THREE QUARTERS AND SIX EIGHTHS
Saturday morning dawned as hot and dry and windless as had been the
other days of the week which had preceded it. Caleb Hunter, rising
from an uneasy night, blamed his sleeplessness upon the weather. It
was fully an hour before his usual, not-too-early hour of rising, when
he slowly descended the wide stairway; and yet he was but little
surprised to find the boy already there before him, seated upon the top
step of the verandah, when he strolled outside.
The little stranger with the grave voice, who had introduced himself as
Stephen O'Mara, had not heard Caleb's step and the latter stood for a
time in the doorway, contemplating the small, square-set shoulders in
the canvas coat which had been his sister Sarah's, and the small,
shapely head above them.
Throughout the night while he lay awake pondering the fantastic
possibilities which the boy's story had stirred him into half
believing, Caleb had had gradually lengthening moments of doubt in
which he admitted to himself that his sister was right in her chafing
analysis of him, her brother. Before morning came he had told himself
a dozen times that he was nothing more than a sentimental old romancer,
who saw in every beggar a worthy spirit bewitched by Destiny, and a
Circumstance-enchanted fairy-prince in every ragamuffin who chanced to
have big eyes. Merely because they had so persistently denied him
sleep--those thoughts of Old Tom and his cherished tin box and the
boy's own unmistakable poise and surety of self which even the
shuffling boots and ragged clothes had only made the more
impressive--merely because they persisted in endless procession through
his brain, while he rolled and tossed and re-arranged the pillow, he
had grown more and more peevishly eager to discount and discredit them,
during the darkness. But when morning came, and he rose and went into
the big guest room to find it empty, he experienced a moment of panicky
disappointment; suddenly anxious for another opportunity to verify all
that which, in the hours of sleepless pro's and con's, had become
figment-like and whimsical, he wondered if the boy really could have
gone without even waiting to bid them good-bye. He could not make that
abrupt sort of a leave-taking harmonize with the rest of the
youngster's actions--and then he caught a glimpse of him, motionless
there on the verandah steps.
The boy did not hear Caleb's coming that morning. His head was tilted
forward in that keen attitude of straining intentness which to the man
had already become eloquently characteristic of his hungry spirit. And
for a time Caleb withheld his greeting; instead of speaking he stood
and studied him, and while he studied it all came back again, until the
illusion, if such it were, was far more vivid, far more compelling than
it had been the night before. Caleb told himself that to look only
meant the discovery of new and compelling "points" both in feature and
body, new and surprising suggestions of inbred fineness totally at
variance with the unhemmed white drill trousers and uncouth shoes. And
then, while he was nodding to himself, he realized that the boy was not
looking down into the town in the valley.
Chin in palm, elbow upon knee, Steve was gazing fixedly in the
direction of Dexter Allison's stucco and timber "summer lodge," and
although Caleb could not have known it, there had been no need for his
silence, for the boy's rapt preoccupation was sound-proof. Caleb heard
voices coming from behind the shrubbery and just as he, a little
perplexed, turned to follow the direction of that fascinated gaze,
Allison himself squeezed through a narrow aperture in the box hedge and
hailed him jovially from the far edge of the lawn. And Caleb Hunter's
brows drew together in a bit of a frown when a slender figure in kilted
black velvet and bright-buckled low shoes, hatless and with thick,
gleaming hair bobbed short in a style strange to Morrison in those
days, flashed through behind him. For Caleb heard the short gasp which
came from the boy's lips, even before the little girl had paused in her
darting advance, on tip-toe like a hovering butterfly, to wave a slim
hand at him.
Caleb heard the boy's breath suck in between tight teeth; heard it
quiver unsteadily as she appeared on swift feet--and Caleb understood
what had been holding so closely his attention. He understood
absolutely and yet, strange as the mood was, at that moment he couldn't
help but feel, too, somehow a little sorry for the boy--he couldn't
help but think---- His eyes went from Steve's forward thrust head,
from the hair shaggy and unkempt for all its fineness and thickness and
wavy softness, across to that dainty vision which, poised in her
absurdly short skirt like a point of flame, was already gazing back at
the boy upon the steps in open and undisguised amaze.
