Читать книгу Rocking Moon - Barrett Willoughby - Страница 7

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Gary Tynan watched Sasha leave the float and run up the sloping beach toward the ranch-house. Though he had not consciously given any thought to the girl Colonel Jeff had mentioned as his employer, he had been vaguely prepared for a tall, Amazonian type of woman, dressed in khaki trousers, perhaps, which too snugly defined ponderous hips. It surprised him that this daughter of Alaska, this owner of Rocking Moon, should be so young, and so small and slender. The tumbled, copper-shadowed hair that crowned her head, reached hardly to his shoulder as she stood beside him. When she looked up at him he became suddenly and acutely conscious of his unshaved face and the old smock that had dried on him in wrinkles which made it look even more disreputable than it was. What a bearded barbarian he must seem to her! He stood looking after her, one hand tentatively feeling his jaw. Thank heaven the lump had subsided, anyway!

As he shouldered a gunny-sack of fox-meal he promised himself that he'd borrow the Colonel's razor at the first opportunity, and use it.

"Where to, now, Chief?" He turned to his companion.

Colonel Jeff was engaged in getting a can of beef scraps to his shoulder. "To the barn, my boy. To the barn," he replied with unintentional metrical effect, as he led the way off the float to the beach. "We'll pack all the fox-food up there, and then take the grub to the house."

Gary followed him along the trail that led through a stretch of rice-grass until it turned abruptly at right angles into a small grove of alders lying between the house and the barn. Lettuce-green ferns spread delicate fronds under the trees and clustered about a circle of gravel, which formed the base of a primitive shower just off the path. He stopped a moment to look at it. Thrust up from the center of the clean white stones was a seven-foot pipe with a curve at the top. Beneath the curve hung a perforated iron kettle such as the early trading companies used to supply their sea-otter hunters for trying out seal oil. The water, not entirely turned off, fell musically into the kettle and dripped on the gravel below.

As Gary walked on he became aware of a silvery tinkle so faint at first he thought he must have been mistaken. But it stirred again; and again it was repeated, thin, illusive, lovely.

"Do I hear bells, Colonel, or don't I?" he asked finally.

"You do, my boy. They're the tree-bells Sasha has strung about here in the alders. See ... there's one of 'em on that branch yonder. No bigger than a robin's egg. One of the Larianoffs was a captain in the fleet of commerce that took cargoes of Alaskan furs and ivory to China and came back with tea in the old days of the Russian occupation. He brought those little silver bells back from Korea once for his sweetheart—oh, I reckon it must have been all of seventy-five years ago. Kind of a pretty notion, eh? Tree-bells? Sasha says they bring good fortune and happiness."

Gary caught a silver gleam among the green of the leaves. Tree-bells from Korea! Tree-bells from some exotic garden of the Orient swaying in the wild alders beside the cabin of an Alaskan girl! How alien, he thought, yet how subtly enchanting was this cobweb thread of sound speaking of the far East here on the shores of a Northern sea. Not even a poet's imagination could have conceived such a thing. He felt as if he were playing a part in a quaint romance staged in some lovely, lonely spot the like of which a man might search the world over and never come upon again.... Suddenly there stirred in him an appreciation, a realization of the witchery and wonder of life—a feeling which he, in his state of post-war disillusionment, had thought forever lost to him. True, it was but a ghost of that intangible sense of expectant youth that had been his only a few years ago, but it was there—not dead; awakening, perhaps, from a long sleep.

He shifted the sack of meal on his shoulder and quickened his pace to catch up with the Colonel, who was just entering the wide door of the log barn. Under the low beams two great salmon-vats squatted, like fat old squaws. A brick stove, like an oven, had embedded in its top a three-foot iron kettle, clean inside as a platter and ready for the next cooking of fox-food. Gary deposited his burden beside the stove and went out again into the late sunshine.

The Colonel, after showing the newcomer the way, left him to attend to the fox supplies, while he, himself, took the household articles to the kitchen. Gary was making his last trip when the young mistress of Rocking Moon came out on the veranda of the ranch-house and rang the ship's bell fastened to one of the log pillars. The melodic sound dwelt on the air with singular, intimate homeliness, like hearthstone music. He wondered if that bell, too, was a relic of the sea-faring Larianoff who had brought the others from Korea.

"Supper-time—in ten minutes, Mr. Tynan!" called the girl, with a friendly wave of her hand.

Before the time was up he and the Colonel, whose good-natured face shone from his recent ablutions, were back on the verandah awaiting the summons. When it came, Gary, a little curious, followed his companion into the big, rectangular living-room which extended across the front of the house.

