Walter. By slow groans and quick, impassioned remonstrances I knew
that he was waking him with water, applied carefully with a sponge
and recklessly out of a cup. I heard it splash in a fat cupful
against the canvas, and by Walter’s howl I knew the canvas had not
got it all. I shivered, for the morning was sharp—better Walter than
I for that baptism. In a minute more they were fraternizing against
me.
Wake, wake, freshman, wake,
Wake while our song strikes the sky,
Bob thundered out of tune. Walter wandered into the concert with
a recitative strangely like an air, but yet not. My tent flap was
fastened; noise was all they could do.
“Good morning,” I was saluted. “Are you ready for breakfast?”
I answered: “Are you?”
“Practically. Bob and I are going to swim. Will you join us?”
I refused, and they went off complaining of bushes in a way which
suggested lack of shoes, and I heard their voices down the stream and
around the turn. As I dozed again Walter was pulling at my tent flap.
“Margaret! Open this—I want my camera.”
Walter was in a blue woolly gown, with his glasses on, and the
faithful cap from which he is seldom parted was on his head.
“Are you going to swim in a cap? What are you going to photograph?” I
demanded.
“Three films left,” he murmured, and pushed up his glasses and
scrutinized me. “Where’s the tripod? What? I’m going to take Bob as
a—as a Greek deity.” He grinned. “There—I’ve got it all,” and he
started out of the tent.
As I said, my sense of decorum has wasted by association with the
Morgans. I simply answered: “If you’re going to do the God Pan you’d
better take him playing on his pipe,” and Walter stopped.
“That’s true.” He came back and dived into his tent.
Bob had yesterday, on the journey, hollowed an instrument from a bit
of wood which gave out flute-like murmurings in keeping with the
forest. Walter with this woodland pipe and camera and tripod melted
into the bush.
By that time I was all awake, and after a plunge in a pool up-stream,
a quarter of an hour made me ready for events. Events came. From the
guides’ quarters rose sounds of crackling fire and rattling dishes
and high French voices, busy and interested—breakfast would soon be
ready. Meanwhile from down the river floated at intervals laughter
and howls—Bob and Walter were playing. But time was passing and
without remonstrances they would not be ready for breakfast; by now
they must have finished their swim—I might reconnoitre.
As I jumped from stone to stone down the bank the voices grew louder.
I stepped along. A log lay overturned and I came to the upper beaver
dam, a pile of earth and sticks four feet high. Thirty feet below lay
the second, and from over the top of it sounded a thanksgiving hymn.
Oh, gee! I’m glad I’m free!
No wedding bells for me!
Bob sang enthusiastically, as if just escaped, and out of the middle
of the dam ripped suddenly a big peeled birch branch. With it went a
mass of mud and sticks and the river wallowed through the gap.
“Holy Ike!” shouted Bob, invisible below. “It’s no trick at all. Easy
as pullin’ teeth. The beggars’ll have to sit up nights to sew that
together.”
Out sprang another great armful of white sticks and black dirt and
the loosened pool flowed with a swirl. The boy had crawled out on the
dam—or swam out—and was pulling to pieces the work of the patient
beavers. I called in distress.
“Bob—Bob! Why _are_ you doing that? Don’t! It’s cruel!” And then I
caught sight of Walter watching through his spectacles, barefooted,
robed in blue, the cap on his nose. “Walter, stop him!” I pleaded.
“Don’t let him. It’s useless and it’s brutal. Those poor little
beavers worked hard to make that wonderful dam and I think it’s a
sin—”
From behind the wonderful dam came incisive tones.
“Take another think. They’ve ruined the river. I’m going to teach
’em manners.” And then, as if hit by a thought, Bob squealed at me:
“For cat’s sake, Margaret, go back—this is no place for you, my good
woman—I’m coming out.”
And Walter added: “You’d better go—he’s not completely clothed.”
“Well, breakfast’s ready,” I said, and I turned, and fell splashing
behind the upper dam, and as I sat there and mourned that the river
had got into my boot I heard Walter’s accents, speaking to Bob.
“That’s enough for scientific research. Now get your clothes on,
cub,” he said, and with that rose a shriek.
“Oh, gosh! My clothes! Walter—save ’em! Down on the beach—Oh, Holy
Ike! The water’s covered ’em—they’re gone!”
There was a dramatic silence. Splashing and crackling of underbrush,
and for a minute nothing more. Then came an outcry, a mixture of
suffering and laughter. Accustomed as they were to the pandemonium
of “M’sieur” and “M’sieur Bob,” it brought the guides—the two light
figures raced down the bank past me as I sat. I did not go. I guessed
what had happened, and I doubted my welcome.
