Earth\'s Enigmas

C >> Charles G. D. Roberts >> Earth\'s Enigmas

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

This diversion, though rough and dangerous, is never practised on any
but green hands or unwary visitors; but all signs fail in dry weather,
and for Gillsey no traditions held.

When he had climbed as high as his tormentors thought advisable--which
usually was just as high as the top of the tree--a couple of vigorous
choppers would immediately attack the tree with their axes.

As the tall trunk began to topple with a sickening hesitation, Gillsey's
eyes would stick out and his thin hair seem to stand on end, for to this
torture he never grew accustomed. Then, as the men yelled with delight,
the mass of dark branches would sweep down with a soft, windy crash into
the snow, and Gillsey, pale and nervous, but adorned with that unfailing
toothless smile, would pick himself out of the _debris_ and slink off to
camp.

The men usually consoled him after such an experience with a couple of
plugs of "black-jack" tobacco,--which seemed to him ample compensation.

In camp at night, when the hands had all gone to bed, two or three
wakeful ones would sometimes get up to have a smoke in the fire-light.
Such a proceeding almost always resulted in skylarking, of which Simon
would be the miserable object. Perhaps the arch-conspirator would go to
the cook's flour-barrel, fill his mouth with dry flour, and then,
climbing to the slumbering Simon's bunk, would blow the dusty stuff in a
soft, thin stream all over the sleeper's face and hair and scraggy
beard. This process was called "blowing him," and was counted a huge
diversion.

On soft nights, when the camp was hot and damp, it made, of course, a
sufficiently nasty mess in the victim's hair, but Gillsey, by contrast,
deemed rather to enjoy it. It never woke him up.

If the joker's mood happened to be more boisterous, the approved
procedure was to softly uncover Gillsey's feet, and tie a long bit of
salmon twine to each big toe. After waking all the other hands, the
conspirators would retire to their bunks.

Presently some one would give a smart tug on one of the strings, and
pass it over hastily to his neighbor. Gillsey would wake up with a
nervous yell, and grabbing his toe, seek to extricate it from the loop.
Then would come another and sharper pull at the other toe, diverting
Gillsey's attention to that member.

The game would be kept up till the bunks were screaming with laughter,
and poor Gillsey bathed in perspiration and anxiety. Then the boss would
interfere, and Gillsey would be set free.

These are only instances of what the butt was made to endure, though he
was probably able to thrash almost any one of his tormentors, and had he
mustered spirit to attempt this, all the camp would have seen that he
got fair play.

At last, however, it began to be suspected that Gillsey was stealing
from the pork barrels and other stores. This was serious, and the men
would not play any more jokes upon the culprit. Pending proof, he was
left severely to himself, and enjoyed comparative peace for nearly a
week.

This peace, strange to say, did not seem to please him. The strange
creature hated to be ignored, and even courted further indignities. No
one would notice him, however, till one night when he came in late, and
undertook to sleep on the "deacon-seat."

A word of explanation is needed here. The "deacon-seat"--why so called I
cannot say--is a raised platform running alongside of the stove, between
the chimney and the tier of bunks. It is, of course, a splendid place to
sleep on a bitter night, but no one is allowed so to occupy it, because
in that position he shuts off the warmth from the rest.

The hands were all apparently asleep when Gillsey, after a long solitary
smoke, reached for his blanket, and rolled himself up on the coveted
"deacon-seat," with his back to the glowing fire. After a deprecating
grin directed toward the silent bunks, he sank to sleep.

Soon in the bunks arose a whispered consultation, as a result of which
stalwart woodsmen climbed down, braced their backs against the lower
tier, doubled up their knees, and laid their sock feet softly against
the sleeper's form. At a given signal the legs all straightened out with
tremendous force, and poor Gillsey shot right across the "deacon-seat"
and brought up with a thud upon the stove.

With a yell, he bounced away from his scorching quarters and plunged
into his bunk, not burnt, but very badly scared. After that he eschewed
the "deacon-seat."

At last the unfortunate wretch was caught purloining the pork. It became
known in the camp, somehow, that he was a married man, and father of a
family as miserable and shiftless as himself. Here was an explanation of
his raids upon the provisions, for nobody in the camp would for a moment
imagine that Gillsey could, unaided, support a family.

One Sunday night he was tracked to a hollow about a mile from camp,
where he was met by a gaunt, wild, eccentric-looking girl, who was
clearly his daughter. The two proceeded to an old stump concealed under
some logs in a thicket, and out of the hollow, of the stump Gillsey
fished a lump of salt pork, together with a big bundle of "hard-tack,"
and a parcel or two of some other kind of provender.

