Читать книгу Wild Geese Calling - Stewart Edward White - Страница 4

Table of Contents

THE SHANTY

HERE, it would seem, John Murdock had found the second element of completion. He had now the woman and the sufficing outlet for his abilities and energies. He had arrived at the place where, like his forebears, he could give over following the restlessness in his blood, could settle down and in real fact better his condition.

For accomplishing the latter was here real opportunity. John’s nature inclined toward the stretch of his muscles in the vigorous out of doors, toward a varied practical application of his excellent brains, and toward the intricacies of mechanics. Here was wide outlet for all three. To be sure, the outfit was small, but it did things in the then modern manner. Bull Kirby drove hard and took no nonsense, nor fraternized with anybody; but he was skilled at placing men where they belonged. He started John as wood monkey for the donkey engine and apparently paid him no more attention. But within a week he transferred him to the mill.

“How much do you know about machinery, anyway?” he asked.

“Not much. Just what I picked up here and there,” said John. “I like it,” he added.

Bull Kirby grunted. “Well, you let it alone until you do.”

John flushed. So Bull had caught him running the donkey! A wood monkey has no business fooling with the donkey. But Bull had not called him down: he had put him in the mill.

The outfit was a modest one. It had just one circular saw and a trimmer. Old Paddock, with the assistance of a gangling moron of sixteen, ran the engine room. John and the others constituted the floor crew. Charley Matson was sawyer, in the upper dimness, silent, detached, remote, in the calm weary patience of a god, high on his carriage, his hands resting on the levers, until John and the others had rolled the log in place. It was dim and wide and cool in the mill. The great saw, revolving so rapidly that it seemed to be standing still, hummed in expectancy. Strange black-hooked hands shot up from the floor, hovered hesitantly above the prostrate log, gripped it in savage decision, half turned it one way, quarter turned it the other, altered its position yet a few inches more. They loosed their grasp, hovered for a moment as though to be sure of their satisfaction, then swiftly, silently vanished down into the limbo whence they had been evoked. Of these strange and formidable creatures Charley was the overlord through the little levers beneath his hand.

And then abruptly it seemed that half of the floor leaped without warning into full swift motion, carrying the log and, with it, Charley on his elevated platform. And the humming peace of the dimness was shattered by the saw’s wild shriek of exultance, and above the patient brown back of the log curved high a sawdust plume of triumph. As abruptly these things ceased. With a faint plop the detached slab fell on the moving rollers and was carried away. Like a ghost in silence the carriage shot back to position.

Next to Bull Kirby, Charley Matson was the most important man on the hill. His judgment, and his command of the strange familiars that his touch summoned, determined how much and how little could be made of each individual cut; whether he should “set” for a two-inch clear or a two-by-four or a six-by-six or just the one-inch mill run. Each run of the carriage on which he stood meant a new calculation, a new decision. A single uncertainty of touch or judgment could spoil the work of many men. He only was responsible.

Ordinarily Charley would have had no other duties. But here, largely of his own choice, and after the day’s mill run was over, he saw to the comfort and well-being of his faithful djinns and daemons. He inspected and lubricated and tested the complicated mechanics that activated them; he filed and set the saws. Thus John was able to come into contact with him. And that is why, a month or so later, Charley Matson did a most unusual thing in expostulating to Bull Kirby when the latter ordered John out of the mill and into the woods.

“He’ll make a good mill man, give him time. He might even,” Charley went to the length of conceding, “make a sawyer. He’s a born mechanic.”

Bull Kirby grunted. He would not have explained himself to anybody else, but Charley was unique.

“I’ve a notion he may be a born lumberman,” he growled. “Only way to know is to find out.”

So John moved outdoors. It was not much of a mill; but it had seemed so to him. Likewise it was not much of a woods layout. They felled the trees by saw and by kerfs chopped from spring boards. They swamped and crosscut by hand. They yanked the logs out to arterial slideways either with horses or donkey engines, according to circumstances. The slideways converged on the mill, and the logs were slid along them by a wire cable hauled over a drum and returned, through blocks suspended to poles planted alongside the slideway, to the big he-donkey that furnished the power. At the mill the logs were sawed about as fast as they could be delivered. The fresh lumber was at once freighted down the mountain in wagons drawn by six, eight, ten mules, and the driver sitting asaddle of one of them, dim in the dust. There were no skidways, no drying yards, no flumes, no booming ponds, few of the customary facilities even of that time. But its lacks measured the strength of its challenge.

