Rolf in the Woods Part 28

Again the sick ox waited for silence, and reaching out with greedy haste, he gulped down the rest and emptied the bucket; seeing which, Rolf ran in and gave the rogue a final trouncing for the sake of consistency.

Any one who knows what slippery elm, peppermint, soda, sulphur, colic, and ox do when thoroughly interincorporated will not be surprised to learn that in the morning the stable needed special treatment, and of all the mixture the ox was the only ingredient left on the active list.

He was all right again, very thirsty, and not quite up to his usual standard, but, as Van said, after a careful look, "Ah, tell you vot, dot you vas a veil ox again, an' I t'ink I know not vot if you all tricky vas like Bright."

Chapter 57. Rolf and Skook.u.m at Albany

The Red Moon (August) follows the Thunder Moon, and in the early part of its second week Rolf and Van, hauling in the barley and discussing the fitness of the oats, were startled by a most outrageous clatter among the hens. Horrid murder evidently was stalking abroad, and, hastening to the rescue, Rolf heard loud, angry barks; then a savage beast with a defunct "cackle party" appeared, but dropped the victim to bark and bound upon the "relief party" with ecstatic expressions of joy, in spite of Rolf's--"Skook.u.m! you little brute!"

Yes! Quonab was back; that is, he was at the lake sh.o.r.e, and Skook.u.m had made haste to plunge into the joys and gayeties of this social centre, without awaiting the formalities of greeting or even of dry-shod landing.

The next scene was--a big, high post, a long, strong chain and a small, sad dog.

"Ho, Quonab, you found your people? You had a good time?"

"Ugh," was the answer, the whole of it, and all the light Rolf got for many a day on the old man's trip to the North. The prospect of going to Albany for Van Cortlandt was much more attractive to Quonab than that of the harvest field, so a compromise was agreed on. Callan's barley was in the stock; if all three helped Callan for three days, Callan would owe them for nine, and so it was arranged.

Again "good-bye," and Rolf, Quonab, and little dog Skook.u.m went sailing down the Schroon toward the junction, where they left a cache of their supplies, and down the broadening Hudson toward Albany.

Rolf had been over the road twice; Quonab never before, yet his nose for water was so good and the sense of rapid and portage was so strong in the red man, that many times he was the pilot. "This is the way, because it must be"; "there it is deep because so narrow"; "that rapid is dangerous, because there is such a well-beaten portage trail"; "that we can run, because I see it," or, "because there is no portage trail,"

etc. The eighty miles were covered in three sleeps, and in the mid-moon days of the Red Moon they landed at the dock in front of Peter Vandam's.

If Quonab had any especial emotions for the occasion, he cloaked them perfectly under a calm and copper-coloured exterior of absolute immobility.

Their Albany experiences included a meeting with the governor and an encounter with a broad and burly river pirate, who, seeing a lone and peaceable-looking red man, went out of his way to insult him; and when Quonab's knife flashed out at last, it was only his recently established relations with the governor's son that saved him from some very sad results, for there were many loafers about. But burly Vandam appeared in the nick of time to halt the small mob with the warning: "Don't you know that's Mr. Van Cortlandt's guide?" With the governor and Vandam to back him, Quonab soon had the mob on his side, and the dock loafer's own friends pelted him with mud as he escaped. But not a little credit is due to Skook.u.m, for at the critical moment he had sprung on the ruffian's bare and abundant leg with such toothsome effect that the owner fell promptly backward and the knife thrust missed. It was quickly over and Quonab replaced his knife, contemptuous of the whole crowd before, during and after the incident. Not at the time, but days later, he said of his foe: "He was a talker; he was full of fear."

With the backwoods only thirty miles away, and the unbroken wilderness one hundred, it was hard to believe how little Henry van Cortlandt knew of the woods and its life. He belonged to the ultra-fashionable set, and it was rather their pose to affect ignorance of the savage world and its ways. But he had plenty of common-sense to fan back on, and the inspiring example of Washington, equally at home in the nation's Parliament, the army intrenchment, the glittering ball room, or the hunting lodge of the Indian, was a constant reminder that the perfect man is a harmonious development of mind, morals, and physique.

His training had been somewhat warped by the ultracla.s.sic fashion of the times, so he persisted in seeing in Quonab a sort of discoloured, barbaric clansman of Alaric or a camp follower of Xenophon's host, rather than an actual living, interesting, native American, exemplifying in the highest degree the sinewy, alert woodman, and the saturated mystic and pantheist of an age bygone and out of date, combined with a middle-measure intelligence. And Rolf, tall, blue-eyed with brown, curling hair, was made to pose as the youthful Achilles, rather than as a type of America's best young manhood, cleaner, saner, and of far higher ideals and traditions than ever were ascribed to Achilles by his most blinded worshippers. It recalled the case of Wordsworth and Southey living side by side in England; Southey, the famous, must needs seek in ancient India for material to write his twelve-volume romance that no one ever looks at; Wordsworth, the unknown, wrote of the things of his own time, about his own door? and produced immortal verse.

