BACK AT LONE-ROCK
All the rest of the way to Lone-Rock, Mary's waking moments were spent
in anticipating her arrival and planning diversions for the days to
follow. Now that she was so near, she could hardly wait to see the
family. The seven months that she had been away seemed seven years,
judging by her changed outlook on life. She felt that she had gone away
a mere child, and that she was coming back, years old and wiser. She
wondered if they would notice any difference in her.
That Mrs. Ware did, was evident from their moment of greeting. Never
before had she broken down and sobbed on Mary's shoulder as she did now.
Always she had been the comforter and Mary the one to be consoled, but
for a few moments their positions were reversed. Conscious that her
coming had lifted a burden from her mother's shoulders, the burden of
enduring her anxiety alone, she tiptoed into Jack's room, ready to begin
playing the Jester at once with some merry speech which she was sure
would bring a smile.
But he was lying asleep, and the jest died on her lips as she stood and
gazed at him. She had expected him to look ill, but his face, white and
drawn with great dark shadows under his closed eyes, was so much
ghastlier than she had pictured, that it was a shock to find him so. She
stole out of the room again to the sunny little back porch, as sick at
heart as if she had seen him lying in his coffin. He was no more like
the strong jolly big brother she had left, than the silent shadow of
him. She was thankful that her first sight of him had been while he was
asleep. Otherwise she must have betrayed her surprise and distress.
[ILLUSTRATION: "OUT ON THE PORCH SHE HEARD FROM NORMAN HOW IT HAD
HAPPENED."]
Out on the porch she heard from Norman how it had happened. Jack had
seen the danger that threatened two of the workmen, and had sprung
forward with a warning cry in time to push them out of the way, but had
been caught himself by the falling timbers. The miners had always liked
Jack, Norman told her. He could do anything with them. And now they
would get down and crawl for him if it would do any good.
From her mother and the nurse Mary heard about the operation that had
been made to relieve the pressure on the spinal cord. It seemed
successful as far as it went. They could not hope to do more than to
make it possible for him to sit up in a wheeled chair. The injury had
been of such a peculiar character that they were fortunate to accomplish
even that much. It would be several weeks before he could attempt it.
Jack did not know yet how seriously he had been injured. They were
afraid to tell him until he was stronger. The Company was paying all the
expenses of his illness, and there was an accident insurance.
At first Mary insisted on sending away Huldah, the faithful woman who
had been the maid of all work in her absence, protesting that "a penny
saved was a penny earned," and that she herself was amply able to do the
work, and that she could economize even if she couldn't bring in any
money to the family treasury. But she was soon persuaded of the wisdom
of keeping her. The nurse was to leave as soon as Jack was able to sit
up, and Mary would have her hands full then. He would need constant
attendance at first, the nurse told her, and since he could never take
any exercise, only daily massage would keep up his strength.
"I shall begin teaching you how to give it just as soon as he rallies a
little more," the nurse promised, "You will have to be both hands and
feet for him for many a week to come, poor boy, and feet always. It is
good that you are so strong and untiring yourself."
For awhile Mary went about feeling like a visitor, since there was
little for her to do either in kitchen or sick-room. Jack had not yet
reached the stage when he needed amusement. He seemed glad that she was
home, and his eyes followed her wistfully about the room, but he did not
attempt to talk much. Sometimes the emptiness of the hours palled on her
till she felt that she could not endure it. She wrote long letters to
Joyce and Betty and all the school-girls with whom she wanted to keep up
a correspondence. She mended everything she could find that needed
mending, and she spent many hours telling her mother all that had
happened in her absence. But for once in her life her usual resources
failed her.
The little mining camp of Lone-Rock was high up in the hills, so that
April there was not like the Aprils she had known at the Wigwam. There
were still patches of snow under the pine trees above the camp. But the
stir of spring was in the air, and every afternoon, while Mrs. Ware was
resting, Mary slipped away for a long walk. Sometimes she would
scramble up the hill-side to the great over-hanging rock which gave the
place its name, and sit looking down at the tiny village below. It was
just a cluster of miners' shacks, most of them inhabited by Mexicans.
