III
The gate latch clicked. From the road Henry Holmes called a last good-night, and Tim and I were alone. We sat in silence, watching through the window the old man's lantern as he swung away toward home. Then the light disappeared and without all was black. The village was asleep.
By the stove lay my hound, Captain, snoring gently. He had tried to keep awake, poor beast! For a time he had even struggled to hold one eye open and on his master, but at last, overcome by weariness, his head snuggled farther and farther down into his fore paws, and the tired tail ceased its rhythmic beating on the floor.
What is home without a dog! Captain is happy. He smiles gently as he sleeps, and it seems that in that strange dog-dreamland he and I are racing over the ridges again, through the nipping winds, on the trail of a fox or a rabbit. His master is home. He has wandered far to other hunting grounds, but now that the tang is in the air that foretells the frost and snow, he has come again to the dog that never misses a trail, the dog that never fails him.
The hound raised his head and half opened one eye. He was sure that I was really there, and the gleam of white teeth showed a broadening dog-smile. And once more we were away on the dreamland trail—Captain and I.
"He's been counting the days till you got home, Mark," said Tim, holding a burning match over my pipe. "It was a bit lonely here, while you were gone, so Captain and I used to discuss your doings a good deal after the rest of the place had gone to bed. And as for young Colonel, why he's heard so much of you from Captain there, I'm afraid he'll swallow you when he gets at you in the morning."
Young Colonel was the puppy the returning soldier had never seen. He had come long after I had gone away, and as yet I knew him only by his voice, for I had heard his dismal wails down in the barn. In the excitement of the evening I had forgotten him, but now I raised a warning finger and listened, thinking that I might catch the appealing cry. And is there any cry more appealing than that of a lonely puppy? There was not a sound outside, and I turned to Tim.
My brother lighted his pipe, and leaned back in his chair, and looked at me. I looked at him very, very hard. Then we both began to blow clouds of smoke in each other's faces. Hardly a word had Tim and I passed since that day in the field when I drew the long twig that sent me away and left him behind to keep our home. What a blessing a pipe is at a time like this! Tim says more by the vigor of his smoking than Perry Thomas could express in a year's oration. So we enshrouded our emotions in the gray cloud; but if he did not speak, I knew well what he would be saying, and the harder I puffed the easier did he divine what was uppermost in my mind. For we were brothers! This was the same room that for years had been our world; this the same carpet over which we had tumbled together at our mother's feet. There was the same cupboard that had been our mountain; here the same chairs that formed our ridges and our valleys. At the table by my side, by the light of this very lamp, we sat together not so very long ago, boys, spelling out with our father, letter by letter, word by word, the stories of the Bible. Here we had lived our little lives; here we were to live what was to come; and where life is as simple as it is with us we grow a bit like the animals about us. We sit together and smoke; we purr, as it were, and know each other's mind. Tim and I purred. Incident by incident, year by year, we travelled down the course of our lives again, over the rough ways, over the smooth ways, smoking and smoking, until at last we brought up together at the present. Not a word had either of us spoken, but at last when our reminiscent wanderings were over and we paused on the threshold of the future, Tim spoke.
"Attractive?" he said in a tone of inquiry.
He was looking at me with eyebrows arched, curiously, and there was a faint suggestion of hostility in the set of his mouth.
Poor Tim! He has seen so little of women! We have them in our valley, of course. But he and I lived much in the great book-land beyond the hills. We had read together of all the heroines of the romances, and we knew their little ways and their pretty speeches as well as if we had ourselves walked with them through a few hundred pages and lived happily ever after. They had been the women of our world as distinct from the women of our valley. The last we knew as kindly, honest persons with a faculty for twisting their English and a woful ignorance of well-turned speeches. They never said "Fair Sir" nor "Master." But I had gone from that book-world and had seen the women of the real world. Here I had the advantage of my brother. Into his life a single woman had come from the real world. She was different from the women of our valley. I had known that the moment our eyes met, and by the way Tim smoked now, and by the tone of his terse inquiry, I knew that he had met a woman who had said "Fair Sir" to him, and I feared for him. It was disturbing. I felt a twinge of jealousy, but whether for the tall, strong young fellow before me, to whom I had been all, or for the fair-faced girl, I could not for the life of me tell. It seemed to be a bit of both.
