A man's mind is a tricky thing--or, speaking more exactly, a man's
emotions are tricky things. Love has come rushing to the back of a
tip-tilted chin, or the tone of a voice, or the droop of an eyelid. It
has fled for cause as slight. Sometimes it runs before resentment for
a real or fancied wrong, but then, if you have observed it closely, you
will see that quite frequently, when anger grows slow of foot, or dies
of slow starvation, love steals back, all unsuspected and unbidden--and
mayhap causes much distress by his return. It is like a sudden
resurrection of all the loved, long-mourned dead that sleep so serenely
in their tended plots. Loved though they were and long mourned, think
of the consternation if they all came trooping back to take their old
places in life! The old places that have been filled, most of them, by
others who are loved as dearly, who would be mourned if they were taken
away.
Psychologists will tell us all about the subconscious mind, the
hidden loves and hates and longings which we believe are dead and long
forgotten. When one of those emotions suddenly comes alive and stands,
terribly real and intrusive, between our souls and our everyday lives,
the strongest and the best of us may stumble and grope blindly after
content, or reparation, or forgetfulness, or whatever seems most likely
to give relief.
I am apologizing now for Bud, who had spent a good many months in
pushing all thoughts of Marie out of his mind, all hunger for her out of
his heart. He had kept away from towns, from women, lest he be reminded
too keenly of his matrimonial wreck. He had stayed with Cash and had
hunted gold, partly because Cash never seemed conscious of any need of
a home or love or wife or children, and therefore never reminded Bud of
the home and the wife and the love and the child he had lost out of his
own life. Cash seldom mentioned women at all, and when he did it was
in a purely general way, as women touched some other subject he was
discussing. He never paid any attention to the children they met
casually in their travels. He seemed absolutely self-sufficient,
interested only in the prospect of finding a paying claim. What he would
do with wealth, if so be he attained it, he never seemed to know or
care. He never asked Bud any questions about his private affairs, never
seemed to care how Bud had lived, or where. And Bud thankfully left his
past behind the wall of silence. So he had come to believe that he was
almost as emotion-proof as Cash appeared to be, and had let it go at
that.
Now here he was, with his heart and his mind full of Marie--after more
than a year and a half of forgetting her! Getting drunk and playing
poker all night did not help him at all, for when he woke it was from a
sweet, intimate dream of her, and it was to a tormenting desire for her,
that gnawed at his mind as hunger gnaws at the stomach. Bud could not
understand it. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before. By all
his simple rules of reckoning he ought to be “over it” by now. He had
been, until he saw that picture.
He was so very far from being over his trouble that he was under it; a
beaten dog wincing under the blows of memory, stung by the lash of his
longing. He groaned, and Frank thought it was the usual “morning after”
headache, and laughed ruefully.
“Same here,” he said. “I've got one like a barrel, and I didn't punish
half the booze you did.”
Bud did not say anything, but he reached for the bottle, tilted it and
swallowed three times before he stopped.
“Gee!” whispered Frank, a little enviously.
Bud glanced somberly across at Frank, who was sitting by the stove with
his jaws between his palms and his hair toweled, regarding his guest
speculatively.
“I'm going to get drunk again,” Bud announced bluntly. “If you don't
want to, you'd better duck. You're too easy led--I saw that last night.
You follow anybody's lead that you happen to be with. If you follow my
lead to-day, you'll be petrified by night. You better git, and let me go
it alone.”
Frank laughed uneasily. “Aw, I guess you ain't all that fatal, Bud.
Let's go over and have some breakfast--only it'll be dinner.”
“You go, if you want to.” Bud tilted the bottle again, his eyes half
closed while he swallowed. When he had finished, he shuddered violently
at the taste of the whisky. He got up, went to the water bucket and
drank half a dipper of water. “Good glory! I hate whisky,” he grumbled.
“Takes a barrel to have any effect on me too.” He turned and looked down
at Frank with a morose kind of pity. “You go on and get your breakfast,
kid. I don't want any. I'll stay here for awhile.”
He sat down on the side of the cheap, iron bedstead, and emptied his
pockets on the top quilt. He straightened the crumpled bills and counted
them, and sorted the silver pieces. All told, he had sixty-three dollars
and twenty cents. He sat fingering the money absently, his mind upon
other things. Upon Marie and the baby, to be exact. He was fighting the
impulse to send Marie the money. She might need it for the kid. If he
was sure her mother wouldn't get any of it... A year and a half was
quite a while, and fifteen hundred dollars wasn't much to live on these
days. She couldn't work, with the baby on her hands...
Frank watched him curiously, his jaws still resting between his two
palms, his eyes red-rimmed and swollen, his lips loose and trembling.
A dollar alarm clock ticked resonantly, punctuated now and then by the
dull clink of silver as Bud lifted a coin and let it drop on the little
pile.
“Pretty good luck you had last night,” Frank ventured wishfully. “They
cleaned me.”
Bud straightened his drooping shoulders and scooped the money into his
hand. He laughed recklessly, and got up. “We'll try her another whirl,
and see if luck'll bring luck. Come on--let's go hunt up some of them
marks that got all the dough last night. We'll split, fifty-fifty, and
the same with what we win. Huh?”
“You're on, ho--let's go.” Bud had gauged him correctly--Frank would
follow any one who would lead. He got up and came to the table where Bud
was dividing the money into two equal sums, as nearly as he could make
change. What was left over--and that was the three dollars and twenty
cents--he tossed into the can of tobacco on a shelf.
