Richmond Palladium (Daily), Volume 32, Number 242, 6 October 1907 — Page 9

n GEORGIA WOOD PANGBORN

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Copyright, 1907, oy Thomas H. McKee. WHEN you see the charred bulk of Spruce mountain. Its fringe of dead trees against the sky, its huge gray bones picked clean, -you think at first that the creature is dead. But if the day is clear, you catch a ripple of green at the roots of the perished trees, which, they will tell you, is the flre-weed and bramble, and these prepare the way. After them come wil'd-cherry, birch, and at last, slowly but surely, the evergreens, bringing the mountain to its own again; for Nature Is very insistent about the green of the world, and man must work hard and long to make a true desert where she has once decided upon forests and rivers. As to Spruce mountain, they had done their most against it before the fire came. Its flanks bore the yellow scars of wood 'roads, and the spruce had been sheared like fleece. The shearing of a mountain is not a cleanly process, for when a log is cut, the green top of it a good half of the lumber is left to rot, and only the fat body goes down to the pulp milL Now, as a dead spruce or balsam twig will nash up like tinder, it was much as if the lumbermen, for every tree they took, had left a fire ready laid for lighting. Of this fire the Valley people will tell you: "It come up like a volcano and jumped over onto the Reserve like a panther. The cottagers came out, hardly waiting to pack up. They come out with the

and the toads. The Nimrod, that went. It eiiAri't wait ne ither. Nor it won't come back. Not In our day.' .... Set? No. The people here arc lor-abiding." This was what I heard one day, but on another day our guide, with only tumultuous miles of mountains on every hand, dropped the discretion that the Valley man uses toward the outsider. "In this dry weather," he drawled, "fires start easy. I shake out my pipe, so, and a beech leaf gets afire." ; He illustrates, and there is a thin curl o smoke 'Theu a twig of balsam gets the idee. And then, if you happen not to like the Reserve people, there's nothing In particular to prevent your going away and leaving it just like that." He watched the quiet, gentle spread of the fire as though, he imagined it to be a far greater fire as though the flaring up and dying of leaves and twigs were like the flaring end of trim cottages, until, as it was beginning to lick . at- the curling outer bark of a white birch stump, he put it out, but slowly, as if he were of two minds. II. An easy road wound past the Hawley camp and the foot of Spruce, up again on the unlumbered side and past the Nimrod to Pease Lake. Eventually, they planned to include the bare side of Spruce in the Reserve, also to re-forest it, and make it lovely, for the Reservo people are good friends to trees and game, and if the mountains ever do return to their old glory, it will be partly due to the Reserve. It was the thirtieth day of that memorable Juno drought, and even the Hawley camp was not quite so Jolly a3 It should have been. There' were some dozen o( so young people, and a weary chaperon. Among . thc33, two in particular carried heavy trouble in their hearts, for she was rich and beautiful, and he was -or, and they loved each other very much, which .-.j of no use at all, on account of the objections of h,v people. The;' both quite believed that there never had been such a dolorous situation before,' and were about as young and innocent as the Prince and Princess in the fairy story. "It used to be possible," said the Prince, gloomily, "for a fellow to go off and do something spectacular. Then the king gave him a title and let him marry the girl right away, and they lived in a castle Lord, ' Lord, to think of it! In a castle, Just the fellow and the girl, living happily ever after!" "But you'll do something." "Yes; but only by years of work. One can't do things suddenly any more, and the fellow gets bald and the girl gets tired of waiting, and marries a title or a millionaire's grandson with no chin." "I shan't get tired." The moon was just toiling over Spruce mountain, and its pallor falling on the two young faces made them of an elfin beauty such as one's imagination grants the boys and girls of fairy-tales. The campfire had been allowed to go out on account of the hot. dry weather, and they sat beside Its white ashes. The rest of the party were on the top of a boulder which was larger than their log house, singing "The Read to Mandalay," while they watched the moon rise. "Oh, her petticoat was yaller, And her little cap was green " "I could kill giants, I think," said the Prince, rising to pace back and forth, "or ogres, or anything In Teason, but to wait and wait, and make you wait " He scowled at the moon, which shone now just clear of the mountain's edge, round and yellow and unattainablesymbolic of the fortune he must win. "On the road to Mandalay " The Princess rose up and stopped his uneasy pacing by putting her two hands against his chest and looking up solemnly with wet black eyes. "If you think it isn't harder than facing giants to sit still as I must! I'd rather be the man, and at least able to try. I won't run off with you. That is, I hope you won't ask me to. I might if you did, but . I'd rather you wouldn't. Running off is cheap. I'm not cheap. And if you won't mind my being wrinkled a bit, I'll try to stand your being bald." She laughed uncertainly, then wept, begging him to hurry and hurry and again to hurry, because life was so short and people grew old so fast. "On the road to Mandalay, Where the flying fishes " "Hoi Moses! " A big fellow rose up out of the chorus like an exclamation point against a sky gone suddenly red. The Prince, with his arms about the Princess, looked up and 6aw it over her head. She was still weeping her heart out and telling him how she loved him, unconscious of any trouble in the world, even of the great and sudden trouble on the mountain. "There's a fire!" the Prince broke in upon her fluttered speech. "Look!" He forced her face .around so that she could see the brightness of it through her

