# The Popular Magazine/Volume 50/Number 3/On Hate and Water

Chapters: I — II — III — IV — V — VI — VII
On Hate and Water
By Theodore Seixas Solomons
Author of “Snow-Blind,” Etc.
How hate and hunger may develop a puling hypochondriac into an upstanding man of health and purpose is demonstrated by the author in this outdoor yarn. Just reading about it is a tonic
CHAPTER I.
THE HYPOCHONDRIAC.
THE consultation took place on the side porch of the Hazeltines’ favorite country place. At least it was the favorite of Mrs. Hazeltine, for her son Harold had no favorites—among country homes or anything else. Doctor Stein had been beckoned to the porch as soon as his car crunched the gravel of the main driveway. He was very solemnly greeted by Mrs. Hazeltine, a small, thin woman, and somewhat soberly by pretty Madge Loring.
“Why doesn’t he come, Carter?” asked the elder woman of a slim, worried-looking manservant who just then emerged from a glass door. He was perspiring.
“Coming, ma’am, as soon as I’ve placed his wide, flat-armed easy-chair.”
The ponderous invalid chair was disclosed in the entryway back of the door. Carter leaped lightly over it and then pushed it out upon the porch and into the thin shadows of the climbing vines, which were just leafing out.
“Oh, dear,” wailed Mrs. Hazeltine, “I wish that boy didn’t have such an aversion to sunlight. I’m sure it would do him good. Tell him Doctor Stein has arrived—mention it casually,” she added to Carter, who threw a kind of shawl over the back of the chair and reëntered the house.
“Now, doctor, do be discreet, won’t you?” begged the anxious mother. “You know Harold is so perverse, poor boy, that any too-emphatic advice is bound to irritate him, and——”
She was interrupted by the appearance of the poor boy himself, a pale young giant of twenty-two, of scrupulous grooming and melancholy, blasé air, who nodded to the women and languidly permitted the doctor to shake his hand before he dropped into the chair. Capacious as the chair was, he quite filled it, for he was flabbily stout. He met the solicitude of his mother, the friendly looking over of the physician and the carefully noncommittal air of his Cousin Madge with an effect of patient toleration.
“Now, darling,” began his mother, seating herself on the arm of his chair and putting her hand caressingly about his shoulders, “please do take Doctor Stein seriously and consider all that he says to you. Madge, please don’t go away. I’m sure Harold considers you quite one of the family by now, and you’re so sensible for a young girl that Harold, I know——” At which Harold raised a feeble hand.
“Please, mother, spare me all needless preambles. Certainly, Madge may stay.” He smiled at the healthy, blooming young woman who, however, was looking out into the bright May morning, disporting itself in a thousand sunny pranks upon the lawns and gardens.
He would have been an exceedingly personable young man if he had not been a gelatinous invalid. Nature had given him shoulders, and an excellent neck and head, and fine, gray eyes. And Providence, more over, had bequeathed him the Hazeltine fortunes, which his all-too-dynamic father had vastly augmented prior to his accidental death nine years before. But Providence is a many-faceted deity and a mere glance at mother and son—such a glance as Madge Loring now threw furtively in their direction—would have left one uncertain as to which was to be pitied the more.
“Now, my dear fellow,” Stein was saying, “as I have told you repeatedly, every examination has failed to disclose any weakness in you that could fairly be termed organic. There are none of your many ailments that could not be functional derangements, very profound and obstinate, perhaps, yet removable. Even the distressing digestive conditions”—Doctor Stein brought his finger tips together in a manner of nice diagnostic discrimination—“might well be the result of your—um—possibly indiscreet diet in conjunction with an almost total lack of physical activity.”
Young Hazeltine held up a perfectly manicured hand. “My good doctor, I am certain I have explained on several occasions that I have a distinct aversion to activity. It fatigues me excessively.”
“But, dearie——” urged his mother.
“One at a time, dear mater,” begged Harold with raised eyebrows and a light sigh.
“Nevertheless,” resumed the physician with a trace of asperity, “this anæmic condition, if we may so term it, is not the sort of thing which should be allowed to progress year after year. It is fraught with certain perils——”
“Oh, doctor,” pleaded Mrs. Hazeltine, “please don’t put it in that way.”
“I merely mean——”
“Oh, say what you mean, if you wish,” interrupted Harold. “I assure you I am no weakling—in a moral sense, at least. My condition has brought me face to face with the realities of life; yes, and of death, too, I assure you. Now for Heaven’s sake, mother——”
Mrs. Hazeltine had suddenly risen and turned away.
“Oh, auntie, you just go in,” said Madge. “You are nervous, dear. Please! It won’t do any good to stay and talk. Let me represent you—do! There.” And she half led, half dragged the perturbed little woman from the porch. When she returned it seemed to her that Stein was visibly relieved. Various and delicate are the tasks of the family physician.
“Now look here, Harold,” he said briskly, “you’ve had all the doctors you’re willing to talk to. I’ve been glad of that. And no man of standing among them has ever made a diagnosis that is really inconsistent with my idea of your case. Great Scott, boy, you worry your mother to death. Buck up and do something!”
Harold smiled his polite—and weary—smile.
“It’s fate, doctor, intricate patterns of fate; the warp and weft of heredity. In my days and nights of bodily inaction I have at least exercised my mind. I have read, as you probably know, profoundly. Don’t forget the Mendelian law of dominants and recessives, doctor. I’m a recessive—that’s all!”
Madge had unconsciously clasped her hands at the quiet eloquence of the palely handsome youth. But when Harold renounced the dominant and claimed the recessive, instinctively her fingers stiffened and she exclaimed spiritedly:
“Fiddlesticks!”
She was only a second cousin of Harold’s departed sire, but apparently she had secured some of the latter’s “dominant” strain. Harold threw a not unamiable glance at his dissentient relative and resumed:
“But get it off your mind, doctor, whatever the new gruel is that you and the mater have cooked up for me. To oblige you both I’ll do it, you know; that is, if it’s not too oppressive.”
“It need not be, even from the first,” replied Doctor Stein, plunging to his task. “It’ll be exhilarating—stimulating—possibly just what you need. It’s simply to live in the open air—go camping—on a journey.”
Harold leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and groaned.
“My boy, it’s the thing! These beach resorts and mountain resorts have failed because you always carried your armchairs with you. Air alone is not enough, nor change of climate; you ought to be on the move. Now let us arrange it for you——” The doctor warmed to his work:
“A good horse for you to ride—plenty of comforts carried along—very slowly at first, you know—easy stages—rest as you need to, or choose to—all that sort of thing. Now, please, Harold, for your mother’s sake; for your own sake——”
He paused as Harold arose and looked wistfully at Madge.
“Oh, very well, then,” decided the young giant lazily. “For all your sakes. But spare me the details, my dear Doctor Stein—the bugs and worms and sunburn and cold water. Talk it over with the others.” And he slouched despondently into the house.
CHAPTER II.
THE QUARREL.
“I say, Dalton, suppose we call it a day?”
Harold rode behind the guide and four pack mules straggled along behind Harold, their sleek, dark bodies protruding fore and aft from bulky packs covered with canvas that had been whiter when the little cavalcade left the Canadian frontier town of Russell some two weeks before. They had fairly entered the heart of the northwestern wilderness.
“Poor feed hereabouts,” observed Dalton, and he looked at his watch. It was three o’clock of a bright June afternoon.
“Good enough,” returned Harold, “and I’m tired; so here we stop.”
Without further protest, Billy Dalton turned off the trail into the bare, rocky creek bottom, dismounted, jerking loose the coiled halter rope of his horse, walked around Hazeltine, dexterously caught and tied the lead mule and began to unpack.
His employer did not at once dismount, but gazed with listless, unseeing eyes at the serrated sky line of timber on the far hill side. When finally he decided to get out of the way of the guide’s unpacking, he swung wearily to the ground and without troubling even to unloosen his horse’s girth cast himself comfortably on a wind-gathered mat of spruce needles and watched the labors of his thirty-dollar-a-week Man Friday.
Thirty or three hundred, it was all the same to Harold, as long as the fellow was his Man Friday. Madge or the doctor or his mother had got him—he didn’t remember which, though he’d probably been told. His mother, however, had devoutly wished the man might prove “guide, philosopher and friend.” Harold remembered that from the absurdity of it as applied to this uncouth person.
