ONCE, years ago, when I was a lad, in an old volume of poems in my father’s library I came across a steel engraving of a beautiful woman. She had a small head with raven black tresses bound smoothly about her brow with a fillet, but twisted back over her ears and ending in ringlets over her shoulders. She had big dark eyes, a tiny mouth, a slim white throat, and infinitesimally small hands and feet. Her name was Haidee. I think her feet fascinated me most; for she wore shoes unlike any I had ever seen, ending in high curving points at the toes. She was a most distracting, elusive personality.
When my wonder woman placed her foot in my palm, and mounted her mare at my meadow bars, to myself I muttered: “Haidee.” So, the following morning, in answer to Joey’s query: “What’s her name, Mr. David?” I answered “Haidee,” and grinned at the lad sheepishly through the smoke that arose from the griddle I was greasing with bacon rind.
Joey, giving the cake batter in the yellow pitcher furtive sly dabs with the iron spoon when he thought me unaware, looked grave.
“It don’t sound nice. It sounds like that name you say sometimes—”
“Ssh!”
“When you’re mad,” finished Joey adroitly.
I shoved the stove lid into place beneath the hot griddle, and motioned to Joey to bring the yellow pitcher. While I poured out the foamy batter, Joey kept silence, watching the sizzling process with fascinated eyes, but when I took the pancake-turner in hand and opened the window to let the smoke escape, he spoke again:
“It’s bad for her, ain’t it, having a name like that?”
“It isn’t her real name, Joey. It’s a name I bestowed upon her. It seemed to belong to her someway. We shall never see her again, so it does not matter.”
“We’ll see her again, Mr. David, if she buys Russell’s old ranch.”
I paused midway to the table, the cake-turner heaped with steaming cakes in my hand. I stared at Joey. Curiously I’d forgotten the possibility of Haidee becoming my neighbor. My wrist trembled, the cakes slipped to the floor. Joey pounced upon them, bore them to the sink and rinsed them painstakingly in the pail of fresh spring water.
“I like cold cakes,” he was saying manfully, when I awoke to the situation.
“So does the collie. No, no, lad—we may not be living in affluence, but we don’t have to economize on corn cakes.” I laughed boisterously and patted his shoulder. “My cedar chests are selling, and my book—my nature story—is almost completed—why, soon we shall be turning up our noses at flapjacks!”
“At flapjacks!” Joey cried incredulously, making a dash for the yellow pitcher.
We were half through breakfast before he spoke again, and then he ventured tentatively: “Suppose she’ll come to-day?”
“Who, Joey?”
“Her—the—woman. The one that made me swear when I saw her in the workshop.”
“Oh, I’d forgotten your behaviour in the shop, Joey! It was reprehensible—it was rude—”
Joey nodded. “I forgot I was a human bein’.”
He put his elbows on the table, sunk his chin in his hands, and regarded me. I raised my coffee-cup hurriedly, drained the contents, and coughed spasmodically, Joey’s eyes widening in concern.
Two days after this conversation with Joey, as, butterfly-net in hand, I was crossing the ploughed field back of the cabin at noon returning from a collecting trip, I saw the bent figure of a man approaching along the river road. He carried a sack of flour on his back and he walked with his head so far forward that his chin almost touched his knees. I was feeling particularly jubilant, having taken four Electas, six Zerenes and two specimens of Breuner’s Silver-spot, and I accosted him lustily: “Good day, Lundquist.”
He attempted to straighten up, found the effort of no avail, and nodded. I rested on the bars and he came slowly toward me. His red face was so knotted and twisted that his very eyes seemed warped askew beneath his ugly freckled forehead. His old hands were horny and purple-veined, his legs spindling and bowed. Poor old derelict! Hapless, hard old man! He lived high up on Nigger Head mountain alone with the birds and squirrels. How he subsisted was a mystery. But he always had tobacco to smoke, and a corn-cob pipe to smoke it in. This fact comforted me, when I fell to musing on his meagre estate.
“It’s a fine day, Lundquist,” I continued.
He came closer, halted, and peered up at me.
“Ya, it ban.”
“Been to town?”
“Ya—I been to town.” He took his old black pipe from his mouth and crept closer. “Last night,” he stuttered, in his rasping broken accent, “last night I saw a light, Mr. Dale—a light—down thar.”
He pointed with his pipe-stem over his shoulder.
“A light? Do you mean you saw a light from your cabin?”
