The doctor diagnosed his case as typhoid, and promised us a speedy convalescence. He looked at me significantly and added: “He’ll recover. But when he goes to that unknown bourne, finally, he may not depart by a route as respectable by far. He’s a periodical drinker—about all in. Can’t stand much more.”
A few days after this I received an unexpected order for a cedar chest from a writer who signed herself Janet Jones, and directed that the chest when completed, should be sent to Spokane.
“I have seen your cedar chests,” she wrote. “And how I want one! I am a shut in—and I want the beauty chest in my boudoir, because it will remind me of the cool, green cedars in the depth of the forest, of wood aisles purpling at twilight, of ferns and grass and all the plushy, dear, delightful things that bend and blow and flaunt themselves in the summer breeze. When I look at it, I am sure I can hear again the voice of the tortuous, swift-running, shadowy river on whose banks it was made. And I long to hear that sound again.”
The check she enclosed was a generous one. The letter seemed almost a sacred thing to me. I folded it carefully and laid it away, and not even to Joey did I mention the order I had received. But I began work at once on the cedar chest. And I labored faithfully, and with infinite relish. The check was a material help to me, and something prompted me to lay bare my heart and tell my new friend so in the note of thanks I penned her that night.
“The wood paths are overrun with kinnikinic, lupine, and Oregon grape just now,” I wrote, “and the woods are in their greenest livery. The paint brushes are just coming into bloom and the white flowers on the salmon berry bushes were never so large before, or the coral honeysuckle so fragrant. My senses tell me this is so; but there is a deeper green in the heart of the woods, a tenderer purple on the mountains, because of one who bides temporarily beneath my roof. And because of her—oh, kind benefactress, I thank you for your order, for your praise, and for your check! I am poor—miserably poor. And for the first time in eight years ashamed of it.”
The answer came back in a few days:
“Don’t be ashamed! Tell me of her, please.”
Because the hour of Haidee’s convalescence when I could greet her face to face, was postponed from day to day, and because my thoughts were full of her, I was glad to answer this letter. But after all I told Janet Jones very little of Haidee, except that she was my guest, and that Joey and I called her our Wonder Woman, and that my own name for her was Haidee.
Each day that followed was well rounded out with work. The workshop proved to be a veritable house of refuge to Joey and me, whither we fled to escape Mrs. Olds’ whining voice and bickering, and the big man’s unsavory language. Here with windows wide to the breeze that swept cool and clean from the mountains we labored side by side, forgetting the discord within the cabin, realizing only that it is good to live, to labor and to love.
In addition to my work on the cedar chest I was carving a design of spirea on a small oak box, which when completed was to hold Joey’s few but highly prized kickshaws. As the design approached completion I observed the small boy eyeing it almost with dissatisfaction from time to time.