Very likely the absurdity of it had struck the uncouth person also. For while it was not difficult to be Harold’s guide if you knew the long trails as this man seemed to know them, it was certainly as hard to be his friend as it was essential to be a philosopher in order to avoid quarreling with him. For the invalid, in spite of his general languor, his indifference to the beauties of the way, to the life or death that might chance upon the journey, was a most perniciously positive person upon any matter affecting his comfort or his whims, his indifference manifesting itself here only with regard to the comfort and welfare of the other members of the party—the two-legged and four-legged appendages, as it were, of the expedition.
Bill Dalton, as big as Hazeltine, somewhat older in years and very much older in experience, quiet, and pithily spoken, had many of the earmarks of the genial philosopher of the great outdoors. But the test of true philosophy is its staying powers, and each passing day of their outward bound had drawn more and more heavily upon the guide’s reserve of patience and forbearance. Though he had doubtless been admonished to regard the youth as unfit, it was likely that Dalton had expected a certain amount of help from Hazeltine as soon as the latter should learn the rudiments of camp craft. But of assistance, even of the simplest and lightest, the guide had received none.
The outfit, due to Harold’s insistence, was ridiculously bulky and hard to handle; the horses and mules required a good deal of attention—always the case during the first part of such an expedition; and the routine labors of camping and traveling when thrown upon one man, no matter how husky and expert he might be, were exceedingly arduous. But Harold rendered them doubly arduous. The six horses and mules, spirited though they were and requiring constant attention, at least ate and slept without assistance, but it was not so with the spiritless seventh animal in the care of Dalton. He required waiting on every moment he was not in the saddle. He must have been a new and strange creature to the frontiersman, and a maddening one.
Young Hazeltine was certainly an enigma. Ill health or underhealth or whatever it was that in a bodily sense ailed him could scarcely account for the monstrous total of his sluggishness and apathy. If his indifference to his youthful being, to his vivid surroundings, was a pose, at least he maintained it with a consistency rare among weaklings. And a like consistency—far less rare—governed him in his selfish indulgences. Blind or perverse to a truer selfishness which would have avoided those courses which were hurtful to him, he continued the process of self-destruction quite as assiduously in the healing woods as he had pursued it at home. His means of suicide was, of course, his appetite—the morbid appetite of the cultivated dyspeptic.
This afternoon Harold was particularly exasperating. The forage being poor, Dalton was obliged to tether one of the mules as well as Harold’s horse, and all the animals had to be closely watched. This was a job that Harold could easily have taken upon himself, leaving the guide free to attend to the camp work. But he preferred to read a book on camp cookery and to mark such recipes as captured his fancy. These he copied out and handed to the perspiring guide, or rather he compelled the guide to come and get them. “I say, Dalton!” he would drawl out lazily, and Dalton would walk over, a queer smile on his round, tanned face, take the paper, pocket it, and go back to slashing fir fronds for Harold’s bed or laying out on the ponchos the innumerable articles—mostly useless—which Harold had caused to be lugged along. The man would no sooner return to these tasks from a flying trip to the famished, straying mules, than Harold would demand the instant production of his fatigue garments and his elaborate toilet paraphernalia. His demands were polite and gentlemanly requests, and if they were not instantly complied with they were repeated with aggrieved, exaggerated politeness, in a tone of injured gentility.
The toilet equipment produced, the young patrician of the north woods proceeded to his elaborate afternoon ablution, a process which seldom consumed less than an hour, while the harried guide fell to cutting wood, getting water, building the fire and preparing the inevitable beans; these and many incidental duties being thinly sandwiched between foot races after the discontented animals.
His self-attentions at the creek being ended for the time, Harold sauntered heavily into the camp and surveyed its arrangements with abysmal disfavor. He requested that his dunnage bag be removed from the greasy vicinity of the bacon. He reminded Dalton that he had neglected to set up the folding chair. And, finally, he suspected that any camp fire in that position would be bound to blow smoke at the only comfortable spot in which his chair and footstool could be placed.
Dalton, presumably with the most obedient of intentions, threw a bucket of quietus upon the fire, from which ashes immediately arose and a few flakes threatened the immaculate person of his employer, whose sigh and upraised face dumbly called Heaven to witness his martyrdom. And Billy started a new fire in another place, moved the whole outfit, and patiently resumed his cooking. Somewhere in his overalls pocket were Harold’s copied recipes for prune shortcake, minced ham omelet—à la evaporated eggs—and canned corn fritters glacé. On the fire was a simple camp repast, but even this was late—thanks to the cavortings of the bell mule and Harold.
The latter destroyer of time and amiability had several times looked up from his perusal of a small volume of “The Poetry of Pessimism” and cast a frowning glance in the direction of the drudge.
“My good man, I’m rather hungry,” said Harold finally. “Can’t you hasten that process?”
When Harold exercised his proprietorship it was always with a “my good man,” though on occasions of extreme good nature he patronized the guide with a condescending “Billy.”
“Coming up,” said the “good man” patiently. But when the meal was served and Harold looked in vain for corn fritters glacé he dropped his knife and fork upon his plate with a clatter, folded his fat arms upon his large, plump chest and said with obvious restraint:
“My good man, I asked you to prepare three dishes for this meal. That is to say, I handed you three recipes, as I have done before. That, from me, is certainly equivalent to—I dislike to say it—a definite command to prepare them.” And he bent upon his hired man a haughty stare of interrogation.
“I got you, all right,” replied Dalton, ladling beans, “but I didn’t have time. I’d have had to fuss with ’em for an hour or two, and we’re late as it is.”
“I noticed, though,” pursued Harold, disdaining the beans, “that you fussed and fussed with those wretched mules. I dislike to suspect you of doing so on purpose to have an excuse for not complying with my wishes.”
A sudden flush suffused the face of the guide. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but, instead, inserted beans. Harold continued to gaze at him angrily, but the guide paid no attention to the irate youth, keeping his weather eye upon the beasts. Twice he bolted from the camp to drive back a hungry wanderer.
“I wish to say,” remarked Harold on Billy’s second return, “that it’s rather disgusting of you, you know, to mother those brutes the way you do and pay no attention to me and my needs.”
Dalton scraped up the last bit of stewed apricot in his bowl, wiped his mouth with a large red bandanna, and turned to his employer.
“Say, young feller,” he asked, “what do you think would become of us if those grazing animals strayed and the others broke loose and followed them?”
“I don’t know, young fellow, and I don’t care. I want supper, and a decent supper.”
“You don’t care,” echoed the guide sneeringly, “and you want your supper.” He mimicked Harold’s querulous tones. “Well, there’s your supper, and a durned good one at that. Take it or leave it. Those concoctions you dream of only make you sick, anyway.”
Harold Hazeltine’s heavy under jaw dropped down, but no words came from him. He was entirely unconscious of the fact that his mouth was open. All he knew was that never in his life had any one spoken to him in that way. Imagine it! Harold Hazeltine, heir to the boundless Hazeltine estates, was actually being talked at in this extraordinary fashion by an obscure and common person. The astounded young gentleman, commanding himself as best he could, finally articulated:
“Do you realize whom you are addressing in that insulting fashion?”
“Sure,” replied Billy coolly, “I know exactly who I’m addressing and what.”
“‘What?’” repeated Harold, almost shrieking it.
“Yes, what. You’re H. Hazeltine, that’s who you are; the son of two others of the same name. I had just as many parents myself—Daltons. And you’re a useless carcass taking up space on the earth where perfectly good grass might grow. That’s what you are.”
Something came to the wealthy invalid’s rescue. He laughed raucously.
“Positively,” he assured the spruce trees, “it is worth the annoyance of this silly trip to have had such an experience. Conceive of it!” And he laughed again.
“Say,” said Dalton, pointing his finger at Harold, “you’re funnier than the experience. I’ll bet those mules think so, watching me feed you with a spoon and prance around whenever you raise that fat paw of yours for me to wait on you. Which do you suppose they’re laughing at most—me or you?”
Harold had managed to light his habitual cigarette. His face had gone white, but somehow his jaw had tightened.
“We don’t pay you thirty dollars a week to air your opinion of us, my good man, either impudently or even respectfully.” He tried to instill into his voice and manner a cutting hauteur.