What should we think of Homer, had he sung his impressions of the ancient Egyptians? or of Thackeray, had he novelized the life of the Babylonians? It is an ancient blindness, with an ancient wall to bruise one's head. It is only those who seek ointment of the consecrated clay that gives back sight, who see the shining way at their feet, who beat their face against no wall, who safely climb the heights. Henry van Cortlandt was a man of rare parts, of every advantage, but still he had been taught steadfastly to live in the past. His eyes were yet to be opened. The living present was not his--but yet to be.

The young lawyer had been a.s.sembling his outfit at Vandam's warehouse, for, in spite of scoffing friends, he knew that Rolf was coming back to him.

When Rolf saw the pile of stuff that was gathered for that outfit, he stared at it aghast, then looked at Vandam, and together they roared.

There was everything for light housekeeping and heavy doctoring, even chairs, a wash stand, a mirror, a mortar, and a pestle. Six canoes could scarcely have carried the lot.

"'Tain't so much the young man as his mother," explained Big Pete; "at first I tried to make 'em understand, but it was no use; so I says, 'All right, go ahead, as long as there's room in the warehouse.' I reckon I'll set on the fence and have some fun seein' Rolf ontangle the affair."

"Phew, pheeeww--ph-e-e-e-e-w," was all Rolf could say in answer. But at last, "Wall, there's always a way. I sized him up as pretty level headed. We'll see."

There was a way and it was easy, for, in a secret session, Rolf, Pete, and Van Cortlandt together sorted out the things needed. A small tent, blankets, extra clothes, guns, ammunition, delicate food for three months, a few medicines and toilet articles--a pretty good load for one canoe, but a trifle compared with the mountain of stuff piled up on the floor.

"Now, Mr. van Cortlandt," said Rolf, "will you explain to your mother that we are going on with this so as to travel quickly, and will send back for the rest as we need it?"

A quiet chuckle was now heard from Big Pete. "Good! I wondered how he'd settle it."

The governor and his lady saw them off; therefore, there was a crowd.

The mother never before had noted what a frail and dangerous thing a canoe is. She cautioned her son never to venture out alone, and to be sure that he rubbed his chest with the pectoral balm she had made from such and such a famous receipt, the one that saved the life but not the limb of old Governor Stuyvesant, and come right home if you catch a cold; and wait at the first camp till the other things come, and (in a whisper) keep away from that horrid red Indian with the knife, and never fail to let every one know who you are, and write regularly, and don't forget to take your calomel Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, alternating with Peruvian bark Tuesday, Thursday, and Sat.u.r.day, and squills on Sunday, except every other week, when he should devote Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays to rhubarb and catnip tea, except in the full moon, when the catnip was to be replaced with graveyard bergamot and the squills with opodeldoc in which an iron nail had been left for a week.

So Henry was embraced, Rolf was hand-shaken, Quonab was nodded at, Skook.u.m was wisely let alone, and the trim canoe swung from the dock.

Amid hearty cheers, farewells, and "G.o.d speed ye's" it breasted the flood for the North.

And on the dock, with kerchief to her eyes, stood the mother, weeping to think that her boy was going far, far away from his home and friends in dear, cultured, refined Albany, away, away, to that remote and barbarous inaccessible region almost to the sh.o.r.e land of Lake Champlain.

Chapter 58. Back to Indian Lake

Young Van Cortlandt, six feet two in his socks and thirty-four inches around the chest, was, as Rolf long afterward said, "awful good raw material, but awful raw." Two years out of college, half of which had been spent at the law, had done little but launch him as a physical weakling and a social star. But his mental make-up was more than good; it was of large promise. He lacked neither courage nor sense, and the course he now followed was surely the best for man-making.

Rolf never realized how much a farmer-woodman-canoeman-hunter-camper had to know, until now he met a man who did not know anything, nor dreamed how many wrong ways there were of doing a job, till he saw his new companion try it.

There is no single simple thing that is a more complete measure of one's woodcraft than the lighting of a fire. There are a dozen good ways and a thousand wrong ones. A man who can light thirty fires on thirty successive days with thirty matches or thirty sparks from flint and steel is a graduated woodman, for the feat presupposes experience of many years and the skill that belongs to a winner.

