They buried Chris upon Katahdin’s breast. It was a good cemetery for
woodsmen, so Herb said, granite above and forest beneath.
But, good or bad, this was the one thing to be done. An attempt to
transfer the body to a distant settlement would be objectless labor;
for, as far as the guide knew, the half-breed had not a friend to be
interested in his fate, father and mother having died before Herb found
him in the snow-heaped forest.
There were three reliable witnesses, besides the man who was known to
have a grudge against him, to testify as to the cause and manner of his
death when the party returned to Greenville; so no suspicious finger
could point at Herb Heal, with a hint that he had carried out his old
threat.
How long Chris, in lonely, crazed repentance, had sheltered in the camp
on the mountain-side could only be a matter of guess. Herb inclined to
think that he had been there for weeks,—months, perhaps,—judging from
the withered spruce bed and the dry boughs and sticks upon the
camping-ground, which had evidently been gathered and broken for fuel.
His ravings made it clear that, on returning to the old haunts after
years of absence, he had missed the trail he used to know, and wandered
wearily in the dense woods about the foot of Katahdin before he escaped
from the prison of trees, and climbed to the hut he sought.
Such wanderings, Herb declared, generally ended in “a man having wheels
in his head,” being half or wholly insane, though he might keep
sufficient wits to provide himself with food and warmth, as Chris had
done while his strength held out. This was not long; for the
half-breed’s words suggested that he felt near to the great change he
roughly called “keeling over,” when he started to find his cheated
partner.
But Cyrus, while he watched the guide making preparations for the
mountain burial, pictured the poor weakling tramping for hundreds of
miles through rugged forest-land, doubtless with aching knee-joints and
feet, that he might make upon his own skin justice for the skins which
he had stolen, and so, in the only way he knew, square things with his
wronged chum. And the city man thought, with a tear of pity, that even
that poor drink-fuddled mind must have been lit by some ray of longing
for goodness.
It was a strange funeral.
The guide chose a spot where the earth had been much softened by the
recent rain; and, with the ingenuity of a man accustomed to wilderness
shifts, he broke up the drenched ground with the axe which he took from
his shoulders.
That axe, which had so often made camp, had never before made a grave;
the Farrars doubted that it ever would. But Herb worked away upon his
knees, moisture dripping from his skin, putting sorrow for years of
anger into every blow of his arms. Then, stopping a while, he went off
down the mountain to the nearest belt of trees, and cut a limb from
one, out of which, with his hunting-knife, he fashioned a rude wooden
implement, a cross between a spade and shovel.
With this he scooped out the broken earth until a grave appeared over
three feet deep. He lined it with fragrant spruce-boughs from the
wind-beaten tangle below.
These Cyrus and Dol had busied themselves in cutting. Neal thought of
other work for his fingers. Getting hold of Herb’s axe when the owner
was not using it, he felled one of the dwarf white birches. Out of its
light, delicate wood, with the help of his big pocket-knife and a ball
of twine that was hidden somewhere about him, he made a very
presentable cross, to point out to future hunters on Katahdin the
otherwise unmarked grave.
He was a bit of a genius at wood-carving, and surveyed his work with
satisfaction when he considered it finished, having neatly cut upon it
the name, “Chris Kemp,” with the date, “October 20th, 1891.”
“Couldn’t you add a text or motto of some kind?” suggested Dol,
glancing over his shoulder. “Twould make it more like the things one
sees in cemeteries. You’re such a dab at that sort of work.”
“Can’t think of anything,” answered the elder brother.
Then, with a sudden lighting of his face, he seized the knife again,
and worked in, in fine lettering, the frightened prayer he had heard on
the half-breed’s lips:—
“God, I am weak; pity me!”
Herb and Cyrus lowered the body into its resting-place, and covered it
with the green spruces.
The four campers knelt bare-headed by the grave.
“Couldn’t one of you boys say a bit of a prayer?” asked Herb in a thick
voice. “I ain’t used to spouting.”
All former help had been easily given. This was a harder matter, yet
not so difficult as it would have been amid a city congregation.
Garst tried to recall some suitable prayer from a funeral service; so
did Neal. Both failed.
But here upon Katahdin’s side, where, in the large forces of storm and
slide, in forest and granite, through every wind-swept bush, waving
blade, and tinted lichen, breathed a whisper from God, it seemed no
unnatural thing for a man or a boy to speak to his Father.
“Can’t one of you fellers say a prayer?” asked Herb again.
Then the river of feeling in Cyrus broke the dam of reserve, and flowed
over his lips in a prayer such as he had never before uttered.
It was the prayer of a son who was for the minute absorbed in his
Father.
It left the five, those who were camping here and one who had gone to
unseen camping-grounds, with son-like trust to the Father’s dealings.
Herb and the Farrars responded to it with heart-eager “Amens!” the
fervor of which was new to their lips.
“I thank you as if he were my own brother, boys,” said the woodsman,
while he filled in the grave, and planted Neal’s cross at its head.
“Sho! when it comes to a time like we’ve been through to-day, a man, if
he has anything but a gizzard in him, must feel as how we’re all
brothers,—every man-jack of us,—white men, red men, half-and-half men,
whatever we are or wherever we sprung.”
“A fellow is always hearing that sort of thing,” said Neal Farrar to
Cyrus. “But I’m blessed if I ever felt it stick in me before! that
we’re all of the one stuff, you know—we and that poor beggar. Some of
us seem to get such precious long odds over the others.”
“All the more reason why we should do our level best to pull the
backward ones up to us,” answered the American.
The words struck into the ears of Dol—that youngster listening with a
soberness of attention seldom seen in his flash-light eyes.
A few years afterwards, when Neal Farrar was a newly blown lieutenant
in his Queen’s Twelfth Lancers, as full of heroic impulses and
enthusiasms as a modern young officer may be,—while his half-fledged
ambitions were hanging on the chances of active service, and the
golden, remote possibility of his one day being a V.C.,—there was a
peaceful honor which clung to him unsought.
During his first year of army life, he became the paragon of every poor
private and raw recruit struggling with the miseries of goose-step,
with whom he came even into momentary contact. For sometimes through a
word or act, sometimes through a flash of the eye, or a look about the
mouth, during the brief interchange of a military salute, these
“backward ones” saw that the progressive young officer looked on them,
not as men-machines, but as brothers, as important in the great schemes
of the nation and the world as he was himself; that he was proud to
serve with them, and would be prouder still to help them if he could.
It was an understanding which inspired many a tempted or newly joined
fellow to drill himself morally as his sergeant drilled him physically,
with a determination to become as fine a soldier and forward a man as
his paragon.
But only one American friend of Lieutenant Farrar’s, who has let out
the secret to the writer, knows that the binding truth of human
brotherhood was first born into him when, on Katahdin’s side, he helped
to bury a thieving half-Indian.
[Illustration]