“Well, now, as to that,” resumed the guide, carefully packing his pipe, “just notice in the first place that I’m not your ‘good man.’ My good services have been yours—about eighteen hours a day for thirty dollars a week; cheap enough for you. And that’s about as far as you own me. The ‘good man’ business is more impertinence than I could hand you back if I tried. And as to airing my opinion of ‘us,’ please notice I’m not saying anything against your people, although I might add that whoever it was that dropped you onto me does not call for my gratitude. But my opinion is, that if they had tanned your hide good while you were a small boy you would probably be a better big one now. What in Sam Hill ails you, anyway?” inquired the guide with a pleasantly contemptuous inflection.
At this question, deeply probing Harold’s interest in life, his self-control collapsed. A tear fell on his smoldering cigarette and eloquence mounted to his tongue.
“You coarse devil, you,” he sobbed, “what could you comprehend of my sufferings; of the weariness of the flesh, of the ominous mutterings inside of me——”
“Your belly, probably,” interjected the coarse devil, ruminatively.
“What do you know of the hot flushes, the palpitations, the dull ache everywhere, the nervousness, the dark forebodings——”
“Your liver, I’ll bet a ten-spot,” asserted Billy with conviction. “You’ve lapped up grease and sugar enough on this trip alone to kill a goat. Only a goat would climb it off, while you are too poison lazy to work any of it out of your system.”
Many times in Harold’s life physicians and relatives had expressed, in more delicate phrases, the same conviction. It was the red flag to the bull. Hazeltine sprang to his feet in fury.
“You impudent cur,” he shouted, “you mind your own infernal business and obey my orders, you understand!”
Billy Dalton smiled up at the quivering lump. “A flash of ginger. Well, by Hunky!” He rose, stretched, and tapped his pipe on a rock. “I never agreed to take all your orders, for I’m the captain of this ship and you don’t know navigation. I didn’t contract to let you allude to me as a cur, either. And you’re liable to be sorry for that.” Though his voice was smooth there was a certain sinister truculence in it which Harold remembered later. The guide pocketed his pipe and sought his blankets.
Left to himself, young Hazeltine, still vibrating intermittently with the dregs of his impotent rage, stood for a while in deep thought. But hunger asserted itself and he glowered at the cold beans, the cold tea and soda biscuits, and the golden mess of apricots. Then he sighed, cast a vengeful glance at the recumbent guide and set to work to mend the fire. When it brightened he searched the pack bags for dainties, selected several highly indigestible articles and both washed and skidded them down with warmed-up, concentrated tea and bacon grease. Then he got into his eiderdown quilts, read a few pungent verses of the “Poetry of Pessimism,” switched off his electric lamp and sank into his nightly torpor.
CHAPTER III.
THE DESERTION.
He was partly awakened before dawn by the whinnying of the animals as Dalton led them in turn into the camp. An hour later he was more fully roused by a none-too-light grasp of his shoulder.
“Get up and get your breakfast, if you want any,” said Dalton briskly. “We start in half an hour.”
Harold rubbed his eyes. It was scarcely daylight. He was conscious of a more than usually miserable feeling in his mouth and stomach; and keenly conscious of a murderous resentment toward the rude disturber of his uneasy repose. It wanted several hours of the usual starting time. Angrily he muttered: “What d’ye mean by this!”
“Got to move to feed, that’s all, or they’ll twist loose and move without us.” Dalton turned on his heel as he spoke, leaving Harold to take the explanation or not, as he chose. Harold chose to mutter imprecations on the guide and to burrow again into his pillow. The end of the half hour found him in the semiconscious lethargy of the dyspeptic, through which sounded the gallop of hoofs on the crisp litter of the forest floor.
The sun was high when young Hazeltine sat up, rubbed his eyes and opened them upon a deserted camp. Guide, animals and outfit had moved on to the nearest feed. At least that is what Harold surmised. There was nothing to do, evidently, except wait for the man’s return with Harold’s saddle horse. So he turned on his side and set himself to deciding the fate of the expedition.
He had promised his mother and Madge—dear girl—to stay out at least two months. Well, he would, of course. But the minute the four-footed brutes were fed they’d all go back, he’d “can” this hound of a Dalton, hire another guide—or rather two or three of them, so they’d have ho excuse of overwork—and start out again.
A little of this energy of intention communicated itself to his limbs; he rose imperiously, kicked the quilts away, dressed and looked about for his toilet case. It was gone.
“Damn the fellow!” said Harold. He could not wash the sleep from his eyes or the had taste from his mouth. It did not occur to him that a creekfull of pure water was of the slightest utility without the elaborate toilet contrivances of the twentieth-century urbanite. Then he went to the camp fire for a cup of coffee. His stomach craved it—medicinally black. But there was no coffee. There was not a sign of utensils or food.
“I’ll mulct him in his wages for this!” said the now doubly indignant youth, aloud. He felt for his cigarette case. There was a single dainty tube within it. His match case was empty, but he managed to light the cigarette at the crumbling embers of the fire, after burning his fingers and getting cinders in his eyes. Then, having no chair, he seated himself on a decayed log—loathsome thing!—and snorted revenge with every nasal exhalation of smoke.
He looked at his watch. It was nearly noon. He sauntered along the trail the pack animals had made to where it turned upon a rocky area and was lost—to his inexperienced eye. So he sat down on the ground with his back against a bowlder and nursed his knees and his grievances. Very soon he felt the gnawing that simulated hunger in his abused alimentary tract.
“That fellow’s got to come, and come mighty quick,” said Harold to himself. But nothing at all happened in obedience to this imperative. An hour passed. The creek murmured somewhere down the rocky slope, and two jay birds screamed discordantly at him. There was little else of sound or movement.
At the end of another hour a hawk sailed toward the setting sun, upon which, in some way, an alarm suddenly smote Harold, fetching him to his feet. What if the guide had no intention of returning? What if he purposed compelling his employer to walk in to the hew camp, himself the while lazily fishing or hunting? Great Scott, it was nearly five o’clock! Clearly, it was out of the question to attempt it, unless the new camp was very close, and he had no means of knowing that. Already there was chill in the air, a plain hint of the terrors of night on an uncertain trail. He decided he had better stick to his bed, and he almost ran back to the old camp—doubly forlorn for the presence of his disheveled quilts. He dashed to the site of the morning’s camp fire and poked in vain for sparks among its charred remains. Then he flung himself miserably upon his bed, covered himself with a quilt and cried softly into his feather pillow: he wept himself to sleep. Hours later, he awoke, shivering in the pitch dark, drew up another eiderdown comforter and slept again, not waking until hunger—a more real hunger, now—roused him at dawn, when he crept out of the quilts, grimy about the eyes, sticky about the body and feet.
First, he walked aimlessly around the camp, unconscious of his reason for doing so, which was the hope that he might spy the guide and a horse or two somewhere. At the end of this survey, he found himself searching among the ashes of the old fire. He did not realize why he did this, either, but his stomach knew, and suddenly he knew also when he came upon some small fragments of biscuit and a few scattered beans. The formerly fastidious invalid bent fascinated eyes upon these morsels; the sight of them seemed to have a moistening effect upon his mouth; he was aware of saliva. Glancing furtively about him, as though he feared some friend might catch him in the act, he gobbled the bits of biscuit, after blowing upon them; and then, on hands and knees, searched out and ate the beans. He managed to retrieve about a dozen. They were a bit gritty, but their flavor was excellent—most excellent.
Great thirst assailed him now, so he went down to the creek and looked in some perplexity at the water. First, he knelt and bent his head to the rippling stream only to find that the water rhythmically lapped his nose and strangled him as he tried to drink. He thought a moment and then sought a placid pool: there he satisfied his thirst with little difficulty. The water was a delightful thing; he liked even the numbing sting of its coldness in his throat.
He felt a little better, and was sure he could walk to the new camp no matter how far it might be. And then he would do the resting and the guide should return for his bedding, or rather they would pick it up on their return journey to civilization, where the guide might sue him for his wages and be damned. He started briskly away.
He had some difficulty in following the trail now, for it consisted only of the tracks of their own pack train. It was easy to see it in the timber, but in the open places, at stream crossings, and when it twisted about among old moraines, it took all the wit Harold could summon to keep him on the route of the animals. His success in this he soon came to regard as a distinct accomplishment, and the flattering thought followed that the whole thing was an adventure such as he had read and heard of, but had never imagined for himself. It was a diverting episode in a deadly world of all outer and inner things, and in spite of gnawing hunger and dragging limbs he was able occasionally to chuckle over the whole absurd affair.
