THE PLAN SUCCEEDS
Old Gaspard Javet was no more than out of the house before Akerley
commenced a detailed account of the morning’s adventure; and when
that was finished—and it was brief as it was vivid—the girl
expressed her delight at Ned Tone’s defeat. But she confessed her
satisfaction was somewhat chilled by apprehension of trouble of the
bully’s making. Akerley made light of her fears on that score.
“I am glad it happened just as it did,” he said. “He picked the
fight. I’m not worrying about him, so long as you are glad I did the
beating. And I don’t think he will talk about it, even after his lip
heals.”
“The less he talks the more he will think,” she said. “He is stupid
and ignorant; and now we know he is bad—a murderer at heart. What
brains he has are inclined to craftiness and cunning. Hatred will
stimulate them—and he is sure to hate you for that thrashing.”
“I believe you. He has hopes of my starving in the woods. But hatred
is not the only sentiment I inspire in him. He is afraid of me.”
“Of course he is afraid of you. He will never stand up to you again
in a fair fight, if he can avoid it.”
“That is not all. Fear of my fists is not his greatest fear of me.
He would rather know me to be dead in the woods, by his lies, than
know me to be here. This came to me when your grandfather was
talking. Now I am beginning to understand things that I used to half
see and half-heartedly wonder at; and of course I have read about
them in books, as you have, too, I suppose. This has been an
illuminating morning to me.”
She looked at him inquiringly; and there was a shadow of
embarrassment in her eyes. She smiled and lowered her glance.
“When you talk like this I am certainly reminded of things I have
read in books,” she said. “But that is not enough intelligent
conversation, is it? What things do you mean?”
Akerley took pipe and tobacco from his pocket and regarded them
fixedly in the palm of his hand.
“I mean jealousy—and things like that,” he said, in a somewhat
stuffy voice. “Jealousy of one man for another—about a woman—and
that sort of ro—er—thing.”
“Oh, that sort of thing! Are you really ignorant of things like
that?—you, who have lived in the big world of men and women?”
Akerley glanced at her, then back at his pipe and tobacco. He
produced a knife and fell to slicing a pipeful.
“It is a fact,” he said. “Ever since I was a small boy I have had to
drive all my brains and energy at other things. I have been only an
onlooker at games of that sort, big and little; and as I didn’t know
the rules, and couldn’t guess them by looking, I wasn’t an
interested onlooker. But I have learned a great deal since I landed
in this clearing; and this very morning Ned Tone tried to lose me in
the woods simply to keep me away from here. Nothing like that ever
happened to me before.”
Catherine colored slightly.
“I wonder if you know anything of the horrors of loneliness,” she
said in a low voice.
“I have been lonely in cities and on crowded roads,” he replied;
“and I have been lonely in the air, sometimes with the old earth
like a colored map below me and flying blind in the fog, and with
sunlit clouds under me like fields and drifts of solid snow.”
“But you had your work,” she said; “and you were not always alone;
and in crowds you were always elbowed by strangers. I have never
seen a crowd of people. You have not known such loneliness as
this—of endless woods, and empty clearings, and winds lost in
everlasting tree-tops, and empty skies with only a speck of a hawk
circling high up. You worked and fought—but I had nothing to do. But
for books I’d have gone mad, I believe.”
“I can imagine it—but I wish you would tell me all about it.”
At that moment the expression of her eyes changed and she got
quickly up from the table.
“What if Grandfather tells Ned Tone about your arrival!” she
exclaimed. “About the devil he is looking for? Ned is from the
settlements. He often goes out to the towns on the main river. He
would know it was an aëroplane, and he would suspect the truth about
you.”
“He may not mention it,” said Akerley; “so why go to meet trouble?”
Then he did a thing that astonished himself more than it seemed to
surprise Catherine. He stood up, stepped around the table and took
her passive right hand awkwardly in his.
“We have both read of this in books, and I have often seen it done
on the stage,” he said, in a wooden tone of voice; and he raised her
hand, bowed his head and touched his lips to the backs of her
fingers. Releasing her hand swiftly he turned, went out by the back
door, took two pails from the bench against the wall and started for
the cow-yard.
The young woman ran after him and called from the porch that she and
her grandfather had already attended to the milking. He returned and
replaced the milk-pails.
“It is just as well,” he said. “I could only use one hand, anyway,
for that big rube caught me one smasher on my lame shoulder.”
She advised him to bathe the shoulder and put arnica on it. She gave
him the arnica along with the advice; and he accepted both. After
that he helped her with the work about the house; and then they sat
on the porch and she told him a great deal about her parentage and
herself while they awaited the reappearance of Gaspard Javet.
