The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

The Duke began to regard the man with a newer interest. He wondered on what errand the man was going when he found him, and what it was that he carried so tenderly in his sack, as though it were a thing fragile and delicate. He had seen a Scottish gillie carry jugs of whisky carefully like that in the ends of a bag swung over a pony. With the thought he gave the sack a little closer notice. He observed that the mountaineer attended thus carefully to but one end of the sack, the end which he carried over his shoulder on his chest, the other end he left to pound and swing as it liked.

At noon the great road, winding in a gentle grade around the mountain, spanning its gullies with stone arches, reached the summit, and the mountaineer turned out, following a trail along the ridge to a knoll—covered, as the road was, with a carpet of brown fir needles, and bordered with a few old trees, huge and wind shaken. Below this knoll, welling out over the roots of trees, was a spring of water, running into a bowl, deep as a bucket, cut out of the rock. The men drank and then the mule thrust her nose up to the eye pits into the crystal water and gulped it down in great swallows, that ran like a chain of lumps, one after the other, under the skin of her gullet. The mountaineer removed the sack carefully from his shoulder, and opened the end which had been swinging all the morning against his back. This end of the sack contained oats, and clearing a place on the ground with his foot, he poured the oats down for the mule's dinner; then, he got out a strip of raw bacon, wrapped in a greasy paper, some boiled potatoes, a baked grouse, and what the Duke took to be a sort of scone, very thick and very yellow.

"I reckon we wont stop to do no cookin' jist now," the mountaineer observed apologetically, and returned the bacon to its greasy wrapper. Then he opened his hands over the frugal luncheon.

"Strengthen us with this heah food, O God Almighty! so our hands kin be strong to war, an' our fingers to fight agin the Devil an' his angels."

And the two men ate, as men eat together in the wilderness, without apology and without comment. When he had finished, the Duke of Dorset stretched himself out on the warm fir needles with a cigarette in his fingers.

The mountaineer took a pipe out of his trousers pocket, the bowl, a fragment of Indian corncob, the stem cut from an elder sprout, and with it some tobacco. He looked at the Duke a moment hesitating, with the articles in his hand, then he said: "Stranger, air you in a right smart hurry?"

The Duke opened his eyes; above him was the sky, deep, blue, fathomless, latticed out by the crossing fir tops; under him the bed was soft and warm, the pungent air of the forest crept into his lungs like opium.

"No," he answered, "why hurry out of a paradise like this." Then he dropped the cigarette from his fingers and lay motionless, looking out over the world of forest. The mountaineer filled his pipe, crumbling the tobacco in his hard palm, lighted it with a sputtering sulphur match and smoked, leaning back against the giant tree trunk—a figure of incomparable peace.

Presently the Duke of Dorset, looking landward across the mountains, dreamy, soft, rising into a sky of haze, caught a bit of deepened color, a patch of some darker haze lying above the distant sky line—lifting a wisp of black, and spreading faintly, like a blot against that shimmering nimbus in which the world was swimming. The thing caught and held the Duke's wayward attention. He sat up and pointed his finger eastward.

"Is that a forest fire?" he said.