Nevertheless he was on the verge of tears when, through the trees, he sighted a lovely meadow. This, of course, was the end of the adventure. It only remained for him to saunter into camp with a haughty nonchalance, and with haughty nonchalance he would saunter in if it took the last ounce of his strength—and then and there deliver the cruel and sarcastic tirade upon his contumacious servant which he had long prepared for the fellow. He came stiffly to the timber’s edge and looked to right and left for the animals and the camp. He could see neither.
New terror assailing him, his weakness forgotten, he ran limping along the edge of the meadow. Halfway around it he paused, gasping for breath; then, alternately walking and running, he had nearly completed the circuit when he fell headlong over the smoldering remains of a camp fire. He rolled out of it, sat up and stared about him.
It was a Bill Dalton camp—the kind of site, the kind of lopped and stumped limbs for the saddles and packs to hang on, the generous pile of wood not yet all gone. It was complete—and completely empty! Deep tracks were visible in the softer places of the delicate meadow sod, where the animals had luxuriated in the lush grass. No need to have watched them last night, Harold dully thought.
It was just such details that at first usurped the stage of his consciousness, as though his coward mind shrank from the larger fact—the momentous fact that he was deserted! His brain still striving to fend him from this realization, he wiped his blackened hands upon his brown duck clothing and straightway cursed the charcoal smears they made. It was no use—he felt himself sickening within, as his mind surrendered to the obvious. He expected to sob in a moment, from terror more than with rage. But somehow only the sickness—a kind of psychic nausea—held him.
Through it a thought picture limned itself—the picture of a man whose patience had snapped, and who had yielded to a vengeful devil that had whispered—“Leave the disgusting fool—let him starve and rot!” He could see him, his lips set in a cruel sneer, mounting and riding away, followed by his train of fellow brutes—more human than he. This presentment of a thoroughly aroused imagination danced above, below, before him, through him. He had the hideous vision. He must yell—shriek, or——
He made a lightning turn—sharply wrenching his side muscles—and sat up. A greater fear, the fear of going mad, had suddenly driven emotion from him.
“Steady!” Had he said it or only thought it? What was the difference? Steady it was. For it had to be. At least for a while, till he decided whether he wanted to go mad or not. It was his affair—he’d go mad or not as he pleased. He’d had his way always, and he’d have it now, by Heaven; he’d——
Strains of many men and women shook themselves from their long sleep in his veins and struggled for dominion over his thought and feeling. And the imprisoned wraiths of one of them—his father, a cool and indomitable spirit—pounded for right of way. Of all of which Harold Hazeltine knew nothing. He knew only that presently he was on his feet, his plump hands clenched, his eyes darting at the old fire.
It had been a large one, a real camp fire, as if the guide had celebrated an infamous decision. Harold advanced upon it with something of the careful quickness of a cat and, kneeling down, blew upon a smoldering stick. It glowed, dully red. He raked its fellow toward it—he had seen some one do this—the guide, no doubt; and he fanned them cautiously with his hat. In a few moments he had a fire.
The blaze being comradely, he talked to it confidentially: “The fellow that made you first, he’s got me, I suppose. He’s left me to die in this wilderness. The outfit is worth a small fortune to him, no doubt, and he tells his rat’s conscience that I badgered him unmercifully and insulted him. I didn’t, really, did I? Not impolitely, anyhow—not the way I’d do it now if I had him here. Now, I’d——”
The effort to clench his hands as Harold tried to clench them—from his very shoulders down every muscle of his starving, weakened frame—was too much for his equipoise, and he toppled over. He laughed at that—just a bit hysterically—as he sat up and, cool again, with one hand on the ground back of him for support and the other upon his damp forehead, entered upon an experience as new to him as the adventure he had fatuously thought ended when he reached the meadow—intense, sustained, brain-clear thought. For the first time in his life he bit into a vital problem with all the teeth that were in him.
“Now then,” he said to the fire, “what shall we do about it?” He closed his eyes, frowned, opened them again and added: “What do we want to do? Life is a nuisance. I decided that long ago. My body’s no good, and just now it’s all in, anyway. So hadn’t we just better say, ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish—body, world, the whole thing!’”
There were numerous passages in point in the “Poetry of Pessimism.” His hand left his forehead and groped toward the little leather-covered volume in his coat pocket. He was about to take it out, when suddenly his thought swerved to the surviving member of the expedition—to Billy Dalton, smirking his satisfaction at every tree and rock and purling stream. Harold’s hand came away from his pocket and clenched itself again upon the imaginary neck of Billy Dalton.
“To think,” gritted Harold, “that I’ve got to die and let that diabolical thing live—and smirk!”
He could not remember anything in the “Poetry of Pessimism” which gave him any comfort in that thought. Mere pessimism, somehow, did not fit the case. Instead of pessimism, he felt—the blood went to his head at what he felt, and his hand followed it to his head, which was not damp now but hot, hot with the fires of hate!
It seemed a stimulating passion, notwithstanding the many sage injunctions against it, for it transformed young Hazeltine into a sort of anti-Dalton dynamo which thrummed under the current of his emotions.
Dalton had called him a miserable baby, and then abandoned that miserable baby to a lingering, terrifying death. Of course he would die; the miserable baby was dying right now, he supposed, and the degraded cur that murdered him was to go on living—and laughing. God, could he stand it! Could even his bones, picked and bleached, stand it!
Pain struck in upon his seething thoughts—the pain of a bitten lip. He wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I can’t,” said Harold, “and I won’t.”
He had passed through the first heat of his hate and had entered the coolness of it. He rose, jerked from his pocket the “Poetry of Pessimism” and flung it as far as he could. Then he went whistling about the camp to see what he could see.
CHAPTER IV.
THE FIRST LAW OF NATURE.
Though Harold was avid to discover anything at all that the guide might have left, his especial quest is not hard to guess. Quite easily he dropped upon all fours and searched about in the trampled and dusty forest carpet for scraps of food. With military precision he crept back and forth across the space of the kitchen, first to the right and then to the left of the fire, covering every inch of it. He thus discovered by his sense of smell a certain spot under the mat of needles where the dregs from the coffee pot had been thrown out. The ground was still wet, and the pine needles themselves, though almost dry, were sprinkled with coffee grounds. He marked this interesting spot with an upright stick. For he proposed, if the worst came to the worst—which it was extremely likely to do—to return here and collect and chew the tough and tasteless little particles. For coffee was a stimulant, and Heaven knew he needed a stimulant!
What had become of the scraps of the guide’s supper and breakfast? Had the guide “licked the platter clean?” Harold lay down and cogitated this serious question.
No, the guide was not a plate licker. He had never been a Jack Sprat in Harold’s presence, at least. And the rascal had always washed the dishes after each meal: Harold remembered the revolting sight of the dishwater at the end of the process. Now, if the grease and scraps of the meal had not been scraped from the dishes and thrown away, they must have been washed away into the dishwater; and the dishwater—Harold shuddered at a horrible thought!
Yet the thought—pang-nurtured—persisted. Good Lord, it persisted! It persisted in the assertion that the dishpan had been emptied at some place, and at that place there must be the means of prolonging life a little.
This pertinacious idea made Harold aware that even a pampered baby may be a very complicated being. For while his main soul, as it were, sickened at the thought, his stomach seemed to possess an auxiliary soul which was emancipated from all ridiculous æsthetic sensibilities. He wondered which soul would triumph, and while he wondered, the legs of the starving youth carried him to the edge of the meadow where, as his wise stomach knew, the cur had probably gone to empty the dishpan.
And sure enough. Clinging stickily to the sedges, balanced on their bowed blades, borne up in the chalices of closely branching tufts, were gray-dyed rinds, pale shreds of prunes, a crust or two of sodden biscuit, and a few beans—blessed beans!
Some minutes later he arose, aware that he had gleaned enough merely to tease rather than appease his appetite. And then he saw within a few yards what the guide would have called a bannock—a thick “flapjack” lying in the damp meadow. He had it in a trice, and wiped it tenderly. It was charcoal upon one side and slimy dough upon the other. Evidently Dalton had left the fire upon some errand, and returning to find his bannock spoiled, had flung it away.
