Wayside Courtships

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"Well, I've got everything straightened up. Been freezing out old
Daggett; the old skeesix has been promisin' f'r a week, and I just said,
'Old man, I'll camp right down with you here till you fork over,' and he
did. By the way, everybody I talked with to-day about leaving said,
'What's Lohr going to do with that girl?' I told 'em I didn't know; do
you? It seems you've been thicker'n I supposed."

"I'm going to marry her," said Albert calmly, but his voice sounded
strangely alien.

"What's that?" yelled Hartley.

"Sh! don't raise the neighbors. I'm going to marry her." He spoke
quietly, but there was a peculiar numbness creeping over him.

"Well, by jinks! When? Say, looky here! Well, I swanny!" exclaimed
Hartley helplessly. "When?"

"Right away; some time this summer--June, maybe."

Hartley thrust his hands into his trousers pockets, stretched out his
legs, and stared at his friend in vast amaze.

"You're givin' me guff!"

"I'm in dead earnest."

"I thought you was going through college all so fast?"

"Well, I've made up my mind it ain't much use to try," replied Albert
listlessly.

"What y' goin' t' do here, or are y' goin' t' take the girl away with
yeh?"

"She can't leave her mother. We'll run this boarding house for the
present. I'll try for the principalship of the school here. Raff is
going to resign, he says; if I can't get that, I'll get into a law
office here. Don't worry about me."

"But why go into this so quick? Why not put it off fifteen or twenty
years?" asked Hartley, trying to get back to cheerful voice.

"What would be the use? At the end of a year I'd be just about as poor
as I am now."

"Can't y'r father step in and help you?"

"No. There are three boys and two girls, all younger than I, to be
looked out for, and he has all he can carry. Besides, _she_ needs me
right here and right now. Two delicate women struggling along; suppose
one of 'em should fall sick? I tell you they need me, and if I can do
anything to make life easy, or easier, I'm going t' do it. Besides," he
ended in a peculiar tone, "we don't feel as if we could live apart much
longer."

"But, great Scott! man, you can't----"

"Now, hold on, Jim! I've thought this thing all over, and I've made up
my mind. It ain't any use to go on talking about it. What good would it
do me to go to school another year, come out without a dollar, and no
more fitted for earning a living for her than I am now? And, besides all
that, I couldn't draw a free breath thinking of her here workin' away to
keep things moving, liable at any minute to break down."

Hartley gazed at him in despair, and with something like awe. It was a
tremendous transformation in the young, ambitious student. He felt in a
way responsible for the calamity, and that he ought to use every effort
to bring the boy to his senses.

Like most men in America, and especially Western men, he still clung to
the idea that a man was entirely responsible for his success or failure
in life. He had not admitted that conditions of society might be so
adverse that only men of most exceptional endowments, and willing and
able to master many of the best and deepest and most sacred of their
inspirations and impulses, could succeed.

Of the score of specially promising young fellows who had been with him
at school, seventeen had dropped out and down. Most of them had married
and gone back to farming, or to earn a precarious living in the small,
dull towns where farmers trade and traders farm. Conditions were too
adverse; they simply weakened and slipped slowly back into dullness and
an oxlike or else a fretful patience. Thinking of these men, and
thinking their failure due to themselves alone, Hartley could not endure
the idea of his friend adding one more to the list of failures. He
sprang up at last.

"Say, Bert, you might just as well hang y'rself, and done with it! Why,
it's suicide! I can't allow it. I started in at college bravely, and
failed because I'd let it go too long. I couldn't study--couldn't get
down to it; but you--why, old man, I'd _bet_ on you!" He had a tremor in
his voice. "I hate like thunder to see you give up your plans. Say, you
can't afford to do this; it's too much to pay."

"No, it ain't."

"I say it is. What do you get, in----"

"I think so much o' her that----"

"Oh, nonsense! You'd get over this in a week."

"Jim!" called Albert warningly, sharply.

"All right," said Jim, in the tone of a man who felt that it was all
wrong--"all right; but the time'll come when you'll wish I'd--You ain't
doin' the girl enough good to make up for the harm you're doin'
yourself." He broke off again, and said in a tone of peculiar meaning:
"I'm done. I'm all through, and I c'n see you're through with Jim
Hartley. Why, Bert, look here--No? All right!"

"Darn curious," he muttered to himself, "that boy should get caught just
at this time, and not with some one o' those girls in Marion. Well, it's
none o' my funeral," he ended, with a sigh; for it had stirred him to
the bottom of his sunny nature, after all. A dozen times, as he lay
there beside his equally sleepless companion, he started to say
something more in deprecation of the step, but each time stifled the
opening word into a groan.

