Later that afternoon John Packer came in from the barn; he had
lingered out of doors in the cold as long as there was any excuse for
so doing, and had fed the cattle early, and cleared up and laid into a
neat pile some fencing materials and pieces of old boards that had
been lying in the shed in great confusion since before the coming of
snow. It was a dusty, splintery heap, half worthless, and he had
thrown some of the broken fence-boards out to the wood-pile, and then
had stopped to break them up for kindlings and to bring them into the
back kitchen of the house, hoping, yet fearing at every turn, to hear
the sound of his wife's voice. Sometimes the women had to bring in
fire-wood themselves, but to-night he filled the great wood-box just
outside the kitchen door, piling it high with green beech and maple,
with plenty of dry birch and pine, taking pains to select the best and
straightest sticks, even if he burrowed deep into the wood-pile. He
brought the bushel basketful of kindlings last, and set it down with a
cheerful grunt, having worked himself into good humor again; and as he
opened the kitchen door, and went to hang his great blue mittens
behind the stove, he wore a self-satisfied and pacificatory smile.
"There, I don't want to hear no more about the wood-box bein' empty.
We're goin' to have a cold night; the air's full of snow, but 't won't
fall, not till it moderates."
The women glanced at him with a sense of relief. They had looked
forward to his entrance in a not unfamiliar mood of surly silence.
Every time he had thumped down a great armful of wood, it had startled
them afresh, and their timid protest and sense of apprehension had
increased until they were pale and miserable; the younger woman had
been crying.
"Come, mother, what you goin' to get me for supper?" said the master
of the house. "I'm goin' over to the Centre to the selec'men's office
to-night. They're goin' to have a hearin' about that new piece o' road
over in the Dexter neighborhood."
The mother and daughter looked at each other with relief and shame;
perhaps they had mistaken the timber-contractor's errand, after all,
though their imagination had followed truthfully every step of a
bitter bargain, from the windows.
"Poor father!" said his wife, half unconsciously. "Yes; I'll get you
your supper quick 's I can. I forgot about to-night. You'll want
somethin' warm before you ride 'way over to the Centre, certain;" and
she began to bustle about, and to bring things out of the pantry. She
and John Packer had really loved each other when they were young, and
although he had done everything he could since then that might have
made her forget, she always remembered instead; she was always ready
to blame herself, and to find excuse for him. "Do put on your big fur
coat, won't you, John?" she begged eagerly.
"I ain't gone yet," said John, looking again at his daughter, who did
not look at him. It was not quite dark, and she was bending over her
sewing, close to the window. The momentary gleam of hope had faded in
her heart; her father was too pleasant: she hated him for the petty
deceit.
"What are you about there, Lizzie?" he asked gayly. "Why don't you
wait till you have a light? Get one for your mother: she can't see
over there by the table."
Lizzie Packer's ready ears caught a provoking tone in her father's
voice, but she dropped her sewing, and went to get the hand-lamp from
the high mantelpiece. "Have you got a match in your pocket? You know
we're all out; I found the last this mornin' in the best room." She
stood close beside him while he took a match from his waistcoat pocket
and gave it to her.
"I won't have you leavin' matches layin' all about the house," he
commanded; "mice'll get at 'em, and set us afire. You can make up some
lamplighters out of old letters and things; there's a lot o' stuff
that might be used up. Seems to me lamplighters is gone out o'
fashion; they come in very handy."
Lizzie did not answer, which was a disappointment.
"Here, you take these I've got in my pocket, and that'll remind me to
buy some at the store," he ended. But Lizzie did not come to take
them, and when she had waited a moment, and turned up the lamp
carefully, she put it on the table by her mother, and went out of the
room. The father and mother heard her going upstairs.
"I do hope she won't stay up there in the cold," said Mrs. Packer in
an outburst of anxiety.
"What's she sulkin' about now?" demanded the father, tipping his chair
down emphatically on all four legs. The timid woman mustered all her
bravery.
"Why, when we saw Mr. Ferris out there talkin' with you, we were
frightened for fear he was tryin' to persuade you about the big pines.
Poor Lizzie got all worked up; she took on and cried like a baby when
we saw him go off chucklin' and you stayed out so long. She can't bear
the thought o' touchin' 'em. And then when you come in and spoke about
the selec'men, we guessed we was all wrong. Perhaps Lizzie feels bad
about that now. I own I had hard feelin's toward you myself, John."
She came toward him with her mixing-spoon in her hand; her face was
lovely and hopeful. "You see, they've been such landmarks, John," she
said, "and our Lizzie's got more feelin' about 'em than anybody. She
was always playin' around 'em when she was little; and now there's so
much talk about the fishin' folks countin' on 'em to get in by the
short channel in bad weather, and she don't want you blamed."
