In Exile and Other Stories

M >> Mary Hallock Foote >> In Exile and Other Stories

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"'Let me alone! I've got to go with her. I tell ye I've got to go with
her!'

"The mate just had time to swing himself back into the mizzen-shrouds
before the sea broke over her and left the decks bare. The old ship pounded
over the bar in an hour or so, and drifted up here on to the beach where
she is now. Every man on board was saved except the cap'n. He 'went with
her,' sure enough.

"There was talk enough about that thing before they got done with it to 'a'
made the old man roll in his grave. They raked up all the stories about his
cruisin' on the Spanish main when he was a young man. They wan't stories
_he_'d ever told; he wan't much of a hand to talk about what he'd seen and
done on his v'yages. They never let him rest till 'twas pretty much the
gen'ral belief, and is to this day, that he knew more about that slaver
from the first than he ever owned to.

"I never had much to say about it, but 'twas plain enough to me. I had my
suspicions the mornin' he towed her in. He looked terrible shattered. It
'peared to me he wan't ever the same man afterwards.

"'I've got to go with her!' Them was his last words. He knew that ship
and him belonged together, same as a man and his sins. He knew she'd been
a-huntin' him up and down the western ocean for twenty year, with them dead
o' his'n in her hold,--and she'd hunted him down at last."

Captain John paused with this peroration: he dug a hole in the wet sand
with the toe of his boot, and watched it slowly fill.

"'Twas a bait most any one would 'a' smelt of, a six-hundred-ton ship and
every timber in her sound; but you'd 'a' thought he'd been more cautious,
knowin' what he did of her. She was bound to have him, though."

"Captain John," said the boy, a little hoarse from his long silence, "what
do you suppose it _was_ he did? Anything except just leave them--the
negroes, I mean?"

"Lord! Wan't that _enough_? To steal 'em, and then leave 'em
there--battened down like rats in the hold! However, I expect there ain't
anybody that can tell you the whole of that story. It's one of them
mysteries that rests with the dead.

"The new mate--the young fellow he brought on from New York--he married the
cap'n's daughter. None o' the Harbor boys ever seemed to jibe in with her.
I always had a notion that she was a touch above most of 'em, but she and
her mother was as good as a providence to them shipwrecked men when they
was throwed ashore, strangers in the place and no money; and it ended in
Rachel's takin' up with the mate and the whole family's leavin' the place.
It was long after all the talk died away that the widow come back and lived
here in the same quiet way she always had, till she was laid alongside the
old cap'n. There wan't a better woman ever walked this earth than Mary
Green, that was Mary Spofford."

Captain John rose from the bowsprit and rubbed his cramped knees before
climbing the hill. He parted with his young listener at the top and took
a lonely path across the shore-pasture to a little cabin, where no light
shone, built like the nest of a sea-bird on the edge of high-water mark.

On the gray beach below, a small, dingy yawl, with one sail loosely bundled
over the thwarts, leaned toward the door-latch as if listening for its
click. It had an almost human expression of patient though wistful waiting.
It was the poorest boat in the Harbor; it had no name painted on its stern,
but Captain John, in the solitude of his watery wanderings among the
islands and channels of the bay, always called her the Mary Spofford. The
boy from the main went home slowly along the village street toward the
many-windowed house in which his mother and sisters were boarding. There
were voices, calling and singing abroad on the night air, reflected
from the motionless, glimmering sheet of dark water below as from a
sounding-board. Cow-bells tinkled away among the winding paths along the
low, dim shores. The night-call of the heron from the muddy flats struck
sharply across the stillness, and from the outer bay came the murmur of the
old ground-swell, which never rests, even in the calmest weather.

A CLOUD ON THE MOUNTAIN.

Ruth Mary stood on the high river bank, looking along the beach below to
see if her small brother Tommy was lurking anywhere under the willows with
his fishing-pole. He had been sent half an hour before to the earth cellar
for potatoes, and Ruth Mary's father, Mr. Tully, was waiting for his
dinner.

She did not see Tommy; but while she lingered, looking at the river
hurrying down the shoot between the hills and curling up over the pebbles
of the bar, she saw a team of bay horses and a red-wheeled wagon come
rattling down the stony slope of the opposite shore. In the wagon she
counted four men. Three of them wore white, helmet-shaped hats that made
brilliant spots of light against the bank. The horses were driven half
their length into the stream and allowed to drink, as well as they could
for the swiftness of the current, while the men seemed to consult together,
the two on the front seat turning back to speak with the two behind, and
pointing across the river.

