I
A big-framed, jaunty man with black side-whiskers, a long black frock
coat, and a square, flat case of shiny black leather strapped upon his
back, stepped into the Corner Store at Brine’s Rip Mills.
He said: “Hullo, boys! Hot day!” in a big voice that was intentionally
hearty, ran his bulging eyes appraisingly over every one present, then
took off his wide-brimmed felt hat and mopped his glistening forehead
with a big red and white handkerchief. Receiving a more or less
hospitable chorus of grunts and “hullos” in response, he seated himself
on a keg of nails, removed the leather case from his back, and asked for
ginger beer, which he drank noisily from the bottle.
“Name of Byles,” said he at length, introducing himself with a sweeping
nod. “Hot tramp in from Cribb’s Ridge. Thirsty, you bet. Never drink
nothing stronger’n ginger pop or soft cider. Have a round o’ pop on me,
boys. A1 pop this o’ yours, mister. A dozen more bottles, please, for
these gentlemen.”
He looked around the circle with an air at once assured and persuasive.
And the taciturn woodsmen, not wholly at ease under such sudden
cordiality from a stranger, but too polite to rebuff him, muttered
“Thank ye, kindly,” or “Here’s how,” as they threw back their heads and
poured the weak stuff down their gaunt and hairy throats.
It was a slack time at Brine’s Rip, the mills having shut down that
morning because the river was so low that there were no more logs
running. The shrieking saws being silent for a little, there was nothing
for the mill hands to do but loaf and smoke. The hot air was heavily
scented with the smell of fresh sawdust mixed with the strong
honey-perfume of the flowering buckwheat fields beyond the village. The
buzzing of flies in the windows of the store was like a fine arabesque
of sound against the ceaseless, muffled thunder of the rapids.
The dozen men gathered here at Zeb Smith’s store—which was, in effect,
the village club—found it hard to rouse themselves to a conversational
effort in any way worthy the advances of the confident stranger. They
all smoked a little harder than usual, and looked on with courteous but
noncommittal interest while he proceeded to unstrap his shiny black
leather case.
In his stiff and sombre garb, so unsuited to the backwoods trails, the
stranger had much the look of one of those itinerant preachers who
sometimes busy themselves with the cure of souls in the remoter
backwoods settlements. But his eye and his address were rather those of
a shrewd and pushing commercial traveller.
Tug Blackstock, the Deputy Sheriff of Nipsiwaska County, felt a vague
antagonism toward him, chiefly on the ground that his speech and bearing
did not seem to consort with his habiliments. He rather liked a man to
look what he was or be what he looked, and he did not like black side
whiskers and long hair. This antagonism, however, he felt to be
unreasonable. The man had evidently had a long and tiring tramp, and was
entitled to a somewhat friendlier reception than he was getting.
Swinging his long legs against the counter, on which he sat between a
pile of printed calicoes and a box of bright pink fancy soap, Tug
Blackstock reached behind him and possessed himself of a box of long,
black cigars. Having selected one critically for himself, he proffered
the box to the stranger.
“Have a weed?” said he cordially. “They ain’t half bad.”
But the stranger waved the box aside with an air at once grand and
gracious.
“I never touch the weed, thank you kindly just the same,” said he. “But
I’ve nothing agin it. It goes agin my system, that’s all. If it’s all
the same to you, I’ll take a bite o’ cheese an’ a cracker ’stead o’ the
cigar.”
“Sartain,” agreed Blackstock, jumping down to fetch the edibles from
behind the counter. Like most of the regular customers, he knew the
store and its contents almost as well as Zeb Smith himself.
During the last few minutes an immense, rough-haired black dog had been
sniffing the stranger over with suspicious minuteness. The stranger at
first paid no attention whatever, though it was an ordeal that many
might have shrunk from. At last, seeming to notice the animal for the
first time, he recognized his presence by indifferently laying his hand
upon his neck. Instead of instantly drawing off with a resentful growl,
after his manner with strangers, the dog acknowledged the casual caress
by a slight wag of the tail, and then, after a few moments, turned away
amicably and lay down.
“If Jim finds him all right,” thought Blackstock to himself, “ther’
can’t be _much_ wrong with him, though I can’t say I take to him
myself.” And he weighed off a much bigger piece of cheese than he had at
first intended to offer, marking down his indebtedness on a slate which
served the proprietor as a sort of day-book. The stranger fell to
devouring it with an eagerness which showed that his lunch must have
been of the lightest.
