d.i.c.k's Desertion.

by Marjorie L. C. Pickthall.

CHAPTER I.

In the Heart of the Woods.

It was early fall, and all the world was golden. Golden seemed the hazy warmth of the sky; golden were the willow leaves and the delicate foliage of the birches; even the gra.s.s, pale from the long heat of the summer, had taken on a tinge of the all-pervading colour. Far as the eye could reach, the woods and uplands were bright with gold, relieved only by the deep sombre green of pines and hemlocks. Save for these, it seemed a country that some gracious Midas had touched, turning everything to ethereal, elfin gold.

The Midas-touch had even included the little log-cabin and its untidy clearing, for broad-disced sunflowers were scattered over the neglected garden, and between them bloomed late goldenrod, which had crept in from the wilds outside; and a small patch of ground was covered with shocks of Indian corn, roughly bound together, yellowing also beneath the influence of sun and frost.

The land was beautiful to look upon--Ontario scenery, marred little by the works of man in that autumn of 1820, when His Most Gracious Majesty George IV. was king. And the log-cabin and its clearing were picturesque enough to the eye of an artist, though speaking of all lack of skill and thrift and industry to the eye of a farmer. Even the garden in front of the cabin was being slowly and surely swallowed up into the wilderness again. The sunflowers flourished and bloomed and seeded, forming food-stores for mult.i.tudes of birds; and the squirrels would flicker down the tree-trunks and feast upon the seeds which the birds dropped, spitting the hard sh.e.l.ls deftly to right and left through their whiskers. But the wild asters and the long convolvulus vines were choking the blossomless pinks and the sweet-williams and the few shy English flowers that were left. There were only very few of these fading alien plants for the healthy native growth to smother and kill, most of them having been taken away to set upon the grave of the woman who had cherished them.

In the centre of this neglected garden grew a clump of sumach trees, heavy with their clumsy crimson cones; and beneath these, in a little hollow lined with all the dead drift of the October woods, a boy was lying. He was about sixteen, burnt brown as any young savage of the forests, but with sun-bleached fair hair and blue eyes to proclaim his English birth. His clothes were of very coa.r.s.e homespun, and he wore a pair of old moccasins and a deerskin belt, brightened with gaudy Indian-work of beads and dyed gra.s.ses. The whole clearing was crying out for some skilled hand to tend and reclaim it once more from the encroaching wilderness; but this st.u.r.dy lad lay there with all the busy idleness of a savage, very deftly making a tiny canoe of birch-bark.

He seemed a fit occupant for the tangled garden and the half-cultivated fields.

Five years before, a certain Captain Underwood, flying from financial disaster in England, had come to Canada with his wife and his two children, d.i.c.k and Stephanie. There was roving blood in the Underwoods, so perhaps it was not surprising that the unfortunate captain should have ranged farther afield in Ontario than others had then done; for he left the settlements and the surveyed townships behind him, and struck farther north, wishing to get as far away as possible from the world that had brought him ruin. In the friendly forests, a little beyond the region where the white settlers had penetrated, but not entirely out of touch with them, he found a natural clearing, and here he had built his tiny cabin and roughly marked out his small fields. Here, perhaps, the poor man, knowing nothing of the country, had thought to live a sort of idyllic hermit existence. But he found it very different. It was a terrible life to which he had brought his wife and children; and when Mrs. Underwood died, three years after leaving England, he blamed himself for her death. Most of his heart he buried with her in that lonely grave under the mighty maples on the hill; and afterwards he turned to the wild life around him as to his only help and comfort.

But he had no longer the courage to fight the farmer's fight, the primitive conflict between man's skill and nature's strength. Soon the garden that his wife had loved became overgrown with native flowers and weeds. Soon the bushes and the gra.s.s crept inwards over his fields.

Soon his son and daughter shot up from childhood to youth, perfectly healthy in their hard life. Stephanie was fifteen years old, and being as strong as a young lynx, she did all the work of the log-cabin. She made a rough sort of corn cake which served for bread, she prepared the endless pea-soup and pork, she washed and mended and even made the clothes. d.i.c.k helped his father, or idled away on little hunting expeditions of his own, from which he returned happy and rarely empty-handed.

