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UP THE LADDER TO THE SCUTTLE ([Page 160])

THE
LITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES

MARY HALLOCK FOOTE

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1899

AUTHOR’S NOTE

These stories were originally published in the St. Nicholas Magazine, and are reprinted here by kind permission of the Century Company.

The profits of the volume are dedicated to the Children’s Hospital of San Francisco.

PAGE
[Flower of the Almond and Fruit of the Fig]	[1]
[The Lamb that couldn’t “keep up”]	[17]
[Dream Horses]	[32]
[An Idaho Picnic]	[44]
[A Visit to John’s Camp]	[92]
[November in the Cañon]	[107]
[The Gates on Grandfather’s Farm]	[120]
[The Garret at Grandfather’s]	[144]
[The Spare Bedroom at Grandfather’s]	[167]

THE
LITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES

FLOWER OF THE ALMOND AND FRUIT OF THE FIG

There is a garden on a hill slope between the snows of the Sierra Nevada and the warm, rich valleys of the coast. It is in that region of Northern California where the pine belt and the fruit belt interlace. Both pine and fruit trees grow in that mountain garden, and there, in the new moon of February, six young Almond trees burst into flower.

The Peach and Plum trees in the upper garden felt a glow of sympathy with their forward sisters of the south, but the matronly Cherry trees shook their heads at such an untimely show of blossoms. They foresaw the trouble to come.

“The Almond trees,” they said, “will lose their fruit buds this year, as they did last and the year before. Poor things, they are so emotional! The first whisper of spring that wanders up the foothills sets them all aflame; out they rush, with their hearts on their sleeves, for the frosts to peck at. But what can one do? If you try to reason with them, ‘Our parents and grandparents always bloomed in February,’ they will tell you, ‘and they did not lose their fruit buds.’”

“The Almond trees come of very ancient stock,” said the Normandy Pear, who herself bore one of the oldest names in France. “Inherited tendencies are strong in people of good blood. One of their ancestors, I have heard, was born in a queen’s garden in Persia, a thousand years ago; and beautiful women, whose faces the sun never shone upon, wore its blossoms in their hair. And as you probably know, their forefathers are spoken of in the Bible.”

“A number of persons, my dear, are spoken of in the Bible who were no better than they should be,” said the eldest Apple tree. “We go back to the ‘Mayflower,’—that is far enough for us; and none of our family ever dreamed of putting on white and pink in February. It would be flying in the face of Providence.”

“White and pink are for Easter,” said the Pear tree, whose grandparents were raised in a bishop’s garden. “I should not wish to put my blossoms on in Lent.”

The Apple tree straightened herself stiffly.

“We do not keep the church fasts and feasts,” she said; “but every one knows that faith without works is dead. What are these vain blossoms that we put forth for a few days in the spring, without the harvest that comes after?”

“Now the Apple tree is going to preach,” said the light-hearted Peach tree, stepping on the Plum tree’s toes. “If we must have preaching, I had rather listen to the Pines. They, at least, have good voices.”

“Those misguided Almonds are putting out all their strength in fleshly flowers,” the Apple tree continued; “but how when the gardener comes to look for his crop? We all know, as the Cherry trees said, what happened last year and the year before. It cannot be expected that the Master of the Garden will have patience with them forever.”

“The Master of the Garden!” Four young Fig trees, who stood apart and listened in sorrowful silence to this talk of blossoms, repeated the words with fear and trembling.

“How long,—how much longer,”—they asked themselves, “will he have patience with us?”

It was now the third spring since they had been planted, but not one of the four sisters had yet produced a single flower. With deep, shy desire they longed to know what the flower of the fig might be like. They were all of one age, and they had no parent tree to tell them. They knew nothing of their own nature or race or history. Two seasons in succession, a strange, distressful change had come upon them. They had felt the spring thrills, and the sap mounting in their veins; but instead of breaking out into pink and white flowers, like the happy trees around them, ugly little hard green knobs had crept out of their tender bark, and these had swollen and increased in size till they were bowed with the burden of their deformity. Fruit this could not be, for they had seen that fruit comes from a flower, and no sign of blossom or bud had ever been vouchsafed them. When inquisitive hands came groping, and feeling of the purple excrescences upon their limbs, they covered them up in shame and tried to hide them with their broad green leaves. In time they were mercifully eased of this affliction; but then the frosts came, and the winter’s dull suspense, and then another spring’s awakening to hope and fear.

“Perhaps we were not old enough before,” they whispered encouragement to one another. “Blossoms no doubt are a great responsibility. Had we had them earlier, we might have been foolish and brought ourselves to blame, like the Almond trees. Let us not be impatient; the sun is warm, but the nights are cold. Do not despair, dear sisters; we may have flowers yet. And when they do come, no doubt they will be fair enough to reward us for our long waiting.”

They passed the word on softly, even to the littlest Fig-tree sister that stood in rocky ground close to the wall that shut the garden in from the pine wood at its back. The Pines were always chanting and singing anthems in the wood; but though the sound was beautiful, it oppressed the little Fig tree, and filled her with melancholy. Moreover, it was very dry in the ground where she stood, and a Fig tree must have drink.

“Sisters, I am very thirsty!” she cried. “Have you a little, a very little water that you could spare?”

The sister Fig trees had not much of anything to spare; they were spreading and growing fast, and their own soil was coarse and stony. The water that had so delicious a sound in coming seemed to leak away before their eager rootlets had more than tasted it; still they would have shared what they had, could they have passed it to their weaker sister. But the water would not go uphill; it ran away down, instead, and the Peach and Plum and Pear trees grew fat with what the Fig trees lacked.

“Courage, little sister!” they called to the fainting young tree by the wall. “The morning sun is strong, but soon the shadow of the wood will reach us. Cover thy face and keep a good heart. When our turn shall come, it will be thy turn too; one of us will not bloom without the others.”

It was only February, and the Almond trees stood alone, without a rival in their beauty. They stood in the proudest place in the garden, in full view both from the road and from a high gallery that ran across the front of the house where the Master of the Garden lived. The house faced the west, and whenever the people came out to look at the sunset they admired the beauty of the Almond trees, with their upright shoots, tipped and starred with luminous blossoms, against the deep, rich colors in the west; and when the west faded, as it did every evening, a lamp on a high post by the gate, bigger and brighter than the brightest star, was set burning,—“for what purpose,” thought the Almond trees, “but to show our beauty in the night?” So they watched through the dark hours, and felt the intoxication of the keen light upon them, and marveled at their own shadows on the grass.

They were somewhat troubled because so many of their blossoms were being picked; but the tree that stood nearest the house windows rose on tiptoe, and behold! each gathered spray had been kept for especial honor. Some were grouped in vases in the room, or massed against the chimney-piece; others were set in a silver bowl in the centre of a white table, under a shaded lamp, where a circle of people gazed at them, and every one praised their delicate, sumptuous beauty.

But peepers as well as listeners sometimes learn unpleasant truths about themselves.

“Aren’t we picking too many of these blossoms?” asked the lady of the house. “I’m afraid we are wasting our almond crop.”

“Almond trees will never bear in this climate,” said the Master of the Garden. “Better make the most of the blossoms while they last. The frost will catch them in a week or two.”

So the mother and children gathered the blossoms recklessly,—to save them, they said. Then a snow fall came, and those that had been left on the trees were whiter than ever for one day, and the next day they were dead. Each had died with a black spot at its core, which means the death that has no resurrection in the fruit to come.

After the snow came rain and frost, and snow again. The white Sierra descended and shook its storm cloak in the face of laughing Spring, and she fled away downward into the warm valleys. Alas, the flatterer! But the Almond trees alone had trusted her, and again their hope of fruit was lost.

“Did we not say so?” muttered the Apple tree between her chattering teeth. She was the most crabbed and censorious of the sisters, and by her talk of fruit one might have supposed her own to be of the finest quality; but this was not the case, and the gardener only that year had been threatening, though she did not know it, to cut off her top and graft her with a sweeter kind.

The leaves of the Almond tree are not beautiful, neither is her shape a thing to boast of. When spring did at last come back to stay, the Almonds were the plainest of all the trees. Their blossoms were like bright candles burned to the socket, that would light no more; their “corruptible crown” of beauty had passed to other heads. No one looked at them, no one pitied them, except the Fig trees, who wondered which had most cause to mourn,—they, who had never had a blossom, or the Almond trees, who had risked theirs and lost them all before the time of blossoms came.

The Fig trees’ reproach had not been taken away. While every tree around them was dressed in the pride of the crop to come, they stood flowerless and leafless, and burned with shame through all their barren shoots.

When the Master of the Garden came with his children to look at them, they hung their heads and were afraid.

“When will they blossom, like the other trees,” the children asked, “and what sort of flower will they bear?”

The Fig trees held their breath to hear the answer.

“A Fig tree has no flower, like the other fruit trees,” said the Master of the Garden. “Its blossom is contained in the fruit. You cannot see it unless you cut open the budding figs, and then you would not know it was a flower.”

“What is the use of having blossoms, if no one ever sees them?” one of the children asked.

“What is the use of doing good, unless we tell everybody and brag about it beforehand?” the father questioned, smiling.

“I thought the best way was—you know—to do it in secret,” said the child.

“That’s what we are taught; and some persons do good in that way, and cover it up as if they were ashamed of it. And so the Fig tree doesn’t tell anybody when it is going to bear fruit.”

The Fig trees had heard their doom. To the words that followed they had not listened; nor would they have understood much more of it than the child of its father’s meaning.

“What is this he calls our fruit?” they asked each other in fear and loathing. “Was that our fruit,—those green and purple swellings, that unspeakable weight of ugliness? Will it come year after year, and shall we never have a flower? The burden without the honor, without the love and praise, that beauty brings. That is the beginning and the end with us. Little sister, thou art happier than we, for soon thy burden-bearing will be done. Uncover thy head and let the sunbeams slay thee, for why should such as we encumber the ground!”

Trees that grow in gardens may have long memories and nature teaches them a few things by degrees, but they can know little of what goes on in the dwellings or the brains of men, or why one man should plant and call it good and later another come and dig up the first man’s planting. But so it happened in this garden. “The stone which the builders rejected, the same was made the head of the corner.”

“These little Fig trees with their strange, great leaves,—why were they put off here by themselves, I wonder?” A lady spoke who had lately come to the cottage. She was the wife of the new Master of the Garden. “I wish we had them where we could see them from the house,” she said. “All the other trees are commonplace beside them.”

“They are not doing well here,” said her husband. “This one, you see, is nearly dead. They must be transplanted, or we shall lose them all.”

Then followed talk which set the Fig trees a-tremble with doubt and amazement and joy. They were to be moved from that arid spot,—where, they knew not, but to some place of high distinction! They—the little aliens who had stood nearest the wall and thirsted for a bare existence—were to be called to the front of the garden and have honor in the presence of all! The despised burden which they had called their deformity they heard spoken of as the rarest fruit of the garden, and themselves outvalued beyond all the other trees, for that, having so little, they had done so much.

Beauty too was theirs, it appeared, as well as excellence, though they could scarcely believe what their own ears told them; and they had a history and a family as old as those of the Almond tree, who can remember nothing that did not happen a thousand years ago and so has never learned anything in the present.

But the Fig trees would have been deeply troubled at their promotion could they have known what it was to cost their neighbors the Almond trees.

“Two we will keep for the sake of their flowers, but the others must go, and give room for the Figs.” So said the new Master, and so it was done. The unfruitful Almond trees were dug up and thrown over the wall,—all but the two whom their sisters had ransomed with their lives; for beauty has its price in this world and there must be some one to pay it.

When another spring came round, it was the little Fig tree that stood in the bright corner where the splendor of the road lamp shone upon its leaves all night. Its leaves were now as broad as a man’s outspread hand, and its fruit was twice the size it had been the season before.

Its sister trees stood round and interlaced their boughs about it.