It would not be true to say that love had come to Albert Lohr as a
relaxing influence, but it had changed the direction of his energies so
radically as to make his whole life seem weaker and lower. As long as
his love-dreams went out toward a vague and ideal woman, supposedly
higher and grander than himself, he was spurred on to face the terrible
sheer escarpment of social eminence; but when he met, by accident, the
actual woman who was to inspire his future efforts, the difficulties he
faced took on solid reality.

His aspirations fell to the earth, their wings clipped, and became,
perforce, submissive beasts at the plow. The force that moved so much
of his thought was transformed into other energy. Whether it were a wise
step or not he did not know; he certainly knew it was right.

The table was very gay at dinner next day. Maud was standing at the
highest point of her girlhood dreams. Her flushed face and shining eyes
made her seem almost a child, and Hartley wondered at her, and relented
a little in the face of such happiness. Her face was turned to Albert in
an unconscious, beautiful way; she had nothing to conceal now.

Mrs. Welsh was happy, too, but a little tearful in an unobtrusive way.
Troutt had his jokes, of course, not very delicate, but of good
intention. In fact, they were as flags and trumpets to the young people.
Mrs. Welsh had confided in him, telling him to be secret; but the
finesse of his joking could not fail to reveal everything he knew.

But Maud cared little. She was filled with a sort of tender boldness;
and Albert, in the delight of the hour, gave himself up wholly to a
trust in the future and to the fragrance and music of love.

"They're gay as larks now," thought Hartley to himself, as he joined in
the laughter; "but that won't help 'em any, ten years from now."

He could hardly speak next day as he shook hands at the station with his
friend.

"Good-by, ol' man; I hope it'll come out all right, but I'm afraid--But
there! I promised not to say anything about it. Good-by till we meet in
Congress," he ended in a lamentable attempt at being funny.

"Can't you come to the wedding, Jim? We've decided on June. You see,
they need a man around the house, so we--You'll come, won't you, old
fellow? And don't mind my being a little crusty last night."

"Oh, yes; I'll come," Jim said, in a tone which concealed a desire to
utter one more protest.

"It's no use; that ends him, sure's I'm a thief. He's jumped into a hole
and pulled the hole in after him. A man can't marry a family like that
at his age, and pull out of it. He _may_, but I doubt it. Well, as I
remarked before, it's none o' my funeral so long as _he's_ satisfied."

But he said it with a painful lump in his throat, and he could not bring
himself to feel that Albert's course was right, and felt himself to be
somehow culpable in the case.

AN ALIEN IN THE PINES.

I.

A man and a woman were pacing up and down the wintry station platform,
waiting for a train. On every side the snow lay a stained and crumpled
blanket, with here and there a light or a chimney to show the village
sleeping beneath.

The sky was a purple-black hemisphere, out of which the stars glittered
almost white. The wind came out of the west, cold but amiable; the
cracked bell of a switch engine gurgled querulously at intervals,
followed by the bumping of coupling freight cars; roosters were crowing,
and sleepy train men were assembling in sullen silence.

The couple walked with arms locked like lovers, but the tones of their
voices had the quality which comes after marriage. They were man and
wife.

The woman's clear voice arose. "O Ed, isn't this delicious? What one
misses by not getting up early!"

"Sleep, for instance," laughed her husband.

"Don't drag me down. You know what I mean. Let's get up early every
morning while we're up here in the woods."

"Shouldn't wonder if we had to. There'll be a lot to do, and I want to
get back to Chicago by the 1st of February."

"This is an experience! Isn't it still? When is our train due?"

"Due now; I think that is our headlight up the track."

As he spoke, an engine added its voice to the growing noise of the
station, and drew solemnly down the frosty steel.

An eruption of shapeless forms of men from the depot filled the one
general coach of the train. They nearly all were dressed in some sort of
fur coat, and all had the look of men accustomed to outdoor
life--powerful, loud-voiced, unrefined. They were, in fact, traveling
men, business men, the owners of mills or timber. The stolid or patient
oxlike faces of some Norwegian workmen, dressed in gay Mackinac jackets,
were sprinkled about.

The young wife was a fine type of woman anywhere, but these surroundings
made her seem very dainty and startlingly beautiful. Her husband had the
fair skin of a city man, but his powerful shoulders and firm step
denoted health and wholesome living. They were good to see as man and
wife.