The girl threw herself upon the food like a famishing animal, devoured
huge mouthfuls, and then, gathering all promiscuously into her scanty
skirt, darted off alone through the gloom. As soon as she had
disappeared with her stores, Gillsey was captured and dragged back to
camp.

At first he was too helpless with terror to open his mouth; but when
formally arraigned before the boss he found his tongue. He implored
forgiveness in the most piteous tones, while at the same time he flatly
denied every charge. He even declared he was not married, that he had no
family, and that he knew no one at all in the Gornish district or that
part of the province.

But the boss knew all about him, even to his parentage. He lived about
ten miles from the camp, across the mountains, on the Gornish River
itself. As for his guilt, there was no room for a shadow of uncertainty.

A misdemeanor of this sort is always severely handled in the lumber
camps. But every man, from the boss down, was filled with profound
compassion for Gillsey's family. A family so afflicted as to own Gillsey
for husband and sire appeared to them deserving of the tenderest pity.

It was the pathetic savagery and haggardness of the young girl that had
moved the woodmen to let her off with her booty; and now, the boss
declared, if Gillsey were dismissed without his wages--as was customary,
in addition to other punishment--the family would surely starve, cut off
from the camp pork-barrel. It was decided to give the culprit his wages
up to date. Then came the rough-and-ready sentence of the
camp-followers. The prisoner was to be "dragged"--the most humiliating
punishment on the woodmen's code.

Gillsey's tears of fright were of no avail. He was wrapped in a sort of
winding-sheet of canvas, smeared from head to foot with grease to make
him slip smoothly, and hitched by the fettered wrists to a pair of
horses. The strange team was then driven, at a moderate pace, for about
half a mile along the main wood-road, the whole camp following in
procession, and jeering at the unhappy thief.

When the man was unhitched, unbound, and set upon his feet,--not
physically the worse for his punishment save that, presumably, his
wrists ached somewhat,--he was given a bundle containing his scanty
belongings, and told to "streak" for home. As he seemed reluctant to
obey, he was kicked into something like alacrity.

When he had got well out of sight the woodmen returned to their camp. As
for the wretched Gillsey, after the lamentations wherewith he enlivened
his tramp had sunk to silence, he began to think his bundle remarkably
heavy. He sat down on a stump to examine it. To his blank amazement he
found a large lump of pork and a small bag of flour wrapped up in his
dilapidated overalls.

The snow was unusually deep in the woods that winter, and toward spring
there came a sudden, prolonged, and heavy thaw. The ice broke rapidly
and every loosened brook became a torrent. Past the door of the camp,
which was set in a valley, the Gornish River went boiling and roaring
like a mill-race, all-forgetful of its wonted serene placidity.

From the camp to Gillsey's wretched cabin was only about ten miles
across the mountain, but by the stream, which made a great circuit to
get around a spur of the hills, it was hardly less than three times as
far.

To Gillsey, in his log hut on a lofty knoll by the stream, the winter
had gone by rather happily. The degradation of his punishment hardly
touched him or his barbarous brood; and his wages had brought him food
enough to keep the wolf from the door. He had nothing to do but to sit
in his cabin and watch the approach of spring, while his lean boys
snared an occasional rabbit.

At last, on a soft moonlight night, when the woods were full of the
sounds of melting and settling snow, a far-off, ominous roaring smote
his ear and turned his gaze down to the valley. Down the stream, on the
still night, came the deadly, rushing sound, momently increasing in
volume. The tall girl, she who had carried off the pork, heard the
noise, and came to her father's side.

"Hackett's dam's bust, shore!" she exclaimed in a moment.

Gillsey turned upon her one of his deprecating, toothless smiles. "'T
aint a-goin' ter tech us here," said he; "but I'm powerful glad ter be
outer the Gornish Camp ter night. Them chaps be a-goin' ter ketch it,
blame the'r skins!"

The girl--she was a mere overgrown child of fourteen or fifteen--looked
thoughtful a moment, and then darted toward the woods.

"Whar yer goin', sis?" called Gillsey, in a startled voice.

"Warn 'em!" said the girl, laconically, not stopping her pace.

"Stop! stop! Come back!" shouted her father, starting in pursuit. But
the girl never paused.