“Lean on us, little one,” they said, regarding it with pride.

“But you have your own load to bear.”

“We scarcely feel it,” said the happy trees.

This was true; for the burden that had seemed beyond their strength, when their hearts were heavy with shame and despondency, they could bear up lightly now, since they had learned its meaning and its worth.

The new Master’s children were so full of the joy of spring in that mountain garden—for they too, like the little Fig trees, had been transplanted from arid ground—they had no words of their own in which to utter it. So their mother taught them some words from a song as old, almost, as the oldest garden that was ever planted:—

“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.”

“Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out.”

THE LAMB THAT COULDN’T “KEEP UP”

Until Jack Gilmour was seven years old his home had been at his grandfather’s house in a country “well wooded and watered,” as the Dutch captain who discovered it described it to his king.

There was water in the river; there was water in the ponds that lay linked together by falling streams among the hills above the mill; there was water in the spring lot; there was water in the brook that ran through the meadow across the road; there was water in the fountain that plashed quietly all through the dark, close summer nights, when not a leaf stirred, even of the weeping ash, and the children lay tossing in their beds, with only their nightgowns covering them. And besides all these living, flowing waters, there was water in the cistern that lay concealed under the foundations of the house. Not one of the grandchildren knew who had dug it, or cemented it, or sealed it up, for children and children’s children to receive their first bath from its waters. The good grandfather’s care had placed it there; but even that fact the little ones took for granted, as they took the grandfather himself,—as they took the fact that the ground was under their feet when they ran about in the sunshine.

In an outer room, which had been a kitchen once (before Jack’s mother was born), there was a certain place in the floor that gave out a hollow sound, like that from the planking of a covered bridge, whenever Jack stamped upon it. Somebody found him, one day, trying the echoes on this queer spot in the floor, and advised him to keep off it. It was the trapdoor which led down into the cistern; and although it was solidly made and rested upon a broad ledge of wood—well, it had rested there on that same ledge for many years, and it wasn’t a pleasant thought that a little boy in kilts should be prancing about with only a few ancestral planks between him and a hidden pit of water.

Once, when the trapdoor had been raised for the purpose of measuring the depth of the water in the cistern, Jack had looked down and had watched a single spot of light wavering over the face of the dark, still pool. It gave him a strange, uncomfortable feeling, as if this water were something quite unlike the outdoor waters, which reflected the sky instead of the under side of a board floor. This water was imprisoned, alone and silent; and if ever a sunbeam reached it, it was only a stray gleam wandering where it could not have felt at home, and must have been glad to leap out again when the sunbeam moved away from the crack in the floor that had let it in.

That same night a thunderstorm descended; the chimneys bellowed, and the rain made a loud trampling upon the roof. Jack woke and felt for his mother’s hand. As he lay still, listening to the rain lessening to a steady, quiet drip, drip, he heard another sound, very mysterious in the sleeping house,—a sound as of a small stream of water falling from a height into an echoing vault. His mother told him it was the rain water pouring from all the roofs and gutters into the cistern, and that the echoing sound was because the cistern was “low.” Next morning the bath water was deliciously fresh and sweet; and Jack had no more unpleasant thoughts about the silent, sluggish old cistern.

Now, there are parts of our country where the prayer “Give us this day our daily water” might be added to the prayer “Give us this day our daily bread;” unless we take the word “bread” to mean all that men and women require to preserve life to themselves and their children. That sad people of the East to whom this prayer was given so long ago could never have forgotten the cost and value of water.

If you turn the pages of a Bible concordance to the word “water,” you will find it repeated hundreds of times, in the language of supplication, of longing, of prophecy, of awful warning, of beautiful imagery, of love and aspiration. The history of the Jewish people in their wanderings, their wars and temptations, to their final occupation of the promised land, might be traced through the different meanings and applications of this one word. It was bargained, begged, and fought for, and was apportioned from generation to generation. We read among the many stories of those thirsty lands how Achsah, daughter of Caleb the Kenizzite, not content with her dowry, asked of her father yet another gift, without which the first were valueless: “For thou hast given me a south land; give me also springs of water. And Caleb gave her the upper springs and the nether springs.”

Now, our little boy Jack was seven years old, and had to be taken more than halfway across the continent before he learned that water is a precious thing. He was taken to an engineer’s camp in a cañon of a little, wild river that is within the borders of that region of the far West known as the “arid belt.”

Well, there was water in this river; but after the placer-mining began, in the month of May, and Moore’s Creek brought down the “tailings” from the mines and mingled them with the current of the river, its waters became as yellow as those of the famous Tiber as it “rolls by the towers of Rome,”—yellow with silt, which is not injurious; but it is not pleasant to drink essence of granite rock, nor yet to wash one’s face in it. They made a filter and filtered it; but every pailful had to be “packed,” as they say in the West, by the Chinese cook and the cook’s assistant. Economy in the use of water became no more than a matter of common consideration for human flesh.

In addition to the river there was a stream that came down the gulch close beside the camp. This little stream was a spendthrift in the spring and wasted its small patrimony of water; by the middle of summer it had begun to economize, and by September it was a niggard,—letting only a small dribble come down for those at its mouth to cherish in pools or pots or pails, or in whatever it could be gathered. This water of the gulch was frequently fouled by the range cattle that came crowding down to drink, mornings and evenings. Dead leaves and vegetation lay soaking in it, as summer waned. It was therefore condemned for drinking, but served for bathing or for washing the camp clothing, and was exceedingly precious by reason of its small and steadily decreasing quantity.

One morning, late in July, Jack was fast asleep and dreaming. The sun was hot on the great hills toward the east,—hills that had been faintly green for a few weeks in the spring, but were now given up to the mingled colors of the gray-green sagebrush and the dun-yellow soil.

They would have been hills of paradise, could rain have fallen upon them as often as it falls upon the cedar-crowned knolls of the Hudson; for these hills are noble in form and of great size,—a family of giants as they march skyward, arm in arm and shoulder to shoulder,—and the sky above them is the sky we call “Italian.” The “down-cañon wind,” that all night long had swept the gulch from its source in the hills to its mouth in the river, had fainted dead away in the heat of the sun. Presently the counter wind from the great hot plains would begin to blow, but this was the breathless pause between.

The flies were tickling Jack’s bare legs and creeping into the neck of his nightgown, where the button was off, as usually it is from a seven-year-old’s nightgown. He was restless, “like a dog that hunts in dreams,” for he was taking the old paths again that once he had known so well.

From the eastern hills came the mingled, far-off bleating, the ululation of a multitude of driven sheep. The sound had reached Jack’s dreaming ear. Suddenly his dream took shape, and for an instant he was a happy boy.

He was “at home” in the East. It was sheep-washing time, the last week in May; the apple orchards were a mass of bloom and the deep, old, winding lanes were sweet with their perfume. Jack was hurrying up the lane by the Long Pond to the sheep-washing place, where the water came down from the pond in a dark, old, leaky, wooden flume, and was held in a pool into which the sheep were plunged by twos and by threes, squeezed and tumbled about and lifted out to stagger away under the apple trees and dry their heavy fleeces in the sun. Jack was kicking in his sleep, when his name was called by a voice outside the window and he woke. Nothing was left of the dream, with all its sweets of sight and sound and smell, but the noise of the river’s continuous wrestle with the rocks of the upper bend, and that far-off multitudinous clamor from over the sun-baked hills.

“Jack, come out!” said the voice of Jack’s big cousin. “They are going to ‘sheep’ us. There’s a band of eight thousand coming!”

There was a great scattering of flies and of bedclothes, as Jack leaped out. He wasted no regrets upon the past,—one isn’t so foolish as that at seven years old,—but was ready for the joys of the present. Eight thousand sheep, or half that number (allowing for a big cousin’s liberal computation), were a sight worth seeing. As to being “sheeped,” what was there in an engineer’s camp to “sheep,” unless the eight thousand woolly range-trotters should trot over tents and house roofs and stovepipes and all, like Santa Claus’s team of reindeer!

Jack was out of bed and into his clothes in a hurry, and off over the hill with his cousin, buttoning the buttons of his “star” shirt waist on the way.

The “band” was pouring over the hill slopes in all directions, making at full speed for the river. The hills themselves seemed to be dizzily moving. The masses of distant small gray objects swarmed, they drifted, they swam, with a curious motionless motion. They looked like nothing more animated than a crop of gray stones, nearly of a size, spreading broadly over the hills and descending toward the river with an impulse which seemed scarcely more than the force of gravitation.

The dogs were barking, the shepherds were racing and shouting to head off the sheep and check their speed, lest the hundreds behind should press upon the hundreds in front and force them out into deep water. The hot air throbbed with the tumult.

When the thirst of every panting throat had been slaked and the band began to scatter along the hill slopes, the boys went forward to speak with the sheepmen.

A few moments afterward both lads were returning to the camp on a run, to ask permission to accept from the shepherds the gift of a lamb that couldn’t “keep up” with the band. It had run beside its mother as far as its strength would carry it, and then it had fallen and been trampled; and there it must lie unless help could revive it. A night on the hills, with the coyotes about, would finish it.

Permission was given, and breakfast was a perfunctory meal for the children by reason of the lamb lying on the strip of shade outside. After breakfast they sopped its mouth with warm milk, they sponged it with cold water, they tried to force a spoonful of mild stimulant between its teeth. They hovered and watched for signs of returning life. The lamb lay with its eyes closed; its sides, that were beginning to swell, rose and sank in long, heavy gasps. Once it moved an ear, and the children thought it must be “coming to.” Upon this hopeful sign they began at once to make plans for the lamb’s future life and joys with them in the cañon.

It should be led down to the river, night and morning, to drink; it should have bran soaked in milk; it should nibble the grass on the green strip; they would build it a house, for fear the coyotes should come prowling about at night; it should follow them up the gulch and over the hills, and race with them in the evenings on the river beach, as “Daisy,” the pet fawn, had done—until something happened to her (the children never knew what), and the lovely creature disappeared from the cañon and out of their lives forever.

THE LAMB THAT COULDN’T KEEP UP

When the strip of morning shadow was gone, they lifted the lamb tenderly and carried it to the strip of afternoon shadow on the other side of the house; and still it took no notice of the water or the milk, or of all the children’s care, nor seemed to hear that they were planning a happy life for it, if only it would get well.

When twilight came, and still it had not moved, the children held anxious consultation on the subject of their neighbors, the coyotes; but their father assured them there would be no danger, so near to the house; and it seemed a pity to disturb the poor lamb.

When the cool night wind began to blow down the cañon again, and the children were asleep, the lamb made its last effort. It is the instinct of all dumb creatures to keep upon their feet as long as they can stand; for when they have fallen the herd has no compassion,—or it may be that its comrades press around the sufferer out of curiosity or mistaken sympathy, and so trample it out of existence without meaning the least harm. The little nursling of the range obeyed this instinct in its last moments,—struggled to its feet and fell, a few steps farther on; and the lamb that couldn’t keep up was at rest.

No more toiling over hills and mountains and across hot valleys, packed in the midst of the band, breathing the dust, stunned with the noise, always hungry, almost always athirst, baked by the sun, chilled by the snow, driven by the wind,—drifting on, from mountain to river, from river to plain.

This one, out of eight thousand, could rest at last, on cool grass, with the peace and the silence and the room of a summer night around it.

The band slept upon the hills that night; the next morning they crossed the gulch above the camp, and drank up by the way all the water of the little stream. Not another drop was seen for days. At length it gathered strength enough to trickle down again, but it was necessary to dip it up and let it stand in casks to settle before it was fit for use; and meanwhile the Chinamen carriers did double duty.

Those eastern hills in spring had been covered with wild flowers,—the moss pink, lupines both white and blue, wild phlox, the small yellow crocus, beds of tiny sweet-scented wild pansies, the camas flower, and a tall-stemmed, pale lilac lily,—the queen of the hill garden. But when spring came again, the old pathways were like an ash heap. The beautiful hill garden was a desert.

