The Duke of Dorset was mistaken when he imagined that a new land would
rid him of these fancies. To remove a passion to the desert, a wise man
hath written, is but to raise it to its triumph.
He had gone directly to Quebec, and from there traveled swiftly across
Canada to the Pacific Coast. In Vancouver he was soon wearied, restless,
overcome with ennui. His rifle and its ammunition lay unpacked in an
ordinary traveling box. The lure of the mountains, the rivers, the
silent barren places, had somehow departed from before him.
In this mood he met the Captain of His Majesty's gunboat, the
_Cleavewaive_. He had known this man in the East; for a fortnight they
had stalked tigers in the mountainous country south of the Amur. The man
was by nature a hunter. The forest was in his blood. Life by rote and
the narrow discipline of the service irked him. His idea of paradise was
not unlike that of the Dakota.
Fourteen days in the wilderness bring men of any station to a certain
understanding for life. The talk ran on big game killed here and there,
in out-of-the-way places of the earth, and memories of that fortnight
in Manchuria. Such conversations are not apt to run for long without
touching a little on the future. It came out presently that the gunboat
was about to make its annual run, south along the coast of the United
States, in the general interest of British shipping, and to show the
flag.
The Captain of the _Cleavewaive_, finding the Duke bored and at leisure,
asked him to come on this cruise. He wished the Duke to accept for a
certain close and personal reason. A larger importance would attach to
the cruise from his presence, and this was to be thought of, but to do
the man justice, this was not primarily his object. He was one of those
men who, prevented by necessity from living the life that he longed for,
sought constantly his experiences of it at second hand. Since he must
needs thus follow the sea, he craved, with a consuming hunger, the
taste of conversation running on the forest, the plain, the trackless
mountain. The Duke of Dorset had lived in all of its richness, the very
life which this man, had his destiny been open, would have chosen for
himself.
For the hope then of talk running on these delectable experiences, he
labored to win over the Duke to this voyage. He was not hopeful that he
would succeed, and so he was surprised when the Duke finally accepted
his invitation.
The Captain of the _Cleaveivaive_, having got his guest aboard, at
first, took nothing from this fortune. The Duke of Dorset was now,
strangely, no longer that mighty hunter with whom he had talked at
Vancouver. On the gunboat he was a silent, reserved, impenetrable
Englishman, hedged about by distances which no inferior could
cross, meeting every advance with courtesy and silence. He talked
conventionally, he looked over the gunboat at the Captain's invitation,
noticed the structure of it, and made a word or two of comment when it
seemed to be expected.
On the first evening of the voyage the Captain labored to draw him into
conversation, but the manner of the Duke was now polite and formal, and
the Captain, seeking a way inward to the man, was always turned deftly
aside, until presently he gave over the effort.
The gunboat was delayed by heavy seas. The second day passed like the
evening of the first, to the discomfiture of this ship's Captain. The
Duke of Dorset was silent, courteous, and interested only in the sea. He
sat in his deck chair watching through the afternoon the long polished
swells--black, smooth as ebony, and rhythmic--in the hollows of which
the sea birds rode. And at night, watching the uncanny mystery of this
iron shell wrestling its way through the sea, shouldered from one side
to the other, heaved up and pitched forward, assailed with every trick,
and artifice, and cunning, with steady lifting and savage desperate
rushes; the sea always failing to throw this black invader fairly on
his shoulders, but never for one instant, never for one fraction of
an instant, ceasing to assail him. And always, as it failed, growling,
snarling, sputtering with a rage immeasurable and hideous. Then, when
the moon opened like a red door, skyward out of the world, the sea
changed as under some enchantment; a golden river welled up on the
horizon and ran down toward that one looking seaward from his chair. On
the instant he was in a kingdom of the fairy, and illusions, fantastic,
unreal, took on under this magic the very flesh and blood of life.
