The Shanty Sled E-Book

Hulbert Footner

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

This story is something vital, but very tragic. The main character decides to travel from New York to northwestern Canada to see her mother, who sent her to New York twenty years ago. She falls in love with a local catcher, and then an evil fur trader tries to intervene.

Leseprobe

Contents

I. AT BEAR COULÈE

II. SUPPER AT THE OLD WOMAN'S

III. AT THE LANDING

IV. IN NEW YORK

V. NORTHWARD

VI. THE MEETING

VII. THE FIGHT

VIII. THE START

IX. OVER THE ICE

X. INTIMATIONS OF DANGER

XI. THE ATTACK

XII. THE LONG PORTAGE

XIII. THE MOTHER

XIV. A LONG DEFERRED MEETING

XV. THE HAND OF MACCUBBIN

XVI. PUTTING ON THE SCREWS

XVII. INCREASING PRESSURE

XVIII. THE CHINOOK

XIX. THE DECISION

XX. MARRIAGE BY CONTRACT

XXI. AND LAST

I

At Bear Coulèe

It was September at Bear Coulèe, and the poplar bluffs were painted with splashes of crude yellow ochre on the chocolate-coloured hills. In the little hollows of the hills rose-scrub burned like fire. Every night for weeks past there had been a frost, and the weather showed signs of breaking; it would not be long before the first snow. Old Woman Rambert came to the door of her shack and looked up at the beautifully dying vegetation with an inexpressible pain in her eyes. It was like seeing one’s dearest friend pass. She thought of the coming snow with a shudder. Six unbroken months of it to face! It was like the hand of death at her heart.

She shook her head like a terrier and trotted back to her work. She had six loaves of bread in the oven, and that was only the first of several batches that had to be baked that day. Three of the boys were starting next morning on the four-hundred mile journey outside. Throughout the whole country the men of Bear Coulèe bragged of their old woman’s home-made bread. A fat lot of good that did the baker, she thought with a wry smile. They were good fellows, all of them, but what did they know, what did they care about the sore heart of the lonely old woman who went to bed every night with a gnawing pain in her side and got up with it? Sometimes in the night panic gripped her. “What will I do?... What will I do when It comes?” she asked herself, stuffing the sheet into her mouth. “And never a white woman near!”

She was only forty-eight years old, but for many a year now she had been the Old Woman. She ran the “kitchen” at Bear Coulèe; that is to say, she fed the gang, which consisted of Maccubbin, the trader, and the half-dozen or so of farmers, all bachelors. There was a fiction current that she was putting by enough to retire presently and live with her daughter outside. Only she and Maccubbin knew that that prospect yearly grew more remote. She was an odd-looking little old woman, with her scanty white hair screwed into a hard knot at the back of her head, and a bright red flannel dress. Year by year the style of it never changed. When she needed a new one she simply cut another piece from the bolt of red flannel which Maccubbin kept for her in the store. She had dark eyes full of a gloomy fire, and her mouth was surrounded by hundreds of tiny wrinkles, due to her continual pursing and twisting of it. In all her movements she was as quick as a squirrel.

Bear Coulèe was at the end of the waggon-trail in that direction. Their nearest white neighbours were at Spirit River Crossing, one hundred miles south. Maccubbin was a “free” trader. The settlement at Bear Coulèe was his idea and his own making, and he enjoyed whatever profit there was in it. These particulars are related in order to explain the isolation of the place. In the most remote of “company” posts there are at least the visits of the doctor, the inspector, and the missionaries to look forward to. Maccubbin made no provision for missionaries. Hence there was no occasion for any white person ever to visit Bear Coulèe, and none ever did.

Hearing footsteps outside, the Old Woman drew a mask over her face. None of the men ever saw her without that mask; the mask of a gallant fighter who conceals his wounds. She was never the one to take refuge behind her sex. As she would have said, she always tried to keep her end up. Maccubbin came in, a handsome, strong, dark man in the prime of life, with another sort of mask over his face. He was better dressed than you would expect to find a man at the back of the backwoods; strathcona boots, whipcord breeches, tweed coat, and the inevitable Stetson. This outfit was the insignia of his office; he was the boss.