When these great sheep bands pass over the country, from range to range, from territory to territory, they devour not only the vegetation of one year, but the seeds, the roots, and, with these, the promise of the next.

It is the migration of the Hungry and the Thirsty; and a cry goes out against them, like the cry of Moab when the children of Israel camped within its borders:—

“Surely this multitude will lick up all that is round about us.”

DREAM-HORSES

There is a little girl who hangs upon her mother’s chair, getting her head between her mother’s work and the light, and begs for pictures.

She expects her mother to make these pictures on some bit of paper treasured for the purpose which she offers, with a book to rest it on, and a stubby pencil notched with small toothmarks, the record of moments of perplexity when Polly was making her own pictures.

It is generally after a bad failure of her own that she comes to her mother. The pang of disappointment with her own efforts is apt to sharpen her temper a little; it does not make Polly more patient with her mother’s mistakes that she makes mistakes herself. But between critic and artist, with such light as the dark lantern of a little girl’s head permits to fall upon the paper, the picture gets made somehow, and before it is finished Polly’s heart will be so full of sunshine that she will insist upon comparisons most flattering to the feelings of her artist, between their different essays at the same subject.

It is a subject they are both familiar with; and it is wonderful, considering the extent of Polly’s patronage, that her artist’s work does not better itself.

It is always a picture of a young person on horseback,—a young person about the age of Polly, but much handsomer and more grown-up looking. And the horse must be a pony with a flowing mane and tail, and his legs must be flung out, fore and aft, so that in action he resembles one of those “crazy-bugs” (so we children used to call them) that go scuttling like mad things across the still surface of a pond. In other respects he may be as like an ordinary pony as mamma and the stubby pencil can make him. But the young person on the pony must be drawn in profile, because Polly cannot make profiles, except horses’ profiles; her young persons always look straight out of the picture as they ride along, and the effect, at full speed, on a horse with his legs widely extended from his body, is extremely gay and nonchalant.

With the picture in her hand, the little girl will go away by herself and proceed to “dream and to dote.”

She lives in a horsey country. Horses in troops or “bands” go past by the trails, on the one side of the river or the other. Sometimes they ford where the water is breast-high over the bar. It is wild and delicious to hear the mares whinnying to their foals in midstream, and the echo of their voices, with the rushing of the loud water pent among the hills.

Often the riders who are in charge of the band encamp for the night on the upper bend of the river, and the red spark of their camp-fire glows brightly about the time the little girl must be going to bed; for it is in spring or fall the bands of horses go up into the hills or down into the valleys, or off, one does not know where,—to a “round up,” perhaps, where each stockman counts his own, and puts his brand on the young colts. Over the hills, where Polly and her big brother go wild-flower hunting, horses wander loose and look down from the summits, mere specks, like black mice, against the sky; they are plainly to be seen from miles away, for there is not a tree anywhere upon these hills. Sometimes a single horse, the chieftain of a troop, will stand alone on a hilltop and take a look all the wide country round, and call, in his splendid voice like “sounding brass,” to the mares and colts that have scattered in search of alkali mud to lick, or just to show, perhaps, that they are able to get on without his lordship. He will call, and if his troop do not answer, he will condescend to go a little way to meet them, halting and inquiring with short whinnies what they are about. Sometimes, in spite of discipline, they will compel him to go all the way to meet them; for even a horse soon tires of dignity on a hilltop all alone, with no one to see how it becomes him.

Polly likes to meet stray horses on her walks, close enough to see their colors and tell which are the pretty ones, the ones she calls hers. They stare at her from under breezy forelocks, and no doubt think themselves much finer creatures than little girls who have only two feet to go upon. And the little girl thinks so, too,—or so it would seem; for every evening after sunset when she runs about the house bareheaded she plays she is a horse herself. And not satisfied with being a horse, she plays she is a rider, too. Such a complex ideal as that surely never came into the brain of a “cayuse,” for all his big eyes and his tangle of hair which Polly thinks so magnificent.

The head and the feet of Polly and her tossing locks are pure horse; that is evident at a glance as she prances past the window. But the clinched, controlling hands are the hands of the rider,—a thrilling combination on a western summer evening, when the brassy sunset in the gate of the cañon is like a trumpet-note, and the cold, pink light on the hills is as keen as a bugle-call, and the very spirit of “boots and saddles” is in the wind that gustily blows up from the plains, turning all the poplars white, and searching the quiet house from room to room for any laggard stay-indoors.

Within a mile of the house, in the cañon which Polly calls home, there is a horse ranch in a lovely valley opening toward the river. All around it are these treeless hills that look so barren and feed so many wild lives. The horses have a beautiful range, from the sheltered valley up the gulches to the summits of the hills and down again to the river to drink. The men live in a long, low cabin, attached to a corral much bigger than the cabin, and have an extremely horsey time of it.

I shouldn’t be surprised if it were among Polly’s dreams to be one of a picked company of little-girl riders, in charge of a band of long-tailed ponies, just the right size for little girls to manage; to follow the ponies over the hills all day, and at evening to fetch water from the river and cook their own little-girl suppers in the dingy cabin by the corral; to have envious visits from other little girls, and occasionally to go home and tell mother all about it.

Now, in this country of real horses there were not many play-horses, and these few not of the first quality. Hobby-horses in the shops of the town were most trivial in size, meant only for riders of a very tender age. Some of them were merely heads of horses, fastened to a seat upon rockers, with a shelf in front to keep the inexperienced rider in his place.

There were people in the town, no doubt, who had noble rocking-horses for their little six-year-olds, but they must have sent for them on purpose; the storekeepers did not “handle” this variety.

So Polly’s papa, assisted by John Brown, the children’s most delightful companion and slave and story-teller, concluded to build a hobby-horse that would outdo the hobby-horse of commerce. (Brown was a modest, tender-hearted man, who had been a sailor off the coast of Norway, among the islands and fiords, a miner where the Indians were “bad,” a cowboy, a ranchman; and he was now irrigating the garden and driving the team in the cañon.)

Children like best the things they invent and make themselves, and plenty of grown people are children in this respect; they like their own vain imaginings better than some of the world’s realities.

But Polly’s rocking-horse was no “vain thing,” although her father and John did have their own fun out of it before she had even heard of it.

His head wasn’t “made of pease-straw,” nor his tail “of hay,” but in his own way he was quite as successful a combination.

His eyes were two of Brother’s marbles. They were not mates, which was a pity, as they were set somewhat closely together so you couldn’t help seeing them both at once; but as one of them soon dropped out it didn’t so much matter. His mane was a strip of long leather fringe. His tail was made up of precious contributions extorted from the real tails of Billy and Blue Pete and the team-horses, and twined most lovingly together by John, the friend of all the parties to the transfer.

The saddle was a McClellan tree, which is the framework of a kind of man’s saddle; a wooden spike, fixed to the left side of it and covered with leather, made a horn, and the saddle-blanket was a Turkish towel.

It was rainy weather, and the cañon days were short, when this unique creation of love and friendship—which are things more precious, it is to be hoped, even than horseflesh—took its place among Polly’s idols, and was at once clothed on with all her dreams of life in action.

When she mounted the hobby-horse she mounted her dream-horse as well; they were as like as Don Quixote’s helmet and the barber’s basin.

She rode him by firelight in the last half-hour before bedtime. She rode him just after breakfast in the morning. She “took” to him when she was in trouble, as older dream-riders take to their favorite “hobbies.” She rocked and she rode, from restlessness and wretchedness into peace, from unsatisfied longings into temporary content, from bad tempers into smiles and sunshine.

She rode out the winter, and she rode in the wild and windy spring. She got well of the measles pounding back and forth on that well-worn seat. She took cold afterward, before the winds grew soft, experimenting with draughts in a corner of the piazza.

Now that summer gives to her fancies and her footsteps a wider range, the hard-worked hobby gets an occasional rest. (Often he is to be seen with his wooden nose resting on the seat of a chair which is bestrewed with clover blossoms, withered wild-roses, and bits of grass; for Polly, like other worshipers of graven images, believes that her idol can eat and drink and appreciate substantial offerings.) But when the dream grows too strong, the picture too vivid,—not mamma’s picture, but the one in the child’s heart,—she takes to the saddle again, and the horsehair switch and the leather fringes float upon the wind, and her fancies mount, far above the lava bluffs that confine her vision.

Will our little girl-riders be as happy on their real horses, when they get them, as they are upon their dream-horses? Is the actual possession of “back hair” and the wearing of long petticoats more blissful than the knot, hard-twisted, of the ends of a silk handkerchief, which the child-woman binds about her brows when she walks—like Troy’s proud dames whose garments sweep the ground—in the skirt of her mother’s “cast-off gown”?

It depends upon the direction these imperious dream-horses will take with our small women. Will the rider be in bondage to the steed? Heaven forbid! for dream-horses make good servants but very bad masters. Will they bear her fast and far, and will she keep a quiet eye ahead and a constant hand upon the rein? Will they flag and flounder down in the middle-ways, where so many of us have parted with our dream-steeds and taken the footpath, consoled to find that we have plenty of company and are not altogether dismayed? The dream-horses carry their child-riders beyond the mother’s following, so that the eyes and the heart ache with straining after the fleeting vision.

It is better she should not see too much nor too far along the way they go, since “to travel joyfully is better than to arrive.”

If only they could know their own “blessedness” while the way is long before them!

AN IDAHO PICNIC

At the camp in the cañon they had a cow. It is true she sometimes broke away and went off with the herds on the range and had to be chased on horseback and caught with a lasso. They had chickens,—all that were left them from night raids by the coyotes;[1] and a garden, the products of which they shared with the jack-rabbits and the gophers. But the supply wagon brought fresh fruit from the town, ten miles away, and new butter from the valley ranches. There were no mosquitoes, no peddlers, no tramps, no book agents, no undesirable neighbor’s children, whom one cannot scare away as one may the neighbor’s dogs and chickens when they creep through the fence, but must be civil to for the sake of peace and good-will,—which are good things in a neighborhood.

Jack Gilmour worked at his crude inventions in the shop, and was allowed to use grown-up tools under certain not too hard conditions; and Polly rode up and down the steep path to the river beach on the shoulders of the young assistant engineers—and assistant everything-elses. The mother was waited on and spoiled, as women are in camp; she was even invited to go fishing with her husband and Mr. Dane, one of the young assistants-in-general. It was a dull time for work in the camp, and there were good care-takers with whom Mrs. Gilmour could trust the children. The boy was the elder. He was learning those two most important elements of a boy’s education, up to nine years, according to Sir Walter Scott,—to ride and to speak the truth. But he was only eight, and perhaps was not quite perfect in either.

He watched the three happy ones ride away, and as they turned on the hilltop and waved good-by to the little figure on the trail below, he was longing, with all the strength of desire an eight-year-old heart can know, for the time to come when he too should climb the hills and wave his hand against the sky before turning the crest, where he had so often stood and felt so small, gazing up into those higher hills that locked the last bright bend of the river from sight.

They were to go up Charcoal Creek; they were to cross the “Divide;” they were to go down Grouse Creek on the other side and camp on some unknown bit of the river’s shore.

The boy went stumbling back down the dusty path to his unfinished work in the shop,—the engine for a toy elevated road he was making. But the painfully fashioned fragments of his plan had no meaning for eyes that still saw only the hills against the morning sky, and the three happy ones riding away.

This first trip led to a second and longer one, to the fishing-grounds up the river, by the trail on the opposite shore. Jack heard his father and Mr. Dane talking one morning at the breakfast-table about riding down to Turner’s and getting a pack-animal and some more riding animals,—and mamma was going again! What good times the grown-ups did have! And John Brown, Jack’s particular crony from the men’s camp, was going, to cook and take care of the animals. This word “animal” is used in the West to describe anything that is ridden or “packed,”—horse, mule, Indian pony, or “burro.” It is never applied to cattle or unbroken horses on the range; these are “stock.”