Ruth Mary watched them with much interest, for travelers such as these
seemed to be seldom came as far up Bear River valley as the Tullys' cattle
range. The visitors who came to them were mostly cow-boys looking up stray
cattle, or miners on their way to the "Banner district," or packers with
mule trains going over the mountains, to return in three weeks, or three
months, as their journey prospered. Fishermen and hunters came up into
the hills in the season of trout and deer, but they came as a rule on
horseback, and at a distance were hardly to be distinguished from the
cow-boys and the miners.

The men in the wagon were evidently strangers to that locality. They had
seen Ruth Mary watching them from the hill, and now one of them rose up in
the wagon and shouted across to her, pointing to the river.

She could not hear his words for the noise of the ripple and of the wind
which blew freshly down-stream, but she understood that he was inquiring
about the ford. She motioned up the river and called to him, though she
knew her words could not reach him, to keep on the edge of the ripple.
Her gestures, however, aided by the driver's knowledge of fords, were
sufficient; he turned his horses up-stream and they took water at the place
she had tried to indicate. The wagon sank to the wheel-hubs; the horses
kept their feet well, though the current was strong; the sun shone brightly
on the white hats and laughing faces of the men, on the guns in their
hands, on the red paint of the wagon and the warm backs of the horses
breasting the stream. When they were halfway across, one of the men tossed
a small, reluctant black dog over the wheel into the river, and all the
company, with the exception of the driver, who was giving his attention to
his horses, broke into hilarious shouts of encouragement to the swimmer
in his struggle with the current. It was carrying him down and would have
landed him, without effort of his own, on a strip of white sand beach under
the willows above the bend; but now the unhappy little object, merely a
black nose and two blinking anxious eyes above the water, had drifted into
an eddy, from which he cast forlorn glances toward his faithless friends in
the wagon. The dog was in no real peril, but Ruth Mary did not know this,
and her heart swelled with indignant pity. Only shyness kept her from
wading to his rescue. Now one of the laughing young men, thinking the joke
had gone far enough perhaps, and reckless of a wetting, leaped out into the
water, and, plunging along in his high boots, soon had the terrier by the
scruff of his neck, and waded ashore with his sleek, quivering little body
nestled in the bosom of his flannel hunting shirt.

A deep cut in the bank, through which the wagon was dragged, was screened
by willows. When the fording party had arrived at the top, Ruth Mary was
nowhere to be seen. "Where's that girl got to all of a sudden?" one of the
men demanded. They had intended to ask her several questions; but she was
gone, and the road before them plainly led to the low-roofed cabin, and
loosely built barn with straw and daylight showing through its cracks, the
newly planted poplar-trees above the thatched earth cellar, and all the
signs of a tentative home in this solitude of the hills.

They drove on slowly, the young man who had waded ashore, whom his comrades
addressed as Kirkwood or Kirk, walking behind the wagon with the dog in
his arms, responding to his whimpering claims for attention with teasing
caresses. The dog, it seemed, was the butt as well as the pet of the party.
As they approached the house he scrambled out of Kirkwood's arms and
lingered to take a roll in the sandy path, coming up a moment afterward
to be received with blighting sarcasms upon his appearance. After his
ignominious wetting he was quite unable to bear up under them, and slunk to
the rear with deprecatory blinks and waggings of his tail whenever one of
the men looked back.

Ruth Mary had run home quickly to tell her father, who was sitting in the
sun by the wood-pile, of the arrival of strangers from across the river.
Mr. Tully rose up deliberately and went to meet his guests, keeping between
his teeth the sliver of pine he had been chewing while waiting for his
dinner. It helped to bear him out in that appearance of indifference
he thought it well to assume, as if such arrivals were an every-day
occurrence.

"Hasn't Tommy got back yet, mother?" Ruth Mary asked as she entered the
house. Mrs. Tully was a stout, low-browed woman, with grayish yellow hair
of that dry and lifeless texture which shows declining health or want of
care. Her blue eyes looked faded in the setting of her tanned complexion.
She sat in a low chair, her knees wide apart, defined by her limp calico
draperies, rocking a child of two years, a fat little girl with flushed
cheeks and flaxen hair braided into tight knots on her forehead, who was
asleep in the large cushioned rocking-chair in the middle of the room. The
room was somewhat bare, for the shed-room outside was evidently the more
used part of the house. The cook stove was there in the inclosed corner,
and beside it a table and shelf with a tin hand-basin hanging beneath,
while the crannies of the logs on each side of the doorway were utilized
as shelves for all the household articles in frequent requisition that
were not hanging from nails driven into the logs, or from the projecting
roof-poles against the light.