“We'll let that ride--to sober up on, if we go broke,” he grunted. “Come
on--let's get action.”
Action, of a sort, they proceeded to get. Luck brought luck of the same
complexion. They won in fluctuating spells of good cards and judicious
teamwork. They did not cheat, though Frank was ready if Bud had led him
that way. Frank was ready for anything that Bud suggested. He drank when
Bud drank, went from the first saloon to the one farther down and
across the street, returned to the first with cheerful alacrity and much
meaningless laughter when Bud signified a desire to change. It soothed
Bud and irritated him by turns, this ready acquiescence of Frank's. He
began to take a malicious delight in testing that acquiescence. He began
to try whether he could not find the end of Frank's endurance in staying
awake, his capacity for drink, his good nature, his credulity--he ran
the scale of Frank's various qualifications, seeking always to establish
a well-defined limitation somewhere.
But Frank was utterly, absolutely plastic. He laughed and drank when Bud
suggested that they drink. He laughed and played whatever game Bud urged
him into. He laughed and agreed with Bud when Bud made statements to
test the credulity of anyman. He laughed and said, “Sure. Let's go!” when
Bud pined for a change of scene.
On the third day Bud suddenly stopped in the midst of a game of pool
which neither was steady enough to play, and gravely inspected the
chalked end of his cue.
“That's about enough of this,” he said. “We're drunk. We're so drunk we
don't know a pocket from a prospect hole. I'm tired of being a hog. I'm
going to go get another drink and sober up. And if you're the dog Fido
you've been so far, you'll do the same.” He leaned heavily upon the
table, and regarded Frank with stern, bloodshot blue eyes.
Frank laughed and slid his cue the length of the table. He also leaned a
bit heavily. “Sure,” he said. “I'm ready, any time you are.”
“Some of these days,” Bud stated with drunken deliberation, “they'll
take and hang you, Frank, for being such an agreeable cuss.” He took
Frank gravely by the arm and walked him to the bar, paid for two beers
with almost his last dollar, and, still holding Frank firmly, walked him
out of doors and down the street to Frank's cabin. He pushed him inside
and stood looking in upon him with a sour appraisement.
“You are the derndest fool I ever run across--but at that you're a good
scout too,” he informed Frank. “You sober up now, like I said. You ought
to know better 'n to act the way you've been acting. I'm sure ashamed
of you, Frank. Adios--I'm going to hit the trail for camp.” With that
he pulled the door shut and walked away, with that same circumspect
exactness in his stride which marks the drunken man as surely as does a
stagger.
He remembered what it was that had brought him to town--which is more
than most men in his condition would have done. He went to the post
office and inquired for mail, got what proved to be the assayer's
report, and went on. He bought half a dozen bananas which did not
remind him of that night when he had waited on the Oakland pier for the
mysterious Foster, though they might have recalled the incident vividly
to mind had he been sober. He had been wooing forgetfulness, and for the
time being he had won.
Walking up the steep, winding trail that led to Nelson Flat cleared a
little his fogged brain. He began to remember what it was that he had
been fighting to forget. Marie's face floated sometimes before him, but
the vision was misty and remote, like distant woodland seen through
the gray film of a storm. The thought of her filled him with a vague
discomfort now when his emotions were dulled by the terrific strain
he had wilfully put upon brain and body. Resentment crept into the
foreground again. Marie had made him suffer. Marie was to blame for this
beastly fit of intoxication. He did not love Marie--he hated her. He
did not want to see her, he did not want to think of her. She had done
nothing for him but bring him trouble. Marie, forsooth! (Only, Bud put
it in a slightly different way.)
Halfway to the flat, he met Cash walking down the slope where the trail
seemed tunneled through deep green, so thick stood the young spruce.
Cash was swinging his arms in that free stride of the man who has
learned how to walk with the least effort. He did not halt when he
saw Bud plodding slowly up the trail, but came on steadily, his keen,
blue-gray eyes peering sharply from beneath his forward tilted hat brim.
He came up to within ten feet of Bud, and stopped.
“Well!” He stood eyeing Bud appraisingly, much as Bud had eyed Frank a
couple of hours before. “I was just starting out to see what had become
of you,” he added, his voice carrying the full weight of reproach that
the words only hinted at.
“Well, get an eyeful, if that's what you come for. I'm here--and
lookin's cheap.” Bud's anger flared at the disapproval he read in Cash's
eyes, his voice, the set of his lips.
But Cash did not take the challenge. “Did the report come?” he asked, as
though that was the only matter worth discussing.
Bud pulled the letter sullenly from his pocket and gave it to Cash. He
stood moodily waiting while Cash opened and read and returned it.
“Yeah. About what I thought--only it runs lighter in gold, with a higher
percentage of copper. It'll pay to go on and see what's at bed rock. If
the copper holds up to this all along, we'll be figuring on the gold to
pay for getting the copper. This is copper country, Bud. Looks like we'd
found us a copper mine.” He turned and walked on beside Bud. “I dug in
to quite a rich streak of sand while you was gone,” he volunteered after
a silence. “Coarse gold, as high as fifteen cents a pan. I figure we
better work that while the weather's good, and run our tunnel in on this
other when snow comes.”
Bud turned his head and looked at Cash intently for a minute. “I've been
drunker'n a fool for three days,” he announced solemnly.
“Yeah. You look it,” was Cash's dry retort, while he stared straight
ahead, up the steep, shadowed trail.