The men of the various crews slept in a two-story dormitory and ate at three oilcloth-covered tables running the full length of the cookhouse. Bull Kirby had a dog kennel of his own containing a bunk, a table and two chairs. He washed outside in a tin basin. Charley Matson, the sawyer, Hugh Barkley, the bookkeeper, who also kept the company store, and old man Paddock, the engineer, shared a four-room shanty with a veranda, one of the houses built originally as married quarters. Of these there were half a dozen standing empty; and others, such as the scaler and the stable boss, would have rated separate quarters had they not preferred the vivacity of the bunk house. Indeed only one, other than the Murdocks’, was occupied. Bull Kirby did not favor women about camp. Bull’s experience with women was that they were pleasant but troublous. He had hired Mel Carter without knowing about Clara and had then kept him because he never went back on his word. Bull had no excuse of ignorance in the case of Murdock: a woman obviously accompanied him, and a damn good-looking one, too. Caught him after supper when he felt good natured.

John and Sally were given free pick of the empty shanties. These were all exactly alike: narrow veranda, three rooms in an L so a rectangular roof would cover the whole, rough lumber throughout except for the floors, which were dressed smooth; large room backing the veranda, two smaller rooms filling the L, one with a stove-pipe hole as kitchen, one with a wide slatted bunk, built in, as sleeping quarters; off the kitchen an open lean-to with a rack at one end for the wood pile and a low wide shelf at the other for water pail, wash basin, laundry. Of furnishing there was little, and that home made.

To John there was not much choice, but Sally showed no hesitation. Her selection stood the last in the row, and an outcropping rock ledge had forced it just around the curve of the meadow so that it was to some degree separate. John was a little doubtful.

“Won’t be so funny when the rain sets in,” he pointed out. “Long way to the cookhouse, and the mud’ll be up to your neck.”

“You don’t think for a minute we’re going to eat at the cookhouse!” cried Sally.

“Why—everybody else does.”

“If,” stated Sally with decision, “we’re going to have a house of our own it’s going to be home, and we’re going to live in it.”

“This lumber jackin’ is hard work,” he objected. “I got to have good cooking to keep up my strength.”

“Well—of all the——” She caught on John’s face the wooden expression she had begun to suspect. She made a rush at him which he dodged.

“Be good girl,” he warned. “Papa spank!”

They came to this new home of theirs from opposite directions but with equal zest. To John it looked good and almost adequate just as it was. In the course of his wandering life John had learned to make himself comfortable, even luxurious, as he saw it, in many an old sod hut or line shack a heap smaller and dirtier and more scantily equipped than this. Needed a drastic cleaning, of course, it hadn’t been occupied for a long time. The rusty old iron stove in the kitchen looked all right. He’d swipe a stove pipe from one of the other empty houses, and maybe a few more chairs and things; if not, he could knock them together out of hours. The camping outfit had most necessities for cooking and such. Might be a few doo-dads to get. A coal-oil lamp would be nice. Nice to get a mattress for the bunk, if they had any at the store. If not, John could get a donkey’s breakfast from the stable boss and fix things up. At this point John’s imagination ran off the deep end. They were all comfortably settled.

“Anything you need you can get at the company store,” he told Sally, “or they’ll order it for you. They’ll charge it against wages.” His mind ran beyond these immediate considerations to concern itself with Sally. Suddenly he was troubled about Sally.

“Going to be kind of tough here for you, I’m afraid,” said he. “I don’t know what you’ll find to do. I could keep Pronto up. You might ride. How do you like Mis’ Carter? Looks like a sort of nice little thing. Hope you and her—I have my job, of course, but you——”

He stopped. Sally stood squarely before him, her clenched hands on her hips.

“What’s the matter?” he interrupted himself.

“Of all the stupid, conceited speeches I ever listened to!” she cried. “You and your job! Just because you’ve camped out like a Siwash all your life! Look at this!” She reached up to seize his shoulders and slowly revolved him in a complete circle. “Well? Do you think I am going to live in this? Do you think I am going to let us live in this? Don’t you think we’re going to have a home, a real home? And don’t you think it’s a job, a real full-time job, to make this into a home? No, you don’t. You don’t even know what a home is. It’s us; us and something else. And that something else is my job. Dull! Why, I don’t believe I’m going to have enough time!” She gave his shoulders a little shake and dropped her hands. “You poor goop!” she laughed in his face. She stood on tiptoe to bestow a butterfly kiss. “You do need gentling! And that’s another full-time job!” she added.