Bob had taken his clothes with him to dress after his bath—all of his
clothes—everything he owned nearer than Lac Lumière. He had rolled
them into a wad, on a bit of pebbly beach convenient to dress on,
below the dam. Then he had gone up above and opened the sluice-gate.
If he had wanted to lose them he could not have planned better. The
first rush of freed water must have taken them away, and by the time
he remembered them they were gone forever.
I scrambled back to camp and awaited developments. The first was
Blanc, who came leaping, catlike, to the tent of “M’sieur.” He threw
me one glance and slipped in and emerged in the same breath, with a
blanket. I understood—as with our savage ancestors the first point
was protection from the elements—from black flies and mosquitoes
worse than elements.
A few minutes later a sad little procession filed up the rocks,
and I stood inside my tent and tried to keep a right expression of
countenance and attitude of mind. Godin came first, ruling his spirit
to seriousness, yet with blue eyes gleaming; then Walter, silent but
rolling in his gait and with a watery look in his glance; and then
came Bob, slim and tall, and wearing a gray blanket with a dignity
which was like a poke in the ribs.
I said: “Oh, Bob, I’m so sorry.” I said it without a smile, and then
I went quickly into the tent.
Walter came, in a minute.
“I’ve got him put away,” he began, and then we both tried not to make
loud noises. When he lifted his face, tears were on it and at his
first word he sobbed.
“Margaret, you mustn’t let him hear you laugh,” he gasped. “He’s
dignified. I wish he wouldn’t be. When I laughed down there, he was
raging. If he’d only—”
“Walter,” cut in a cold, clear young voice. Bob knew well enough how
his family were engaged.
“Yes, Bob, I’m coming,” Walter called back hurriedly. “Now, Margaret,
about this question of clothes. Let’s see what we can raise.”
I looked at him with concern, for we both knew what we could raise,
and that it was nothing. It was all I could do to remember, and not
to mention, that I begged them both to bring a change of clothes,
and they would not. But we got him, at the end, clothed—as it might
be. He wore a coat of Blanc’s which had been his own three years
back—it had suffered under the first régime, but Blanc had ground its
face since then. It was short in the sleeves and popped open when
buttoned; but it was necessary to keep it buttoned. It had burst on
the shoulder blades. There was no extra shirt in the party, so this
coat must be worn V-necked. I felt a yearning for a black velvet
ribbon to tie around Bob’s neck. Walter contributed some offerings,
not of surface value, and Bob had his own sneakers and socks—short
socks, because the drowned trousers had been long ones.
“Holy Ike!” wailed Bob, from his blanket, in a voice with a squeal in
the middle. “What I want is a pair of clothes!”
I trembled a little. “Cub,” I said, as considerately as I knew how,
“I’m sorry—it’s the only thing there is—I’m afraid you’ll have to
wear my extra skirt.”
Bob whirled. “Me!” he barked. “Not so’s you’d notice it!”
Then we reasoned. It was short—yes—but yet. Of course he was eight
inches taller than I—yes, eight inches was a good bit off a skirt—but
yet. Oh, yes, it would fasten around the waist—with safety pins.
Socks—bare legs—yes, it was too bad—black flies, yes—but yet. The
point was, what else could you do about it? Which finally settled
things.
When it was on, and anchored around his vague waist-line, he gazed
downward like a young pine-tree outraged in its finest feelings.
He missed the bony neck, he got a poor view of the strain across
his chest; but he saw the gray corduroy swathing his knees—just
his knees—and, below, a waste of fly-bitten legs and a little Lord
Fauntleroy finish of gray socks and white sneakers. Before that
vision his young dignity went in a landslide. Laughter and yelps rose
in succession.
“Don’t, cub! You’ll ruin the hunting! Shut up, you long-legged devil!
Stop raising Cain! Stop it!” Walter exhorted him.
Bob, with his arms around a tree and his legs prancing in time,
thundered on.
We led between us to breakfast a raw-boned and short-haired lady of
six feet, wreathed in a shamefaced grin, and wreathed in desperately
little else. When the “Messieurs” so presented themselves it seemed
likely during the first shock that there would be no breakfast, for
our respectful guides were incapacitated.
We could not get used to him all day. All day, as we caught a
glimpse of a short skirt skipping high in air, or vaulting logs with
unladylike ease, we were seized with new spasms of mirth. But that
night the cub lived down his costume. At four he went off with a
body-guard of Blanc, prancing down the portage to Lac à la Poêle, the
gray corduroy skirt glinting in and out of the forest. At seven there
was talking heard from that direction—reckless talking and crackling
of branches.
