And so the status of the strange boy was fixed at the Forks. He was declared to be a poet, and was no more a wonder. Curiosity was satisfied.
"It is something to know that it is no worse," growled a very practical old man, as he held a pipe in his teeth and rubbed his tobacco between his palms.
He spoke of it as if it had been a case of the small-pox, and as if he was thinking how to best prevent the spread of the infection.
CHAPTER III.
THE FIRST WOMAN IN THE FORKS.
One day Limber Tim came up from the Howling Wilderness, all excitement: all gyrations, and gimlets, and corkscrews. He twisted himself around a sapling—this great, overgrown, six-foot boy without a beard—and shouting down to his "pardner" in the mine, Old Sandy, who stood at the bottom of the open claim, leaning on his pick, resting a moment, looking into the bright bubbling water that burst laughing from the bank before him, dreaming a bit in the freshness about him; and said, "Hallo! I say! a widder's come to town. D'ye hear? A widder; one what's up and up, and on the square."
Sandy only looked up, for he was getting old, and gray, and wrinkled. Then he looked at the silver stream that ran from the bank and through the rocks at his feet, and called to him in the pleasant, balmy sunset, sweet with the smell of fir, and he did not disturb the water again with his pick. It looked too pretty, laughed, and sparkled, and leapt, and made him glad and yet sad.
A poet was this man Sandy, a painter, a sculptor, a mighty moralist; a man who could not write his name.
He laid down his pick, for the sun was just pitching his last lances at the snow-peaks away up yonder above the firs, above the clouds, and night was coming down with steady steps to possess this chasm in the earth.