BEREFT
I HAD not heard from Janet Jones again and I was beginning to think
that I might never have another letter from her when a missive came.
Thank you for my cedar chest (she wrote). It reached me safely,
but I have been ill in body and mind and unable to write sooner.
Oh, the joy my bit of cedar wood is to me. When I look at it, I am
transported at once to the heart of the clean woods. And I shut my
eyes and vision the tree hosts in their tawny brown, like Khaki-clad
soldiers marshalling at the trumpet call of the rushing September
winds. What a sparkle and spirited flavor there is in the wine-like
air. How the leaves swirl in the paths like gilded cups, and winnow
through the air like painted galleons, and rustle and unroll beneath
the tread, like cloth of gold. Oh, I love the summer. But the fall
with its shining sumptuous days--its melancholy grandeur surpasses
it. Only--the birds are gone--are they not? And the dear clever
nests--“half-way houses on the road to Heaven”--sway tenantless.
While the wood aisles seem hushed and solemn, I know, like vast
cathedral spaces after the organ has ceased to reverberate.
I read this letter with delight, and I wrote and thanked Janet Jones as
cordially as I knew how for the pleasure it had given me. I began to
look forward to her next missive, and I was beginning to experience no
small satisfaction from our peculiar, unconventional friendship, when a
strange thing happened.
Joey and I were tearing out the straw from his mattress one day, intent
on our usual fall house-cleaning, when my fingers closed over a bit of
cardboard. I drew it forth, unrolled it, and smoothed it in my hand. It
was the small square visiting card that had been attached to the parcel
that Haidee had placed in my saddle-bag for Joey, on the day that now
seemed so long ago, when I had gone to fell the trees at Hidden Lake
and had ridden so ungallantly away.
Joey sprang at me and seized my wrist. “That’s mine! That’s mine!” he
shouted. “Give it here, Mr. David--please.”
But I was staring at the writing on the back of the card. “For the
boy who goes to Sunday school,” Haidee had written in strong, clear
characters. Surely, the hand that had penned that line had more
recently penned other lines to me and beneath them signed the name of
Janet Jones.
I had a letter in my pocket, and later I compared the writing on
the envelope with that on Joey’s card. And I smiled to myself; but
wonderingly. Still a doubt assailed me. I grew wary. And fate favored
me. When Wanza stopped her cart at the meadow bars en route to Roselake
one day, to pick up Joey, I saddled Buttons and rode to the village in
their wake. At the post-office I swung out of my saddle.
“Give me your letters, Wanza,” I suggested. “Don’t get down. I’ll post
them.”
Once inside the office I ran the letters through my fingers. There were
two letters addressed to Miss Janet Jones, Spokane, Washington, and
the writing was that with which I had grown familiar in Janet Jones’
letters to me.
I was completely mystified. I rode home in a brown study. And then
suddenly I reached a solution. That night I wrote a letter. I took
great pains with its construction. And after Joey was in bed I paddled
away down the river in the light of the moon to the hollow stump among
the willows on the bank. I placed my letter to Haidee within the recess
on a soft bed of ferns and dried grass that I found there; and then I
paddled stealthily home.
I kept an even face when I greeted Haidee the following day, and she
did not betray by word or glance that she had received a communication
from me. But as I opened my lunch pail that night to give Joey some
doughnuts that Wanza had sent him, there on top was a small white
envelope addressed to me.
I read the letter after Joey was in bed and I had built up a fire of
pine cones on the hearth. It was a characteristic Janet Jones letter:
_Dear Mr. Craftsman_:
Once upon a time--which is the way I begin my fairy tales to
Joey--there was a certain foolish woman, whom we will call Haidee,
who lived all alone in the heart of a forest. She was a very
headstrong young woman, full of whims and insane impulses, or she
never would have gone into the forest to live alone. But she loved
Nature passionately and she had suffered and known heartache--and she
felt that Nurse Nature could assuage pain.
A big-hearted woodsman lived nearby in this same forest. He swung
his ax, and befriended her. He labored in the hot sun felling trees
that the headstrong woman might be safe in her flimsy shack. But
the woman taunted him, and when he would have felled every tree
that endangered her habitation she stayed his hand. Then, one day,
retribution overtook her. A tree fell, and she was hewn down in her
conceit and foolhardiness. She was taken to the woodsman’s cabin by
the kind-hearted woodsman who rescued her. There she was cared for
tenderly, and the coals of fire burned her poor silly head--so much
so that, knowing she was a burden and an expense to the woodsman,
who, like most big-hearted honest woodsmen, was desperately poor,
she lay awake nights planning how best to recompense him without
wounding his proud spirit. At last, she thought of a plan. And with
the connivance of a dear old-time friend in Spokane, carried it out.
Her friend gave her permission to sign her name to the letters she
wrote the woodsman. After the letters were written, they were sent to
the original Janet Jones, who forthwith mailed them to the woodsman
at Roselake. Janet Jones also, naturally, received the letters which
the woodsman wrote, and in due time they were put into envelopes and
addressed to the headstrong woman, whom they did not fail to reach.