The party were to take a tent and stay perhaps a week, if no word came from the home camp to call them back.

Jack slipped away from the table and went out and hung upon the railing of a footbridge that crossed the brook. Beside learning how to ride and to speak the truth, Jack was learning to whistle. He was practicing this last more persistently, perhaps, than either of the more important branches of knowledge,—let us hope because there was more need of practice; for he was as yet very far from being a perfect whistler. It was but a melancholy, tuneless little note in which he gave vent to his feelings, as he watched the trickling water.

“I’d like to take the boy,” his father was that moment saying at the breakfast-table in the cook-tent, “if we had anything he could ride.” And then he added, smiling, “There’s Mrs. O’Dowd.” The smile went around the table.

Mrs. O’Dowd, or “Peggy,” as she was variously called, was a gray donkey of uncertain age and mild but inflexible disposition who sometimes consented to carry the children over the hills at a moderate pace, her usual equipment being a side-saddle, which did not fit her oval figure (the curves of which turned the wrong way for beauty); so the side-saddle was always slipping off, obliging the children to slide down and “cinch up.”

The engineer’s house was built against a hill; from the end of the upper piazza a short bridge, or gang-plank, joined the hill and met a steep trail which led upward to the tents, the garden, the road to the lower camp, the road up the bluffs, and all the rest of the children’s world beyond the gulch. One of their favorite exercises with Mrs. O’Dowd was to ride her down the trail, and try to force her over this gang-plank. She would put her small feet cautiously one before the other, hanging her great white head and sniffing her way. The instant her toes touched the resonant boards of the bridge, she stopped, and then the exercises began. Mrs. O’Dowd’s gravity and resignation, in the midst of the children’s laughing and shouting and pulling and whacking, was most edifying to see; but she never budged. She saw the darlings of the household dance back and forth before her in safety; the engineers in their big boots would push past her and tramp over the bridge. Mrs. O’Dowd was a creature of fixed habits. Useless, flighty children, and people with unaccountable ways of their own might do as they liked; it had never been her habit to trust Mrs. O’D. on such a place as that, and she never did.

“Yes, the boy might ride Peggy,” said Jack’s father. “He could keep her up with John and the pack-mule, if not with us.”

“Oh, I should not want him behind with the men,” said Jack’s mother,—“and those high trails! If he’s to go over such places, he must ride where you can look after his saddle-girths.” She could hear Jack’s disconsolate whistle as she spoke. “I hope he does not hear us,” she said. “It would break his heart to think he is going, and be left behind after all.”

“If the boy’s heart is going to break as easily as that, it is time it was toughened,” said his father, but not ungently. “I should tell him there is a chance of his going; but if it can’t be managed, he must not whine about it.”

Jack went to bed by himself, except on Sunday nights; then his mother went with him, and saw that he laid his clothes in a neat pile on the trunk by his bed,—for in a camp bedroom trunks sometimes take the place of chairs,—and heard him say his prayers, and sometimes they talked together a little while before she kissed him good-night. That night was Sunday night, and Jack’s mother asked him, while she watched his undressing, if it ever made him dizzy to stand on high places and look down. Jack did not seem to know what that feeling was like; and then she asked him how far he had ever ridden on Mrs. O’Dowd at one time. Jack thought he had never ridden farther than Mr. Hensley’s ranch—that was three miles away, six miles in all, going and coming; but he had rested at the ranch, and had walked for a part of the journey when his sister Polly had resolved to ride by herself, instead of behind him, holding on to his jacket.

It made his mother very happy to tell the boy that the next day, if nothing happened to prevent, he was to set out with the fishing party for a week’s camping up the river. She knew how, in his reticent child’s heart, he had envied them. He was seated on the side of his bed, emptying the beach sand out of his stockings, when she told him. He said nothing at first, and one who did not know his plain little face as his mother knew it might have thought he was indifferent. She took a last look at him, before leaving the room. It seemed but a very little while ago that the close-cropped whity-brown head on the pillow had been covered with locks like thistle-down, which had never been touched with the scissors; that the dark little work-hardened hands (for Jack’s play was always work) lying outside the sheet had been kissed a dozen times a day for joy of their rosy palms and dimples. And to-morrow the boy would put on spurs,—no, not spurs, but a spur, left over from the men’s accoutrements,—and he would ride—to be sure it was only Mrs. O’Dowd, but no less would the journey be one of the landmarks in his life. And many older adventurers than Jack have set out in this way on their first emprise,—not very heroically equipped, except for brave and joyous dreams and good faith in their ability to keep the pace set by better-mounted comrades.

Jack woke next morning with a delightful feeling that this day was not going to be like any other day he had known. Preparations for the journey had already begun. In the cook-tent two boxes were being filled with things to eat and things to cook them with. These were to be covered with canvas, roped, and fastened, one on each side of the pack-mule’s pack-saddle. On the piazza, saddle-bags were being packed; guns, ammunition, fishing-rods, rubber coats, and cushions were being collected in a heap for John to carry down to the beach to be ferried across the river, where the man from Turner’s horse-ranch was already waiting with the animals. The saddle-horses and Mrs. O’Dowd were to cross by the ford above the rapids. The boat went back and forth two or three times, and in the last load went Jack and his mother and Polly in the care of one of the young engineers. The stir of departure had fired Polly’s imagination. It was not mamma saying good-by to Polly,—it was Polly saying good-by to mamma, before riding off with “bubba” on an expedition of their own. She was telling about it, in a soft, joyous recitative, to any one who had time to listen. The man from Turner’s had brought, for Mrs. Gilmour to ride, a mule he called a lady’s animal, but remarked that for his own use he preferred one that would go. Mrs. Gilmour thought that she did, too; so the side-saddle was changed from the “lady’s animal” to the mule that “would go.”

The pack-mule was “packed,” the men’s horses were across the ford, mamma had kissed Polly, two pairs and a half of spurs were jingling impatiently on the rocks,—but where was Mrs. O’Dowd?

She was dallying at the ford,—she was coy about taking to the water. Sticks and straps and emphatic words of encouragement had no effect upon her. She had unfortunately had time to make up her mind, and she had made it up not to cross the river. She was persuaded finally, by means of a “lass’ rope” around her neck. Everybody was laughing at her subdued way of making herself conspicuous, delaying the whole party and meekly implying that it was everybody’s fault but her own.

The camp of the engineers was on a little river of Idaho that rises in the Bitter-root range of the Rocky Mountains, and flows into the swift, silent current of the great Snake River, which flows into the Columbia, which flows into the Pacific; so that the waters of this little inland river see a great deal of grand and peculiar scenery on their way to the ocean. But the river as it flows past the camp is still very young and inexperienced. Its waters have carried no craft larger than a lumberman’s pirogue, or the coffin-shaped box the Chinese wood-drivers use for a boat. Its cañons have never echoed to a locomotive’s scream; it knows not towns nor villages; not even a telegraph pole has ever been reared on its banks. It is just out of the mountains, hurrying down through the gate of its last cañon to the desert plains. But young and provincial as it is, it has an ancestral history very ancient and respectable, if mystery and tragedy and years of reticence can give dignity to a family history. The river’s story has been patiently recorded on the tablets of the black basalt bluffs that face each other across its channel. Their language it is not given to everybody to read. The geologists tell a wonderful tale which they learned from those inscriptions on the rocks. They do not say how many years ago, but long enough to have given a very ancient name to our river,—had there been any one living at that time to call it by a name,—it met with a fearful obstruction, a very dragon in its path, which threatened to devour it altogether, or to scatter it in little streams over the face of the earth. A flood of melted, boiling-hot lava burst up suddenly in the river’s bed, making it to boil like a pot, and crowded into the granite gorges through which the river had found its way, half filling them. It was a battle between the heavens and the earth,—the stream of molten rock, blinding hot from the caverns beneath the earth’s crust, meeting the sweet cool waters from the clouds that troop about the mountains or hide their tops in mist and snow. The life-giving flood prevailed over that which brought only defacement and death. The sullen lava flux settled, shrank, and hardened at last, fitting into the granite gorges as melted lead fits the mould into which it is poured. The waters kept flowing down, never resting till they had worn a new channel in the path of the old one, only narrower and deeper, down through the intruding lava. When the river was first known to men, wherever its course lay through a granite gorge the granite was seen to be lined in places, often continuously for miles, with black lava rock, or basalt, standing in lofty palisades with deeply scarred and graven fronts and with long slides of crumbled rock at their feet, descending to the level of the river.

Another part of the river’s story has been toilsomely written in the trails that wind along its shores, worn by the feet of men and animals. Whose feet were the first to tread them, and on what errands? This is the part of the river’s story some of us would like best to know. But this the geologist cannot tell us.

It was one of these hunters’, miners’, cowboys’, packers’, ranchmen’s trails the fishing-party followed on its way up the river. Through the cañon they wound along the base of the lava bluffs; then entered a crooked fold of the hills called Sheep Gulch, passing through willow thickets, rattling over the pebbles of a summer-dried stream, losing the breeze and getting more than they wanted of the sun. Sheep Gulch is one of the haunts of grouse, wood-doves, and “cotton-tails” (as the little gray rabbits are called to distinguish them from the tall leaping “jack-rabbits” of the sage-brush plains, which are like the English hare).

Above Turner’s horse-ranch, Sheep Gulch divides into two branches; up one of these goes the old Idaho City road. Where the gulch divides there is a disused cabin, (which Jack remembered afterward because there they saw some grouse which they didn’t get,) and there they left the trail for the old stage-road. As they climbed the little divide which separates the waters (when there are any) of Sheep Gulch from those of Moore’s Creek, they were met by a fresh breeze which cooled their hot faces and seemed to welcome them to the hills. The hills were all around them now,—the beautiful mountain pastures, golden with their wind-sown harvest of wild, strong-stemmed grasses. As the grass becomes scarce on the lower ranges the herds of cattle climb to the higher, along the spiral trails they make in grazing, taking always, like good surveyors, the easiest upward grade.

In the fall the cattle-men send out their cowboys, or “riders,” to drive the herds down from these highest ranges, where snow falls early, and to collect them in some valley chosen for the autumn “round-up.”

At Giles’s ranch, on the divide, the party halted to cinch up and to ask a drink all around from the spring which every traveler who has tasted it remembers.

The women of the household—a slender, dark-haired daughter and a stout, fair, flushed mother with a year-old baby—were busy, baby and all, in an outdoor kitchen, a delightful-looking place, part light and part shadow, and full of all manner of tools and rude conveniences that told of cheerful, busy living and making the best of things. They were preparing for the coming, next week, of the threshers,—a yearly event of consequence at a ranch,—fifteen men with horses for their machines and saddle-horses besides, all to be fed and lodged at the ranch. In the corral behind the big new barn, there were stacks of yellow and stacks of green, and between them a hay press, painted pink, which one could see as far as one could see Giles’s. Altogether it was lovely at Giles’s; but they were building a new house,—which, of course, they had a perfect right to do. But whoever stops there next year will find them all snugly roofed and gabled and painted white; and it is to be feared the outdoor kitchen, with its dim corners full of “truck” and its lights and shadows, will be seen no more.

The old stage-road went gayly along a bit of high plain, and then, without the slightest hesitation or circumlocution, dropped off into the cañon of Moore’s Creek. These reckless old pioneer roads give one a vivid idea of the race for possession of a new mining-camp, and of the pluck it took to win. At the “freeze-out” stage-passengers probably got out and walked, and the driver “rough-locked” the wheels; but the horsemen of that new country doubtless took a fresh hitch on their cinches and went jouncing down the breakneck grade, with countenances as calm as those of the illustrious riders of bronze and marble horses we see in the public squares, unless they were tired of the saddle and walked down to rest themselves,—never their horses.

