BRIAN SOLVES A PROBLEM

To Brian had come a problem of his own. His vagabond days were nearly over. Now with the wind cool at twilight and the dawns sharp, the two wayfarers, lean and brown as gypsies, were tramping back over the trail of the summer, finding old fires and the delight of reminiscence.

"Don," said Brian one twilight as they swung along in the dust of a country road, "if I'm not mistaken back yonder is the field where you barked for a summer show. Man alive," he added with a laugh, "how you did bark! Now with a summerful of health in your system and your voice full of fresh air, I could understand it, but then! Honestly, old top, I didn't know it was in you!"

The boy looked up and laughed.

"It wasn't," he said with utter truth. "You told me I could do it and I--I just did."

"I knew you could do it!" said Brian with the vigor of confidence that had made the boy his slave. "Still, when you unleashed that first roar and the crowd began to collect, I confess I thought you'd busted something vital and were yelling for help."

Don glanced at this clothes. The summer show had freed him from the mended rags he hated. Shirt and trousers, hat and shoes were as near like Brian's as they could be. So was the coat upon his arm and the knapsack on his back.

"Whenever you tell me I can do a thing," he said, "and hang around to see me do it, I can always somehow seem to make myself do it. Look!"

he broke off with a boyish grin, pointing at a farmhouse on a distant hill. "There's the farm where you threw the can of whitewash at the farmer when he swore at his wife for dropping the eggs and threatened to lick her. Wasn't he a sight!"

"He was!" admitted Brian. "And wasn't he mad? If he hadn't been a coward he would have licked me instead. As it was, I never fully understood why his wife shied an egg at me. However, that's all rather a shady part of my past. I'm not reminding you of the self-winding blunderbuss you got in part payment for chopping wood, am I? Or that it went off by itself and shot a cabbage?"

Laughing they struck off into a twilight stretch of woods, found a familiar clearing near a spring and made a fire.

"Well," said Brian when the fire was down to embers, "what's the schedule? You're road manager this week. What do we eat?"

"Sausages," said Donald, unloading his pockets. "A can of macaroni and an apple pie."

"You disgraceful kid!" exclaimed Brian. "Whenever you get into a country store without a guard you kick over the traces and appear with something in your pocket that busts a road rule and obligates me to a sermon when I hate 'em. Pie, my son, is effete and civilized. It's like feeding cream puffs to a wandering Arab. You're apt to make him stop his Arabing and hang around the spot where the cream puff grows.

However, now that you've brought the thing into camp, it would be improvident not to eat it. What am I, Don, wood-scout or cook?"

"Cook," said Donald. "All day," he added, "you've been limping."

Brian made a fence of forked twigs, hung the sausages up to toast, opened the can of macaroni and set it in the embers. That Don had noticed the limp gratified him immensely, even though it had been a mere and prosaic matter of a blistered heel.

Whistling softly, he watched the boy gather wood. Well, thank G.o.d! he was as unlike that white-faced moody lad who had stumbled into his Tavern of Stars as a boy could be. He whistled a good deal. He was as slim as a sapling, the slimness of muscle and health. His eyes were clear and boyish. And there was color in his face. Best of all, to Brian's mind, after the first sullen period of readjustment he had worked his own salvation and reverted by wholesome instinct to boyhood with its inexhaustible animal vigor, its gaucheries and its boisterous minutes of frolic heretofore denied. Now save for the hours by the camp fire when he pa.s.sionately blurted out again and again the tale of his rebellion until Brian knew his life as he knew the weather-lore of the open road, he seemed ever on the verge of laughter.

Brian smiled. Attuned to the mood he summed up the achievement of his own summer. The brawn of splendid health and a clear head! For the one he could thank his gypsying; for the other, in a measure, he could thank the boy.

In the lonely hours before he came with his problems there had been solitude less soothing than Brian had expected. There has been an inclination to smoke and brood and nurse certain sentimental misgivings about Kenny when the fire was low and the owls hooting in the forest.

