Читать книгу Wild Honey - Frederick John Niven - Страница 4

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There was a pang at going, for Penny's Pit, like most experiences, however hard, had its joys. I was working as a navvy there, and the hours of shoveling were ten per day. It was all as long ago as that, though even then the eight-hour day shout was heard at election times. Yes, there was a pang at leaving Penny's Pit. It was the closing of a door. It was passing on. It was the ending of a period that had not been by any means without its pleasures.

There was hard work, but there was refreshing sleep. The reflected sunlight from the gravel of the pit in which we toiled blistered the under parts of our chins, making shoveling a torture; so we wore scarves bunched up around the neck, and these scarves made us hotter. There were mosquitoes too. But the evenings were cool, up on the plateau of that Dry Belt. And there was a something about life there.

Often nowadays when I mention a liking for the beauty of the West some man will chip in with the comment that if I had to work in it I'd soon forget the beauty, taking me for a sort of fair-weather friend of nature. But when I was working in it in the sense meant (not sitting in a pleasant bungalow writing, which doesn't seem like work to some people, but outside with heavy tools) I never lost sight of its beauty. That was the attraction. The dust and heat of the day, the callouses on the hands, or the splinters in them, were merely by the way. At Penny's Pit the air and the scene more than atoned. Above the rasp of the shovels with which we worked astern of the big, rhythmically-coughing steam-shovel, I would hear the murmur of Thompson River lapsing past; and that murmur, somehow, was worth much weary labor to hear. But I do not try to explain these things to those who say: "If you had to work in it you'd soon get fed up with the beauty." The attempt would only lead to argument with the unconvinceable.

Penny's Pit—a tear in a hill, and by the side of that tear two box-cars converted into bunk-houses for us, and a third into kitchen and dining-room with a cubby-hole partitioned off for the cook to sleep in. It had been a home for a spell. Sitting on the butt-end of a tie, with my legs over the gorge, darning socks in the exquisite evenings, I had seen, nightly, two loons come home to a spreading part of the Thompson River below; and every evening, as they settled on the water, they called, and laughed. The call of loons in the West has something in it for me at least, though chacun son goût of course, every time I hear it, even beyond the first call of cuckoos in England. In my memory, since then, they have laughed for me at many subsequent hardships.

And talking of the sounds at Penny's Pit, before we start upon our way—for this is but preamble, while we roll our blankets: one wonderful thing I heard there and did not know what it was at the time. None of us knew, looked one to another, marveled and puzzled over it. The sound we heard was as a bell ringing; but such a bell! The notes of it were exquisite, toning right with the clarity of the upland atmosphere. We stopped our work and looked round and up, for the sound seemed simply in air. Nothing that could have been responsible for it was visible. It was as though the mysterious First Cause who had made that scene and that river was, in addition to all else, ventriloquist. The Indians working beside us were awed. I thought of the bell-bird and wondered if it came thither, as well as to the forests of Essequibo, Orinoco and Amazon. Humming-birds fly far north in the basking summers; why not a bell-bird? Not a cloud. Nothing. Just the very quiet sand-hills on all sides, and the very blue sky overhead; and it was not till years later that I had an explanation on coming across an account of a phenomenon seldom known, and only heard in Dry Belts, a sound as of a sweet-toned bell made by electricity in the air.

An interesting life it had been at Penny's Pit. Interesting men they were there too, of types I had never known before. There was one who spread mustard instead of butter on his bread, a man with the brightest eyes I ever saw. There was the buffoon of the camp, who was always mountebanking when the boss was near, having discovered that his fooling amused the boss. "The King's fool!" I heard a man called Hank mutter one day, after a rather obsequious exhibition of clowning followed by the guffaws of that potentate of the gang. There was a little Cockney navvy, who had saved up enough money in England to emigrate, very ignorant and gentle. He asked us one day if we knew "that beautiful song 'Break the news to Mother,'" and told us it brought tears to his eyes when he heard it in a hall in Seattle. Hank, overhearing that announcement, turned his head and looked at him curiously, interested, and as if with pity. That little navvy simply could not pronounce the name of our nearest town, which was Savona's. It used to be called Savona's Ferry in the early days—a ferry across Thompson River being owned then by one called Savona. To-day the maps have it as Savona; but in our time it was in the transition stage of Savona's, though most people dropped out the apostrophe. To the little Cockney it was always Sevenoaks. He tried to say Savona's but Sevenoaks persisted, Savona's beyond him.