"Blame the'r skins! Blame the'r skins!" murmured Gillsey to himself.
Then, seeing that he was not gaining on the child, he seemed to gulp
something down in his throat, and finally he shouted:--

"_I'll_ go, sis, _honest_ I'll go. Yer kaint do it yerself. Come back
home!"

The girl stopped, turned round, and walked back, saying to her father,
"They've kep' us the winter. Yer _must_ git thar in time, dad!"

Gillsey went by the child, at a long trot, without answering, and
disappeared in the woods; and at the same moment the flood went through
the valley, filling it half-way up to the spot where the cabin stood.

That lanky youngster's word was law to the father, and she had set his
thoughts in a new channel. He felt the camp must be saved, if he died
for it. The girl said so. He only remembered now how easily the men had
let him off, when they might have half-killed him; and their jests and
jeers and tormentings he forgot. His loose-hung frame gave him a long
stride, and his endurance was marvellous. Through the gray and silver
glades, over stumps and windfalls, through thickets and black valleys
and treacherous swamps, he went leaping at almost full speed.

Before long the tremendous effort began to tell. At first he would not
yield; but presently he realized that he was in danger of giving out, so
he slackened speed a little, in order to save his powers. But as he came
out upon the valley and neared the camp, he caught once more a whisper
of the flood, and sprang forward desperately. Could he get there in
time? The child had said he _must_. He _would_.

His mouth was dry as a board, and he gasped painfully for breath, as he
stumbled against the camp-door; and the roar of the flood was in his
ears. Unable to speak at first, he battered furiously on the door with
an axe, and then smashed in the window.

As the men came jumping wrathfully from their bunks, he found voice to
yell:--

"The water! Dam broke! Run! Run!"

But the noise of the onrushing flood was now in their startled ears, and
they needed no words to tell them their awful peril. Not staying an
instant, every man ran for the hillside, barefooted in the snow. Ere
they reached a safe height, Gillsey stumbled and fell, utterly
exhausted, and for a moment no one noticed his absence.

Then the boss of the camp looked back and saw him lying motionless in
his tracks. Already the camp had gone down under the torrent, and the
flood was about to lick up the prostrate figure; but the boss turned
back with tremendous bounds, swung Gillsey over his shoulder like a sack
of oats, and staggered up the slope, as the water swelled, with a
sobbing moan, from his ankles to his knees.

Seeing the situation of the boss, several more of the hands, who had
climbed to a level of safety, rushed to the rescue. They seized him and
his burden, while others formed a chain, laying hold of hands. With a
shout the whole gang surged up the hill,--and the river saw its prey
dragged out of its very teeth.

After a rest of a few moments, Gillsey quite recovered, and began most
abject apologies for not getting to camp sooner, so as to give the boys
time to save something.

The demonstrative hand-shakings and praises and gratitude of the men
whom he had snatched from a frightful death seemed to confuse him. He
took it at first for chaff, and said, humbly, that "Bein' as sis wanted
him to git thar in time, he'd did his best." But at length it dawned
upon him that his comrades regarded him as a man, as a hero, who had
done a really splendid and noble thing. He began to feel their gratitude
and their respect.

Then it seemed as if a transformation was worked upon the poor cringing
fellow, and he began to believe in himself. A new, firmer, manlier light
woke in his eye, and he held himself erect. He presently began to move
about among the woodsmen as their equal, and their enduring gratitude
gave his new self-confidence time to ripen. From that day Simon Gillsey
stood on a higher plane. In that one act of heroism he had found his
slumbering manhood.

In the Accident Ward.

The grass was gray, of a strange and dreadful pallor, but long and soft.
Unbroken, and bending all one way, as if to look at something, it
covered the wide, low, rounded hill that rose before me. Over the hill
the sky hung close, gray and thick, with the color of a parched
interminable twilight. Dew or a drop of rain could not be thought of as
coming from such a sky.

Along the base of the low hill ran a red road of baked clay, blood red,
and beaten with nameless and innumerable feet. I stood in the middle of
this road and prepared to ascend the hill obliquely by a narrow
footpath, red as blood, which divided the soft gray bending of the
grasses. Behind me the road made a sharp turn, descending out of thick
clouds into a little blood-red hollow, where it was crossed by an open
gate. In this gate, through which I had somehow come, stood two gray
leopards and a small ape. The beasts stood on tip-toe and eyed me with a
dreadful curiosity; and from somewhere in the little hollow I heard a
word whispered which I could not understand. But the beasts heard it,
and drew away through the open gate, and disappeared.

