THE HIGH WOODS
“Signs ain’t no great, I never ’lowed,” said Ella thoughtfully.
Sweeping her knife in a neat semicircle, she pared the dough round the
edge of a tin plate. The sweet, steamy breath of apple pies filled the
kitchen, consorting genially with the soft, high sunshine reflected
upward from snow-fields without. “No more ducks’ breast-bon’s for me!
November, and see there!” She pointed at the frosty window-panes.
“Open winter! What’s a shut? And for cold, why, ’fore breakfast, the
what’s-name’s ’way down below the other thing.”
She knelt before the stove, cautiously placed her newest product, and
rose muttering, her freckled cheeks, powdered with flour, rouged with
heat from the oven.
“Don’t tell me!” she grumbled, as though taxing Miles with the
weather’s iniquity. “Yisterday, fall. To-morrow, winter. Onseasonable,
and ondignified, like’s if the powers was playin’ us tricks.
’Tain’t the wet kind that goes, but the dry that keeps aholt. Below
what’s-name, too. Beats Old Roper!”
Through the glistening stillness came a thin, mellow jingle.
“Sleigh-bells!” Ella nodded, with an air of angry wisdom. “Another year
gone. Shoo-fly! No more’n last week, first mud to out on wheels; and
here’s them things a-calangalin’ round again!”
Helpless against this revolution of the seasons, Miles laughed.
“Not my fault, Ella.” Listening to the jog-trot cadence of the bells,
he added, “They’re coming here.”
“Ain’t neither--yes, they are too!” Ella bustled to the back window,
and, twisting her apron into knots, stared eagerly up the smooth, white
heave of the hill. “Who’ll it be, s’pose? All is, he’ll break out our
ro’d for us! I’d ought to reco’nize any bells o’ twenty mile round--do,
too. Them’s either Old-Hab, or Lazy-Hab, or Cal Martin the tinker.”
Against the pale sky, with a slow and broken jangling of bells,
appeared a sorrel horse. He shambled steeply down, knee-deep in drifts,
yet straining to hold back a broad sled. The driver, swathed to the
eyes, precariously embraced a sled stake, like a trained bear hugging
his pole.
“Old-Hab’s hoss,” reported Ella.
“Ho there, Danamite!” sounded a smothered growl. The bells cut their
music short; and a moment later Old-Hab himself battered the door, and,
entering, unwound a woolen muffler white-furred with frozen breath. His
bony cheeks, at last uncovered, shone glazed and flaming.
“By the hokey,” he grumbled, breathing sharp and stamping his yellow
“larrigans” on the oilcloth. “Smells good in here, Miss Dawson. Black
as night, too. Takes this piercifyin’ cold to aidge a man’s stummick
and file his teeth. Dretful holler, this weather!”
“Eatin’! What did I say?” With the ready grievance of a comedian, Ella
turned to Miles. “Eatin’, I says, is the first word Hab Belden speaks
inside this house! There ye go.”
The teamster, unmoved, began to shed jacket after jacket,--a grimy
sheep-fleece, a worn reefer, a faded blanket coat belted with tarred
rope. After each struggle he diminished in bulk, as though peeling
layer by layer to the core; till at last, dashing his cap on the
discarded pile, he emerged like Burleigh from the Lord Treasurer,
and stood forth as a little, wiry, beardless man in a brown jersey.
His narrow body, sharp, frost-red features, and Indian hair brushed
fiercely back in coarse lines, gave him an eager, windswept air, as of
a weather-cock facing the winter blast. In a gusty way he veered upon
Ella.
“You can talk like Day o’ Pentecost,” he said, admiring. “But don’t
tell us ye can’t beat the old house afire at cookin’! I says to ’em
all, up Sweet Water way, they can’t use the same oven with Ella Dawson.”
“Shoo-fly,” retorted the cook contemptuously. None the less, she
rummaged for dishes, and slowly arranged them on the table. The
flatterer was soon plying an expert knife.
“Well, Mr. Mile,” he continued, “I’ve come o’ business to your
gran’father. Consarns you, but no hurry. Cares can wait: Old Appetite,
not so.--Now, why don’t a handy girl like that ever git merried?”