Tommy had not returned, and Mrs. Tully suggested as a reason for his delay
that he had stopped somewhere to catch grasshoppers for bait.

"I should think he had enough of 'em in that bottle of his," Ruth Mary
said, "to last him till the 'hoppers come again. Some strange men forded
the river just now. Father's gone to speak to them. I guess he'll ask 'em
to stop to dinner."

Mrs. Tully got up heavily and went to the door. "Here, Angy,"--she
addressed a girl of eight or ten years who sat on the flat boulder that
was the cabin doorstep;--"you go get them taters; that's a good girl," she
added coaxingly, as Angy did not stir. "If your foot hurts you, you can
walk on your heel."

Angy, who was complaining of a stone-bruise, got up and limped away,
upsetting from her lap as she rose two kittens of tender years, who tumbled
over each other before getting their legs under them, and staggered off,
steering themselves jerkily with their tails.

"Oh, Angy!" Ruth Mary remonstrated, but she could not stay to comfort the
kittens. She ran up the short, crooked stairs leading to the garret bedroom
which she shared with Angy, hastily to put on her shoes and stockings and
brace her pretty figure, under the blue calico waist she wore, with her
first pair of stays, an important purchase made on her last visit to the
town in the valley, and to be worn now, if ever. It was hot at noon in the
bedroom under the roof, and by the time Ruth Mary had fortified herself
to meet the eyes of strangers she was uncomfortably flushed, and short of
breath besides from the pressure of the new stays. She went slowly down the
uneven stairs, wishing that she could walk as softly in her shoes as she
could barefoot.

Her father was talking to the strangers in the shed-room. They seemed tall
and formidable, under the low roof, against the flat glare of the sun on
the hard-swept ground in front of the shed. She waited inside until her
mother reminded her of the dinner half cooked on the stove; then she went
out shyly, the light falling on her downcast face and full white eyelids,
on her yellow hair, sun-faded and meekly parted over her forehead, which
was low like her mother's, but smooth as one of the white stones of the
river beach. Her fair skin was burned to a clear, light red tint, and her
blonde eyebrows and lashes showed silvery against it, but her chin was very
white underneath, and there was a white space behind each of her little
ears where her hair was knotted tightly away from her neck.

"This is my daughter," Mr. Tully said briefly; and then he gave some
hospitable orders about dinner which the strangers interrupted, saying that
they had brought a lunch with them and would not trouble the family until
supper-time.

They gathered up their hunting gear, and lifting their hats to Ruth Mary,
followed Mr. Tully, who had offered to show them the best fishing on that
part of the river.

Mr. Tully explained to his wife and daughter, as the latter placed the
dinner on the table, that three of the strangers were the engineers from
the railroad camp at Moor's Bridge, and the fourth was a packer and
teamster from the same camp; that they were all going up the river to look
at timber, and wanted a little sport by the way. They had expected to keep
on the other side of the river, but seeing the ranch on the opposite shore,
with wheel-tracks going down to the water, they had concluded to try the
ford and the fishing and ask for a night's accommodation.

"They don't want we should put ourselves out any. They're used to roughin'
it, they say. If you can git together somethin' to feed 'em on, mother,
they say they'd as soon sleep on the straw in the barn as anywheres else."

"There's plenty to eat, such as it is, but Ruth Mary'll have it all to do.
I can't be on my feet." Mrs. Tully spoke in a depressed tone, but to her
no less than to her husband was this little break welcome in the monotony
of their life in the hills, even though it brought with it a more vivid
consciousness of the family circumstances, and a review of them in the
light of former standards of comfort and gentility: for Mrs. Tully had been
a woman of some social pretensions, in the small Eastern village where she
was born. To all that to her guests made the unique charm of her present
home she had grown callous, if she had ever felt it at all, while dwelling
with an incurable regret upon the neatly painted houses and fenced
door-yards, the gatherings of women in their best clothes in primly
furnished parlors on summer afternoons, the church-going, the passing in
the street, and, more than all, the housekeeping conveniences she had been
used to, accumulated through many years' occupancy of the same house.

