After the death of Mary Evered the days slipped away, and June passed to
July, and July to August. Gardens prospered; the hay ripened in the
fields; summer was busy with the land. But winter is never far away in
these northern hills; and once in July and twice in August the men of
the farms awoke in early morning to find frost faintly lying, so that
there were blackened leaves in the gardens, and the beans had once to be
replanted. Customary hazards of their arduous life.
The trout left quick water and moved into the deep pools; and a careful
fisherman, not scorning the humble worm, might strip a pool if he were
murderously inclined. The summer was dry; and as the brooks fell low and
lower little fingerlings were left gasping and flopping upon the gravel
of the shallows here and there. Nick Westley, the game warden for the
district, and a Fraternity man, went about with dip net and pail,
bailing penned trout from tiny shallows and carrying them to the larger
pools where they might have a chance for life. Some of the more ardent
fishermen imitated him; and some took advantage of the trout’s extremity
to bring home catches they could never have made in normal times.
John Evered loved fishing; and he knew the little brook along the hither
border of Whitcher Swamp, below the farm, as well as he knew his own
hand. But this year had been busy; he found no opportunity to try the
stream until the first week of July. One morning then, with steel rod
and tiny hooks, and a can of bait at his belt, he struck down through
the woodlot, past the spring where Mary had been killed, into the timber
below, and so came to the wall that was the border of his father’s farm,
and crossed into the swamp.
Whitcher Swamp is on the whole no pleasant place for a stroll; yet it
has its charms for the wild things, and for this reason John loved it.
Where he struck the marshy ground it was relatively easy going; and he
took a way he knew and came to the brook and moved along it a little
ways to a certain broad and open pool.
He thought the brook was lower than he had ever seen it at this season;
and once he knelt and felt the water, and found it warm. He smiled at
this with a certain gratification for the pool he sought was a spring
hole, water bubbling up through pin gravel in the brook’s very bed, and
the trout would be there to dwell in that cooler stream. When he came
near the place, screened behind alders so that he could not be seen, he
uttered an exclamation, and became as still as the trees about him while
he watched.
There were trout in the pool, a very swarm of them, lying close on the
yellow gravel bottom. The water, clear as crystal, was no more than
three feet deep; and he could see them ever so plainly. Big fat fish,
monsters, if one considered the brook in which he found them. He judged
them all to be over nine inches, several above a foot, one perhaps
fourteen inches long; and his eyes were shining. They were so utterly
beautiful, every line of their graceful bodies, and every dappled spot
upon their backs and sides as clear as though he held them in his hands.
He rigged line and hook, nicked a long worm upon the point, and without
so much as shaking an alder branch thrust his rod through and swung the
baited hook and dropped it lightly in the very center of the pool, full
fifteen feet from shore. Then he swung upward with a strong steady
movement, for he had seen a great trout strike as the worm touched the
water, had seen the chewing jaws of the fish mouthing its titbit. And as
he swung, the gleaming body came into the air, through an arc above his
head, into the brush behind him, where he dropped on his knees beside it
and gave it merciful death with the haft of his heavy knife, and dropped
it into his basket.
Fly fishermen will laugh with a certain scorn; or they will call John
Evered a murderer. Nevertheless, it is none so easy to take trout even
in this crude fashion of his. A shadow on the water, a stirring of the
bushes, a too-heavy tread along the bank--and they are gone. Nor must
they be hurried. The capture of one fish alarms the rest; the capture of
two disturbs them; the taking of three too quickly will send them flying
every whither.
John, after his first fish, filled and lighted his pipe, then caught a
second; and after another interval, a third--fat, heavy trout, all of
them; as much as three people would care to eat; and John was not minded
to kill more than he could use. He covered the three with wet moss in
his basket, and then he crept back through the alders and lay for a long
time watching the trout in the pool, absorbing the beauty of their
lines, watching how they held themselves motionless with faintest
quivers of fin, watching how they fed.
