ALL night the rain pelted furiously against my window, and the wind blew a hurricane, roaring in the pine trees, maundering in my chimney, and rattling the loose casements. In the morning the rain had ceased. The sky was massed with black clouds, but streaks of blue glimmered here and there, and there was a glorious rainbow.
“Oh, Mr. David,” Joey shouted, hanging on my arm as I opened the front door, “the sky looks like a Bible picture!” But I was thinking of Haidee and wondering how she had borne the storm, alone on the shore of that black melancholy lake, through all the devastating night. A huge pine tree lay uprooted across the path, the serviceberry bushes were stripped bare of bloom, and a cottonwood growing on the river bank sprawled, a shattered giant, bathing its silver head in the water.
I evaded Joey, slipped around to the tool-shed, and taking my ax and crosscut saw, mounted my cayuse and rode stealthily away. When I got within sight of the cabin on Hidden Lake, I looked around me fearfully. Smoke was coming from the chimney, and the cabin seemed unscathed. And then I saw that one of the towering pine trees in the draw adjacent had fallen, and in falling had barely grazed the lean-to. The cabin had miraculously escaped.
I rode around to the rear of the cabin and knocked with my whip on the closed door. A figure rose up suddenly out of the bracken by the spring and came to my horse’s head. A figure in a crumpled red cape, with big startled tired eyes, and pale cheeks.
“I have come to cut down every tree that endangers the cabin,” I announced grimly.
She looked at me, brushed her disordered hair back from her eyes, attempted to speak, and failing, dropped her head forward against the horse’s neck and stood with face hidden.
“I came as soon as I could,” I continued, brooding above the wonderful bent head with its heavy ringlets of hair.
A sound unintelligible answered me. I sat there awkwardly, scarcely knowing what was expected of me. Presently she moved, looked up at me, and smiled. Her purple-black eyes were dewy. Standing there in her jaunty cape and short skirt, with her opulent hair unbound and sweeping her shoulders, she might have been a timid schoolgirl; and suddenly I lost my awe of her, though my admiration deepened.
“Were you alone through all that brute of a storm?”
“Yes.”
I got off my horse, and she took the bridle from my hand.
“I shall have to get a woman to stay with me,” she said slowly.
“An elderly woman?”
“No! No! A young woman—a strapping country girl with boisterous spirits,” she protested, an odd husky catch in her voice.
I revolved this in my mind. “Wanza Lyttle is the very one for you,” I declared jubilantly. Then I added uncertainly: “That is, if she will come.”
“And who is Wanza Lyttle?”
“Oh, Wanza is a wonderful girl,” I answered, warming to my part. “She drives a peddler’s cart. I’ve no doubt she will call on you. There never was such a peddler’s cart as Wanza’s, I’ll give you my word. It has a green umbrella with a pink lining, and two green wheels with pink spokes, and Wanza’s buckskin pony is never without a green paper rosette for his harness—”
“You’re not telling me much about Wanza, after all,” Haidee interrupted, opening her velvet eyes wide, and favoring me with an odd glance.
“Oh, but I am, I am going on to tell you that Wanza lined the green umbrella herself, and painted her cart. She is very capable. She makes cherry pies that melt in your mouth. And her tatting!—you should see her tatting.”
“It’s on all her dresses, I suppose?”
“It is. And her dresses are pink and starchy. Yes,” I ended, “Wanza is very capable, indeed—” I hesitated. It was awkward not knowing what to call my wonder woman.
“My name is Judith Batterly,” she said quietly, seeing my hesitation—“Mrs. Batterly. I am a widow.”
A turbulent tide of crimson swept up to her brow as she spoke. Her eyes sought the ground. There was a silence. The sun had forsaken its nest of feathery clouds and all the shy woodland things began to prink and preen. A flycatcher ruffled its olive plumage on an old stump in the spring, a blue jay jargoned stridently. Above our heads tiny butterflies floated—an iridescent, turquoise cloud. A fragrant steam arose from the damp earth.