"Seems as though I hadn't any ambition left," she often complained to her
daughter. "There's nothin' here to do with, and nobody to do for. The most
of the folks we ever see wouldn't know sour-dough bread from salt-risin',
and as for dressin' up, I might keep the same clothes on from Fourth July
till Christmas--your father'd never know."

But Ruth Mary was haunted by no fleshpots of the past. As she dressed the
chickens and mixed the biscuit for supper, she paused often in her work
and looked towards the high pastures with the pale brown lights and purple
shadows on them, rolling away and rising towards the great timbered ridges,
and these lifting here and there along their profiles a treeless peak or
bare divide into the regions above vegetation. She had no misgivings about
her home. Fences would not have improved her father's vast lawn, to her
mind, or white paint the low-browed front of his dwelling; nor did she feel
the want of a stair-carpet and a parlor-organ. She was sure that they,
the strangers, had never seen anything more lovely than her beloved river
dancing down between the hills, tripping over rapids, wrinkling over
sand-bars of its own spreading, and letting out its speed down the long
reaches where the channel was deep.

About four o'clock she found leisure to stroll along the shore with Tommy,
whose competitive energies as a fisherman had been stimulated by the advent
of strange craftsmen with scientific-looking tackle. Tommy must forthwith
show what native skill could do with a willow pole and grasshoppers for
bait. But Ruth Mary's sense of propriety would by no means tolerate Tommy's
intruding his company upon the strangers, and to frustrate any rash,
gregarious impulses on his part she judged it best to keep him in sight.

Tommy knew of a deep pool under the willows which he could whip, unseen,
in the shady hours of the afternoon. Thither he led Ruth Mary, leaving her
seated upon the bank above him lest she should be tempted to talk, and so
interfere with his sport. The moments went by in silence, broken only by
the river; Ruth Mary happy on the high bank in the sun, Tommy happy by
the shady pool below, and now and then slapping a lively trout upon the
stones. Across the river two Chinamen were washing gravel in a rude miner's
cradle, paddling about on the river's brink, and anon staggering down from
the gravel bank above, with large square kerosene cans filled with pay
dirt balanced on either end of a pole across their meagre shoulders.
Bare-headed, in their loose garments, with their pottering movements and
wrinkled faces shining with heat, they looked like two weird, unrevered old
women working out some dismal penance. High up in the sky the great black
buzzards sailed and sailed on slanting wing; the wood doves coo-oo-ed from
the willow thickets that gathered the sunlight close to the water's edge.
A few horses and cattle moved like specks upon the sides of the hills,
cropping the bunchgrass, but the greater herds had been driven up into the
high pastures where the snow falls early; and all these lower hills were
bare of life, unless one might fancy that the far-off processions of pines
against the sky, marching up the northern sides of the divides, had a
solemn personality, going up like priests to a sacrifice, or that the
restless river, flowing through the midst of all and bearing the light of
the white noonday sky deep into the bosom of the darkest hills, had a soul
as well as a voice. In its sparkle and ever-changing motion it was like a
child among its elders at play. The hills seemed to watch it, and the great
cloud-heads as they looked down between the parting summits, and the three
tall pines, standing about a young bird's flight from each other by the
shore and mingling their fitful crooning with the river's babble.

It is pleasant to think of Ruth Mary, sitting high above the river, in the
peaceful afternoon, surrounded by the inanimate life that to her brought
the fullness of companionship and left no room for vain cravings; the
shadow creeping upward over her hands folded in her lap, the light resting
on her girlish face and meek, smooth hair. For this was during that
unquestioning time of content which may not always last, even in a life as
safe and as easily predicted as hers. But even now this silent communion
was interrupted by the appearance of one of Tommy's rivals. It was the
young man whose comrades called him Kirk, who came along the shore,
stooping under the willow boughs and scattering all their shadows lightly
traced on the stones below. He held his fishing-rod, couched like a lance,
in one hand, and a string of gleaming fish in the other.

Tommy, with practiced eye, rapidly counted them and saw with chagrin that
he was outnumbered, but another look satisfied him that the stranger's
catch was nearly all "white-fish" instead of trout. He caressed his own
dappled beauties complacently.

