Happy’s imagination floundered in the stagnant pool of a slow-thinking brain.
“I went right in and—”
“Exactly.” Miguel smiled a smile of even, white teeth and ironical lips. “Some moonlight night we will come back here at midnight, you and I. I have heard of that man, and I am fond of music. We will come and listen to him.”
Some of the other boys, ambling up from behind, caught a part of the speech, and looked at one another, grinning.
“The Native Son’s broke out all over with schoolbook grammar ag’in,” Big Medicine remarked. “Wonder what Happy’s done? I’ve noticed, by cripes, that the guilty party better duck, when that there Miguel begins to talk like a schoolma’am huntin’ a job! Hey, there!” he bellowed suddenly, so that one might hear him half a mile away. “What’s this here music talk I hear? Who’s goin’ to play, and where at, and how much is it a head?”
Miguel turned and looked back at the group, smiling still. “Happy was telling me about a ghost in that cabin down there.” He flung out a hand toward the place so suddenly that his horse jumped in fear of the quirt. “I say we’ll come back some night and listen to the ghost. Happy says he frequently rides over to hear it play on moonlight nights, and—”
“Aw, g’wan!” Happy Jack began to look uncomfortable in his mind. “I said—”
“Happy? If he thought there was a ghost in One Man Coulee, you couldn’t tie him down and haul him past in a hayrack at noon,” Andy asserted sharply. “There isn’t any ghost.”
Andy set his lips firmly together, and stared reminiscently down the hill at the lonely little cabin in the coulee. Memory, the original moving-picture machine, which can never be equaled by any man-made contrivance, flashed upon him vividly a picture of the night when he had sat within that cabin, listening to the man who would play the north wind, and who wept because it eluded him always; who played wonderfully—a genius gone mad under the spell of his own music—and at last rushed out into the blizzard and was lost, seeking the north wind that he might learn the song it sang. The scene gripped Andy, even in memory. He wondered fancifully if Olafson was still wandering with his violin, searching for the home of the north wind. They had never found him, not even when the snows had gone and the land lay bare beneath a spring sky. He must have frozen, for the night had been bitter, and a blizzard raged blindingly. Still, they had never found a trace of him.
There had been those who, after searching a while in vain, had accused Andy to his face of building the story to excite his fellows. He had been known to deceive his friends heartlessly, and there had been some argument over the real fate of the vanished Olafson. If Andy had told the truth, asked the doubters, where was Olafson’s body? And who had ever tried to play the wind? Who, save Andy Green, would ever think of such a fantastic tale? Happy Jack, Andy remembered resentfully, had been unusually vociferous in his unbelief, even for him.