CHAPTER VI
GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS
IT all came back there by the smoldering fires—the wonder and the beauty and the awe of being alive. We had eaten hugely—a giant feast. There had been no formalities about that meal. Lying on our blankets under the smoke-drift, we had cut with our jack-knives the tender morsels from a haunch as it roasted. When the haunch was at last cooked to the bone, only the bone was left.
Heavy with the feast, I lay on my back watching the gray smoke brush my stars that seemed so near. My stars! Soft and gentle and mystical! Like a dark-browed Yotun woman wooing the latent giant in me, the night pressed down. I closed my eyes, and through me ran the sensuous surface fires of her dream-wrought limbs. Upon my face the weird magnetic lure of ever-nearing, never-kissing lips made soundless music. Like a sister, like a mother she caressed me, lazy with the huge feast; and yet, a drowsy, half-voluptuous joy shimmered and rippled in my veins.
Drowsing and dreaming under the drifting smoke-wrack, I felt the sense of time and self drop away from me. No now, no to-morrow, no yesterday, no I! Only eternity, one vast whole—sun-shot, star-sprent, love-filled, changeless. And in it all, one spot of consciousness more acute than other spots; and that was the something that had eaten hugely, and that now felt the inward-flung glory of it all; the swooning, half-voluptuous sense of awe and wonder, the rippling, shimmering, universal joy.
And then suddenly and without shock—like the shifting of the wood smoke—the mood veered, and there was nothing but I. Space and eternity were I—vast projections of myself, tingling with my consciousness to the remotest fringe of the outward swinging atom-drift; through immeasurable night, pierced capriciously with shafts of paradoxic day; through and beyond the awful circle of yearless duration, my ego lived and knew itself and thrilled with the glory of being. The slowly revolving Milky Way was only a glory within me; the great woman-star jeweling the summit of a cliff, was only an ecstasy within me; the murmuring of the river out in the dark was only the singing of my heart; and the deep, deep blue of the heavens was only the splendid color of my soul.
Bill snored. Among the glowing fires moved the black bulk of the Kid, turning the hunks of venison. And then the universe and I, curiously mixed, swooned into nothing at all, and I was blinking at a golden glow, and from the river came a shouting.
It was broad day. We leaped up, and rubbing the sleep from our eyes, saw a light skiff drifting toward us. It contained two men—Frank and Charley. We had met them at Benton, and during an acquaintance of three weeks we had learned of their remarkable ability as cooks. Frank was a little Canadian Frenchman, and Charley was English. Both, in the parlance of the road, were "floaters"; that is to say, no locality ever knew them long; the earth was their floor, the sky their ceiling—and their god was Whim. Naturally our trip had appealed to them, and one month in Benton had aggravated that hopelessly incurable disease—Wanderlust.
So we had agreed that somewhere down river we would camp for a week and wait for them. They would do the cooking, and we would take them in tow. Two days after we dropped out of Benton, they had abruptly "jumped" an unfinished job and put off after us in a skiff, rowing all day and most of the night in order to overtake us.
Certainly they had arrived at the moment most psychologically favorable for the beginning of an odd sort of tyranny that followed. Cooking is a weird mystery to me. As for Bill and the Kid, courtesy forbids detailed comment. The Kid had been uniformly successful in disguising the most familiar articles of diet; and Bill was perhaps least unsuccessful in the making of flapjacks. According to his naïve statement, he had discovered the trick of mixing the batter while manufacturing photographer's mounting paste. His statement was never questioned. My only criticism on his flapjacks was simply that he left too much to the imagination. For these and kindred reasons, we gladly hailed the newcomers.