The Backwoodsmen Part 7

Dave kicked off his snow-shoes with a dexterous twist, stepped inside, slammed the door, and with a laugh and a kiss deposited Lidey in her mother's lap.

"She jest run down to meet me!" explained Dave, truthfully but deceptively.

"Oh, girlie, how you frightened me!" cried the woman, divided between tears and smiles. "I woke up, Dave, an' found her gone; an' bein' kind o' bewildered, I couldn't understand it!"

She clung to his hand, while he looked tenderly down into her face.

"Poor little woman!" he murmured, "you've had a bad turn ag'in, Lidey tells me. Better now, eh?"

"I'm plumb all right ag'in, Dave, now you're back," she answered, squeezing his hand hard. "But land's sakes, Dave, how ever did you git all that blood on your pants?"

"Oh," said the man, lightly, "that's nothin.' Tell you about it bime-by. I'm jest starvin' now. Let's have supper quick, and then give old Mr. Sandy Claus a chance. Tomorrow we're going to have the greatest Christmas ever was, us three!"

The Gentling of Red McWha

I

It was heavy sledding on the Upper Ottanoonsis trail. The two lumbermen were nearing the close of the third day of the hard four days' haul in from the Settlements to the camp. At the head of the first team, his broad jaw set and his small grey eyes angry with fatigue, trudged the big figure of Red McWha, choosing and breaking a way through the deep snow. With his fiery red head and his large red face, he was the only one of his colouring in a large family so dark that they were known as the "Black McWhas," and his temper seemed to have been chronically soured by the singularity of his type. But he was a good woodsman and a good teamster, and his horses followed confidently at his heels like dogs. The second team was led by a tall, gaunt-jawed, one-eyed lumberman named Jim Johnson, but invariably known as "Walley." From the fact that his blind eye was of a peculiar blankness, like whitish porcelain, he had been nicknamed "Wall-Eye"; but, owing to his general popularity, combined with the emphatic views he held on that particular subject, the name had been mitigated to Walley.

The two were hauling in supplies for Conroy's Camp, on Little Ottanoonsis Lake. Silently, but for the clank and creak of the harness, and the soft "thut, thut" of the trodden snow, the little procession toiled on through the soundless desolation. Between the trees--naked birches and scattered, black-green firs--filtered the lonely, yellowish-violet light of the fading winter afternoon. When the light had died into ghostly grey along the corridors of the forest, the teams rounded a turn of the trail, and began to descend the steep slope which led down to Joe G.o.dding's solitary cabin on the edge of Burnt Brook Meadows. Presently the dark outline of the cabin came into view against the pallor of the open clearing.

But there was no light in the window. No homely pungency of wood-smoke breathed welcome on the bitter air. The cabin looked startlingly deserted.

"Whoa!" commanded McWha, sharply, and glanced round at Johnson with an angry misgiving in his eyes. The teams came to a stop with a shiver of all their bells.

Then, upon the sudden stillness, arose the faint sound of a child's voice, crying hopelessly.

"Something wrong down yonder!" growled McWha, his expectations of a hot supper crumbling into dust.

As he spoke, Walley Johnson sprang past him and went loping down the hill with long, loose strides like a moose.

Red McWha followed very deliberately with the teams. He resented anything emotional. And he was prepared to feel himself aggrieved.

When he reached the cabin door the sound of weeping had stopped.

Inside he found Walley Johnson on his knees before the stove, hurriedly lighting a fire. Wrapped in his coat, and clutching his arm as if afraid he might leave her, stood a tiny, flaxen-haired child, perhaps five years old. The cabin was cold, almost as cold as the snapping night outside. Along the middle of the floor, with bedclothes from the bunk heaped awkwardly upon it in the little one's efforts to warm it back to responsive life, sprawled rigidly the lank body of Joe G.o.dding.

Red McWha stared for a moment in silence, then stooped, examined the dead man's face, and felt his breast.

"Deader'n a herring!" he muttered.

"Yes! the poor old shike-poke!" answered Johnson, without looking up from his task.

"Heart?" queried McWha, laconically.

Johnson made no reply till the flame caught the kindling and rushed inwards from the open draught with a cordial roar. Then he stood up.

"Don' know about that," said he. "But he's been dead these hours and hours! An' the fire out! An' the kid most froze! A sick man like he was, to've kept the kid alone here with him that way!" And he glanced down at the dead figure with severe reprobation.

