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PART I

THE WOODS

CHAPTER I

BOY AND GIRL

IN THE remote hills of northern Scotland dwelt the clan of Murdock. Of it, one man, John, the generations bred to attunement, so that he, alone of all his people, felt and must respond to the first faint lift of the wave. Therefore, he took ship and sailed west, to better his condition, he thought and said, though his condition was well enough. He landed on the New England coast. There he hewed him a farm from the forest and married and prospered and in due time raised a family. He became a selectman, and afterwards an assemblyman in the legislature. He lived to a good old age, content with his establishment. This was in 1731.

To his numerous children he left a prosperous estate, but to one, Luke, he bequeathed, unknown to himself, also certain hormones, so that when, in the ’70s, the rhythm again surged westward Luke was borne on it over the Alleghanies with Boone into the Dark and Bloody Ground, to better his condition, he said, though his condition, too, was well enough to satisfy his brothers.

From his broad acres and the mansion he had built in the foundation of what was to be an ancestral home, set out another Luke, his son, with his bride, in a covered wagon following Marcus Whitman toward Oregon; and to them, on the journey, and in the covered wagon, a son was born who was named Marcus in the leader’s honor. Luke did not follow Whitman all the way, however. In his case the wave spent itself near the Dalles, on the Columbia River; and there he took up land and raised a family. His wife died in the birth of the third boy John. When the latter had reached the age of twelve Luke was killed by a horse. He had bettered his condition precisely to the extent of three sod-and-wattle shacks, a well and windmill, a corral of greasewood, twenty horses and about six hundred cattle.

His personal accomplishment might have seemed small, but it was a far cry from the Highlands to the Dalles. And there was John.

John stayed with his two brothers on the ranch near the Dalles for three years after their father’s death. Then he tied the roll of his slicker behind his cantle and rode away. He told the brothers he could not stand them any longer, bossing him around; but the impulse of his forthfaring was a deeper compulsion. Possibly the three felt this to be so, for at the last the parting was amicable. It was understood John’s share in the patrimony would be intact for his return and claiming.

So he rode forth on his pinto, driving his remuda of four. His saddle, a rifle under his leg, a pair of slick-leather chaps, a pair of silver-inlaid spurs, a tall slender figure hard as steel wire, a contagious grin and a reckless flick of the eye were all his valuables. He had in addition a few perishables, such as his age of fifteen and the worn and bleached blue jeans he rode in and the modest blanket roll lashed athwart one of the spare horses.

He entertained no definite ideas, so he headed to the southeast, the ranch country of eastern Oregon. He got a job promptly enough, for he was well grown and strong, and men were scarce. He rode boundary and chopped wood and peeled potatoes occasionally, when Wong the cook was pressed, and shod horses and pitched alfalfa hay and strung wire fence and drove chuck wagon. To all these things he was accustomed. He made good at them and at the scores of other jobs that would naturally be shunted toward a willing and handy boy of fifteen. Jim Carston wanted to keep him and offered him man’s wages to stay. But something stronger than his liking for Jim Carston was lifting within him. He tied the roll of his slicker behind his cantle, waved his old Stetson, flashed his gay smile and rode away. He was richer by six months, by some added knowledge of how to do things, some friendly good wishes and a rather ancient forty-five-caliber frontier-model Colt revolver, astoundingly thrust upon him by Wong at the moment of departure. There was also the matter of a few dollars of wages.

For the next ten years John ranged the great basin between the Rockies and the Cascades, seeking, he told himself, to better his condition. He punched cattle as a cowboy; he peeled cayuses as a bronco buster; he acted as sportsmen’s guide in the game country; he prospected with the desert rats, but half-heartedly, for this type of mania quickly wore thin for him; he took a look at the southern mines and shot deer for their commissary, which was well enough, for he liked hunting; he rode as express messenger atop a Concord coach with a sawed-off shotgun across his knees. He was good at all these things. But always, just as his condition looked well toward settled betterment, he rode on. Curiously enough the job that held him longest would seem to have the least adventurous appeal of the lot. In western Washington he stayed for almost a year on a wheat farm. Here was something new to him–and to the country, for that matter. Its owner had progressive ideas and a little capital, and he had brought in the first harvesting machinery. John discovered an enormous aptitude for machinery. It fascinated him. He loved to run it and figure it out and repair it, make it obey. But it could not hold him.

