3stalwarts (105 page)

He crawled back into the manger.

Brackett’s jaw dropped.

“I don’t think it’s nice, Harrow. It wasn’t honest.”

“He’s slick,” said the little girl, looking at Dan admiringly.

“You’re a swell man to get trade,” Johnson said to Brackett.

“It amounts to the same thing,” Brackett said. “The party bought the brown one. Where’s my per cent?”

“It was another deal,” said Johnson.

“The little fat man bought him for Harrow, and I brought Harrow here to you,” Brackett maintained, his voice rising angrily.

“Go spit in the river,” Johnson growled, and turned his back, and got out a fresh chew.

The rest moved off, Molly and Dan bringing up the rear with the two horses.

“Let’s eat lunch now,” Mrs. Gurget said. “I’m all hollowed out with hunger.”

They ate in the shed, to escape the rising wind.

“They’ll make a good team,” Berry said.

The horses were looking each other over carefully; after a while the black lifted his muzzle to the other’s ear, then they touched noses, and afterwards, when Dan grained them lightly, they ate contentedly side by side.

“What’ll we call the brown one? We named the black one Prince.”

“Call him Earl,” Solomon suggested.

“Those are good names,” Hector said nodding. “They’ll make a good team.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Gurget, starting to open the second pickle jar. “Their bones look good.”

6

THE WINTER TOGETHER

It began to snow that afternoon; it snowed all night. The next morning it was still snowing, small flakes drifting lazily through a bright sun. It stopped at noon, but the temperature sank in the first cold spell of the year. In the afternoon, word was given out at the weighlock that the canal was shutting down. Dan and Molly noticed the dropping of the water that afternoon.

The old Sarsey Sal groaned during the night, waking them, at first, until they became used to the sound. A stiff wind was drawing down the valley, and a smart ripple slapped the hull. Dan went to sleep again with the sound of it in his ears.

But later he woke suddenly, stiff in the bunk, with a cold damp on his face. He lay quite still trying to determine what was wrong. The clock in the cabin whirred and struck rapidly, three notes. Then there was dead silence in the boat. Outside he could hear the shrill whistle of the wind.

He shifted slightly, and became aware that Molly was awake, as tense as he. For an instant neither of them spoke; then he asked, “What is it, Molly?”

She did not answer.

It occurred to him that someone must have come on board. But he felt sure that he would have heard the creak of the cabin stairs; and the wind would have rattled the door. But, with the idea, Jotham Klore’s face, blackbearded, had come back into his mind, for the first time in many days.

He got up slowly, cautiously, letting his weight come gradually on each foot. Little by little he edged into the cabin. A faint moonlight, white and brittle as it was reflected from the new snow, lay in two bars across the room. In a moment he was able to pick out the familiar shapes, the chair, the stove now dead and cold, the mirror with an unreflecting pallor in it, his own hat and Molly’s coat hanging side by side on the door.

“There ain’t anyone aboard,” he said in a low voice.

In the cabin he heard Molly stirring. Presently she came out quietly, about her shoulders a pink Mother Hubbard she had recently bought, mysteriously colorless in the stillness. Her face was vague, and her light hair had acquired shadows. Only her eyes, dark and large, seemed real to Dan.

There was an unreality in the world for both of them, as if they were ghosts— they made no sound, their voices were inarticulate whisperings, like the touch of flakes against the windowpanes. They stood facing each other in a silly, breathless hush.

Then Dan drew a deep breath; and the faint food smell in it, and the cold in his lungs, reassured him. He could hear Molly’s even breathing.

“What woke you up?” he asked her.

“I don’t know.”

Her voice, too, was low. He could catch her uneasiness in the sound of the words. Again he felt a terror overwhelming him. He would have welcomed a sight of Jotham Klore opening the door and standing there with his black beard and heavy fists.

“I don’t know, Dan,” she said again, almost plaintively.

She kept her eyes on the door as if she also expected someone to come in. He knew she was afraid of Klore. He did not know how badly. Ever since he had met her coming towards him with Mrs. Gurget, the Brackett girl, and the rest at the fair, she had been uneasy, paler than usual. She had smiled to watch him with his new team, and she had gone with him to see them stabled in Butterfield’s barn back of the wharf. She had kept close to him the rest of the day. He had felt an insecurity in the old Sarsey Sal, which he dared not admit to himself.

As he stood opposite her there in the dim light, his flannel nightshirt rubbing on the backs of his ankles, he realized how pleasant she made liv-ing on the old boat. For the first time he took her into the personal account of his own life. Before, she had been a matter of course— essential to the Sarsey Sal as the rudder and the towline. Seeing her now with her deep broody eyes staring at him out of the paleness of her face, she became important to him; but it was hard to say how.

Things had come upon him since he had left the Tug Hill country. They had come by pieces, here and there, almost without his seeking; certainly without his knowing that he sought. And as each came he had a dim awareness that he had expected its arrival, as the jobs he had got, as the Sarsey Sal, as Molly Larkins. It was hard to see where they might all be fitted in.

Behind it all there had been the moving figure of Gentleman Joe, with a price upon his head, as strange to the canal as Dan himself, who seemed to keep tabs on Dan’s journeying back and forth, and who yet was followed step by step by the fat marshal, Henderson. It almost seemed as though they traveled the same road. He could not see where it would bring them out, for Gentleman Joe had Henderson to reckon with, and Dan had Jotham Klore. But for the winter, by all accounts, Henderson was out of the picture, and by all accounts Klore was also. But Molly stood in front of him, between sleeping and waking. He was puzzled. He rubbed his hair back until it stood on end, tousled and ungainly. He did not know what had waked him; Molly had said she did not know.

Then she laughed and came over to him. There was a high note in her laughter, but even so it comforted him. She led him to a window on the canal side of the cabin and stretched on tiptoe beside him to look out.

The wind was blowing swirls of snow off the roofs; a white moon glittered. It was silent but for the breath of the wind.

“See, Dan, that’s why we woke up.”

She pointed to the bed of the canal, where the low water should be lying, and he saw that it was still in the wind, with a dark unruffled lustre.

“It’s frozen over, Dan.”

“Yeanh.”

He put his arm about her and felt her draw in close to him. She was laughing to herself; he could feel her shake. But when he lifted her chin to look at her, he saw her cheeks glistening.

Now that the stillness was explained, he felt it close about them both. It had a comforting touch. He put his haunting uneasiness behind him, for though he knew that he must make up his mind about where he was to take his stand in the path sometime, and choose his way, he knew that the winter lay before them. The canal had frozen in.

They woke next morning with the run of sleigh bells in their ears. The sound had a closeness and intimacy, coming and going quickly, with no echo, that caught Dan’s ears.

“More snow coming,” he said to himself.

Molly was already stirring in the kitchen, and the smell of coffee was coming in to him, with the humming of a little tune.

“If you don’t love me, Love who you please; Throw your arms round me, Give my heart ease.”

There was plaintiveness under the light dance in the tune. Though he could not see her, the humming brought to Dan’s mind Molly’s face as he had noticed it at the horse fair— pale, anxious. And it brought back her face as he had seen it the night before, in the dark, with the winter coming in round the old boat… . Afraid— she was afraid. Jotham Klore was safely out of the way, working his team on the railroad between Rochester and Syracuse. When they had heard the news of him, Dan had covertly watched her face. He had noticed that she listened breathlessly; then she had dropped her eyes to something else. Her expression had made him think of her as he had seen her for the second time, just after she had run away from Klore, after Klore had given her her licking. He had felt, as he could feel it now, the same hot anger coming up in him, and he wanted the boater in reach of his hands. He had toughened during the fall; the easier winter would build him up. His shoulders had thickened through; he was putting on weight. Molly had noticed it in the mornings when he shaved, with his shirt hanging from his belt.

He got up and greeted her in the cabin, went up to wash. There was a grey film of cloud hanging over the roofs of the city; the morning smokes spread out under it mushroomwise. The air was quite still, but heavy to breathe. It seemed strange not to see boats stirring in the basin, not to hear horns blowing for the weighlock. Boats lay tied up to the docks, resting low down, like the Sarsey Sal, with just enough water to keep them off the bottom. Smoke came from the stovepipes of some, feebly against the grey air, and it hung low over the bed of the canal. The boats seemed sleeping— on the verge of death; and yet they were in the heart of the city, which was full of life, going about with its accustomed activity, on its morning chores. The sounds of wagons on the docks were muffled; there were few now, anyway. But across the canal Dan caught glimpses, between the warehouses, of city bucks racing their trotters in cutters up and down Canal Street. They went by with a flash of bright red and silver, and a jingling of bells that burst out and faded away all up and down beside the course of the canal. And a smell of more snow coming hung over the city.

As he shaved in the cabin, he caught glimpses of Molly out of the tail of his eye in the mirror. Once or twice he surprised her watching him with a speculative glance, doubtful; the same expression he had seen upon her at the fair. It worried him; he wondered what she was afraid of, with Klore out in Rochester.

The second time he caught the look on her face, he asked her flatly, “What’s bothering you, Molly?”

And she said, “What would be bothering me?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

She brought up a smile for him.

“You hadn’t ought to talk till you’ve had breakfast.”

He looked at her awhile, till the bright color came up to her cheeks, and she busied herself with the dishes on the table. She was wearing a bright pink gingham with short sleeves and a low neck, and she needed color to set it off.

“Ain’t you going to get harness for your team?”

“Yeanh,” he said, buttoning his shirt. “Sol knows a man. I’ll take them round with him.”

“I like them,” she said. “I like the black one with his big white nose.”

“He’s a good horse,” Dan nodded. “But he’s got an awful thin hide. I’d ought to have some hemlock syrup to rub his shoulders with till he gets hardened up.”

“I’ll make some to-day,” she said.

His mind full of the team, he ate his breakfast quickly.

“When will you commence hauling up to Goldbrook?” Molly asked.

“First of the week, I expect. There ought to be good snow then.”

The team went well. As soon as he had seen them making friends in the shed off the fair grounds, Dan had said to Molly, “I could take them just as they be and win a prize in a ploughing match.” He could believe it himself, now, watching them walk. Their stride was so well matched that they kept step as a natural thing. They would, he felt sure, turn in two miles better than the bays in their trick on the towline, for all the others appeared to move faster.

The bays were ahead now, drawing Solomon’s sleigh, and on the down grades they broke into a smart trot and drew away from Dan. But on the up grades the long, even-tracking stride of the big team caught up with them, and, looking round, Solomon would see their noses close to the tail of his sleigh.

They pulled without strain, though they were hauling by far the heavier load, close to two tons; they gave no evidence of the weight at all in their even stride; only the puckers in their haunches showed deep. Dan did not need to hold the lines. After the first mile he kept his hands inside his coat; and Solomon, watching them over his shoulder, called back, “See them keep a sight on where they’re going. After a couple of trips you won’t hardly need to be on the sled.”

The little man had the horse blankets round his knees, and he wore a horsehide coat with the high collar turned up. Even when he turned round, all Dan could see of him was his thin nose, red as a strawberry, poked between the edges of the collar, with a white patch of frost under it, and his protuberant blue eyes, water-dimmed with cold.

Crouching behind the barrier of boxes and barrels he had constructed round his seat, Dan had nothing to do but watch the sky and the woods. The scrunch of the travois runners on the snow, the insistent, light jingle of the trace chains, the squeak as the bobs tracked round a turn, merged into an unheard monotone. As even as their stride, the breaths of the team spouted in four puffs ahead and whitened on their withers.

The road led them past farms, at first, and then into the woods round the base of Deerfield Hill. At times they tracked over corduroy stretches. And once they crossed a small brook on a high narrow bridge, from which the woods had drawn back, so that on a dark night it would almost be invisible.

It was slow going, and on windy days, with the temperature way down, Dan let the team drive themselves, and made it his business to keep warm. He had nothing to do but think of the warm comfortable evenings in the Sarsey Sal. Three nights a week he stayed in the camps, hauling out from Utica three days and three days hauling in. But three nights he spent aboard the boat and he had his Sundays off.