Sally bought sparingly and improvised lavishly, measuring carefully her purchases against John’s wages. Hugh Barkley, the bookkeeper and storekeeper, proved a real help. He had suggestions to make out of his knowledge of stocks and prices, and he sent to the city for things he did not keep, to be brought up by the lumber wagons returning empty, and he charged against Sally at the wholesale-cost price. Barkley examined her sternly over the tops of his glasses when she expressed doubt of this arrangement.

“We don’t keep it in stock, so there’s no reason we should charge a profit on it,” said he.

The logic of this was obscure, but Sally accepted it with a thankful murmur. Her conscience was easily quieted on sixty dollars a month.

But slowly the bare shack was taking on character. The stained deal table had a top of blue-squared oilcloth. Sally’s half-dozen books she had packed from Siler’s Bend made as brave a show as they could on a shelf above the table. The shelf was Sally’s most heroic effort, for which she had appropriated the piece of dressed lumber and borrowed the tools. John laughed at it and made it over again. Spurred by derision, Sally next day put up another shelf, a long shelf high up, taking enormous pains and pounding cruelly her thumb. She held the thumb behind her while John that evening, his head appraisingly on one side, made his opinion.

“That’s a good job, Sally,” he had paid the compliment of a real inspection. “Plumb and true. Only thing you might do yet is to countersink the nails.”

“How do you do that?” asked Sally. She glowed within. She could not have stood it if John had tried to be funny.

“Where’s your hammer, and a big nail—a good big one.”

He showed her, holding the square end of the old-fashioned cut spike against the head of the nail and tapping the spike until the nail was well countersunk below the surface of the wood. “Now with a little putty and a piece of sandpaper and maybe some wood stain ...” John was getting interested. “Here, you try it.” So he noticed the bruised thumb. “You got enough things to do without bunging yourself all up!” he cried indignantly. “If you got any more things to make, you leave ’em for me.”

“But you’ve been working so hard all day,” objected Sally.

“Shucks,” John was scornful, “this ain’t work, it’s fun. What else you want done?”

Sally might do with another shelf or so in the kitchen. She showed John the place.

“What you want there is a cupboard,” decided John. “If I had a T-square and chisel and plane—say, where’d you dig up these tools, anyway?”

“Mr Barkley loaned them to me.”

“Well, you see if you can get him to let you have some more. I’ll pick up some good scrap iron at the mill.”

They returned to the main room, where John again admired the shelf. He reached up to run his hand over it, testing the surface dressing.

“Say,” he seemed surprised, “what you tack on this edging for? Expecting an earthquake?”

Sally hesitated.

“Well, I was going to have them all up, for a surprise. What do you mean, coming home so early? But come here.”

She led the way to the bedroom and threw back the old camp tarpaulin from a corner. It had concealed a set of blue and white china, a wonderful set. There were plates of three sizes and cups and saucers and four platters, and all were quaintly patterned alike with a willow tree and an arched bridge across a pond and a Chinaman about to cross the bridge and two great birds, one in the sky and one on the ground. She watched John with the pride of shining eyes.

John whistled. He was gratifyingly impressed. “Where in blazes did them come from?”

“The store. See!” Sally breathlessly scooped up a half dozen of the largest plates and flitted back to the large room. John, following, stopped in the doorway. Sally was standing tiptoe to reach the shelf, placing the plates one by one on edge, side by side, behind its shallow rails of edging. She could just make it, precariously. Sally looked mighty pretty that way, reaching up, thought John, and her dress straining against her that-away and her sleeves falling back. She had nice round arms. And when she looked over her shoulder at him, her cheeks all pink from reaching up ...

“You come here!” ordered John peremptorily.

She dropped to her heels and turned, a little startled by his tone.

“Come here!” he repeated. “Now turn round. Just as I thought,” said he; “funny I never noticed it before!”

She struggled to face him, but he held her tight.

“What are you talking about, you idiot!”

“Why,” said he, “standin’ straight and easy my chin is just an easy fit for the top of your head.” He leisurely disengaged one arm and tilted her chin. “I bet that’s so as to make it handy to kiss upside down. Say,” said he after the success of this experiment, “did anybody ever tell you that you’re mighty cute?”

Laughing, she twisted to free herself. “Did anybody ever tell you that you’re crazy? Let me go!”