“You want to see me?” he said, frowning.

“I sure do,” she answered brusquely.

“What’s the idea?” he asked, running up his eyebrows.

The Old Woman knew exactly why he had assumed this high and mighty air, and she was not in the least intimidated. “In the store the clerk is always about. I wanted to see you by yourself.”

“What about?”

“You know perfectly well.”

Maccubbin sat down, frowning still. The Old Woman looked at him with that look of long-tried exasperation that women are so often obliged to bend on men. She was looking at his hat. In her twenty years in the country she had not been able to overcome her resentment at the fact that they did not take off their hats when they came into her kitchen. It stuck in her crop at the beginning, and it was still sticking there–but she no longer spoke about it. She drew a long breath for patience, and began:

“The boys are starting out to-morrow, and I shall send my letter to my daughter by them. I want a draft from you to enclose in it.”

“Oh, of course,” said the trader, as if he had not known it all along. “I don’t remember the exact figures, but there’s a little over a hundred dollars due you.”

“A hundred dollars nothing!” said the Old Woman energetically. “The child can’t get through the winter on less than four hundred.”

“That’s not my fault,” said Maccubbin.

“Nor mine either.

“Four hundred dollars!” cried Maccubbin, with a cold hard stare.

“That’s what I said!” she returned, squarely meeting his cold eyes with her hot ones.

“That’s ridiculous!”

The Old Woman waggled her head and pursed up her lips, and said nothing.

“You can’t have it.”

“Then I’ll go out with the boys,” she said promptly. “And you can cook for yourself.”

“That’s ridiculous too,” he said coolly. “You know you can’t go.”

“And why can’t I?”

“Because I won’t allow it.”

This was what she was waiting for. “And are you the Lord God Almighty?” she cried, brandishing her hands above her head. “Have you the power of life and death over us?”

“Don’t be silly, Old Woman. You’ll bring on a fit of coughing if you screech so. This is merely a matter of business, and you understand it as well as I do... You owe me over a thousand dollars. Out of consideration for you I have funded it, and I never say anything about it as long as you pay me the trifle of interest yearly...”

“Oh, you can always make the figures come out on your side...”

”... The team that takes the men out to-morrow is my team...”

“Everything hereabouts is yours!”

”... And I’m certainly not going to let my team carry my thousand dollars out of my reach.”

“Then I’ll walk!”

“A hundred miles?”

“I’d like to see anybody try to stop me!”

“Now come, Old Woman, you’re just talking wildly. Suppose you did go out, what could you do at your age? You couldn’t make a living for your daughter. You’d only starve together.”

“I’m not making a living for her here.”

“Quiet down, and talk to me like a reasonable being. You must remember that you’re getting on, and your health isn’t what it was. I stand to lose the whole amount. But I want to do all I can for you. I’ll do what I’ve always done before, advance still a little more to you. I’ll make it two hundred.”

“Four hundred!”

And so the battle was joined. They went through this every year.

“If you were a square man,” cried the Old Woman desperately, “you would take the responsibility of this boarding-house and pay me a fair wage, but you make me stand the risk, and I always lose! always lose! Because I have to buy everything from you!”

“It was your idea in the beginning.”

“Because you persuaded me I could make money this way.”

“I’ll make it two fifty just to quiet you.”

“Four hundred!”

“I’m not made of money. I’ve had a losing season.”

“God forgive you for that lie,” cried the Old Woman. “You lose! Only He knows what your profits are! Look at these poor wretches of farmers here, all in your debt. You take precious good care that they never get out. They have to buy everything they eat and everything they wear, and their seed, and their implements, from you at your price, and when they’re not frozen out and they get a crop, they have to sell their grain to you at your price. And the Indians, they’re all in your debt too. You grind the grain into flour and sell it to them at your price; and they have to sell their furs to you at the price you set. Four profits on every transaction, and you dare to tell me you’re losing money!”