“Much!” cried Ella angrily. She turned her back, and stared out at
window, muttering, “Waste time ketchin’ some glutteron to cook for?” No
one but a Bissant might have known what memory her scorn disguised, or
in what gale Ben Constantine went overboard, thirty years ago.
A feeble step came down the passage. The inner door opened.
“Mornin’, Mr. Bissant.” Their visitor finished his coffee at a gulp and
sprang up, nodding and ducking. “Health fust rate, I hope, sir?”
“Fair, thank you,” replied the Admiral’s brother. “And yours,
Mr. Belden?” His white head inclined gravely. Perhaps it was the
upward-slanting glow in the sunny kitchen, perhaps some subtler effect
of the strange, untimely cold; but of late, and now especially, he
seemed to Miles far more old and frail. Age had stolen upon him in his
chamber, as winter had surprised the yellow autumn fields.
“Mine’s tol’able, thank ye,” replied the teamster. “Now fust crack,
sir, here’s the whole point, and no offense. I’m bound up to High
Woods, after cord-wood; also to mark handy spots, p’r’aps, for gittin’
out knees. Sleddin’’s fine: might be Feb’uary. Now to Kilmarnock is
neither youngsters ner able bodies. No one free to go but my son,
Lazy-Hab, who ain’t no great, all knows, beside he’s a hard-o’-hearin’
man. I got kind o’ desprit. ‘What, miss all that splendid goin’?’
thinks I. ‘Won’t neither. There’s young Mr. Mile, the bigness of a man
a’ready.’ Now all I ask is, will he ride along o’ me, week or ten days,
and do a man’s work for a man’s wages?”
“I don’t know,” replied old Mr. Bissant in slow surprise. “It’s pretty
cold, Habakkuk. The mercury showed--”
“My feelin’s is better’n any old jibometer!” cried the other
recklessly. “’Scuse my common way, sir, but it’ll do the young man
good.”
“True for once!” cried Ella, with sudden animation. “Let him go! If
anybody ever needed a change! He’s been mopin’ and sykin’ about this
house like a sweetheart in a picture book!”
Miles felt his grandfather’s eyes fasten on him so odd a scrutiny that
he gladly heard the interruption of Tony’s laugh. “Yes, let him go
skylark,” called the sailor, lounging in from the passage. “The lad’s
been cooped up till he’s stale. I’ll keep all ship-shape for him here.
This last fortnight he’s hardly spoken to us--sour even on his old
mate!”
“You’re right, Florio. You’re always right.” The old man nodded.
Seldom had his wrinkled face appeared so tolerant, his eyes and
voice so regretful and kindly. “I hate to lose you out of sight, boy,
but--perhaps--”
“Slip your cable!” laughed Tony.
So Miles went with Habakkuk Belden to the High Woods.
“Thought he’d knock under,” chuckled the teamster, as they slid
jingling through the powdery snow. “Here, Mile, drive Danamite whilst
I git a pipeful o’ Mundungo. Yes, sir, a turr’ble persuadin’ tongue I
got, if a man can brag o’ gifts. The pen of a ready writer! But the
Old Sir looks peeked, Mile. Standin’ so in the door, I saw a breath o’
feebleness go out again’ him. Well, stren’th don’t hitch up with years.
G’ long there, Danger!”
The road ran high and lonely over the ridges. Their eyes, dazzled with
leagues of white glare, blurred with tears in the sweep of a freezing
wind, gained power slowly to descry the milder gleam of the channel far
beneath, and beyond this, the billowing of the Maine hills, softened
by distance and the smoothing magic of the snow. Sometimes, dipping
into a smothered hollow among firs, they suffered again a momentary
blindness, in the obscurity of dark green and shadowed white; and
again, yet once more dazed with wide brilliancy, climbed higher and
farther from the river, up an immense and softly convex curve, toward
the fugitive sky-line. Black evergreen tops, the distant relics of some
grove, dotted the hill like ermine; or singly, and closer to hand, like
feathered arrows that a giant might have shot straight downward. Rarely
these, however; so free was the north wind, so shelterless and dry the
snow, that by turns the sled groaned over frozen mud, and stuck fast in
smoking drifts.
As the two men pushed and tugged to aid the horse, or slapped their
aching hands, or stamped and kicked the sled, they exchanged few words.
