turned to other activity--for next morning I went down to the pond with
nothing beyond the two theories of yesterday: that it was protest and
that the drake was somehow at the bottom of it. But I scored no advance
in my knowledge. All three birds were in the water and did not come out
while I remained there; nothing more of their plan of life was revealed
to me. Still, I saw one new thing. Sir Francis swam about, with the
Duchess and Countess in a suite, following close, but never crowding
him. What they did do was crowd each other. A struggle for place
occurred between them from time to time; and, although all the rest of
the time they were like sisters, when the struggle was on it was bitter.
I must have stayed watching them for half an hour to make sure of this
and I know that there were moments when they would have gladly killed
each other. Sir Francis never took the slightest notice of it, though he
must have been well aware of it, since it always went on some six inches
behind his back. The Countess would attempt to swim up closer to him, at
which the Duchess would instantly crook her neck sidewise at her and,
savagely undulating her head, would utter quick, poisonous sounds that
trembled with fury. To these the Countess would retort, crooking and
undulating too; thus they would swim with their necks at right angles,
raging at each other and crowding for place. Sometimes the Duchess
darted her bill out and bit the Countess, who was of a milder nature, I
gradually discerned. The admirable ignorance which Sir Francis preserved
of all this testified plainly to his moral balance, and filled me with
curiosity and respect. Whatever was going on behind him, whether peace
or war, he swam quietly on or stopped as it pleased him, with never a
change in the urbanity of his eye and carriage.
It came to me that afternoon what his attitude at the woodpile
essentially was. He stood there again alone--the ducks were quacking in
the pond--and as I looked at his neat white body and the lemon-colored
bill and orange-colored legs, all presented in the same dignified
profile, I saw that his was by instinct the historical portrait
attitude: Perry after Lake Erie, Webster before replying
to Hayne, Washington on being notified of his appointment as
Commander-in-Chief--you will understand what I mean. And if you smile at
my absorption in these little straws from the farmyard you have never
known the blessing of true leisure. To drop clean out of my mind for a
while the law and investment of trust funds and the self-induced
hysterics of Wall Street, and study a perfectly irrelevant, unuseful
trifle, such as the family life of Sir Francis and his ladies, brings a
pastoral health to the spirit and to the biliary duct.
There was an error in my conclusions about the Countess and Duchess
which I did not have a chance to perceive for a day or two, because our
domestic harmony was mysteriously disturbed. That clear note in May’s
voice waked up again, this time a tone or so higher; and it was kept
awake by one thing after another. It began after a wagonful of people
had passed the ranch on its way down the valley to town. I was off by
the river when they stopped a few minutes on the road outside the fence.
One could not see who they were at that distance. Jimsy left his ditch
work and talked to them and when they had gone returned to it. At our
next meal Jimsy’s eye was bewildered--and something more--and May’s
voice was bad for digestion. As soon as my last mouthful was swallowed I
sought the solitude of my cabin and read a book until bedtime. How
should one connect that wagonload of people with the new and higher tide
of unrest? Nothing was more the custom than this stopping
[Illustration: “Well, Jimsy, are you going to get me any wood for this
stove--or ain’t you?”]
of neighbors to chat over the fence. May’s voice and Jimsy’s eye kept me
as often and as far from their neighborhood as I could get.
It was Scipio, the next time I saw him, who began at once: “Did you see
Mrs. Faxon?”
“Who’s she?”
“Gracious! I thought everybody in this country knowed her. She’s an
alfalfa widow.”
“Well, I seem to have somehow missed her.”
“She went down to town the other day. Pity you’ve missed her. Awful
good-looker.”
“Well, I’ll try to meet her.”
“Her and Jimsy used to meet a whole heap,” said Scipio.
“Oh!” said I. “H’m! All the same May’s a fool.”
“Did she get mad? Did she get mad?” demanded Scipio, vivaciously.
“Lord!” said I, thinking of it. I told Scipio how Jimsy had talked over
the fence to the scarlet fragment of his past for perhaps three minutes
in the safe presence of a wagonload of witnesses, and how in consequence
May had gone up into the air. “To love acceptably needs tact,” I
moralized; but while I expatiated on this, Scipio’s attention wandered.
“You saw Honey Wiggin go up the river with his dudes?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And two other parties go up?”
“Yes.”
“Any further notions about the game laws?”