Maccubbin’s dark face turned darker still with rage. “Whisht, Old Woman,” he cried. “I’m not obliged to give you anything more than your hundred and eighteen dollars. And not even that, because you owe me a thousand! You’ll do yourself no good by angering me.”

She marched up to him with arms akimbo. “And who are you that you must not be angered? You’ll never shut my mouth while I have breath. You may break me, but you’ll never tame me!”

Thus it raged for more than an hour. When Maccubbin strode out of the shack with knotted brows, he left a draft for three hundred dollars lying on the table. The Old Woman, her head still up and her eyes flashing, bowed him out with polite sarcastic remarks, each of which had a sting in its tail. When he was gone she dropped into a chair exhausted, all but fainting, pressing her hand hard to her side. But there was thankfulness in the weary old eyes that she lifted to the yellow and brown hills. She had got more than she expected.

In the intervals of putting the bread in the oven, and looking to see how it was getting on, and taking it out again, the Old Woman sat down at the table to write her letter to her daughter–her letters rather, for she always wrote two. The first and the longest wrote itself, one might say: the pen fairly raced across the paper line after line without a pause, and the Old Woman’s tears splashed down and spread the ink. When it was finished, she stood up and read it to herself in a low voice, holding a hand ready to press against her wrinkled lips when they trembled too much.

“MY DARLINGEST, DARLINGEST CHILD,

“I love you! Oh, how I love you! The thought of you is never absent from my heart! Those are my red letter nights when I have a dream of you. The photographs you have sent me are my most precious possessions. I am never too tired to go over them one by one. The little ones are almost worn out. But it is the later ones that I love best. You have become such a beautiful woman that I can scarcely believe you were born of me. That sweet woman’s face that I have never seen is engraven on my heart. Oh, I should know you among a thousand!

“Two months have passed since I wrote you. I shall not speak of them. Nothing is changed here. It is a long nightmare. The land is beautiful in the summer, but I hate it, how I hate it! because it has taken from me everything that I hold dear. It took my husband from me, and it forced me to put my child away from me. It has wrecked me, this land; I am not old, but I’m finished and done for, my darling. It has forced me to live among men, and long ago I lost my womanly gentleness. It has turned me into a hideous, coarse old hag. If the miracle should happen, and there ever was a chance of my seeing you, I should put it from me, though my heart broke in two. I could not bear to have you see me. You could not help but turn from such a one. It would be preposterous for me to set up to be your mother, my darling lady daughter. I would not risk losing your dear, dear letters which you write to the mother you have imagined.

“But oh, my darling, how I hunger and thirst for you–for a little love and tenderness and gentleness which have been denied me for twenty years! I continually forget myself and pray God to let me see you once before I die–that won’t be long now. When I come to myself I fall on my knees and implore Him not to listen to my prayers, I am so terrified lest He put an intimation into your heart that I need you, and you should come here. That would be too terrible! You might be trapped here as I was. This country wrecks women, wrecks women, wrecks women! My last and final prayer will be that my child may never know what it is to be trapped in a womanless country.

“The pain grows slowly worse. I don’t know what it is. It doesn’t matter. It is certainly a mortal pain; but slow. I expect it will give me a goodish run yet before it shuts down on me. I can stand it if only I am able to keep going until I have set you on your feet, my darling. My great fear is of dying among these men. I must not think of that. If I am not taken too suddenly I shall have the courage to steal away before it happens to a place where they will never find me.

*****

“Good-bye, my darling, my pretty one. May God and His angels guard you. Ah! my heart is breaking for you, my courage is gone. I just want you, want you, want you! Come to me, my child!

“MOTHER.”

The Old Woman kissed her letter passionately, and going to the stove, lifted one of the lids and dropped the sheets on the flames. As the paper blazed up she whispered:

“That is my heart.”

Then she brushed her hand across her eyes; shook her head like a terrier, and stiffening her little back, sat down to write her second letter with serious look and pursed up lips. This was a matter of much greater difficulty. The sentences came slowly. She had often to pause and bite her pen.