They soon felt the reaction to sleepiness which comes to those not
accustomed to early rising, and the wife, soothed by the clank of the
train, leaned her head on her husband's shoulder and dozed. He looked
out upon the landscape, glad that his wife was not observing it. He did
not know such desolation existed in Wisconsin.

On every side were the evidences of a ruined forest land. A landscape of
flat wastes, of thinned and burned and uprooted trees. A desolate and
apparently useless land.

Here and there a sawmill stood gray and sagging, surrounded by little
cabins of unpainted wood, to testify to the time when great pines stood
all about, and the ring of the swamper's axe was heard in the intervals
of silence between the howls of a saw.

To the north the swells grew larger. Birch and tamarack swamps
alternated with dry ridges on which an inferior pine still grew. The
swamps were dense tangles of broken and uprooted trees. Slender pikelike
stumps of fire-devastated firs rose here and there, black and grim
skeletons of trees.

It was a land that had been sheared by the axe, torn by the winds, and
blasted by fire.

Off to the west low blue ridges rose, marking the boundaries of the
valley which had been washed out ages ago by water. After the floods it
had sprung up to pine forests, and these in their turn had been sheared
away by man. It lay now awaiting the plow and seeder of the intrepid
pioneer.

Suddenly the wife roused up. "Why, we haven't had any breakfast!"

He smiled at her childish look of bewilderment. "I've been painfully
aware of it for some time back. I've been suffering for food while you
slept."

"Why didn't you get into the basket?"

"How could I, with you on my manly bosom?"

She colored up a little. They had not been married long, evidently.

They were soon eating a breakfast with the spirit of picnickers.
Occasionally she looked out of the window.

"What a wild country!" she said. He did not emphasize its qualities to
her; rather, he distracted her attention from the desolation.

The train roared round its curves, conforming with the general course of
the river. On every hand were thickening signs of active lumber
industry. They flashed by freight trains loaded with logs or lumber or
ties. Mills in operation grew thicker.

The car echoed with the talk of lumber. A brisk man with a red mustache
was exhibiting a model of a machine to cut certain parts of machinery
out of "two by fours." Another was describing a new shingle mill he had
just built.

A couple of elderly men, one a German, were discussing the tariff on
lumber. The workmen mainly sat silent.

"It's all so strange!" the young wife said again and again.

"Yes, it isn't exactly the Lake Shore drive."

"I like it. I wish I could smell the pines."

"You'll have all the pines you can stand before we get back to Chicago."

"No, sir; I'm going to enjoy every moment of it; and you're going to let
me help, you know--look over papers and all that. I'm the heiress, you
must remember," she said wickedly.

"Well, we won't quarrel about that until we see how it all turns out. It
may not be worth my time up here. I shall charge you roundly as your
lawyer; depend on that."

The outlook grew more attractive as the train sped on. Old Mosinee rose,
a fine rounded blue shape, on the left.

"Why, there's a mountain! I didn't know Wisconsin had such a mountain as
that."

"Neither did I. This valley is fine. Now, if your uncle's estates only
included that hill!"

The valley made off to the northwest with a bold, large, and dignified
movement. The coloring, blue and silver, purple-brown and bronze-green,
was suitable to the grouping of lines. It was all fresh and vital,
wholesome and very impressive.

From this point the land grew wilder--that is, more primeval: There was
more of Nature and less of man. The scar of the axe was here and there,
but the forest predominated. The ridges of pine foliages broke against
the sky miles and miles in splendid sweep.

"This must be lovely in summer," the wife said, again and again, as they
flashed by some lake set among the hills.

"It's fine now," he replied, feeling the thrill of the sportsman. "I'd
like to shoulder a rifle and plunge into those snowy vistas. How it
brings the wild spirit out in a man! Women never feel that delight."

"Oh, yes, we do," she replied, glad that something remained yet
unexplained between them. "We feel just like men, only we haven't the
strength of mind to demand a share of it with you."

"Yes, you feel it at this distance. You'd come back mighty quick the
second night out."

She did not relish his laughter, and so looked away out of the window.
"Just think of it--Uncle Edwin lived here thirty years!"

He forbore to notice her inconsistency. "Yes, the wilderness is all
right for a vacation, but I prefer Chicago for the year round."

When they came upon Ridgeley, both cried out with delight.

"Oh, what a dear, picturesque little town!" she said.

"Well, well! I wonder how they came to build a town without a row of
battlemented stores?"