“Nothing--except it’s the merest charity to assume they made them when
they were drunk.”
“Sure thing! I guess I’ll have a cook when your camping stuff comes.”
My stuff was due in not many days; and as I walked home from Scipio’s
cabin I felt gratitude to the game laws for the part they had played in
delaying me in this valley where each day seemed the essence distilled
from the beauty of seven usual days. Even as I waded Buffalo Horn I
stopped to look up and down the course that it made between its
bordering cottonwoods. A week ago these had been green; but autumn had
come one night and now here was Buffalo Horn unwinding its golden miles
between the castle walls of the mountains. Amid all this august serenity
I walked the slower through fear of having it marred by the voice of
May. I lingered outside the house and it was the voice of the Duchess
that I heard. Yes, I was grateful to the game laws. They, too, caused
me to learn the whole truth about Sir Francis.
On this particular evening I saw where had been my error regarding the
Countess and Duchess. I have spoken of the Countess’ milder nature,
which I thought always put her behind the Duchess in their struggle for
precedence. It did not. Quite often she made up in skill what she lacked
in force and I now saw the first example of it. They were all coming to
the pond for their evening swim, the two ducks scolding and walking with
their necks at right angles. Sir Francis was in the lead, his head
gently inclined toward the water. As he got in the Duchess made an
evident miscalculation. She thought he was going to swim to the right,
and she splashed hastily in that direction. But he swam to the left. The
Countess was there in a flash. She got herself next to him and held her
place round and round the pond, crooking her neck and quacking backward
at the enraged, defeated Duchess.
Twice in the following forenoon I saw this recur; and before supper I
knew that it was a part of their daily lives. Sometimes it happened on
land, sometimes in the water, and always in the same way--a
miscalculation as to which way the drake was going to turn. It was the
duck who had been nearest to him that always made the miscalculation,
and she invariably lost her place by it. Then she would rage in the rear
while the other scoffed back at her. Neither of them could have been
entirely a lady or they would have known how to conduct their quarrel
without all this displeasing publicity. But there can be no doubt that
Sir Francis was a perfect gentleman. Not only was he never aware of what
was happening, but he so bore himself as wholly to avoid being made
ridiculous. That the Duchess was a little near-sighted I learned when I
took to feeding them with toast brought from breakfast.
My time was growing short and I began to fear that I might be gone
hunting before I had penetrated the mystery of the historical portrait
attitude near the woodpile and the protests of the ducks in the water.
This was going on straight along, only I had never managed to see the
beginning of it. Therefore I fed them on toast to draw closer to them,
and I tried to give each a piece, turn about; but only too often, when
toast meant for the Duchess had fallen in the water directly under her
nose, she would peer helplessly about and the Countess would dip down
quickly and get it. Sometimes the Duchess saw it one second too late,
when their heads would literally collide, and the Duchess, under the
impression she had got it, would snap her bill two or three times on
nothing, and then perceive the Countess chewing the morsel. At this she
always savagely bit the Countess; and still, through it all, the drake
sustained his admirable ignorance. My feeding device triumphed. I did
learn about the woodpile.
This is what I saw. They had been swimming for a while after eating the
toast. Sir Francis had finally swallowed a last hard bit of crust after
repeatedly soaking it in the water. He looked about and evidently
decided it was time for the haystack. He got out on the bank, but the
ladies did not. He turned and looked at them; they continued swimming.
Then he walked slowly away in silence, and as he grew distant their
swimming became agitated. Reaching the woodpile, he turned and stood in
bland, eminent profile. Then the ducks in the pond began. The Duchess
quacked; the Countess quacked; their voices rose and became positively
wild. A person who did not know would have hastened to see if they
needed assistance. This performance lasted four minutes by my watch--the
drake statuesque by the woodpile, the ducks screaming in the water.
Then, as I have before described, they succumbed to the power at the
woodpile. They swam ashore, flapped to dry themselves, and made for Sir
Francis like people catching a train. He did not move until they had
reached him, when all sought the haystack.
So now I understood clearly that it was he who made their plans, timed
all their comings and goings, and that they, bitterly as they disliked
leaving the water until they were ready, nevertheless had to leave it
when he was ready. Of course, if either of them had had any real mind,
they would have realized long before that it was of no use to attempt to
cope with him and they would have got out quickly when he did, instead
of making this scene several times every day. But why did they get out
at all when they didn’t want to? Why didn’t they let him go to the
haystack by himself? What was the secret of his power? It was they who
were always fighting and biting; his serenity was flawless.