"Never was much good, that Joe G.o.dding!" muttered McWha, always critical.

As the two woodsmen discussed the situation, the child, a delicate-featured, blue-eyed girl, was gazing up from under her mop of bright hair, first at one, then at the other. Walley Johnson was the one who had come in answer to her long wailing, who had hugged her close, and wrapped her up, and crooned over her in his pity, and driven away the terrors. But she did not like to look at him, though his gaunt, sallow face was strong and kind.

People are apt to talk easy generalities about the intuition of children! As a matter of fact, the little ones are not above judging quite as superficially and falsely as their elders. The child looked at her protector's sightless eye, then turned away and sidled over to McWha with one hand coaxingly outstretched. McWha's mouth twisted sourly. Without appearing to see the tiny hand, he deftly evaded it.

Stooping over the dead man, he picked him up, straightened him out decently on his bunk, and covered him away from sight with the blankets.

"Ye needn't be so crusty to the kid, when she wants to make up to ye!"

protested Walley, as the little one turned back to him with a puzzled look in her tearful blue eyes.

"It's all alike they be, six, or sixteen, or sixty-six!" remarked McWha, sarcastically, stepping to the door. "I don't want none of 'em!

Ye kin look out for 'er! I'm for the horses."

"Don't talk out so loud," admonished the little one. "You'll wake Daddy. Poor Daddy's sick!"

"Poor lamb!" murmured Johnson, folding her to his great breast with a pang of pity. "No; we won't wake daddy. Now tell me, what's yer name?"

"Daddy called me Rosy-Lilly!" answered the child, playing with a b.u.t.ton on Johnson's vest. "Is he gettin' warmer now? He was so cold, and he wouldn't speak to Rosy-Lilly."

"Rosy-Lilly it be!" agreed Johnson. "Now we jest won't bother daddy, him bein' so sick! You an' me'll git supper."

The cabin was warm now, and on tiptoe Johnson and Rosy-Lilly went about their work, setting the table, "bilin' the tea," and frying the bacon. When Red McWha came in from the barn, and stamped the snow from his feet, Rosy-Lilly said "Hush!" laid her finger on her lip, and glanced meaningly at the moveless shape in the bunk.

"We mus' let 'im sleep, Rosy-Lilly says," decreed Johnson, with an emphasis which penetrated McWha's unsympathetic consciousness, and elicited a non-committal grunt.

When supper was ready, Rosy-Lilly hung around him for a minute or two before dragging her chair up to the table. She evidently purposed paying him the compliment of sitting close beside him and letting him cut her bacon for her. But finding that he would not even glance at her, she fetched a deep sigh, and took her place beside Johnson. When the meal was over and the dishes had been washed up, she let Johnson put her to bed in her little bunk behind the stove. She wanted to kiss her father for good-night, as usual; but when Johnson insisted that to do so might wake him up, and be bad for him, she yielded tearfully; and they heard her sobbing herself to sleep.

For nearly an hour the two men smoked in silence, their steaming feet under the stove, their backs turned towards the long, unstirring shape in the big bunk. At last Johnson stood up and shook himself.

"Well," he drawled, "I s'pose we mus' be doin' the best we kin fer poor old Joe."

"He ain't left us no ch'ice!" snapped McWha.

"We can't leave him here in the house," continued Johnson, irresolutely.

"No, no!" answered McWha. "He'd ha'nt it, an' us, too, ever after, like as not. We got to give 'im lumberman's shift, till the Boss kin send and take 'im back to the Settlement for the parson to do 'im up right an' proper."

So they rolled poor Joe G.o.dding up in one of the tarpaulins which covered the sleds, and buried him deep in the snow, under the big elm behind the cabin, and piled a monument of cordwood above him, so that the foxes and wild cats could not disturb his lonely sleep, and surmounted the pile with a rude cross to signify its character. Then, with lighter hearts, they went back to the cabin fire, which seemed to burn more freely now that the grim presence of its former master had been removed.

"Now what's to be done with the kid--with Rosy-Lilly?" began Johnson.

Red McWha took his pipe from his mouth, and spat accurately into the crack of the grate to signify that he had no opinion on that important subject.

"They do say in the Settlements as how Joe G.o.dding hain't kith nor kin in the world, savin' an' exceptin' the kid only," continued Johnson.

McWha nodded indifferently.