“Nice crazy?” He squeezed her tighter. “Nice crazy?” he insisted. After a moment she nodded. “All right.” He opened his arms.

“You’re terrible,” she said without conviction. “There, don’t you think that looks nice? Help me put up the rest of them.”

“They look fine,” John agreed. They stepped back together when the row was completed.

“As soon as I can get some hooks we’ll hang the cups underneath. See, they just match the oilcloth.”

“Fine,” repeated John. “Do we eat off them, or are they just pictures?”

“Of course we eat off them!”

“Well,” said John placidly, “reckon then I’ll have to build you a stepladder.”

Sally’s eyes flashed, but she made no retort. Evidently what was bothering her had not yet occurred to John. She must justify her conscience.

“I got the whole set for five ninety-eight,” she said in a small voice.

“What!” cried John, aroused.

“I know it’s extravagant, and we need so many things, and there’s all the provisions to get yet, and——” The words poured from her with a rush.

But, it appeared, that was not John’s emotion.

“You mean to say all that for six dollars?” He shook his head. “Somebody’s crazy. Sure you understood right?”

“I know it sounds absurd,” she hurried on breathlessly, “but Mr Barkley said we might just as well have it. It’s no use to them. It was meant to sell to married hands, and then Mr Kirby decided not to have any more married hands, and they can’t use it in the cookhouse, and they’ve had it for years, and Mr Barkley says he couldn’t get much of anything for it if he sent it back——”

“Mr Barkley, Mr Barkley, Mr Barkley,” John cut in. “Look here, young woman, I’m a nice easygoing cuss, and I like to live soft and easy and magnificent, but there’s one thing I draw the line at.” He eyed her severely. “I won’t be no kept man.”

She stared at him. And suddenly John threw himself into a chair and laughed and laughed and laughed. He tried to recover himself, dashed the tears from his eyes, was again overcome.

“If you could only see your face!” he gasped.

But Sally stood coldly waiting.

“I shall take the china back tomorrow,” she told him when he had sobered.

Instantly John was on his feet. He tried to take her in his arms. She was rigid.

“Why, honey!” he cried all contrition, “you didn’t think for one minute I meant——Why, honey, that funny little bald-headed coot——Of course I was fooling.”

She shook her head obstinately. The plates were going back, the borrowed tools were going back, John could do his own buying at the store hereafter. She failed to see any joke in it. She was wholly unreasonable. She would not listen to John. And finally John began to warm a little into anger. Maybe it was a fool thing to say, he fumed to himself, but doggone it, he hadn’t meant anything, and she ought to have sense enough to see it. He wanted to shake her into some sense. Damn the blue china! For one perilous moment John was tempted to smash the blue china. Luckily that impulse passed. He was bewildered, disillusioned, resentful.

Then his eyes widened, and his mouth dropped. Sally was laughing. She laughed and laughed and laughed.

“You goop!” she choked at last. “‘That funny little bald-headed coot!’” she quoted. “But he’s nice,” she added in justice. She chortled again at John’s open mouth. He closed it, but he still looked crestfallen.

“Keno!” he gave in. Then he rallied. “But you are kind of cute,” said he.

Beside the blue plates Sally indulged also in another luxury. She bought some cheap gay-striped material and made curtains for the windows. Except for these two things, her purchases she kept within the bare necessities—and the sixty dollars a month. This was a matter of close figuring. Sixty dollars is not a great sum. The first month she must run over a little, but Barkley said that would be all right. It turned out there was a small rebate allowance if one did not eat at the cookhouse. That was a welcome help.

By now John had begun to be genuinely interested in the house.

“Well, what’s new?” was his first greeting when he returned from work. He must be shown the day’s accomplishment before he would begin to clean up. He marveled gratifyingly over the simplest things.

“Well now, what do you know! I’d never have thought of that!”

Particularly did he admire the bright curtains, once they were in place. Sally had mentioned curtains. What for curtains, John wanted to know. Keep people from looking in, for one thing. Nobody, pointed out John, was going to climb way out in the middle of that wet meadow just to look in. He did not urge this as an objection, however, merely as the reasonable point of view. If Sally wanted curtains that was all right. When he saw them, in place, he was vastly pleased and surprised. John had thought of curtains as things that wound up on a spring roller. These were pretty!

But Sally would not permit him to linger too long. The table was set. “I’ve got a good dinner, and I don’t intend to let you spoil it,” said she.