"I remarked that she was attractive," said Tim aggressively, for I had kept on smoking in silence.
"Rather," I answered carelessly. "But who is she—a stranger here?"
"Rather," repeated Tim hotly. "Well, you are blind. I suppose you judged her by that ugly gray gown. You thought she was some pious Dunkard."
"I am no enemy of piety," I retorted. "In fact, I hardly noticed her clothes at all, except to think that their simplicity gave her a sort of Priscilla air that was fetching."
Tim softened. "That's it exactly," he said. "But, Mark, you should have seen Mary Warden when she came here."
"From where?" I asked.
"From Kansas. She lived in some big town out West, and when her mother died there was no one left to her but Luther Warden, her uncle. He sent for her, and now she is living with him. The old man sets a great store by her."
Luther Warden is rich. He has accumulated a fine lot of property above Six Stars—several good farms, a mill and a tannery; but even the chance of inheriting all these did not seem fair compensation for being his niece and having to live with him. He was good to a fault. He exuded piety. Six days of the week he worked, piling up the passing treasures of this world. One whole day he preached, striving for the treasures in that to come. You could not lay a finger on a weak spot in his moral armor, but Tip Pulsifer protected from the assaults of Satan only by a shield of human skin, always seemed to me the better of the two. Tip wore leaky boots all last winter, but when spring came he bought Mrs. Pulsifer a sewing machine. Have you ever worn leaky boots when the snow was banked fence high? Luther Warden's boots never leak. They are always tight and well tallowed. His horses and his cows waddle in their fat, and the wool of his flocks is the longest in the valley. Luther gets up with the sun and goes to bed with it. Some in our valley think his heavy crops come from his six days of labor, and some from his one day of preaching. He says that the one day does it all; but he keeps on getting out with the sun on the other six. I knew that the poor girl from Kansas must get up with the sun, too, for her uncle was not the man to brook any dawdling. I knew, further, that Sunday could not be a day of rest for her, for of all his people she would have to listen to his preaching.
That was why I murmured in a commiserative tone, "Luther's niece—poor girl!"
"You needn't pity her," Tim snapped. "She knows a heap more about the world than you or I do. She—"
"She is not a Dunkard, then?" I interrupted.
"Not a bit," Tim answered. "I don't know what she was in Kansas, but Luther has preached so much on worldliness and the vanity of fine clothes that it wouldn't look right for his niece to go flaunting frills and furbelows about the valley. That plain gray gown is a concession to the old man. He'd like her to wear a prayer-cap and a poke bonnet, I guess, but she has a mind of her own. I think she drew the line there."
She had not given up so much, I thought. Perhaps in her self-denial there was method, and her simple garb became her best. Even a prayer-cap might frame her face the fairest; but she must know. And I had seen that in the flash of her eye and the toss of her head that told me that a hundred Luther Wardens, a hundred Dunkard preacher uncles, could not abate her beauty one jot.
"She's rich," said Tim.
He blurted it out. As long as I had seen her and found her beautiful, this announcement seemed uncalled for. Had she been plain of face and figure it might have served a purpose, were my brother endeavoring to excuse the sentimental state of mind he had disclosed to me. He knew that the place he held in my heart was first. This had always been true, and in our lonely innocence we had promised it should be true to the end. There was to be a fair return. He had promised it, and now he was learning how hard it was to keep faith. His attitude was one of half penitence, half defiance. Had I not seen the girl, had he told me that she was beautiful, and even rich and good, all our boyish pledges would have been swept aside, and I should have cheered him on. But I had seen her. She had laughed with me. Somehow we had understood each other. And now I cared not so much what he felt for her as how she looked on him. For once in our lives Tim and I were fencing.