It was a strange life for a boy and girl, carefully and lovingly brought up amid English comforts and ease, to lead. Their nearest neighbours, the Collinsons, with whom Captain Underwood did most of his little trading, were twenty miles distant. Kindly Mrs. Collinson had offered Stephanie a home when Mrs. Underwood died, but the girl had chosen to stay with her father and d.i.c.k, and be the one influence which restrained that little household in the woods from lapsing into the happy-go-lucky sort of savagery to which even the most cultivated are liable in a new land.

I do not think that we of this generation can quite realise the life which was led in Upper Canada eighty years ago, when forest and swamp and bush foretold nothing of the great farms and cities and thriving towns which now replace them to such a great extent. Those first settlers did not foresee the heights of prosperity and hope to which the land would rise in the time of their children. They looked upon it rather as some unfriendly place from which they might wrest a living, than as a goodly country given them that they and their children and their children's children might labour in it and love it and enjoy it--and fight and die for it if need were. All their love and remembrance they gave to those little Isles across the sea; but, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, they were obliged to give their wit and muscle to Canada.

They fought against hardships and privations that were almost incredible, chiefly in the hope that they might win enough from the New World to take them back in comfort to the Old. They thought chiefly of making provision for present needs, not foreseeing that their toil went to the making of a nation, the building of an Empire. They wrought indeed better than they knew.

No prophetic vision of the mighty future came to d.i.c.k Underwood as he lay beneath the sumachs that golden October day, nearly ninety years ago. He gave all the sentiment of which his boyish heart was capable to his fading memories of his English home, even as his father did--laying these recollections aside, as it were, in a sacred place.

But here the likeness to his father ceased; for he looked forward in vast, ignorant, splendid dreams to the possibilities of the land of his adoption--not the possibilities of trade and agriculture, which seldom attract youth--but to the more alluring chances of those great Unknown Lands, to the wonder and mystery of the Indian-haunted North.

He did not put this feeling into words. Indeed, he did not know how to describe it, or what it was. But it is written in the history books that in Talon's time the welfare of the French colony was endangered by the number of young men who took to the woods, obeying the "call of the wild." It was this that moved d.i.c.k Underwood. It moved him then as he lay lazily in the sweet, new-fallen leaves, so deftly shaping that little canoe of birch bark; and he wished, with a half smile at himself, that it might turn out to be a fairy canoe, suddenly growing to full size, and bearing him away on some new risen fairy river, into the land of his dreams. "But if I had fifty rivers and fifty canoes,"

he said to himself with a sigh, "I could not leave Stephanie."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'IF I HAD FIFTY RIVERS AND FIFTY CANOES, I COULD NOT LEAVE STEPHANIE.'"]

It was the old struggle, though he did not know it--the voice of the wilderness striving against the voice of the home ties. This time the voice of the home ties sang in triumph at thought of Stephanie; but there comes a time occasionally in a man's life when his mother the woman may mean less to him for a s.p.a.ce than his mother the earth.

But with d.i.c.k the crisis had not yet come; and he scrambled to his feet very contentedly, and proceeded to a little marsh close at hand, where all sorts of fair swamp plants grew--feathery green things, and jewelled touch-me-not, and jacks-in-the-pulpit, and long-stemmed violets in season. For the tiny canoe was to be filled with little ferns and soft mosses as a gift for Stephanie, and that thought of the fairy river was forgotten.

This important business attended to, he turned slowly and reluctantly towards home. But the woods were full of sights and sounds that appealed to every half-awakened instinct in the boy's soul.

A small, brown, hawk-faced owl lay stupidly at the mouth of a sort of tunnel it had made for itself in the long, bleached gra.s.ses. So perfectly did it resemble a piece of decayed and mottled wood that even d.i.c.k's keen eye almost pa.s.sed it over, until it sprang up from this cosy day-time retreat, and blundered away among the trees.

Dragon-flies, unlike their brethren of the earlier year, in that they were clad in crimson and russet plush, and not in green and pink and sapphire mail, took their flashing flights among the faded undergrowth.

The air was warm and golden still, but a keen nose might detect in it a threatening of frost; and the fallen leaves yielded a delicate fragrance as of damp earth and new mown hay.

A chipmunk ran down a tree trunk and scolded him viciously, and then fled before him to another tree, where it awaited him angrily, evidently under the impression that he was following it with evil designs upon its winter stores. In this way it preceded him to the edge of the corn-field, and finally vanished into a hole in a half-dead pine that stood near the clearing, putting out its head once more with a last outpouring of abuse. "Oh! little fellow," said d.i.c.k, "I am afraid your nuts will be wasted, for to-morrow we chop the tree down.