A twelve-inch trout rose and struck at a leaf upon the pool’s surface,
and John told himself, “They’re hungry.” He laughed a little, and got an
inch-long twig and tied it to the end of his line in place of hook. This
he cast out upon the pool, moving it to and fro erratically. Presently a
trout swirled up and took it under, and spat it out before John could
twitch the fish to the surface. John laughed aloud, and cast again. He
stayed there for a long hour at this sport, and when the trout sulked he
teased them with bits of leaf or grass. Once he caught a cricket and
noosed it lightly and dropped it on the water. When the fish took it
down John waited for an instant, then tugged and swung the trout half a
dozen feet into the air before he could disgorge the bait.
“Hungry as sin,” John told himself at last; and his eyes became sober as
he considered thoughtfully. There were other men about, as good
fishermen as he, and not half so scrupulous. If they should come upon
this pool on such a day----
He did a thing that might seem profanation to the fisherman who likes a
goodly bag. He gathered brush and threw it into the pool; he piled it
end to end and over and over; he found two small pines; dead in their
places among their older brethren; and he pushed them from their rotting
roots and dragged them to the brook and threw them in. When he was done
the pool was a jungle, a wilderness of stubs and branches; a sure haven
for trout, a spot almost impossible to fish successfully. While he
watched, when his task was finished, he saw brown darting shadows in the
stream as the trout shot back into the covert he had made; and he smiled
with a certain satisfaction.
“They’ll have to fish for them now,” he told himself.
He decided to try and see whether a man might take a trout from the
pool in its ambushed state. It meant an hour of waiting, a snagged hook
or two, a temper-trying ordeal with mosquitoes and flies. But in the end
he landed another fish, and was content. He went back through the swamp
and up to the farm, well pleased.
Moving along the brook he saw other pools where smaller fish were lying;
and that night he told Ruth what he had seen. “You can see all the trout
you’re minded to, down there now,” he said.
The girl nodded unsmilingly. She had not yet learned to laugh again,
since her sister’s death. They were a somber household, these
three--Evered steadily silent, the girl sober and stern, John striving
in his awkward fashion to win mirth from her and speech from Evered.
The early summer was to pass thus. And what was in Evered’s mind as the
weeks dragged by no man could surely know. His eye was as hard as ever,
his voice as harsh; yet to Ruth it seemed that new lines were forming in
his cheeks, and his hair, that had been black as coal, she saw one
afternoon was streaked with gray. Watching, thereafter, she marked how
the white hairs increased in number. Once she spoke of it to John,
constrainedly, for there was no such pleasant confidence between these
two as there had been.
John nodded. “Yes,” he said, “he’s aging. He loved her, Ruth; loved her
hard.”
Ruth made no comment, but there was no yielding in her eyes. She was in
these days implacable; and Evered watched her now and then with
something almost pleading in his gaze. He began to pay her small
attentions, which came absurdly from the man. She tried to hate him for
them.
Once John sought to comfort his father, spoke to him gently of the dead
woman; and Evered cried out, as though to assure himself as well as
silence John: “She was tricking me, John! Leaving me. With Semler, that
very day.”
He would not let John reply, silenced him with a fierce oath and flung
away. It might have been guessed that his belief in his wife’s treachery
was like an anchor to which Evered’s racked soul clung; as though he
found comfort and solace in the ugly thought, a justifying consolation.
X
John went no more to the brooks that summer; but what he had told Ruth
led her that way more than once. Westley, the game warden, stopped at
the house one day, and found her alone, and asked her whether John was
fishing. She told him of John’s one catch.
“Swamp Brook is full of trout,” she said; “penned in the holes and the
shallows.”
Westley nodded. “It’s so everywhere,” he agreed. “I’m dipping and
shifting them. Tell John to do that down in the swamp if he can find the
time.”
She asked how it should be done; and when Westley had gone she decided
that she would herself go down and try the trick of it if the drought
still held.
The drought held. No rain came; and once in early August she spent an
afternoon along the stream, and transported scores of tiny trout to
feeding grounds more deep and more secure. Again a week later; and
still again as the month drew to a close.