I stood on the breast of the pond, turning this over. If you have outrun
me and arrived at the truth, it just shows once again how superior
readers are to writers in intelligence. I was not destined to fathom it.
Many a problem has taken two to solve it and it was Jimsy who--but let
that wait. Jimsy came across from the stable and spoke to me now:--
“What are you studying?”
“I have been studying your ducks.”
He looked over at the cabin, where May could be seen moving about in the
kitchen, and I saw his face grow suddenly tender. “They’re hers,” he
said softly. “She kind o’ wanted ducks round here and so one day I
brought ’em to her from town. Then I made this pond for ’em--just dammed
the creek across this little gully. Nothing’s wrong with ’em?”
“Oh, no. But they’ve set me guessing.”
He did not believe my story, though he listened with his gray eyes fixed
on mine. “That’s wonderful,” he said; “but you’ve made it up. I’d have
noticed a thing like that.”
“I don’t think you would. You’re working all day with your stock and
your ditches. Think what a loafer I am.”
“It’s most too extraordinary,” he said, and stood looking at the
woodpile. He was not really thinking about what I had told him; I could
feel that.
“Well, Jimsy!”
We both started a little. It was May, who had come round the corner of
the house, and the setting sun shone upon her and made her quite lovely,
where she stood shading her eyes, with a little hair floating one side
of her forehead.
“Well, Jimsy! Dreaming again! Do you know what time it is? The way
you’ve took to dreaming is something terrible!”
Jimsy went into the house.
I was glad that two days more would see me out of this.
Next morning I stood justified--oh, more than justified--in Jimsy’s
eyes. No one could have anticipated such a performance at the pond as I
was able to show him--it bore me out and surpassed anything I had told
him--and no one could have foretold that it would fire Jimsy with a
curiosity equal to mine.
The ceremony of the toast was in progress when Jimsy, crossing to the
corral, saw me thus engaged. He stuck his hands into his pockets and
strolled across to the water’s edge, wearing a broad grin of
indulgence.
“Awful busy, you are!” said he.
“Just watch them,” said I.
“Oh, I’ve got a day’s work to do.”
“I’m aware,” I retorted, “that scientific observation doesn’t look like
work to the ignorant.”
“What’re you trying to find out?”
“I told you last night. I can’t see how that drake keeps those ducks in
order.”
“Oh, I guess he don’t keep ’em in order.”
“I tell you he has them under his thumb.”
Jimsy cast a careless eye upon the birds. They had finished the toast
and were swimming about. The quacks of the Duchess were merely quacks to
him; he did not hear that she was saying to the Countess: “Hah, Hah,
Hah! How do you fancy a back seat this morning?”
“One feels mortified, of course,” I explained to Jimsy, “that she should
betray her spite so crudely--a sad but common thing in our country.”
“In the name of God, what are you talking about?” demanded Jimsy.
“Oh, I’m not in the least crazy. New York stinks with people like that.”
At this moment the usual thing happened in the pond--the Duchess made a
miscalculation. The drake swam suddenly left instead of right, and the
Countess jumped to the favored place. Now it was she who quacked
backward at her discountenanced rival.
“She is really the sweeter nature of the two,” I said. But Jimsy was
attending to the ducks with an awakened interest; in fact, he was now
caught in the same fascination that had held me for so many days. He
took his hands out of his pockets and followed the ducks keenly.
“I believe you weren’t lyin’ to me,” he remarked presently.
“You wait! Just you wait!” I exclaimed.
He watched a little longer. “D’you suppose,” he said, “it’s his feathers
they love so?”
“His feathers?” I repeated.
“Those two curly ones in his tail. They’re crooked plumb enticing, like
they were saying, ‘Come, girls!’”
This reminded me of Jimsy’s unbrushed mound of hair and May’s coldness
at his reference to it. “Feathers would hardly account for everything,”
I said.
A last spark of doubt flickered in Jimsy. “Are you joshing about this
thing?” he asked.
“Just you wait,” I said again.
We did not have to wait. In the judgment of the drake it was time for
the haystack; the ducks thought it too soon. All began as usual. Sir
Francis had reached the woodpile and taken his attitude, the first
protesting scream from the pond had risen to the sky, Jimsy’s face was
causing me acute pleasure, when the Duchess did an entirely new thing.
