But Carter was equal to the contradiction. "We was talking of averages—"
"Were," the other interrupted.
Grimacing, Carter repeated: "Were talking of averages. The exception gets his fun climbing, and don't find out how much of a fool he is till he looks down from the top."
"Doesn't," the other put in, and Carter resaid the word.
The corrections sprang from a compact that was now as old as their acquaintance. A graduate in engineering, the young fellow was widely read and cultured far beyond the needs of his profession, and as they talked, smoking, in their office-tent of evenings, his allusions to and illustrations from the realms of science, literature, art had given Carter glimpses of Helen's world, a universe in which touch, taste, smell, sight, and other things gave place to feeling, memory, perception. And so he had been stimulated to conscious attempts at improvement.
"I feel like a two-year-old!" he had exclaimed one evening early in their acquaintance. "I 'd like to know more of that. D' you suppose I could get that book in town? An' say, if you catch me straddling the traces—manners, speech, an' so forth—I wish you'd lam me one. Of course I'm pretty set, but if I could just tone down a bit on a few of the big things, the little ones might slip by unnoticed."
In the nature of things a construction-camp is bound to suffer a chronic drouth of news, and in default of other subjects Carter's marital troubles had received exhaustive and analytical treatment at the hands of the Silver Creek men and others. Filtering through many strata, enough of the gossip had reached the surveyor to inform him of the motive under this rough appeal, and he readily consented. So, in their talks thereafter, he had trimmed out the wilder growths of Carter's speech, giving rule and reason, for, as he laughingly assured him, his big pupil had an uncanny appetite for underlying law.
"Now 'tain't reasonable to suppose that you have to learn all the individual cases," he would say, when the surveyor tripped him on some expression; "what's the law of it?" And he would offer humorous opinions on the eccentricities of the tongue. "The darn language seems to have grown from wild seed, an' though Lindley Murray—ain't that his name?—lopped a bit here an' pruned a bit there, he couldn't straighten the knarls and twists in the trunks. An' I don't know but that it's as well that way Leave them grammarians alone, an' they'd clip an' trim the language till it was tame as the cypress hedges that my old aunt uster shape into crowing roosters, gillypots, an' pilaster pillars at home back East." In saying which he touched a profound etymological truth that is altogether ignored by the scientific inventors of universal languages.
One who had not seen him for some months—Helen, for instance—could not have failed, this evening, to notice how his faithful delving in that wild orchard had begun to bring forth fruit in his speech. Evincing fewer "aint's," it had more "ings," and even attained, on occasion, to correct usage in "number" of verbs. Equally forcible, as full of curt figures, its epigrammatic quality had gained rather than lost by better expression.
The silence which had fallen between them endured till they came in sight of the camp, a string of tents and log-cabins under the eaves of the forest. Then the surveyor pointed out a girl who was watching the tired stream from the door of the nearest tent.