Читать книгу The Ghost of Hemlock Canyon - Harold Bindloss - Страница 4

IV

TRAVELING COMPANIONS

The train stopped for some time at Ottawa, and when the cars rolled into the station Denis was among the first who jumped from the crowded vestibules. Although the afternoon was sunny, he had pulled on his big coat. He hoped he was not unjust to his fellow-passengers, but in France a soldier’s best title to his property was his watchfulness. A British-warm was a useful article, and Denis had no other coat.

He went to the telegraph-office, and after a few minutes a clerk, who had not answered his polite inquiries, threw him an envelope, as one throws a bone to an importunate dog. Denis was young, and for a time had used command, but he smiled philosophically. In Canada, a telegraph-operator was, no doubt, important, but he himself was not.

“You got something on me?” the clerk inquired.

“I don’t know,” said Denis in a meditative voice. “Much depends on one’s point of view, and you might not see the joke.”

“You’re blocking the passage,” the clerk remarked. “If you’re through with your business, suppose you pull out.”

Denis went. His impulse was to climb across the counter, but to let himself go might be expensive and he imagined the Misses Cullen waited. They were on the platform, jostled about by the swarming emigrants, and looking anxious and forlorn. When one saw Denis she ran forward and touched his arm. He thought her disturbance vanished, and the light touch moved him.

“Will there be time to go to the post-office?” she asked. “Nobody will stop to tell us where it is.”

“As a rule, in Canada, the telegraph-office is at the station. Anyhow, I have got a message for Miss Monica Cullen.”

Monica tore open the envelope and smiled happily.

“Dan will follow in the morning; we are not to wait. What would we have done, Mr. Aylward, if you’d not been about?”

“You’d have stayed on board, as Danny orders,” Denis replied. “Well, we have half an hour. Let’s go and see the town.”

The girls he had remarked at Montreal went by, and one turned her head. Her glance was coolly critical, as if she were interested. Denis’s coat was shabby, but he carried the stamp of a British officer; the Misses Cullen were audibly Irish, and for all their youthful charm, fresh from the bogs. Anyhow, they were his friends, and with one on either side, he started for the town.

About ten o’clock in the evening, he walked along the train and stopped for a few minutes on a platform. Dark forest rolled by, and the beams from the windows touched tangled, slanted trunks. Water shone in a ravine, and he heard a river brawl. Rocks leaped from the gloom and melted, and the train roared on a bridge.

Denis pushed back the door and went through the vestibule to a second-class car. Since Danny was left at Montreal, he ought perhaps to see if the girls were all right. When he stopped in the doorway, it looked as if they were not.

But for a bench or two at the other end, the car was no longer open. At each side of the middle passage curtains gently swung. In some places, the light from the swaying lamps pierced the thin material and one vaguely saw uncouth recumbent figures. A cold draught blew along the passage, cinders beat upon the roof, and dust eddied about the floor. The passengers had gone to bed; one or two in upper berths struggled to pull off their clothes, but the Misses Cullen yet occupied the uncurtained bench. Monica’s arm was round the other and Denis thought Bride wept. Well, he imagined he knew the trouble, but he went forward and inquired.

Monica blushed and explained in an embarrassed voice. The railroad’s Dublin agent stated that second-class passengers were entitled to use the sleeping-berths, but the porter declared they must buy a fresh ticket. Danny kept the joint purse, and Monica doubted if all the money she and Bride had would buy the food they needed for the next five days.

“Very well,” said Denis. “The thing can soon be fixed and you mustn’t bother. I’ll see Danny about it at the other end.”

Bride—he imagined her name was Bridget—dried her tears. She was young, and although she had not known much luxury, the loneliness daunted her. Monica shook her head.

“No,” she said firmly, “you are kind, but it cannot be done like that. When Danny’s train got there, you would be gone, and we do not borrow where we cannot pay.”

Denis liked her pride and he liked her rather formal talk. For all her musical accent, her English was colloquially good. He felt she, so to speak, translated; but he knew he could not persuade her.

“If you’re going to be obstinate, we must try another plan,” he said. “One is not forced to buy a ticket for a Colonist sleeping-berth, and I have a mattress and some other things I don’t particularly need. In two or three minutes I’ll bring the stuff along.”

He went off, and when he returned with his coat and bed, the load jammed in the door. A colored porter looked at him severely across the top.

“This car’s a second-class sleeper, suh. We got no use for emigrant truck.”