The slow jangling of the bells traveled in the void, a stray mote of
cheerful sound.
To Miles, looking back down many a long slope, they chimed with vague
but happy thoughts. He surveyed, in shining perspective from this
eminence, not only his native valley, but the last fortnight of his
life there. Ella was wrong, he had not moped; Tony was wrong, he had
hardly considered their estrangement; here was the real truth: before
that adventure in the fog, he had passed his days in a brown study,
and after it, had been whirled into the glowing rout of life. A
hundred dim things which had passed him by he now saw, heard, felt, and
thrillingly understood.
Two regrets lingered: he had not seen again either the man or the girl
of Alward’s Cove; and from them he traveled farther at every shake
of the bells. Yet all that was but temporary; and meanwhile, to his
strange, new vision of the world, the simplest detail in this simple
journey was a bit of exultation.
The woods at last received them into vast and crowded silence. The
sorrel horse, with steaming haunches, plodded heavily through a dark
lane of virgin whiteness, between puffy, undulating banks of buried
under-wood. Beyond or through these, in broken glimpses of depth, white
and black trunks so lurked and interchanged in reciprocating movement
as to create an illusion of presences--many, yet one--who dodged and
spied and followed. There seemed no other life in all this stillness.
Yet now and then, in sunny clearings, a line of tiny hollows, filled
with shadowy blue, marked some late woodland errand; the straight
trot of a fox, scored alongside with shallow scoops of his brush; the
neat cuneiform written by partridge claws; the bunched all-fours of a
leaping rabbit, or the beaten stream where his whole tribe had flowed
over log and knoll into some green cavern. When drifts halted the sled,
and brought the bells to silence or single notes, an invisible brook
chuckled from among willows, its runnels gossiping under ice and snow.
At dusk the two men reached a dark little shanty in second-growth
beeches.
“W’oa there, Gyasticus!” cried Hab. “Here y’ are. Stand by to unlo’d
dunnage!”
That night they spent in watches, turn about, sleeping and tending
fire; and before daylight were out and away to distant groves of birch
and maple. A week of happy, vigorous days fled by. Sometimes the two
chopped side by side; sometimes they separated for whole mornings, each
alone in the snowy wilderness, but for the ringing shock of the other’s
axe in frosty wood, half a mile away. The novice felled his trees,
first with reluctance at such treachery to old friends, but later
with a workman’s pride. In the beginning they crashed through their
neighbors’ tops in a violent cloud of snow, dazzling as an explosion of
diamond dust; but now they dropped, groaning, with one clean swing into
their foreseen places.
At noon Miles met Habakkuk in the lee of a tall granite boulder,
blackened with smoke, and crowned with the red spikes of sumac. Here,
over a leaping fire, they boiled snow for their coffee, and thawed
their frozen food; and here they lounged for a half hour of vernal
warmth and drowsiness. Snow, melted by noonday sun above and flame
beneath, dropped round them from the branches, in white batons that
broke and dispersed in mid-air. A thin arc of pale green grass bordered
the melting semicircle where they sat, with steaming moccasins, while
Old-Hab growled some slow account of “getting out knees,” of swamping,
stumpage, the excellence of beech for “water-log work,” and all the
personal traits of Nasty Ellum, Old Popple, and Master Oak.
Night found them tired in camp, sleeping or watching the fire. Once or
twice only they sat together talking.
“Yes, sir, for my years, I stay clever,” said Habakkuk, on one of these
rare occasions. Smoking wisely, he pointed his weather-vane countenance
toward the glow. “Can’t leave Old Mundungo alon’, but never teched
Rum. Result is, spry and tough as linkumvity. Old-Hab they call me;
but that’s jest to tell apart from Lazy-Hab. Now me, always fond o’
work; him, always talkin’ o’ luck and lookin’ for easy ways. Never
could break that boy to harness. A hard-o’-hearin’ man, he is; but eyes
like a bee. Always connivin’ round and spyin’ after truck. Spoilt a
turnip-field, one time, diggin’ for gold.”
The teamster chuckled, meditating.
