaked to the skin in the first ten minutes. There was no trail,
but Morris had a compass. Darkness fell early on the first night when
we had covered barely six miles. Morris found a deserted lumbermen’s
shanty. One man chopped down a pitch-pine and cut out its dry heart of
resinous wood which caught fire instantly; another soaked a shred of
cedar-wood in a tin mug filled with melted bacon fat; a third cooked
dinner for the whole party; and by eight o’clock we all lay grouped
about the fire, dodging the streams of water that splashed through the
gaping remnants of the pine-log roof.
Outside in that windless forest the drip of the rain was like the
sound of waterfalls, but it was a magnificent, a haunted, a legendary
forest none the less. Our shanty was faintly lit by the flickering
cedar-candle. Queer shadows danced, eyes glittered, the faces here and
there seemed distorted oddly in the shifting flame and darkness that
alternately rose and fell. One by one, dog-tired, we fell asleep. It
was R.M.’s turn to watch. Before supper was ended even, he lay soundly
slumbering, his head, with touselled hair and ragged beard, thrown back
against the wall, his mouth, containing unswallowed food--so weary was
he--half-open. I exchanged a significant glance with Paxton over his
collapsed body, meaning that we must watch instead.
Our steaming clothes dried slowly as the night wore on. The dripping
trickle of the trees became louder and louder. Paxton, very thin now,
looked like a scarecrow in his ragged shirt and coat. His customary
exclamation was rarely heard. He fell asleep in turn. The rest of the
party had been snoring for an hour or more. It was up to me to watch.
I watched. The next thing I knew was a sudden stealthy movement, and
a low voice that woke me out of a slumber made of lead. The fire was
low, the candle hardly flickered. Across the gloom I saw the movement
that had waked me--Morris, the hairy man, was stirring. I watched him.
He sat up. He leaned cautiously over--towards R.M. His hand stretched
out slowly. Splendid fellow! I felt furious with R.M. for falling
asleep, for keeping his mouth open in that idiotic way. Stupid idiot
and faithless comrade! Morris, I saw, was doing something to his
bulky, motionless figure, just about to slit him open perhaps. Well,
let him slit! It was the head he touched. He was doing something to
the sleeper’s head--pushing it--pushing it sideways so that a stream
of water through the roof might just miss falling on his shoulder and
thus splashing the hairy man’s own face with spray. I watched closely,
faithful to my job. I saw Morris the Stiff take a bit of spare clothing
out of his pack and hang it over R.M.’s neck and shoulder. “I got no
use for it,” he was saying. “Yer friend might jest as well hev it.”
He knew, therefore, quite well that I was watching. But R.M. knew
nothing, less than nothing. He neither stirred nor woke. A more kindly,
tender-hearted fellow than Morris the Stiff, no traveller in wild
places could possibly desire.
It was perhaps a couple of hours later when I woke again, disturbed
this time not by noise, but by the sudden absence of it. One winter’s
night the inhabitants of Niagara, similarly, woke up because, ice
having formed, the thunder of the falls had ceased. I listened a
moment, then went out. The rain had ceased, the clouds were gone, in a
clear sky the three-quarter moon shone brightly. The rain-washed air
seemed perfumed beyond belief. Nor did the old moon merely “look round
her when the heavens were bare,” she sprawled fantastically at full
length, as it were, in her magnificent blue-black bed of naked space. I
went out to a clear spot among the trees. Far away rose a soft murmur.
The air hummed and shook with the roar of distant rapids, so calm and
still the night was. No bird, no animal cried. The earth herself, it
seemed, stopped turning in that wonderful stillness. Those few minutes
painted a picture that memory must always keep....
Three months later the first week in October found us in New York
again. The bullets were forgotten and, of course, unmentioned, and five
months of glorious wasted time lay safely behind us.