“The blunder that gave you to me,” said Harold, as he thrust into it the full semicircle of his jaws, “may cost the wretch that made you his life.”
It was a small bannock, but it helped. Harold drank from the marshy stream, dragged wood to the fire with the last bit of his remaining strength, covered himself with pine needles and slept an almost dreamless sleep.
He awoke shivering in a cold gray light that revealed cold gray boles of trees shadowing a cheerless meadow. For a few moments he was the old Harold, ready to blubber at the cold, to whine for food, for coffee and a cigarette. But at once to his aid came Harold the hater, and it was the latter that shook his fist at the gaunt trees, sprang up, mended the fire, thrust arms and head into icy water, took off his shirt and dried himself upon it, replaced his shirt and bathed his swollen feet. Then he drank as much water as he could and struck out across the meadow.
As Harold moved energetically along the trail of tracks on this third day of his great adventure, his mind moved at an equal pace—an activity of thought of which he was keenly conscious; for though great changes were taking place in the fellow, his life long habit of morbid introspection was not easily unseated.
What was causing it? He did not know, of course. Wretchedly ignorant of self, as all self-centered people are, he could only guess that his peril had sharpened his faculties. This was true. But the main reason was that he was getting rid of the toxins in his blood—foul tinctures, distilled of reckless eating, with which his torpor-enfeebled body had been powerless to cope. Two days of virtual fasting, coupled with sustained exercise, had given his youthful vitality a chance to assert itself. His body and his brain, both naturally excellent, were responding to the purification. Outwardly rather dirty, he was becoming inwardly clean, and the cleansed mechanisms of his brain reviewed his problems swiftly and methodically.
He reasoned that the incarnate devil of a guide had schemed the desertion some time before; that the quarrel had merely served the fellow as a personal pretext for precipitating a well-matured villainy. A cool and calculating miscreant—his perfect woodcraft showed him to be that—he had without doubt carefully prepared an “alibi.” Harold was willing to wager that that long letter the man had mailed at the half-breed’s camp was a first step in such an alibi. It probably told of the steady decline of the invalid; possibly even of his death; and Dalton would return with a sad tale of a burial in the wilderness—or, more probably, of his drowning in a swift northern river, for that would avoid the danger of an expedition to exhume the body from its grave.
That was Harold’s theory of murder for revenge. But on the theory of murder for theft—a more likely explanation, he felt—Dalton would have no intention of returning, either with or without an alibi; and he would be striking out for another part of North America—Alaska or the Yukon, it would be. Sure of the death of the weakling by starvation in the camp in which he had left him, he would travel north and west, hunting and fishing, riding along between times, whistling those old-fashioned, loutish tunes of his—the man was a moral idiot! He would almost forget that Harold Hazeltine had ever existed.
It was nicely conceived but for one thing: the guide had somehow overlooked the power of hate. Perhaps he was ignorant of this power, as Harold himself had been. It was good that he was, for he would move over the country slowly, never suspecting that a Nemesis was plodding in his wake!
The boy turned now to the problem of prolonging his life—this swift, clear, seeing, feeling, moving life that, in spite of starvation—because of it, had Harold only known—had opened to him. This new existence was a novelty; and novelty, to pampered, sated Harold was a rare thing. Well, it would give life zest, and zest in turn would aid him in the struggle to prolong life till his master object, vengeance, was accomplished.
And that achieved—how Harold’s mind raced on!—what of the zest of life? Why, Madge! He had never dared to more than dream of her, for the philosophy of pessimism had forbade the thought of possessing her—Madge, vital with splendid girlhood, he sinking into a premature grave. But suppose there had been some mistake? Suppose that hate, naked in the wilderness, could cure where love, surfeited with wealth and luxury, had failed? Was it possible that there could lie between the pages of the philosophy of pessimism so good a joke as that?
Harold began to feel very weak. His body had been going as fast as his brain, and his brain needed less food than his body to sustain the pace. Alarm seized him, and he sank upon the hill slope up which he had been striding, and put his hand to his heart, that all-pervading nausea, that sickening perspiration, again upon him.
Really, all he needed was water and a slower gait, for of food he still had plenty in his fatty tissues. But he thought his hour had come. He closed his eyes and gave himself up to bitter reflections. His last months in civilization passed in review, then the frontier town, the outfitting, the trip, the desertion—the dastard guide—Dalton! Once more to the aid of the despairing youth that saving hatred sprang. Once more the ghosts of his fighting forbears rose in his heated blood—always, when he was about to succumb, their steel offered itself to his grasp. He stood up, surprised at how much better he felt, and searching his mind for an effective expletive. It came to him:
“Odds Bodkins!” said Harold—a mysterious resurrection of some old literary memory. Somehow it fitted, and many times thereafter he uttered it—very whimsically, toward the last.
“It’s grub,” he added. “That’s my whole problem. The fool guide leaves scraps, and there’s things to eat all round me. I’m going to eat: Everything else will take care of itself.”
He trudged the hills and hollows at a slow but carefully sustained pace, and after a long while he came to the top of a mile-long slope and saw below him, at the base of an abrupt, rocky declivity, a tiny vale set with an emerald spot of grass.
He paused, warily. Dalton might be there. To approach him openly was, of course, simply to be shot, for after deserting Harold, Dalton must know he was guilty of intent to murder and that he must either kill the younger man, be killed by him, or go ultimately to the penitentiary.
Harold could see no signs of life in the little valley, but, as he had surmised, it had been the guide’s haven for the night. From the base of the rocky slope the tracks led him to a grove at the meadow’s edge, and here was the camp. He was racked; exhausted; he felt himself to be just hollow, aching bones strung together. But it was still early afternoon, and he had actually gained on the guide!
There were few scraps from Dalton’s supper and breakfast, but again the old fire was capable of rekindling; the slope which he had just descended was alive with berries, some of which were already ripe; and, best of all, there were the remains of a grouse—that is to say certain uncooked remains which fastidious, well-fed people like Billy Dalton consider to be wholly inedible. Upon these details, flung out from the camp with disdain, Harold Hazeltine fairly pounced.
CHAPTER V.
A CUNNING SAVAGE.
A creature that had once been Harold Hazeltine stood on a barren height of land that overlooked the Arctic watershed of one of Canada’s great rivers. Patches of old snow lay in the cirques of deep north-side gulches, and there was an occasional gleam of it where the dark forests straggled out upon the margins of bare, rocky plateaus.
It was a wild and savage landscape, but a fit setting for the wild and savage figure that shaded piercing gray eyes with a hard, brown hand—looking for something. His undershirt, itself much torn, showed through great gaps and tatters of his blue flannel overshirt. His khaki trousers were in like condition, but his shoes, originally of the best within the cobbler’s art and plentifully hobnailed, though scuffed and worn, still held. His socks had long since gone—at least from his feet; but he had used their uppers to patch his undershirt, sewing with a raveling from his frayed trousers pushed through the fabric with a stout thorn.
Gaunt as he was, his height was conspicuous. His long, light-brown hair and beard were almost matched in hue by the deep tan of his face, neck, chest and bare arms. Long ago every vestige of fat had gone to feed him, and his lean frame was laced in sinews supple in the relax but tense in action.
He had come up to this observation point along a ridge trail. He knew these beaten paths of the moose, and never confused them with the more scattered lowland trails of the caribou, whose routes headed for shallow crossings of the main streams. Nor did he mistake these for the occasional old, blurred trails of Indians and voyageurs which, in the earlier weeks of his struggle to live, had tempted him with the promise of leading to some distant Hudson’s Bay post. It was fear of the uncertainty of these that had at first dissuaded him, but later, as his reliance in his power to forage for himself grew, he had considered the idea of turning directly south and making for civilization, well knowing both the distance and the danger. But always the thought of the guide escaping his just vengeance held him, a pursuing fury, on his course. For as his strength and craft had grown, his hate, if it had not in creased, had at least not diminished. That hate, his sustainer and teacher, should sustain and teach him to the end, and he would overtake and kill the fiend unless he himself perished in the effort.