The cedar chest was the headstrong woman’s gift to Janet Jones, who
is an invalid, and a romanticist who enjoys beyond all words any
departure from the commonplace.
Am I forgiven, Mr. Fixing Man? And now, one word more. You will not
receive another letter from Janet Jones. And--I pray you, come not
too often to Hidden Lake--it is better so.
This was the missive which I read in the firelight. As I finished I
suddenly felt bereft. And I lay back in my chair and stared into the
coals with unseeing eyes, brooding miserably, groping in a misty sea of
doubt and unrest and feeble desire. Then Joey called me in his sleep.
Just as I was sinking utterly, I heard, “Mr. David, Mr. David,” and the
cry of appeal braced me, strengthened the man in me. I went in to him
as a sinner into a sanctuary, and the kiss he gave me sleepily was a
salve that solaced and sustained me throughout the trying night.
I had finished the improvements on Haidee’s cabin at this time; so
I gave over going to Hidden Lake in prompt obedience to the request
my wonder woman had made in her letter. But I wrote an answer to the
letter and placed it in the old stump. I assured her that I would
respect her wishes, and I begged her to let me know the instant I
could serve her in any way, promising her that never a day should pass
without my going to the secret post-office.
I had advertised my cedar chests in the magazines during the summer,
and orders began to pour in, so that I was kept busy in my workshop.
Those were busy days in the house as well, for, with the beginning of
September, Joey had started to school at Roselake, and many of the
small duties he had taken upon his young shoulders devolved upon me.
Oh, the day on which Joey started to school!
I dressed him carefully that morning, with all the trepidation of an
over-fond parent, and I admonished him concerning his demeanor in the
school-room until I am sure his small head must have been in a whirl,
and his little heart in a flutter of apprehension.
“I’ll do my best, Mr. David, dear,” he said bravely. “You said yourself
they can’t no one do more.” He hesitated and looked at me, reddening
painfully. “And if the teacher asks me who am I--and who’s--who’s my
father--what am I to tell her?”
My hand closed on his shoulder fiercely. “Tell her you are Mr. Dale’s
boy, from Cedar Dale--tell her your name is Joey Dale,” I cried. The
look on his face had stabbed me.
He considered, looking into my eyes awesomely as I took his chin in my
hand.
“If I have the Dale part, couldn’t I have the David, too?” he
suggested. “Hm! Then we’d be big David and little David.”
“David Dale, the second,” I said, poking him in the ribs.
“But there couldn’t be any David Dale, the second. There couldn’t never
be but one real David Dale. But there could be a little David.”
A little David!
That was a dragging day. I missed the lad which ever way I turned. And
his words to me, when he leaped to my arms from old Buttons’ back that
night! “It was fine! I liked it, really and truly. But, oh, Mr. David,
I ’most knew you was lonely and missing me!”
Every morning I walked to the edge of the meadow, let down the bars
for old Buttons, and watched Joey ride away, his sturdy little figure
jouncing up and down in the saddle, his brave, bright face turned back
to me over his shoulder, with rare affection beaming from big big brown
eyes, as he waved and waved to me until a bend of the road hid him from
my sight.
One memorable morning in the latter part of September, as I was
tightening the saddle girths, he bent down to me, and as I lifted my
head he surprised me with a quick shame-faced salute of moist lips on
my forehead.
“You’re a good Mr. David,” he said patronizingly. “And I ain’t yours
either--not blood kin.”
I hugged the little lad to me--a sudden fierce warmth of affection
stirring my sluggish halting heart that had grown weary lately of
life’s complexities.
“You’re my boy, just the same,” I assured him.
“They can’t anybody get me away from you--can they?” he asked
anxiously, and I saw genuine consternation in his eyes.
I laughed and hugged him tighter. “I guess not,” I bragged. “Let them
try. Jingles would eat them up.”
“And we’d hide, wouldn’t we?”
“We surely would.”
“And--and we’d shoot at them from the rushes.”
I know not why Joey’s words should have irked me, but the day seemed
long, and I was glad when I heard the soft thud of Buttons’ hoofs on
the turf outside the cabin promptly at the accustomed hour. I was
building the kitchen fire, but I straightened up, stepped to the door,
and threw it wide.
Buttons stood with his bridle over his head, his nose sniffing the
ground, but no Joey sprang from the saddle into my eager arms. The
horse was riderless.
All Roselake joined in the search for Joey, after I had ascertained
that the lad was not with Haidee, and the search was prolonged far
into the night. The school-master had seen Joey ride away at the close
of school, and I argued that Buttons must have come straight home. At
dawn the search was resumed. For miles in each direction the searching
party spread out, but at night, totally disheartened, the kindly
neighbors disbanded, and Joey’s case was left in the hands of the
police.