“Get out of the way,” said Denis. “I’ll see you in the smoking-compartment when I go back.”

The porter hesitated, but he blocked the passage. The Company’s rules were strict, and all one might get from an emigrant did not justify much risk.

“You do’n’ put your stuff on board my car. Shoo, boy, before I fire you!”

Since Denis did not move, he seized the bed, braced his legs against a seat, and pulled. Denis put his hand on the fellow’s chest, and pushed. The porter reeled back and sat down, noisily, on the boards. Opening curtains tossed, and somebody shouted:

“Them fellows get too fresh. Sick it to him good!”

A firm hand seized Denis’s arm, and, swinging round, he fronted the conductor.

“What the—?” inquired the railroad man, and then saw the battered mattress and the Misses Cullen on the uncurtained bench.

“Scat!” he ordered the porter, and signed Denis into the vestibule.

“The girls,” said Denis, “are going to the Coast and will be on board for four or five nights. They have no sleeper-tickets, and their brother was left behind at Montreal.”

“Sure I know. I’m sorry for the colleens.”

“There’s not much use in being sorry,” Denis remarked, and pulled out his wallet. “It looks as if they were your countrywomen, and perhaps something could be wangled. I believe you say fixed.”

“Ye need not translate: I have heard the word. ’Tis a fine coat ye have got, although the stars is gone! Well, we old pals was up in Dublin when the law courts was burned: but I was in the mud at Paschendaele with Sam Hughes’s gang.”

“You’re a queer lot,” said Denis. “Perhaps you think we are— But I expect a conductor is sergeant-major on board his train. What about the girls?”

“Ah,” said the other, “the grand old days is gone, and, for a conscientious man, the times is hard. Ye cannot travel on a box of cigars, and there’s not much use in throwing the money ye collect at the roof. The company takes the lot.”

“Then, at one time, that was not the rule?”

The conductor grinned. “Ye kept the dollars that did not stick. Now all the papers ye get are numbered and they check your counterfoils. Mike but twice miscalculated, and he was fired last trip. Anyhow, ye can put up your pocket-book. Your mattress is not the company’s, and to lend a friend your coat is not agin the law.”

He sternly ordered the porter to carry Denis’s bed and get some curtains. In a few minutes the Misses Cullen’s corner was a passable bedroom, and Denis went off. The conductor indicated his retreating form and smiled.

“A fine soldier boy, an’ modest! Well, all I can do’s to O.K. your corner right through to the Coast. Sleep well, Mavourneen, and waken fresh as the dew on the heather.”

Denis climbed to his shelf under the roof. The polished boards were hard and the night was cold, but he had known colder beds and was soon asleep.

At daybreak the long train was deep in the Laurentian wilds. The clearings had vanished, and small, tangled pines, cracked by frost and torn by storms, rolled by the clanging cars. Sometimes one saw low rocky hills, and shining lakes pierced the woods. Rivers plunged down the ravines, and at intervals the cars stopped at a dreary settlement with a big water-tank. For the most part, however, the slim, gray trunks sped by in endless rows.

Farther west, the line curved about the rocks by Lake Superior. Now and then Denis remarked an ore dump and a steamboat wharf, but as a rule the landscape was bleak and austerely desolate. At Port Arthur the swift panorama struck a different note. Rows of new frame houses bordered the water-front, as if to link up with Fort William ten miles off. Industrial smoke floated about the fresh clearings; giant grain-elevators towered above the wharfs. From the twin ports Canada’s wheat goes down the lakes, and in fall the mile-long trains block the railroad-tracks.

The elevators vanished and the cars plunged again into the lonely woods. For three or four hundred miles the track pierced the wilderness; and then the dark pines stopped, and willow and poplar bluffs melted into open plain at Winnipeg.

Denis saw a muddy river, fresh ranks of elevators, flour-mills, and ambitious hotels, but although the train stopped for some hours, the prairie city did not interest him much. At length he had reached the wheat belt, where a man might live by his labor in the wind and sun. One, no doubt, must front drawbacks. For example, a friend of his went broke, and was frozen; but some made good. Denis had seen the Winnipeg flour-mills and the Port Arthur wharfs.

When the cars rolled west he studied the moving landscape. Spacious wooden homesteads and windmill-pumps went by; he saw wide belts of vivid green where the fresh wheat sprang. Then short grass, rippling in the wind, went back to the horizon, and only scattered poplar bluffs, like islands, broke the lonely plain.