There were the Company's stores and the post-office, and away at the
farther end of the one street were the houses of the few American
families who had found their way to Lone-Rock, either on account of the
mines or the healthful climate of the pine-covered hills. She could
distinguish the roof of their own cottage among them, and the chimney of
the little, unpainted school-house.
She wondered what the outcome of all their troubles was to be. She
couldn't go on in this aimless way, day after day. She must find
something to do that would pay her a salary, and it must be something
that she could do at home, where she would be needed sorely as soon as
the nurse left. Then she would go over and over the same little round.
She might teach. She knew that she could pass the examination for a
license, but the school was already supplied with a competent teacher,
of many years' experience, whom the trustees would undoubtedly prefer to
a seventeen year old girl just fresh from school herself.
There was stenography--that was something she could master by herself,
and at home, but there was already a stenographer in the Company office,
and there was no other place for one in Lone-Rock. Round and round she
went like one in a treadmill, always to come back to the starting point,
that there was nothing she could do in Lone-Rock to earn money, and she
_must_ earn some, and she could not go away from home. Sometimes the
hopelessness of the situation gave her a wild caged feeling, as if she
must beat herself against the bars of circumstance and make them give
way for her pent-up forces to find an outlet.
The only thing that Mrs. Ware could suggest was that they might
advertise in the Phoenix papers for summer boarders. She had been told
that the year before several camping parties had pitched tents near
Lone-Rock, and they had said that if there were a good boarding place in
the village it could be filled to overflowing with a desirable class of
guests.
So Mary spent an evening, pencil in hand, calculating the probable
expenses and income from such a venture. They could not go into it on a
large scale, the house was too small. The cost of living was high in
Lone-Rock, and the market limited to the canned goods on the shelves of
the Company's stores. Her careful figuring proved that there would be
so little profit in the undertaking that it would not pay to try. But
the evening was not lost. It suggested the vegetable garden, which with
Norman's help she proceeded to start the very next morning.
Plain spading in unbroken sod is not exactly what a boy of thirteen
would call sport, and Norman started at the task with little enthusiasm.
But Mary, following vigorously in his wake with hoe and rake, spurred
him on with visions of the good things they should have to eat and the
fortune they should make selling fresh garden stuff to the summer
campers, till he caught some of her indomitable spirit, and really grew
interested in the work. Mary confined her energies to the vegetables
which she knew would grow in that locality, and which would be sure to
find a ready sale, but Norman gradually enlarged the borders to make
experiments of his own, till all the lot back of the house was a well
tilled garden.
If it had done nothing but keep her employed out of doors many hours of
the day it would have been well worth the effort, for it kept her from
brooding over her troubles, and largely took away the caged feeling
which had made her so desperate. As the fresh green shoots came up
through the soil and she counted the long straight rows, she counted
also the dimes each one ought to bring to the family purse, and drew a
breath of relief. They would amount to a neat little sum by the end of
the season, and by that time maybe some other way would be opened up for
her to earn money at home. True, not all the things they planted came
up. Fully a third of the garden "failed to answer to roll call," Norman
said, but those that did respond to their diligent care amply made up
for the failure of the others.
Jack's room in the wing of the cottage had a south door over-looking the
garden, and it was a happy day for the entire household when he asked to
know what was going on out there. He could not see the garden from the
corner where his bed stood, but the nurse propped a large mirror up
against a chair in a way to reflect the entire scene. Norman was
vigorously hoeing weeds, and Mary, armed with a large magnifying glass,
was on a hunt for the worms that were threatening the young plants.
The scene seemed to amuse Jack immensely, and entirely aroused out of
his apathy, he began to ask questions, and to suggest various dishes
that he would like to sample as soon as the garden could furnish them.