At the cookhouse the triangle had already rung, and the men were filing in. They looked scrubbed and clean. As a matter of fact, each had merely plunged over-ears into the basin so his head was slick and shining. If John had been eating at the cookhouse he would have been already at table.

“I’ve been working hard, honey, I’m hungry,” he expostulated, “and honest, I’m perfectly clean—didn’t even sweat my shirt! See!”

“If you didn’t work hard enough to sweat your shirt you can’t be as hungry as all that,” said Sally with inexorable logic. “Shoo! Your clean shirt is all laid out. And don’t dawdle; we’ve got a pot roast.”

“Doggone schoolma’am!” accused John.

Sally chuckled. “Well, don’t act like a small boy.”

John retired in the direction of the lean-to back of the kitchen. Here was another of Sally’s simple contrivances. Somewhere she had found an old garden watering pot with which one could sprinkle oneself in a kind of shower. John would never have thought of that. His idea of a bath was to set the wash tub in the middle of the floor and go to it. As that involved heating of water on the stove, considerable contortion, a liberal slopping over and a subsequent mopping up, it was a rite likely to be somewhat spaced in time. Like most out-of-door males John had a healthy instinct for cleanliness but was not bigoted on the subject. To be taken as needed. Sally’s incomprehensible philosophy was more rigid. Whether needed or not, seemed to be her idea.

The flower-pot idea was ingenious, John admitted, but could be improved. Too much, said John, like pulling your own tooth. Again like most out-of-door men, he had a distaste for cold water. Don’t mind jumping in all over, said John, but doggone this slow trickling! Now, if you hung up the flower pot and hitched a string to the end of the spout, then you’d get a steady shower just by pulling the string. He fell into a brown study.

“No, I got a better scheme,” said he at last. “I’ll rig you up, first chance I get.”

The next Sunday he set about it. He refused to divulge his plan.

“You keep me from my work,” she complained. “I’ve got to stay out here and see what you are up to.”

The preliminaries, however, were sufficiently obvious. John was a deft handy man. Adjoining the lean-to, overlooking the meadow, he knocked together the framework of a small platform. This he floored with narrow slats set apart so the water would drain through. Atop it he erected a three-sided shelter, open toward the house. Sally thought this was all and agreed it was an improvement. She fetched her watering pot. John loftily waved it aside.

With a brad he punched dozens of holes in the bottom of a five-gallon coal-oil tin from which he had cut the top. He fastened the tin securely between two supports above his shelter.

“Now there,” said he, climbing down from his lofty perch, “is a shower as is a shower: not one of your measly little trickles!”

“And how,” asked Sally sweetly, “are you supposed to get any water into it? Or is this an air bath?”

“How about that stepladder you spoke of?” suggested John.

“If you think,” said Sally with decision, “that I’m going to stagger up any stepladder lugging pails of water—and”—she pointed out, carried away by the triumph of her own common sense—“the minute you pour in the water it’s going to begin to shower, isn’t it, and how are you——” She broke off short. She had caught John’s wooden expression. She had learned to know that expression.

John was tickled. He’d got a rise out of Sally. He was always solemnly badgering Sally, trying to get a rise out of her. It didn’t work very often. Sally was pretty quick. And it didn’t do to get brash. She generally got back at him. And she never got mad, like some folks would.

“Doggone,” he complained once, after a particularly outrageous bit of fooling, “try my best, I can’t seem to scare up a real good fight out of you nohow!”

“You wouldn’t like it if you did,” said Sally quietly. Somehow it sounded as though she meant that. But next moment she was laughing.

She was laughing now. John was satisfied: he’d got his rise; he was ready now to explain.

Over in the machine shop he’d found an old wing pump. This he would screw up, hand high, to the inside of the shelter. Its outlet he would lead up to the coal-oil can. Its inlet was a rubber hose that went out through an augur hole. You carried out a pail of water and set her down on an outside shelf John would build handy—or two pails of water, hot and cold, some style about this, he interpolated—and stick the hose in it, and then you got inside, under the coal-oil can, and worked the handle of the wing pump and pumped the water up into the can, and——

“The water comes out through all the cute little holes,” mocked Sally, “and trickles excruciatingly, and you howl. Full set of directions with every package. But, oh, John, I think it’s going to be grand!”