“MY DEAREST DAUGHTER,

“Mr. Maccubbin is sending out three lads to Miwasa Landing to bring in the three new teams that will be needed for next season’s work, together with our winter’s supply of grub, and that gives me an opportunity to write you for the last time this year. You may expect to hear from me again next April. That is, I will write in April, but it will be May before you receive it. But you can write to me again upon receipt of this, for the boys will be obliged to wait over at the Landing until the winter road forms. Horses can only be brought into this country over the ice. Address your letter to me in care of Hugh Bell, Miwasa Landing, Athabasca. Bell is the most dependable of the three. We expect them back here at Christmas or shortly after. For a Christmas present you may send me six pictures of yourself, all different. I like snapshots best, they are so unexpected.

“One of the breeds will drive the lads to the Crossing, where they will get a lift with the freighters over the long portage, and our team will come back. It will bring the August and September mail, and then I shall have two long, long letters from you, I hope, and maybe a picture or two enclosed. It is silly for you to talk about sending me a little camera so I can take a picture of myself. Nobody here would know how to use it. You must just imagine what your mother looks like. You mustn’t spend your money on any more books for me either, for my eyes won’t permit me to read by lamplight in the winter evenings. I must just defer my reading until I come outside, and can have my eyes seen to. That won’t be long now.

“I enclose Mr. Maccubbin’s draft for three hundred dollars. I trust this will be enough to see you through, together with what you are now earning. I am delighted to hear how well you are getting on. When your work begins to appear in the magazines, you can send me the magazines, and how proud I shall be! This money I send is only a part of my earnings, of course, and you must not stint yourself any necessaries. Should you run short through sickness or anything, write to me for more in the spring. I am saving every cent against the happy, happy day when I shall be able to leave here and join you. They say that the route which passes through Bear Coulèe has been decided on for the new trans-continental railway. That will make us all, well, not rich, but comfortably off. I have a hundred and sixty acres of land right on the location. Of course, it’s mortgaged to Mr. Maccubbin for a small sum, but that will be a mere fraction of its value when the railway comes through.

“You must never speak of coming up here. The expense would be terrific, and there would be nothing to see when you got here. I assure you it’s the dullest hole on earth. Why, it’s two months since I wrote you, and I cannot think of a bit of news. We had a crop this year, and the farmers are correspondingly elated, but most of it will go to pay the debts they contracted because of the freeze-up last year. When more farmers come in and a larger area is cultivated, we will not suffer so much from summer frosts. You ask me to tell you about the men, but they would not interest you, my dear; well-meaning fellows, but only rough, crude farmers. I am more fortunately placed than the farmers, because they all have to eat just the same, bad years and good.

“My health continues to be excellent, I am happy to say. Everybody remarks on how well I look. I do not have to work as hard as you seem to think, for there is always native help, such as it is. I just direct things. You needn’t fear the effect of the long winter on me. We do not have the extreme cold that they have to endure further east, for the Chinook wind modifies our climate. In the middle of the winter I have seen the snow melt right off the prairie. The winter climate is dry and bracing, and seems to suit me very well.

“That is all now, my dear. I have to see to the supper, and early to-morrow the lads will be gone with this. I will start another letter right away, and jot down a line or two from time to time. Sometimes in the winter we have to send men out to the Crossing on snowshoes. Who knows, perhaps you will hear from me before spring after all. As soon as we have twenty people in this place, the Government has promised us a regular mail service summer and winter. Good-bye, my darling child. Take great care of yourself, and write me a long letter on receipt of this. Do not worry about me, for everything is going splendidly here. Much, much love from

“MOTHER.”

II

Supper at the Old Woman’s

Hugh Bell and Billy Penrose sat on a bench outside the Old Woman’s shack waiting for the summons to supper. The sun had gone down and a chill was falling on the valley, but inside the shack it was a little too warm, for the Old Woman was in one of her “stews.” When that happened they all kept close to the ground. What there was of Bear Coulèe was spread before their eyes. There was the Old Woman’s shack; and a hundred yards away Maccubbin’s group of buildings; store, dwelling, mill, and stables; two or three more shacks at intervals of a quarter-mile or so down the little valley. That was all. All the buildings were of logs with sod roofs. Musquasepi or Bear Creek a small stream threaded its way down the valley to meander away to the north-west, where it fell into a great river, they said. Nobody had been out there. The fields of golden stubble stretched along both sides of the creek.