On this second night of the run the Duke of Dorset, sitting alone on
the deck, put his hand into his pocket, took out the map that Caroline
Childers had sent to him at Oban, tore off the strip at the bottom on
which her name was written, pulled that strip deliberately to bits,
and tossed the scraps of paper over into the sea. Then he arose, walked
across the deck into the cabin of the navigating officer, and put the
map down on the table before that officer.
"Lieutenant," he said, "how near is this point, marked here in ink, to
the ship's course?"
The officer got out his charts, located the point, and made roughly an
estimate of the distance.
"We pass this point, sir."
"On what day?" inquired the Duke.
"On to-morrow morning, sir," replied the officer.
"I thank you," replied the Duke of Dorset. "I wish to be put ashore
there." Then he went out.
It is a theory that good fortune travels usually close on the heels
of despair. The Captain of the _Cleavewaive_, as his boat ran south,
verified that theory. The Duke of Dorset sat with him for the remainder
of this night in his cabin, and in the smoke of it, the talk ran
constantly on the wilderness. He was again, as under the sprinkling of
some magic water, that primordial man of the wild, whom the Captain so
extravagantly envied.
In the cabin, while the moon walked on the water, and the great swells
slipped one over the other silently, and that sinister desperate
wrestling went endlessly on, the Duke of Dorset charmed and thrilled
this sailor with the soul of a Dakota. He led him, panting with fatigue,
through the vast, silent forests of Lithuania, day after day, in a path
cut down like a ditch by the hoofs of a hundred beasts, one following
the other--beasts, that the hunter, now himself a beast, running with
the rifle in his hand, his hair caked with dirt, his body streaming with
sweat, his heart lusting to kill, could never gain on.
He led him, shriveling with thirst, down the beds of lost rivers, where
there was no green thing, no thing with a drop of moisture, only the
dull red earth baking eternally under a sun that stood always above it
like a disk of copper.
He led him, chattering with cold, across bleak steppes where the wind
blew like a curse of God, set there to see that no man passed that way
and lived; blew and blew, until it became a thing hideous and maddening,
a thing damnable and accursed, coming out of a hell that froze; and the
hunter, driven mad, his face raw, his hands bleeding, his bones aching
to the marrow, no longer able to go forward, sat on the earth with his
head between his knees and howled.
The Captain of the _Cleavewaive_, set thus living the life he longed
for, forgot to be astonished at the strange course which the Duke of
Dorset had elected to follow. When the navigating officer had carried to
him the Duke's direction, he had been greatly puzzled. There was better
hunting in British Columbia than here, some deer and a bear now and
then, but nothing to tempt a man over seas with his gun cases. But the
mystery of it was a thing inconsequential beside the pleasing fortune
which this changed plan carried individually to him, and he easily
left it. He was living, through the medium of this man's adventures,
vicariously, that big, open, alluring life of the first man running with
the wolf in the morning of the world. He was harking back with joy to
those elements, primal and savage, by virtue of which all things fight
desperately to live. These things were not to be found in books, they
were not to be invented, they were known only to those haunting the
waste places of the earth.
The Captain of the Cleavewaive was, then, pleased to carry out any plan
of his guest. He was quite willing to go into the coast at the point
selected by the Duke of Dorset, or at any point within a reasonable run.
At sunrise, the gunboat, turning due east out of her course, anchored
off a little bay on the Oregon coast of the United States. The mountains
came, at this point, down to the sea; a great chain rising landward and
covered with firs, standing a primeval forest. The bay was a perfect
miniature harbor protected by a crooked finger of the mountain; the
inner border of this finger was a sea wall with steps coming down to the
water. A small, gray-stone house, not unlike a gamekeeper's lodge, stood
behind this wall on the summit of the finger, flanked by two giant firs,
lifting their brown, naked bodies, without a limb, two hundred feet into
the sky.