“Ye was sayin’ as how ye’d jest come up from Cribb’s Ridge?” put in a
long-legged, heavy-shouldered man who was sprawling on a cracker box
behind the door. He had short sandy hair, rapidly thinning, eyes of a
cold grey, set rather close together, and a face that suggested a cross
between a fox and a fish-hawk. He was somewhat conspicuous among his
fellows by the trimness of his dress, his shirt being of dark blue
flannel with a rolled-up collar and a scarlet knotted kerchief, while
the rest of the mill hands wore collarless shirts of grey homespun, with
no thought of neckerchiefs.
His trousers were of brown corduroy, and were held up by a broad belt of
white dressed buckskin, elaborately decorated with Navajo designs in
black and red. He stuck to this adornment tenaciously as a sort of
inoffensive proclamation of the fact that he was not an ordinary
backwoods mill hand, but a wanderer, one who had travelled far, and
tried his wits at many ventures in the wilder West.
“Right you are,” assented the stranger, brushing some white cracker
crumbs out of his black whiskers.
“I was jest a-wonderin’,” went on Hawker, giving a hitch to the
elaborate belt and leaning forward a little to spit out through the
doorway, “if ye’ve seed anything o’ Jake Sanderson on the road.”
The stranger, having his mouth full of cheese, did not answer for a
moment.
“The boys are lookin’ for him rather anxious,” explained Blackstock with
a grin. “He brings the leetle fat roll that pays their wages here at the
mill, an’ he’s due sometime to-day.”
“I seen him at Cribb’s Ridge this morning,” answered the stranger at
last. “Said he’d hurt his foot, or strained his knee, or something, an’
would have to come on a bit slow. He’ll be along sometime to-night, I
guess. Didn’t seem to me to have much wrong with him. No, ye can’t have
none o’ that cheese. Go ’way an’ lay down,” he added suddenly to the
great black dog, who had returned to his side and laid his head on the
stranger’s knee.
With a disappointed air the dog obeyed.
“’Tain’t often Jim’s so civil to a stranger,” muttered Blackstock to
himself.
A little boy in a scarlet jacket, with round eyes of china blue, and an
immense mop of curly, fluffy, silky hair so palely flaxen as to be
almost white, came hopping and skipping into the store. He was greeted
with friendly grins, while several voices drawled, “Hullo, Woolly
Billy!” He beamed cheerfully upon the whole company, with a special
gleam of intimate confidence for Tug Blackstock and the big black dog.
Then he stepped up to the stranger’s knee, and stood staring with
respectful admiration at those flowing jet-black side-whiskers.
The stranger in return looked with a cold curiosity at the child’s
singular hair. Neither children nor dogs had any particular appeal for
him, but that hair was certainly queer.
“Most an albino, ain’t he?” he suggested.
“No, he ain’t,” replied Tug Blackstock, curtly. The dog, detecting a
note of resentment in his master’s voice, got up and stood beside the
child, and gazed about the circle with an air of anxious interrogation.
Had any one been disagreeable to Woolly Billy? And if so, who?
But the little one was not in the least rebuffed by the stranger’s
unresponsiveness.
“What’s that?” he inquired, patting admiringly the stranger’s shiny
leather case.
The stranger grew cordial to him at once.
“Ah, now ye’re talkin’,” said he enthusiastically, undoing the flap of
the case. “It’s a book, sonny. The greatest book, the most _interestin’_
book, the most useful book—and next to the Bible the most high-toned,
uplifting book that was ever written. Ye can’t read yet, sonny, but this
book has the loveliest pictures ye ever seen, and the greatest lot of
’em for the money.”
He drew reverently forth from the case a large, fat volume, bound
sumptuously in embossed sky-blue imitation leather, lavishly gilt, and
opened it upon his knees with a spacious gesture.
“There,” he continued proudly. “It’s called ‘Mother, Home, and Heaven!’
Ain’t that a title for ye? Don’t it show ye right off the kind of book
it is? With this book by ye, ye don’t need any other book in the house
at all, except maybe the almanack an’ the Bible—an’ this book has lots
o’ the best bits out of the Bible in it, scattered through among the
receipts an’ things to keep it all wholesome an’ upliftin’.