Jack’s short legs were getting numb with pressing the saddle, and he was glad to walk, and to linger on his way down the wild descent into the cañon. It was the middle of September; Moore’s Creek had not more than enough water left to float the “Chinaman’s drive” of cord-wood, cut higher up on its banks. Its waters, moreover, were turbid with muddy tailings emptied into them from the sluice-boxes of the placer-miners who had been working all summer on the bars. Above Moore’s Creek the water of the river is clear as that of a trout-stream and iridescent with reflections from sky and shore; but after its union with that ill-fated stream it is obliged to carry the poor creek’s burden, and its own bright waters thenceforth wear the stain of labor. A breath of coolness, as of sunless rocks and damp, spicy shade, came up to them from the cañon; and a noise of waters, mingled with queer, discordant cries. It was dinner-time at the Chinamen’s camp and word was being passed up stream, from man to man, calling the wood-drivers to leave their work. They were not the sleek-braided, white-bloused, silk-sashed Chinese of the house-servant variety. They had wild black hair, rugged, not fat, sleepy faces, and little clothing except the boots,—store boots, in which a Chinaman is queerer than in anything except a store hat. They struggled with the jam of cord-wood as if it were some sort of water-prey they had hunted down, and were now meeting at bay, spearing, thrusting, hooking with their long boat-hooks, skipping from rock to rock in midstream, hoarse with shouting.

The party had now left the stage-road and turned down the pack-trail along the creek toward its junction with the river. The pack-trail here crosses the creek by a bridge high above the stream; the bridge was good enough, but it was a question whether Mrs. O’Dowd, with her known prejudices, could be induced to go over it. It was quickly decided to get a “good ready,” as Jack said, and hustle the old lady down the trail between two of the horses and crowd her on the bridge before she had time to make up that remarkable mind of hers. This simple plan was carried out with enthusiasm on the part of all but Mrs. O’D. herself.

Soon after leaving Giles’s, they had met a wagon-load of people townward bound from Gillespie’s, the beautiful river ranch above Moore’s Creek. Mr. Gilmour had stopped them to inquire if a pack-animal and two riding animals, mules or horses, could be sent from the ranch up to the fishing-camp, on a day set for the journey home; for the mules from Turner’s were to go back that same day, to start the next day but one, as part of a pack-train bound for Atlanta.

The people in the wagon “couldn’t say.” Most of the horses were out on the range; those at the ranch were being used for hauling peaches to town, fording Moore’s Creek and the river, and scaling the “freeze-out.” But Mr. Gillespie himself was at home; the travelers had better stop on the way up and find out.

So, after crossing the bridge and gaining the good trail along the river-bank, Mr. Dane spurred on ahead and forded the river, to make the necessary inquiries at the ranch. Gillespie’s is on the opposite side of the river from the packer’s trail. It is most beautiful with the sun in the western sky, its hills and water-front of white beech and pine trees all in shadow, and a broad reflection floating out into the river at its feet.

The sun was still high and the shadows were short; but the river ranch was a fair picture of a frontier home as they looked back at it passing by on the other side,—the last home they should see on the wild way they were taking.

The trail went winding up and up, and still higher, until they were far above the river and could see, beyond the still reflections that darkened it by Gillespie’s, the white-whipped waters of the rapids above. And the higher they went, the more hills beyond hills rose along the horizon widening their view.

Mr. Dane had rejoined the party, with a satisfactory report from the ranch. He rode ahead on his blue-roan Indian pony twirling his romál, a long leathern strap attached to the bridle, the end divided like a double whip-lash by means of which and a pair of heavy blunt spurs “Blue Pete” and his rider had come to a perfect understanding. Blue Pete was a sulky little brute, with a broad white streak down his nose and a rather vicious eye, but he was tough and unsensitive and minded his business.

Next came Jack’s mamma on the “mule that would go”—with a will, as far as Turner’s,—but after that needed the usual encouragement; a gentle-paced creature though, and sure-footed on a bad trail. Then came Jack on Mrs. O’Dowd. The poor old girl had been vigorously cinched and it wasn’t becoming to her figure; but those were bad places for a saddle to turn, even with an active, eight-year-old boy on it.

The boy was deeply content, gazing about him at the river, the hills, the winding trail ahead, and serenely poking up Mrs. O’Dowd with his one spur in response to the packer’s often-repeated command to “Keep her up!” When Mrs. O’Dowd refused to be kept up Jack’s father made a rush at her—a kind of business his good horse Billy must have despised, for Billy had points that indicated better blood than that which is usually found in the veins of those tough little “rustlers” of the desert and the range. He loved to lead on a hard trail, with his long, striding walk, his cheerful, well-opened eyes to the front. He was gentle, but he was also scornful; he was not a “lady’s animal;” he had a contempt for paltry little objectless canters over the hills with limp-handed women and children flopping about on his back. He liked to feel there was work ahead; a long climb and a bad trail did not frighten him; he looked his best when he was breasting a keen ascent with the wind of the summit parting his thin forelock, his ears pointed forward, his breath coming quick and deep, his broad haunches working under the saddle. Poor work indeed he must have thought it, hustling a lazy, sulky old donkey along a trail that was as nothing to his own sinewy legs.

After Billy came the pack-mule, driven by the man from Turner’s, a square-jawed, bronzed young fellow, mounted also on a mule and conversing amicably with John Brown. The lunch-bag had been passed down the line, but there was no halt, except for water at the crossing of a little gulch. The trail wound in and out among the spurs of the hills and up and down the rock-faced heights. They passed a roofless cabin, once the dwelling of some placer-miners, and farther on the half-obliterated ditch they had built leading to the deserted bars, where a few gray, warped sluice-boxes were falling to pieces in the sun.

Between two and three o’clock they came in sight of some large pine-trees, sheltering a half circle of white sand beach that sloped smoothly to the river. Above the pines a granite cliff rose, two hundred and fifty feet of solid rock against a hill five hundred or more feet higher, that shut off the morning sun. Between the cliff and the lava bluffs opposite, the eastern and western shadows nearly met across the river. There were deep, still pools among the rocks near shore, where the large trout congregate. Below the shadowed bend, the river spread out again suddenly in the sunlight that flashed white as silver on the ripples of a gravelly bar. This was the spot chosen at sight for the fishing-camp.

A bald eagle perched on a turret of the lava bluffs across the river watched the party descending the trail. At the report of a rifle echoing among the rocks, he rose and wheeled away over the pine-trees without hurrying himself or dropping a single feather in acknowledgment of the shot. It was a dignified, rather scornful retreat.

Where the trail hugs the cliff closest on its way around the bend, it passes under a big overhanging rock. No one, I am sure, ever rode under it for the first time without looking up at the black crack between it and the cliff, and wondering how far up the crack goes, and when the huge mass will fall. There is a story that the Bannock braves, following this trail on the war-path, always fired a passing arrow up into the crack,—perhaps out of the exuberance of youth and war-paint, perhaps to propitiate the demon of the rocks, lest he should drop one of his superfluous boulders on their feathered heads. The white men who followed the trail after the Indians had left it, amused themselves by shooting at the arrows and dislodging them from the crack. The story must be true, because there are no arrows left in the crack! Jack stared up at it many times, and never could see one.

So now they were at home for a week in the wilderness. Jack followed Brown about as he was “making camp,” cutting tent-pegs and poles and putting up the old A-tent, which had seen service in the army and in many frontier camps since it was “condemned” and sold at quartermaster’s sale.

The man from Turner’s had taken another bite of lunch and returned with his animals. He bade Jack to watch for him as he passed the camp, day after to-morrow, with his mule-train for Atlanta.

The kitchen was unpacked down on the beach and the fireplace chosen,—a big, wedge-shaped rock,—in the lee of which John built a fire, not for warmth, but for the sake of a good bed of coals for cooking. Mrs. Gilmour was resting in the tent, under the pine-trees. Mr. Gilmour had gone up the river to catch some trout for supper.

After four o’clock the sun left the river bank, but all the colors were distinct and strong,—the white beach, the dark pine boughs against the sky, the purple colors in the rocks, and the spots of pale green and yellow lichen on them, the changing tints in the dark water swinging smoothly around the bend and then flashing out into a broad sheet of silvery sparkles over the bar. It was as if it went gravely around the shadowy bend, and then broke out laughing in the bright light.

As it grew darker, the kitchen fire began to glow red against the big gray rock. In front of it John was stooping to heap coals on the lid of the bake-kettle, where the bread was spread in a thin, round cake for cooking.

There were three big trout for supper and four or five little ones. The big ones were a noble weight to tell of, but the little ones tasted the best when they were taken out of the bake-kettle on hot tin plates and served with thin slices of bacon and camp bread.

The horses had been turned loose up the trail but now came wandering back, Billy leading, followed by Pete, who was hobbled but managed to keep up with him, and Mrs. O’Dowd meandering meekly in the rear. They were on their way home, having decided that was the best place to pass the night, but John turned them back. After supper he watered them at the river and took them up the trail to a rudely fenced inclosure on the bluffs, where there was better pasture.

Sleepy-time for Jack came very soon after supper, but as the tent was some distance from the camp-fire,—a lonesome bedroom for a little boy to lie in by himself,—he was rolled up in a blanket and allowed to sleep by the camp-fire. The last thing he could remember was the sound of the river and the wind in the great pine boughs overhead and voices around him talking about the stars that could be seen in the night sky between the fire-illumined tree branches. The great boughs moved strangely in the hot breath of the fire that lit them from below. The sky between looked black as ink and the stars blazed far and keen. John was washing up the dishes on his knees by the light of a candle fastened in a box set upon end to shield it from draughts. Jack watched the light shining up into his face and on his hands as he moved them about. It seemed as if he had slept but a moment, when they were shaking him and trying to stand him on his feet and he was stumbling along to the tent with his father’s arm around him.

How they crawled about in the low tent, by the light of a candle fastened by its own drippings to a stone, and took off a few clothes and put on more (for the September nights were cold); how cosy it was, lying down in his blankets inside the white walls of the tent with the curtain securely tied against the wind, with his father close beside him and his father’s gun on the outside within reach of an outstretched hand; how the light went out and the river sounded on and some twigs scraped against the tent in the wind,—this is about all Jack can remember of his first night under canvas.

The morning was gray and cold. The sun had been up several hours before it was seen in the camp. Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Dane were out with the earliest light for trout. Jack was the next to leave the tent and go shivering down to the river to wash, and then run to warm his red hands and button his jacket at the kitchen fire, where John was again cooking bread. John and Mr. Dane had slept on the beach with only the pine boughs for a roof and saddle-bags for a pillow.

When Mrs. Gilmour appeared, last of all, Jack was just finishing his second chunk of last night’s bread, leaning against the angle of the rock fireplace out of the smoke that made a pale blue wavering flight upward and aslant the dark pine boughs.

The fishermen had returned with trout, but not a surfeit of trout, for breakfast. The bread was taken out of the bake-kettle and the trout put in to plump up in their own steam over the coals. The coffee smelled deliciously in the sweet, cold air. The broiled ham was welcome, even after a first course of trout, and Jack was good for a third of bread and honey. He could use his fingers and wipe up the honey with the broken bread until his tin plate shone, not to speak of his countenance, and nobody observed him except to smile.

But something had happened that morning besides breakfast. Mr. Dane had lost a tremendous trout, after playing him a long time and tiring him out. He had been fishing from a rock, with deep water all around him. The big fish seemed quite still and tame as he was drawn in, but as his tail touched the rock, with a frantic rebound he made one last plunge for the water and got off. If there had been but a beach to land him on!

Then, a man had been shot the evening before at Atlanta, the big mining-camp of the Saw-tooth range; and another man riding a tired horse had passed the camp at daybreak, on his way to Boise for a surgeon. The horse he had started with from Atlanta had given out about twenty miles from that place; he had walked ten or fifteen miles along the mountain trail in the darkness before he could get another horse. He wished to change this for one of the horses from the fishing-camp, but they were back on the bluffs and he concluded to go on and change at Gillespie’s. He had traveled about fifty miles that night, on horseback and on foot, over a trail that some of us would not enjoy riding over by daylight.