When Quonab and Rolf came back from taking each a load over the first little portage, they found Van Cortlandt getting ready for a fire with a great, solid pile of small logs, most of them wet and green. He knew how to use flint and steel, because that was the established household way of the times. Since childhood had he lighted the candle at home by this primitive means. When his pile of soggy logs was ready, he struck his flint, caught a spark on the tinder that is always kept on hand, blew it to a flame, thrust in between two of the wet logs, waited for all to blaze up, and wondered why the tiny blaze went out at once, no matter how often he tried.

When the others came back, Van Cortlandt remarked: "It doesn't seem to burn." The Indian turned away in silent contempt. Rolf had hard work to keep the forms of respect, until the thought came: "I suppose I looked just as big a fool in his world at Albany."

"See," said he, "green wood and wet wood won't do, but yonder is some birch bark and there's a pine root." He took his axe and cut a few sticks from the root, then used his knife to make a sliver-fuzz of each; one piece, so resinous that it would not whittle, he smashed with the back of the axe into a lot of matchwood. With a handful of finely shredded birch bark he was now quite ready. A crack of the flint a blowing of the spark caught on the tinder from the box, a little flame that at once was magnified by the birch bark, and in a minute the pine splinters made a sputtering fire. Quonab did not even pay Van Cortlandt the compliment of using one of his logs. He cut a growing poplar, built a fireplace of the green logs around the blaze that Rolf had made, and the meal was ready in a few minutes.

Van Cortlandt was not a fool; merely it was all new to him. But his attention was directed to fire-making now, and long before they reached their cabin he had learned this, the first of the woodman's arts--he could lay and light a fire. And when, weeks later, he not only made the flint fire, but learned in emergency to make the rubbing stick spark, his cup of joy was full. He felt he was learning.

Determined to be in everything, now he paddled all day; at first with vigour, then mechanically, at last feebly and painfully. Late in the afternoon they made the first long portage; it was a quarter mile. Rolf took a hundred pounds, Quonab half as much more, Van Cortlandt tottered slowly behind with his pill-kit and his paddle. That night, on his ample mattress, he slept the sleep of utter exhaustion. Next day he did little and said nothing. It came on to rain; he raised a huge umbrella and crouched under it till the storm was over. But the third day he began to show signs of new life, and before they reached the Schroon's mouth, on the fifth day, his young frame was already responding to the elixir of the hills.

It was very clear that they could not take half of the stuff that they had cached at the Schroon's mouth, so that a new adjustment was needed and still a cache to await another trip.

That night as they sat by their sixth camp fire, Van Cortlandt pondered over the recent days, and they seemed many since he had left home.

He felt much older and stronger. He felt not only less strange, but positively intimate with the life, the river, the canoe, and his comrades; and, pleased with his winnings, he laid his hand on Skook.u.m, slumbering near, only to arouse in response a savage growl, as that important animal arose and moved to the other side of the fire. Never did small dog give tall man a more deliberate snub. "You can't do that with Skook.u.m; you must wait till he's ready," said Rolf.

The journey up the Hudson with its "mean" waters and its "carries" was much as before. Then they came to the eagle's nest and the easy waters of Jesup's River, and without important incident they landed at the cabin. The feeling of "home again" spread over the camp and every one was gay.

Chapter 59. Van Cortlandt's Drugs

"AIN'T ye feelin' all right?" said Rolf, one bright, calomel morning, as he saw Van Cortlandt preparing his daily physic.

"Why, yes; I'm feeling fine; I'm better every day," was the jovial reply.

"Course I don't know, but my mother used to say: 'Med'cine's the stuff makes a sick man well, an' a well man sick."'

"My mother and your mother would have fought at sight, as you may judge.

B-u-t," he added with reflective slowness, and a merry twinkle in his eye, "if things were to be judged by their product, I am afraid your mother would win easily," and he laid his long, thin, scrawny hand beside the broad, strong hand of the growing youth.

"Old Sylvanne wasn't far astray when he said: 'There aren't any sick, 'cept them as thinks they are,"' said Rolf. "I suppose I ought to begin to taper off," was the reply. But the tapering was very sudden. Before a week went by, it seemed desirable to go back for the stuff left in cache on the Schroon, where, of course, it was subject to several risks. There seemed no object in taking Van Cortlandt back, but they could not well leave him alone. He went. He had kept time with fair regularity--calomel, rhubarb; calomel, rhubarb; calomel, rhubarb, squills--but Rolf's remarks had sunk into his intelligence, as a red-hot shot will sink through shingles, letting in light and creating revolution.

This was a rhubarb morning. He drank his potion, then, carefully stoppering the bottle, he placed it with its companions in a box and stowed that near the middle of the canoe. "I'll be glad when it's finished," he said reflectively; "I don't believe I need it now. I wish sometimes I could run short of it all."