“We’ll have a fine day for the start,” remarked Hugh.

It had cleared at sundown, and the sky was a lucent sea of aquamarine and topaz above the western hills. The surrounding hills were not hills really, but merely the escarpments of the prairie. On top it was bald, and gently rolling for hundreds of miles in every direction. Bear Coulèe was a place where the deep trough, cut by the little stream in the prairie, had widened out to something less than a mile. The extraordinarily rich bottom lands of this hole in the prairie stretched along the stream for six miles or so. “The richest land in the north!” Maccubbin would cry; “twenty-four inches of black loam!” Unfortunately, the bottom lands were even more liable to frost than the bench above. “What matter?” said Maccubbin. “The land is so rich that one crop out of three will pay you.” Well, to the involved farmers it didn’t quite seem to work out that way.

The door to the shack opened, and the angry voice of the Old Woman came out with a burst.

“What do you s’pose started her off to-day?” asked Billy, with an anxious glance through the window. Billy was the youngest member of the community, a stripling of seventeen, with the rosy, innocent face of a child, and a man’s length of limb.

“I suppose she’s had a scrap with Maccubbin,” said Hugh, scowling. “It’s a damn shame!” Hugh was some eight years Billy’s senior, a big fellow; blonde, slow, and diffident. The two batched together half a mile down the valley.

“What about?” asked Billy.

“What about? You know. She was trying to get money to send out to her daughter.”

“Why does she stay here?” asked Billy.

“For the same reason that we’re all chained here. She has a quarter section of land that her husband left her, and it’s all she has in the world.”

“It’s a rotten shame!” said Billy.

“She and her husband were among the first to come in twenty years ago,” Hugh went on. “I’ve heard say that she was above him in station. They had a baby just able to walk. The first spring after they came in, the man was killed by the fall of a spruce-tree he was cutting. Seems they had put every cent they possessed into their outfit, and she didn’t know what to do. Maccubbin persuaded her to stay, with his talk of the future of the country–you know his style. What he was after really was a cook. He would have been glad to marry her then, but she wouldn’t. She was one of these fierce widows; all other men were horrible to her alongside the memory of her husband. But she sent the child outside to her sister by a missionary’s wife from the Crossing, and she stayed to cook. She’s never seen her daughter since. She’s still here cooking; you see what she’s got out of it.”

“It’s a shame!” said Billy.

“So we don’t mind if she gives us the rough side of her tongue occasionally,” said Hugh. “I’d do anything to serve the Old Woman. Only she won’t let me. Proud as Lucifer!”

The well-dressed Maccubbin presiding with dignity at the head of the table; the Old Woman in her red flannel dress at the foot; four men in more or less nondescript garments down each side: such was the entire white population of Bear Coulèe. There was a soft-footed, big-eyed breed boy to fill the cups and bring the pie. All the men were in an excellent humour, for the meal was a special one in honour of the departing travellers; there was a haunch of moose-meat with onions and potatoes, and a wild cranberry-pie. The Old Woman had quieted down. She kept her head up and her mouth tightly pursed. She was Johnny-on-the-spot with her sharp remarks, but her glance was sombre. There was always this emotional strain when anybody departed for the Land of Promise–outside.

“Bring me two whole cartons of cigarettes!” cried one. “I want to kill myself smokin’.”

“Bring me a store suit with peg-top trousers.

“Aah! peg-tops went out ten years ago.”

“Bring a little phonograph and a dozen records. That would make the winter nights pass.”

“Bring the Old Woman a five-pound box of candy for me. None of your cheap stuff out of a wooden pail, but real outside candy in a box with a ribbon round it.”

“Much obliged, Wilkie,” said the Old Woman dryly, “but I’m thinking after a month on the trail, my old teeth would hardly be equal to it.”