His wife and their young child were at his horse-ranch away back on the hills, alone, except for some of the cowboys. He had gone up to Atlanta to attend the ball. The man who had been shot was a stranger to him,—had a brother in Boise, he believed. He had breathed his horse a moment while he talked to John and took a bite of something to eat, and then went on his way.

It was strange to think that all this was part of those dark hours of the night that had passed so peacefully to the sleepers on the river beach,—the miners’ ball, the shooting, the night ride in haste, the wife waiting at the lonely ranch in the hills for her husband’s return.

The day passed with fishing and sketching and eating, and beauty of sunlight and shadow on rocks and trees and river.

Brown had built a table and placed boxes around it for seats. The gray rock fireplace had got well blackened, and the camp had taken on a homelike look. Jack had gone for a glorious walk up the trail with Brown, to see if the fence on the bluffs was all right, and if there was a way down to the river from the bluffs by which the horses could go down to drink. There was one, a rather obscure way; but Billy was clever, and Pete was a “rustler,” and Mrs. O’Dowd could be relied upon to follow the lead of her betters. But they did not seem to be eating, and Jack fancied they looked homesick in their high pasture, as if the scenery did not console them for being sent off so far from camp.

That second day Mr. Gilmour went fishing alone down the river. John was gathering firewood; the boy and his mother were in the tent; Mr. Dane sat in the doorway, tending a little fire he had made outside, and reading aloud, while Mrs. Gilmour made a languid sketch of him, in his red-hooded blanket robe. Mr. Dane was the first to hear a shout from down the river. He threw off the red robe, seized a rifle, and ran down the shore in the direction Mr. Gilmour had taken. The shout meant, to him, game of a kind that could not be tackled with a fly-rod.

In a moment or two he came running back for more cartridges. Mr. Gilmour had met a black bear, and they were going after him. John followed with the axe. Some time passed, but no shots were heard. At last the men came back, warm and merry, though disappointed of their game. The bear had got away. It was tantalizing to think how fat and sleek he must have been, after his summer in the mountains. There would be no bear-steaks for supper that night, and no glossy dark skin to carry back in triumph to the home camp and spread before next winter’s hearth wherever the house-fires might be lighted.

Mr. Gilmour had been walking down the trail when he saw the bear ahead of him, crossing the high flat toward the trail and making straight for the river. If both had continued to advance, there would have been a meeting, and as Mr. Gilmour was armed only with a fly-rod and a pistol, he preferred the meeting should be postponed. Then he stopped and shouted for Dane. The bear came on, and Mr. Gilmour fell back, leisurely, he said, toward camp. He did not care to bring his game in alive, he said, without giving the camp due warning, so he shouted again. It was the second shout Dane had heard. The way of his retreat led him down into a little gulch, where he lost sight of the bear.

It did not take very long to tell the story of the hunt, and then Mr. Gilmour went back to his fishing. The sun came out. The fire in front of the tent was a heap of smoking ashes; the magazine story palled; the sketch was pronounced not worth finishing; and then the pack-train for Atlanta came tinkling and shuffling down the trail. Fourteen sleek, handsome mules, with crisp, clipped manes, like the little Greek horses on ancient friezes, passed in single file between a man riding ahead on the “bell-mare,” and another bringing up the rear of the train, swinging his leathern “blind” as he rode. This one was the man from Turner’s. He had met Mr. Gilmour farther down the river, and heard the story about the bear, and offered to leave his dog, which he said was a good bear-dog. But the dog wouldn’t be left, and so the picturesque freight-train went its way, under the Indian’s rock, and up the steep climb beyond. High above the river they could be seen, footing with neat steps the winding trail, their packs swinging and shuffling with a sidelong motion, in time to the regular pace, while the bell sounded fainter and fainter.

Bear stories were told by the camp-fire that night; and Mr. Dane slept with his rifle handy, and John with an axe. John said he was a better shot with an axe than with a rifle. Jack thought he should dream of bears, but he didn’t. The next morning he went with John Brown up to the high pasture to bring down one of the horses. Brown was to ride down to Gillespie’s and make sure of transportation for the party home, the next day but one.

Jack had the happiness of riding Billy barebacked down the trail, following John on Pete, Mrs. O’Dowd, as usual, in the rear. Mr. Gilmour was surprised to see all the animals coming down, and he noticed at once how hollow and drooping the horses looked. John explained that they had evidently not been able to find the trail leading down to the river, and had been without water all the time they had been kept upon the bluffs. He could see by their tracks where they had wandered back and forth along the edge of the bluffs, seeking a way down. How glad they must have been of that deep draught from the river, that had mocked them so long with the sound of its waters! No one liked to find fault with Brown, who was faithful and tender-hearted; and it was stupid of horses, used to the range, not to have gone back from the bluffs and followed the fence until they found the outlet to the river. They quickly revived with water and food, which they could once more enjoy now that their long thirst was quenched. Brown rode Pete down to Gillespie’s, and returned in the afternoon with word that Mr. Gillespie himself would come for the party on Saturday, with the outfit required.

The evening was cool and cloudy; twilight came on early, and Brown cooked supper with the whole family gathered around his fire, hungrily watching him. There was light enough from the fire, mingled with the wan twilight on the beach, by which to eat supper. John was filling the tin cups with coffee, when horses’ feet were heard coming down the trail from the direction of Boise. A man on a gray horse stopped under the Indian’s rock and looking down on the group on the beach below asked what was “the show for a bite of something to eat.” He was invited to share what there was, and throwing the bridle loose on his horse’s neck he dropped out of the saddle and joined the party at the table.

He was the man from Atlanta, returning from his errand to Boise. No doctor had been willing to go up from Boise, so he said, and the friends of the wounded man had telegraphed to C—, and a doctor had gone across from there. The messenger had stayed over a day in Boise to rest, and was now on his way home to his ranch in the hills. He gave the details of the shooting,—the usual details, received with the usual comments and speculations as to the wounded man’s recovery,—then the talk turned upon sport, and bear stories and fish stories were in order. The man from Atlanta knew what good hunting was, from his own account. He told how he had struck a bear track about as big as a man’s hand in the woods and followed it some distance, thinking it was “about his size,” and all of a sudden he had come upon a fresh track about as big—he picked up the cover of the bake-kettle—“as big as that.” Then he turned around and came home. It was suggested (after the man from Atlanta had gone) that the big track he saw was where the bear had sat down.

It was now deep dusk in the woods; only the latest and palest sky gleams touched the water. The stranger included the entire party in his cordial invitation to stop at his place if they ever got so far up the river, mounted his horse and quickly disappeared up the trail. He expected to reach his home some time that night.

The next day was the last in camp. It was still gray, cold weather, and the tent among the pine-trees looked inviting, with a suggestion of a fire outside; but there were sketches to be finished and last walks to be taken and a big mess of trout to be caught to take home. Jack had a little enterprise of his own to complete,—the filling of a tin can Brown had given him with melted pine gum, which hardened into clear, solid resin. The can was nearly full, and Jack had various experiments in his mind which he intended to try with it on his return. Brown had told him it would make an excellent boot-grease mixed with tallow—and if he should want to make a pair of Norwegian snowshoes next winter, it would be just the thing to rub on the bottom of the wood to make it slip easily over the snow.

Brown was going back on the hills to try to get some grouse and the boy was allowed to go with him. They tramped off together, and the walk was one of the memorable ones in Jack’s experience; but Jack’s mother would not have been so contented in his absence, had she known they were coming home by way of Deer Gulch, one of the most likely places in the neighborhood of the camp for a meeting with a bear.

Mr. Gilmour was the enthusiast about fishing, and so it happened that Mr. Dane was generally the one to stay about camp if John were off duty. The fishing should have been good, but it was not, partly because the Chinese placer-miners on the river had a practice of emptying the deep pools of trout by means of giant-powder, destroying a hundred times as many fish as they ate. The glorious fishing was higher up the river and in its tributaries, the mountain streams. However, not a day had passed without one meal of trout at least, and many of the fish were of great size, and an enthusiast like Mr. Gilmour cares for the sport, not for the fish!

The last camp-fire, Jack thought, was the best one of all; it was built farther down the beach, since a change of wind had made the corner by the rock fireplace uncomfortable. A big log, rolled up near the fire on its wind-ward side, made an excellent settle-back, the seat of which was the sand with blankets spread over it. The company sat in a row facing the fire, and Mrs. Gilmour was provided with a tin plate for a hand-screen. Perhaps they all were rather glad they were going home to-morrow. Mrs. Gilmour wanted to see Polly, the sand floor of the tent was getting lumpy, and they all were beginning to long for the wider outlook and the fuller life of the home camp at headquarters. Beautiful as the great pine-trees, the sheltered beach, and the shadows on the water had looked to them after their long, hot ride over the mountain trail, there were always the granite cliff on one side and the lava bluffs on the other, and no far-off lines for the eye to rest upon. People who have lived in places where there is a great deal of sky and a wide horizon are never long contented in nooks and corners of the earth, however lovely their detail may be.

At all events, the talk was gayer that last night by the camp-fire than any night except the first one of their stay. At last one of the company—the smallest one—slid quietly out of sight among the blankets, and no more was heard of him until the time came to dig him out, and restore him to consciousness.

After Mr. and Mrs. Gilmour and Jack—poor little sleepy Jack—had gone down the shore to their tent, Mr. Dane and Brown rolled the log settle upon the fire. It burned all night, and there were brands left with which to light the kitchen fire.

Breakfast was a sort of “clean-up,” as the miners say. The last of the ham, the last of the honey, one trout, left over from last night’s supper which the company quarreled about, each in turn refusing it,—even Jack, who seldom refused anything in the eating line,—and leaving it finally for John, who perhaps suspecting there was something wrong with it threw it out upon the beach.

After breakfast everybody fell to packing, except Jack, who roamed around, with his leggings and his one spur on, watching for Mr. Gillespie and the animals.

Mrs. Gilmour had finished her small share of the packing, and with Jack climbed up among the rocks in the shadow of the cliff. Mr. Gillespie had arrived and on the beach below he and Brown were loading the pack-horse with the camp stuff.

The two boxes in which the kitchen was packed went up first, one on each side of the pack-saddle, set astride the horse’s back, and in shape something like a saw-horse. The boxes were balanced and made fast with ropes. The roll of blankets filled the space between them; an axe was poked in, or a fishing-pole protruded from the heap; more blankets went up, then the tent was spread over all and the load securely roped into place,—Mr. Gillespie and Brown, one on either side, pulling against each other, and the patient old horse being squeezed between.

Mr. Gillespie had brought the usual “lady’s animal” for Mrs. Gilmour to ride which, in the West always means an article of horseflesh which no man would care to bestride, but on which it will do to “pack” women and children about.

The chief event of the journey home was the fording of the river, once above Gillespie’s and once below, thus avoiding the highest and hottest part of the trail which they would pass at midday. Neither Jack nor his mother had ever forded a stream on horseback before. The sun was high, the breeze was strong, the river bright and noisy. Giddily rippling and sparkling, it rushed past the low willows along its shore.

Mrs. O’Dowd was whacked into her place in the line between Billy and the lady’s animal, and kept her feet, if not her temper. And so, in due time, they arrived at the home ford and the ferry.

Brown and Mr. Gillespie took the animals across the ford, but the others were glad to exchange the saddle for the boat. Polly, in a fresh, white frock, with her hair blown over her cheeks, was watching from the hilltop, and came flying down the trail to meet them. Every one said how Polly had grown, and how fair she looked—and the house, which they called a camp for its rudeness, looked quite splendid with its lamps and books and curtains, to the sunburnt, dusty, real campers; and as Jack said, it did seem good to sit in a chair again. It was noticeable, however, that Jack sat lightly in chairs for several days after the ride home; but he had not flinched nor whined, and everybody acknowledged that he had won his single spur fairly well for an eight-year-old.