The Captain of the _Cleavewaive_ hesitated to put the Duke ashore in a
place so evidently deserted. He pointed out that the bay was merely a
private yacht harbor, used doubtless in summer, but now in the autumn
abandoned for the winter. There was no boat of any kind to be seen in
the bay, and no evidence that the place was inhabited. But the Duke was
unmoved in his determination to go ashore at this point; and his boxes
were got up from his cabin. While these preparations went forward, the
Captain, searching the coast with his glass, saw a man come out from
behind the stone house on the summit of the promontory. The man stopped
when he observed the gunboat, looked at it a moment under the palm of
his hand, and came down with long swinging strides to the point on the
sea wall where the stone steps descended into the water.
When the Duke came ashore at this point, the man swinging along the sea
wall was already there. He stood back some twenty feet from the landing,
waiting until the sailors should bring the Duke's boxes up the stone:
stairway, and return to the gunboat. Then he spoke, nodding his head to
the Duke: "Good mornin', stranger," he said, in a big deliberate voice
that drew out each word as though it were elastic, stretching from his
throat over his tongue to his teeth.
The Duke, standing on the sea wall among his boxes, regarded the man
with an interest, every moment visibly increasing. He had never until
this day, in any country, come upon this type of peasant. The man was
past sixty, but indefinitely past it; one could not say how old he was.
He might have been five or ten, or only a year or two beyond it. He was
big-boned, slouchy, and powerful; his eyes, mild and blue; his face,
sinewy and weather-beaten; he wore a shirt without a collar, and
fastened at the throat with a big white button; suspenders, hand knitted
of blue wool; and trousers tucked into the tops of enormous cowhide
boots. His head was covered with a big felt hat, rain-stained,
sweat-stained, and mould-stained, until it was a color that no maker
ever dreamed of.
The Duke returned the salutation and inquired if he were on the estate
of Mr. Cyrus Childers.
"He calls it his'n," replied the native, "but to my notion no man owns
the mountains."
The Duke's interest increased. "Are you a servant of Mr. Childers?" he
asked.
The man's mouth drew down into a long firm slit.
"Well, no, stranger," he answered, "I don't use that air word 'servant,'
except when I pray to God Almighty."
"Ah!" said the Duke, and he remembered that he was in the United States
of America.
The native went on with the conversation, "I reckon," he said, "you're
on your way over to the big house."
The Duke divined the man's meaning, and explained that he had come
ashore from the departing gunboat, under the impression that there was
a village here, and some means of transportation to the residence of Mr.
Childers. In reply the mountaineer talked deliberately for perhaps
five minutes. Much of the idiom was to the Duke unintelligible, but he
understood from it that this bay was a private yacht harbor, that
the yacht was on the Atlantic Coast, that the keeper's lodge here was
closed, and that Mr. Childers's residence was not near to this point, as
he expected, but farther inland. The Duke inquired the distance from the
coast.
The native screwed up the muscles on one side of his face, "Hit's a
right smart step," he said.
The Duke was reassured, "You mean," he ventured, "three or four miles?"
The mountaineer seemed to ponder the thing a moment seriously, then he
answered, "Well," he said, "I reckon hit's furder than three or four
mile. I reckon hit's purty nigh on to forty-eight mile."
The Duke of Dorset laughed over his own astonishment. He was beginning
to like this new type of peasant, who spoke of forty-eight miles as
"a right smart step," who thought no man owned the mountains, and who
reserved the word "servant" exclusively for his prayers.
The man looked seriously at the smiling face of the Duke and repeated
the substance of his first query. "I reckon," he said, "you're a-wantin'
to git over to the big house."
"I should like it," replied the Duke, "but the prospect does not seem
favorable."
"I might give you a lift," the man replied hesitatingly, a bit timidly,
as though he asked rather than offered a favor.
The words attached themselves to no exact meaning in the Duke's mind,
but he understood the intent of them.
"Have you a cart here?" he said.
