THREE-FINGERED BILL
Barnes noted that Miss Van Patten had a personality which asserted
itself even in the dark. Though he could see nothing of her more than
an outline, he was able to follow every expression. This made it easier
to understand how the blind father gave himself up completely to that
other illusion.
“Will you ring for a light, Eleanor?” requested Aunt Philomela.
“The dark is very restful,” hazarded Barnes.
He rather enjoyed the situation. It gave his imagination freer play.
“The dark may keep us all in better countenance,” assented the aunt
tartly.
“You left him happy? He suspected nothing?” inquired Miss Van Patten,
eagerly.
“I left him asleep,” answered Barnes.
“Oh, that’s good. He hasn’t slept at night.”
“He has worried a great deal?”
“It’s been enough to break one’s heart to hear him call for Joe night
after night in the dark.”
“If ever I meet the boy,” observed Barnes with impressive
deliberateness, “I shall try to make him live for himself the hour I’ve
just lived for him. I listened to a saint, feeling like the Devil.”
“I don’t understand how Joe had the heart to hurt him,” choked the girl.
“He didn’t _have_ the heart--that’s the trouble,” answered Barnes. “No
one in the world will venture so far to give us pain as our own.”
Aunt Philomela stirred uneasily.
“For sheer mercilessness,” added Barnes, “give me a relative. It made
me squirm to have to save the boy from the shame he deserves.”
“How can we ever thank you for this!” exclaimed Miss Van Patten.
“By letting me stand face to face with the boy sometime.”
Aunt Philomela broke in.
“This act is not like Joe. He was never brutal. I don’t think he
understood.”
“No. He probably didn’t understand. That’s the brutal part of it. It’s
the brutes who don’t understand.”
He spoke with some heat--more than he intended, but he was still fresh
from that interview. The old man’s grip was still on his arm; those
sightless eyes were still straining into his. He still heard the
irregular breathing and the panting questions--childish questions,
trivial questions made great by the love back of them. And to these
he had been forced to give lying answers which would never have been
accepted save for this same great love and trust. He needed now to
be diverted from the memory of it. He was eager to stir up Aunt
Philomela--to turn to the lighter side of it though even the comedy of
it was tragical.
“If we’re going to be consistent travelers, Aunt Philomela,” he began,
“it will be necessary for me to repeat my story to you.”
“Is travelers the word?” she snapped back.
“The more polite word at any rate,” answered Barnes.
“I believe in calling a spade a spade.”
“But that isn’t any reason for calling everything a spade,” he ventured
to suggest. “What I was forced to tell him didn’t have sufficient truth
in it to make it a lie. It was pure fiction. I am sorry I didn’t have
more time for preparation. My effort was necessarily in the nature
of an inspiration. It was crude. It made me sorry that when a boy I
neglected physical geography.”
Aunt Philomela groaned.
“I’m sure you did the best you could,” declared Miss Van Patten. “It
was a very awkward position for you.”
“It was to say the least humiliating. He asked a great many questions.”
“Poor Daddy.”
“He will probably ask still more of Aunt Philomela,” he remarked.
“If he does!” she exploded.
“If he does?” he inquired.
“Why--this is disgraceful! We’re getting in deeper and deeper.”
“And he?”
Aunt Philomela did not answer.
“Well,” Barnes finished, “we will hold him high out of the water as
long as we can. Shall I repeat to you what I told him?”
“Yes, yes,” broke in the girl, “our stories must agree.”
“The best I could do was to paint a picture,” he half apologized.
“Picture making is your profession, I believe?” questioned Aunt
Philomela.
“Yes,” he answered slowly. “But _my_ public has eyes. There are some
advantages in painting for the blind. But, for that matter, many
supposedly good eyes _are_ blind.”
“And many supposedly weak ones are sound.”
“Exactly. The soul is the vision. I remembered the heading of the boy’s
letter--‘The Last Chance’--and so had a starting-point. Given, too,
the mystical white name ‘Alaska’ and what setting ought we to furnish
a penniless young man with more spirit than heart? It was only a guess
but I chose this: a green-blue sky, brittle, stinging; a panorama of
white undulating to a horizon shrouded in virgin snow; in the middle
distance a few slab huts; in the foreground a closer huddling of camps
with the gaudy sign of the ‘Nugget’ saloon conspicuous. In the single
street, bearded men as ungainly as bears in their heavy clothing,
glancing with fevered eyes now towards the ‘Nugget,’ now towards the
rugged banker mountains. Lean mongrels attached to sleds, passing from
time to time, but no other animals; no birds, no felines, no wasted
brute life.”
The Princess stole across the room and sprang into the girl’s lap. She
passed her hand over the silken hair.
“The notable other buildings,” continued Barnes, dreamily, “are
the post-office, the bank, the assayer’s offices, all of which
are distinguished by their signs. In the bank the sheriff has
diplomatically taken up quarters. So much for the stage.
“In a shanty on the outskirts of the settlement, sits Joe--sits myself.