Catherine MacKim had been born twenty-one years ago, in this very
house in this clearing. She could not remember anything of her
mother, Gaspard’s daughter, for she had been left motherless at two
years of age; but her father, a son of the Crimean veteran, had
often talked to her about Catherine Javet, whom he had met and
married, cherished and buried in this wilderness. Hugh MacKim had
been utterly lacking in worldly ambition; and though not a weakling
in mind or body, he had possessed none of that particular blunt yet
narrow variety of strength by which thousands of men force
themselves successfully through life. He had been born in a big
house in a prosperous farming district in Ontario. His father, Major
Ian MacKim, who had been awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor
for his services before Sevastopol when an ensign in an infantry
regiment of the line, had moved to Canada soon after his retirement
from the active list of the army. Whatever the major may have been
when operating against the enemies of his King and Country, he had
proved himself an extraordinarily violent, stupid and difficult
person in civil life. As a farmer he had made himself an object of
terror and dislike to his neighbors and of fear and distress to his
family. The fact that he had contracted the causes of that bitter
and unreasoning temper while serving his country at the risk of his
life excused it to those of his connections and acquaintances who
were so fortunate as never to come into contact with it; but the
truth is that rheumatism from Russia and a liver whose action had
been dulled and deranged in India had made that valiant old soldier
a terror to his own children.
Under the circumstances young Hugh MacKim, (who was later
Catherine’s father), had been glad to leave the farm and go to
school in Montreal; and when his school years had come to an end and
he had been ordered to return to the farm, he had taken to the woods
instead. That life had suited him. He had given up, without regret,
most of the things to which he had been born and bred; and of all
that collection of inherited and acquired tastes and habits, only
his mild affection for books, his good manners and his sense of fair
play had survived. From one point and another of the northern fringe
of settlement he had written occasionally to his mother.
After the major’s death the widow had sent the Cross of the Legion
of Honor to her strayed son Hugh, hoping that it might act as a spur
to hereditary pride and ambitions. It had pleased him mildly, that
was all. So the widow had turned to her younger son for an
acknowledgment of family and class responsibilities. Then Hugh had
come into the Indian River country, “cruising timber” for a big firm
of Quebec operators; and here he had discovered Gaspard Javet and
his secluded clearings and his beautiful daughter. Hugh had not gone
farther. He had even neglected to retrace his steps to Quebec and
submit his report on the timber of the lands which he had gone forth
to explore. He had simply fallen in love with Catherine Javet and
thrown in his lot with her father.
Hugh MacKim had known happiness and contentment in his
height-of-land for seven years—until his wife’s death; and after
that—after time had dulled the cutting edge of his loneliness for
her—he had known contentment for the remaining years of his life.
His appetite for the woods, and for those dexterities of hand and
eye which life in the wilderness called for, had never failed him.
He had been a poet in his appreciation of nature. His eye for the
weather had never been as knowing as Gaspard’s, but always more
loving. He had always seen more in dawns and sunsets than promises
of rain or wind or frost. And his had been the knowledge and skill,
but never the ruthlessness, of a first-rate trapper and hunter. He
had delighted in the companionship of his father-in-law from the
first; and admiration and affection had been mutual in the
friendship of those two. His love for his daughter had been tender
and unfaltering. He had taught her the delight of books and of the
life around her. He had taught her to read two languages from
printed pages and the hundred tongues and signs of wood, water and
sky. He had died two winters ago.
“I should like to have known your father,” said Akerley. “I believe
he was right about himself, his own life—but didn’t he ever look
ahead? Did he picture you here in the woods always?”
“There was no place in the big world for him,” she replied. “We
belonged to these woods, he and I; and, of course, he did not know
that he was to die so soon. His health was good. He was ill only a
few days.”
“Part of his brain must have been asleep,” said Akerley. “He thought
of you always as a child, I suppose. All this would be well enough
if you never grew up; but you are grown up already. And your
grandfather cannot live for ever. He is queer, anyway—with this
crazy idea in his head about devils.”
“Here he is,” said Catherine.
Gaspard Javet stepped out onto the back porch and stood his rifle
against the wall. He sat down and reflectively combed his beard with
long fingers crooked with the toil of the woods. Then he looked at
Akerley with a new interest, new curiosity and a distinct light of
kindliness in his gray eyes.
“I found Ned Tone,” he said. “He tol’ me how he’d had a fight with a
b’ar—an’ he looked it. I didn’t gainsay him.”
“Did you tell him anything, Grandad?” asked Catherine.
“Yes, I told ’im how I’d like fine to see the b’ar.”
“Nothin’ about the devil, Grandad?”
“Not me—to be laughed at fer an old fool by them fat-heads down
round B’ilin’ Pot.”
“Did you ask him why he told this gentleman to go to the westward to
find these clearings?”
“I didn’t tell ’im nothin’ about what doesn’t consarn ’im. If he
wants to know what’s happened to this young feller he kin take the
old road to the west an’ try to find out.”
“I think you are very clever and wise, Grandad,” said the girl; and
she glanced at Akerley with relief in her eyes.
Akerley felt relief, too. The heavy hitter was off his trail for the
moment, at least. But something else worried him.
“About that devil,” he said, turning to Gaspard. “What makes you
think it was a devil?”
“I heared it miles an’ miles away,” replied the old man, “It was a
devilish sound, hummin’ all ’round in the dark. It was foretold to
me long ago in a dream—how I’d be beset by a devil, an’ how I’d best
’im if I kep’ my eyes skinned an’ my gun handy. I ain’t afeared of
’im—but I was at first. I hid in the woods; but pretty soon that old
dream come back to me about how a devil would beset me one day fer
the cussin’, unbelievin’ ways o’ my youth, but how I’d surely git
’im in time if I kep’ after ’im.”
“What would you do if you found him?” asked Akerley.
The old man twitched a thumb toward the rifle against the wall.
“But if he’s a devil you couldn’t hurt him with a bullet.”
“Ye’re wrong. In my dream I shot ’im dead as pork. And now that I’ve
told you all about that devil, young man, I’d like to hear more
about yerself.”
“Have you ever heard of men flying in the air?”
“What’s that?” exclaimed Gaspard, with a swift change of voice and a
queer, dangerous gleam in his gray eyes. “Men flyin’? No, I ain’t!
Nor I don’t want to. Devils may go disguised, in lonely places as
well as in towns, fer to dig pit-falls fer the feet of men. But men
can’t fly!”
Catherine gave the intruder a warning glance.
Akerley sighed and told a story of his past—a very patchy one—along
the lines which he had planned while lying awake in the barn the
night before. But his heart was not in it. He felt that the old
woodsman was doing him an injustice and an injury in believing in
flying devils and at the same time refusing to believe in flying
men. He felt that, but for this crazy kink in Gaspard’s brain, he
could safely be as frank with him as he had been with Catherine—for
he saw the qualities of kindness and understanding in the old man.
But he had to invent a silly story as he valued his life.
He was from the big river, he said: but he had lived in towns
sometimes and even gone to school. He had made his living in the
woods of late years in lumber-camps and on the “drives” and that
sort of thing. He had trapped for one winter, without much success;
and he had taken city sportsmen up-country several times, for
fishing in summer and to hunt moose and deer in the fall. He was not
a registered guide, and he had not kept to any one part of the
country for long at a time.
“What started ye fer Injun River?” asked Gaspard.
“I had to start for somewhere, and quick at that,” replied Akerley.
“Had to, hey? Chased out?”
“I didn’t wait to see if I was chased. I had plenty of gas, as it
happened, and—”
“Hey?”
“Grub. I shifted my ground quick and stepped light so’s not to leave
any tracks in the mud. My canoe was ready.”
“I reckon ye mean that the Law’s on yer tracks,” said Gaspard,
eyeing him keenly. “Ye don’t look like a law-breaker to me—onless
maybe it was a game-law ye busted.”
“Anything you prefer.”
“Well, some game-laws have hoss-sense an’ reason to ’em and others
ain’t.”
“He wouldn’t kill deer or moose or caribou out of season,” said
Catherine, looking intently at the intruder. “But I wouldn’t think
the worse of anyone who took a salmon out of a rented pool, as Mick
Otter did on Indian River.”
There was something in her glance that caused Akerley to sit up and
use his brains quick.
“I am glad you feel that way,” he said, quite briskly.
He remembered an actual incident of a trip he had made into the
wilds years ago.
“I dipped into a pool with a spear that was given me by an old
Indian,” he continued. “I got a fine fish—twenty-four pounds. You
should have seen him come up like a ghost through the black water to
the light of the birch-bark torch. Great sport—but it isn’t inside
the law now-a-days.”
“Ye’re right!” exclaimed old Gaspard Javet. “I ain’t speared a
salmon in thirty years—but I reckon I’ve done worse.”
“So here I am—with a frying-pan and an old quilt,” said Akerley.
“Thar’s grub enough fer ye here, an’ work too,” said Gaspard. “Grub
an’ work, an’ blankets to sleep in—which is enough fer any sensible
man. Ye’re welcome to all three fer as long as it suits ye, fer I
like yer looks.”