All of that characteristic which had been most pronounced in Dexter
Allison, the latter had passed down to this slender girl who was his
daughter, Barbara. No matter how vivid Allison's raiment had been,
Caleb remembered that even when Dexter was a stripling at school, it
had always seemed more a part of the man himself, than just protection
for his body. Caleb had never given it a serious thought up to that
moment, but now it came back to him with added cumulative force. He
recollected that he had often wondered at the child's unconscious
adaptation of mood to the clothes she happened to be wearing; he
recalled how he had seen her demure and distant in misty, pastel-tinted
party frocks or quaintly, infantilely dignified in soberer Sunday
morning garb. But that Saturday morning he realized what the woman was
to be like, when the hem of the velvet skirt no longer hung high above
spindly black legs and the bobbed hair had been allowed to grow and
grow, far below the tiny ears which it now barely covered.
To Caleb who, without knowing it, from sheer sympathy was viewing her
through the untaught eyes of the boy at his feet, she was no longer a
mere slip of a girl-child, dark-eyed, bewildering of mood and pulsingly
alive. Caleb caught his first illuminating glimpse of the woman she
was to be--of the dainty grace and more than usual beauty which was
there in the promise of the years. And he who was fond of insisting to
his sister Sarah, that there was many a boy back in those hills who,
with his chance, might some day achieve greatness, suddenly realized
how long and weary the road would be for just such a one as the
fascinated little figure on the steps, before he could begin to
approach that level which, to a society that Caleb understood, was
typified by this exquisite, elfin figure, Dexter Allison's daughter.
He was no snob--Caleb Hunter--and yet the little girl's bearing at that
moment doubly accented for him the gulf which lay between her and the
hills-boy, by name Steve. For though she did pause to stare at his
white drill trousers and unbelievable man-sized boots with frankly
childish astonishment, the next instant she had recovered herself and
without another glance preceded her father across the grass. Quite as
though Steve had not been there at all she passed him, to hesitate
demurely at Caleb's side.
"Good morning, Uncle Cal," she greeted him.
And then, quite suddenly, Caleb didn't feel so very sorry after all for
his little visitor. He stopped pitying him. Steve's eyes had not
wavered once from the little girl's face, from the time she appeared in
the hedge gap until she mounted the steps, utterly oblivious to his
nearness; but when she brushed against his elbow, the boy rose and
stood, hat in hand, gravely quiet, gravely possessed, and silently sure
of himself.
Even after he had answered Barbara Allison's greeting and turned with
his grown-up, ponderous courtesy to present the boy to her, only to be
left with the words hanging upon tongue-tip by her instant
disappearance inside in search of Sarah, Caleb caught no hint of the
thoughts behind those impassive and steady eyes. And yet he knew that
Steve had risen in order that he might bow as he had the night before,
when Caleb introduced him to his sister.
Dexter Allison, coming up in less airy fashion across the lawn,
surprised Caleb with his mouth still open.
"Well?" said Dexter Allison--and Caleb recovered himself.
"Well?" he countered; and then they both laughed softly and shook
hands. It was their unvaried formula of greeting, whether they had not
seen each other for twenty-four hours or twenty-four months.
And while they were shaking hands the boy turned quietly and re-seated
himself upon the top step. But Allison gave him more notice than had
his daughter Barbara. He stood with his pudgy hands in his pockets,
gazing at the averted face, unconcealed and growing amusement in the
scrutiny, until Caleb, not yet aware of the boy's woods-taught habit of
seeing while seeming not to see, was simultaneously annoyed at
Allison's fatuous grin, and glad of the fact that Steve apparently was
looking the other way. After a time Allison raised quizzical eyes to
Caleb's face.
"Wel-l-l?" he intoned, and with a little reluctance as reasonless as it
was unnoticed, Caleb answered the inferred question.
"This--this is a little friend of mine, Dexter," he said, "down from
the hills. He's in to have a look at the city which you have been so
instrumental in arousing to its present state of teeming activity.
This is Stephen O'Mara. Steve--this is Mr. Allison, Steve!"
Then the boy turned and again rose to his feet, and at that moment
Caleb could have hugged him for his deliberation. The boy inclined his
head; he bowed, without a word. And it was Dexter Allison who first
offered a hand.
"Glad to make your acquaintance, Stephen," the latter exclaimed with
quite violent good humor. "And how are you?"
Steve took the hand and closed his brown fingers hard upon the puffy
white ones. For an instant he stood, his eyes, grave and inscrutable,
full upon Allison's smaller ones. "I'm tol-lable," he drawled soberly.
"And--haow be you--yourself?"
Allison gasped, stood with mouth agape, and then burst into one of his
rather too-frequent, too-hearty laughs.