“Bring me in a Stilton cheese.”

All this was mere comedy, of course. They knew they would get none of these things. Maccubbin might import them, and they could buy them at the store. It was the Old Woman who got in the slyest dig at the trader.

“Bring me in a mail order catalogue.”

There was a great laugh.

“Well, I hope there’ll be room on the sleds for a little bacon and beans,” said Maccubbin, undisturbed by it.

Maccubbin was the first to leave the party. He shook hands genially with Hugh, Billy, and Lester Morrow, the three travellers-to-be. “I shan’t see you fellows before you start. You’ll have to be off by five, if you want to halt at the water-hole by the big spruce. Well, you know what you have to do. You’ll find my outfit stored in my own warehouse at the Landing. Trudeau has the key; and Trudeau has the horses. Check up the inventory when you arrive, and again when you load the sleds.

“Start back as soon as you are able, but do not be foolhardy. Don’t be the first party to start over the ice, but the second. Once you are started, push through without delay. You know as well as I do that, most years after January fifteenth, there is too much snow on the prairie for you to get through with horses and sleds. And we’ll be in need here of sugar and beans and tea by that time.”

When Maccubbin went a certain constraint was lifted from the gathering. The men pushed their chairs back and rocked on the hinder legs. The Old Woman sat down away from the table with her mending. She had a small lamp on a dresser beside her, with a tin reflector to cast down the light on her work. But her eyes were bad to-night. After an ineffectual struggle, she put down her sewing and sat quietly in her corner.

“Old Woman, have you written to your daughter?” asked Lester. He was a tall, handsome lad as dark and spare of frame as an Indian. And like an Indian’s were his keen, close-set eyes. Unlike most Indians, he was a great talker, and was generally the life of the party. He was reputed to be a favourite of Maccubbin’s, but in the North a man finds his level, and there was a general feeling that Lester, good hunter and tireless on the trail though he was, was less dependable, say, than the diffident Hugh.

“Why, of course,” said the Old Woman.

“I’ll carry it for you,” said Lester.

“Much obliged,” said the Old Woman, “but I calculate giving it to Hugh.”

Lester’s eyes seemed to draw closer together. “Can’t you trust me?” he said, with the frank laugh which was one of his recommendations.

“Surely. But it just happened I spoke to Hugh about it first.”

“Old Woman, did you give her our regards?” asked Wilkie Beach, a slack-looking, hairy farmer.

“Surely,” she said, with more than a trace of dryness.

“Not meaning any disrespec’,” said Wilkie deprecatingly, “but just because we feel we know her, having talked about her so much, and looked at her pitchers.”

“Tell us about her, Old Woman,” said Sandy Govans cajolingly. He was a wistful little fellow, on whom Maccubbin’s stock sizes of shirts and pants hung a world too big. “What’s this about her being an artist?”

The Old Woman could not resist this. She said with a quickening eye: “She draws pictures such as those you see in the magazines.”

“But I thought them was printed,” said Sandy.

“You blooming idiot, they’ve got to be drawn before they can be printed,” said Lester.

“Oh! Well, how was I to know?... Well, anyhow, I never see no pitchers anywhere as purty as herself. Show us her pitchers to-night, Old Woman.”

She got up with an air of great condescension, and pulling open the top drawer of the dresser, took from it a little packet carefully wrapped in a handkerchief. The handkerchief spread, a little pile of photographs was revealed, including several of cabinet size, and many snapshots, small and smaller.

“Let me see your hands,” she said sternly to Sandy.

He wiped them furiously on a very grimy bandanna before venturing to exhibit. The others, more or less furtively, also wiped their hands. The Old Woman, carrying the precious packet, returned to the foot of the table, and the men drew up again. With a sharp admonition to handle the pictures carefully if they ever wanted to see them again, she began to pass them around the board.