“Reckon I’m just a bum, a rolling stone,” he laughed and rode away. Sometimes, on rare occasions, when he took more serious stock of himself, his conscience reproached him. Perhaps he was a bum, just a natural hobo. He would settle down. But deep within him he knew he would not settle down. He had to find something first.

In the spring of 1895 he imagined he had found it, or rather them, for the objects of his search must, it seemed, be two–a woman and a place in work that suited his whole desire. He had no ideals as to the one, or definite ideas as to the other, but he was certain he would know them when he saw them.

This proved to be the case. Riding early one morning into Siler’s Bend, near the Deschutes, he came upon the woman, seated under a cottonwood tree outside the little settlement. This was Sarah Slocum, spinster and orphan: age twenty, schoolteacher, native of Borland, which is west of the Cascades, reduced to penury by the decease of her father after a disastrous law suit, lineal descendant of Joshua Slocum, trader, immigrant of ’51, and therefore also possibly harboring in her life essence the genes and hormones of attunement to the racial urge of which we write. Of these statistics John Murdock remained ignorant until much later. More pressing matters claimed his enterprise; and so masterfully did he press them, and perhaps so predestined were they to fulfillment, that he and the schoolteacher rode out from Siler’s Bend that very afternoon as man and wife.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

He waved his hand toward the west.

“A place I been saving. I always meant to camp there, but I never got around to it. Now I know why.” The copper bronze of his face deepened. He stared straight ahead. “There’s a river,” he chose his words at first a little awkwardly, “it comes out from underground full growed. Worth seeing. There’s a lot of big ferns and those wide-leaf things that sort of hide the hole it comes out from, and all of a sudden there she is, wide and cold and full growed, a regular river, just like that! It’s in a pine park, pretty high up in the foothills, so it’s cool. And there’s a lot of green feed and flowers and those birds that sing sort of solemn and slow, like bells. Hi you, Sukey! Git back there!” He slapped his quirt against heavy leather in admonition of the single pack horse. “There’s trout there, too,” he added.

They came to the park late in the afternoon. The tall pines stood about it, consulting in whispers. Azaleas and rhododendrons bordered the meadow. The stream was wide and shallow, with small deep pools behind boulders and rims of bracken and saxifrage and tufts of them here and there in the current, like little islands. The horses must be unpacked and off-saddled and belled and hobbled. John did this and set the saddles in a row along a brown log, as though it were a horse’s back, and threw across them the cinches and stirrups and then spread on top the coronas and the saddle blankets, after the cowboy’s neat fashion; after which he took the ax and departed. He made no comments on these activities; nor did he offer any suggestions to Sarah; but this omission was only, the latter sensed, because he assumed she must know what to do. Except in theory this was not the case. She emptied the kyacks of their contents and surveyed the provisions and utensils. Then she gathered some dry sticks and fallen rubbish for a fire and began to arrange them at the base of a boulder. She looked up at the sound of John Murdock’s laugh.

His back and shoulders were piled high with fir-balsam fronds. He looked like a walking green haystack.

“Aiming to smoke out a ground hog?” said John. He caught the expression in her eyes. “Reckon this is all new to you.” Mysteriously the green haystack swung from his shoulders to the ground and stood upright. John stretched his arms. “This party is on me,” said he. “You just sit and watch.”

“I’m so useless,” she lamented.

“Think so?” said John. That was all he said; but something in his manner of saying comforted her. She was content.

She arose to her feet.

“How in the world...?” She was curious about the fir-balsam fronds and their inexplicable cohesion and uprightness. Then she saw just the tip of the ax handle protruding from the center of the mass.