It was a room of very general purpose, containing the furnishings gathered through four generations of Larianoffs. To the wandering Gary it seemed a friendly room with that seductive charm that comes from coziness and homelikeness. The westering sun slanted through the small panes of the oblong windows, pointing a golden finger to the age-darkened portrait of a young man, almost barbaricly princelike in the robes of a Russian arch-priest—the first Anton Larianoff, Gary afterward came to know. Against the smooth, hewed-log walls, unstained except by time, corduroy hangings showed leaf-brown with glints of apricot linings. There was the apricot gleam of old native-copper bowls, dented and flower-filled; the sheen of the silver-and-gold icon and lampada in the East corner; the feathery green of hanging plants against the light; the blurred dimness of old rugs trodden into monotones. Sturdy home-made chairs promised comfort in the cushioned depths between their arms. The fireplace, primitive in its roughness, was built of brown rock from the sea-beaten cliffs of Rocking Moon. The dying wood fire flickered on the brass of andirons older than civilization in Alaska.

Before the hearth, on the largest brown bear rug Gary had ever seen, squatted a low, wide couch of mahogany, a massive, foreign-looking piece of furniture piled with corduroy cushions, brown, orange, cobalt and olive. The table at its low back held books, the latest magazines and a friendly, parchment-shaded lamp, made evidently from the bowl of a samovar. Over the top of the yellow-keyed piano a kiskillim spread its age-fused colors, and a Russian balalaika lay across a cabinet phonograph. Near the windows facing the alder grove there was the glint of a copper samovar on a massive sideboard, and silver on the supper-table spread with cream-colored linen. With the effect of blending and harmonizing the whole three sides of the room below the deep-silled windows were lined with book-shelves well-stocked with Russian and English volumes.

As Gary looked about him, his ideas of Alaska and Alaskans, formed by reading grim tales of a crude and gloomy North, underwent a complete change. His eyes, with quickened interest, sought the young mistress of the establishment. On their entry she had been leaning over the back of a wide wing-chair which faced the windows framing the bay. She was talking, her bright head bent, to some one in the chair, invisible from where Gary stood.

"Oh, here you are!" She looked up at the two men with her flashing smile. "We're hungry as bears. Come Seenia—" she held out her hand—"supper-time now. I'll be your escort to the table tonight."

From the depths of the chair a woman slowly rose—the woman with a background of ninety years. But there was none of the repellent emaciation of age about her. In her youth she must have been tall. She was taller now than Sasha, yet her figure, though not stooped, had a look as if the heavy hand of life had pressed it down a little each year. Her coarse, thick hair, white as bleached clam-shells, was parted in the middle and drawn into a knot behind, and in the pale old-ivory of her face, her black eyes seemed to have retreated under the shelf of her brows until they were like shadows on a marble head. Hers was the primitive type of face that registers least the passage of years; yet, when she looked at Sasha and patted the girl's hand, her eyes were soft with that great maternal love which is a characteristic of all Aleut women.

Sasha's manner had in it some of the great indulgence of childhood as she tucked her arm under that of the old nurse, and guided her to the table. A few moments later they were all seated, the girl in her father's big chair at the head, the Colonel entrenched behind the soup tureen at the foot. Gary found that in this household mistress and servants sat down together. He was conscious of that indefinable atmosphere of Northern hospitality which makes the stranger feel at once as if he were a member of the family. Both Sasha and the Colonel talked to him of the plans of the morrow as if he had been with them for months instead of hours. He, who had been homeless for so many years, liked it.

"Now, my boy, tomorrow we make a start salting down salmon for the winter," announced Colonel Jeff, ladling out a bowl of steaming soup. "This is our harvest time, you know. Harvest time even though we're in what so many ignoramuses down in the States insist on terming 'the frozen North.'" He made a contemptuous movement with the ladle, then continued. "The girls here will be busy putting up jellies, and berries and clams, and we have the hay to get for the cow, and two vats to fill with salmon for the foxes. Besides, there's the salmon and herring that we must smoke for family use. I tell you, my boy, the old H.C.L. doesn't trouble us much up here. About all a fellow really needs to live on is a fish-pole, a clam-shovel and a gun, and once you get started garnering in your grub from Mammy Nature's supply, you lose all taste for the highfalutin' grub they feed you in the States." He sat back while Zoya removed the soup tureen. "Why, I can remember that 'gone' feeling I had last year when I went down to California to visit my sister in Burlingame," he continued, applying himself to his soup. "Between minding my manners at the table—on account of the lady flunky keeping tabs at my back—and the foreign food they had, I like to starved, by the infernal Jumbo! And I got such a hankering for smoked salmon, my boy, that I—well, I cut my visit short right after the wedding, and I just naturally burned up the wind getting back home here. Didn't I, Sasha? Yes, sir, one month was enough for me, down there. What I didn't learn about profiteering and bootlegging you could engrave on a poker chip. Of course, I never would have gone Outside but for that wedding—ah, Zoya," he broke off as the girl placed before him a heaping platter of deliciously browned salmon steaks. He picked up the serving knife and resting an arm on each side of the platter, looked up at her with twinkling eyes. "My dear," he said in his best speaking voice, "could any eatable be more delectable than this piscine delicacy when prepared by your own fair hands!"