Between the footpath (which all the time gleamed redly through the
over-gathering grasses) and the rounded brink of the gulf there seemed
to be a fence of some sort, so fine that I could not quite distinguish
it, but which I knew to be there.

I turned my eyes to the low summit of the hill. There I saw a figure,
all gray, cleaving the grasses in flight as swift as an arrow. Behind,
in pursuit, came another figure, of the color of the grasses, tall and
terrible beyond thought. This being, as it seemed to me, was the Second
Death, and my knees trembled with horror and a sort of loathing. Then I
saw that he who fled made directly for me; and as they sped I could hear
a strange hissing and rustling of their garments cleaving the grasses.
When the fleeing ghost reached me, and fell at my feet, and clasped my
knees in awful fear, I felt myself grow strong, and all dread left my
soul. I reached forth my right hand and grasped the pursuing horror by
the throat.

I heard the being laugh, and the iron grip of my own strong and
implacable fingers seemed to close with a keen agony upon my own throat,
and a curtain seemed to fall over my eyes. Then I gasped for breath, and
a warm pungent smell clung in my nostrils, and a white light swam into
my eyes, and I heard a voice murmuring far off, but in an accent
strangely familiar and commonplace, "He's coming round all right now."

I opened my eyes with a dim wonder, and found myself surrounded by the
interested faces of the doctors and the clean white walls of the
hospital ward. I heard a sound of some one breathing hoarsely near by,
and a white-capped nurse with kind eyes stepped up to my pillow, and I
perceived that the heavy breather was myself. I was lying with my head
and neck swathed in bandages, and a sharp pain at my throat. Then
flashed across my memory the crash and sickening upheaval of the
collision. I wondered feebly how it had fared with my fellow-passengers,
and again I saw that instant's vision of wild and startled faces as the
crowded car rose and pitched downward, I knew not whither. With a sense
of inexpressible weariness, my brain at once allowed the terrible scene
to slip from its grasp, and I heard a doctor, who was standing at the
bedside watch in hand, say, quietly, "He'll sleep now for a couple of
hours."

The Romance of an Ox-Team.

The oxen, lean and rough-haired, one of them carroty red, the other
brindle and white, were slouching inertly along the narrow backwoods
road. From habit they sagged heavily on the yoke, and groaned huge windy
sighs, although the vehicle they were hauling held no load. This
structure, the mere skeleton of a cart, consisted of two pairs of
clumsy, broad-tired wheels, united by a long tongue of ash, whose tip
was tied with rope to the middle of the forward axle. The road looked
innocent of even the least of the country-road-master's well-meaning
attempts at repair,--a circumstance, indeed, which should perhaps be set
to its credit. It was made up of four deep, parallel ruts, the two
outermost eroded by years of journeying cart-wheels, the inner ones worn
by the companioning hoofs of many a yoke of oxen. Down the centre ran a
high and grassy ridge, intolerable to the country parson and the country
doctor, compelled to traverse this highway in their one-horse wagons.
From ruts and ridges alike protruded the imperishable granite boulder,
which wheels and feet might polish but never efface. On either side of
the roadway was traced an erratic furrow, professing to do duty for a
drain, and at intervals emptying a playful current across the track to
wander down the ruts.

Along beside the slouching team slouched a tall, lank, stoop-shouldered
youth, the white down just beginning to stiffen into bristles on his
long upper lip. His pale eyes and pale hair looked yet paler by contrast
with his thin, red, wind-roughened face. In his hand he carried a
long-handled ox-whip, with a short goad in the butt of it.

"Gee, Buck!" he drawled, prodding the near ox lightly in the ribs. And
the team lurched to the right to avoid a markedly obtrusive boulder.
"Haw, Bright!" he ejaculated a minute later, flicking with his whip the
off shoulder of the farther ox. And with sprawling legs and swaying of
hind-quarters the team swerved obediently to the left, shunning a
mire-hole that would have taken in the wheel to the hub. Presently,
coming to a swampy spot that stretched all the way across the road, the
youth seated himself sidewise on the narrow tongue connecting the fore
and hind axles, and drove his team dry-shod.

It was a slow and creaking progress; but there seemed to be no hurry,
and the youth dreamed gloomily on his jolting perch. His eyes took no
note of the dark-mossed, scrubby hillocks, the rough clearings blackened
with fire, the confused and ragged woods, as they crept past in sombre
procession. But suddenly, as the cart rounded a turn in the road, there
came into view the figure of a girl travelling in the same direction.
The young man slipped from his perch and prodded up the oxen to a brisk
walk.