She swam to the inlet and began to waddle slowly up the trickling
stream. Then I perceived a few yards beyond her the cleanings of some
fish which had been thrown out. It was for these she was making.
“She has ruined everything!” I lamented.
“Wait!” said Jimsy. He whispered it. His new faith was completer than
mine.
The Duchess heavily proceeded. In my childhood I used sometimes to see
old ladies walking slowly, shod in soft, wide, heelless things made of
silk or satin--certainly not of leather, except the soles--which seem to
have gone out. The Duchess trod as if she had these same mid-Victorian
feet and she began gobbling the fish. If this was any strain upon the
drake, he did not show it. The Countess now discerned from the pond what
the Duchess was doing and she was instantly riven with contending
emotions. The waves from her legs agitated the whole pond as she swam
wildly; sometimes she looked at the drake, sometimes at the fish, and
between the looks she quacked as if she would die. Then she, too, got
out and went toward the fish. I looked apprehensively at the figure by
the woodpile, but it might have been a painted figure in very truth. I
think Jimsy was holding his breath. When a moral conflict becomes
visible to the naked eye there is something in it that far outmatches
any mere thumping of fists; here was Sir Francis battling for his empire
in silence and immobility, with his ladies getting all the fish. And
just then the Countess wavered. She saw Sir Francis, white and
monumental, thirty yards away; and she saw the Duchess and the fish
about three more steps from her nose. She stood still and then she broke
down. She turned and fled back to her lord. It cannot be known what the
more forcible Duchess would have done but for this. As it was, she
looked up and saw the Countess--and immediately went to pieces herself.
I had not known that she had it in her to run so.
I cannot repeat Jimsy’s first oath as he stared at the triumphant drake
leading his family to the haystack. After silence he turned to me.
“Wouldn’t that kill you?” he said very quietly; and said no more, but
began to walk slowly away.
“Now,” I called after him, “will you tell me how he manages to keep head
of his house like that?”
If Jimsy had any hypothesis to offer then, he did not offer it, and
before he had reached the corral May appeared. I’ll not report her talk
this time, it was the usual nursery governess affair: did Jimsy know
that he had wasted half an hour when he ought to have hitched up and
gone for wood up Dead Timber Creek, and didn’t he know there was wood
for just one day left and it would take him the whole day? I escaped to
my fishing before she had done and I took my dinner with Scipio.
It is wicked to fish in October, but we ate the trout; and I must tell
you of a discovery: when artificial flies fail, and frost has finished
the grasshoppers, the housefly is a deadly bait! I am glad at last to
have accounted for the presence of the housefly in a universe of
infinite love.
At supper I was sorry that Scipio and I had not got off to the mountains
that day. Jimsy was still out. He had brought, it appeared, one load of
wood from Dead Timber Creek and had gone for another. It was May’s
opinion that he should have returned by now. I hardly thought so, but
this made small difference to May. She was up from table and listening
at the open door three times before our restless meal was over. Next she
lighted a lantern and hung it out upon a gate-post of one of the outer
corrals, that Jimsy might be guided home from afar. In the following
thirty minutes she went out twice again to listen and soon after this
she sent me out to the lantern to make sure it was burning brightly.
“He would see the windows at any rate,” I told her.
But now she had begun to be frightened and could not sit in her chair
for more than a few moments at a time.
“What o’clock is it?” she asked me.
It was seven forty-five and I think she fancied it was midnight. If
Jimsy had been six years old and a perfect fool to boot she could not
have been more distracted than she presently became.
“Why, Mrs. Culloden,” I remonstrated, “Jimsy was raised in this valley.
He knows his way about.”
She did not hear me and now she seized the telephone. Into the ears of
one neighbor after another she poured questions up and down the valley.
It was idle to remind her that Dead Timber Creek was five miles to the
south of us and that the Whitlows, who lived six miles to the north,
were not likely to have seen Jimsy. The whole valley quickly learned
that he had not come back with his second load of wood by eight o’clock
and that she was asking them all if they knew anything about it. In the
space of twenty minutes with the telephone she had made him ridiculous
throughout the precinct; and then at ten minutes past eight, while she
was ringing up her friend Mrs. Sedlaw for the second time, in came
Jimsy. The wood and the wagon were safe in the corral, he was safe in
the house and hungry; and, of course, she hadn’t heard him arrive
because of the noise of the telephone. He had been at the stable for the
last ten minutes, attending to the horses.