But I 've promised Stephanie that first I 'll climb up and poke you out with a stick--and get bitten for my pains, I suppose, you little spitfire. So you need not be afraid you 'll be killed." He ran a hand over the smooth bark, blue-black, mottled with fragile green lichens, with no thought of its beauty. "Half rotten," he said to himself, "and it ought to go down as easily as a bulrush." And he turned away, his mind full of the fascinating way in which the bright blades of the axes would bite deep through that beautiful dark bark into the sweet-smelling white wood beneath; of how the chips would scatter and fly, and lie like creamy shreds of ivory underfoot; of the tremor that would seem to shake the neighbouring woods at the sound of the falling of the tree.

CHAPTER II.

The Fall of the Tree.

Next morning the year had grown perceptibly older; or so it seemed to Stephanie, as she stood in the doorway of the log-cabin, looking across the misty clearing to the golden forests that encircled it. The fallen leaves looked browner, each furred at the edge with a delicate fringe of h.o.a.r-frost; and the newly risen sun strove as yet in vain to send some heat through the faint, cold haze. It was more penetratingly chill than if it had been the drier winter time. Stephanie snuggled into her little gray shawl with a keen appreciation of its rough warmth, and watched her breath floating as tiny silver clouds in the almost motionless air.

She was a tall, strong girl, with an unexpectedly plaintive face--a quaint, dark-eyed face which suited well with her quaint foreign name.

Already she looked older than d.i.c.k, for her eyes were grave, and her mouth had taken a firm, responsible curve; it was a look which comes sometimes to motherless girls who have men-folk to manage and care for.

The room behind her was neat and clean, but almost bare of even such comforts as might have been found in pioneer homes. Here and there some little stool or shelf showed that her brother's deft fingers had been at work; but in this as in most things he lacked the steadiness of application which would have served to better their lot. And Captain Underwood was a broken man, plunged in a lethargy of remorse and disappointment which threatened never to lighten. Since her mother's death, life would have been almost unendurable to Stephanie had it not been for two things: these were the pa.s.sionate affection existing between herself and d.i.c.k, and her intense love for and kinship with nature. All her scanty hours of idleness she spent roaming about the clearing or the edge of the forest--she knew the haunts of every weed and flower for a mile around. In the winter, flocks of little hungry birds were her pensioners, and it is likely that she would have seriously diminished their own stores in feeding them, had not d.i.c.k collected berries and wild rice and seeds in the fall as a provision for emergencies.

On this keen autumn morning there were very few birds about; the robins had flown, and the owls were going to bed; far away some noisy crows wheeled and cawed above the trees, but no longer could Stephanie hear the innumerable small twitterings and tentative songs of a morning in the summer. The forest was very silent. Indeed, the only sound that broke the half-awakened quietness was the distant thud and throb of axes biting deep into the trunk of a tree.

It was a curiously insistent sound, that seemed to claim more notice than it was worth. Very clearly on the clear air was borne the noise of every blow, and occasionally a faint crack as of a blade being wrenched away. It forced itself on Stephanie's attention, growing louder and fainter as slight breaths of wind moved the hazy air, but never ceasing in its continual, irregular thud--thud; thud--thud. Her father and d.i.c.k were chopping down the half-dead pine; she could distinguish the difference between the weight of their respective strokes.

Half unconsciously she listened. There was no cessation in the dull noise; and to her it seemed full of threat and menace. She fancied that the other trees must be shaking all their remaining leaves in fear that a like fate might befall them, and she hoped that d.i.c.k had remembered to chase the chipmunk out of his hole. The chipmunk had been a friend of hers, and she used to drop acorns at the foot of the tree where he might find them. Vaguely she wondered whether she would recognise the little fellow again if she saw him in some other tree, and concluded that it was scarcely possible. While all the time the thud--thud of the axes seemed to weave itself into a sort of irregular accompaniment to her wandering thoughts. And then suddenly she was aware that it had stopped, and that a brief silence had once more fallen over the golden woods and the hazy field of corn.

The silence was broken by a sharp crack. Then a series of small tearing, rushing, rending sounds ended in a mighty crash. Stephanie knew that the tree was down, and an odd little feeling of regret came over her; once more there was a moment of utter silence. Then, sharp and keen and terribly distinct, she heard a wild cry from d.i.c.k.