Completed, it turned out to be a weird-looking mechanical contraption. But it worked: and it was grand. John finished it early of a Sunday afternoon, and nothing would do but they must try it at once. The demonstration was entirely successful and delightful but was curtailed and complicated by a knock on the front door.

“Good lord!” whispered John in a panic, “it’s Clara Carter. What are we going to do? All our clothes are in the front room.”

But Sally remained calm.

“Put a towel around you and go get them,” said she.

“She’ll bust in, sure as shooting. The door ain’t locked.”

“You get ’em.”

Sally gave him a shove. “If you don’t hurry she will bust in.”

John managed it. He was scared.

“Come in, Clara,” Sally’s voice was tranquil, “and sit down. Be with you in a minute.”

John’s demoralization lasted over.

“Just suppose she’d come in and caught me!” he said to Sally after Clara had gone.

“Well, suppose she had.” Sally was matter of fact.

John was belatedly indignant.

“I think you might have done it,” he grumbled. But, it seemed, that would not have done at all. John, with only a towel around him, was respectable enough. Sally, with only a towel around her, would not have been respectable at all: not at three o’clock in the afternoon. This seemed entirely axiomatic to Sally. John gave it up. Anybody who could understand a woman could breed a mule, thought John, reverting to an elegant simile of his cowboy days.

But Sally had news. Clara was going to have a baby. That’s what she had really come for, to tell Sally about it. Clara couldn’t stand it any longer: she had to talk about it to somebody, and Sally was the only other woman.

“Ain’t she told Mel?” asked John, “or is it going to be a happy surprise?”

“Oh, Mel!” Sally’s scorn dismissed Mel. Sally was all excited. She chattered on. John only half listened, wondering idly how a woman could get up all that steam over just a kid.

“Huh?” He was startled to full attention by a question. “Sure! Sure! It would be fine!” he agreed, trying for the heartiness he sensed as appropriate.

“I don’t believe you think so at all!” she accused.

“Sure, sure I do!” repeated John. He was guiltily conscious that he really did not give a damn, so he covered the situation by the device that he had discovered sure fire in a crisis. He took her in his arms and patted her back. She snuggled against him.

“I wonder why we don’t,” she said wistfully, after a little.

But John was not wholly enlisted in the sentiment of this occasion.

“Well,” he suggested with a laugh, “if at first we don’t succeed, try, try again.”

She flung away.

“John! You’re outrageous!” she cried.

But he refused to be abashed.

“Only method I know of,” he insisted.

The construction of the shower bath fired John’s creative interest in nest building. Heretofore he had contented himself with admiring Sally’s efforts. Now he wanted to take part. He spent all of every Sunday, and the hour or so of almost every evening, tinkering on the house. Had it not been known that they were new married, their almost complete self-absorption might have bred active unpopularity. He made a rocking chair with a back by cutting away a barrel and upholstering it with excelsior and sacking and nailing staves on the bottom for rockers.

“Try it,” he urged Sally, misunderstanding her look of doubt. “Isn’t that comfortable?”

“Most comfortable chair I ever sat in,” agreed Sally surprisedly. It did not look comfortable.

“Then what’s the matter?” John had by now learned to sense at least some of Sally’s moods.

“Well,” Sally hesitated, “it’s a grand chair. But—do you think it quite goes with the curtains?”

John looked from the chair to the curtains to the blue china on the shelf.

“It’ll go fine out on the porch.” Sally hastened to soften the supposed disappointment. “And when we need it we can bring it in ...”

But John was not hurt. He was, on the contrary, astounded and delighted by the sudden revelation of a point of view he had never before considered.

“Sure! I see!” he cried. “It looks sort of clumsy!”

Sally thought that crisis safely past. But some days later, lacking other occupation for the moment, she took down the rawhide kyacks from where, with the packsaddles, they hung overhead in the lean-to, with an idea of cleaning and wrapping the camp equipment they contained. Thus she laid hands on a paper obviously hidden there by John as the last place on earth she would be likely to rummage. Sally took the paper to the blue oilcloth-covered table, where she studied it with knitted brows.

On the face of it was nothing mysterious. The thing was merely a Montgomery Ward & Co. order form. In the space at the top John had printed his name and address. Below, in appropriate columns, he had written a list of numbers, and opposite each a price.

The matter was plain. John was ordering a number of things by mail from Montgomery Ward & Co. He did not want Sally to know about it. The proper thing for her to do, Sally realized, was to put back the paper, say nothing and be properly surprised. She would have done this except for that column of prices. For some moments she stared at them unbelieving. But they were written plainly enough. They totaled nearly two hundred dollars. Had John gone crazy—on sixty dollars a month?