As the sound of my trusty ax rang through the woods, and I chopped and sawed with a will all through the morning, I asked myself what it mattered to me whether Haidee were maid, wife or widow. I asked myself this, over and over again, and I did not answer my own question.
By noon I was hot, streaming with perspiration, and covered with chips and sawdust. I was inspecting a symmetrical, soaring white fir-tree that towered some fifty feet distant from the cabin, when a voice behind me cried: “No, no!” so peremptorily, that I started.
I turned to see Haidee standing there. She had looped up the masses of her black hair, and discarded the scarlet cape for a white corduroy jacket. A white duck skirt gave her an immaculate appearance.
“I want that fir left,” she explained.
“Your cabin is in jeopardy while it stands,” I assured her.
“Oh, I’ll take the risk,” she said carelessly.
“It is foolish to take a risk,” I countered.
She smiled. “Are all woodsmen as cautious as you?”
Now, I am convinced she was only bantering me, but I chose to take offense. I looked at her cool daintiness, and met her level gaze with shifting sullen eyes. I was unpleasantly aware of the figure I presented, with my grimy hands and soiled clothing, and red, streaming face. I reached for my handkerchief, remembered that I had lent it to Joey, and used the back of my hand, instead, to wipe my beaded forehead.
“It is sometimes fortunate for the new-comer that we woodsmen are before-handed,” I said pointedly.
At this, a stain of carmine crept into the flawless face. Resentment deepened in her eyes. “Thank you for your morning’s work, my man,” she said, as if to an inferior. “How much do I owe you?”
A vast slow anger shook me. I saw her through hot eyes. I did not answer. She lifted her shoulders with a forebearing shrug, and tendered me a coin on a palm that was like a pink rose petal. I snatched at the coin. I sent it spinning into the buck brush. And I turned on my heel.
“When you want that tree felled, send for old Lundquist back on Nigger Head. He’s the man you want,” I growled, jerking my thumb over my shoulder.
By the time I reached Cedar Dale, I was overcome with chagrin and remorse at my uncouth behavior. The more so, when on dismounting I turned Buttons over to Joey’s eager hands; for in the saddle-bag Joey discovered a small flat parcel addressed: “To the boy who goes to Sunday School.” The parcel contained peppermints of a kind Joey had never encountered before, and a gaily striped Windsor tie between the leaves of a book of rhymes.
Each night after that I climbed Nigger Head and lay on my ledge of basaltic rock and watched the light down on Hidden Lake. Each time the wind came up in the night, I turned uneasily on my pillow and thought of Haidee alone in that ramshackle cabin. And I worried not a little over that white fir that towered there, sentinel like, but menacing her safety.
Joey surprised me one day with the information that he had been to Hidden Lake.
“I took Jingles—the collie. Jingles carried the basket,” he added.
“What basket?” I asked sharply, looking up from the flute I was making for Joey out of a bit of elder.
“The basket with the strawberries.”
I knew of course they were berries from my vines, that were unusually flourishing for that season of the year, but I continued:
“What strawberries, Joey?”
Joey’s honest eyes never wavered. He smiled at me, pursed his lips, and attempted a whistle.
“I’m most sure I saw a little brown owl fly out of a hole in the ground last night, Mr. David,” he ventured, giving over the whistling after a time. “Do owls burrow in holes—like rabbits?”
“What strawberries, Joey?” I repeated perseveringly.
“Our strawberries—mine and yours. I put green salmon berry leaves in the basket. Jingles carried it so careful! Never spilled a berry.”
I stroked the shaggy head at my knee. “He’s a good old fuss pup. Aren’t you, Jingles?”
“That’s what she said, Mr. David. I sat on her porch a whole hour. She asked the most questions.” Joey reflected. “People always ask boys questions.”
“Do they, Joey?”
“Gracious—goodness! I should say so! She asked me what I was agoing to be when I grow up. I told her—” Joey came over to my knee and stroked the flute in my hand caressingly.
“I told her,” he took his hand away and looked at me slyly, “I told her I was agoing to be a fixing man like you.”