The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

Jack Gilmour worked at his crude inventions in the shop, and was allowed to use grown-up tools under certain not too hard conditions; and Polly rode up and down the steep path to the river beach on the shoulders of the young assistant engineers—and assistant everything-elses. The mother was waited on and spoiled, as women are in camp; she was even invited to go fishing with her husband and Mr. Dane, one of the young assistants-in-general. It was a dull time for work in the camp, and there were good care-takers with whom Mrs. Gilmour could trust the children. The boy was the elder. He was learning those two most important elements of a boy’s education, up to nine years, according to Sir Walter Scott,—to ride and to speak the truth. But he was only eight, and perhaps was not quite perfect in either.

He watched the three happy ones ride away, and as they turned on the hilltop and waved good-by to the little figure on the trail below, he was longing, with all the strength of desire an eight-year-old heart can know, for the time to come when he too should climb the hills and wave his hand against the sky before turning the crest, where he had so often stood and felt so small, gazing up into those higher hills that locked the last bright bend of the river from sight.

They were to go up Charcoal Creek; they were to cross the “Divide;” they were to go down Grouse Creek on the other side and camp on some unknown bit of the river’s shore.

The boy went stumbling back down the dusty path to his unfinished work in the shop,—the engine for a toy elevated road he was making. But the painfully fashioned fragments of his plan had no meaning for eyes that still saw only the hills against the morning sky, and the three happy ones riding away.

This first trip led to a second and longer one, to the fishing-grounds up the river, by the trail on the opposite shore. Jack heard his father and Mr. Dane talking one morning at the breakfast-table about riding down to Turner’s and getting a pack-animal and some more riding animals,—and mamma was going again! What good times the grown-ups did have! And John Brown, Jack’s particular crony from the men’s camp, was going, to cook and take care of the animals. This word “animal” is used in the West to describe anything that is ridden or “packed,”—horse, mule, Indian pony, or “burro.” It is never applied to cattle or unbroken horses on the range; these are “stock.”

The party were to take a tent and stay perhaps a week, if no word came from the home camp to call them back.

Jack slipped away from the table and went out and hung upon the railing of a footbridge that crossed the brook. Beside learning how to ride and to speak the truth, Jack was learning to whistle. He was practicing this last more persistently, perhaps, than either of the more important branches of knowledge,—let us hope because there was more need of practice; for he was as yet very far from being a perfect whistler. It was but a melancholy, tuneless little note in which he gave vent to his feelings, as he watched the trickling water.

“I’d like to take the boy,” his father was that moment saying at the breakfast-table in the cook-tent, “if we had anything he could ride.” And then he added, smiling, “There’s Mrs. O’Dowd.” The smile went around the table.

Mrs. O’Dowd, or “Peggy,” as she was variously called, was a gray donkey of uncertain age and mild but inflexible disposition who sometimes consented to carry the children over the hills at a moderate pace, her usual equipment being a side-saddle, which did not fit her oval figure (the curves of which turned the wrong way for beauty); so the side-saddle was always slipping off, obliging the children to slide down and “cinch up.”

The engineer’s house was built against a hill; from the end of the upper piazza a short bridge, or gang-plank, joined the hill and met a steep trail which led upward to the tents, the garden, the road to the lower camp, the road up the bluffs, and all the rest of the children’s world beyond the gulch. One of their favorite exercises with Mrs. O’Dowd was to ride her down the trail, and try to force her over this gang-plank. She would put her small feet cautiously one before the other, hanging her great white head and sniffing her way. The instant her toes touched the resonant boards of the bridge, she stopped, and then the exercises began. Mrs. O’Dowd’s gravity and resignation, in the midst of the children’s laughing and shouting and pulling and whacking, was most edifying to see; but she never budged. She saw the darlings of the household dance back and forth before her in safety; the engineers in their big boots would push past her and tramp over the bridge. Mrs. O’Dowd was a creature of fixed habits. Useless, flighty children, and people with unaccountable ways of their own might do as they liked; it had never been her habit to trust Mrs. O’D. on such a place as that, and she never did.