“Cap’n Kidd’s pirate money, once, he ’lowed ’twas hid somewheres along
ar shore. To see him, those days, you’d thought the price o’ clams had
ris’. And shortly afterwords, havin’ eyesight like a bee, the young
fool found some kind o’ mound up into a patch o’ woods. Took spade,
pick, and lantrun, and sneaked up there one night. Old Postmaster Quinn
see his light, and bein’ always of a busy-brain, followed him after.
Found Lazy-Hab over a dug hole, pryin’ open a chist full o’ stuff.
“‘What ye doin’?’ shouts Quinn. ‘Come away from that!’
“Lazy-Hab, bein’ a hard-o’-hearin’ man, kep’ right on. So Quinn claps
mouth to ear, and bellers ‘Small-pock!’
“Lazy-Hab give a jump like Sam Patch, and run, and never stopped
for spade or lantrun. ’Twas that Portugee sailor’s kit, died o’ the
small-pock up to Barry’s.”
Again the wood-chopper laughed, quietly.
“All one same,” he continued, growing serious, “that ain’t sayin’
the Old Sir didn’t bury no pirate-money round these parts.” He rose
suddenly, nodding with an air of mystery. “Reminds me. Come along till
I show ye.”
Bundling himself warmly, and seizing the lantern, he led Miles
outdoors, round the hut, through the whispering withered leaves of the
stunted beeches, and up a steep rising ground. Wading thigh-deep, or
scrambling over dry granite, they gained the rocky summit of a little
hill.
“I see it a fortni’t ago,” said Old-Hab. “Up here alon’. P’r’aps
’twon’t show to-night.” He pointed across the vast darkness of the
valley. “Down there’s the river, and my finger’s ’bout on that bit o’
island opposite your place. Now from tide-water, she looks all solid
fars and spruce, don’t she? But up here, daytimes, they show jest a
ring-round, like, and a bald spot in the middle. Now, one night--”
He bosomed the lantern under his sheepskin coat. In starlight, they
faced a bitter wind, hearing only the whisper of the beeches and the
distant bark of a fox.
“Watch! Nothin’, is they? Well, p’r’aps--Hold on! See there!”
Far off and far below, a point of light gleamed, winked, shone steady
for some minutes, and was gone.
“Jest like other time,” said Hab. “Now what d’ ye make o’ that?”
Miles, wondering, could find no explanation.
“Me neither,” muttered his companion, as they descended to the hut.
“Some one diggin’ for the Old Sir’s money? I give it up. Ain’t pic-nic
weather, any rate, jibometer below. Not tellin’ fo’ks, but some loafin’
weather I may take a look there myself--invest things, kind of.”
Without further incident their ten days drew to a close. Though they
climbed the hill a second time, no light appeared on the island. Their
speculation flagged, and soon Miles was to forget it, along with other
trifles.
They were returning from a day’s work below the hut, and had crossed a
long bog or heath, where the pent-up water of some brook shone toward
the sunset, a broad, pale mirror of green ice. On the upper side of
this they had gained the road, which ran roundabout with the low,
skirting alders, black against the west,--a belt of night, between
the last daylight sinking vertically in the sky and the last daylight
horizontally retreating along the ice.
“Somebody comin’,” said Old-Hab suddenly. Both men paused and listened.
They heard no bells, but in the extreme silence of twilight caught
a faint jingle of trace-chains, and the frosty creak of runners,
following Hab’s own runners in the ruts of a week ago. Some one drew
slowly nearer, invisible in the black band of night, but moving as an
obscure, watery reflection along the sallow ice, darkening the thin,
inverted fringe of alders. The picture of that still approach, long
afterward, became for Miles the symbol and essence of all misgiving.
A white horse appeared, drawing a swaddled figure on a sled.
“Hallo!” called the voice of Tony.
He pulled up, and fixed them with a strange look, his eyebrows sharply
contracted in the dusk.
“Is that you?” His tone, though matter of fact, was subdued and
changed. “Miles, old chap, I--They sent me after you.”
“Has--has anything happened, Tony?”
The sailor nodded soberly.
“Your grandfather wants to see you. You’d better come along.” He
hesitated, then fell back upon that homely phrase which trouble has
consecrated. “He--he’s a very sick man, Miles. I’ll take you.”
It seemed to Miles that all his life he had foreseen and known this
moment in the dark woods.