“And you never had the sense to tell me!” she cried.
“Tell you what?” He had not taken it in. “Gosh, but that chicken looks
good! What’s that lantern out there for?” He was now seated and helping
himself to the food.
“And that’s all you’ve got to say to me!” she said. And then the deluge
came--not of tears, but words.
Somewhere inside of Jimsy was an angel, whatever else he contained.
Throughout that foolish, galling scene made in my presence before I
could escape, never a syllable of what he must have been feeling came
from him, but only good-natured ejaculations--not many and rather brief,
to be sure. When he learned the reason for the lantern he laughed aloud.
This set her off and she rushed into the story of her telephoning. Then,
and then alone, it was on the verge of being too much for him. He laid
down his knife and fork and leaned back for a second, but the angel won.
He resumed his meal; only a brick-red sunset of color spread from his
collar to his hair--and his eyes were not gray, but black.
That was what I saw after I had got away to my cabin and was in bed: the
man’s black eyes fixed on his plate and the pretty girl standing by the
stove and working off her needless fright in an unbearable harangue.
Audibly I sighed, sighed with audible relief, when the Culloden Ranch
lay a mile behind Scipio and me and our packhorses the next day. Jimsy
had been as self-controlled in the morning as on the night
before--except that no man can control the color of his eyes. The murky
storm that hung in Jimsy’s eyes was the kind that does not blow over,
but breaks. Was May blind to such a sign? At breakfast she told him that
the next time he went for wood she would go to see that he got back for
supper! I told Scipio that if things were not different when we returned
I should move over to his cabin.
“You’d never have figured a girl could get Jimsy buffaloed!” said
Scipio.
“He’s not buffaloed a little bit,” I returned.
“Ain’t he goin’ to do nothin’?”
“I don’t know what he’ll do.”
Scipio rode for a while, thinking it over. “If I had a wife,” he said,
“and she got to thinkin’ she was my mother, I’d take a dally with her.”
His meaning was not clear; but he made it so: “I’d take her--well, not
_on_ my knee, but acrost it.”
This I doubted, but said nothing. By and by we were passing the Sedlaw
Ranch and Mrs. Sedlaw came running out rather hastily--and began
speaking before she reached the gate.
“Oh, howdy-do?” said she; and she stood looking at me.
“Isn’t it perfect weather?” said I.
“Yes, indeed. And so you’re going hunting?”
“Yes. Want to come?”
“Why, wouldn’t that be nice! I thought Jimsy and May might be going with
you.”
“Oh, they’re too busy. Good-by.”
She stood looking after me for some time and I saw her walk back to the
house quite slowly.
There’s no need to tell of our hunting, or of the games of Cœur d’Alène
Solo which Scipio and I and the useful cook played at night. In twenty
days the snow drove us out of the mountains and we came down to human
habitations--and to rife rumors. I don’t recall what we heard at the
first cabin--or the second or the others--but we heard something
everywhere. The valley was agog over Jimsy and May. Amid the wealth of
details, I shall never know precisely what did happen. Jimsy had left
her and gone to Alaska. He hadn’t gone to Alaska, but to New York, with
Mrs. Faxon, the alfalfa widow. May had gone to her mother in Iowa. She
hadn’t gone to Iowa; she was under the protection of Mrs. Sedlaw. Jimsy
and the widow were living in open shame at the ranch. The ranch was shut
up and old man Birdsall had seen Jimsy in town, driving a companion who
wore splendid feathers. There was more, much more, but the only
certainty seemed to be that Jimsy had broken loose and gone
somewhere--and over this somewhere hovered an episodic bigamy. But where
was Jimsy now? And May? Had the explosion blown them asunder forever?
Was their marriage lying in fragments? On our last night in camp we
talked of this more than we played Cœur d’Alène Solo. If anybody could
tell me the true state of things it would be Mrs. Sedlaw, and at her
door I knocked as I passed the next morning.
“Oh, howdy-do?” said I; and she sat looking at me for some moments.
“What luck?” said she. “Get an elk?”
“Yes,” said I. “How are things in general?”
“Elegant,” said she. “Give my love to dear May.”
“Thank you,” said I, not very appropriately.
The lady followed me to my horse. “Seems like only yesterday you came
by,” was her parting word. She had certainly squared our accounts.