Читать книгу Wild Honey - Frederick John Niven - Страница 5

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We had not gone very far from Penny's Pit, grasshoppers clicking round our feet, and the railway ties cracking in the heat, when Slim, of whom I knew no more than I knew of Hank, divulged inherent laziness.

"What's the matter with having a siesta somewhere in the shade?" he suggested.

Shade! There was no shade to speak of. The whole wide scene was ablaze with light to which we puckered our eyes; but he was sure that if we crossed a bench nearby and went over to the river, twisting away from us there, we could find some nook of waterside trees. So we left the track, crossed the bench and there, sure enough, was a fringe of trees in the river's cleft below us.

Down into it we plunged, and there Slim divulged another characteristic. He did not have a siesta. He got down on his heels on the bank where the river made a backward eddy and began examining the little sticks and twigs joggling together in that backwash, while Hank and I rolled cigarettes, and sat down to enjoy the coolness of the water under the shade of the trees.

"Here you are!" said Slim. "Ever seen one of these before?" and he picked from the water a specimen of some species of caddis worm. "Look. See here. Don't he look just like a bit of a twig? And here he is living among a whole raft of little twigs." He jerked a thumb toward the immensity of blue that glittered in chinks of the green over us and—"Queer Fellow!" he remarked.

Retrieving another of the little things from that backwash, with both side by side in his palm, he compared their characteristics, noting similarities and discrepancies, an untutored Fabre and without a microscope.

"They ain't a match, you see," he said. "They're as different as two twigs would be. This fellow has a little sort of a knob, like you see on a twig, but it ain't placed the same as on the other lad. Whatever eats 'em or preys upon 'em wouldn't be sure, seeing one, that it wasn't a twig. They tell me if you break a little bit off one, he grows it again."

With thumb and finger-nail he began to pluck at the tiny soft head that protruded.

"Here, what are you doing?" asked Hank. "No sense in hurting the little son of a gun."

"I wonder how he'd feel if I pulled him out of his case and shoved him in wrong end," said Slim.

"Aw, guess it would kill him. Let him go," said Hank.

Slim laughed and tossed them both back into the water, dried his hands on his seat and squatted down to smoke. A restless fellow! His cigarette half-through, he was inquiring: "Well, how about getting on top and hitting it again?"

"Plenty of time," replied Hank.

"Oh, that's what you always say."

"Now see here, you know why we asked this fellow to come with us," Hank broke out. "We told him it was because we thought he'd like to see the places we figure on hiking through, but you know the real reason. And it would just be as well to let him know before we've fairly started."

Slim laughed; and I felt mystified. Then——

"Sure," said Slim, and grinned at me. "The idea is that three is company where two is liable to be a rough house, at least hus two."

He frequently said hus for us in a very deliberate way, as though it were the vogue to pronounce it so in some society in which he was proud to be at home.

"We're liable to scrap when we're alone together," he went on, "but we've been so long with each other that we can't somehow separate. Funny thing! We have a hell of a row and decide to part, and each go our different ways. And then a couple of days later I go hiking after him, and he's hiking after me, and we meets grinning, and he says: 'Well, you can't get along without me. Hope you notice my forgiving nature, coming back for you,' or some gall like that, and then we have a scrap over that gall of his and string along together for a while again," he paused, "till he gets too damn fresh again to stand," he ended.

Hank winked at me.

"Listen to him!" he said. "Well, you'll have opportunity to see which it is that makes the scraps. I hope, now you know, that you'll stay with us and keep the peace."

I nodded.

"Yes," I promised.

"All right. Now if we scrap you just say that's what you're here for, and we'll quit; that's a deal."

I nodded my head again, accepting the rôle.

"All right," said Slim, nodding his.

"Well, Slim, my son," said Hank then, "you said you would like us to be going. Shall we go?"

This he spoke very genially, ultra-genially, with a smile that made his partner look cynically at him a moment before rising and picking up his blanket-roll. At once Hank and I were up shouldering ours, and we climbed to the bench, back into the full blaze of sunlight and thence, at a tangent, across to the track, and once again were jig-jogging in the silly short steps the ties decree, upon our way.

