Jim met me at the station. I knew it was Jim when I caught sight of him
loping along the platform, craning his neck, his head on one side as if
in search of someone. He had the same stoop in his shoulders; the same
long, disjointed, shambling body--six feet and more of it--that had
earned him his soubriquet.
"Guess you be him," he said, recognizing me as easily, his face breaking
suddenly into a broad smile as I stepped on to the platform. "Old man
'lowed I'd know ye right away, but I kind o' mistrusted till I see ye
stop and look 'raound same's if ye'd lost the trail. I'll take them
traps and that bag if ye don't mind," and he relieved me of my
sketch-kit and bag. "Buck-board's right out here behind the freight
shed," and he pointed across the track. "Old mare's kinder skeery o' the
engine, so I tied her a piece off."
He was precisely the man I had expected to find--even to his shaggy gray
hair matted close about his ears, wrinkled, leathery face, and long,
scrawny neck. He wore the same rough, cowhide boots and the very hat I
had seen so often reproduced--such a picturesque slouch of a hat with
that certain cant to the rim which betokens long usage and not a little
comfort, especially on balsam boughs with the sky for a covering, and
only the stars to light one to bed.
I had heard all these several details and appointments described ever so
minutely by an enthusiastic brother brush who had spent the preceding
summer with old man Marvin--Jim's employer--but he had forgotten to
mention, or had failed to notice, the peculiar softness of Jim's voice
and his timid, shrinking eyes--the eyes of a dog rather than those of a
man--not cowardly eyes, nor sneaking eyes--more the eyes of one who had
suffered constantly from sudden, unexpected blows, and who shrank from
your gaze and dodged it as does a hound that misunderstands a gesture.
"Old man's been 'spectin' ye for a week," Jim rambled on as he led the
way to the shed, hitching up his one leather suspender that kept the
brown overalls snug up under his armpits. "P'raps ye expected him to
meet ye," he continued, "but ye don't know him. He ain't that kind. He
won't go even for Ruby."
"Who's Ruby?" The brother brush had not mentioned him. "Mr. Marvin's
son?"
"No, she's Mother Marvin's girl. She's away to Plymouth to school.
Stand here a minute till I back up the buck-board."
The buck-board is the only vehicle possible over these mountain-roads.
It is the _volante_ of the Franconia range, and rides over everything
from a bowlder to a wind-slash. This particular example differed only in
being a trifle more rickety and mud-bespattered than any I had seen; and
the mare had evidently been foaled to draw it--a fur-coated,
moth-eaten, wisp-tailed beast, tied to the shafts with clothes-lines and
scraps of deerhide--a quadruped that only an earthquake could have
shaken into nervousness. And yet Jim backed her into position as
carefully as if she had felt her harness for the first time, handing me
the reins until he strapped my belongings to the hind axle, calling
"Whoa, Bess!" every time she rested a tired muscle. Then he lifted one
long leg over the dash-board and took the seat beside me.
It was my first draught of a long holiday; my breathing-spell; my time
for loose neckties and flannel shirts and a kit slung over my shoulder
crammed with brushes and color-tubes; my time for loafing and inviting
my soul. It felt inexpressibly delightful to be once more out in the
open--out under the wide sweep of the sky; rid of the choke of narrow
streets; exempt of bens, mails, and telegrams, and free of him who
knocks, enters, and sits--and sits--and sits. And it was the Indian
summer of the year; when the air is spicy with the smoke of burning
leaves and the mountains are lost in the haze; when the unshaven
cornfields are dotted with yellow pumpkins and under low-branched trees
the apples lie in heaps; when the leaves are aflame and the round sun
shines pink through opalescent clouds.
"Ain't it a hummer of a day?" Jim exclaimed, suddenly, looking toward
the valley swimming in a silver mist below us. "By Jiminy! it makes a
man feel like livin', don't it?"
I turned to look at him. He, too, seemed to have caught the infection.
His shoulders had straightened, his nostrils were dilated like a deer's
that sniffs some distant scent; his face was aglow. I began to wonder
if, with my usual luck, I had not found the companion I always looked
for in my outings--that rare other fellow of the right kind, who
responds to your slightest wish with all the enthusiasm and gusto of a
boy, and so vagabondish in his tendencies that he is delighted to have
you think for him and to follow your lead.
I had not long to wait. Before we had gone a mile into the forest Jim
jerked the mare back upon her haunches and, pointing to a great hemlock
standing sentinel over us, cried out with boyish enthusiasm:
"Take a look at him once. Ain't he a ring-tailed roarer? Seems to me a
tree big as him must be awful proud just o' bein' a tree. Ain't nothin'
'raound here kin see's fur as he kin, anyways." "My luck again," I
thought to myself. I knew I could not be mistaken in the outward signs.
