Other Main-Travelled Roads Part 42

She faced her companion again. "You're the only man I know, now, that I respect, and you despise me."

"No, I don't; I pity you."

"That's worse. I want you to help me. Oh, if you could go with me, or if I could be with you!" Her gloved hands strained together in the agony of her desire.

His calm lips did not waver. He did not smile, even about the eyes. He knew her cry sprang from her need of a brother, not from the pa.s.sion of a woman.

"Our home is yours just as long as you can bear the monotony of our simple lives," he said, in his quiet way, but it was deep-throated and unmistakable in its sincerity.

She laid her hand on his arm and clasped it hard, then turned away her head, and they rode in silence.

After they left the car Allen sat, with savage eyes and grimly set mouth, going over the problem again and again. He saw that young and helpless creature walking the gantlet between endless ranks of l.u.s.tful, remorseless men, s.n.a.t.c.hing at her in selfish, b.e.s.t.i.a.l desire.

It made him bitter and despairing to think that women should be helpless--that they should need some man to protect them against some other man. He cursed the laws and traditions that had kept women subordinate and trivial and deceptive and vacillating. He wished they could be raised to the level of the brutes till, like the tigress or she-wolf, they could not only defend themselves, but their young.

He tried to breathe a sigh of relief that she had gone out of his life, but he could not. It was not so easy to shake off the shadow of his responsibility. He followed her in imagination on her downward path till he saw her stretching out her hands in pitiful need to casual acquaintances--alone and without hope; still pet.i.te, still dainty in spite of all, still with flashes of wit, and then--

He shuddered. "O my G.o.d! Upon whom does the burden of guilt lie?"

On the night of his return he sat among his romping babes, debating whether he should tell the story to his wife or not. As the little ones grew weary the noise of the autumn wind--the lonely, woful, moaning prairie wind--came to his ears, and he shuddered. His wife observed it.

"What is it, Joe? Did you get a chill?"

"Oh no. The wind sounds a little lonesome to-night, that's all." But he took his little girl into his arms and held her close.

AN ALIEN IN THE PINES

I

A man and a woman were pacing up and down the wintry station platform, waiting for a train. On every side the snow lay a stained and crumpled blanket, with here and there a light or a chimney to show the village sleeping beneath.

The sky was a purple-black hemisphere, out of which the stars glittered almost white. The wind came out of the west, cold but amiable; the cracked bell of a switch-engine gurgled querulously at intervals, followed by the b.u.mping of coupling freight-cars; roosters were crowing, and sleepy train-men were a.s.sembling in sullen silence.

The couple walked with arms locked like lovers, but the tones of their voices had the quality which comes after marriage. They were man and wife.

The woman's clear voice arose. "Oh, Ed, isn't this delicious? What one misses by not getting up early!"

"Sleep, for instance," laughed her husband.

"Don't drag me down. You know what I mean. Let's get up early every morning while we're up here in the woods."

"Shouldn't wonder if we had to. There'll be a lot to do, and I want to get back to Chicago by the 1st of February."

"This is an experience! Isn't it still? When is our train due?"

"Due now; I think that is our headlight up the track."

As he spoke an engine added its voice to the growing noise of the station, and drew solemnly down the frosty steel.

An eruption of shapeless forms of men from the depot filled the one general coach of the train. They nearly all were dressed in some sort of fur coat, and all had the look of men accustomed to out-door life--powerful, loud-voiced, unrefined. They were, in fact, travelling men, business men, the owners of mills or timber. The stolid or patient ox-like faces of some Norwegian workmen, dressed in gay Mackinac jackets, were sprinkled about.

The young wife was a fine type of woman anywhere, but these surroundings made her seem very dainty and startlingly beautiful. Her husband had the fair skin of a city man, but his powerful shoulders and firm step denoted health and wholesome living. They were both good to look at.

They soon felt the reaction to sleepiness which comes to those not accustomed to early rising, and the wife, soothed by the clank of the train, leaned her head on her husband's shoulder and dozed. He looked out upon the landscape, glad that his wife was not observing it. He did not know such desolation existed in Wisconsin.

On every side were the evidences of a ruined forest land. A landscape of flat wastes, of thinned and burned and uprooted trees. A desolate and apparently useless land.

Here and there a sawmill stood gray and sagging, surrounded by little cabins of unpainted wood, to testify to the time when great pines stood all about, and the ring of the swamper's axe was heard in the intervals of silence between the howls of a saw.

To the north the swells grew larger. Birch and tamarack swamps alternated with dry ridges on which an inferior pine still grew. The swamps were dense tangles of broken and uprooted trees. Slender pike-like stumps of fire-devastated firs rose here and there, black and grim skeletons of trees.

It was a land that had been sheared by the axe, torn by the winds, and blasted by fire.

Off to the west low blue ridges rose, marking the boundaries of the valley which had been washed out ages ago by water. After the floods pine forest had sprung up, and these in their turn had been sheared away by man. It lay now awaiting the plough and seeder of the intrepid pioneer.

Suddenly the wife awoke and sat up. "Why, we haven't had any breakfast!"

He smiled at her childish look of bewilderment. "I've been painfully aware of it for some time back. I've been suffering for food while you slept."

"Why didn't you get into the basket?"

"How could I, with you on my manly bosom?"

She colored up a little. They had not been married long, evidently. "How considerate you are!"

They were soon eating a breakfast with the spirit of picnickers.

Occasionally she looked out of the window.

"What a wild country!" she said. He did not emphasize its qualities to her; rather, he distracted her attention from its desolation.

The train roared round its curves, conforming with the general course of the river. On every hand were thickening signs of active lumber industry. They flashed by freight trains loaded with logs or lumber or ties. Mills in operation grew thicker.

The car echoed with the talk of lumber. A brisk man with a red mustache was exhibiting a model of a machine to cut certain parts of machinery out of "two by fours." Another was describing a new shingle-mill he had just built.

A couple of elderly men, one a German, were discussing the tariff on lumber. The workmen mainly sat silent.

"It's all so strange!" the young wife said, again and again.

"Yes, it isn't exactly the Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive."

"I like it. I wish I could smell the pines."

"You'll have all the pines you can stand before we get back to Chicago."