Every morning after that he called for the mirror to see how much the
garden had grown in the night. It was an event when the first tiny
radish was brought in for him to taste, and a matter of family
rejoicing, when the first crisp head of lettuce was made into a salad
for him, because his enjoyment of it was so evident.
About that time he was able to be propped up in bed a little while each
day, and was so much like his old cheerful self that Mary wrote long
hopeful letters to Joyce and Betty about his improvement. He joked with
the nurse and talked so confidently about going back to work, that Mary
began to feel that her worst fears had been unfounded, and that much of
her mental anguish on his account had been unnecessary. Sometimes she
shared his hopefulness to such an extent that she half regretted leaving
school before the end of the year. When the girls wrote about the
approaching Commencement and the good times they were having, and of how
they missed her, she thought how pleasant it would have been to have had
at least the one whole year with them. She was afraid she would be sorry
all the rest of her life that she had missed those experiences of
Commencement time. The exercises were always so beautiful at Warwick
Hall.
She could not wholly regret her return, however, when she saw how much
Jack depended on her for entertainment. He was ready to hear all about
her escapades at school now, and hours at a time she talked or read to
him, choosing with unerring instinct the tales best suited to his mood.
Phil kept them supplied with all the current magazines. Phil had been so
thoughtful about that, and his occasional letters to Jack had made
red-letter days on Mary's calendar. They had been almost as good as
visits, they were so charged with his jolly, light-hearted spirit.
But it happened, that the story she intended to read Jack first, _The
Jester's Sword_, still lay unopened on her table. She could not even
suggest his likeness to Aldebaran while he talked so hopefully of what
he intended to do as soon as he was out of bed. It was evident that he
did not realize the utter hopelessness of his condition, or he could not
have made such big plans for the future.
"Of course I appreciate your leaving school in the middle of the term,"
he told her. "It's good for mamma to have you here, and it's fine for
me, too, to have you look after me. But I'm sorry you were so badly
frightened that you thought it necessary. You'll have to pay up for this
holiday, Missy. I shall expect you to study all summer to make up lost
time, so that you can catch up with your class and enter Sophomore with
them next fall."
To please him she brought out her books and studied awhile every day,
reciting her French and Latin to her mother, and wrestling along with
the others as best she could. Then, too, it was impossible not to be
affected to some extent by his spirit of hopefulness, and several times
she gave herself up to the bliss of dreaming of the joyful thing it
would be, if he should prove to be right and she could go back to
Warwick Hall in the fall. Then, one day the surgeons came up from
Phoenix again and made their examination and experiments, and after
that the lessons and the day-dreams stopped. Everything stopped, it
seemed.
They told him the truth because he would have nothing else, although
they shrank from doing it until the last moment of their stay. They knew
it would be like giving him his death-blow. Mary, standing in the door,
saw the look of unspeakable horror that stole slowly over his face, then
his helpless sinking back among the pillows, and the twitching of his
hands as he clenched them convulsively. Not a word or a groan escaped
him, but the wild despair of his set face and staring eyes was more
than she could endure. She rushed out of the room and out of the house
to the little loft above the woodshed, where no one could hear her
frantic sobbing. It was hours before she ventured back into the house.
It would only add to his misery to see her distress, she knew, so she
left him to the little mother's ministrations.
Anticipating such a result, the surgeons had brought several appliances
to make his confinement less irksome. There was a hammock arrangement
with pulleys, by which he might be swung into different positions, and
out into a wheeled chair. They fastened the screws into walls and
ceiling, put the apparatus in place and carefully tested it before
leaving. Then they were at the end of their skill. They could do nothing
more. There was nothing that could be done.
Several times in the days that followed, the nurse spoke of the brave
way in which Jack seemed to be meeting his fate. But Mrs. Ware shook her
head sadly. She knew why no complaint escaped him. She had seen him act
the Spartan before to spare her. Mary, too, knew what his persistent
silence meant. He was not always so careful to veil the suffering which
showed through his eyes when he was alone with her. She knew that half
the time when he appeared to be listening to what she was reading, he
was so absorbed in his bitter thoughts that he did not hear a word. "_An
eagle, broken-winged and drooping in a cage, he gloomed upon his lot and
cursed the vital force within that would not let him die._"
One morning, when he had been settled in his wheeled chair, she brought
out the story of the Jester's Sword, saying, tremulously, "Will you do
something for me? Jack? Read this little book yourself. I know you don't
halfway listen to what I read any more, and I don't blame you, but this
seems to have been written just on purpose for you."