"Well, I'm----" he began his favorite phrase of ejaculation, and then
stopped to look down again into the small face before him. "Well,
I'm----" and he stopped to chuckle. Then he turned back to Caleb.
"I suppose, Cal, you know what this early morning call presages?" he
suggested.
Caleb recalled himself with an effort from a contemplation of the
sudden, prideful something which had warmed him while Steve was shaking
hands. He smiled, mechanically.
"I suppose it's the usual raid upon the commissary," he answered.
Allison mounted heavily to the verandah.
"Right!" he exclaimed. "Right! You'll notice that Barbara has already
gone on ahead. She's the skirmish line--scouts--videttes--whatever you
please to call 'em. There's no-one up yet--none of the family--over to
our place. We are hungry, Cal. I hope this is waffle morning?"
Caleb smiled at him, less impersonality in the mirth. It was a regular
custom, this truancy of Barbara Allison and her father--one of the
little human foibles which Caleb often told himself accounted, in part
at least, for his real liking of the man.
"Waffles it is," he said, and he turned toward the boy.
"Would you mind finding Miss Sarah, Steve?" he asked. "Will you tell
her, please, that we are to be subjected to another neighborly
imposition?"
After the boy had disappeared Caleb followed the larger man to a chair.
And this time it was Caleb who met Allison's silence with a
challenging, "Well?"
"Where did you get him, Cal?" Allison demanded. "Where _did_ you get
him? Those shoes, and those trousers--pants, I guess is the word, eh?
And say, how that little beggar did squeeze my hand! Look here!"
He held one soft hand up for inspection. There were faint red welts
still visible across the finger joints.
"Friend of yours, did you say?"
Without stopping to think about it, Caleb was not so keen to enlarge
upon the boy's obvious "points" as he had been with Sarah. He omitted
to mention his thoughts of the night before, and he omitted any
reference to Old Tom, except for the most hazy explanation that the boy
had no immediate kin. But with an increasing eagerness he dilated upon
the small foot traveler's first view of the "city," his breathless
reception of Allison's own switch engine, and his avowed intention to
"look around a trifle," before he located something to do.
"I thought I'd take him down this morning and get McLean to give him a
ride in the cab of one of those sheet-iron steam relics of yours," he
finished.
If Caleb had expected his unadorned recitation of the boy's appearance
to make any impression upon his hearer he would have been disappointed.
But, without any confessed reason for so doing, Caleb had aimed rather
at the opposite effect. And Allison turned from it with a large,
matter-of-fact indifference, to rise and bow to Sarah Hunter, who
appeared that moment in the doorway.
"Surely--surely," he echoed Caleb's suggestion. "Take him down and
give him a ride! McLean'll be glad of the chance to show someone his
pet buzz-saws and things. I'll walk down with you, myself, after
breakfast. I may be away for a day or two, and I want to leave
directions for changes to be incorporated while I'm gone."
At the table that morning Caleb noted that there was no hesitation in
Steve's selection from the silver beside his plate, no waiting to
follow in the lead of Sarah Hunter's choice. He noticed, too, that the
boy's eyes did not once lift to those of Barbara Allison, opposite him.
And while the little girl from time to time joined in the conversation,
he not once opened his mouth to speak, until they were almost ready to
rise from their places.
Allison had been growling genially at the lack of water and the
prolonged drouth which was burning the pasturage to a crisp and
juiceless brown.
"If that everlasting sun would only stop shining for a while," he said,
"if it'd only rain a bit, I'd like to take a trip back north,
a-fishing, before it gets too late in the season."
"You mean you'd like a fishing trip as an excuse to go back north,
don't you, Dexter?" Caleb badgered him.
Allison was smiling blandly, for Caleb's joke over his round-about
methods was an old, old joke, when Stephen O'Mara spoke.
"It's goin' to rain," said the boy.
Allison turned toward him, his eyes again quizzical.
"I suppose so," he admitted. "In the general course of things it'll
come, no doubt, but----"
The boy interrupted him, shaking his head.
"It's goin' to come before mornin'," he stated inflectionlessly, "and
it's comin' to stay fer a spell, too!"
And Allison did not try to hide his broad grin of amusement.
"You think so, do you, sonny?" he dismissed the matter not unkindly.
"Well, at that, your guess when it comes to the weather, is about as
good as the next man's."
Once more the boy shook his head.
"I ain't guessin'," he finished unabashed. "Ner I ain't thinkin' it
will. It'll jest be rainin', come sun-up, and it'll be good for 'til
Wednesday, fer sure!"