Cultivation as yet was checkered. Sometimes, for an hour or two, the homesteads were numerous and the train sped by wire fences and black, gumbo roads. Then they plunged into dreary sandhills where battered jack-pines grew. The towns were small and not remarkable. Portage and Brandon were quiet and somehow English; Regina was obviously growing, and Denis saw the noble white parliament house by Wascana Lake. He remarked the stockyards at Medicine Hat; and then the train crossed the muddy Bow and climbed the Alberta tablelands to the shining Rockies.

They crossed the high pass in the dark, and when the sun was up stopped for some time on a lonely mountain-side. Denis understood that plunging rocks had broken a snow-shed, but speed was not important and he was satisfied to look about. Sitting down on the step of a first-class car, he lighted a cigarette.

Fifty yards off, a riband of snow, like a frozen river, curved between the rocks, and the sun, reflected from its sparkling surface, was pleasantly hot. Where the white belt stopped, the pines began, and rolled down in dark-green ranks to a foam-streaked river. Denis thought they went down for a thousand feet; anyhow, he got a sense of profound depth and the rapid’s hoarse turmoil hardly pierced the throb of the locomotive pump. The morning was fresh; he smelt the keen scent of the pines and the creosote in the railroad-ties. All he saw moved him and the sooty train did not jar. The mountain wilds were beautiful beyond his dreams, and the track man had built was the road to adventure.

Somebody came from the vestibule and Denis got up. Two girls were on the steps and one rather imperiously signed him to stop. Denis had remarked her proud, searching glance at Montreal and Ottawa.

“We need not disturb you. The cars are cold and grimy, and the sunshine called us to come out,” she said.

“This is the sunniest spot along the train; you get the snow’s reflections,” Denis remarked. “Well, I thought I’d like to see the locomotive that pulled us across the pass.”

He did not start. Had the girl wanted him to go, he imagined she would have indicated her wish. Instead, she smiled, and beckoning her companion, sat down on the steps.

“You will not bother us, and one must not be selfish. I believe we are held up for some time, and we are already two or three hours behind the schedule.”

“One might stop at a much less attractive spot, and my time is not at all valuable,” Denis rejoined and leaned against a broken pine a few yards off. “In Canada, I expect the admission’s strange.”

“You are English?”

“Obviously English?” said Denis. “It’s perhaps a drawback?”

“Something depends—” the girl replied. “Well, I think you are keener than some Englishmen I have met. The model you use in the Old Country is good, but when you imply that there is not another we don’t like you. In fact, we rather expect you to copy ours. However, I do not think that is hard. As a rule, the strangers who join us are soon stancher Canadians than the native-born.”

“There was, I believe,” said Denis, “a fox who lost his tail. He declared he wondered why he had ever carried the awkward thing. After all, when speed’s important, a draggled brush is a handicap.”

The girl laughed frankly. “Then you would sooner travel light?”

“To some extent,” Denis agreed, in a thoughtful voice. “When one is forced to take the road, there is not much use in carrying stuff one can go without. The trouble is to choose which to throw on the rubbish-heap, but recent events have helped. We have dumped much we thought indispensable before nineteen-fourteen.”

The girl smiled, but she gave him an understanding glance.

“The fox you talked about inherited his brush, and I expect to lose it hurt. But are you going to the cities?”

“No,” said Denis. “I have had enough. I thought I might grow fruit.”

“Then, perhaps you are lucky. The things most useful in the woods cannot be dumped. If you have got them, you ought to make good.”

“For example?”

A touch of color came to the girl’s face, but she said, “Steadiness and pluck; the power to take hard knocks and hold on. But I’m not a philosopher and one must be practical. Perhaps you can chop? And pull a cross-cut?”

“I cannot chop,” said Denis; “I doubt if I’d know a cross-cut, except that it’s a saw. However, if I’m forced, I certainly can dig. Well, that’s not much to boast about, but I want to earn five hundred dollars in the next twelve months. In a way, a relation bet I could not. Do you think it impossible?”

“The sum is not very large,” the girl replied. “On the whole, I would not be daunted. The proper plan is to try—”

A deep whistle blew, and a man on the track began to shout, “All aboard.” The girls went up the steps, and Denis thought one for a moment turned. Then the bell clashed, the cars rolled ahead, and Denis jumped on his. The throb of wheels got faster and the train plunged into a dark snow-shed.