It was on this third occasion that the girl came upon Darrin. Working
along the brook with dip net and pail she had marked the footprints of a
man in the soft earth here and there. The swamp was still, no air
stirring, the humming of insects ringing in her ears. A certain gloom
dwelt in these woods even on the brightest day; and the black mold bore
countless traces and tracks of the animals and the small vermin which
haunted the place at night. Ruth might have been forgiven for feeling a
certain disquietude at sight of those man tracks in the wild; but she
had no such thought. She had never learned to be afraid.
She came upon Darrin at last with an abruptness that startled her. The
soft earth muffled her footsteps; she was within two or three rods of
him before she saw him, and even then the man had not heard her. He was
kneeling by the brook and at first she thought he had been drinking the
water. Then she saw that he was studying something there upon the
ground; and a moment later he got up and turned and saw her standing
there. At first he was so surprised that he could not speak, and they
were still, looking at each other. The girl, bareheaded, in simple waist
and heavy short skirt, with rubber boots upon her feet so that she might
wade at will, was worth looking at. The man himself was no mean
figure--khaki flannel shirt, knickerbockers, leather putties over stout
waterproof shoes. She carried pail in one hand, dip net in the other;
and she saw that he had a revolver slung in one hip, a camera looped
over his shoulder.
He said at last, “Hello, there!” And Ruth nodded in the sober fashion
that was become her habit. The man asked, “What have you got? Milk, in
that pail? Is this your pasture land?”
“Trout,” she told him; and he came to see the fish in a close-packed
mass; and he exclaimed at them, and watched while she put them into the
stream below where he had been kneeling. He asked her why she did it,
and she told him. At the same time she looked toward where he had knelt,
wondering what he saw there. She could see only some deep-imprinted
moose tracks; and moose tracks were so common in the swamp that it was
not worth while to kneel to study them.
He saw her glance, and said, “I was looking at those tracks. Moose,
aren’t they?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“They told me there were moose in here,” he said. “I doubted it, though.
So far south as this.”
“There are many moose in the swamp,” she declared.
He asked, “Have you ever seen them?”
She smiled a little. “Once in a while. A cow moose wintered in our barn
two years ago.”
He slapped his thigh lightly. “Then this is the place I’m looking for,”
he exclaimed.
She asked softly, “Why?” She was interested in the man. He was not like
John, not like anyone whom she had known; except, perhaps, Dane Semler.
A man of the city, obviously. “Why?” she asked.
“I want to get some pictures of them,” he explained. “Photographs. In
their natural surroundings. Wild. In the swamp.”
“John took a snapshot of the cow that wintered with us,” she said. “I
guess he’d give you one.”
The man laughed. “I’d like it,” he told her; “but I want to get a great
many.” He hesitated. “Where is your farm?”
She pointed out of the swamp toward the hill.
“Near?” he asked.
And she said, “It’s right over the swamp.”
“Listen,” he said eagerly. “My name’s Darrin--Fred Darrin. What’s
yours?”
“Ruth MacLure.”
“Why you’re Evered’s sister-in-law, aren’t you?”
She nodded, her cheeks paling a little. “Yes.”
“I was coming to see Evered to-night,” he said. “I want to board at the
farm while I work on these pictures--that is, I want permission to camp
down here by the swamp somewhere, and get milk and eggs and things from
you. Do you think I can?”
“Camp?” she echoed.
“Yes.”
She looked round curiously, as though she expected to see his equipment
there. “Haven’t you a tent?”
He laughed. “No. I’ve a tarp for a shelter; and I can cut some hemlock
boughs and build a shack; if you’ll let me trespass.”
“You could sleep in the barn I guess,” she said. “Or maybe in the
house.”
He shook his head. “No roof for mine. This is my vacation, you
understand. I can sleep under a roof at home.”
“You’ll be getting wet all the time.”
“I’ll dry when the sun comes out.”
She asked, “Who’s going to cook for you?”
“I’m a famous cook,” he told her.
She had the rooted distrust of the open air which is common among the
people of the farms. She could not see why a man should sleep on the
ground when he might have hay or a bed; and she could not believe in the
practicality of cooking over an open fire; especially when there was a
stove at hand.
“You’ll have to see Mr. Evered,” she said uneasily.
So it happened that they two went back through the swamp together and up
the hill; and they came side by side to meet Evered and John in the
barnyard by the kitchen door.