“Ya—in the old shack on Hidden Lake.” He chuckled. “Thar been no light thar fer three year. The wood-rats they eat up the furniture ole Russell leave. Place sold—maybe?”
I saw Joey watching me miserably during dinner. I ate like an automaton, and never once did I speak. Afterward it was no better. I took my book and sat on a bench outside the cabin. Joey’s voice soaring high above the rattle of the dishes in the sink; a red-shafted flicker hammering noisily on a pine tree before the door, saluting me with his “kee-yer, kee-yer”; the whistle of the Georgie Oaks at the draw-bridge, were all heard as in a dream. I was back in the workshop with Haidee, I heard her eager question: “There is a place I may buy, then?” I tried to picture to myself Russell’s old cabin metamorphosed by that radiant presence. It required a daring stretch of the imagination to vision anything so improbable.
The valley which lies like an emerald-green jewel in the very lap of the mountains in this section of Idaho, is watered by innumerable streams which it seems presumptuous to call rivers, and honeycombed with tiny blue lakes, their entrance from the rivers so concealed by tangles of birches and high green thickets and clumps of underbrush that their existence is practically unknown, save to the settlers along the adjacent rivers and to a few zealous sportsmen who make portages from lake to lake, dragging their canoes across the intervening marshes and of the Georgie Oaks likens the shadowy St. Joe and the equally shadowy but more obscure Cœur meadow-land. The tourist sitting on the deck d’Alene river to the Rhine, and bemoans the absence of storied castles, never dreaming of the chain of jeweled lakes that lies just beyond.
It was on the most cleverly hidden of these lakes that Russell’s cabin stood. Years before I had paddled down the river and contrived to find the lead. But the thickets were still deeper now, and I doubted my ability to find the narrow aperture. Toward the middle of the afternoon, therefore, I threw the saddle on Buttons, and rode away beneath the fragrant yews, seeking the trail that skirted the mountain.
The day was fair, the sky a soft azure, and the wheat fields rippled in a sultry breeze; but as I left the trail and descended through a boscage of cedars and scrub pines, following the damp clay path to Hidden Lake, I shivered in spite of the warmth of the day. And when I rode through the rushes that grew as high as a man’s head, and emerged on the cozy grey beach, and gazed across the deep blue, unnatural quiet of the water, I was weighted down by a weird depression. I felt suddenly like a puny thing, shaken with the knowledge of my own mutability. A bittern rose up from the tules, flapped its wings and gave its honking note of desolation; a flock of terns on a piece of driftwood emitted raucous cries. Russell’s cabin stood before me, weather-beaten, warped, and unsightly; moss on the roof, bricks falling from the chimney, the door steps rotted, the small porch sagging.
I slid off my cayuse and stood contemplating the ravages about me. Not a sound came from the cabin. Presently, I gathered my courage sufficiently to mount the steps and knock with the butt of my whip on the slatternly door that stood ajar. I received no response. I waited. The bittern in the tules gave its pumping call, “pumper-lunk, pumper-lunk,” and the hollow rushes droned suddenly in the wind like ghoulish piccolos. I pushed open the door without further ado and looked within.
I saw a small room, dust-covered and cob-web frescoed. The floor was littered with refuse, the fireplace held a bank of gray ashes, the home-made furniture had fallen a prey to the savage onslaughts of wood-rats. A damp and disagreeable odor permeated the air. “Surely she has not been here,” I said to myself.
I stepped to a door at the further end of the room, turned the wobbly knob, peered within, and shrank back, confounded at what I saw.
The light was streaming in through a window that had been recently washed and polished until it shown, over a floor freshly scoured. A small white-draped dressing table with all a woman’s dainty toilet paraphernalia met my prying eyes; a small cot gleamed fresh and spotless in a corner; and on every chair, and ranged on the floor around the room, were canvases of various sizes with tantalizing impressionistic bits of the outdoor world painted upon them, while streaming from an open trunk and overflowing in sumptuous, foamy sensuousness to the crude pine floor was the lingerie of a fastidious woman.
I took myself out of the house post-haste, threw myself into my saddle, and plunged away into the enveloping shadows of the cedar thicket. That night I climbed up Nigger Head almost to old Lundquist’s very door. I cast my eyes down in the direction of Hidden Lake. I saw a small red light gleaming there. I lay down on a ledge of rock and watched the light, watched it until toward midnight it disappeared, the wind came up with a soughing sound, the tall pines creaked and swayed above my head, and I walked down the mountain—the rain in my face.