He believed he would have overtaken him long ago had he not been obliged to spend so much time hunting his food. For the leavings of the guide and the berries and edible roots he found had very early in the game proved far too little for his needs, and partial starvation had goaded him to find ways of capturing meat. It dragged to light long-buried memories of shifts and expedients of which he had lazily read in books of travel, and it stimulated ingenuity to use them. Thus, after many failures he snared rabbits, squirrel and ptarmigan, at first with one of his shoe strings, all but the noose of it carefully concealed by leaves; later, and more successfully, with horse hairs which had been caught in the bark of trees against which the animals had switched their tails. Several times he managed to sneak up behind bowlders and flail fish from shallow riffles with a broom of thin, dry branches. And once he actually came within an ace of catching a young mountain sheep, and his mouth watered for that lost mutton for days. In spite of these successes, however, there were hunger times when he lived on gritty hate and water!
At first he had longed for a gun. A little later, when he managed to procure food without it, he still longed for a gun—to use on Billy Dalton. All that was in the days of his weakness. He did not want a gun now. He wanted only his hands. But since a cowardly murderer like Dalton would shoot him the moment he saw him and realized his crime had failed, Harold planned to come upon the guide in the night, remove the guns to a safe distance, and wake and grapple with him man to man. He had trained his hands and arms and back for just this purpose—trained them after a drastic fashion of his own! His legs, of course, had strengthened perfectly of themselves.
Shading his eyes against the afternoon sun, he searched for smoke. Many times since the pack train entered the mountain region he had taken such an observation, but without avail. Now, as his eyes swept the winding valley below him, he uttered a cry—a roar, almost—of exultation. For, far off over the tops of the timber, he saw the bluish vapor of dry-wood smoke. It was very far away, but it could mark no other spot than the camp of Billy Dalton. Mechanically, Harold reached up for his hat to throw it in the air, forgetting he had accidentally burned it some time before in the first camp fire he had lit with the dry sticks with which he had practiced morning, noon and night for weeks on end before he had found and mastered the trick of it.
As a substitute he threw a rock. It was a large one—suited to the magnitude of his sensations—and the fellow hurled it far. Now was his chance. It was a slim one, for he happened to be very hungry and tired. He had been unlucky the last few days in catching the prey on which he relied for the hard traveling and grueling training he had lately forced upon himself.
Yes, the chance was slim, but he would take it. He-would travel by the last of the daylight—it was not so long a daylight now as when the guide had left him to die; but there would be a fair-sized moon coming up over the mountain and he would press on, a half-famished bloodhound on the scent. He had grown to rely on that singular entity which had developed within him—a will of adamant. He would make that camp before daybreak. He would steal some of his own food, rest a bit, and then he would fulfill the oath he had taken to the stars. So he made off down the hill.
Harold was very expert now in following the tracks. In daylight he never swerved a foot, let the trail be over bare rocks, even. While the daylight lasted, therefore, he fairly raced. But there came a period between the wane of the dusk and the coming of the moon when the pursuing savage had to slow his pace almost to that of a snail. It was even a hands-and-knees job in the worst of the darkness. But when the moon rose he found to his delight that he made good time, at least in the open. Through the patches of timber the work was still exasperating. He kept doggedly on, however, till dawn light glimmered, and then, in a tum, where the way lay narrow between the torrent and the sharp hill slope, he heard the sudden jangling of a bell! He ran swiftly around the bend in time to see a dark object fling granite dust from flying heels and disappear.
He had frightened what? The bell mule, surely. Then he was near the camp, and the cursed mule would waken the guide, unless the guide was so used to the sound of the bell that——
What was it dangling from that balsam limb? It was a short length of very light rope—broken. Harold paused and studied it. The mule had torn away from that young fir tree. The fool guide had tied the animal there before he made camp and had then forgetfully gone off and left him; and the patient animal had waited all night, till Harold’s footsteps had frightened him. He had jerked up his head, snapped the frail rope, and was now speeding toward the camp. How far was the camp?
Stifling his pangs of hunger, he quickened his pace. Nevertheless it was nearly broad daylight before he made the grazing ground of the camp. He knew those camps by now. And, like all the rest, this one too was deserted! Harold cursed most feelingly.
On the far side of the meadow the fire was still burning brightly; a small coffepot was on the coals—nearly dry; and a piece of bacon with some slices cut from it lay near by on a rock. Evidently the decamping had been precipitate—there was some satisfaction in that! The guilty devil was afraid of what might have scared his mule—afraid of visitors—afraid of his own shadow.
“Well, better luck next time,” muttered the disappointed sleuthhound. “And in the meantime—bacon and coffee!” Harold ate the bacon raw—every scrap of it. That new stomach of his—he stomach of an ostrich—took what was given it with thanks, and was never heard from till it needed more.
Then he looked into the coffeepot and found a boiled-down liquor, black as ink. He diluted it, heated it and took a swallow. It was good coffee, he supposed—as coffee went. But the young savage had lost his taste for drugs. It was as repellent to him as it would have been to a young horse. He threw it away, pot and all, dexterously built his usual V-shaped fire and lay down to sleep.
He never saw smoke again. With packs lightened by more than three months of consumption, the guide traveled fast. The route, which latterly had been westward, had since curved southwestward and then south, and they were leaving the mountains. In another week—Harold recorded the passing of the days by tooth marks in a pocket stick—the Nemesis made a discovery: the trail showed hoof marks going in both directions. What could it mean?
He went down on his hands and knees and examined and measured the tracks. He rose and went farther, to find and measure them all. Thus he discovered that the same string of animals had passed in both directions. They were back in their northbound trail! The guide was not going to Alaska; he was returning to his old haunts—perhaps to the very frontier town from which they had started.
Harold threw back his tawny head, and his laughter pealed upon the air and came back to him from a bare hillside beyond.
CHAPTER VI.
THE RETURN.
The days were short, the morning air was eager, the trees were searing when young Hazeltine found himself once more on beaten trails, and then upon a road—an old log road which he hardly remembered, for when he had ridden upon it a century or two ago he was a listless, unobserving thing.
Soon he saw men, first at a distance on the river, then upon the old road. He passed two of them, driving burros. He saluted them gayly, but they stared at him and were very wary. This made him look at himself in the first still pool he came to, and he caught his reflection plainly enough to decide to leave the road and hide in the brush whenever he heard the sound of hoofs or the crunch of a wheel.
At last the long descent into the valley where the town of Russell sprawled. It was near sundown of a golden day of late October, and Harold glided into the timber, snared his last rabbit and made his last solitary camp. In the morning he fastened on his feet the two battered objects which for a month had been slung to his waist in order to save the remnants of their soles for an emergency, and walked briskly into the town.
Along the main street a few early birds viewed him with open-mouthed wonder as he strode boldly into Russell’s chief hostelry. He and the archfiend had lodged there a century or two ago—the night before they started on their journey. He recognized the proprietor who did not, however, recognize him. In fact the proprietor ran to the woodbox and seized a stout poker.
Harold spoke—after several efforts. His voice was at first too low, then too loud. At the third attempt it sounded, if not natural, at least of a right and gentlemanly volume.
“Good morning, sir. Don’t be alarmed. I’m—Mr. Hazeltine.” He laughed and corrected himself. “Or, at least, I was Mr. Hazeltine. I suppose I’m still Hazeltine. Recollect me?”
Something in the voice and manner allayed the fears and challenged the memory of the hotel man. He dropped the weapon, came a little closer, and was finally persuaded by the hairy wild man to submit to the bone-crushing process of shaking hands.
Harold had left a pair of suit cases in the place; but he tarried in the room assigned him only long enough to wash his face and hands. Then he fell down the stairs, peeped into the little dining room, and observing it to be empty entered and backed awkwardly into a chair. The proprietor hurried after him and took his order.
“Nobody here I’ll scare?” questioned the biped.
“Well, there’s no guest from out of town, sir, except a young——” He turned in dismay toward the creaking door. Harold turned also and stared into the staring eyes of Madge Loring.
The young girl, a vision of morning loveliness, slowly opened her lips—but not to speak. The sun-browned, hairy giant who rose, half naked, before her seemed like a remote progenitor of the youth she had known—some cave-man incarnation of him upon whom rags of modern clothing had been flung. Actual recognition came but slowly.
“Is it Harold?” she asked, timidly.
For answer the cave man set his great hands upon lank hips and roared his laughter at the ceiling.
“It was,” he declared.
Swiftly she approached and studied him intently at close range. Then she put out her hand to his cordial clasp.
“Don’t,” she shrieked, and Harold dropped her hand and nearly fell down with remorse. “Heavens, what a clamp!” She winced and smiled at the same time.