Kirkwood stopped and looked at them; he was evidently impressed by Tommy's
superior luck.

"Those are big fellows," he said; "did you catch them?"

"You don't suppose _she_ did?" said Tommy, with a jerk of his head towards
Ruth Mary.

Kirkwood looked up and smiled, seeing the young girl on her sunny perch.
The smile lingered pleasantly in his eyes as he seated himself on the
stones,--deliberately, as if he meant to stay.

Tommy watched him while he made himself comfortable, taking from his
pocket a short briar-wood pipe and a bag of tobacco, leisurely filling
the pipe and lighting it with a wax match held in the hollow of his
hands--apparently from habit, for there was no wind. He did not seem to
mind in the least that his legs were wet and that his trout were nearly
all white-fish. He was evidently a person of happy resources, and a
joy-compelling temperament that could find virtue in white-fish if it
couldn't get trout. He began to talk to Tommy, not without an amused
consciousness of Tommy's silent partner on the bank above, nor without an
occasional glance up at the maidenly head serenely exalted in the sunlight.
Nor did Ruth Mary fail to respond, with her down-bent looks, as simply and
unawares as the clouds turning their bright side to the sun.

Tommy, on his part, was stoutly withholding, in words, the admiration
his eyes could not help showing, of the strange fisherman's tools. He
cautiously felt the weight of the ringed and polished rod, and snapped it
lightly over the water; he was permitted to examine the book of flies and
to handle the reel, things in themselves fascinating, but to Tommy's mind
merely a hindrance and a snare to the understanding in the real business of
catching fish. Still, he admitted, where a man could take a whole day all
to himself like that, without fear of being called off at any moment by the
women on some frivolous household errand, he might afford to potter with
such things. Tommy kept the conservative attitude of native experience and
skill towards foreign innovation.

"If Joe Enselman was here," he said, "I bet he could ketch more fish in
half 'n hour, with a pole like this o' mine and a han'ful o' 'hoppers, than
any of you can in a whole week o' fishing with them fancy things."

"Oh, Tommy!" Ruth Mary expostulated, looking distressed.

"Who is this famous fisherman?" Kirkwood asked, smiling at Tommy's boast.

"Oh, he's a feller I know. He's a packer, and he owns ha'f o' father's
stock. He's goin' to marry our Sis soon's he gits back from Sheep Mountain,
and then he'll be my brother." Tommy had been a little reckless in his
desire for the distinction of a personal claim on the hero of his boyish
heart. He was even conscious of this himself, as he glanced up at his
sister.

Kirkwood's eyes involuntarily followed Tommy's. He withdrew them at once,
but not before he saw the troubled blush that reddened the girl's averted
face. It struck him, though he was not deeply versed in blushes, that it
was not quite the expression of happy, maidenly consciousness, when the
name of a lover is unexpectedly spoken.

It was the first time in her life that Ruth Mary had ever blushed at the
name of Joe Enselman. She could not understand why it should pain her to
have this young stranger hear of him in his relation to herself.

Before her blush had faded, Kirkwood had dismissed the subject of Ruth
Mary's engagement, with the careless reflection that Enselman was probably
not the right man, but that the primitive laws which decide such haphazard
unions doubtless provided the necessary hardihood of temperament wherewith
to meet their exigencies. She was a nice little girl, but possibly she was
not so sensitive as she looked.

His pipe had gone out, and after relighting it, he showed Tommy the gayly
pictured paper match-box from Havana, which opened with a spring, and
disclosed the matches lying in a little drawer within. Tommy's wistful
eyes, as he returned the box, prompted Kirkwood to make prudent search in
his pockets for a second box of matches before presenting Tommy with the
one his eyes coveted. Finding himself secure against want in the immediate
future, he gave himself up to the mild amusement of watching Tommy with his
new acquisition.

Tommy could not resist lighting one of the little tapers, which burned in
the sunlight with a still, clear flame like a fairy candle. Then a second
one was sacrificed. By this time the attraction had proved strong enough
to bring Ruth Mary down from her high seat in the sun. She looked scarcely
less a child than Tommy, as, with her face close to his, she watched the
pale flame flower wasting its waxen stem. Then she must needs light one
herself and hold it, with a little fixed smile on her face, till the flame
crept down and warmed her finger-tips.

"There," she said, putting it out with a breath, "don't let us burn any
more. It's too bad to waste 'em in the daylight."

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