"You'd ought to set her to work, and learnt her head to save her
heels," said John Packer, grumbling; and the pale little woman gave a
heavy sigh, and went back to her work again. "That's why she ain't no
good now--playin' out all the time when other girls was made to work.
Broke you all down, savin' her," he ended in an aggrieved tone.
"John, 't ain't true, is it?" She faced him again in a way that made
him quail; his wife was never disrespectful, but she sometimes faced
every danger to save him from his own foolishness. "Don't you go and
do a thing to make everybody hate you. You know what it says in the
Bible about movin' a landmark. You'll get your rights; 't is just as
much your right to let the trees stand, and please folks."
"Come, come, Mary Hannah!" said John, a little moved in spite of
himself. "Don't work yourself up so. I ain't told you I was goin' to
cut 'em, have I? But if I ever do, 't is because I've been twitted
into it, an' told they were everybody's trees but mine."
He pleased himself at the moment by thinking that he could take back
his promise to Ferris, even if it cost five dollars to do it. Why
couldn't people leave a man alone? It was the women's faces at the
window that had decided his angry mind, but now they thought it all
his fault. Ferris would say, "So your women folks persuaded you out of
it." It would be no harm to give Ferris a lesson: he had used a man's
being excited and worked upon by interfering neighbors to drive a
smart bargain. The trees were worth fifty dollars apiece, if they were
worth a cent. John Packer transferred his aggrieved thoughts from his
family to Ferris himself. Ferris had driven a great many sharp
bargains; he had plenty of capital behind him, and had taken advantage
of the hard times, and of more than one man's distress, to buy
woodland at far less than its value. More than that, he always
stripped land to the bare skin; if the very huckleberry bushes and
ferns had been worth anything to him, he would have taken those,
insisting upon all or nothing, and, regardless of the rights of
forestry, he left nothing to grow; no sapling-oak or pine stood where
his hand had been. The pieces of young growing woodland that might
have made their owners rich at some later day were sacrificed to his
greed of gain. You had to give him half your trees to make him give
half price for the rest. Some men yielded to him out of ignorance, or
avarice for immediate gains, and others out of bitter necessity. Once
or twice he had even brought men to their knees and gained his point
by involving them in money difficulties, through buying up their
mortgages and notes. He could sell all the wood and timber he could
buy, and buy so cheap, to larger dealers; and a certain builder having
given him an order for some unusually wide and clear pine at a large
price, his withering eye had been directed toward the landmark trees
on John Packer's farm.
On the road home from the Packer farm that winter afternoon
Mr. Ferris's sleigh-bells sounded lonely, and nobody was met or
overtaken to whom he could brag of his success. Now and then he looked
back with joy to the hill behind the Packer house, where the assailed
pine-trees still stood together, superb survivors of an earlier
growth. The snow was white about them now, but in summer they stood
near the road at the top of a broad field which had been won from wild
land by generation after generation of the Packers. Whatever man's
hands have handled, and his thoughts have centred in, gives something
back to man, and becomes charged with his transferred life, and
brought into relationship. The great pines could remember all the
Packers, if they could remember anything; they were like some huge
archaic creatures whose thoughts were slow and dim. So many anxious
eyes had sought these trees from the sea, so many wanderers by land
had gladly welcomed the far sight of them in coming back to the old
town, it must have been that the great live things felt their
responsibility as landmarks and sentinels. How could any fisherman
find the deep-sea fishing-grounds for cod and haddock without bringing
them into range with a certain blue hill far inland, or with the
steeple of the old church on the Wilton road? How could a hurrying
boat find the short way into harbor before a gale without sighting the
big trees from point to point among the rocky shallows? It was a
dangerous bit of coast in every way, and every fisherman and
pleasure-boatman knew the pines on Packer's Hill. As for the Packers
themselves, the first great adventure for a child was to climb alone
to the great pines, and to see an astonishing world from beneath their
shadow; and as the men and women of the family grew old, they
sometimes made an effort to climb the hill once more in summer
weather, to sit in the shelter of the trees, where the breeze was
cool, and to think of what had passed, and to touch the rough bark
with affectionate hands. The boys went there when they came home from
voyages at sea; the girls went there with their lovers. The trees were
like friends, and whether you looked seaward, being in an inland
country, or whether you looked shoreward, being on the sea, there they
stood and grew in their places, while a worldful of people lived and
died, and again and again new worldfuls were born and passed away, and
still these landmark pines lived their long lives, and were green and
vigorous yet.