It lay among and upon the sharp, low, stumpy pine ridges in haphazard
fashion, like a Swiss village. A small brook ran through it, smothered
here and there in snow. A sawmill was the largest figure of the town,
and the railway station was the center. There was not an inch of painted
board in the village. Everywhere the clear yellow of the pine flamed
unstained by time. Lumber piles filled all the lower levels near the
creek. Evidently the town had been built along logging roads, and there
was something grateful and admirable in its irregular arrangement. The
houses, moreover, were all modifications of the logging camps; even the
drug store stood with its side to the street. All about were stumps and
fringes of pines, which the lumbermen, for some good reason, had passed
by. Charred boles stood purple-black out of the snow.

It was all green and gray and blue and yellow-white and wild. The sky
was not more illimitable than the rugged forest which extended on every
hand.

"Oh, this is glorious--glorious!" said the wife. "Do I own some of this
town?" she asked, as they rose to go out.

"I reckon you do."

"Oh, I'm so glad!"

As they stepped out on the platform, a large man in corduroy and
wolf-skin faced them like a bandit.

"Hello, Ed!"

"Hello, Jack! Well, we've found you. My wife, Mr. Ridgeley. We've come
up to find out how much you've embezzled," he said, as Ridgeley pulled
off an immense glove to shake hands all round.

"Well, come right over to the hotel. It ain't the Auditorium, but then,
again, it ain't like sleeping outdoors."

As they moved along they heard the train go off, and then the sound of
the saw resumed its domination of the village noises.

"Was the town named after you, or you after the town?" asked Field.

"Named after me. Old man didn't want it named after him; would kill it,"
he said.

Mr. and Mrs. Field found the hotel quite comfortable and the dinner
wholesome. They beamed upon each other.

"It's going to be delightful," they said.

Ridgeley was a bachelor, and found his home at the hotel also. That
night he said: "Now we'll go over the papers and records of your uncle's
property, and then we'll go out and see if the property is all there. I
imagine this is to be a searching investigation."

"You may well think it. My wife is inexorable."

As night fell, the wife did not feel so safe and well pleased. The loud
talking in the office below and the occasional whooping of a crowd of
mill hands going by made her draw her chair nearer and lay her fingers
in her husband's palm.

He smiled indulgently. "Don't be frightened, my dear. These men are not
half so bad as they sound."

II.

Mrs. Field sat in the inner room of Ridgeley's office, waiting for the
return of her husband with the team. They were going out for a drive.

Ridgeley was working at his books, and he had forgotten her presence.

She could not but feel a deep admiration for his powerful frame and his
quick, absorbed action as he moved about from his safe to his desk. He
was a man of great force and ready decision.

Suddenly the door opened and a man entered. He had a sullen and bitter
look on his thin, dark face. Ridgeley's quick eyes measured him, and his
hand softly turned the key in his money drawer, and as he faced about he
swung shut the door of the safe.

The stranger saw all this with eyes as keen as Ridgeley's. A cheerless
and strange smile came upon his face.

"Don't be alarmed," he said. "I'm low, but I ain't as low as that."

"Well, sir, what can I do for you?" asked Ridgeley. Mrs. Field half
rose, and her heart beat terribly. She felt something tense and strange
in the attitude of the two men.

But the man only said, "You can give me a job if you want to."

Ridgeley remained alert. He ran his eyes over the man's tall frame. He
looked strong and intelligent, although his eyes were fevered and dull.

"What kind of a job?"

"Any kind that will take me out into the woods and keep me there," the
man replied.

There was a self-accusing tone in his voice that Ridgeley felt.

"What's your object? You look like a man who could do something else.
What brings you here?"

The man turned with a sudden resolution to punish himself. His voice
expressed a terrible loathing.

"Whisky, that's what. It's a hell of a thing to say, but I can't let
liquor alone when I can smell it. I'm no common hand, or I wouldn't be
if I--But let that go. I can swing an axe, and I'm ready to work. That's
enough. Now the question is, can you find a place for me?"

Ridgeley mused a little. The young fellow stood there, statuesque,
rebellious.

Then Ridgeley said, "I guess I can help you out that much." He picked up
a card and a pencil. "What shall I call you?"

"Oh, call me Williams; that ain't my name, but it'll do."

"What you been doing?"

"Everything part of the time, drinking the rest. Was in a livery stable
down at Wausau last week. It came over me, when I woke yesterday, that I
was gone to hell if I stayed in town. So I struck out; and I don't care
for myself, but I've got a woman to look out for--" He stopped abruptly.
His recklessness of mood had its limits, after all.

Ridgeley penciled on a card. "Give this to the foreman of No. 6. The men
over at the mill will show you the teams."

The man started toward the door with the card in his hand. He turned
suddenly.