“This is the first picture they sent back to me after she had gone,” she said. “Age two years, nine months, and eleven days. At that time her hair curled all over her head as you can see, in ringlets as soft as the finest spun silk, and in colour like pale sunlight... In this one they have put her hair in a ribbon for the first time, and she is wearing her first stuff dress. It was a red and black plaidie. They sent me a sample of it. She was intensely proud of it, they said, and went about to everybody holding out the skirt and saying: ‘See! See! New dress!'...”

And so on. And so on. They all knew the Old Woman’s tender, simple game off by heart. Nobody thought of laughing at her. They were not merely humouring her either; for this charming baby, child, girl, woman, had come to fill a big space in their empty lives. They handled the pictures reverently, and something of the mother’s own rapt air entered into them as they looked. That is, into all but Lester. He was no less keenly interested than the others, but he kept his slightly conceited air.

“Well, Old Woman, it is something to have had a beautiful child like that, even if it was by proxy sort of,” said Wilkie Beach.

“Oh, the pretty little Miss!” said Sandy, with his face all softened. “See, in this one she looks as if she was just goin’ to start dancin’. See! See!”

“She’s somepin more than just a pretty child, too,” said another. “See how she looks out at you so serious and all. She’s got good sense.”

“Hurry up with the ones where she’s grown up,” said Billy. “Those are the ones that get me. Oh, boy!”

Hugh said nothing at all, but his too-candid eyes betrayed him. Lester looked sideways at him with a slightly derisive smile. These two being young, and of the same age, were great rivals in everything.

When at last they had all been passed around and had returned to the Old Woman again, and she carried them to the dresser to put them in the handkerchief, something prompted her to count the pictures. Having done so, she whirled around to the table with a terrible face.

“There’s one missing!” she cried.

They all looked slightly aghast, and started to look in the most unlikely places: under the dishes that remained on the table, under the table, under the chairs; they even got up to see if by chance they were sitting on the lost picture. It was not to be found. Meanwhile, the Old Woman agitatedly went through the pile. She was at no loss.

“It is the one taken on her nineteenth birthday,” she cried accusingly. “A snapshot. She is sitting on the grass with a bush behind her and her feet at one side. She has on a hat with two wings, and she is smiling. Who had that last?”

Her tone made them all look guilty.

“I remember that pitcher,” said Sandy hastily; “I looked at it and passed it along to Dan here.”

“And I passed it on to Wilkie,” the next man hastened to aver.

“That’s right, and I passed it to Hughey,” said Wilkie.

Before Hugh could speak for himself, Lester, who sat on the other side of him, said softly: “It never came to me.”

Everybody looked at Hugh.

“Bell, have you got my picture?” the Old Woman demanded in an awful voice.

The hanging head, the crimson face told their own tale. Hugh had never a word to say for himself.

“Hand it over!”

Blonde Hugh arose and with wretched eyes slipped his hand in his inside breast pocket and produced the missing card. He carried it to the Old Woman with a hang-dog air. The feelings of the company were mixed. Lester led off with an enormous laugh, in which one or two others joined, but some, like little Sandy Govans, looked at him with a curious compunction. Billy, his pal, was, of course, quick with his look of sympathy, and he glared at the laughers. The Old Woman felt no compunctions.

“How dare you! How dare you!” she stormed. “You miserable thief! You snake in the grass! When I let you look at the pictures out of kindness, you would rob me, would you? Well, I’ll take precious good care you never get your itching palms on them again. Out of my house, you thief, before I forget myself!” In her heat she clean forgot that she had asked Hugh to do her a service.

Hugh took his hat and left the shack without a word. Billy made haste to follow, with defiant backward glances at those who laughed. Outside the man walked along with his head down. The boy slipped his arm through that of his friend, but there was no answering pressure; Hugh’s arm hung straight down.

In their own shack Hugh sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the floor. Hugh and Billy shared a big home-made bedstead filled with straw. Lester’s bedding roll was lying on the floor; for he was to sleep with them that night, that all might get up together.

“Aw, don’t take it so hard,” said Billy in distress. “It was only a kind of a joke like. The Old Woman don’t mean all she says when she’s mad.”

“It wasn’t a joke,” muttered Hugh.