"You like trees, then?" I asked, watching the glow on his face.
"Like 'em! Well, wouldn't you if ye'd lived 'mong 'em long's I have?
Trees don't never go back on ye, and that's what ye can't say o'
everything." The analogy was obscure, but I attributed it to Jim's
slender stock of phrases. "I've knowed that hemlock ever since I come
here, and he's just the same to me as the fust day I see him. Ain't
never no change in trees; once they're good to ye they're allus good to
ye. Birds is different--so is cattle--but trees and dogs ye kin tie to.
Don't the woods smell nice? Do ye catch on to them spruces dead ahead of
us? Maybe ye can't smell 'em till ye git yer nose cleared out o' them
city nosegays," he continued, with a kindly interest in his voice. "But
ye will when ye've been here a spell. Folks that live in cities think
there ain't nothin' smells sweet but flowers and cologne. They ain't
never slep' on balsam-boughs nor got a whiff o' a birchbark fire, nor
tramped a bed o' ferns at night. There's a cool, fresh smell for ye! I
tell ye there's a heap o' perfumes 'raound that ye can't buy at a
flower-store and cork up in a bottle. Well, I guess--Git up, Bess!" and
he flopped the reins once more along the ridges and hollows of the
mare's back while he encouraged her to renewed efforts with that
peculiar clucking sound heeded only by certain beasts of burden.
At the end of the tenth mile he stopped the mare suddenly.
"Hold on," he cried, excitedly, "there's that scraggy-tail. I missed him
when I come down. See! there he is on that green log. I was feared he'd
passed in his chips." I looked and saw a huge gray squirrel with a tail
like a rabbit. "That's him. Durn mean on his tail, warn't it? And one
paw gone, too. The dog catched him one day last year and left him tore
up that way. I found him limping along when I was a-sugaring here in the
spring and kinder fixed him up, and he's sorter on the lookout for me
when I come along. He's got a hole 'round here somewheres."
Jim sprang out of the buck-board. Fumbling under the seat he brought out
a bag of nuts. The squirrel took them from his hand, stuffing his mouth
full, five at a time, limping away to hide them, and back again for more
until the bag was empty, Jim, contented and unhurried, squatting on the
ground, his long knees bent under him. The way in which he did this gave
me infinite delight. No vagabond I had ever known ignored time and duty
more complacently.
We drove on in silence, Jim taking in everything we passed. This
shambling, slenderly educated, and clay-soiled man was fast looming up
as a find of incalculable value--the most valuable of my experience.
The most important thing, however, was still to be settled if a perfect
harmony of interests was to be established between us--_would he
like me_?
Marvin's cabin, in which I was to spend my holiday, lay on a clearing
half a mile or more outside the woods and at the foot of a hill that
helped prop up the Knob. The stage road ran to the left. The house was a
small two-story affair built of logs and clapboards, and was joined to
the outlying stable by a covered passage which was lined with winter
firewood. Marvin, who met us at the pasture-gate, carried a lantern, the
glow of the twilight having faded from the mountain-tops. He was a
small, thick-set man, smooth-shaven as far as the under side of his chin
and jaws, with a whisk-broom beard spread over his shirt-front and half
of his waistcoat. His forehead was low, and his eyes set close
together--sure sign of a close-fisted nature.
To my great surprise his first words, after a limp handshake and a
perfunctory "pleased to see you," were devoted to an outbreak on Jim for
having been so long on the road. "Been waitin' here an hour," he said.
"What in tarnation kep' ye, anyway? Them cows ain't milked yit!"
"Don't worry. I won't go back on them cows," replied Jim, quietly, as he
drove through the gateway, following Marvin, who walked ahead swinging
the lantern to show the mare the road.
Mrs. Marvin's manner was as abrupt as that of her husband.
"Well, well!" she said, as I stepped upon the porch, "guess you must be
beat out comin' so fur. Come in and set by the stove," and she resumed
her work in the pantry without another word.
I was not offended at her curtness. These denizens of the forest pass
too many hours alone and speak too seldom to understand the value of
politeness for politeness' sake. The wife, moreover, redeemed herself
the next morning when I found her on the back porch feeding the birds.
"Snow ain't fur off," she remarked, in explanation, as she scattered the
crumbs about, "and I want 'em to larn early where they kin find
something to eat. Ruby'd never forgive me if I didn't feed the birds.