“Well, so you’re back?” A kind of embarrassment to both of them had succeeded.
“Back—yes,” said Harold, his brow darkening. Then the mystery of her presence there struck him.
“But how do you come to be here?” Mechanically they had seated themselves.
Madge carefully polished her plate with a paper napkin.
“Well,” she replied, “we were terribly worried of course. And at last I volunteered to come and look for you.”
“Is my mother ill?” asked Harold in alarm.
“No, no; but there was nothing to be gained by her waiting around here—no conveniences or comforts. I’m a sort of advance agent.”
“For the circus,” added Harold gayly; “a menagerie of one—sort of ‘Gosh, there ain’t no such animal!’”
“There certainly ‘ain’t no such animal’—not among our friends, at least.”
She had fallen to studying him again, and he let her—placidly, without embarrassment, now; wearing his rags with the utterly unconscious pride of a king of beasts. And he thought he saw in the girl’s face deep approval of the antithesis he made to every being she had ever known.
Directly, she told him of affairs at home, chatting naturally—covering his awkward handling of the table utensils. But not one question did she put to him about himself, so that he forgot his great wrong and felt only the beauty and freshness and charm of Madge. The sweet, even timbre of her voice enthralled him, and he was conscious that he had brought back with him from the wilds, along with his will to live, a will to have—to have this girl-
Suddenly footsteps sounded in the hotel lobby.
“Quick,” she whispered, instantly. She sprang up, seized him by his wrist and whisked him out of a side door.
“You’d frighten mere men to death, you monster,” she said. “Stay here now.” She backed him into an arbor. “And please don’t move till I return.” The pliant animal obeyed. In a few moments Madge was back with a large camera.
“It would be a shame,” she explained. “I could never forgive myself if I didn’t snap you just as you are, rags and all. You’ll never look like this again, you know. Now don’t——” She looked for protest, but there was none. Harold had left his vanity somewhere in the north woods.
“Go as far as you like,” he said amiably. “Isn’t that what we used to say?”
“In the misty past,” she added, mockingly, “when we were young—and handsome.”
“Come now,” said Harold presently, “how many of those things are you going to take?”
Madge peeped at a red eye in the camera. “There are three more films,” she announced. “Now that side view once again. It shows your bare calf to perfection, and—and the big rip farther up.”
CHAPTER VII.
SOME REVELATIONS.
They left each other in the hallway upstairs with an arrangement by which Madge went to her room and prepared long “day letters,” while Harold went to his, fumbled open his suit cases, got out some clothes, bathed, dressed and sought the nearest barber shop, whence he emerged with clean white jaws that contrasted oddly with his tanned upper face and neck, went to the bridge just out of town and there met his pretty cousin, who was attired in a walking costume.
“Oh,” she said, a little ruefully.
“Oh what?” said Harold, a little disappointed, too.
“The savage is gone,” said Madge in mock dismay, “and only a tan-and-white creature of this age is left. But,” she added sweetly, “a really wonderful, wonderful one.”
“Come on,” said Harold, “and don’t let me walk too fast for you.”
They were soon alone and safe from disturbance in a little wooded hollow off the road.
“Now, young woman,” began Hazeltine, “I’ve done some thinking. Moreover, I’ve seen the hotel register which states that you reached this place only yesterday. Pray, how did you guess my arrival so exactly? Was it just a coincidence?”
“Well, you see the way it was—— Oh pshaw. Say, Harold, let’s make another little bargain. Tell me about your trip first. You know I’m simply dying to learn all about it. And by the way”—her tone was casual, “where is the guide, this—Mr. Dalton, wasn’t it?”
A black cloud came over Hazeltine’s face. Every muscle in his body stiffened.
“Mr. Dalton,” he said through his clenched teeth. “Well, Mr. Dalton I haven’t seen for many months.”
The girl raised her eyebrows mildly.
“But it hasn’t been my fault. I’ve dogged the cur for one hundred and twenty-seven days—and nights. But he’s somewhere round here in this country—and I’ll get him—I’ll get him!”
Almost frightened, Madge gazed with something very like awe at the face of the passion-possessed man bending forward beside her, his bony fists knotted, his eyes half closed by his down-drawn brows. She touched his hand.
“Harold,” she said quietly, “tell me all about it.”
And he did. Leaving out the sordid details, he swiftly sketched the story of the quarrel and desertion, of the anguish and bitterness of his struggle with the physical world, and of that still sterner grapple with the greater world within him.
Eagerly, intently, Madge Loring listened, with no word of interruption. Several times she glanced up into his deadly earnest face—that was all.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get him out there.” Harold’s arm swept toward the blue, northward hills. “It would have saved a fuss—for you and mother. But I promised I’d live and get him; I promised the spirit of my dad—— He seemed to be around, somehow. You know what a man he was—they’ve told you.” He turned to her suddenly:
“And now that I am alive, and you’re so—so beautifully alive—— Oh, Madge,” he cried, and devoured her with his yearning eyes.
“Madge,” he said again, his hands gently upon her shoulders, “will you care very much—will you blame me when I——”
“When you hunt him down with detectives, and have him arrested and punished?”
“No,” he answered sharply, “not arrested. I’ll hunt him down, with detectives if necessary. But I’ll attend to the rest of it myself. There are crimes that are personal: This is between him and me.”
“And if I asked you to forget and forgive?” She put her face very close to his. He took her clasped hands between his own.
“Madge,” he answered huskily, “you know how much I’ve always cared for you. But—bedeviled weakling that I was—I couldn’t decently have told you. Yet you knew, Madge, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she said steadily.
“Well, think of that bedeviled weakling out there. A sick whelp with a small jack knife and the clothes on his back. He had nothing to offer the frowning gods of the wild—nothing but hate and his oath. Yet they saw him through—they and his father. I’m here——” he struck the sod. “Alive on the good earth, not moldering upon it. And now, would you have me false—a traitor to it all?”
Harold had learned the ways of the gods of earth, but not of the goddesses that hover half on, half over it. Of these was Madge. Perplexingly to the wrought-up savage, she rose with a smile, kissed him lightly on the forehead, and reached her hand down for him to rise. He obeyed her somewhat morosely, though his heart beat wildly to her kiss.
“Come back to the hotel, you seething caldron,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
Rapidly they retraced their way through the now busy little town into the lobby of the hotel, where she left him and went upstairs, returned, beckoned him to follow her, and seated him in the only armchair in her room.
“Now, then,” she began, briskly, “here are two letters that will interest you. But you must promise to read them through without uttering a word of comment. I’ve some little things to do and if you are silent while you read you won’t bother me a bit.”
Hazeltine took the letters wonderingly.
“What the deuce is it all about, Madge?”
“Do you promise?”
“Yes,” he said at length, and he read the first letter:
Near a Half-Breed’s Camp, Otter River, June 17th.
My Dear Miss Loring: As this may be my last chance to get a letter out, and as I have about made up my mind what ought to be done with this baby elephant you wished on me, I guess I’d better send you a report.
You won’t show this to Mrs. Hazeltine, of course, so there won’t be any harm in telling you frankly how the chap strikes me and what I think is the matter with him.
He’s good-natured when he has his way, but he must have his way or he goes to pieces. And having his way means just one thing—six feet under the daisies. He loads his carcass with rich truck, even out here, for he brought along all sorts of fancy goods which he makes me slop up for him, and you know how a stomach is when it’s abused—it has no appetite for plain, wholesome food. He don’t do a lick of work; won’t hunt, fish, walk or fool around even. He reads highbrow rot and quotes it at the trees in a graveyard voice. He can’t really see anything around him, don’t know he’s alive, don’t seem to care whether he is or not and, unless all signs fail, won’t be very long. You said you folks and the doctor had done all sorts of things, and a simple life with air and exercise was the only thing left.
But you can’t make a man live that kind of a life simply by sending him off into the north woods with plenty of animals and grub and a comfortable camp chair if he’s the boss and don’t want to.
I can’t make him want to. Any suggestion from me just brings a chilly stare to his pale, flabby face. He looks on me as an ignorant hired man—he’s just changed valets and surroundings, and proposes to live as he always has—if you can call it living. The only difference is that out here he can kill himself faster than at home. But he won’t go home because he promised his mother to stay out three months, so the question is, How am I going to get him home alive? When you said it was a desperate case you said it all, and you know that desperate ills need desperate remedies.