As the noise of the team approached her, the girl looked around. She was
good to see, with her straight, vigorous young figure in its blue-gray
homespun gown. Her hair, in color not far from that of the red ox, was
rich and abundant, and lay in a coil so gracious that not even the
tawdry millinery of her cheap "store" hat could make her head look quite
commonplace. Her face was freckled, but wholesome and comely. A shade of
displeasure passed over it as she saw who was behind her, and she
hastened her steps perceptibly. But presently she remembered that she
had a good five miles to go ere she would reach her destination; and she
realized that she could not hope to escape by flight. With a pout of
vexation she resigned herself to the inevitable, and dropped back into
her former pace. Immediately the ox-team overtook her.

As the oxen slowed up she stepped to the right to let them pass, and
then walked on, thus placing the cart between herself and her undesired
companion. The youth looked disconcerted by these tactics, and for a few
moments could find nothing to say. Then, dropping his long white lashes
sheepishly, he murmured, "Good-day, Liz."

"Well, Jim-Ed!" replied the girl, coolly.

"Won't ye set on an' let me give ye a lift home?" he asked, with
entreaty in his voice.

"No," she said, with finality: "I'd ruther walk."

Not knowing how to answer this rebuff, he tried to cover his
embarrassment by exclaiming authoritatively, "Haw, Bright!" whereupon
the team slewed to the left and crowded him into the ditch.

Soon he began again.

"Ye _might_ set on, Liz," he pleaded.

"Yes, I _might_," said she, with what she considered rather withering
smartness; "but I ain't a-goin' to."

"Ye'll be tired afore ye git home," he persisted, encouraged by finding
that she would talk back at him.

"James-Ed A'ki'son," she declared, with emphasis, "if ye think I'm
a-goin' to be beholden to _you_ fer a lift home, ye're mistaken, that's
all."

After this there was silence for some time, broken only by the rattling
and bumping of the cart, and once by the whir of a woodcock that
volleyed across the road. Young Atkinson chewed the cud of gloomy
bewilderment. At length he roused himself to another effort.

"Liz," said he, plaintively, "y' ain't been like ye used to, sence ye
come back from the States."

"Ain't I?" she remarked, indifferently.

"No, Liz, ye ain't," he repeated, with a sort of pathetic emphasis, as
if eager to persuade himself that she had condescended to rebut his
accusation. "Y' ain't been like ye used to at all. Appears like as if ye
thought us folks in the Settlement wasn't good enough fer ye now."

At this the girl tossed her head crossly.

"It appears like as if ye wanted to be back in the States ag'in," he
continued, in a voice of anxious interrogation.

"My lands," exclaimed the girl, "but ye're green!"

To the young man this seemed such an irrelevant remark that he was
silent for some time, striving to fathom its significance. As his head
sank lower and lower, and he seemed to lose himself completely in
joyless revery, the girl shot occasional glances at him out of the
corners of her eyes. She had spent the preceding winter in a factory in
a crude but stirring little New England town, and had come back to Nova
Scotia ill content with the monotony of life in the backwoods seclusion
of Wyer's Settlement. Before she went away she had been, to use the
vernacular of the Settlement, "keepin' company with Jim-Ed A'ki'son;"
and now, to her, the young man seemed to unite and concentrate in his
person all that she had been wont to persuade herself she had outgrown.
To be sure, she not seldom caught herself dropping back comfortably into
the old conditions. But these symptoms stirred in her heart an uneasy
resentment, akin to that which she felt whenever--as would happen at
times--she could not help recognizing that Jim-Ed and his affairs were
not without a passing interest in her eyes.

Now she began to grow particularly angry at him because, as she thought,
"he hadn't nothing to say fer himself." Sadly to his disadvantage, she
compared his simplicity and honest diffidence with the bold
self-assertion and easy familiarity of the young fellows with whom she
had come in contact during the winter. Their impertinences had offended
her grievously at the time, but, woman-like, she permitted herself to
forget that now, in order to accentuate the deficiencies of the man whom
she was unwilling to think well of.

"My lands!" she reiterated to herself, with accumulated scorn, "but
_ain't_ he green? He--why, he wouldn't know a 'lectric car from a
waterin'-cart. An' _soft_, too, takin' all my sass 'thout givin' me no
lip back, no more 'n if I was his mother!"

But the young man presently broke in upon these unflattering
reflections. With a sigh he said slowly, as if half to himself,--

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10