“It’ll tell ye such useful things as how to get a cork out of a bottle
without breakin’ the bottle, when ye haven’t got a corkscrew, or what to
do when the baby’s got croup, and there ain’t a doctor this side of
Tourdulac. An’ it’ll tell ye how to live, so as when things happen that
no medicines an’ no doctors and no receipts—not even such great receipts
as these here ones” (and he slapped his hand on the counter) “can help
ye through—such as when a tree falls on to ye, or you trip and stumble
on to the saws, or git drawn down under half-a-mile o’ raft—then ye’ll
be ready to go right up aloft, an’ no questions asked ye at the Great
White Gate.
“An’ it has po’try in it, too, reel _heart_ po’try, such as’ll take ye
back to the time when ye was all white an’ innocent o’ sin at yer
mother’s knee, an’ make ye wish ye was like that now. In fact, boys,
this book I’m goin’ to show ye, with your kind permission, is handier
than a pocket in a shirt, an’ at the same time the blessed fragrance of
it is like a rose o’ Sharon in the household. It’s in three styles o’
bindin’, all _reel_ handsome, but——”
“I want to look at another picture now,” protested Woolly Billy. “I’m
tired of this one of the angels sayin’ their prayers.”
His amazing shock of silver-gold curls was bent intently over the book
in the stranger’s lap. The woodsmen, on the other hand, kept on smoking
with a far-off look, as if they heard not a word of the fluent harangue.
They had a deep distrust and dread of this black-whiskered stranger, now
that he stood revealed as the Man-Wanting-to-Sell-Something. The
majority of them would not even glance in the direction of the gaudy
book, lest by doing so they should find themselves involved in some
expensive and complicated obligation.
The stranger responded to Woolly Billy’s appeal by shutting the book
firmly. “There’s lots more pictures purtier than that one, sonny,” said
he. “But ye must ask yer dad to buy it fer ye. He won’t regret it.” And
he passed the volume on to Hawker, who, having no dread of book-agents,
began to turn over the leaves with a superior smile.
“Dad’s gone away ever so far,” answered Woolly Billy sadly. “It’s an
awfully pretty book.” And he looked at Tug Blackstock appealingly.
“Look here, mister,” drawled Blackstock. “I don’t take much stock myself
in those kind of books, an’ moreover (not meanin’ no offence to you),
any man that’s sellin’ ’em has got to larn to do a sight o’ lyin’. But
as Woolly Billy here wants it so bad I’ll take a copy, if ’tain’t too
dear. All the same, it’s only fair to warn ye that ye’ll not do much
business in Brine’s Rip, for there was a book agent here last year as
got about ha’f the folks in the village to sign a crooked contract, and
we was all stung bad. I’d advise ye to move on, an’ not really tackle
Brine’s Rip fer another year or so. Now, what’s the price?”
The stranger’s face had fallen during this speech, but it brightened at
the concluding question.
“Six dollars, four dollars, an’ two dollars an’ a half, accordin’ to
style of bindin’,” he answered, bringing out a handful of leaflets and
order forms and passing them round briskly. “An’ ye don’t need to pay
more’n fifty cents down, an’ sign this order, an’ ye pay the balance in
a month’s time, when the books are delivered. I’ll give ye my receipt
for the fifty cents, an’ ye jest fill in this order accordin’ to the
bindin’ ye choose. Let me advise ye, as a friend, to take the six dollar
one. It’s the best value.”
“Thanks jest the same,” said Blackstock drily, pulling out his wallet,
“but I guess Woolly Billy’d jest as soon have the two-fifty one. An’
I’ll pay ye the cash right now. No signin’ orders fer me. Here’s my name
an’ address.”
“Right ye are,” agreed the stranger cordially, pocketing the money and
signing the receipt. “Cash payments for me every time, if I could have
_my_ way. Now, if some o’ you other gentlemen will follow Mr.
Blackstock’s fine example, ye’ll never regret it—an’ neither will I.”
“Come on, Woolly Billy. Come on, Jim,” said Blackstock, stepping out
into the street with the child and the dog at his heels. “We’ll be
gittin’ along home, an’ leave this gentleman to argy with the boys.”