He took the book from her listlessly, and opened it because she wished
it. Watching him from the doorway, she waited until she saw him glance
up from the opening paragraph to the watch-fob lying on the stand at his
elbow. Then he looked back at the page, with a slight show of interest,
and she knew that the reference to Mars' month and the bloodstone had
caught his attention as it had hers. Then she left him alone with it,
hoping fervently it would arouse in him at least a tithe of the interest
it had awakened in her.
When she came back after awhile he merely handed her the book, saying
in an indifferent way, "A very pretty little tale, Mary," and leaned
back in his chair with closed eyes, as if dismissing it from his
thoughts. She was disappointed, but later she saw him sitting with it in
his hand again, closed over one finger as if to keep the place, while he
looked out of the window with a faraway expression in his eyes. Later
the nurse asked her what book it was he kept under his pillow. He drew
it out occasionally, she said, and glanced at one of the pages as if he
were trying to memorize it.
That he had at last read it as she read it, putting himself in the place
of Aldebaran, Mary knew one day from an unconscious reference he made to
it. A sudden wind had blown up, scattering papers and magazines across
the room, and fluttering his curtains like flags. She ran in to pick up
the wind-blown articles and close the shutters. When everything was in
order, as she thought, she turned to go out, but he stopped her, saying
almost fretfully, "You haven't picked up that picture that blew down."
When she glanced all around the room, unable to discover it, he pointed
to the hearth. A photograph had fallen from the mantel, face downward.
"There! _Vesta's_ picture!"
Mary picked it up and turned it over, exclaiming, "Why, no, it is
Betty's!"
"That's what I said," he answered, wholly unconscious of his slip of the
tongue that had betrayed his secret. Her back was turned towards him, so
that he could not see the tears which sprang to her eyes. If already it
had come to this, that Betty was the Vesta of his dreams, then his
renunciation must be an hundredfold harder than she had imagined.
With a pity so deep that she could not trust herself to speak, she
busied herself in blowing some specks of dust from the mantel, as an
excuse to keep her back turned. She was relieved when the nurse came in
with a glass of lemonade and she could slip out without his seeing her
face. She sat down on the back steps, her arms around her knees to think
about the discovery she had just made. It made her heart-sick because it
added so immeasurably to the weight of Jack's misfortune.
"Oh, _why_ did it have to be?" she demanded again of fate. "It is too
cruel that everything the dear boy wanted most should be denied him."
With her thoughts centred gloomily on his injuries, it seemed almost an
insult for the sun to shine or for any one to be happy, and she was in
no mood to meet any one in a different humour from her own. Added to
her dull misery on Jack's account, was a baffled, disappointed feeling
that she had not been the comfort to him she had hoped to be. True, she
was learning to give him the massage he needed with almost as skilful a
touch as the nurse, but she could not see that she had eased his burden
mentally, in the least, although she had tried faithfully to carry out
the good friar's suggestion. It seemed so hard, when she was ready to
make any sacrifice for him, no matter how great, even to exchanging her
strength for his helplessness, that the means should be denied her.
While she sat there, longing for some great Angel of Opportunity to open
the way for her to help him, a little one was coming in at the back
gate, so disguised that she did not recognize it as such. She was even
impatient at the interruption. Norman, followed by a half grown Mexican
boy trundling a wheel-barrow, came up from the barn, with a whole train
of smaller boys running along-side, to support the chicken coop he was
wheeling. Norman's face shone with importance, and he called excitedly
as he fumbled at the gate latch, "Look, Mary! You can't guess what we've
got in this box! A young wild-cat! Lúpe wants to sell him."
