It was the third of July that Bobby shook the dust of Fawcettville
from his feet. So he had the third, and all day the fourth, which was
a holiday, in which to get a good start.
Bobby was original, even in robbing a bank. In fact, this is not so
much the story of a bank pillage as it is of Bobby’s originality.
Europe, Monte Carlo, and Cape Town played as small parts in his plans
as did Timbuctoo and Zanzibar. He loved his own people too well to go
very far away from them. So he went to Duluth, where a launch was
waiting for him. On the Fourth of July he set out alone along the
northern shore up Superior, which is unbroken wilderness from Duluth
to Fort William. Three days later a fisherman found McTabb’s boat
wrecked among the rocks, and on the shore near the launch were Bobby’s
coat and hat, sodden and pathetic. Of course there were cards and
letters in the pockets of that coat, and also a roll of small bills.
So identification was easy. Close on the lurid newspaper tales of
Bobby McTabb’s defalcation followed the still more thrilling story of
his death. And, meanwhile, Bobby thought this the best joke of his
life, and with a kit of supplies on his back was hiking straight North
into the big timber.
The joke lived until about ten o’clock in the morning of the first
day, when the whole affair began to appear a little less clever to
Bobby McTabb. It was hot, and not one decent half-mile of travel did
Bobby find. Up and down ridges of broken rock, through tangled swamps
and forests of spruce and cedar he went, hitting it as straight north
as a tenderfoot could make it by compass. The water poured down his
round, red face, wet his collar first, and gradually soaked him to the
tips of his toes. But it was not the heat that troubled him most. He
was fat and succulent, as tender as a young chicken, and the black
flies gathered from miles around to feast upon him. By noon his face
was swollen until he could hardly see. His nose was like a bulb; his
feet were blistered; a thousand bones and joints that he had never
supposed were in the human anatomy began to ache, and for the first
time in his life his jolly heart went _loco_, and he began to swear.
The railroad was forty miles north. He had planned to reach that, and
follow it to some small station, whence he would take a train into the
new mining country that was just opening up, westward. It was a
terrible forty miles. He would look at his compass, strike out
confidently toward the North Pole, and five minutes later discover
that he was traveling east or west. Early in the afternoon he got into
a swamp of caribou moss that was like a spring bed, three feet thick,
under his feet. It held him up nicely for a time, and the softness of
it was as balm to his sore feet. Then he came to a place where a
caribou would have sniffed, and turned back. But B. McTabb went on—and
in. He went in—first to his knees, then to his middle, then to his
neck, and by the time he had wallowed himself to the safety of firmer
footing there was not a spot of him that was not covered with black
mud. At two o’clock Bobby McTabb struck firm ground. He believed that
he had traveled thirty-nine miles. But he made up his mind that he
would camp, and make the last mile in the cool of the morning. As a
matter of fact the lake was only six miles behind him.
When Bobby awoke on the morning of the second day he was so stiff that
he waddled and so sore that he groaned aloud, and then he made the
discovery—the alarming discovery—that was the beginning of the making
of a new man of him. His rubber grub-bag was torn to shreds, and what
was left of his provisions could have been gathered into a salt
cellar. All about the front of his tent were tracks as big as a hat,
and though he had never seen tracks like those before he knew that
they were the visiting cards of a very big and a very hungry bear. “My
Gawd!” said B. McTabb. “My Gawd!” he repeated over and over again,
when he found nothing but crumbs and a bacon string.
Then he reflected that the railroad must be but a short distance away,
and that he would surely strike some habitation or town before
dinner-time. His shoulders were sore, so he left his tent behind him,
stopping every time he came to a saskatoon tree or a clump of wild
raspberries. The fruit did very well for a time, but like many another
tenderfoot before him, he did not learn until too late that the little
red plums, or saskatoons, are as bad as green apples when taken into
an uncultivated stomach. He began to suffer along toward noon. He
suffered all of that day, and far into the night, and when the dawn of
the second day came he was no longer the old Bobby McTabb, but a
half-mad man. For three days after this the black flies fed on him and
the fruit diet ate at his vitals. On the morning of the sixth day he
came to the railroad, nearly blind, bootless, and starving, and was
found by a tie-cutter named Cassidy. For a week he lay in Cassidy’s
cabin, and when at last he came to his feet again, and looked into a
glass, he no longer recognized in himself the tenderly nurtured Bobby
McTabb of Fawcettville. His round face had grown thin. A half-inch
stubble of beard had pierced his chin and rosy cheeks. His eyes were
wild and bloodshot, and there was a looseness in the waist of his
trousers that made him gasp. Three days later he weighed himself at
the little station up the line and found that he had lost sixty
pounds.
