The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

The morning was gray and cold. The sun had been up several hours before it was seen in the camp. Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Dane were out with the earliest light for trout. Jack was the next to leave the tent and go shivering down to the river to wash, and then run to warm his red hands and button his jacket at the kitchen fire, where John was again cooking bread. John and Mr. Dane had slept on the beach with only the pine boughs for a roof and saddle-bags for a pillow.

When Mrs. Gilmour appeared, last of all, Jack was just finishing his second chunk of last night’s bread, leaning against the angle of the rock fireplace out of the smoke that made a pale blue wavering flight upward and aslant the dark pine boughs.

The fishermen had returned with trout, but not a surfeit of trout, for breakfast. The bread was taken out of the bake-kettle and the trout put in to plump up in their own steam over the coals. The coffee smelled deliciously in the sweet, cold air. The broiled ham was welcome, even after a first course of trout, and Jack was good for a third of bread and honey. He could use his fingers and wipe up the honey with the broken bread until his tin plate shone, not to speak of his countenance, and nobody observed him except to smile.

But something had happened that morning besides breakfast. Mr. Dane had lost a tremendous trout, after playing him a long time and tiring him out. He had been fishing from a rock, with deep water all around him. The big fish seemed quite still and tame as he was drawn in, but as his tail touched the rock, with a frantic rebound he made one last plunge for the water and got off. If there had been but a beach to land him on!

Then, a man had been shot the evening before at Atlanta, the big mining-camp of the Saw-tooth range; and another man riding a tired horse had passed the camp at daybreak, on his way to Boise for a surgeon. The horse he had started with from Atlanta had given out about twenty miles from that place; he had walked ten or fifteen miles along the mountain trail in the darkness before he could get another horse. He wished to change this for one of the horses from the fishing-camp, but they were back on the bluffs and he concluded to go on and change at Gillespie’s. He had traveled about fifty miles that night, on horseback and on foot, over a trail that some of us would not enjoy riding over by daylight.

His wife and their young child were at his horse-ranch away back on the hills, alone, except for some of the cowboys. He had gone up to Atlanta to attend the ball. The man who had been shot was a stranger to him,—had a brother in Boise, he believed. He had breathed his horse a moment while he talked to John and took a bite of something to eat, and then went on his way.

It was strange to think that all this was part of those dark hours of the night that had passed so peacefully to the sleepers on the river beach,—the miners’ ball, the shooting, the night ride in haste, the wife waiting at the lonely ranch in the hills for her husband’s return.

The day passed with fishing and sketching and eating, and beauty of sunlight and shadow on rocks and trees and river.

Brown had built a table and placed boxes around it for seats. The gray rock fireplace had got well blackened, and the camp had taken on a homelike look. Jack had gone for a glorious walk up the trail with Brown, to see if the fence on the bluffs was all right, and if there was a way down to the river from the bluffs by which the horses could go down to drink. There was one, a rather obscure way; but Billy was clever, and Pete was a “rustler,” and Mrs. O’Dowd could be relied upon to follow the lead of her betters. But they did not seem to be eating, and Jack fancied they looked homesick in their high pasture, as if the scenery did not console them for being sent off so far from camp.

That second day Mr. Gilmour went fishing alone down the river. John was gathering firewood; the boy and his mother were in the tent; Mr. Dane sat in the doorway, tending a little fire he had made outside, and reading aloud, while Mrs. Gilmour made a languid sketch of him, in his red-hooded blanket robe. Mr. Dane was the first to hear a shout from down the river. He threw off the red robe, seized a rifle, and ran down the shore in the direction Mr. Gilmour had taken. The shout meant, to him, game of a kind that could not be tackled with a fly-rod.