[1] Poisoned meat was laid near the chicken-house one night after the coyotes had carried off some fine young Plymouth Rocks (with a baleful instinct they always picked out the best of the fowls), and was eaten by them. Two of the robbers were found next day, dead, by the irrigation ditch, where they had crept to quench their thirst, and one was afterward seen, from time to time, in the sage-brush, a hairless spectre. The coyote mothers no doubt told their babies of this gruesome outcast as a warning, not against chicken-stealing, which must be one of the coyote virtues, but against poison and other desperate arts of man.

A VISIT TO JOHN’S CAMP

John Brown had concluded to “quit work and go to mining.” Not that mining is not work; but a man doesn’t get so tired working for himself, choosing his own hours and resting when he pleases, as he does working in another man’s time. It is like picking tame blackberries inside the garden fence for the family table, and picking wild blackberries in the fields and hedgerows and eating as one goes. Every boy knows how that is; and some of these good-natured, wandering, Western men are very like big boys.

John was still the teamster at the engineers’ camp in the cañon. He had been a sailor in his native Northern seas. He had been a fisherman of the Skager Rack; and more than once, by his own story, he had been driven out to sea, when drifting from his trawls, and picked up by one of the numerous vessels of the fishing-fleet that is always lying off or on the entrance to the strait. He had been a teamster on the plains where the Indians were “bad.” Once, when crossing the great Snake River plains, he had picked up a curious stone shaped by the Indians which he recognized as a “sinker,” such as he himself had made and used on the fishing-grounds of the far North. John had a little ranch of his own, and he owned half a house. The other half of the house was on the land of the adjoining settler. The two men had taken up preëmption claims, side by side, and to save expense had built a joint-dwelling on the boundary line between the two claims. Each man lived in his own side of the house—the half that rested on his land. John had lived six months on his claim, as the law requires before a settler can secure a title to his land. He was now working to get the money to improve it into a farm. He was a bit of a carpenter; and in many odd ways he was clever with his hands, as fishermen and sailors almost always are. Jack Gilmour possessed a riding-whip, such as the cowboys call a “quirt,” which John had braided for him, with skill and economy, out of leather thongs cut from scraps of waste leather, old boot-legs, or saddle-straps, discarded by the camps.

Such a companion as this, so experienced and variously gifted, and so uniformly gentle, was sure to be missed. Jack found the cañon a much duller place without his friend. He and Charley Moy, the Chinese cook, used to discourse about John, and recount his virtues, much as we linger over praises of the dead—although John’s camp was but five miles away, and he himself in good health, for all any one knew to the contrary.

After a while, Jack got permission to ride up the river to John’s camp and pay him a visit; and he was to be allowed to make the trip alone. Jack had been promoted, since his fishing expedition of two summers before, from a donkey and one spur to a pony of his own, a proper boy’s saddle, and two spurs, all in consequence of his advancing years and the increasing length of his legs. The pony was called “Lollo,” for just when he came the children had been reading “Jackanapes,” and the new pony, like the pony in the story, was “red-haired.” He had belonged, not to the gypsies, but to the Indians, who had broken and branded him. One of his ears was clipped, and the brand on his flank was a circle with a bar through the centre. He had the usual thick mane and tail of a “cayuse,” a white nose, and four white feet.

Now, there is an ancient rhyme which says:

“One white foot, buy him;
Two white feet, try him;
Three white feet, deny him;
Four white feet and a white nose,
Take off his hide and give him to the crows!”

But Lollo shook the dust of the trail from his four white feet, in defiance of the crows; nor was he ever known to hide the light of his white nose under a bushel, except when there were oats in the bottom of it.

Jack’s mother advised him to make sure of his lunch by taking it with him, in case John might be absent from the camp in the hills. But for some reason (it is very difficult to know a boy’s real reasons) Jack preferred to take the chances of the trip without provisions.

His father told him that when he had ridden as far as John Turner’s, by the river trail, he must take the upper trail which runs along the bluffs.

As it turned out, this was mistaken advice. The upper trail was not a good one, as Jack soon discovered; and in certain places, where it was highest and steepest above the river, it had been nearly rubbed out by the passage of herds of stock, crowding and climbing past one another and sliding over the dry and gritty slope.

In one spot it disappeared as a footing altogether, and here Jack was obliged to dismount and creep along on all fours, Lollo following as he could. A horse can go, it is said, wherever a man can go without using his hands. As Jack used his hands it was hardly fair to expect Lollo to follow; but the pony did so. These Western horses seem as ready as the men to risk themselves on dangerous trails, and quite as sure of what they are about.

What with all these ups and downs, the breeze on the bluffs, and the natural state of a boy’s appetite about midday, Jack was hoping that lunch would be ready at John’s camp by the time he reached it; and it is possible that he wished he had not been so proud, and had taken a “bite” in his pocket, as his mother advised him.

John’s camp was in a gulch where a cool stream came down from the hills. There were shade and grass and flowers in the season of flowers. The prospect-holes were higher up beneath the basalt bluffs which rise like palisades along the river. Earlier prospectors had driven tunnels, such as prisoners dig under the foundations of a wall, some extending a few feet, some farther, under the base of the bluffs. John was pushing these burrows farther still and “panning out” the dirt he obtained in his progress.

Jack soon found the sluice-boxes that John had built, and the “head” he had made by damming the little stream, but he could not find John nor John’s camp.

He argued with himself that John would not be likely to “make camp” below the pool of water; it was clear and cold, much better for drinking than the murky river water. His searching, therefore, was all up the gulch instead of down toward the river; but nowhere could he discover a sign of John nor of his belongings.

Jack’s mother asked him afterwards, when he told his story, why he did not call or make a noise of some kind. He said that he did whistle, but the place was so “still and lonesome” that he “did not like the sound of it.”

His hope now was that John might be at work in one of the tunnels under the bluffs. So he climbed up there; and by this time he was quite empty and weak-hearted with hunger. He had a fine view of the river and its shores, rising or sinking as the bluffs came to the front, or gave place to slopes of dry summer pastures. There was a strong wind blowing up there, and the black lava rocks in the sun were like heated ovens. The wind and the river’s faint ripple, so far below, were the only sounds he could hear. There were no living sounds of labor, or of anything that was human or homelike.

At the entrance to one of the tunnels he saw John’s canvas overalls, his pick and shovel, a gold-pan, and a wheelbarrow of home construction. Jack examined the latter and saw that the only shop-made part of it was the wheel, an old one which John must have found, and that John by his own ingenuity had added the other parts out of such materials as he could find.

The sight of these things, lying unused and unclaimed by their owner, made Jack feel more dismal than ever. The overalls, in particular, were like a picture of John himself. The whole place began to seem strange and awesome.

Jack crept into the short tunnels, where it was light even at the far end; and he saw nothing there, either to explain or to add to his fears. But the long tunnel was as black as night. Into that he dared not go.

He looked once more at the dreary little heap of tools and clothing, and with an ache that was partly in his heart, partly no doubt in the empty region of his stomach, he climbed down again into the gulch, mounted Lollo and rode away.

When he came to the bad place on the trail, he slid down, keeping ahead of Lollo, who shuffled along cautiously behind him. Lollo would not have stepped on Jack, but he might have slipped and fallen on him. However, a cayuse on a bad trail attends strictly to business, and is quite safe if he can keep but two of his feet on firm ground.

If Jack’s father had known about that place on the trail he never would have sent Jack by that way; and it was well that his mother had no notion of it. As it was, they were merely surprised to see the boy returning about the middle of the hottest part of the afternoon, and were not a little sorry for his disappointment when they heard the story of the trip.

Mrs. Gilmour shared the boy’s anxiety about John; and Charley Moy, while he was giving Jack his dinner, told some very painful stories of miners done away with on their solitary claims for the sake of their supposed earnings. Mr. Gilmour said there might be a dozen explanations of John’s absence; and, moreover, that Jack hadn’t found the camp at all, and the camp should be there, or some sign of its having been there must remain to indicate the spot.

Still the boy could not dismiss his fears, until two or three days later John himself stopped at the cañon, on his way to town, not only alive but in excellent health and spirits.

He told Jack that he had been at his camp all the time the boy was searching for him; but the camp was at the mouth of the gulch, close to the river, where he had found a spring of pure cold water. Very near the spring was a miner’s shanty, deserted but still quite habitable. The advantages of house and spring together had decided John to camp there, instead of higher up and nearer to his ditches. He urged Jack to make the trip again, and in a week or so the boy repeated his visit.

This time he did not take the upper trail. John said that that trail was only used at high water in the spring, when the river rose above the lower trail.

The lower trail along the river bank was safe and pleasant, and not so hot as the upper one; and this time there were no adventures. Adventures do very well to tell of afterward, but they do not always make a happy journey.

John was at home, and seemed very glad to see the boy. He took him up on the bluffs to show him his workings, and Jack found it very different, up there by the tunnels,—not at all strange and anxious. He did not mind the dark tunnel a bit, with John’s company and a candle to guide him.

John showed him the under surface of the bluffs, exposed where he had undermined them and scraped away the dirt. These lava bluffs were once a boiling flood of melted rock. The ground it flowed over and rested upon after it cooled had been the bed of a river. In its soft state the lava had taken the impression of the surface of the river-bed, and after it cooled the forms remained the same; so that the under surface of these ancient bluffs was like a plaster cast of the ancient river-bed. The print could be seen of stones smoothed by water, and some of the stones were still embedded in the lava crust.

Now this river came down from the mountains, where every prospector in Idaho knows there is plenty of gold for those who can discover it. John argued that the old river-bed must have had, mixed with its sand, fine gold for which no one had ever prospected. The new bed which the river had worn for itself at the foot of the bluffs probably contained quite as much gold, sunk between stones or lodged in potholes in the rocks (as it lodges against the riffles in a sluice-box), but no one could hope to get that gold, for the water which covered it. The old river-bed was covered only with rock, which “stays put” while you dig beneath it.

So, on the strength of this ingenious theory, John was digging where the other theorists had dug before him. He was not getting rich, but he was “making wages” and enjoying himself in the pleasant camp in the gulch; and as yet he had not found any of the rich holes.

He made a great feast in the boy’s honor. The chief dish was stewed grouse, rolled up in paste and boiled like dumplings. Jack said those grouse dumplings were about the best eating he had ever “struck.” They also had potatoes, baked in the ashes, and canned vegetables and stewed apples and baking-powder biscuits and honey; and to crown the feast, John made a pot of strong black coffee and sweetened it very sweet.

But here the guest was in a quandary. He refused the coffee, because he was not allowed to drink coffee at home; but he could see that his refusal made John uncomfortable, for there was no milk; there was nothing else that he could offer the boy to drink but water, and water seemed very plain at a feast.

Jack wondered which was worse—for a boy to break a rule without permission, or to seem to cast reproach upon a friend’s entertainment by refusing what was set before him. He really did not care for the coffee; it looked very black and bitter; but he cared so much for John that it was hard to keep on refusing. Still, he did refuse, but he did not tell John his reason. Somehow he didn’t think that it would sound manly for a big boy, nearly twelve years old, to say he was forbidden to drink coffee.

Afterward he told his mother about it, and asked her if he had done right. His mother’s opinion was that he had, but that he might have done it in a better way by telling John his reason for refusing the coffee. Then there would have been no danger of John’s supposing that the boy refused because he did not like that kind of coffee.

Jack’s little problem set his mother thinking how often we do what is right, at some cost to ourselves, perhaps, but do it in such an awkward, proud way, that we give pain to others and so undo the value of our honest effort to be good; and how, in the matter of feasts, it is much easier in our time for a guest to decline anything that does not suit him in the way of eating and drinking than it used to be long ago, when a gentleman was thought not to have “dined” unless he had both eaten and drunk more than was good for him; and how, in the matter of rules, it is only little silly boys who are ashamed to confess that they are not their own masters. The bravest and wisest men have been keepers of simple rules in simple matters, and in greater ones respecters of a loving Intelligence above their own, whose laws they were proud to obey.