Caleb, watching the boy's face, was on the point of offering to wager
two bits with Allison that the prophecy held good, but Sarah's
well-known attitude toward the vice of gambling checked him in the rash
offer. Besides, he wondered how he could make sound anything but
foolish an offer to back the certainty of a weather forecast which was
based upon nothing but the unassuming and quiet finality of the prophet.
Barbara Allison insisted upon joining the excursion down to the mill
that morning; she developed a sudden and unshakable resolve to be one
of the party, and after his remonstrances had finally brought stormy
tears to her eyes, Allison surrendered in perplexity to her whim.
"All right, then," he gave in. "If you want to come as much as all
that, but--but you--now run along, then, with Stephen."
On the way down the hill he voiced his perplexity to Caleb.
"When it comes to dealing with men," he said, "I pride myself upon
being able to go back, rather incisively, to first motives. But the
other sex is beyond me! She's always turned up her dainty nose at the
noise and dirt before, and--and now she's ready to cry because I
suggest that she wait with Miss Sarah until we return!"
Caleb's eyes rested upon the oddly matched little couple ahead in the
road. The boy was carrying his battered hat in his hand, but Barbara
walked with small head up, without a single glance for her escort.
Caleb, noting that Steve's head was forward-thrust, knew that his eyes
must be fastened hungrily upon the town in the valley; and he
understood the reason for the disdainful tilt of the little girl's
chin. For even at the age of ten Barbara Allison was not accustomed to
inattention. Caleb smiled, rather covertly for him.
"I never knew but one woman whose motives were absolutely transparent,"
he mused. "And she--she was the most uninteresting, unsuccessful
female person I ever did know."
As Allison had promised they found McLean, the white-haired mill
superintendent, only too eager at the prospect of an audience for one
of his voluble tours of the premises. But when Caleb had explained the
main errand upon which they had come, after a long, keen scrutiny of
the boy's face, the burly river-man led the way, without a word, to a
wheezing old two-wheeler in the piling yard.
"So you'll be wantin' to take a spin in one av me ingines, is it?" he
asked then. And, after a moment: "An' do you think you'll be able to
hang on, whin she gets to r-rollin'?"
Steve's eyes were like bits of polished steel, so bright they were. It
was a struggle for him to take them, even for a moment, from the engine
before him.
"I cal'late I kin," he quavered.
"Well, thin, we'll see." McLean looked up and winked at the engineer
in the diminutive cab. "It's car-reful you'll be, Misther engineer,"
he cautioned, "an' watch your steerin' on the cur-rves!"
He leaned over to lift the boy to the running-board, but Steve, with
one foot upraised, hung back. He faced toward Caleb and, without a
glance in the girl's direction, said:
"Mebby she--mebby she'd like to go, too?"
Barbara Allison, chin lifted a little higher, half wheeled and slipped
her hand within that of her father.
"Thank you, but I don't care to," she refused.
Steve caught the little toss of her head from the corner of his eye,
and his face went pink. Without another word he clambered up beside
the driver and the engine rolled out of the yard and went clanking down
the uneven, crooked track, leaving a dissolving trail of steam behind.
When it returned the little face at the cab window was tense and
somewhat pale beneath its tan, but the hand upon the throttle beside
the engineer's lay steady as a little pine knot.
"Well, an' what do you think av her?" McLean demanded with an
assumption of anxiety as the boy dropped to the ground.
Steve turned and patted the footboard with a proprietary hand. As
grave of mien as his questioner he bobbed his head.
"She--she certainly kin git up and step," he volunteered. And then,
cocking his head judiciously: "I'll hev to be a-gittin' me one of them
fer myself, some day!"
McLean chuckled--he chuckled in deep delight within his white
whiskers--and led the way to the mills. But once there the amusement
in his eyes rapidly deepened to amazement, for there were few steps in
the processes upon which the boy could not talk as fluently and
technically as did the mill boss himself. And he knew timber; knew it
with the same infallibility which had, even in McLean, always seemed to
border upon the uncanny.
It was Allison himself who first called attention to an unsawed log
which was being discarded.
"That looks like too good a stick to be wasted, doesn't it, McLean?" he
asked.
Before McLean could answer the boy spat gravely into a pile of sawdust,
his piping voice rising above the shrill scream of the saws.
"She's holler," he stated succintly. "Dry rotten above the stub!"
And when Allison raised his brows, interrogatively, McLean dropped one
hand upon the boy's shoulder, a bit of pride in the gesture.