[Illustration: On the morning of the sixth day he came to the
railroad, nearly blind, bootless and starving.]
From this day on McTabb was a different man. He had relieved himself
of sixty pounds of waste, and the effect was marvelous. A new spirit
had entered into him by the time he reached the mining country. He
prospered—and grew thinner. Unfortunately there is no moral lesson to
this little history of B. McTabb. If he had been an ordinary runaway
cashier he would have been caught and sufficiently punished, and all
the good world would have been warned by his miserable end. But McTabb
was not ordinary. He made money with the savings of Fawcettville. He
made it so fast that it puzzled him at times to keep count of it. He
turned over three claims in the first six months at a profit of a
hundred thousand dollars. This was what optimistic Bobby called a
“starter.” He was in a rough country, and once more he found himself
doing as the Romans did. He worked, and worked hard; he wore heavy
boots and shoe-packs, and the more he worked and the more he prospered
the thinner he grew.
He was richer each day. Good things came to him like flies to sugar.
At the end of his second year in the new bonanza country he was worth
a million. And this was not all. For B. McTabb was no longer short and
thick. He was tall and thin. From two hundred and eighty he had
dropped to one hundred and sixty pounds, and he was five feet ten and
a half in his cowhide boots.
But this is not the story of the beginning or the middle of Bobby
McTabb. It is the story of his extraordinary and entirely original
end, and of the manner in which pretty blue-eyed Kitty Duchene helped
to bring that end about.
McTabb was no longer known by that name. He was J. Wesley Brown,
promoter and mine owner, and as J. Wesley Brown he met Kitty Duchene
once more, in Winnipeg. Kitty was visiting a friend whose father had
joined McTabb in a promoting scheme, and all of Bobby’s old love
returned to him, for in reality it had never died. The one thing that
had been missing in his life was Kitty Duchene, and now he began to
court her again as J. Wesley Brown. There was nothing about J. Wesley
Brown that would remind one of B. McTabb, and of course Kitty did not
recognize him. One day Bobby looked deep into Kitty’s pure blue eyes
and told her how much he loved her, and Kitty dropped her head a
little forward, so that he could see nothing but the sheen of her
gold-brown hair, and promised to be his wife.
[Illustration: Kitty dropped her head and promised to be his wife.]
From this day on more and more of the old Bobby began to show in J.
Wesley Brown. He was the happiest man in the North. His old laugh came
back, full and round and joyous. He often caught himself whistling the
old tunes, telling the old stories, and cracking the old jokes that
had made Fawcettville love him. One evening when he was waiting for
Kitty, he whistled softly the tune to “Sweet Molly Malone” and when
Kitty came quietly into the room her blue eyes searched his
questioningly, and there was a gentleness in them which made him
understand that the old song had gone straight home, for it was Kitty
Duchene herself who had taught him the melody, years and years ago, it
seemed. She had told him a great deal about Fawcettville, its green
hills and its meadows, its ancient orchards and the great “bottoms,”
yellow and black with ox-eyed daisies. And tonight she said, with her
pretty face very close to his: “I want to live back in the old home,
Jim. Do you love me enough for that?”
The thrill in her voice, the soft touch of her hand, stirred Bobby’s
soul until it rose above all fear, and he promised. He would go back.
But—what might happen then? Could he always live as J. Wesley Brown?
Would no one ever recognize him? Trouble began to seat itself in his
eyes. Misgivings began to fill him. And then, in one great dynamic
explosion, the world was shattered about Bobby McTabb’s ears.
He had taken Kitty to a carnival, and like two children they were
stumbling through a “House of Mystery,” losing themselves in its
mazes, laughing until the tears glistened in Kitty’s happy eyes, when
they ran up against two mirrors. One of these made tall and thin
people short and fat, and the other made short and fat people tall and
thin. Before one of these stepped B. McTabb. For a moment he stood
there stunned and helpless. Then he gave a sudden quick gasp and faced
Kitty. There was no laughter now in the girl’s eyes, but a look of
horror and understanding. In that hapless moment Bobby’s leanness was
gone. He was the old Bobby again, short and ludicrously fat. The girl
drew back, her breath breaking in sobbing agony.
“Robert,” she cried accusingly. “Robert McTabb!”
She drew still farther away from him, and hopelessly he reached out
his arms.
“Kitty—My God, let me explain,” he pleaded. “You don’t understand—”
But she was going from him, and he did not follow.