"She's pretty, Tim," said I, "and rich, you say?"
"Mary has several thousand dollars," he answered. "Besides that, she'll get all old man Warden has to leave, and that's a pretty pile."
"Little wonder she wears that Dunkard gown," said I with the faintest sneer.
It angered Tim.
"That's not fair," he cried. "She's not that kind. Luther Warden is all she has of kin, and if it makes him any happier to see her togged out in that gawky Dunkard gown——-"
"Gawky?" said I. "Why, man, on a woman like that a plain dress is simply quaint. She looks like an old Dutch picture. You must not let her change it."
The insinuation of his authority made Tim pound the table with his pipe. He was striving to be angry, but I knew what that furious flush of his face meant. He tried to conceal it by smoking again, but ended in a laugh.
"Oh, nonsense!" he said. Then he laughed again.
"Tell me," I went on, following up my advantage, "when is she coming here, or when are you going to move up there?"
My brother recovered his composure.
"It's all silly, Mark. There is no chance of a girl like that settling down here with a clumsy fellow like me—a fellow who doesn't know anything, who's never been anywhere, who's never seen anything. Why, she's travelled; she's from Kansas; she's lived in big cities. This is nothing but a lark for her. She'll go away some day, and she'll leave us here, grubbing away on our bit of a farm and spending our savings on powder and shot—until we get to the happy hunting grounds."
Tim laughed mournfully. "I've been just a little foolish," he went on, "but I couldn't help it, Mark. It doesn't amount to anything; it never did and never will, and now that you're here and the rabbit season will soon be in, we'll have other things to think of. But you must remember I'm not the only man in the world who's been a bit of a fool in his time."
"No," said I. "May I be spared myself, but see here, Tim, how does it feel?"
"How does what feel?" snapped Tim.
"To be in love the way you are," I answered.
"Oh!" he exclaimed.
He had been taken back, and hesitated between anger and amusement. When Tim hesitates he loses his temper as a sensible man should lose it—he buries it, and his indomitable good humor wins.
"Tip Pulsifer says it's like religion," he answered. "At first it makes you feel all low-down like, and miserable, and you don't care. Then you either get over it entirely or become so used to it you don't feel it at all."
"May I be spared!" I cried, "and may you get over it."
But the youngster refused to commit himself. He just smiled and smoked, and it seemed as though in his suffering he was half happy. I smoked, too. We smoked together. The silence startled Captain, for the clock struck, and yawning, he arose, trotted to my side, and with one leap he brought his ponderous paws into my lap.
You can trust your dog. He never fails you.
"Well, old chap," I said, as I scratched his nose ever so gently, "you at least have no one to think of but me and Tim there, eh?"
[Illustration: "Well, old chap!">[
"No," cried Captain heartily.
That was not the exact word that he used, but he expressed it by beating his tail against the table and giving a long howl.
"And if Tim, there, goes dawdling after a woman, we shall stick to the ridges, and the foxes, and the rabbits. We can't go as fast as we used to, Captain, but we can go together, eh?"
"The same as ever and the same forever," cried Captain.
Those were not his exact words, but I saw his answer in his eyes, for he had climbed higher and they were close to mine. He seemed ready to swallow me.
"And when he brings her home, Captain," said I, "and fills the whole house with young ones who'll pull your tail and tickle your ears and play horse with my crutches, we shall sit outside and smoke our pipes alone, in peace and quiet, eh, Captain?"
"Oho!" cried Captain. "That we will, and you never need want, Mark, for I've many a fine bone buried away against old age and rainy weather."
"Spoken like a man," said I, slapping the hound on the back.
Tim had lighted a candle. Now he blew out the lamp and stood over me in the half-light, holding out a hand.
"Come," he said. "That's right, put your hand on my shoulder, for the stairs are steep and will trouble you. That's the way. Come along, Captain; to-night we'll all go up together. And when she comes—that woman—we'll go to your house—all three of us—the same as now—eh, Captain?"