"Holler she is," he agreed, and he added: "An' I'll be afther knowin'
where to find a riverman av the old school, I'm thinkin', some day whin
the need arises!"
A man came hunting for McLean at that moment with news that the tram
which carried the logs up from the basin to the saws needed his
attention. They followed him out, Steve hard at his heels, and Barbara
Allison, lips pouted, tight to her father's side. After a brief
examination of the trouble McLean gave a half dozen hurried orders;
then turned to the boy beside him and jerked one thumb over his
shoulder.
"Run down to the smithy shop, lad," he directed, "an' tell the smith
that I'll be wantin' a strip av str-rap iron, two feet in lingth, av
quarter inch stuff--and three-quarters av an inch wide."
The boy was off like a deer and back again in a twinkling,
empty-handed, but with an astounding bit of news.
"The blacksmith says he ain't got no--no iron three-quarters of an inch
wide," he said, and the words were broken by his panting breaths. "But
he says he's got plenty that's six-eighths. Shall I--shall I git some
o' that?"
He waited the word, poised to go.
McLean had been kneeling upon the saw-dust strewn ground. Now he rose
and stood, feet apart, gazing down into that face, afire with
eagerness, uplifted to his. Quiet endured for a long time, and then,
at a chuckle from Allison, Steve wheeled--he wheeled just in time to
see Barbara Allison's brows arch and her lips curl in a queer little
smile. And suddenly Allison burst into a loud guffaw.
Caleb had never seen a change so swift as that which came over the
boy's face. The eager light faded from the gray eyes, until they were
purple where they had been gray before. And Caleb had never seen a
face grow so white--so white and set and dangerous. Stephen O'Mara's
head drooped, he turned and wavered away a step or two. Allison
stopped laughing, abruptly. Then McLean spoke.
"'Twas funny, mebby," he muttered. "But it was not so damned funny,
aither! An' I--I'll be goin' down now to teach that smith to kape his
funny jokes till afther hours."
He started toward the shop, and stopped again.
"It's all right, buddy," he said. "'Tis nothing that you need feel
badly about, for 'twas I who made the mistake. I should have sint you
out to estimate whether our spruce would cut two million feet or less,
an' you'd have come as close as mor-rtal man could, I'll wager. 'Twas
a trivial thing, lad. What's a little matter av figures between min av
the river, eh? We'll leave that to the capitalists who laugh at our
dinseness, me bhoy!"
With that shot at his employer McLean strode off, fuming.
Steve hung back beside Caleb on the return trip up the hill. Not once
did he speak, and Caleb, aware of his thinned lips and the bleak
whiteness of his face, did not know what to say himself. He only knew
that he, too, felt unreasonably bitter against Allison for his burst of
mirth. Not until they had left Barbara and her father at their own
gate and were crossing the Hunter lawn did Caleb attempt any remark
whatsoever.
"I--you musn't feel badly just because you didn't know that
three-quarters and six-eighths were the same, Steve," awkwardly he
tried to comfort him. "I guess there was a time when Allison, in spite
of all his tutors, didn't know it himself, if the truth's old."
Then Caleb learned that Steve had not even heard Allison's burst of
laughter. He whirled--the boy--and his eyes blazed, hurt, shamed,
bitter, into Caleb's kindly ones. He shook with the very vehemence of
the words that came through twitching lips.
"_She_ didn't hev no call to smile like that at me," he flung out. "If
I'd ever hed a chance to learn that they wa'n't no difference between
them figgers, and _hedn't_ knowed, she could'a smiled. But I--I ain't
hed my chance--yit!"
He swung around and stumbled blindly up the steps and groped his way
upstairs.
Caleb stood there for a long time, motionless, and the one thought
uppermost in his mind was that Steve, like Allison, was scarcely
woman-wise. A low muttering behind him finally recalled him to
himself, and when he turned he saw that here were thunder-heads piling
up in the southwest. One long finger of black cloud was already poked
up over the horizon. He remembered the boy's prophecy of the breakfast
table; remembered what McLean had said in scorn of trivial things, and
he went upstairs to urge Steve to remain and join them in their fishing
trip on Monday--the trip north which Allison had proposed, if it rained.
He found the boy stretched, face down, upon the bed, a rigid figure of
misery. Out of his deep desire to heal his hurt he even promised him
the use of a most precious rod; he promised to teach him to cast a fly,
come Monday!
And when the boy finally nodded his head in mute assent, he left him
alone for a while--alone with his bruised spirit that was bigger than
the spare little body which housed it.