"For mercy's sake, Norman Ware," she answered, impatiently, "haven't we
enough trouble now without your bringing home a wild-cat to add to them?
And _now_, of all times!"
The tone carried even more disapproval than her words. It seemed to
insinuate that if he had the proper sympathy for Jack he would not be
thinking of anything else but his affliction. Instantly the bright face
clouded, and in an injured tone he began to explain:
"I thought brother would like to see it, and he could make the trade for
me. He talks Mexican, and I only know a few words, I couldn't make the
boys understand more than that they were to bring it along. I don't see
why Jack's being sick should keep me from having a nice pet like a
wild-cat. He isn't a bit mean, and I haven't had a single thing since
the puppy was poisoned."
The procession had paused, and the piercingly bright eyes of each one of
the little Mexicans seemed also to be asking why. Mary suddenly had to
acknowledge to herself that there wasn't any good reason to prevent.
Because one brother was desperately unhappy was no reason why she should
cloud the enjoyment of the other one by refusing him something on which
he had set his heart.
Norman could not understand the lightning change in her, but he
followed joyfully when she answered with a brief, "Well, come on," and
led the way around to the south door of Jack's room, and called his
attention to the embryo menagerie outside.
To her surprise, for the first time since the surgeons' last visit, Jack
laughed. It was an amusing group, the wild-cat in the chicken-coop with
its body-guard of dirty, grinning little Mexicans, and Norman circling
excitedly around them, explaining that Lúpe asked a dollar for it, but
that he could only give fifty cents, and for Jack to make him
understand.
Jack did make him understand, and conducted the trade to Norman's entire
satisfaction. Then recognizing Lúpe as one of the boys he had seen
around the office, he began to question him in Mexican about the mines
and the men. Then it developed that Lúpe was the son of one of the men
who had been saved by Jack's quick warning, and when the boy repeated
what some of the miners had said about him, Jack grew red and did not
translate it all. The part he did translate was to the effect that the
men wanted him back at the mine. They were having trouble with the "fat
boss," their name for the new manager.
The little transaction and talk with the boys seemed to cheer Jack up so
much that Mary mentally apologized to the wild-cat for her inhospitable
reception, and electrified Norman by an offer to help him build a more
suitable cage for it than the coop in which it was confined. Norman, who
had unbounded faith in Mary's ability as a carpenter, accepted her offer
joyfully. She wasn't like some girls he had known. When she drove a nail
it held things together, and whatever she built would be strong enough
to hold any beast he might choose to put in it.
[ILLUSTRATION "WHEN SHE DROVE A NAIL IT HELD THINGS TOGETHER."]
"Now, if I could get a couple of coyotes and a badger and a fox or two,"
he remarked, "I'd be fixed."
Mary, who was sorting over a pile of old boards back of the woodshed,
paused in alarm.
"It strikes me, young man," she said, a trifle sarcastically, "that the
more some people get the more they want. Your wishes seem to be on the
Jack's Bean-stalk scale. They grow to reach the sky in a single night.
Suppose you did have those things, you wouldn't be satisfied. It would
be a zebra and a giraffe and a jungle tiger next."
"No, it wouldn't," he declared. "I wouldn't know how to take care of
them, but I do know how to feed the things that live around here."
"What do you want them for?"
"Well, you know what Huldah said about summer campers. There's always a
lot of boys along, and if I had a sort of menagerie they'd want to come
over and play circus, and then they'd let me in on their ball-games and
things. It's awful lonesome with school out and Billy Downs gone back
East. There's so few fellows here my age, and Jack won't let me play
much with the little Mexicans. They aren't much fun anyhow when I can't
talk their lingo."
Mary straightened up, hammer in hand, and squinted her eyes
thoughtfully, a way she had when something puzzled her. It had not
occurred to her that Norman had social longings like her own which
Lone-Rock failed to satisfy. He watched her anxiously. That preoccupied
squint always meant that interesting developments would follow.