"One thing more. I want you to send ten dollars of my pay every two
weeks to this address." He took an envelope out of his pocket. "It don't
matter what I say or do after this, I want that money sent. The rest
will keep me in tobacco and clothing. You understand?"

Ridgeley nodded. "Perfectly. I've seen such cases before."

The man went out and down the walk with a hurried, determined air, as if
afraid of his own resolution.

As Ridgeley turned toward his desk he met Mrs. Field, who faced him with
tears of fervent sympathy in her eyes.

"Isn't it awful?" she said, in a half whisper. "Poor fellow, what will
become of him?"

"Oh, I don't know. He'll get along some way. Such fellows do. I've had
'em before. They try it a while here; then they move. I can't worry
about them."

Mrs. Field was not listening to his shifty words. "And then, think of
his wife--how she must worry."

Ridgeley smiled. "Perhaps it's his mother or a sister."

"Anyway it's awful. Can't something be done for him?"

"I guess we've done about all that can be done."

"Oh, I wish I could help him! I'll tell Ed about him."

"Don't worry about him, Mrs. Field; he ain't worth it."

"Oh yes, he is. I feel he's been a good boy once, and then he's so
self-accusing."

Her own happiness was so complete, she could not bear to think of
others' misery. She told her husband about Williams, and ended by
asking, "Can't we do anything to help the poor fellow?"

Field was not deeply concerned. "No; he's probably past help. Such men
are so set in their habits, nothing but a miracle or hypnotism can save
them. He'll end up as a 'lumber Jack,' as the townsmen call the hands in
the camps."

"But he isn't that, Edward. He's finer some way. You feel he is. Ask Mr.
Ridgeley."

Ridgeley merely said: "Yes, he seemed to me to be more than a common
hand. But, all the same, it won't be two weeks before he'll be in here
as drunk as a wild cat, wanting to shoot me for holding back his money."

In this way Williams came to be to Mrs. Field a very important figure in
the landscape of that region. She often spoke of him, and on the
following Saturday night, when Field came home, she anxiously asked, "Is
Williams in town?"

"No, he hasn't shown up yet."

She clapped her hands in delight. "Good! good! He's going to win his
fight."

Field laughed. "Don't bet on Williams too soon. We'll hear from him
before the week is out."

"When are we going to visit the camp?" she asked, changing the subject.

"As soon as it warms up a little. It is too cold for you."

She had a laugh at him. "You were the one who wanted to 'plunge into the
snowy vistas.'"

He evaded her joke on him by assuming a careless tone. "I'm not plunging
as much as I was; the snow is too deep."

"When you go I want to go with you--I want to see Williams."

"Ha!" he snorted melodramatically. "She scorns me faithful heart. She
turns----"

Mrs. Field smiled faintly. "Don't joke about it Ed. I can't get that
wife out of my mind."

III.

A few very cold gray days followed, and then the north wind cleared the
sky; and, though it was still cold, it was pleasant. The sky had only a
small white cloud here and there to make its blueness the more profound.

Ridgeley dashed up to the door with a hardy little pair of bronchos
hitched to a light pair of bobs, and Mrs. Field was tucked in like a
babe in a cradle.

Almost the first thing she asked was, "How is Williams?"

"Oh, he's getting on nicely. He refused to sleep with his bunk mate, and
finally had to lick him, I understand, to shut him up. Challenged the
whole camp then to let him alone or take a licking. They let him alone,
Lawson says.--G'lang there, you rats!"

Mrs. Field said no more, for the air was whizzing by her ears, and she
hardly dared look out, so keen was the wind, but as soon as they entered
the deeps of the forest it was profoundly still.

The ride that afternoon was a glory she never forgot. Everywhere
yellow-greens and purple shadows. The sun in a burnished blue sky
flooded the forests with light, striking down through even the thickest
pines to lay in fleckings of radiant white and gold upon the snow.

The trail (it was not a road) ran like a graceful furrow over the
hills, around little lakes covered deep with snow, through tamarack
swamps where the tracks of wild things thickened, over ridges of tall
pine clear of brush, and curving everywhere amid stumps, where
dismantled old shanties marked the site of the older logging camps.
Sometimes they met teams going to the store. Sometimes they crossed
logging roads--wide, smooth tracks artificially iced, down which
mountainous loads of logs were slipping, creaking and groaning.
Sometimes they heard the dry click-clock of the woodsmen's axes, or the
crash of falling trees deep in the wood. When they reached the first
camp, Ridgeley pulled up the steaming horses at the door and shouted,
"Hello, the camp!"

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