There was Slim, an unknown quantity, seldom speaking; generally, when we were not at work, conning the advertisement pages in the few magazines that littered a corner of our bunk-car. He figured chiefly as "Hank's partner"; and Hank I leave to the last, dropping in here instead the boss of this steam-shovel outfit—"the steam-shovel engineer." One day a stream of leaflets descended on us from the rear platform of a passing train where sat an advance publicity agent for a piano recital to be given in Vancouver, showering these out when he saw houses or converted box-cars, any indication of inhabitants. We picked up the leaflets, and found that they announced the coming to Vancouver of Paderewski. Opposite a column of names of towns, beginning at Calgary and going west by Golden, Kamloops, Ashcroft, Revelstoke, was a column of figures—the reduced special railway rate for return tickets procurable at these places to hear him play.

The boss considered one of these broadsheets a long time.

"I'm damned if I can understand it!" he said at last. "They tell me he hits the piano for a matter of four hours on end. Imagine going from here to Vancouver, about a coupla hundred miles, to hear a man hit the piano for four hours on end! Now that gets me. If he was playing it with his toes, or anything in the nature of a side-show, I could understand. I once seen a man playing a fiddle behind his back. That was something to look at!"

Hank's gaze drifted sadly to me and when the boss moved away he stood looking after him stupefied and then he said: "Well—by—God!" very slowly. He sighed. He looked out over Thompson River, brought his hands together in front of him and fumbled his fingers.

"Well—by—God!" he sighed again. "O the Yahoo!"

It was a word much in the currency—Yahoo—in the West in those days, the derivation, I suppose, from Swift's "Gulliver's Travels." Hank was one of the wildest looking men in the outfit, and as for his clothes, no pawn-broker would have considered them. But this heart-broken murmur of his over the boss's solecism in the matter of musical performance, as you will understand, drew me to him, whetted my interest. I had already heard him mutter "The King's fool!" and drop casually this or that remark that the others had not the knowledge to drop or, had they picked up the knowledge, might have paraded in the hope that you would think they had known better days—which they had not. Hank looked what is called tough, very tough, and when occasion demanded it he had the most appalling flow of profanity; and violent fits of temper too, he had, blazing and gone. But he had periods when his voice was quiet, and words dropped out in his speech that were good to hear, hinting of an extended vocabulary. At such times there was a graciousness in his attitude and movements that made his worn attire ridiculously anomalous.

This Hank came to me one evening as I sat on a bluff above the scene of our labors, listening for the call of a coyote away back in the low range beyond the sand-hills, and broached a subject that greatly interested me. He and his partner Slim were going to leave, going to walk down into the United States. Walk, mark you. Would I care to accompany them?

I was twenty years of age and full of love of seeing. I assuredly would care to go. I had not been long at Penny's Pit, but I had been long enough to know its life, and here was a chance to dip into another. When he said they had not decided whether to take the trail in from Ducks or go in by Salmon Arm, I got that fret that comes of place-names and the word "trail."

We would, of course, he said, have to get our wages first, and they could not be paid to us at Penny's Pit; we would have to go to North Bend, a hundred miles or so west, with our time-checks to collect unless we stayed till the end of the month when the paymaster came past. They were not going to wait, men of impulse, and the impulse already curbed long enough. I calculated my wages due and discovered they would just meet the cost of a ticket to North Bend and back.

"Oh, that's neither here nor there," said Hank. "We won't pay fares. We'll walk a bit from this camp and then steal a ride on the trains."

That settled it. One experience more to have, a way of life other than my average to dip into! That was how the proposal appealed to me. Yes; I would be delighted to accompany them. All right. And then in the dusk my coyote, for whom I had been listening, gave his lonely-sounding yet rejoicing wail across the darkening sand-hills.