Zoya laughed as she put down the plates, and an oblique glance from her lustrous eyes rested a moment on Gary as if to see whether the cheechako appreciated the Colonel's playful, but to her, obscure comments on her cooking.

"Colonel Jeff, you forget how to speak United States!" She smiled banteringly. "You forget all about how to speak United States since you go to Cal-eef-ornia!"

"Tell us something about the wedding," reminded Gary, who was interested in the garrulous old Alaskan's point of view.

"Oh—that!" Colonel Jeff waved his knife carelessly. "It was my niece's wedding, and being my only one, I felt as if I ought to be there to give her a send-off. But—never again for me! I'm a simple man, and what with the temperature at a hundred, and me not allowed in my shirt-sleeves, and the rehearsing, and fluffy bridesmaids overrunning the house, and all the swank, I was nearly a total ruin before it was over. By the lord, I couldn't help but contrast it with the nice quiet wedding of Aggie and Jack McGillis, friends of mine in the Interior. I never told you that story, Sasha. It happened in the days when preachers were as scarce as soap in an igloo. I didn't attend the wedding, exactly, but one evening I was floating down the Yukon in a dory, and I ran up a little slough to a small lake and made camp under a big birch tree. I noticed some scratchings on the bark, so after I got my grub warming up on the camp fire, I goes over to see what it was." The Colonel chuckled as he served himself salmon. "Say, you could'a knocked me down with a feather!" He included the whole table in the swing of his fork. "By the lord, I was looking at a marriage certificate! It's a fact! And this is how she reads": With his fork the Colonel traced imaginary lines on an imaginary tree——

"'To whom it may concern'": he began pompously ...

"'Ten miles from the Yukon on the banks of this lake, For a partner to the Koyukuk, McGillis I'll take. We have no preacher and we have no ring, It makes no difference, it's all the same thing.

(Signed) 'Aggie Dalton.'

"And below it was this:

"'I swear by my gee-pole under this tree, A faithful husband to Aggie I always will be. I'll love and protect this maiden so frail, From the sour-dough stiffs on the Koyukuk Trail.

(Signed) 'Jack McGillis.'

"And then, by the lord, came the crowning touch:

"'For two dollars apiece in cheechako money, I unite this couple in holy matrimony. He be a miner and she be a teacher. I do the job just as good as a preacher.

(Signed) 'French Joe.'

"There, Sasha," he finished, helping himself to creamed new potatoes, "how'd you like to be wed under such circumstances, eh? I bet Madam Grundy threw a fit. But I'm here to tell you, children, that this same wedding, without benefit of clergy, you might say, was the beginning of the happiest partnership I know. McGillis struck it rich a few years ago, and he and Aggie have a prune ranch down in California now. They lead an ideal life, absolutely. They stay down there among the prunes four months of the year, and the other eight they spend in Alaska on Jack's claim."

"Dad wrote me they passed through Juneau on their way south the other day, Colonel Jeff," Sasha interrupted, drawing her father's letter from her pocket. She unfolded it, slipping one page over another as she searched for the paragraph. "Oh, bother, I can't find it just now, but Dad also says he's finding wonderful data in the library down there, so many new things that it will take him longer than he expected to finish his book. The Governor's greatly interested in his history, too, and is doing everything he can to help Dad. But Colonel—listen to this. It worries me a little." A faint frown marked a line between her brows as she read from her father's letter:

"'The Governor tells me that many complaints are coming in from the islands used for raising foxes in Southeastern Alaska; that they are being invaded by strangers who kill or carry away domesticated and privately owned foxes. So much of this is being done that the Government is sending out secret service men to trace these fox-pirates. If anything of this nature happens along the Aleutians, Sasha, have the Colonel go to Kodiak and wire me at once.'"

She ceased reading and looked up at the old man, anxiety in her eyes. "But nothing like that has happened in this section of Alaska, has it, Colonel Jeff?"