Now, the way I reason about him is this: He’s got a crust that no one can break into, so no one outside of that crust can help him. He’s the only one inside of that crust, so he’s got to help himself. Will he? Now you say that his mother and the doctors feel that he has no will power because he wouldn’t change his habits. Why, he didn’t want to change them. That’s self-indulgence, not weak will. Hasn’t he managed to have his way with every living being that ever came against him? Believe me, that’s will power. He’s got slathers of it.
And therefore I size him up as a dead safe proposition to do what he wants to do against any odds. He thinks he don’t care whether he lives or dies, but I’ve heard that rot before! And the plain thing to do is to get him up against a “root, hog, or die” proposition and force him to make his decision before it’s too late.
So my scheme is to let him shift for himself. A fellow that has made every one dance to his music for twenty-two years has got it in him to dance to his own, and he’ll dance himself back to civilization or I miss my guess.
Now, don’t imagine I’m going to really desert him. But I’ll certainly make him think so. I’ll let him quarrel with me, or rather I’ll quarrel back, and then leave him and make him follow on and live on his nerve and wits, or die, just as he pleases. At least that’s the way it will look to him.
At first, I’ll use his fresh horse at night and cut around back to be sure he’s all right—or right enough, at least. And when I find he’s up and coming I’ll certainly give him fresh air and exercise for many moons. Just tell Mrs. Hazeltine if we like it we’ll keep out longer, and not to worry even if we don’t get back till snow flies.
Somehow, I think you’ll say Amen when you read this letter, or you wouldn’t have looked me so steady in the eye when you shook hands and said: “Billy, I trust you absolutely. Do just what you think best.” I’m going to do just what I would if he was my own kid brother, for somehow I like the pup—I don’t know why. So here’s luck to the scheme. Your sincere friend, Wm. Dalton.
Hazeltine shot up from his chair and turned on Madge, his head high. The girl, fussing with a frock, frowned at him, a reminding finger across her lips. He collapsed in the chair and read the second letter. It was written and mailed four days before, in Russell.
Nov. 22d.
My Dear Miss Loring: Well, I’m back, and your fourth cousin is coming after me—and my scalp—like the milltail of hell.
Durn him, he’s pretty near wore out the whole bunch of us—horses, mules and me—keeping out of his way.
I hope you got the letter I sent out by the half-bread last June, and if you did you’ll know the game I played. I stripped the camp clean as a whistle, and left him in bed sleeping off one of his usual suicide pacts with his stomach. I went on about ten miles, made camp, mounted his fresh horse, worked back along the sidehill to near the old camp and watched him. I knew he’d wait for me to come back, and he did, the whole day. But next morning he started off, and I beat it pronto back to my camp and moved on another eight or ten miles, leaving enough fire to last till he’d come up, for he hadn’t sense enough to hang on to one of his fancy blankets. I left some scraps, too; just enough to whet his appetite and make him mad at having to eat refuse.
I figured to keep him mad, and I guess I did, because pretty soon I found that I didn’t have to coax him along the trail any more. He was coming of his own free will and chasing me hard. On the back track, at several of his camps, I saw saplings uprooted, bark-skinned, and badly mauled generally. They puzzled me at first till I figured out that he had used ’em for wrestling partners!
I kept a good margin of safety between us after that, for though I’m generally allowed to be some husky brute myself, I was none too keen for a bout with the young gentleman that had twisted those saplings out of the earth. And I was too proud of my handiwork to care to spoil it with a gun. The plain truth, miss, is that I’d done too good a job!
If he hadn’t had to spend a lot of time learning to prey on the country for his grub, I believe I’d have had to travel night and day to keep from being murdered. In fact, he nearly got me one night, anyhow. I had been afraid that if he caught sight of my camp, and there happened to be a moon, he’d keep going all night. So during moon periods I had put a bell on my scariest mule and tied her out in the trail with a piece of light line which she’d bust at the slightest alarm. Then, before turning in I’d make the packs ready, and saddle up the whole string with loose cinches.
One morning in comes the mule a-snorting. And you can just bet your life, young lady, that in ten minutes I had the packs on, and we were jingling down the valley. Since then that hound has run us ragged, as I before stated. This last week or two I lightened ballast and spurted hard in order to gain on him, and if we’re even a few days ahead we’re doing well.
He’ll come in needing money and things, so it might be a good idea for one of you folks to happen along up here and meet him. You’ll find me resting up at Hawkin’s Mill, four miles out on the Stevens meadow road. But for God’s sake square me with that maniac before he finds out where I am and steals a gun. Your sincere but anxious friend, Wm. Dalton.
Young Hazeltine dropped the letters, leaned forward in his chair, took his chin in his hands and stared fixedly at the floor. His lower teeth scraped away at his upper lip.
Once he glanced at the intently watching girl for a single instant, and then resumed his staring at the floor. He was in the clutch of thoughts as bitter as any he had tasted during his long fight with cold and starvation. But they were thoughts, not of a bitter wrong, but of a bitter humiliation.
“I can’t kill him,” he whispered half to himself. He sought to hide the stress of his surging feelings by striding to the window, his back to Madge, whose heart was beating fast.
She went to him timidly and touched his arm.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
After a little he turned from the window, somewhat master of himself, and asked quietly:
“Who is this man Dalton?”
“The Daltons are old family friends. In the summertime, for many years, we used to almost live at their big ranch. He taught me to shoot and fish when I was a pigtailed tad. I got him to go with you at some sacrifice, for he is a rather busy man, with many interests.”
He put his hand on her hair. “You took a lot of trouble about me, Madge.”
The girl’s eyes filled with tears.
“Your mother has been a mother to me, Harold, these last two years,” she replied with downcast eyes. After a little Hazelzine said:
“Where is this Dalton now?”
Madge looked at him searchingly.
“Will you forgive him?” She had to wait some moments for his reply.
“I shan’t—harm him,” said Harold finally.
“Then—he is here,” said Madge. She walked swiftly down the ball and returned with Billy Dalton.
The two men faced each other across the room. If Dalton had smiled, Hazeltine, despite his promise, might have sprung at the man’s throat, for he was as yet unpracticed in the restraint of those virile passions which had so long lain dormant. But the guide’s face was stoical. He waited, hat in hand—a strong man, sure of his strength.
As the silence grew tense, the girl’s face flamed. She sprang imperiously toward the sullen, glowering youth and said in a resonant voice:
“Harold Hazeltine, you listen to me. You know what you were—a miserable creature, a chronic, hopeless hypochondriac. The doctors gave you up. I didn’t—because I knew what you were, deep down. I started this, I—deliberately. But Billy Dalton did it. He, too, with no coaching from me—his letter shows you that—he, too, sensed the man that slumbered in you. It was heroic treatment, Harold, but it was the only way.”
She turned for a swift moment to the head of the bed, came to Harold with something in her hand, and brought him face to face with the mirror of her dresser. Then she propped up against the mirror the thing she had taken from under her pillow, the photograph of a heavy, pallid young man in an invalid chair, a gray-haired woman on one side, a servant on the other.
“Here,” she exclaimed, “look at this.” And she pointed to the photograph. “Study it well, and then compare it with this.” And she pointed above the pitiful picture to his splendid image in the glass.
“Who made that difference, Harold Hazeltine?”
“He did, I suppose.”
“No!” cried Madge triumphantly. “If he had done it you would not owe him half the debt you do, for he would have been only your benefactor. You did it! He made you make yourself. That was friendship—the very quintessence of friendship.”
Hazeltine slowly nodded, as he raised his eyes now from the sickly spectacle upon the pasteboard to his own vivid image in the glass.
“Oh, Madge,” he faltered, with a rush of feeling, “you bhad faith in me all the time—faith in the creature that I was. Let me show my gratitude. Let me devote my life to you.” He put out his arms to her.
Dalton had turned hurriedly toward the door.
“Wait, Billy,” said Madge. She looked up at the humbled, pleading youth. “On one condition, Cousin Harold.”
His face cleared. He turned to the guide, all hatred banished from his heart.
“I guess I know that condition,” he said with a sunny smile. “You want Billy Dalton to stand up with us when we are married. Will you, Bill?”
“You bet I will,” said Dalton.
And Harold gripped his hand.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1947, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 76 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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