She had run down the garden almost before that cry ceased to ring in the air, and now she fled over the rough ground outside with as swift and sure a step as a young deer might use. Her face was grey and drawn with the sense of coming disaster, but neither her feet nor her breath failed her as she breasted the low rise of ground, slippery with pine needles, which lay between her and the place from which that cry had come.

As she gained the crest of the hill, she staggered back a step and almost fell, but recovered and ran on, though for a minute she was blind and deaf and scarcely conscious.

The pine, shorn of its few branches, lay upon the ground, and near the stump lay her father, with d.i.c.k kneeling beside him. When her sight came back to her, she found that she also was kneeling there, staring stupidly at her brother's agonised face, and at the great branch torn from a neighbouring maple, which told all the terrible tale. Somewhere in the silent woods a chipmunk chattered shrilly, and she wondered when it would stop, for the noise hurt her head. Someone seemed to be saying drearily over and over again, "What are we to do? What are we to do?" and she felt angry with the momentous question. Surely silence was the only fitting thing.

Then her senses seemed suddenly to wake into painful life again, and she stood up and looked about in dry-eyed desperation. That her father was seriously injured she knew, for the branch had struck him at the base of the head. But he appeared to be still living; and what were they to do for the best? A feeling of their utter loneliness swept over her, bringing back that other irremediable loss of two years ago.

Once more she knelt in the rustling leaves, sobbing her heart out.

"Oh, mother!" she cried, "oh, mother, mother, mother!"

The words held the most pa.s.sionate prayer she had ever prayed in her life. And presently she rose to her feet again, with dimmed eyes and trembling lips, but strong to do and to endure. She seemed almost to have grown a woman in that moment, and unconsciously she took the lead, though she was the younger of the two.

"d.i.c.k," she said steadily, "go and harness Murphy. We must take father to the Collinsons."

d.i.c.k stumbled off blindly to do her bidding. Murphy was the one lean ox who had done all their carting and ploughing; and before long the boy came back again, driving the slow brute in the clumsy, creaking ox-cart. Between them they managed to draw their father up two inclined boards until his inert body rested safely in the cart; and then fleet-footed Stephanie ran back to the cabin for all the coverings and pillows in their poor store. Before half-an-hour had pa.s.sed, the clumsy conveyance was creaking down the rough old Indian trail which led by many windings to the Collinson homestead, bearing the unconscious Captain, while d.i.c.k and Stephanie walked beside, urging Murphy to his best pace. Their hearts were sick with dread; motherless they had been for two years--were they now to be fatherless also?

It had all been so terribly sudden they had scarcely time to think, but it was the best thing they could do. At the Collinson homestead their father would be certain to receive the tenderest care, and perhaps medical attendance if things turned out fortunately. But would they ever get him alive over those long, jolting miles? The same fear was in the eyes of each as they looked at one another.

They were never to reach their journey's end. Before long the Captain began slowly to regain consciousness, and his first question was a faintly-uttered "What's this? Where are you taking me?"

They told him, with white, anxious faces bending over the rough sides of the cart, while Murphy tried to reach a tempting bit of green gra.s.s under the trees. But the injured man shook his head. "It is no use, my dears," he said feebly, "another two miles would kill me at once.

And I must die where she died, for I cannot recover. Stephanie"--it was curious how he turned from the elder child to his younger--"Stephanie, take me back! Promise to take me back!"

Who could have withstood the pitiful appeal in his eyes? With aching hearts they promised, and once more he relapsed into unconsciousness, muttering fragments of old orders which he had given as captain of the great merchantman Theseus, in the long ago days. They looked at each other in miserable helplessness.

d.i.c.k broke the wretched silence. "Stephanie," he said, "you must take him home again, and I must go on to the Collinsons--for if he will not be taken to help, help must be brought to him. I shall be able to take two or three short cuts, and they will ride or drive back with me, so it won't be so very long. But oh, my dear, I do hate to leave you!"

Stephanie shook her head. "We are thinking of him now," she said quietly, and without another word turned Murphy round. With a last hurried look, d.i.c.k plunged rapidly into the bushes at the side of the trail, and she could hear the rustling of his footsteps growing fainter in the distance. Then began the weary journey home again.