As we walked, Hank talked the history of the region, of the Bonaparte Mine, somewhere away over there to north beyond the heat-quake over the sand and the river; talked of the Cariboo road, winding north under the blue glitter of the Dry Belt sky. He knew a lot about it (how men going into the Cariboo country in the gold rush, penniless, signed promises to work on it a stated period before leaving Victoria and New Westminster, and did so; how a detachment of Royal Engineers from England came out to work upon it in response to a request of the governor of those days to the Home Office), either from listening to old-timers or from reading; I fancy from reading, for he spent much time in the winter, as I discovered later, sitting in public libraries, and he was no great fiction fan. Books of sociology, books of criminology, books of travel: that was the order of his library leanings. These men who had invited me to hike with them to the United States were not just railway workers. I very soon tapped that. All that they were I came to know by degrees.

At a high trestle bridge over a rocky gorge, in the bottom of which ran a diminutive stream, Slim paused and looked down in between the ties.

"Some shade-trees below us," he said.

"Why, man, we've hardly started!" exclaimed Hank.

"Well, that's why. I ain't limbered up."

Hank laughed, and when we were across the trestles, down we fumbled into the bottom of the gorge.

"Gee, it's good not to be working," said Slim, as he sat there leaning against his blanket-roll.

"Working! Huh, you didn't do much," replied Hank. "You shuffled out of every heavy job. I saw you."

"Guess I did," and Slim laughed. "I wouldn't have held it down as long as I did if I hadn't been able to shuffle out a bit."

The labor of getting down into that draw was equal to walking half a mile on the track, I thought, and of climbing up would be equivalent to walking a mile, but Slim liked deep gorges with shade-trees and a whimpling little brook, liked to lie on his back and look up through leaves at chinks of blue sky and blow cigarette smoke.

A far-off rumble sounded as we loafed there. We looked up, and realized how deep the gulch was, for the rumble was of a train passing over, and it seemed like a toy.

"Gee, ain't it cute!" said Slim. "It's like a kid's play train."

"Well, this isn't going to Vancouver," said Hank.

"We ain't going to Vancouver," said Slim.

"Figure of speech," Hank explained.

The intense heat of the hours around noon was over, and so, having munched a lunch that we had got from the Chinese cook at the camp, we washed it down with water from the narrow little brook, climbed the precipitous bank, and trudged on, Hank talking, as we drew near to Ashcroft, of the old six-in-hand mailcoach that started from there into the Cariboo country. Had I seen Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show? Yes. Well, it was just the same sort of coach as the old Black Hills coach he had in his show, the old Deadwood stage. He was interrupted by Slim.

"What about quitting hiking here?" said he. "Your talk about a six-in-hand makes my feet ache."

"We can take the train if you like," said Hank, pleasantly.

That we had not so much as a twenty-five cent piece between us was irrelevant.

We could guess, from the times that the freight-trains had been wont to pass Penny's Pit, when one would be due, west-bound, at Ashcroft; and as we waited for it, sitting on our blanket-rolls, backs against the freight-shed wall there, Hank gave me a few pointers on how to travel without a ticket. He began by drawing in the dust with a finger a design of the under-part of the average freight-car.

"There are the trucks, you see, on which the car rests. Above the trucks, here, are the big springs. Here the brace-rods run under the car fore and aft. Here they run across. If there are two here, close together, though there are not always, you can lay a board on them and lie on the board face down, but you're apt to get cramp in your legs. Your legs dangling, or stretched out behind you, you get your thighs knotted up, and then you're up against it. A good place is here, at the trucks. You creep under and shove your bundle in, between the truck the car sits on, and the car; and then you sit on this rod that runs from side to side, with your back against the truck. If you sit this side of the truck, facing ahead, that's called 'punching the breeze.' If you sit this side, looking back, it's called 'taking it in the neck.' I don't know which to advise. Which would you say, Slim?"

"Oh, I don't know. Any old way does so long as you make it."

Hank took up the thread again.

"There's one advantage," said he, "in taking it in the neck, for when you are looking ahead, punching the breeze, there is an awful tendency to jump forward to try to grab the world as it goes under you. When it's running away from you, instead of rushing at you and passing under, it doesn't have that effect."

I tried to look as though a little thing like that would not upset me.

"Gee!" exclaimed Slim. "Once when I was riding facing, punching the breeze, a rod broke loose in front of me—one of them other brace-rods he was telling you about—and it hit the roadway all the time, and every time it hit it shot up a cinder or a rock, or something. I got the dust and pebbles down inside my shirt and in my pockets, and I was all cut and bleeding from the rocks and all when she stopped, and I rolled off. You know, my inside breast pocket, even," and he tapped his chest, "was plumb full of little stones."

I again tried to look at ease as Slim continued.

"Underneath, the brakemen can't see you except at stops. But bumpers are not too bad. I guess we'll take bumpers this time, to start you, seeing you're green to traveling, if there ain't an empty car we can get inside."