I am in heavy trousers tucked into cowhide boots and wear a bearskin
coat. I am studying a batch of papers. They are the giddily-printed
stock certificates of ‘The Lucky Find.’”
“I know them,” nodded Aunt Philomela, now quite lost in the narrative.
“I’m indebted to you for that suggestion,” answered Barnes. “I pore
over the papers for a minute and then go to a corner where there’s
a stout wooden chest marked ‘Joe Van Patten, His box,’ I take out a
package of letters from home. I place them on the table and my eyes
grow moist.”
“I never saw the boy blubber in my life,” objected Aunt Philomela.
“You mustn’t interrupt,” protested Miss Van Patten.
“While I’m thus sentimentalizing,” Barnes hurried on,
“enter--three-fingered Bill.”
“Bah,” interrupted the aunt again.
“The name isn’t mine,” he explained, “I stole it from a magazine story.
Besides, Bill was falsely so called--they neglected to count his thumb.
Bill is a rough dog with whiskers like an anarchist but with a kindly
heart beating beneath his faded pink sweater. This was a relic of the
days when he served as a rubber down at prize fights.”
“A pleasant companion,” snorted Aunt Philomela.
“A useful one, at any rate. He greets me with a cheery ‘Hello, pard,
back in the home camp?’ I guiltily thrust the packet aside and we come
down to business on how most advantageously to use our relatives in the
matter of the gorgeous stock certificates.”
“So Bill was responsible for that!” exclaimed the aunt.
“Responsible?”
“For disposing of that worthless paper.”
She checked herself quickly.
“I hope,” she added, “that you didn’t hint to Mr. Van Patten what I
inadvertently let drop about ‘The Lucky Find.’”
“I was very cautious about particularizing in any matter capable of
substantiation.”
“I wouldn’t for the world have him know. The loss--er the loss was
slight.”
Barnes felt his heart warm towards Aunt Philomela. It would have warmed
still more had he known that this investment involved half her scant
property.
“I mentioned the fact that Bill with his wider experience held out
very bright prospects for the mine.”
“It was thoughtful of you to lay it to Bill.”
Mr. Van Patten instantly offered to assist me to the limits of his
means.
“If you dare allow him to invest--”
“I haven’t even any gilded certificates,” he reminded her.
“Of course not. I forgot.”
“This is merely a picture. As you see picture making can be the most
harmless of occupations. We artists produce the effect, without the
danger; we present the rose, without the thorns; we develop our mines,
without certificates. I assured Mr. Van Patten that this was no time to
invest.”
“You did very well,” Aunt Philomela complimented him.
“Thank you. Following this I went into the details of the cold weather,
but--you know all about that. I assured him that I was warm and that I
had plenty to eat.”
“Daddy hasn’t been able to take food at all without wondering if Joe
were hungry.”
“I was well supplied, I assure you. He wished to know more about my
friends and so I introduced him to Sam Foss, a most likeable fellow;
Ranston, an old college friend of mine out there somewhere; and Bart
Stanton, a Massachusetts Technology graduate. So you see my friends
averaged up pretty well.”
“They certainly were an improvement on one fingered Bill.”
“_Three_ fingered Bill,” he corrected, “you must be careful of your
details.”
“I shall venture to repeat nothing,” she asserted. “And you think he
believed all that nonsense?”
“As an eager child believes.”
“I suppose,” she mused sadly, “he _has_ become a bit childlike.”
“He was a child when listening,” Barnes continued, “but when he talked
to me it was the father who talked. I’m sorry the real child who wrote
the childish letter didn’t hear what he said to me.”
He paused. Aunt Philomela waited expectantly and so, too, did her
niece. But he told them nothing more. That which was not part of the
dream--that which was sober reality, he had no heart to repeat.
“That concludes my report,” he said as the silence remained unbroken.
Again a silence. Then Miss Van Patten spoke.
“You’ve been most kind to us. It’s hard to know how to thank you.”
“It isn’t necessary. I’ve been well repaid--if that were essential.”
Somewhere about the house an old clock chimed nine.
Aunt Philomela rose.
“We retire early in the country,” she said wearily, “I’ll call John.”
“Thank you. I trust your dreams will be pleasant.”
“They will be of Alaska. I feel it in my bones.”
“They might be worse located--on a summer evening,” he hazarded.
She swept like a royal dowager towards the door. The girl followed but
stopped a moment before him.
“Thank you again,” she murmured. “Good night.”
Then, with the Princess close behind her, she too swept queen like from
the room.
As with something of a sigh Barnes half turned, he found John beside
him as though he had come up through a trap in the floor.
“Ah, you?” he exclaimed.
“Yes, sir,” faltered John, wondering what else his master’s son had
expected, “will you follow me, sir?”
Lighting a candle, the man escorted him to the room where the dimity
curtains were bulging in from a brisk night breeze. As he placed the
flickering light upon the dresser, Barnes inquired,
“You haven’t seen--”
“Good Lord, sir. No, sir.”
“Very well, John. You may go.”
He went, leaving Barnes to the fragrance of the night. The dark of the
orchard made him think of her hair.