“What in thunder?” Walter inquired of space. “That can’t be Bob—he’d
never be such a lunatic. He’ll scare everything in five miles. It
sounds like Bob’s voice. What does it mean?”
“If we’d heard a shot I’d think he’d killed something,” I ventured.
“Too early—and we would have heard a shot, anyway.”
With that Bob broke through the woods. “Hear me fire?” he burst forth.
“No—what at? Where? When?” Questions hit him in groups.
“Only a muskrat. Nice easy shot, and I’ve never killed one—I thought
I’d try it.”
“What do you mean, Bob?” Walter asked sternly. “You did _not_ fire at
small game in caribou season, in a hunting country?”
With that Bob exploded. “Wake up, Walter, and hear the birdies sing.
I’ve got a moose, a peach, twelve hundred pounds, Blanc says. You’re
a nice lot of Rip Van Winkles not to hear a shot within two miles. I
potted him the first thing, almost at the landing, beaned him with
one shot; he dropped like a log.”
Whether he wore skirts or wings mattered little to the cub now. Life
was a trumpet peal, and he gambolled about the wilderness with his
gray curtain flying, callous to criticism. It took most of the next
day to _arranger_ the moose _comme il faut_, as the guides delicately
put it, for the shot had finished a mighty life.
“We’ll have to sit up nights and eat,” Bob considered, regarding the
huge _pacquetons_ of meat done up in a hide, and then his eyes fell
on the head and antlers.
It was a fine head and the _panaches_ were forty points.
“Hully gee!” the cub gurgled, and caracoled on all fours, with
that mixture of child into the man which sometimes makes an
eighteen-year-old boy startling. “Won’t the fellows be stunned when
they lay their eyes on that? Won’t that look delicious on the wall of
my house in the ‘Hutch’ next winter! I wish those boys were here to
help eat.”
And his long legs, still as in early youth the most emotional
features of his physique, described ellipses.
“Bob,” Walter remonstrated, “wait till you get your natural clothing
before you jump so much. Your legs gleam not wisely but too well.”
And Bob chuckled, but calmed down.
“I guess that’s good dope,” he acknowledged—“dope” being Yaleish for
“advice”—and then he went on: “Ginger!” he brought out explosively.
“I’m glad those fellows aren’t due for a while yet, till I shed my
ball gown. Just picture to yourself if they’d been on this trip.” His
head went back and his big laugh rang up through the trees, ending
in a projection of a bark and a bleat as if he could not get it
all out. Bob’s laugh ranked with his legs as a safety valve for his
spirits, and both worked overtime. “Think if those fellows had seen
me this way—Buck and Donnie and Hal Harriman—why, I’d never have
heard the last of it.”
Three of the cub’s classmates, coming to visit us in camp, were due
now in two days.
Walter stared at him fixedly, and Bob’s wide eyes became attentive.
He looked alarmed.
“You’re not going to give me away to the fellows, are you?”
Walter pulled his cap over his eyes, stuck his hands in his pockets,
and regarded his young brother.
“I can’t say. I’d be glad to say, but I don’t feel that I can.”
“Look here, Walter,” begged Bob, “if you could curb yourself enough
not to tell the fellows—maybe it’s asking too much, but Holy Ike,
won’t they guy me! It’ll be a crime! It doesn’t seem as if I could
have you do that form of torture.”
Walter grinned. “You look out, you young cuss. Be very gentle and
thoughtful to your brother, or it’ll be worse for you. I owe you
several. You’re doomed anyway, I think, but you’re doomed worse if
you’re not careful.”
The next day, with heavy luggage of tents and _pacquetons_ and game
we made a slow way down the Poêle River toward the home camp. It
was necessary, with so much _butin_, that the men should triple the
portages. Walter, Bob, and I waited at the lower end of one for the
last charge to be brought over. Around us lay the impedimenta of a
hunting trip, mail-bags which were our trunks, tents, heavy bundles
wrapped about with rope, and above the heap, towering darkly, low
in the forest, where it had been carried with stateliness, was the
sombre magnificence of Bob’s moose’s horns. A still-water stretched a
shining band below us between walls of forest; in front was a pool,
foam-flecked from the white rapids above.
The boy picked up a rod.
“There ought to be trout in that hole even if it is sunny. If I were
a trout I’d—”
He sprang, murmuring a sentence, to a rock. Then to a farther one. In
the middle of the river he stood in sharp sunshine, and cast into
shadows under the bank. Where the brown hackle touched a ripple,
there was a break; his hand lifted instantaneously, and a splashing
bit of color followed the glint of the leader—a fish was on. I
watched, held with the never-failing fascination of the game, as
the lad played cleverly the lively half-pounder in the narrow pool,
keeping him away from rocks, away from shore, giving him no slack and
no pull, for he was lightly hooked.