And then off east there was the deep, mellow hoot of the train whistling for curves, and I admit my heart accelerated its beats suddenly.

"We'll just be projecting ourselves up and down," said Hank, "so as not to attract attention with our bindles" (he always called his blanket-roll his bindle instead of bundle). "You sit there with the bindles, and Slim and I will slope along and try to look like residents till it's time to take her."

Blessed "her"! It humanized the train to give it sex! She came in, slowing down beautifully, the piston puff-puffing past, the heat of the locomotive over me in a gust where I sat on the three "bindles" while Hank and Slim were strolling casually and separately back and forth on the station platform.

The locomotive took water; the conductor and brakemen stood chatting in groups with the depot hands. They all seemed to me, of course, while they talked, to be considering Slim, or Hank or me. Then Hank came toward me, stopped and lit a cigarette, stood close by absently staring, as though he were merely some one whose idle diversion was to watch the trains come in; watch the trains go out. Away along the platform, Slim leant against the station-house wall, hands in pockets, near to one of the groups. I saw him give a faint nod to Hank, and wondered what it meant. It meant that he had overheard there was some shunting to be done; and it then began, with all the accompanying bumping and clatter of cars, arm-signaling and easy hanging-on to side ladders and neat dropping off on the part of the train-men. At last all was in order again, cars sidetracked, cars picked up, and the caboose coupled once more at the tail of the long string.

Slim walked back near us, looking on at all this as a child watching men work, and the engine puff, and the "wheels go wound."

"Well, we'll get across the track now," said he, and lifting his bundle he started away smartly as though, the show over, he was off upon his way, and that it led east.

Hank and I followed at once, but as soon as we had passed the caboose we turned and hurried forward upon the far side of the train.

"Now," said Hank, "we couldn't get on before—too many looking. And besides, we didn't know what cars were going to be left here. There's a box-car with the door full open on this side and just a little bit ajar on the other. If she starts before we get that length, run with us. We'll throw our bindles up and then jump. We'll show you how first, and then be ready to grab you and drag you in after us."

And then she started, and we ran.

"Come on—oh, not such a hell of a scramble on the clinkers," hissed Slim.

We came level with the selected car, door wide open on our side.

"In with the bindles!" said Hank and, as we tossed them up he growled: "Now we've got to make it!"

Slim put hands to the floor of the car, pacing along in big strides beside it, and leapt, got a knee up, rolled in. In a second Hank followed, though he had almost to run alongside instead of stride. They looked back anxiously for me, both bending down to grab me but, before the speed was too great, I had performed the necessary gymnastics and was inside. On tiptoe we sneaked into the corner where we had thrown our blanket-rolls and sat down upon them, my heart going rub-a-dub, sat quietly on our bindles, looking from one to the other. There! We were out of Ashcroft. Then Slim rose.

"What's the matter with shutting the doors?" he asked.

"Better just drop the grain-door down on that side we got in at," replied Hank. "She'd never joggle enough to close the sliding door, and they know that, and they know the ones that are open, you bet."

"That's right," agreed Slim, and merely lowered the grain door, which is apt, at any rate, in rough shunting, to spring from its catch and drop down, lowered it and set it at such an angle that no one, at another halt, could, by peering, see more than a limited portion of either end of the car. To the sliding door on the other side, which was open about a foot, he gave a slight thrust so that it was almost closed, showing only an opening of a matter of a couple of inches.

"There!" said he. "She might easily joggle that much. That looks natural."

"How about the end wicket window?" asked Hank.

"We'll shut the one ahead for the draught, anyhow," replied Slim, and did so. "We'd better leave the other open for ease in climbing out when we get there," and to me he explained: "It makes an awful racket sliding open them wickets when a train's stopped. They never fit good, and the wedge they run in is always all grit and dust."

There was something very invigorating in this form of travel, something of the stolen fruits thrill. I take it that that thrill never utterly fails, for my companions, though old hands at the game, as I was to hear, had a light on their faces, an air of glee, though it was more clear with Slim than with Hank. There was a lurking dourness in Hank.

Slim, of course, must needs, sitting down then, roll a cigarette.

"Here," said Hank, "you might cut that out till we make a few miles anyhow. It isn't so darn simple every time, getting on, as it was that time, and what I say is, when luck is with one there's no sense in queering it." He turned to me. "If a brakeman were to go over the roof," he explained, "not smoking himself, he'd smell us, you know."

Slim laughed and lit his cigarette.