"No," replied the man, shaking his head; "I hain't got no cyart, but
I've got a mewel." Then he pointed to the Duke's boxes. "If you leave
them air contraptions," he went on, "you kin ride the mewel an' I'll
walk; but if them air contraptions has got to go, we'll load'em on the
mewel, and both of us walk." Then, he added, jerking his head over his
shoulder, "She's back there in the bushes."
The Duke, following the line indicated by this gesture and expecting to
see there a donkey, saw such a domestic animal as he had never before
this day observed in the service of the human family. It was a mule at
least seventeen hands high, big-boned and gaunt like its owner; the hair
worn off bare to the skin in great patches on the beast's flanks and
withers--marks of the plow. The mule seemed to the Duke to have fallen
into the same listless slovenly attitude as that which marked so
strikingly the carriage of its master. The resemblance between the two
seemed a thing come slowly by intimate association through a lifetime, a
thing brought forth by common environment. The beast's trappings were no
less distinctive; the bridle was made of rope, smaller than one's little
finger, without brow-band or throat-latch, merely a head loop fastened
to a bit; the saddle was a skeleton wood frame covered with rawhide;
across this saddle hung a gunny sack with something in either end of it.
The Duke looked at the lank beast and then down at his articles of
luggage. "Do you think your animal can carry these boxes?" he said.
The mountaineer made a contemptuous gesture. "Jezebel will tote them
traps an' not turn a hair," he answered; "hit's the hoofin' hit I'm
apesterin' about."
The latter part of this remark the Duke did not wholly follow. While
he hesitated to embarrass this good-natured person by inquiring what
he meant, the man came over and lifted the various boxes, one after the
other, in his big sun-tanned hands. Then he stepped hack, and rested
these big hands on his hips. "Yes," he drawled, "if you git wore out, I
kin pack 'em an' you kin ride a spell."
The Duke understood now, and he was utterly astonished. This curious
person actually thought of carrying these boxes, in order that he might
ride the mule. He realized also within the last five minutes, that the
usual manner of speech to a servant was conspicuously out of place
here. That this man, big and elemental, required a relation direct and
likewise elemental. The Duke stepped down at once into that primitive
relation. He walked over directly in front of the mountaineer. "Look at
me closely," he said, "do I look like a man who would ride while another
man walked and carried his luggage?"
The mountaineer ran his mild-blue eyes over the Duke's big sinewy
shoulders, then he moved over his woolen braces a trifle with his thumb.
"You mightn't be toughened to it," he said, apologetically.
The Duke doubled his right arm up in its good tweed sleeve, and
presented it to the mountaineer's fingers. The muscles under that sleeve
sat together, compact and hard as bunches of ivory. Doubt and anxiety
departed slowly from the man's face. He made no comment. He removed his
hand from the Duke's arm and set off to bring his mule. In a few minutes
he returned with that animal and a piece of tarred rope which he had got
from some boathouse back of the keeper's lodge.
He lifted the sack from the saddle and set it carefully down. "I'll pack
that," he said, by way of explanation, "hit'll jist balance me." And he
began to tie pieces of the luggage to the saddle; but the Duke of Dorset
instantly took over this part of the preparation for the journey. He had
adjusted loads to cavalry horses in India, to donkeys in' the Caucasian
Mountains, to hairy vicious ponies in Russia, and he knew how to lay the
pack so it would sit snug and firm to the beast. It was fortunate that
he stood on this morning an expert in this craft, for the boxes made a
difficult pack to manage with the primitive saddle.
When it was done the mountaineer tested it with his big forefinger
hooked between the beast's belly and the rope. He arose from the test
with an approving nod, glanced at the sun, standing over bay, and spoke
his word of comment.
"Hit's a purty job," he said, "an' we better be a-hoofin' it." And this
time the Duke of Dorset understood that expressive idiom.
The man lifted his sack tenderly onto his shoulder, slipped the rope
bridle over his arm, and set out along the sea wall eastward toward the
mountain.