The courage that displays itself in excesses is happily no longer the fashion; rather the courage that keeps modestly within bounds, and can say “no” without offense to others.

NOVEMBER IN THE CAÑON

The long season of fair autumn weather was drawing to a close. Everybody was tired of sunshine; there had been nearly six months of it, and the face of nature in southern Idaho was gray with dust. A dark morning or a cloudy sunset was welcome, even to the children, who were glad of the prospect of any new kind of weather.

But no rain came. The river had sunk so low in its bed it barely murmured on the rocks, like a sleeper disturbed in his dream. When the children were indoors, with windows shut and fire crackling, they could hear no sound of water; and this cessation of a voice inseparable from the life of the cañon added to the effect of waiting which belonged to these still fall days.

The talk of the men was of matters suited to the season. It was said the Chinamen’s wood-drive had got lodged in Moore’s Creek on its way to the river, there being so little water in the creek this year, and might not get down at all, which would be almost a total loss to the Chinamen. Charley Moy knew the boss Chinaman of the “drive,” and said that he had had bad luck now two seasons running.

The river was the common carrier between the lumber-camps in the mountains and the consumers of wood in the towns and ranches below. Purchasers who lived on the river-bank were accustomed to stop their winter’s supply of firewood as it floated by. It was taken account of and paid for when the owners of the drive came to look up their property.

Every year three drives came down the river. Goodwin’s log-drive came first, at high water, early in the summer. The logs were from twelve to twenty feet long. Each one was marked with the letters M H. These were the first two of Mr. Goodwin’s initials, and were easily cut with an axe; the final initial, G, being difficult to cut in this rude way, was omitted; but everybody knew that saw-logs marked M H belonged to Goodwin’s drive. They looked like torpedo-boats as they came nosing along with an ugly rolling motion through the heavy current.

The men who followed this first drive were rather a picked lot for strength and endurance, but they made slow progress past the bend in the cañon. Here a swift current and an eddy together combined to create what is called a jam. The loggers were often seen up to their waists in water for hours, breaking up the jam and working the logs out into the current. When the last one was off the men would get into their boat—a black, flat-bottomed boat, high at stem and stern like a whaleboat—and go whooping down in mid-current like a mob of schoolboys upon some dangerous sort of lark. These brief voyages between the jams must have been the most exciting and agreeable part of log-driving.

After Goodwin’s drive came the Frenchmen’s cord-wood drive; and last of all, when the river was lowest, came the Chinamen’s drive, making the best of what water was left.

There is a law of the United States which forbids that an alien shall cut timber on the public domain. A Chinaman, being an alien unmistakably and doubly held as such in the West, cannot therefore cut the public timber for his own immediate profit or use; but he can take a contract to furnish it to a white dealer in wood, at a price contingent upon the safe delivery of the wood. But if the river should fail to bring it in time for sale, the cost of cutting and driving, for as far as he succeeds in getting it down, is a dead loss to the Chinese contractor, and the wood belongs to whoever may pick it out of the water when the first rise of the creek in spring carries it out.

The Chinese wood-drivers are singular, wild-looking beings. Often at twilight, when they camped on the shore below the house, the children would hover within sight of the curious group the men made around their fire—an economical bit of fire, sufficient merely to cook the supper of fish and rice.

All is silence before supper, in a camp of hungry, wet white men, but the Chinamen were always chattering. The children were amused to see them “doing” their hair like women,—combing out the long, black, witch-locks in the light of the fire and braiding them into pigtails, or twisting them into “Psyche knots.” They wore several layers of shirts and sleeveless vests, one over another, long waterproof boots drawn up over their knees, and always the most unfitting of hats perched on top of the coiled braids or above the Psyche knots. Altogether, take them wet or dry, on land or in the water, no male or female of the white race could show anything in the way of costume to approach them.

The cloudy weather continued. The nights grew sharper, and the men said it was too cold for rain; if a storm came now it would bring snow. There was snow already upon the mountains and the high pastures, for the deer were seeking feeding-grounds in the lower, warmer gulches, and the stock had been driven down from the summer range to winter in the valleys.

One afternoon an old man, a stranger, was seen coming down the gulch back of the house, followed by a pack-horse bearing a load. The gulch was now all yellow and brown, and the man’s figure was conspicuous for the light, army-blue coat he wore—the overcoat of a private soldier. He “hitched” at the post near the kitchen door, and uncovering his load showed two fat haunches of young venison which he had brought to sell.

No peddler of the olden time, unstrapping his pack in the lonely farmhouse kitchen, could have been more welcome than this stranger with his wild merchandise to the children of the camp. They stood around so as not to miss a word of the conversation while Charley Moy entertained him with the remnants of the camp lunch. The old buckskin-colored horse seemed as much of a character as his master. Both his ears were cropped half off, giving a sullen and pugilistic expression to his bony head. There was no more arch to his neck than to the handle of a hammer. His faded yellow coat was dry, matted and dusty as the hair of a tramp who sleeps in haymows. Without bit or bridle, he followed his master like a dog. In the course of conversation it appeared that the cropped ears were not scars of battle nor marks of punishment, but the record of a journey when he and his master were caught out too late in the season, and the old horse’s ears had both been frozen.

The children were surprised to learn that their new acquaintance was a neighbor, residing in a dugout in Cottonwood Gulch, only three miles away. They knew the place well, had picnicked there one summer day, and had played in the dugout. Had not Daisy, the pet fawn, when they had barred him out of the dugout because he filled up the whole place, jumped upon the roof and nearly stamped it in?—like Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple? But no one had been living there then. The old man said he used the dugout only in winter. It was his town house. In summer he and the old horse took their freedom on the hills, hunting and prospecting for mineral—not so much in the expectation of a fortune as from love of the chances and risks of the life. Was it not lonely in Cottonwood Gulch when the snows came? the children asked. Sometimes it was lonely, but he had good neighbors: the boys at Alexander’s (the horse-ranch) were down from the summer range, and they came over to his place of an evening for a little game of cards, or he went over to their place. He would be very glad, however, of any old newspapers or novels that might be lying around camp; for he was short of reading-matter in the dugout.

There was always a pile of old periodicals and “picture papers” on Charley Moy’s ironing-table; he was proud to contribute his entire stock on hand to the evening company in the dugout. The visitor then modestly hinted that he was pretty tired of wild meat: had Charley such a thing as the rough end of a slab of bacon lying around, or a ham bone to spare? A little mite of lard would come handy, and if he could let him have about five pounds of flour, it would be an accommodation, and save a journey to town. These trifles he desired to pay for with his venison; but that was not permitted, under the circumstances.

Before taking his leave the old hunter persuaded Polly to take a little tour on his horse, up and down the poplar walk, at a slow and courteous pace. Polly had been greatly interested in her new friend at a distance, but this was rather a formidable step toward intimacy. However, she allowed herself to be lifted upon the back of the old crop-eared barbarian, and with his master walking beside her she paced sedately up and down between the leafless poplars.

The old man’s face was pale, notwithstanding the exposure of his life; the blood in his cheek no longer fired up at the touch of the sun. His blue coat and the yellow-gray light of the poplar walk gave him an added pallor. Polly was a pink beside him, perched aloft in her white bonnet and ruffled pinafore.

The old sway-backed horse sulked along, refusing to “take any hand” in such a trifling performance. He must have felt the insult of Polly’s babyish heels dangling against his weather-beaten ribs, that were wont to be decorated with the pendent hoofs and horns of his master’s vanquished game.

Relations between the family and their neighbor in the dugout continued to be friendly and mutually profitable. The old ex-soldier’s venison was better than could be purchased in town. Charley Moy saved the picture papers for him, and seldom failed to find the half of a pie, a cup of cold coffee, or a dish of sweets for him to “discuss” on the bench by the kitchen door. Discovering that antlers were prized in camp, he brought his very best pair as a present, bearing them upon his shoulders, the furry skull of the deer against his own, back to back, so that in profile he was double-headed, man in front and deer behind.

But the young men of the camp were ambitious to kill their own venison. The first light dry snow had fallen, and deer-tracks were discovered on the trails leading to the river. A deer was seen by John Brown and Mr. Dane, standing on the beach on the farther side, in a sort of cul-de-sac formed by the walls of the lava bluffs as they approached the shore. They fired at and wounded him, but he was not disabled from running. His only way of escape was by the river in the face of the enemy’s fire. He swam in a diagonal line down stream, and assisted by the current gained the shore at a point some distance below, which his pursuers were unable to reach in time to head him off.

They followed him over the hills as far and fast as legs and wind could carry them, but lost him finally, owing to the dog Cole’s injudicious barking, when the policy of the men would have been to lie quiet and let the deer rest from his wound. By his track in the snow they saw that his left hind foot touched the ground only now and then. If Cole had pressed him less hard the deer would have lain down to ease his hurt, the wound would have stiffened and rendered it difficult for him to run, and so he might have met his end shortly, instead of getting away to die a slow and painful death.

They lost him, and were reproached for it, needlessly, by the women of the family. One Saturday morning, when Mr. Dane was busy in the office over his notebooks, and Jack’s mother was darning stockings by the fire, Jack came plunging in to say that John Brown was trying to head off a deer that was swimming down the river—and would Mr. Dane come with his rifle, quick?

Below the house a wire-rope suspension bridge for foot passengers only spanned the river at its narrowest point, from rock to rock of the steep shore. Mr. Dane looked out and saw John Brown running to and fro on this bridge, waving his arms, shouting, and firing stones at some object above the bridge that was heading down stream. Mr. Dane could just see the small black spot upon the water which he knew was the deer’s head. He seized his gun and ran down the shore path. Discouraged in his attempt to pass the bridge, the deer was making for the shore, when Mr. Dane began firing at him. A stranger now arrived upon the scene, breathless with running; he was the hunter who had started the game and chased it till it had taken to the river. The deer was struggling with the current in midstream, uncertain which way to turn. Headed off from the bridge and from the nearest shore, he turned and swam slowly toward the opposite bank. The women on the hill were nearly crying, the hunt seemed so hopeless for the deer and so unfair: three men, two of them with guns, combined against him, and the current so swift and strong! It was Mr. Dane’s bullet that ended it. It struck the deer as he lifted himself out of the water on the rocks across the river.

The venison was divided between the stranger who started the game and the men of the camp who cut off its flight and prevented its escape.

The women did not refuse to eat of it, but they continued to protest that the hunt “was not fair;” or, in the phrase of the country, that the deer “had no show at all.”

THE GATES ON GRANDFATHER’S FARM

Little Eastern children, transplanted in their babyhood to the far West, have to leave behind them grandfathers and grandmothers, and all the dear old places associated with those best friends of childhood.

The Little Fig-tree Stories

THE
LITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES

AUTHOR’S NOTE

CONTENTS

THE
LITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES

FLOWER OF THE ALMOND AND FRUIT OF THE FIG

THE LAMB THAT COULDN’T “KEEP UP”

DREAM-HORSES

AN IDAHO PICNIC

A VISIT TO JOHN’S CAMP

NOVEMBER IN THE CAÑON

THE GATES ON GRANDFATHER’S FARM

The Little Fig-tree Stories

THELITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES

AUTHOR’S NOTE

CONTENTS

THELITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES

FLOWER OF THE ALMOND AND FRUIT OF THE FIG

THE LAMB THAT COULDN’T “KEEP UP”

DREAM-HORSES

AN IDAHO PICNIC

A VISIT TO JOHN’S CAMP

NOVEMBER IN THE CAÑON

THE GATES ON GRANDFATHER’S FARM

THE
LITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES

THE
LITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES