Produced by David Edwards, Emmy and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)
[Illustration: Cover]
Travelers Five
Along Life's Highway
Works of ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON
The Little Colonel Series
(_Trade Mark, Reg. U. S. Pat. Of._)
Each one vol., large 12mo, cloth, illustrated
The Little Colonel Stories $1.50
(Containing in one volume the three stories, "The
Little Colonel," "The Giant Scissors," and "Two
Little Knights of Kentucky.")
The Little Colonel's House Party 1.50
The Little Colonel's Holidays 1.50
The Little Colonel's Hero 1.50
The Little Colonel at Boarding-School 1.50
The Little Colonel in Arizona 1.50
The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation 1.50
The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor 1.50
The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding 1.50
Mary Ware: The Little Colonel's Chum 1.50
Mary Ware in Texas 1.50
The above 11 vols., _boxed_ with The Little Colonel's Good
Times Book, as a set of 12 vols 18.00
* * * * *
The Little Colonel Good Times Book 1.50
The Little Colonel Doll Book 1.50
Illustrated Holiday Editions
Each one vol., small quarto, cloth, illustrated, and printed in colour
The Little Colonel $1.25
The Giant Scissors 1.25
Two Little Knights of Kentucky 1.25
Big Brother 1.25
Cosy Corner Series
Each one vol., thin 12mo, cloth, illustrated
The Little Colonel $.50
The Giant Scissors .50
Two Little Knights of Kentucky .50
Big Brother .50
Ole Mammy's Torment .50
The Story of Dago .50
Cicely .50
Aunt 'Liza's Hero .50
The Quilt that Jack Built .50
Flip's "Islands of Providence" .50
Mildred's Inheritance .50
Other Books
Joel: A Boy of Galilee $1.50
In the Desert of Waiting .50
The Three Weavers .50
Keeping Tryst .50
The Legend of the Bleeding Heart .50
The Rescue of the Princess Winsome .50
The Jester's Sword .50
Asa Holmes 1.00
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
53 Beacon Street Boston, Mass.
[Illustration: TRAVELERS FIVE ALONG LIFE'S HIGHWAY]
Travelers Five
Along Life's Highway
Jimmy, Gideon Wiggan, The Clown, Wexley Snathers, Bap. Sloan
BY
Annie Fellows Johnston
Author of "The Little Colonel Series," "Asa Holmes,"
"Joel: A Boy of Galilee," etc.
With a Foreword by
Bliss Carman
Frontispiece in full colour from a painting by
Edmund H. Garrett
[Illustration: Emblem]
L. C. Page & Company
Boston [Illustration: Flower] Mdccccxi
_Copyright, 1901, 1904, by_
THE SHORTSTORY PUBLISHING COMPANY
_Copyright, 1899, by_
THE S. S. MCCLURE CO.
_Copyright, 1903, by_
THE CENTURY CO.
_Copyright, 1911, by_
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
_All rights reserved_
First impression, October, 1911
_Electrotyped and Printed by
THE COLONIAL PRESS
C. H. Simonds & Co., Boston. U. S. A._
Foreword
OF all the elements that go to make up a good story,--plot,
verisimilitude, happy incident, local colour, excellent style,--none
perhaps is more important than the touch of understanding sympathy. The
writer must not only see his characters clearly and draw them with a
masterly hand; he must have the largeness of heart that can share in all
the turbulent experience of the human spirit. His people must be set
against the vast shifting background of destiny. He must show their
dramatic relations, one to another, and the influence of life upon life;
he must also show their profounder, more moving and mysterious,
relations to fate and time and the infinite things.
The writer of fiction creates for us a mimic country, peoples it with
creatures of the fancy, like ourselves and yet different, and asks us to
stray for our entertainment through that new kingdom. The scenes may be
as strange or as familiar as you please; the characters as commonplace
or as exceptional as you will; yet they must always be within the range
of our sympathy. The incidents must be such as we ourselves could pass
through; the people must be such as we can understand. They may well be
exceptional, for that enlists our interest and enlivens our curiosity;
they must not be beyond our comprehension nor outside our spiritual
pale, for then we could have no sympathy with them, and our hearts would
only grow cold as we read.
And what is at the base of our sympathy and interest? Nothing but our
common life. They, too,--all the glad or sorrowing children of
imaginative literature from Helen of Troy to Helena Richie--are
travelers like ourselves on the great highway. We know well how
difficult a road it is, how rough, how steep, how dangerous, how boggy,
how lined with pitfalls, how bordered with gardens of deadly delights,
how beset by bandits, how noisy with fakirs, how overhung with poisonous
fruit and swept by devastating storms. We know also what stretches of
happiness are there, what days of friendship, what hours of love, what
sane enjoyment, what rapturous content.
How should we not, then, be interested in all that goes by upon that
great road? We like to sit at our comfortable windows, when the fire is
alight or the summer air is soft, and "watch the pass," as they say in
Nantucket,--what our neighbours are about, and what strangers are in
town. If we live in a small community, there is the monotony of our
daily routine to be relieved. When an unknown figure passes down the
street, we may enjoy the harmless excitement of novelty and taste
something of the keen savour of adventure. If we are dwellers in a great
city, where every passer is unknown, there is still the discoverer's
zest in larger measure; every moment is great with possibility; every
face in the throng holds its secret; every figure is eloquent of human
drama. The pageant is endless, its story never finished. Who, indeed,
could not be spellbound, beholding that countless changing
tatterdemalion caravan go by? Yet all we may hope for of the inner
history of these journeying beings, so humanly amazing, so significant,
and all moved like ourselves by springs of joy and fear, hope and
discouragement, is a glimpse here and there, a life-story revealed in a
single gesture, a tragic history betrayed in the tone of a voice or the
lifting of a hand, or perhaps a heaven of gladness in a glancing smile.
For the most part their orbits are as aloof from us as the courses of
the stars, potent and mystic manifestations of the divine, glowing
puppets of the eternal masked in a veil of flesh.
This was the pomp of history which held the mind of Shakespeare, of
Dickens, of Cervantes, of Balzac, in thrall, and drew the inquiring eye
of Browning and Whitman, of Stevenson and Borrow, with so charmed and
comprehending a look. To understand and set down faithfully some small
portion of the tale of this ever changing procession, which is for ever
appearing over the sunrise hills of to-morrow and passing into the
twilight valleys of yesterday, is the engrossing task of the novelist
and the teller of tales.
How well that task is accomplished, is the measure of the story-teller's
power. He may pick his characters from homely types that we know, and
please us with the familiar; or he may paint for us some portion of the
great pageant that has never passed our door, and raise us with the
mystery of unaccustomed things. In either case he will touch our hearts
by revealing the hidden springs of action in his chosen men and women.
He will enlarge the borders of our mental vision and illumine our
appreciation by his greater insight, greater knowledge, finer reasoning.
In his magic mirror we shall not only see more of life than we saw
before, but we shall see it more clearly, more penetratingly, more
wonderfully. And ever afterwards, as we look on the world we know, life
which perhaps used to seem to us so commonplace, and events which used
to seem such a matter of course, will take on a significance, a dignity,
a glamour, which they never before possessed,--or, to speak more truly,
which they always possessed, indeed, but which we had not the power to
see. This is the great educative use of creative literature; it teaches
us to look on the world with more understanding, to confront it in
manlier fashion, to appreciate the priceless gift of life more widely
and generously, and so to live more fully and efficiently and happily.
The great opportunity of literature, then, and its great responsibility,
are evident. As Matthew Arnold put it, "The future of poetry is
immense." In an age when men and women are coming more and more to do
their own thinking and form their own ethical judgments, the power and
moral obligation of letters must tend to increase rather than to
diminish. It is an encouraging sign of the times and of growing
intelligence, that we demand a greater veracity in our stories, and like
writers who find significance and charm in common surroundings. Our
genuine appreciation has produced a very real national literature, great
in amount and often reaching true eminence and distinction in quality.
Books like Miss Alice Brown's "Meadow Grass" and "Country Neighbours"
are at once truly native and full of the dignity and poetry and humour
of life. At their best they reveal depths of human feeling and
experience with a telling insight and sympathy, and with a felicity of
style, which belong only to masterpieces of fiction.
To this charming province in the wide domain of letters "Travelers Five"
belongs, and Mrs. Annie Fellows Johnston's many admirers must
congratulate themselves on its appearance, as they stir the fire of an
autumn afternoon. Here once more we may sit as at a pleasant window and
"watch the pass" on the great highway. Here you shall see approaching,
in that delightful and motley cavalcade, Irish Jimmy in his ranchman's
dress, his warm Celtic heart urging him on up the obscure trail of
unselfish good; here, grotesque old Gid Wiggan, flouting the shows of
fashion, yet himself a showman conspicuous in the greater show of life;
here, the old story, a fine gentleman's sense and feeling masquerading
under the antics of a traveling clown; next, an embarrassed villager
with something like greatness thrust upon him; and last, another strange
example of silent persistent New England idealism, too proud to confess
itself and only reaching its goal through a lifetime of repression and
apparent failure.
But I am obstructing your view while I prate! Forgive me. I will step
aside and let you have the window to yourself, so that you may quietly
observe these Travelers going by.
[Illustration: Bliss Carman signature]
NEW CANAAN, CONN.,
26 September, 1911.
Contents
PAGE
The First Traveler. Jimmy
On the Trail of the Wise Men 1
The Second Traveler. Gid Wiggan
In the Wake of a Honeymoon 55
The Third Traveler. The Clown
Towards His Accolade 91
The Fourth Traveler. Wexley Snathers
By Way of an Inherited Circus 131
The Fifth Traveler. Bap. Sloan
To His Mount of Pisgah 159
The First Traveler
Jimmy
On The Trail of the Wise Men
ORDINARILY a fleck of cigar ashes in the pot of mashed potatoes would
not have caused a row in the ranch kitchen, but to-day old Jimmy had had
a sup too much. At such times the mere sight of Matsu, the Japanese
cook, could provoke him to oaths, and it was Matsu who had unwittingly
dropped the ashes into the pot, as he laid his cigar stump on the shelf
above the stove, preparatory to dishing up dinner.
Time was when Jimmy had been the cook at Welsh's ranch, and had had it
all his own way in the greasy adobe kitchen. But that was before Ben
Welsh's last round-up. Since then his widow had been obliged to turn
part of the cattle-ranch into a boarding camp for invalids; the part
that lay in a narrow strip along the desert. Health-seekers paid better
than cattle or alfalfa she found.
Many things came in with the new administration. Matsu was one of them,
in his white chef's cap and jacket. The spotless linen was a delight to
the boarders, but to Jimmy, deposed to the rank of hewer of wood and
drawer of water, it was the badge of the usurper. Naturally enough his
jealousy took the form of making Matsu live up to his linen, and he
watched him like a cat for the slightest lapse from cleanliness.
This constant warfare with Matsu was one of the few diversions the camp
afforded, and every man made much of it. Had he been let alone, old
Jimmy would have accepted the situation as merely one more ill-turn of
Fate, which had left him as usual at the bottom of the wheel. But his
futile resentment was too funny a thing for his tormentors to allow to
die out.
It was a remark made early that morning which set him to brooding over
his wrongs, and finally led to the sup too much which precipitated the
fight over the potato-pot. Batty Carson made it, in a hoarse whisper,
all the voice left to him since the grippe sent him West in his senior
year. (He had been the best tenor in his college glee-club.) Jimmy was
moving a table into the shadow of the tents, in order that the daily
game of poker might begin. Poker was all there was in that God-forsaken
desert to save a man's reason, Batty declared, so they played it from
breakfast till bed-time. As the usual group joined him around the table,
he opened a new deck of cards and began shuffling it. Automatically he
found the joker and flipped it out of the pack. It fell face up on the
dry Bermuda grass and old Jimmy stooped to pick it up.
Batty stopped him with a laugh. "A seasoned old poker player like you
stooping to pick up the joker!" he teased. "You know well enough only
one game goes on this ranch, and the joker's no good in _that_." Then he
winked at the others.
"That's what you'll be after awhile, Jimmy, if you don't stand up for
your rights better than you are doing. Matsu will be taking every trick
in the game, and you'll count for nothing more than just the joker of
the pack."
Jimmy flared up with an indignant oath at the laugh which followed, tore
the card in two, and would have gone off muttering vengeance on Batty
himself, had not the young fellow stopped him and teased him back into
good humour. But the remark rankled afterward because there was such a
large element of truth in it. Jimmy was no fool even if he was
slow-witted. He knew as well as any one else that he had never counted
for much in any game Life had ever given him a hand in. He brooded over
the fact until some sort of solace was necessary. After that he burned
for an occasion to assert himself. It came when Mrs. Welsh called to him
to fill the wood-box. Just as he threw down his first armful of
mesquite, the accident befell the potatoes, and he waited to see what
Matsu would do.
What could Matsu do with sixteen hungry men listening for the dinner
bell, but scoop out a big spoonful from the side of the pot where the
ashes had fallen, toss it out of the window and heap the rest of the
white fluffy mass into the hot dish awaiting it? Jimmy would have done
the same in his day but now he thundered, "Throw out the whole potful,
you pig of a heathen! Do you want to drive away every boarder on the
ranch with your dirty tricks? Throw it out, I say."
With the good-nature that rarely failed him, Matsu only shrugged his
shoulders, giggled his habitual giggle and proceeded, unmoved by
threats.
"Go get 'notha drink," he advised, as Jimmy continued to glare at him.
"Make you have heap much betta feeling. Not so big mad. Go get full."
Dinner was twenty minutes late that day. The boarders heard the reason
from Hillis, who came in in his shirt sleeves to wait on the table, in
place of Mrs. Welsh. Hillis was the dish-washer, a tall big-fisted
lumberman from Maine, who, stranded at the close of an ill-starred
prospecting tour, had taken temporary service in Mrs. Welsh's kitchen.
He talked cheerfully of the disturbance as he clumped around the table,
thrusting the dishes at each boarder in turn. They forgave his
awkwardness in their interest in the fight.
"Jimmy began it," he told them. "Swung on to the pot and tried to pull
it away from Jappy and throw out the stuff himself. But Jappy wouldn't
have it, and batted him one on the head with the potato masher. Then
Jimmy went in for blood, and grabbed the meat-knife, and would have put
it into him in a pair of seconds if I hadn't tripped him up and sat on
him. There was a hot time in there for a spell, the air was blue. Old
Jimmy cussin' for all he was worth in the sand-flapper lingo, and Matsu
going him one better every time in his pigeon English!"
"I suppose they'll both throw up their jobs now," remarked a dyspeptic
looking man near the foot of the table. "I thought it was too good to
last, and this God-forsaken Arizona desert can't hold more than one chef
like Matsu. He's the perfection of his kind. I'd feel like hitting the
trail myself if he should go."
"That's what Mrs. Welsh is afraid of," replied Hillis. "She's out there
now trying to patch up the peace with him and coax him to stay. She told
me not to tell you about the potatoes--thought it might turn some of you
against your victuals; but it's too blamed funny to keep."
"For my part I hope she'll patch up the peace with Jimmy, too," said
Batty Carson in his hoarse whisper. "He's the only amusing thing in all
this howling wilderness. His being so far off the track himself makes it
all the funnier when he goes to playing human guidepost for everybody
else."
"He'll get his neck wrung a-doing it sometime," rejoined Hillis. "I told
him so when he came fussing around at first, sticking his fingers in my
dish-water to see if it was hot enough to kill germs. I told him I'd
scald him instead of the dishes if he didn't let me alone. But it's just
his way I suppose. He's been here off and on ever since Welsh bought the
ranch."
"It's off this time," came Batty's croaking whisper. "There he goes now.
Whew! He's hot! Just watch him hump himself along!"
The eight men whose backs were toward the window, turned in their chairs
to follow the gaze of the others. They had a glimpse of a tall spare
figure, hurrying stiffly past the house as fast as his rheumatic joints
would allow. There was anger in every line of it. Even the red bandana
around his throat seemed to express it. The fierce curves of his old
hat-brim, the bristling hairs of his grizzly mustache, the snap of his
lean jaws as the few snags left in his sunken gums opened and shut on a
quid of tobacco, all told of an inward rage which would be long in
cooling.
"Well, it's all over now," announced Hillis a moment later, coming back
from the kitchen with a bowl of hot gravy. "Jimmy vowed one of them had
to go, so Mrs. Welsh said he'd have to be that one. She could get a
Mexican to chop wood and carry water, but she couldn't get another cook
like Matsu. And Jimmy's that mad and insulted and hurt he can't get off
the place fast enough. He's gone now to pack his kit, muttering as if
he'd swallowed a lot of distant thunder."
A laugh went around the long table. Usually the meals proceeded in
silence except for a few spasmodic outbursts. Sitting all day in the
sun, gazing at the monotonous desert landscape while one waits for
winter to crawl by, is not a conversational stimulant. But to-day, even
Maidlow, the grumpiest invalid in the lot, forgot his temperature and
himself in adding his mite to the fund of anecdotes passing around the
table about Jimmy. The conversation was less restrained than usual in
the absence of the only lady and child which the ranch boasted. The
Courtlands were spending the day in Phoenix, so there were three
vacant chairs at the foot of the table. One was a child's high-chair
with a bib hanging over its back. Hillis laid his hand on it in passing.
"Here's one that will miss the old rain-crow," he said, as if glad to
find some good word about Jimmy. "Little Buddy Courtland comes about as
near loving him as anybody could, I guess. _He'll_ miss him."
"It's Dane Ward who'll really miss him," declared the dyspeptic,
glancing out of the window at the farthest row of tents to the one at
the end whose screen door was closed. "Now Jimmy's gone I don't see what
that poor fellow will do when he needs some one to sit up with him of
nights."
"That's right," agreed Batty Carson. "Jimmy's been his right bower ever
since he came. I'll give the old devil credit for that much."
While they talked, Jimmy, outside in the shack which he shared with
Hillis, was gathering up in a furious rage his small bundle of
belongings, cursing darkly as he threw boots, shirts and overalls into a
confused heap in the middle of his bunk. Near at hand the tents stood
empty in the December sun; five rows of them, four in a row with twenty
foot spaces between. Each canvas-covered screen door swung open, and
outside sat a camp chair or a big wooden rocker, with blanket or
overcoat trailing across it, just as its occupant had left it to go in
to dinner. A litter of newspapers and magazines lay all around on the
dry Bermuda grass.
There was one exception. One screen door was closed, that of the
farthest tent on the back row in line with Jimmy's shack. A sound of
coughing--choked, convulsive coughing, had been coming from that
direction for several minutes, but the sound did not penetrate Jimmy's
consciousness until he heard his name called in an agonized tone. He
craned his head out to listen. The call came again in a frantic gasp:
"Jimmy! Jimmy! Oh, _somebody_ come!"
Then he recognized the voice. It was Dane Ward calling him. In his row
with Matsu he had forgotten the boy; forgotten that he was to carry him
his dinner and give him his medicine. He remembered with a pang of
self-reproach that he had promised to come back with fresh wood as soon
as he had carried an armful of wood to the kitchen. He started off on a
stiff jog-trot towards the tent.
A moment later, maybe not even so long as that, for as he ran he knew
that he might be racing against death, he dashed into the kitchen which
he had sworn never again to enter, and caught up a handful of salt.
Hillis, thinking he had lost his mind, almost dropped the tray of
dessert dishes he was holding for Matsu to fill; but Mrs. Welsh
recognizing the import of Jimmy's act, followed without question as he
called back over his shoulder, "It's Dane! The worst hemorrhage the
lad's had yet."
Hillis carried the news into the dining room with the dessert. Big and
strong, never having had a sick day in his life, he could not know the
effect it would produce, and Mrs. Welsh had not thought to warn him. The
room grew silent. It was what might happen to any one of them; had
happened in fact to all. The apprehension of it was the skeleton at
their every feast. First one man and then another pushed back his plate
and went out into the sunshine. They all liked Dane, the shy, quiet boy
from some village in the New York hills. That was all they knew of him,
for he always sat apart. Sometimes there was a book in his lap but he
rarely read--just sat and gazed off towards the east with a hungry look
in his big grey eyes. The homesick longing of them was heart-breaking to
see.
They went back to their chairs and their naps and their newspapers, but
the usual afternoon monotony was broken by the interest centering in the
farthest tent in the last row. They glanced up furtively every time the
door opened. It swung many times in the course of the afternoon, for
Mrs. Welsh to go in and out, for the doctor to make a hurried visit, for
Jimmy to come and go with crushed ice and clean towels, a spoon or a
pitcher of fresh water.
For Jimmy, in his anxious ministrations, forgot his fight with Matsu,
forgot that he had had no dinner, and that he was in the midst of
preparations for leaving the ranch. The ugly facts did not come back to
him till several hours had passed. Then he started up from the chair
beside Dane's bed and tip-toed heavily across the floor. He would finish
making up his bundle while the boy was asleep. The danger was past now.
If he could get down to the Tempe road before dark, probably he could
catch a ride the rest of the way into Phoenix. A board creaked and
Dane opened his eyes.
"I wasn't asleep," he said weakly. "Hand me that little picture off the
bureau, won't you, Jimmy?" Then as his fingers closed over it--"And roll
the canvas to the top of the door please. I can't see."
Jimmy sat down again, impelled by the pitifulness of the thin white
face. He knew the picture, having examined it privately on several
occasions while sweeping the tent. It was a tin-type of two laughing
school-girls, with their arms around each other. It was plain to him
that one was Dane's sister. He guessed the relationship of the other
when he saw that it was on the face unlike his that Dane's wistful eyes
rested longest. Presently he slipped it under his pillow and lay so
still that Jimmy thought he was asleep, until he saw a tear slipping
slowly from under the closed eye-lids. Involuntarily the rough hand went
out and closed in a sympathetic grasp over the white fingers on the
coverlet. Dane bit his lip to hide their twitching and then broke out
bitterly, but in a voice so weak that it came in gasps:
"That doctor back home lied to me! He _lied_! He knew that I was past
saving when he sent me out here. He ought to have told me. Do you
suppose I'd have let my mother mortgage her home--all she had in the
world--to send me, if he hadn't led us to believe that the Arizona
climate could work a miracle? He made it so certain that I'd get well
right away, it seemed suicidal not to take the chance."
He stopped, almost strangled by a paroxysm of coughing, lay panting for
a moment, and then began again, despite Jimmy's warning that it would
make him worse to talk.
"Mother can never pay out without my help, and I've got to lie here to
the end and think of what's in store for her and Sis, and then--_die and
be buried out here in this awful desert_! It'll cost too much to be sent
back home. Oh, how could a man lie like that to a person that's dying?"
The question staggered Jimmy a moment. He turned his eyes uneasily from
Dane's piercing gaze in order that he might lie cheerfully himself.
"What are you thinking about dying for?" he demanded in his bluff way.
"You'll be better than ever after this spell. It sort of cleaned out
your pipes you know. You'll be busting bronchos with the best of them by
spring if you keep up your courage. Look at Mr. Courtland now. He was
worse off than you when he came, a heap sight. Had to be brought on a
stretcher. _He's_ getting well."
"No, it's different--everyway," answered Dane wearily. "He's got his
family with him, and money and--everything. I haven't even my mother's
picture. She never had any taken. If I had even that when the end comes
it wouldn't seem quite so lonesome. But to think of all strange faces,
and afterwards--to lie among strangers hundreds of miles away from
home--oh, it nearly makes me crazy to think of the miles and miles of
cactus and sand between us! I hate the sight of this awful country."
Jimmy looked out through the open door of the tent, across the dreary
waste of desert, separated from the camp by only the irrigating ditch,
and the unfrequented highroad, as if he were seeing it in a new light.
"'Spect it might strike a fellow as sort of the end of nowhere the first
time he sees it," he admitted. "I've lived here so long I kind of like
it myself. But I know what you're craving to see. I lived back in the
hills myself when I was a kid. I was brought up in York state."
Dane raised himself on his elbow, an excited flush on his face. "_You_,
from home," he began. "New York--"
Jimmy pushed him back. "You're getting too frisky," he admonished.
"You'll be took again if you ain't careful. Yes, I know just what you're
pining for. You want to see the hills all red with squaw berries or pink
in arbutus time; and the mountain brooks--nothing like these muddy old
irrigating ditches--so clear you can see the pebbles in the bottom, and
the trout flipping back and forth so fast you can hardly see their
speckles. But Lord! boy--you don't want to go back there now in
mid-winter. The roads are piled up with drifts to the top of the stone
fences and the boughs of the sugar-bush are weighed down with snow till
you'd think you was walking through a grove of Christmas trees."
"Oh, go _on_!" pleaded Dane, as he paused. His eyes were closed, but a
smile rested on his face as if the scenes Jimmy described were his for
the moment. "Jimmy, it's--it's like heaven to hear you talk about it!
Don't stop."
To keep the smile on the white face, that rapt, ineffable smile of
content, Jimmy talked on. Over forty years lay between him and the
scenes he was recalling. He had wandered far afield from his
straight-going, path-keeping Puritan family. He had been glad at times
that they had lost track of him, and that wherever he went he was known
only as "Jimmy." Gradually the reminiscences like the touch of a
familiar hand on a troubled brow, soothed Dane into forgetfulness of his
surroundings, and he fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.
Just at dusk that evening, when Batty Carson went around to the kitchen
for his usual glass of new milk, he was surprised to see Jimmy down by
the wood-pile. He was vigorously at work, helping unload a wagon of
mesquite, and quite as vigorously scolding the Indian who had brought it
for coming so late.
"Thought he was going to leave," croaked Batty, nodding towards the
wood-pile as he took the glass extended towards him.
Hillis chuckled. "Says he's staying on Dane's account; that it would
have touched the heart of a coyote the way he begged not to be left to
die among strangers. It seems they're both from the same state, so
they're almost claiming kin. I rather guess though, that when he'd
cooled down he was glad of any old excuse to stay, and when the boy
begged him and Mrs. Welsh seconded the motion, he felt he could give in
without any let-down to his dignity."
The Indian, gathering up his reins, rattled away in the empty wagon, and
Jimmy began to fill his chip-basket, singing in a high, tremulous
falsetto as he worked. His voice had been his pride in his youth. It was
still sweet, although it cracked at times on the higher notes--
"Wa-ait for me at heav-un's gate,
Swe-et Belle Mahone!"
Hillis laughed. "Sings as if he fairly feels his wings sprouting. It's a
sure sign he's at peace with the world when he trots out those
sentimental old tunes. He doesn't sound now much like the man who was in
here this noon, cussin' and slashing around with a butcher knife."
But Jimmy had not forgotten. He cooked his own supper that night, first
ostentatiously wiping the skillet and everything else that Matsu had
touched, with such an expression of disgust on his face that the little
Jap's fine sense of humour was tickled. He shrugged his shoulders,
giggled his usual jolly giggle, and afterwards mimicked the whole scene
until Mrs. Welsh and Hillis nearly choked with laughter.
Dane was up in a few days, able to go to the dining room and to drive
short distances. Young Mrs. Courtland spoke of his improvement to Jimmy
one morning as they watched him drive away with Hillis in the ranch
surrey. They were going to a neighbouring orange grove to replenish the
stock in the storeroom. Jimmy, kneeling in the path, mending Buddy's
wooden goat, drove a final tack before he straightened himself to
answer.
"No, ma'am!" he said emphatically. "That boy'll never be what is to say
really better. When he tears the last leaf off that calendar in his tent
he ain't going to need next year's."
Mrs. Courtland looked up, shocked, frightened. "He seems almost as well
as my husband, and _he_ is going to get well." She said it defiantly.
"Sure," answered Jimmy. "But he isn't dying of homesickness and worry
along with his lung trouble. He's got you and Buddy and the cash. He
doesn't have to drive himself nearly crazy thinking that the time is
bound to come when those he loves best will be left without a roof over
their heads on account of him. It was worse than cruel--it was a
downright crime for that doctor to build their hopes up so. If he'd had
sense enough to doctor a June-bug he'd have seen that nothing can cure
the lad. To send him on such a wild goose chase is bad enough, but to
send him alone and as poor as he is--Good Lord--"
Jimmy paused, remembering his audience, just in time to stop the
malediction on his tongue.
"But," urged Mrs. Courtland, unconsciously moved to the championship of
the unknown doctor by the fact that her father was a physician, "other
men have come alone and they seem to be getting on all right."
"Yes, but if you take notice they're all the kind that had bucked up
against the world before they got sick, and were used to shifting for
themselves. Now there's Batty Carson. _He's_ going to get well. He goes
about it as if he was training to get on a foot-ball team. So much deep
breathing every so often, hot beef juice at nine, raw eggs at ten, fifty
licks at the wood-pile at eleven--What with his sun baths and water
baths and rubdowns, looking at his thermometer and weighing himself and
feeling his pulse and counting his breaths and watching the clock, he
ain't got time to miss his folks. Most of the boarders this year happen
to be that sort, or else they've got money to go in for all kinds of
amusements that make them forget their troubles. But there was a pitiful
lot of cases here last winter. They was too far gone when they come to
have any fight in 'em. And that's what I say--it's heartless of the
doctors to ship them off here when they've only one chance in a
thousand. The West is full of 'em and it ain't right."
Batty Carson, shuffling cards at the little table set in the shade
behind the next tent, looked up with a wink when he heard his name
mentioned. The others in the game smiled with him as Jimmy went on, and
a voice from one of the farther tents called, "Go it, Jimmy! You ought
to hire a hall and not waste all that eloquence on a lot of lungers who
already vote your ticket. Wish you'd bring me a box of matches when you
get around to it."
Taking the tents in order, as was his custom, emptying slops and filling
pitchers, Jimmy gradually worked his way along the row until he came to
the one outside of which the card-game was going on in silence. As he
moved around inside setting things to rights, Batty Carson held up a
finger and winked.
"Listen!" he whispered. There was a clinking of bottles on the
wash-stand, then a soft plash into the slop-jar, and Jimmy cleared his
throat with a muffled "kha-a-a" as if he had just swallowed something
good.
"The old buzzard's been at my alcohol bottle again," whispered Batty.
"Last time he went against it he didn't leave me enough for one good
rub-down, and then he had the face to reel off a long temperance lecture
on what a pity it was that so many of us fellows kept spirits in our
tents."
A loud laugh followed Jimmy as he walked out innocently clinking his
pails. There was a smell of alcohol in his wake. He had spilled some on
his clothes. Ignorant of the cause of their mirth he looked back at them
over his shoulder with a friendly smile. As he dropped the bucket into
the cistern out by the bamboo thicket, his voice floated back in a high
cracked falsetto:
"Wa-ait for me at heav-un's gate,
Swe-et Belle Mahone!"
Batty laughed again. "What kind of a bet will you fellows put up on
Jimmy's prospect of even getting within gun-shot of heaven's gate?" he
asked.
"I never bet on a dead certainty," answered the man whose turn it was to
play. "He knows he's sampled about everything that goes on in a mining
camp or anywhere else in a new territory, and he's nothing to show for
himself that St. Peter could take as a passport. But he isn't worrying,
as long as he's provided for in this world. His pension keeps him in
clothes and tobacco and when he's too old to work the Soldiers' Home
will take him in."
"He's not worrying over the next world either," some one else added.
"Mrs. Welsh says he has sixty dollars salted down in bank that he's
saved to have masses said for the repose of his soul. Not that he's tied
_his_ belief to anything in particular, but he once had a wife back in
his young days, who was one of the faithful."
"Let us hope that particular bank won't suspend payment," laughed Batty,
"for it's his only hope of ever joining his Belle Mahone."
Dane came back from his drive with new interest in life. The sight of
the olive groves and almond orchards, the alfalfa fields and acres of
lemon and orange trees lying green and gold between the irrigating
canals, had lured him away from thoughts of his condition. He was not so
shy and speechless that day at dinner. He even walked out on the desert
a little way that afternoon, with Buddy clinging to his hand to pilot
him to the wonderful nest of a trap-door spider. For a day or two he
made feeble efforts to follow Batty Carson's example. Instead of
watching the eastern horizon he watched Mrs. Courtland ply her
embroidery needle or bead-work loom, preparing for the Christmas now so
near at hand.
But it was only a few days till he was back in the depths again. The
slightest exertion exhausted him. Burning with fever he clung to Jimmy,
talking of the white hillsides at home, the icicles on the eaves, the
snow-laden cedars. Then when the chill came again he shivered under the
blankets Jimmy tucked around him, and buried his face in the pillow to
hide the tears that shamed him.
"I can't help it," he gasped at last. "I hate myself for being so
babyish. But, Jimmy, it's like living in a nightmare to have that one
thought haunt me day and night. I don't mind the dying--I'll be glad to
go. It racks me so to cough. But it's the dying so far away from
home--alone! I can't go without seeing mother _once_ more! Just _once_,
Jimmy, one little minute."
The old man's mouth twitched. There was no answer to that kind of an
appeal.
"Mail!" called a voice outside. The ranch wagon had come back from
Phoenix, and Hillis was going from tent to tent with the letter-bag.
"Mr. Dane Ward," he called. "One letter and one package. Christmas is
beginning a week ahead of time," he added as Jimmy came to the door.
Dane sat up and opened the letter first, with fingers that trembled in
their eagerness. He read snatches of it aloud, his face brightening with
each new item of interest.
"They're going to have an oyster supper and a Christmas tree for the
Sunday-school. And Charlie Morrow broke into the mill-pond last
Saturday, and the whole skating party nearly drowned trying to fish him
out. Mr. Miller's barn burned last week, and Ed Morris and May Dawson
ran away and were married at Beaver Dam Station. It's like opening a
window into the village and looking down every street to get mother's
letters. I can see everybody that passes by, and pretty near smell what
people are cooking for dinner. She's sending my Christmas present a week
ahead of time, because from what I wrote about the cold nights she was
sure I'd need it right away. Cut the string, please, Jimmy."
Two soft outing flannel shirts rolled out of the paper wrapping. Dane
spread them on the bed beside him with fond touches.
"She made every stitch of them herself," he said proudly, smiling as he
turned the page for the last sentence.
"Christmas will not be Christmas to us with you so far away, dear boy,
but we are going to be brave and make as merry as we can, looking
forward to the time when that blessed land of sunshine will send you
back to us, strong and well."
The letter dropped from his hands and Jimmy heard him say with a
shivering, indrawn breath, "But that time will never come! Never!" Then
catching up the mass of soft flannel as if it brought to him in some way
the touch of the dear hands that had shaped it, he flung himself back on
the pillow, burying his face in it to stifle the sobs that would slip
out between his clenched teeth.
"Never go home again!" he moaned once. "_God!_ How can I stand it!" Then
in a pitiful whisper, "Oh, mother, I _want_ you so."
Jimmy got up and tip-toed softly out of the tent.
* * * * *
That night, Batty Carson, taking his after-supper constitutional, strode
up and down outside the camp, his hands in his overcoat pockets. The
little tents, each with a lamp inside, throwing grotesque shadows on the
white canvas walls, made him think of a cluster of Chinese lanterns.
Only the last one in the last row was dark, and moved by a friendly
impulse to ask after Dane's welfare, he strolled over towards it. Had it
not been for the odour of a rank pipe, he might have stumbled over
Jimmy, in the camp chair outside Dane's door.
"Playing sentinel?" he asked.
"No, just keeping the lad company a spell. He can't bear to hear them
kiotes howl."
"You're lively company, I must say," bantered Batty. "I didn't hear much
animated conversation as I came up."
Jimmy glanced over his shoulder. "No," he said in a lower tone. "He's
asleep now."
Lighting a cigar, Batty unfolded a camp stool which was leaning against
one of the guy ropes, and seated himself. Jimmy seemed in a confidential
mood.
"I've been setting here," he began, "studying about a Christmas present
that had ought to be made this year. _I_ ain't got no call to make it,
but there's plenty of others that could do it and never miss it. I've
got an old uncle that sets 'em up now and then, but he isn't liable to
send me another check before February, so _I_ can't do it."
"Oh, your Uncle Sam," laughed Batty, remembering Jimmy's pension and the
object of his savings. "Well," speaking slowly between puffs, "I'm not
counting on making any Christmas presents this year except to myself.
Being sick makes a man selfish, I suppose. But if I have to be exiled
out here in the cactus and greasewood, I intend to make it as pleasant
for myself as possible. So I know what's going into my Christmas
stocking: the dandiest little saddle horse this side of the Mississippi,
and a rifle that can knock the spots off anything in Salt River valley."
When Jimmy answered his voice was still lower, for a cough had sounded
in the tent behind them.
"Well, Sandy Claws and I ain't never been acquainted, so to speak. I
neither give or get, but if I had the price of a saddle horse in my
breeches it wouldn't go into _my_ stocking. It 'ud take that boy in
there back home to die, as fast as steam cars can travel. A man would
almost be justified in giving up his hope of heaven to give a poor soul
the comfort that would be to him."
The distant barking of coyotes sounded through the starlight. Jimmy
pulled at his pipe in silence and Batty sat blowing wreaths of cigar
smoke around his head until a woman's voice struck musically across the
stillness.
"Come, little son, hug father Ted good night."
As Batty watched the shadow pantomime on the white canvas walls of the
tent in front of him, the baby arms clasped around the young father's
neck, and the beautiful girl bending over them, laughing, he understood
the miracle that was bringing Courtland back from the very grave. The
screen door slammed and she came out with the child in her arms, a
golf-cape wrapped over his nightgown. Then the shadows changed to the
next tent. Buddy, with his bare pink toes stretched out toward the
little drum stove, sat in his mother's lap and listened to the good
night story.
It was a Christmas story as well, and the three Wise Men in quest of the
starlit manger came out of the shadows of a far-gone past, to live again
before the glowing wonder of a little child's eyes. Once he glanced over
his shoulder when she told of the silver bells jingling on the trappings
of the camels, and he clasped his dimpled hands with a long, satisfied
sigh when the gifts were opened at last before the Christ-child's
cradle.
"An' nen the little king was _so_ glad," he added, lying back happily
against his mother's shoulder.
"Yes, dear heart."
"An' the little king's mothah was glad, too," he persisted. "She liked
people to give fings to her little boy."
"Oh yes, she was the happiest of all. Now shut your eyes, little son,
and we'll rock-a-bye-baby-in-the-tree-top."
The two shadows were merged into one as the rocking chair swayed back
and forth a moment in time to a low, sweet crooning. Then Buddy sat up
straight and laid an imperative hand on the cheek pressed against his
curly hair.
"Stop singin', Mothah Ma'wy!" he demanded. "I want to go there. _I_ want
to take 'em fings to make 'm glad!"
She tried to explain, but he would not be appeased. The little mouth
quivered with disappointment. "If they're all gone away up to heaven how
can I _find_ the king, Mothah Ma'wy?"
"Oh, little son, we still have the star!" she cried, clasping him close
and kissing him.
"Show it to me!" he demanded, slipping from her lap and pattering
towards the door in his bare feet. She caught him up again with more
kisses, and holding him close began to grope for words simple enough to
make it plain--that the Star which wise men follow now, when they go
with gifts for the Christ-child's gladdening, is the Star of love and
good-will to men, and the Way lies near at hand through the hearts of
his poor and needy.
When she finished at last, Batty's cigar had gone out, and Jimmy,
stirred by some old memory or by some new vision, was staring fixedly
ahead of him with unseeing eyes. Neither man moved until the last note
of the lullaby, "Oh little town of Bethlehem," faltered into silence.
Then without a word, each rose abruptly and went his separate way.
It was reported in camp next day at dinner that Dane was going home, and
that the doctor on his morning rounds had consented to engage a sleeper
for him and help him aboard the first Eastern-bound train. While the
doctor gave it as his opinion that it was suicidal for any one in his
condition to go back to such a climate in mid-winter, he offered no
remonstrance. Nor could any one else in the face of such pathetic joy as
Dane's, over his unexpected release.
It was with a sigh of relief that Mrs. Welsh turned from the departing
carriage to begin her preparations for Christmas. It would have been
depressing for all the camp to have had any one in their midst during
the holidays as ill as Dane; besides she had work for Jimmy other than
nursing. There were trips to be made down the canal after palm leaves
and the coral berries of the feathery pepper trees. There were the
dining-room walls to be covered with those same Christmas greens, and
since Mrs. Courtland wished it, a little cedar to be brought out from
the town market, and decked for the centre of the table.
In the days which followed Dane's departure, Jimmy was so rushed with
extra work that gradually he began to ignore his grudge against Matsu.
One night, having absent-mindedly followed Hillis in filling his plate
from the pots and pans on the stove, instead of cooking for himself, he
thereafter ate whatever Matsu prepared without comment.
Maybe the mere handling of the Christmas symbols induced a mellower
mood, for when the last taper was in place on the tinsel decked
evergreen he felt so at peace with all mankind that he included the
little heathen in his invitation, when he called Hillis in to admire his
handiwork. He was whistling softly when he stepped out doors from the
dining-room, and turned the latch behind him. The shaggy old dog rose up
from the door-mat and followed him as he strolled down towards the
highroad. He was in his shirt-sleeves, for the dusk was warm and
springlike. A great star hung over the horizon.
"It's Christmas eve, Banjo," he said in a confidential tone to the dog.
"I guess Dane is home by this time. By rights he ought to have got there
this morning."
Banjo responded with a friendly wag and crowded closer to rub his head
against Jimmy. For the twentieth time that day the old man's hand stole
down into his empty pocket on a fruitless errand.
"Nary a crumb," he muttered, "and not a cent left to get one. Banjo, I'd
give both ears for a good chaw right now. I'm not grudging it, but I
sure would 'a' held back a dime or two if I hadn't thought there was
another plug in the shack."
Banjo bristled up and growled.
"Hush, you beast!" scolded Jimmy. "You ought to be so full of peace and
good-will this here Christmas eve that there wouldn't be room for a
single growl in your ugly old hide. _I'd_ be if I could lay teeth on the
chaw I'm hankering for. What's the matter with you anyhow?"
With his hand on the dog's head to quiet him, he peered down the dim
road. A boy on a shaggy Indian pony was loping towards him.
"Is this Welsh's ranch?" he called. "Then I've got a telegram for
somebody. It's addressed mighty queer--just says 'Jimmy, care of Mrs.
Clara Welsh.'"
"Well, I'm a--_greaser_!" was all that Jimmy could ejaculate as he
reached for the yellow envelope. He turned it over with growing
curiosity. "First telegram I ever got in my life, and me sixty odd
years," he muttered.
"There's a dollar charges for delivering it out so far," said the boy.
Jimmy's hand went down into his pocket again.
"I'll have to go to the house for it," he said. "You wait."