As I watched I heard a click, as of a camera, and I turned quickly,
and with that, before I had time to investigate, I turned back in
astonishment. Floating up the stretch of still-water sounded the most
unexpected noise on earth—human voices. As I looked, around the bend
below paddled two canoes, loaded heavily with men. I stared, dazed.
Who were they? What did they want on our particular planet? There
were seven, four guides and three messieurs.
At this point there was a bang on the rocks close by and I was blown
sideways by a whirlwind. A flash of bare legs and gray corduroy
accompanied the phenomenon. Bob had dropped the rod in midstream and
left the trout to play himself and had taken to the woods; the forest
crashed as his flying feet fled up the portage.
I gathered myself. The canoes were within two hundred yards now,
and Walter stood by me glaring a welcome; for it annoys him to be
reminded in the woods that the earth is not his private star. Who
were these interlopers? A deep, fresh voice called out:
“Good morning, Mrs. Morgan.”
And I knew. It was, of course, Bob’s friends, the boys not expected
for two days, Buck and Donnie and Hal Harriman. Buck I had known
before; a magnificent youngster of six feet two, he towered between
desiccated-looking guides in the middle of the first canoe and sent
questions to me in trumpet tones.
“Where’s Bob, Mrs. Morgan? Do you mind our getting here sooner? Isn’t
Bob up yet? This forest is a perfect peach. Are we upsetting things,
coming ahead? Do you mind? Where’s that beggar Bob?”
The huge young brute was out on the rocks and mangling my hand with
a friendly grip, while he introduced the two others, clean-cut,
bright-faced lads like himself. Walter had got back his hospitality,
and we both talked steadily to give time for the refugee to make
arrangements; we wondered what arrangements he might make. It seemed
to me a case of exposure or suicide, but the cub would have to decide
which. And meantime, of course, the burning question was Bob’s
whereabouts.
“The men at the camp told us you were here; our guides knew the way,
so we thought we’d come on and meet you,” the boys explained. “But
they said Bob was along, too. Isn’t he?”
By then we had told them four times that we were delighted to have
them sooner, and had said all that the subject would bear about
canoes and paddling. The moment had arrived when Bob had to be
mentioned.
“Yes; he’s along,” Walter acknowledged carelessly. “He killed a moose
last night, you know.”
The inference was that no gentleman receives company the first day
after killing a moose. The boys looked mystified, but were full of
polite interest.
“He stayed back then? He didn’t come down with you?” Buck questioned.
I watched Walter, for this was a crisis. He simply had to decide now
where Bob was: whether a few rods back or still in camp on Lac à la
Poêle; and whichever way he decided Bob was likely to plan otherwise.
It was a crucial moment. And with that, out of the forest dashed the
long figure of Blanc, his trousers suspended up under his arms, his
belt six inches lower, the red stripes of his wool socks giving a
flippant expression to his earnest personality. Blanc was not clever,
and he looked anxious as he came into the midst of us.
“M’sieur,” he opened fire; “it is from M’sieur Bob.”
“_Oui_, you may tell me what he said,” Walter allowed. I saw him bite
his lip as if the strain was great. The three lads listened.
“I do not comprehend—me, M’sieur,” Blanc went on, “but M’sieur Bob
instructed me to say to M’sieur that M’sieur should say to the new
messieurs—” He glanced about the circle mildly, including them, and
drew his brow together with an unhappy expression. But he spoke with
a pretty distinctness. “That M’sieur should say to the new messieurs
that he—M’sieur Bob—had unfortunately returned to Lac Lumière by
another route. M’sieur is to say that M’sieur Bob did not know of the
arrival of the three new messieurs. M’sieur is by no means to let the
new messieurs learn that he—M’sieur Bob—is at present up the river,
one-half mile of distance from here on the portage.”
Between Bob’s extreme duplicity and Blanc’s extreme frankness even
Walter and I could not make out the plot for a moment. There is no
other route to Lac Lumière, but it simultaneously came to us that
Bob meant to make a forced march and pass us back in the woods, so
reaching the lake before us. There he would probably shout till the
guides left in camp heard him and paddled over for him, and once
landed at the base of reserves he could await his friends clothed
properly. It was a well-planned flank movement—Bob seemed a young
Napoleon, but Blanc as his _aide-de-camp_ was a complete Waterloo.
With that Blanc veered about and melted, the way he had come, into
the forest. I looked at Walter, and saw that even a lawyer did not
know any hole out of this corner, and then suddenly the end came in a
way not expected.