"There you are!" ejaculated Hank. "No will power! Got to be sucking away on a pimp stick all the time. Cig-fiend! Abuse the blessings!" He waved a hand. "It's not just yourself. You might have the three of us ditched, and all to do over again because you can't keep off tobacco for a quarter of an hour."

"There he goes," said Slim, "wanting to be king of this trip. What you want is to get your block knocked off, my friend, like kings got in the French Revolution."

There was a faint smile round his loose mouth as he spoke, but Hank glared.

"You think you could do it?" he asked. "Do you think you could knock my block off? What would I be doing while you were having a try?"

So said I:

"I don't know if this is where I serve or not, for I don't know if this is persiflage and idle repartee, or a storm brewing."

Slim got the drift of my remark, but Hank understood it all. He laughed.

"God!" he broke out. "It is good to hear somebody using English again. Persiflage . . . repartee . . . words I have not heard for fifteen years," and then he fell abrooding, and Slim nipped out his cigarette between thumb and forefinger and put it behind his ear. I was going to know them both more intimately in this kind of travel, I could see, than I had known them in the social intercourse between supper and "hitting the hay" at Penny's Pit.

Now and then the train stopped, and then we had our thrills. At the first stop a train-hand stood just outside the door talking to some one, and before he went away, just casually, without looking inside, stretched up and shoved the door shut.

"Good man," Slim muttered. "I was feeling the draught a bit."

The sound of feet went past on boardwalk to one side, or on cinders to the other. At the second halt somebody clambered on to the bumper at the end at which Slim had closed the wicket. We wondered if it was going to be opened, but next moment the scuffling heels outside had passed. They were evidently only of some man, brakeman likely, crossing from one side of the train to the other, who happened to select our car for the transit. A minute after—doubtless he had been signaling to the engineer—we heard a series of noises beginning far ahead and coming closer, clatter and clash. Then the bumper of our car received a thwack, and the thwacks went on to the rear end. The puffing of the locomotive seemed far off as she got under way. Off we went, then halted abruptly, with a jar, and went backwards.

The shunting of a freight-train is a noisy and jolting proceeding. That punch coming along, car after car, hitting the car one is on, and passing on, is somehow very exhilarating—I don't say it is comfortable—exhilarating it is. I think the thrill comes from the knowledge that just outside are brakemen at work, creating all these tugs and bumps, with wave of arm or lantern, while here are we, unbeknown, joggled jocundly inside.

Darkness fell, after that knocking about, as we went rolling on, swaying round curves, slacking up with buffer impacts and clash of chains, followed by sudden tugs, through the night. I began to feel sleepy, when suddenly a match spurted alight in Hank's hand and he lit a cigarette.

"Well, by gosh!" broke out Slim. "After what you said! And it's time to sleep now, anyhow. Now maybe they'll smell us out and we won't get no sleep, get flung off."

"Oh, there are limits, limits," replied Hank. "We're doing fine. A man must have his two draws before turning in, especially if he's had no supper."

"Well, give us a light off yours," said Slim.

In the glow, as they puffed, I could see the ends of their noses lit up, their cheek bones, and their wild eyes, produced my own "makings," rolled and lit, and the three flicks of fire rose and grew and fell and dwindled. Half an hour later we were calmly rolled in our blankets; shoes off. When I woke there was a faint light outside. Through the open tail-end wicket I saw that so strangely moving first light of day on the end boards of the car that came veering, oscillating, behind us. Hank and Slim, to judge by their blinking, had just come awake at the same time.

I suppose we must all have been brought back from sleep by one of these series of bumps, for we were at a standstill, but next moment moved again with the usual abrupt tug that seemed to wrench us, as well as the car, then stopped again. Slim rose and peered out at a crack in the wall near us. As he tiptoed back, Hank asked in a sleepy voice where we were.

"Can't see the name," answered Slim, "we're right in the depot. I can see what looks like a god-dam cemetery."

"Lytton," said Hank; "that's where we are—Lytton. We've got a little way to go yet."

The locomotive bell clanged, and the smash-smash-smash came along to us. We received one dull impact that jarred us as if we were part of the car, and listened to the whacks go on and die away. We were off once more.

"Say, are you awake?" asked Hank.

"Yes," said I.

"It's named after a relative of the novelist Lytton. The relative was a government man—governor, or deputy-governor, or some damned thing like that. This West has its history, all right." He grunted, and then muttered: "Fetch me my shaving water in time to spruce up for North Bend," and was asleep again next minute, to judge by his breathing.

