HAIDEE
ONCE, years ago, when I was a lad, in an old volume of poems in my
father’s library I came across a steel engraving of a beautiful woman.
She had a small head with raven black tresses bound smoothly about
her brow with a fillet, but twisted back over her ears and ending in
ringlets over her shoulders. She had big dark eyes, a tiny mouth, a
slim white throat, and infinitesimally small hands and feet. Her name
was Haidee. I think her feet fascinated me most; for she wore shoes
unlike any I had ever seen, ending in high curving points at the toes.
She was a most distracting, elusive personality.
When my wonder woman placed her foot in my palm, and mounted her mare
at my meadow bars, to myself I muttered: “Haidee.” So, the following
morning, in answer to Joey’s query: “What’s her name, Mr. David?” I
answered “Haidee,” and grinned at the lad sheepishly through the smoke
that arose from the griddle I was greasing with bacon rind.
Joey, giving the cake batter in the yellow pitcher furtive sly dabs
with the iron spoon when he thought me unaware, looked grave.
“It don’t sound nice. It sounds like that name you say sometimes--”
“Ssh!”
“When you’re mad,” finished Joey adroitly.
I shoved the stove lid into place beneath the hot griddle, and
motioned to Joey to bring the yellow pitcher. While I poured out the
foamy batter, Joey kept silence, watching the sizzling process with
fascinated eyes, but when I took the pancake-turner in hand and opened
the window to let the smoke escape, he spoke again:
“It’s bad for her, ain’t it, having a name like that?”
“It isn’t her real name, Joey. It’s a name I bestowed upon her. It
seemed to belong to her someway. We shall never see her again, so it
does not matter.”
“We’ll see her again, Mr. David, if she buys Russell’s old ranch.”
I paused midway to the table, the cake-turner heaped with steaming
cakes in my hand. I stared at Joey. Curiously I’d forgotten the
possibility of Haidee becoming my neighbor. My wrist trembled, the
cakes slipped to the floor. Joey pounced upon them, bore them to the
sink and rinsed them painstakingly in the pail of fresh spring water.
“I like cold cakes,” he was saying manfully, when I awoke to the
situation.
“So does the collie. No, no, lad--we may not be living in affluence,
but we don’t have to economize on corn cakes.” I laughed boisterously
and patted his shoulder. “My cedar chests are selling, and my book--my
nature story--is almost completed--why, soon we shall be turning up our
noses at flapjacks!”
“At flapjacks!” Joey cried incredulously, making a dash for the yellow
pitcher.
We were half through breakfast before he spoke again, and then he
ventured tentatively: “Suppose she’ll come to-day?”
“Who, Joey?”
“Her--the--woman. The one that made me swear when I saw her in the
workshop.”
“Oh, I’d forgotten your behaviour in the shop, Joey! It was
reprehensible--it was rude--”
Joey nodded. “I forgot I was a human bein’.”
He put his elbows on the table, sunk his chin in his hands, and
regarded me. I raised my coffee-cup hurriedly, drained the contents,
and coughed spasmodically, Joey’s eyes widening in concern.
Two days after this conversation with Joey, as, butterfly-net in hand,
I was crossing the ploughed field back of the cabin at noon returning
from a collecting trip, I saw the bent figure of a man approaching
along the river road. He carried a sack of flour on his back and he
walked with his head so far forward that his chin almost touched his
knees. I was feeling particularly jubilant, having taken four Electas,
six Zerenes and two specimens of Breuner’s Silver-spot, and I accosted
him lustily: “Good day, Lundquist.”
He attempted to straighten up, found the effort of no avail, and
nodded. I rested on the bars and he came slowly toward me. His red
face was so knotted and twisted that his very eyes seemed warped
askew beneath his ugly freckled forehead. His old hands were horny
and purple-veined, his legs spindling and bowed. Poor old derelict!
Hapless, hard old man! He lived high up on Nigger Head mountain alone
with the birds and squirrels. How he subsisted was a mystery. But he
always had tobacco to smoke, and a corn-cob pipe to smoke it in. This
fact comforted me, when I fell to musing on his meagre estate.
“It’s a fine day, Lundquist,” I continued.
He came closer, halted, and peered up at me.
“Ya, it ban.”
“Been to town?”
“Ya--I been to town.” He took his old black pipe from his mouth and
crept closer. “Last night,” he stuttered, in his rasping broken accent,
“last night I saw a light, Mr. Dale--a light--down thar.”
He pointed with his pipe-stem over his shoulder.
“A light? Do you mean you saw a light from your cabin?”