The hero Buck has, like many heroes, an eye for the fair sex. While
he waited for the riddle to be solved, taking it for granted easily
that Bob would turn up some time and that “the guide chap was
loony”—so he told me later—the memory of another mystery came back to
him, the mystery of an unknown lady.
“Do you have lady guides in these parts?” he fired at me. “Who was
the tall girl that fled off the rocks as we came around the bend?”
I looked at Walter appealingly, and over the face of Buck came
illumination. There burst from him instinctively a yell which Bob
could not have bettered, but he instantly choked his feelings to
decorum.
“Beg your pardon, Mrs. Morgan.” The boy’s theory of good manners was
stretched on top of a volcano of curiosity. “I beg your pardon,” he
went on eagerly. “But—but—it wasn’t—wasn’t it Bob—that queer thing?”
I looked at Walter helplessly, and the bright-eyed lads looked at
both of us, and something about us answered the question.
“B-Bobby disguised as a f-female, what for?” stammered, inquiringly,
one of them—Donnie, I knew later.
And then, whether they crowed in chorus like young roosters, or
whether the jubilance of excited chickens was merely expressed in
their silence, I do not know. I only know that sound was the symbol
of that moment. In another instant, with permission asked—for
whatever he may be underneath, the typical Yale boy is Lord
Chesterfield on top—with permission impetuously asked and helplessly
given, they were off like hounds on a scent, up the portage, after
the fated Bob.
The next chapter in the drama I did not witness, but it was told to
Walter and me by the actors with such spirit that I could not regret
the real play.
As the boys disappeared we once more regarded each other.
“He’s lost,” said Walter. “‘The execution will be private, and may
Heaven have mercy on his soul!’ Those young lunatics will raise
Cain. All we can do is to await the remains.”
He settled himself against a _pacqueton_ and lighted his pipe, and I
stepped across the rocks and picked up Bob’s rod and began to play
his unhappy trout, still going through the motions of a fight about
the pool. I pulled him in. Then I hooked another, and another, till
half a dozen spotted lines of saffron and silver-gilt lay at my feet
on the moss. Walter meanwhile gave advice—one of the things he does
best.
“Look out for your recover. That last cast was almost on the alders.”
Three puffs. “Don’t draw your flies so fast; you don’t give them a
chance to rise. Your flies are in the air more than on the water.”
Two puffs. “I wouldn’t let out more line—I’d reel in. Nobody can
handle a long line in a cut-up little place like this.”
The worm turned. “Walter, do I know how to fish or don’t I? And
haven’t I been pulling in trout every minute? Look—seven! Why don’t
you come and take them off for me, instead of sitting there and
smoking?”
With that, down the road of the woods came a sound—an unwoods-like
sound. Growing and clearing, it resolved itself into Lohengrin’s
“Wedding March,” sung in a powerful bass:
Here comes the bride!
Get on to her stride!
The melody floated through the spruces, and across it cut mirth and
plaintive squeals.
“Let me go! Ouch!” And a crash. “It’s no joke, I tell you, to step
through a jagged stump when you’ve got bare legs on!” And with that
Lohengrin stopped for a second, and heroic laughter filled the
forest. Then
Here comes the bride!
Get on to her stride!
the orchestra repeated.
“Let me alone! Oh, you beast! These portages aren’t made to go
double, Buck. I _can’t_ walk up a tree. Oh, I say!”
A ripping of timber, and from the woods filed a procession. Bob’s
maiden garb dripped water, and he was conducted, reluctant, by Buck,
who led him along firmly, chanting “Lohengrin.” The others followed,
lending a hand. Then the tale was told. The two stranger lads lost
strangeness in the telling; and in language of whose color I can give
but an echo, they painted the picture of a Homeric battle.
“Bob heard us coming,” Buck began, “and he lit out.”
Hal Harriman was a mighty, square-built, black-headed lad, whose name
I had come to reverence. Bob’s accounts of him drew an intellectual
giant, eating up the toughest mathematical course in Yale, taking
honors in it, asking for more. An inventor Hal Harriman was, who
sat at his desk and made machines play about the room. I had come
to think of him as the mediæval world thought of Erasmus. I felt a
little dizzy, then, when Hal Harriman burst into the conversation on
the heels of Buck, like an excited and slangy boy, not like Erasmus.
“The old nut lit out over the river, kicking his legs hidjous,”
exploded the genius.
Then something told him he had been slangy; he remembered suddenly
that he had never seen me before, and he apologized with blushes in a
general way for everything. Nobody noticed, for Donnie’s stammering
tongue was jerking out a sentence spaced like telegraphy.