Long before coming to North Bend we were all awake again, had hauled on our shoes, rolled and roped our blankets, toothbrushes, shaving-tackle, change of socks and so forth, all safely within the bundles.

In the event the disembarking was no more difficult than the boarding of her. She stopped and Slim, at the end wicket that was open, peeped out.

"North Bend all right," he whispered. "Ssh! Listen! Nobody near, I think."

"Go to it," said Hank.

It is a contorting performance to get through these end wickets. They are just high enough from the floor, and of sufficient smallness of height and breadth, to make it difficult, having got one leg out, to wriggle out. One cannot just hang out, head first, and slide, as in a sort of dive, on to the bumpers, and there is nothing to grab on the roof above, so as to allow of one swinging out feet first, sitting on the wicket's edge and then glissading off on to the bumper. One gets out like a distraught frog. Slim went first and then reached in for his blanket-roll, which we passed to him. Then he disappeared, dropped like a cat to the track, and we heard his voice, guardedly:

"All right. Come on."

Out went Hank, twisted, puffing, murmuring blasphemy over the contortions necessary, and then standing on the bumper reached back for his blankets and told me to give him mine also. I handed both rolls to him.

"Catch," he said to Slim, and then he too had vanished.

I wriggled through, and as I was in the midst of my contortions, half in, half out, feeling sympathetic regarding all Hank had said to the wicket, a man strolled past on the station boardwalk, heard the fuss of my scramble and looked round. I met his eyes. He closed the lid of the one nearer to me, and went leisurely on. I can see his face still in memory. Then, somehow, I was out on the bumper. Down on the track stood Hank, looking up.

"Well, that was all right," he whispered to me. "He ain't hostile. Take a peek on that side, and if there's nobody looking just step on to the platform. You've no bindle and they'll think you were just crossing to the depot."

I stepped on to a rung of the end ladder and took a peek. Everybody seemed busy in the depot. I stepped on to the platform, and standing there lit a cigarette, then looked back to tell Hank and Slim all was clear; but they had disappeared, bindles and all. I surmised that they had espied a train-hand on their side and that they had moved away because of him, and paced slowly along the boardwalk, glancing between the cars as I came to the intervening spaces. Between two, further on, I saw Hank standing smoking, no bindle in evidence. He gave me a cheerful nod and a wave of his hand as one saluting an old friend unexpectedly seen.

The locomotive bell rang, the train clashed and tugged and went on. Worlds within worlds, ad infinitum, if we only knew! One man travels in a Pullman car, another in a box-car. The train gone, with a final fluttering of old dropped papers in the suction under the caboose, Hank and Slim picked up the blanket-rolls from behind a stack of ties where they had tossed them, came across and joined me.

There were two hotels in North Bend, the guests of each not aware of how the guests of the other lived. One of these hotels, trellised, and the trellis all climbed upon with greenery, was set back beyond a sloping lawn kept emerald by a sprinkler that twisted at the end of a long hose-pipe. The trousers of the men sitting on that kindly-shaded veranda were pressed. Then there was another hotel back among trees, but with no lawn, no sprinkler, no trellis of climbing green, and patronized by men whose trousers were not pressed.

We went to neither hotel. Many are the different worlds within the world. We waited till none observed and then, walking across the track, plunged into what Hank called the jingles, meaning jungles, saying it so in the same tone as Slim's when he said hus instead of us, as though he knew better but with implication that it was the thing to say jingles, even as bindle for bundle, in some set to which he gave fealty.

In the heart of that patch of jungle we dropped our blankets. Talk of "rest and a world of leaves"! Those who write to their friends in British Columbia, commiserating with them for living in "the cold dark north," or "cold Canada," or what-not in that strain, know not what they say. The cold, dark north indeed! At North Bend we were in the latitude of the Scilly Isles, and in a far less humid part of the world. Humming-birds were darting among the creepers on the trellis of the hotel with the lawn and sprinkler.

That dingle of ours was colored like the plates in "The Swiss Family Robinson" of my boyhood. We were in a dapple of greens and yellows, and iridescent shade. "Rest and a world of leaves and stealing stream." The stream was not far distant, and thence Slim brought water in a can he found near the track and, hanging our pocket-mirrors on twigs of the trees, we shaved.

Wonderful what a shave will do for one! Refreshed thereafter, I smiled to myself over the fun of it all, and wondered what my good people at home would have thought had they known of that night's travel in the box-car and this open-air hospice, this shaving and titivating in the jingle, pocket-mirror hanging on a twig of a tree.