She loves 'em 'bout as much as Jim does."
Neither she nor her husband became any more cordial as they knew me
better. To them I was only the boarder whose weekly stipend helped to
decrease the farm debt, and who had to be fed three times a day and
given a bed at night. It was Jim who made me feel at home. He was the
fellow I had longed for; the round peg of a chance acquaintance that
exactly fitted into the round hole of my holiday life, and he fulfilled
my every expectation. He would fish or hunt or carry a sketch-trap or
wash brushes, or loaf, or go to sleep beside me--or get up at
daylight--whatever the one half of me wanted to do, Jim, the other
half, agreed to with instant cheerfulness.
And yet, in spite of this constant companionship, I never crossed a
certain line of reserve which he had set up between us. He would ramble
on by the hour about the things around us; about the trees, the birds,
and squirrels; of the way the muskrats lived by the sawmill dam, and
their cleverness in avoiding his traps; about the deer that "yarded"
back of Taft's Knob last winter, and their leanness in the spring.
Sometimes he would speak of Mother Marvin, saying she "thought a heap of
Ruby, and ought to," and now and then he would speak of Ruby with a
certain tender tone in his voice, telling me of the prizes she had won
at school, and how nobody could touch her in "'rithmetic and readin'."
But, to my surprise, he never discussed any of his private affairs with
me. I say "surprise," for until I met Jim I had found that men of his
class talked of little else, especially when over campfires smouldering
far into the night.
This reticence also extended to Marvin's affairs. The relations between
them, I saw, were greatly strained, although Jim always discharged his
duties conscientiously, never failing to render a strict account of the
time he spent with me, which Marvin always itemized in the weekly bill.
I used often to wonder if he were not under some obligation to his
employer which he could not requite; it might be for food and shelter
in his earlier days, or perhaps that he was weighted by a money debt he
was unable to pay.
One morning, after a particularly ugly outbreak in which Jim had been
denounced for some supposed neglect of his duties, I asked him, then
lying beside me, his head cupped upon his saucer of a slouch hat, why he
stayed on with a man like Marvin, so different from himself in every
way. I had often wondered why Jim stood it, and wished that he had the
spirit to try his fortunes elsewhere. In my sympathy for him I had even
gone so far as to hint once or twice at my finding him other employment.
Indeed, I must confess that the only cloud between us dimming my
confidence in him was this very lack of independence.
"Well, I got to git along with him for a spell yit," Jim answered,
slowly, his eyes turned up to the sky. "He _is_ ornery, and no mistake,
and I git mad at him sometimes; but then ag'in I feel kinder sorry for
him somehow. He's a queer kind, ain't he, to be livin' up here all his
life with trees and mountains all 'round him, all doin' their best to
please him--and I don't know nothin' friendlier nor honester--and yet
him bein' what he is? I'd 'a' thought they'd thawed him out 'fore this.
And he's so dog-goned close, too, if I must say it. Why, if it warn't
for Mother Marvin, some o' us 'raound here"--and he stopped and lowered
his voice--"would be out in the cold; some ye wouldn't suspect, too."
This apparently studied reticence only incited my curiosity to learn
something more of the man for whom I had begun to have a real affection.
I wanted particularly to know something of his life before he came to
Marvin's!--twelve years now. I could not, of course, ask Marvin or his
wife for any details--my intimacy with Jim forbade such an invasion of
his privacy--and I met no one else in the forest. I saw plainly that he
was not a mountaineer by birth. Not only did his dialect differ from
those about him, but his habits were not those of a woodsman. For
instance, he would always carry his matches loose in his pocket, instead
of in a dry box; then, again, he would wear his trousers rolled up like
a fireman's, as if to keep out the wet, instead of tucking them into his
boots to tramp the woods the better. Now and then, too, he would let
fall some word or expression which would betray greater familiarity with
the ins and outs of the city than with the intricacies of the forest.
"It was fixed up in a glass case like one Abe Condit used to have in his
place in the Bowery," he said once in describing a prize trout some city
fisherman had stuffed and framed. But when I asked him, with some
surprise, if he knew the Bowery, he looked at me quickly, with the
slightest trace of offended dignity in his eyes, as if I had meant to
overstep the line between us, and answered quickly:
"I knowed Abe Condit," and immediately changed the conversation.
And yet I must admit that there was nothing in the way he answered this
and all my other questions that weakened my confidence in his sincerity.
If there were any blackened pages in his past record that he did not
want to lay bare even to me, they were discolored, I felt sure, more by
privations and suffering than by any stains he was ashamed of.