“Just lay them crisscross across the blade and keep on piling them up,” said John.

“But what holds them together? Why don’t they fall off?” she marveled.

“They just hold themselves. They don’t fall off.” He was tickled at her amazement over this simple commonplace. “That’s our bed. Where’d you wish it?”

“I–I don’t know.” Curiously the little park seemed to fall very still. The faint sweet tinkle of the horse bell and the sigh of wind high in the trees were only an embroidery on the texture of waiting silence. She turned her head slowly and looked wide eyed into his face, as though she were seeing it for the first time.

“There’s blankets enough for us both, if you want it that way.” His voice was gentle.

“No,” said she steadily.

He took her in his arms. Strangely, this was their first kiss. Events had, with them, moved too rapidly: the usual demonstrations were but just catching up. She raised her face simply and confidently. Their lips touched. She closed her eyes. And abruptly they were swept away, clinging to one another.

After a time they drew apart. John Murdock was bewildered and, at that moment, ashamed of himself. In John’s world girls were either “nice” or “easy.” This was not the way a man felt toward a “nice” girl. He had had his women here and there in the natural course of adventure; and he had learned to spot the “easy” ones; and the minute you found out they were “easy” the game was wide open, and you treated them in any way they would let you treat them. Some went farther than others, but the idea was the same, and they all played back. His desire had caught him unaware: he had yielded blindly to its impulsion. And this girl he had brought with him from Siler’s Bend to the park under the Cascades had played back. A little belatedly, perhaps, but ardently. Her lips had widened to the passion in his kiss, her body had met eagerly the pressure of his. What had he done! He stared at her appalled.

But she did not perceive his panic; nor would she have understood it.

“I did not know it was so beautiful to love,” she breathed.

Her eyes were starry: and John again was ashamed–ashamed of that in him which had caused his first shame. And he felt suddenly very humble, and a little reverent, which was quite a new feeling for John Murdock.

They camped together for two magic, ecstatic weeks. Their life was simple enough. Sarah Murdock’s trousseau consisted of just what she had, which had not overburdened Sukey when they left Siler’s Bend. The groom’s presents to the bride were two: a pair of soft-leather, high-heeled short boots, stitched in a bright pattern; and a light stock saddle, a Visalia tree with silver conchas, the most expensive in town.

They rarely stirred outside the tiny park. The enclosure of its great trees contained an all-sufficing world. There is much to be said for after-marriage courtship. John could not get used to the idea. His eyes followed her as she moved about.

“Dog gone!” he marveled, “it’s always seemed kind of wonderful to me to own a live thing like a horse, but to own a woman–all by myself...”

They caught their trout from behind the boulders, but the pool deepest and farthest downstream they kept for bathing. John had learned to swim in the Columbia, but Sally–she could not long remain Sarah–could only splash.

“Where would I learn to swim at Borland!” she cried indignantly. “You must teach me.”

She was from the first serenely unself-conscious. John secretly marveled and puzzled over the mystery of women, whose modesty seems to be an affair of the moment’s fashion, and whose giving carries wholeheartedly with it all the minor implications. In face of her matter-of-fact acceptance John actually felt an uneasy guilt that he could not so carelessly let fall tradition.

The afternoons passed quickly, for the ranges towered high to the west, and the sun must early touch their rims. From beneath the trees the shadows lengthened slowly, inch by inch. The shadows had chill fingers. They must dress, set about the necessary affairs of subsistence, postponed in deference to the day. It was the still time. The breeze had fallen. The pines held themselves straight and without movement in a compactness of silence. The birds drowsed. Even the heedless patter of the river seemed to have fallen in tone to a smooth, low muttering. And soon it was night.

One morning Sally was awakened by a touch on her shoulder. She opened her eyes sleepily and sat up in surprise and a little alarm. John was dressed and afoot. The hour was gray, the air chill, the tips of the pines as yet untouched by dawn.

“Time’s up,” said John briefly.

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