Sally pondered for some time, then took the list and walked down to the company store. Barkley was back in the office.

“Have you a Montgomery Ward catalogue I could borrow?” asked Sally from the doorway.

She carried the catalogue to a counter in the empty store and looked in it for the item corresponding to the first number on the list. She stared unbelieving at the picture of it, for the catalogue was lavishly illustrated. It was of a clock, a large clock, that had started out to be round but had decided to break the line purity of its circumference by a succession of swooping convex baroque ornamentations. The text informed her that it was covered with blue velvet.

“To match the china!” flashed Sally’s appalled intuition.

Feverishly she turned to the next item. At the end of fifteen minutes she closed the thick volume and sat for some time collecting her ideas and emotions, which were numerous and jumbled. Poor John! Such awful things! Such terrible, terrible monstrosities of “fanciness” and “elegance” and varnish and imitation carving and fringe and dingle-dangle! Sally was overwhelmed by an impulse to wild laughter as she recalled some of them. She had to stop thinking of them. She couldn’t have hysterics on poor old Hugh Barkley. What if she hadn’t had that fool impulse to drop everything and clean those kyacks, and that stuff had actually come! The thought effectively sobered her. She stared at it and shuddered. Could she have played up and been pleased and surprised, as John had planned? She certainly would have been surprised, all right! Then suddenly a tenderness flooded her heart, and the measure of it was precisely the gap between John’s eager secret anticipation and the atrocities of the Montgomery Ward catalogue. She thought only of John, and his poor, pitiful, blundering little plan; and of how puzzled and hurt and disappointed he was going to be. For just the flash of an instant it occurred to her that she really ought to let the transaction go through. But that was only a flash.

She walked back through the deep dust disturbed and thoughtful. How could she do it? John looked so like a hurt baby when he did not understand. Her heart yearned over John. All the rest of that day she moved apart, asking prayerfully and humbly that she be given wisdom.

The whole crisis flattened out ridiculously. John’s only show of disappointment was when he caught sight of the order form laid out prominently for his eyes.

“Oh, shucks!” said he disgustedly, “I meant that for a surprise! You would go rummaging around those old kyacks!”

He broke through Sally’s tactful circumlocutions when at last he grasped their purport.

“Don’t like ’em, eh?” said he. “Well, you go ahead and pick out what suits you.”

“Then—then you don’t care?” faltered Sally.

He looked surprised.

“Why, I was just aiming to please you.”

“Oh, John! John!” cried Sally, casting herself upon him.

John looked still more surprised. Then he grinned.

“Bad as all that, were they?” he surmised shrewdly. “Well, well. No call to cry about it.”

He could not make out why she should weep so passionately. Will I ever understand Sally? thought John. Gosh, women are funny critters. What’s all the shooting about? He patted her back. After a time she looked up at him wet faced. She had to know.

“John,” she asked seriously, “tell me. Did you actually like those things? Did you really want them?”

The intensity of her question brought him up standing.

“Why—they looked to me kind of—kind of fancy! Nothing too good for us, old girl.” He tried for the lighter touch.

She continued to stare at him. She thought of John as she had seen him once gazing rapt into a desert sunrise. Oh dear, thought Sally, will I ever understand John! Men are so funny!

That was at once emphasized for her.

“You order what suits you,” repeated John. “But get the best. I want you to have the best.”

This was Sally’s chance to point a lesson.

“But we can’t afford such things,” she objected.

Then it appeared that John had money in the bank in Portland. He was, after all, still a Murdock. When it happened that his wanderings left him a few dollars over from wages, he had sent them in. Never very much, but it mounted up.

“You told me you were broke!” accused Sally, a trifle exasperated.

“I told you that?” John was genuinely astonished.

She reminded him of their journey, which they had curtailed for lack of funds with which to buy food.

“Oh, then!” said John. “I just meant I hadn’t any money with me.” And since then? “I never thought of it,” said John. “Seemed like we had everything we wanted.”

Sally’s mind flashed back across her scrimping sixty-dollar-a-month economies. She looked at John, thought better of speech, threw her hands out in futility. She choked.

“What’s funny?” John wanted to know. “What are you laughing at?”

“At myself,” said Sally. “You wouldn’t understand.”