"Norman Ware," she said, slowly, "I didn't give you credit for being a
genius, but you are as great in one way as Emerson. You've hit on one of
his ideas all by yourself. He said, 'If a man can write a better book,
preach a better sermon or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbours,
though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten
track to his door,' If you want company as bad as all that, you _shall_
have a beaten track to your door. We'll build something better than the
neighbours ever dreamed of, and it won't be a mouse-trap, either.
There's enough old lumber here to build half a dozen cages, and if
you'll pay for the wire netting out of your share of the garden profits,
I'll help you put up a menagerie that P.T. Barnum himself wouldn't have
been ashamed of."
Norman's answer was a whoop and a double somersault, and he came up on
his feet again remarking that she was worth all the fellows in Lone-Rock
put together.
"According to what you've just said that isn't very much of a
compliment," laughed Mary. Still it gratified her so much that presently
she was planning a side-show for the menagerie. There were all her
mounted specimens of trap-door spiders and butterflies and desert
insects. She would loan the collection occasionally, and her stuffed
Gila monster and the arrow-heads and rattle-snake skins that she and
Holland had collected.
As she hammered and sawed she told Norman the story of _The Jester's
Sword_. "That is one reason I am taking so much interest in this," she
explained. "I've been thinking for days about what the old friar said,
that men need laughter sometimes more than food, and if we haven't any
cheer to spare ourselves, we may go a-gathering it from door to door as
he did crusts and carry it to those who need. That is why I have gone on
long walks and made so many calls on the few people that are here, so
that I'd have something amusing to tell Jack when I came home. But he
has seemed to find my 'crusts of cheer' mighty dry food, and he didn't
take half the interest in them that he did in talking to Lúpe to-day."
"Lúpe will make a beaten track to _his_ door fast enough," prophesied
Norman, "when he finds we want to buy more animals. I'll send word
to-night to him to set his traps for those coyotes and foxes."
That evening after supper, Jack wheeled himself out on to the porch. It
was the first time he had attempted it, and when he had made the trip
successfully, he sat a few minutes watching the stars. They seemed
unusually brilliant, and he amused himself in tracing the constellations
with which he was familiar. It had been a family study at the Wigwam,
and they had learned many things from the little Atlas of the Heavens
which Mrs. Ware kept among her other old school books. Presently he
called Mary.
"I've located Taurus. See, just over that tree top. And there is its red
eye, Aldebaran. I wanted you to see what a jolly twinkle he has
to-night."
It was the first direct reference he had made to the story, and Mary
waited expectantly for him to go on.
"Don't you worry, little pard," he said, after a pause. "I've known all
along how you felt about me. But I'm not knocked quite out of the game,
even if I am such a wreck. I felt so until I had that talk with Lúpe, as
if there was no use of my cumbering the ground any longer. But I found
out a lot from him. The men want me back. They don't understand the new
boss at all. They will do anything for me. So even if I can't walk I can
be worth at least half a man to the Company, in just being on the spot
to interpret and to keep things running smoothly. I could attend to the
correspondence, too, for my head and hands are all right. I know I am as
helpless as a baby yet, but if you'll just stand by me, and keep up that
treatment, and help me get my strength back, I'll make good, some way or
another, just as well as Aldebaran did. By the bloodstone on my
watch-fob!" he added, laughingly. "How is that for a fine swear?"
The old hopeful note in his voice made his helplessness more pathetic
than ever to Mary, but she answered gaily, "You know I'll stand by you
till 'the last cock crows and the last trump blows!' _You_ didn't have
to be born in Mars month to make undaunted courage the jewel of your
soul."
Perched on the arm of his chair she sat watching the red star for a
moment, thinking of the events which had led to his resolution. "It's
queer, isn't it," she said aloud. "I almost drove Norman away this
afternoon with his beast and his train of little Mexicans. I was so out
of patience with him for bringing them here. But how is one to know an
Opportunity when it comes in a chicken-coop disguised as a Wild-cat?"