“We wasn’t married then,” he explained confidentially. “It’s a long time ago. Seems queer that there ever was a time when Maggie and me wasn’t married; but there was.” He wrinkled his brow with a ruminative air. “But there wasn’t never at no time, any other girl than Maggie Delane for me.” He looked gently at Forrester. “You should ’a’ seen her then,” he said; “she was the purtiest girl in Cascapedia, my Maggie was.
“There was a lot of fellers after her. She could ’a’ done lots better, but—she stuck to me. Seems like I didn’t have much luck, even then. I dunno why—I was always willin’ to work. It just happened that way, Mister. Times I said to her: ‘You’d best quit me, honey, and take up with a luckier man.’ I said that not knowin’ just what I’d do if she done it. But she—she just put her hands on my shoulders,”—he glanced wonderingly at his shabby coat,—“she put her hands there, an’ she says: ‘Good luck or bad, I’ll never go back on you, Si.’ ” His slow eyes went back to Forrester’s face. “You know how it is with them, with the good ones, boss, when they’re—fond of a feller.”
“No,” said Forrester, after a short silence, and very humbly, “no, I don’t know—yet. Go on, please. Tell me the rest.”
“We was to have been married that Christmas. But I didn’t have no luck. I didn’t have enough saved. It near broke my heart. I hadn’t got so kinder used to waitin’ on things then, and I was just set on goin’ to Cascapedia and claimin’ my girl that Christmas. She was workin’ in a store there, and I was on a lumberin’ job back on the Oucouagan. ’Twasn’t so far asunders, but the hills riz up to heaven in betwixt us. I hadn’t seen her in a long while, Mister. And when the time come on, an’ I’d no luck an’ had been sick, an’ dassent to quit my job, I tramped them hills all one night, boss, tryin’ to find the nerve to write Maggie and say: ‘We can’t be married this Christmas after all, honey; we’ll have to wait for the spring.’ ”
He bent down and picked a thread carefully from his frayed trousers. Raising his head, he stared again at the picture. “I wrote it at last,” he went on in his heavy way, “an’ I sent it to her. I was down an’ out. I—kinder lost me self-respeck, boss, havin’ to write that way to Maggie when she could ’a’ done so much better. . . Yes sir. An’ then her answer came. She wasn’t a very good writer. She just said I wasn’t to worry; she guessed she could get along without me till the spring—always one for a joke, was Maggie!—but I was to think of her on Christmas.”
The shabby man’s voice trailed off into silence. After a moment he said, thoughtfully: “Queer how they—the good ones—can break a feller all up an’ put him on his feet at the same time, aint it, boss?”
“I—don’t know,” said Forrester, softly. “Go on please.”
“She said I was to think of her on Christmas. Somethin’ you said awhile back put me in mind of how I felt then. Think of her! Why, I—I felt as though I could chop the mountains down same as if they was trees to get her! I felt there was nothin’—just nothin’—I couldn’t do, or bear, or get, so as Maggie didn’t quit me. I felt I’d get her them great shiny stars fer buttons to her Sunday dress if she was wantin’ them. Made me feel twelve foot high and drunk, she did, just with three lines o’ bad spellin’ and a joke! I’d five dollars in me pocket, an’ I went an’ looked up a Siwash, one o’ them mountain Injuns that looks like a Chinaman and moves up or down like a goat; I’d done him a kindness a little while back, an’ he was grateful, which is more’n white fellers always is. I said, would he take a letter to my klootch in Cascapedia, for five dollars, she to get it on Christmas? Yes, he said, he would. I gave him the letter an’ the bill, an’ off he went—not that she was rightly my klootch then, o’ course, an’ she’d ’a’ been terrible vexed if she’d known I called her so; but it was near enough fer him.
“We wasn’t so far apart, as I says—not so many miles on the level, only not a yard of it was level; the hills was like a wall between us; but there was one thing we could both see, one thing that was in sight from Cascapedia an’ from the Oucouagan on the other side. An’ that was that mountain there.”
He looked at the picture with lingering surprise. “My!” he said, “You wouldn’t never think I’d been up there, would you? You’d think I was too old and had too much sense. But I was young then; and some way Maggie’d made me clean crazy.”