After, mercifully--for they might have driven him back to sunsets--there had been no time. The life of another had made its demand and sympathy with Brian was never pa.s.sive. Impossible somehow not to romp with the young savage yonder rejoicing in his freedom, with even work a lark! Impossible not to laugh with him, fight out his battles with him and surrender with a sigh of content to the weariness and hunger of a caveman!

If now with autumn at hand the fortunes of the road had in them a grain more of hardship and less of romance, it was to be expected. Brian had tramped to his goal. The staleness was gone. It was time to be up and off, seeking Whitaker.

A sausage burst its casing with an appetizing sizzle and leaped, it seemed of its own accord, into suicidal embers. Brian rescued it with a stick and looked up. Don had come back with the wood.

"It's fall," said Brian. "The wind's full of it to-night. Last night I was cold."

"So was I," said Don. Brian thought he looked a little out-of-sorts.

"It narrows down to two things," said Brian, fishing in his pocket for some forks and spoons. "Either we must acquire another blanket or two or get a job and sleep under cover until--"

The boy's imploring eyes upset him. Brian turned a charred sausage and sighed. There was his problem, he knew: Don and his future. And they were barely twenty miles away from his uncle's farm.

"Remember the mountain quarry somewhere over there to the west?" he asked. "Suppose we hike over there in the morning and see if they need some brawny arms to help 'em crush stone. Seems to me there were a lot of shacks up back of it on the mountain. We could live in one of them."

"Yes."

"What's the matter?"

"Oh," said Don with an effort, "I'm a little blue. I suppose it's the fall."

They tramped west in the morning and climbed a winding road. The quarry lay ahead in the rocky wall of a mountain.

"Lord, what an out-of-the world spot!" exclaimed Brian in dismay.

"Don, you thought we were getting too close to your uncle's farm but n.o.body'd find us here. I suspect they have to build shacks to keep the men contented. That basin of stone looks as if it had been gouged out of the mountainside by the hand of a giant."

A drill-runner was shouting to a man with a red flag as Brian climbed into the pit. The flagman waved him back. A second later a dull blast shook the quarry, earth and stone crumbled out of a fissure in the cliff ahead, and the suspended labor of men awaiting the t.i.tan aid of inanimate force, turned to noise and bustle.

"Hum!" said Brian, glinting, "mostly dago labor. Well, that doesn't need to worry us, does it? You stay here, Don, while I find the boss."

Don obeyed. Derricks hung above the cars upon the spur track. Farther back a screen revolved and sorted stone. Men were feeding the crusher and men were busy at the drills but the boy's eyes, with an instinct for adventure, followed a man who drove a mule-cart along an overhanging ledge above the pit. The task held for him a fearful fascination.

"Needs men to load cars," announced Brian coming back, "and feed the crusher. In quarry caste I imagine that's about at the bottom. The shacks are furnished and four of them are empty. We can take our pick.

What do you say?"

"Whatever you say," said Don.

"Well," said Brian, "to tell you the truth, I have the keys."

The quarry, he fancied as he climbed the path to the cl.u.s.ter of shacks, would solve his problem for him and when the time was ripe he would have his say.

The time ripened with frost in the morning and a harvest moon at night; and Brian had failed to have his say. A letter came from John Whitaker definite in detail and a shade impatient. Why was he loitering when G.o.d's green world of spring had turned to autumn? Was he still stale and thinking wrong?

Brian set his lips to his task and spoke.

"Don," he said one night when the dishes were washed, the shack swept and the lamp lighted, "I've been thinking a lot about you and what you're going to do this winter."

The boy, who had been sparring with a kitten that had strayed into the shack the day before, rose abruptly.

"You say you won't write to your sister until you've made good?"

"It isn't just that," stammered Donald, changing color. "I--I don't dare. She'd beg me to come back--"

Brian nodded.

"Yes," he said. "I know the feeling."

"And I won't go back!" flung out Donald pa.s.sionately. "I won't go back. I simply can't."

"It's better," said Brian sensibly, "if you don't. For a number of reasons. But you must do something. I mean something with the future in view."

"Yes."