“Ya--in the old shack on Hidden Lake.” He chuckled. “Thar been no
light thar fer three year. The wood-rats they eat up the furniture ole
Russell leave. Place sold--maybe?”
I saw Joey watching me miserably during dinner. I ate like an
automaton, and never once did I speak. Afterward it was no better.
I took my book and sat on a bench outside the cabin. Joey’s voice
soaring high above the rattle of the dishes in the sink; a red-shafted
flicker hammering noisily on a pine tree before the door, saluting me
with his “kee-yer, kee-yer”; the whistle of the Georgie Oaks at the
draw-bridge, were all heard as in a dream. I was back in the workshop
with Haidee, I heard her eager question: “There is a place I may buy,
then?” I tried to picture to myself Russell’s old cabin metamorphosed
by that radiant presence. It required a daring stretch of the
imagination to vision anything so improbable.
The valley which lies like an emerald-green jewel in the very lap of
the mountains in this section of Idaho, is watered by innumerable
streams which it seems presumptuous to call rivers, and honeycombed
with tiny blue lakes, their entrance from the rivers so concealed by
tangles of birches and high green thickets and clumps of underbrush
that their existence is practically unknown, save to the settlers along
the adjacent rivers and to a few zealous sportsmen who make portages
from lake to lake, dragging their canoes across the intervening marshes
and of the Georgie Oaks likens the shadowy St. Joe and the equally
shadowy but more obscure Cœur meadow-land. The tourist sitting on the
deck d’Alene river to the Rhine, and bemoans the absence of storied
castles, never dreaming of the chain of jeweled lakes that lies just
beyond.
It was on the most cleverly hidden of these lakes that Russell’s cabin
stood. Years before I had paddled down the river and contrived to
find the lead. But the thickets were still deeper now, and I doubted
my ability to find the narrow aperture. Toward the middle of the
afternoon, therefore, I threw the saddle on Buttons, and rode away
beneath the fragrant yews, seeking the trail that skirted the mountain.
The day was fair, the sky a soft azure, and the wheat fields rippled
in a sultry breeze; but as I left the trail and descended through a
boscage of cedars and scrub pines, following the damp clay path to
Hidden Lake, I shivered in spite of the warmth of the day. And when I
rode through the rushes that grew as high as a man’s head, and emerged
on the cozy grey beach, and gazed across the deep blue, unnatural
quiet of the water, I was weighted down by a weird depression. I
felt suddenly like a puny thing, shaken with the knowledge of my own
mutability. A bittern rose up from the tules, flapped its wings and
gave its honking note of desolation; a flock of terns on a piece of
driftwood emitted raucous cries. Russell’s cabin stood before me,
weather-beaten, warped, and unsightly; moss on the roof, bricks falling
from the chimney, the door steps rotted, the small porch sagging.
I slid off my cayuse and stood contemplating the ravages about me.
Not a sound came from the cabin. Presently, I gathered my courage
sufficiently to mount the steps and knock with the butt of my whip
on the slatternly door that stood ajar. I received no response. I
waited. The bittern in the tules gave its pumping call, “pumper-lunk,
pumper-lunk,” and the hollow rushes droned suddenly in the wind like
ghoulish piccolos. I pushed open the door without further ado and
looked within.
I saw a small room, dust-covered and cob-web frescoed. The floor was
littered with refuse, the fireplace held a bank of gray ashes, the
home-made furniture had fallen a prey to the savage onslaughts of
wood-rats. A damp and disagreeable odor permeated the air. “Surely she
has not been here,” I said to myself.
I stepped to a door at the further end of the room, turned the wobbly
knob, peered within, and shrank back, confounded at what I saw.
The light was streaming in through a window that had been recently
washed and polished until it shown, over a floor freshly scoured. A
small white-draped dressing table with all a woman’s dainty toilet
paraphernalia met my prying eyes; a small cot gleamed fresh and
spotless in a corner; and on every chair, and ranged on the floor
around the room, were canvases of various sizes with tantalizing
impressionistic bits of the outdoor world painted upon them, while
streaming from an open trunk and overflowing in sumptuous, foamy
sensuousness to the crude pine floor was the lingerie of a fastidious
woman.
I took myself out of the house post-haste, threw myself into my saddle,
and plunged away into the enveloping shadows of the cedar thicket. That
night I climbed up Nigger Head almost to old Lundquist’s very door. I
cast my eyes down in the direction of Hidden Lake. I saw a small red
light gleaming there. I lay down on a ledge of rock and watched the
light, watched it until toward midnight it disappeared, the wind came
up with a soughing sound, the tall pines creaked and swayed above my
head, and I walked down the mountain--the rain in my face.