"No, no, my dear," he replied with conviction. "Thank God we live so far away from civilization that we're practically immune from the criminal element. I always did say that Southeastern Alaska was about the most lawless place—outside of the United States, of course. It's too durned close to Canada. What with the rum-runners from Prince Rupert, slipping in and out, and every little bay down there having its own bootlegger, you can't expect anything else. Rum-running, fox-pirating, bootlegging—it's all of a piece, I tell you!" And the Colonel, who, if left alone, could trace all calamities and crime to Prohibition, launched out on his favorite topic. "As for fox-poaching," he concluded, "they'd never come this far west. But I'll ask Nick to keep his ears open. He got two men in from the West'ard today. If there's any fox-lifting going on in this vicinity, Nick will be the first to know of it. He handles all the furs from this section of the country, you know." The old fellow nodded reassuringly. "Don't worry your pretty head about that, Sasha."

When the meal was over the girl disappeared, while Zoya busied herself clearing the table. Gary followed the Colonel's example and sought a comfortable chair for his smoke, questioning the Alaskan, in the meanwhile, about the business of fur-farming.

"Sasha will be out in a minute," the Colonel concluded, "and then, my boy, you'll begin to learn the fox business for yourself. I'll carry the feed to the stations nearest the house, and she's going to take you to the stations on the outer beach of the Island. We're giving them raw salmon today, instead of cooked food. By the lord, Gary, do you know, the Rocking Moon ranch is a regular fox Waldorf-Astoria! Sasha pampers her foxes as if they were babies—and she's got a menu a foot long for 'em. But the specialists say that it takes a gentle person to rear a gentle animal, so maybe that's why her Blues are the best in Alaska." The Colonel surrounded himself with a smoke cloud, enjoying it a moment in silence. "Foxes," he continued, dabbing the air with the stem of his pipe, "foxes are damned dainty animals, Gary, there's no getting around that. They're as erratic in their feeding as a prima donna, too. Why, my boy, when Mrs. Baranoff had her pups this June she got that sulky and highfalutin' that she refused to eat anything, and she with eight puppies each worth a hundred and fifty dollars or more this December. Sasha was all wrought up about her for a spell, and tried to tempt her with all kinds of delicacies. She wanted her to take milk for the sake of the pups, you know, but that onery vixen just stared out of her burrow with a go-to-blazes look, and refused to eat. Finally Sasha remembered that Mrs. Baranoff liked clams—and didn't that girl get the largest clam shells she could find, and fill 'em with milk, and by the lord, Gary, Madam Baranoff took all she could get!" The Colonel slapped his knee and laughed in delight. "Put one over on the old lady that time, all right."

Gary listened with interest to the little human details of this new industry of the North—the last effort of Alaskans to make a living in their own country under the strangling restrictions of red tape imposed on them by a bureaucracy five thousand miles away. The Colonel went on explosively to tell how this set of thirty-seven bureaus at Washington, D. C., had hermetically sealed for posterity Alaska's coal, oil and timber, but they had not yet succeeded in performing an abortion on the fox industry, and more than a million and a half dollars were already invested in the one hundred and fifty fur farms of the territory.

Colonel Jeff's profane and earnest discourse was at its height, when Sasha, slim and boyish in knickers and a heavy white sweater, appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. She was without a hat, and a light rifle hung over her back by a strap.

She smiled as the Colonel clipped a vociferous sentence in the middle.

"All ready for business, now!" she announced, and after a word to Seenia she led the way out across the veranda. Alexander, the fox, uncurled from a porch chair and followed at her heels. Gary attached himself to the procession heading for the float where the Simmie and Ann swung at her moorings.

The trim whiteness of the launch had borrowed a rosy glow from the coral clouds which heralded the sunset. The wind had died away leaving the bay reflecting the tints of the sky. At this hour of the waning day gulls and blackbirds were mute, as if they, too, felt the peace that was enveloping the Northern world.

Sasha sprang aboard the launch and stepped into the wheel-house. In a business-like way she slipped the rifle from her shoulder and set it in a corner. Her hands sought the spokes of the steering-gear as if she liked the feel of them, and she leaned over to look out the open window, wrinkling her nose like a small wild thing, as the redolence of the forest struck across the cool sea-water.

"I'll take the wheel." She turned to nod as Gary made his stooping way into the engine room.

A couple of half-revolutions of the fly-wheel, a few hollow coughs, a whiff of gasoline, and the mechanism responded in slow, rhythmic throbs that vibrated from stem to stern. At the movement Gary felt that thrill which comes to all those who love the ways of ships—that buoyant sense of "going somewhere."