They had their colloquy there in the open barnyard, while the slanting
rays of the sun drew lengthening shadows from where they stood. Darrin
spoke to Evered. John went into the house after a moment and built a
fire for Ruth; and then he came out again while the girl went about the
business of supper.
Darrin was a good talker; and Evered’s silence made him seem like a good
listener. When John came out he was able to tell Darrin something of the
moose in the swamp, their haunts and their habits. Darrin listened as
eagerly as he had talked. He told them at last what he had come to do;
he explained how by trigger strings and hidden cameras and flash-light
powders he hoped to capture the images of the shy giants of the forest.
John listened with shining eyes. The project was of a sort to appeal to
him. As for Evered, he had little to say, smoked stolidly, stared out
across his fields. The sunlight on his hair accentuated the white
streaks in it, and John looking toward him once thought he had never
seen his father look so old.
When Darrin put forward his request for permission to camp in the
woodlot near the swamp, Evered swung his heavy head round and gave the
other man his whole attention for a space. It was John’s turn for
silence now. He expected Evered to refuse, perhaps abusively. Evered had
never liked trespassers. He said they scared his cows, trampled his
hay, stole his garden stuff or his apples. But Evered listened now with
a certain patience, watching Darrin; and Darrin with a nimble tongue
talked on and made explanations and promises.
In the end Evered asked, “Where is it your mind to camp?”
“I’ve picked no place. I’ll find a likely spot.”
“You could sleep in the barn,” said Evered, as Ruth had said before him;
and Darrin laughed.
“As a matter of fact,” he explained, “half the sport of this for me is
in sleeping out of doors on the ground. I’m on vacation, you know. Other
men like hunting, and so do I; but mine is a somewhat different kind,
that’s all. I won’t bother you; you’ll not see much of me, for I’ll be
about the swamp at all hours of the night, and I’ll sleep a good deal in
the day. You’ll hardly know I’m there. Of course, I don’t want to urge
you against your will.”
Evered’s lips flickered into what might have passed for a smile. “I’m
not often moved against my will,” he said. “But I’ve no objection to
your sleeping in my ground. If you keep out of the uncut hay.”
“I will.”
“And put out your fires. I don’t want to be burned up.”
Darrin laughed. “I’m not a novice at this, Mr. Evered,” he said. “You’ll
not have to kick me off.”
Evered nodded; and John said, “You want to keep out of the bull’s
pasture too. You’ll know it. There’s a high wire fence round.”
Darrin said soberly, “I’ve heard of the red bull.”
“He killed my wife,” said Evered; and there was something so stark in
the bald statement that it shocked and silenced them. Evered himself
flushed when he had spoken, as though his utterance had been
unconsidered, had burst from his overfull heart.
“I know,” Darrin told him.
John said after a moment’s silence, “If there’s any way I can help--I
know the swamp. As much as any man. And I’ve seen the moose in there.”
There was a certain eagerness in his voice; and Darrin said readily, “Of
course. I’d like it.”
He said he would tramp to town and come with his gear next morning. John
offered to drive him over, but he shook his head. As he started away
Ruth came to the kitchen door, and he looked toward her, and she said
hesitantly, “Don’t you want to stay to supper?”
He thanked her, shook his head. Evered and John in the barnyard watched
him go; and Evered saw Ruth leave the kitchen door and move to a window
from which she could see him go up the lane toward the main road.
Evered asked John: “What do you make of him?”
“I like him,” said John. “I’m--glad you let him stay.”
“Know why I let him stay?”
“Why--no.”
“See him and Ruth together? See her watching him?”
“I didn’t notice.”
Evered’s lips twitched in the nearest approach to mirth he ever
permitted himself. “Ought to have better eyes, John; if you’re minded to
keep hold o’ Ruth. She likes him. If I’d swore at him, shipped him off,
she’d have been all on his side from the start.”
John, a little troubled, shook his head. “Ruth’s all right,” he said.
“Give her time.”
Evered said, that wistful note in his voice plain for any man to hear,
“I don’t want Ruth leaving us. So I let Darrin stay.”