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tears. "That means 'all hands.' I've got to go. You and the other girls and Mrs. Slocum go straight down the road to the village." He kissed her three times more, took an axe and followed the rest, going to meet the "big spectacular thing" in the manner of those knights of whom they had been talking, when giants challenged them to combat. III. And at this point one must make clear the story of Hiram Patno, which is really longer and more interesting than the one in hand, but tragic, and with an involved moral, which are not desirable qualities in a story. Hiram's trouble began to smoulder before he wa3 born, with the government making laws about game and fish. At that time old Patno kept the only inn of the Valley. Hunters came up from the cities to stay with him and hear his stories and brew punch by his great fire-place. And hfe made them free of the mountains, and parceled them out to guides as he saw fit, and grew rich as wealth goes in the mountains. But first came the Law, which one denounced and did not obey, and then suddenly Spruce mountain, which had made a green background for his inn ever since he built it, was lumbered off. He was as bewildered as if some one had come up from the cities and lumbered the clouds out of the sky, or carried off the air and water. Not but that lumbering was common

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THE CAMP-FIRE HAD GONE OUT, AND enough, but this was the lumbering for pulp which takes everything as it conies, leaving only naked rocks and dead treetops. There were still mountains in plenty. Patno was beginning to think it was about time he owned a few of them himself, if his inn was to continue to be an attractive place, but just as he was about to carry out that idea a forbidding shape confronted him. It was named the "Reserve." One might no longer hunt, it said, through those forests, nor fish in their multitude of little lakes; trails that had been blazed by Patno's own axe were closed to him. But he paid no attention to this nonsense, until one day he was met upon one of his own trails by a keeper with a gun a keeper who spoke not with the mountain drawl, but who confused his aspirates. Now, in the mountains, the wars of the Revolution and Rebellion are remembered, not as history, but as real events, and the old hatreds survive. If this new keeper had been American, it would have been bad enough, but to be ordered off one's own earth by an Englishman! Was the Revolutionary war, then, in vain? He staggered home under his rifle and met his family with a gray and twitching face, stammering out his story with wild incoherence. Hiram was ten years old. He straightway set to work quietly to play a new game, which was the daily cleaning of the whole armory of the Inn, from the blunderbuss that had killed Englishmen in its day down to his own sheath knife; for it seemed to his keen and savage little nostrils that another war was in the air, and that Patno Inn was a strategic point and in danger of attack, in which he was partly right, although the war was not of the sort he had in mind.

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Hostilities were opened by gangs of men improving the narrow, sandy road. After this, wagon-loads of lumber crept up as yellow slabs, where they had slid down as gray-coated logs. Then, before one knew it, in a setting of sleek lawn with round and starshaped beds of cannas and gladiolus, the many gables of the "Nimrod" stood forth in green and yellow paint. After that the hunters and mountain climbers came no more to Patno's Inn, for they were now members of the exclusive Nimrod Club, and stayed at the clubhouse, where their wives and children could be comfortable also. They built cottages of their own, too. And nobody might hunt or trap or cut down trees but themselves, or with their permission. They put an end, moreover, to hounding, and many a dog from the Valley and some belonging to the Nimrod itself who was in the habit of hunting deer on his own account, was justly executed in the act of carrying on his wicked business in the Reserve mountains. Old Bose, Patno's dog, came home on three legs one day, and never walked on four again, though he lived as long as his master. Patno examined the wound, and shook a lean fist in the direction of the Nimrod. But at least, after that, his dog kept him faithful company. Summers they sat together on the empty porch which Patno had built with his own hands for the acommodation of his faithless hunters. Winters they

THEY SAT BESIDE ITS WHITE ASHES. shivered before the big fire in the sitting-room, a place furnished according to the mingled tastes of Patno and hi3 wife. There was a great moose head thrust forth from the chimney, with "God Blos3 Our Home," in red worsted, on one side, and on the other a pencil drawing of the Inn done by some artistic hunter of long ago. Beneath these, on the long, wide shelf, a stuffed panther snarled fixedly, his whiskers touching one glass case of wax flowers, the tip of his sinuous tail another. There were deer skin3 and bear skins on the floor, side by side with braided rugs; a stuffed bear by the window balanced a Rogers group in another, and everywhere there were antlers antlers like a fungous growth on the walls. And here, as Patno sat and brooded, his wits became askew. He got a notion of talking to these relics of his victims, forgetting that he had ever wronged them by hustling them out of life, looking upon them rather as friends and partisans. If their fierce souls could have been coaxed back into their bodies, he seemed to think they would have fought for him with teeth and horns and claws against his new enemy, and to this effect he conversed with them, troubling his wife and son, while the fortunes of the Inn ebbed lower and lower. He was fortunate, however, in his death, which came at the last moment when it was possible to obtain comforts for him; and, after that, the Inn with its mortgages and taxes was added at once to the Nimrod Reserve. Hiram became bellboy, and his mother washed dishes for a year or two in the kitchen before she followed her hiKband. Hiram was a popular servant, because he was quiet and attended strictly to business; but he never said "Thank you," when pocketing a tip, and was fond of

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reading an English translation of "Wilhelm Tell" which he had found somewhere. IV. The young men with axes and picks went up the mountain to meet the fire. The smoke darkened and shut out the air, yet a wind lifted it now and then to let in the red shine of fire through the trees. The white ovals of the blazes on the trees looked dimly out of the bark, like the small, scared faces of dryads begging them to make haste and beckoning them to the right path. A deer crashed past, so close that the Prince, putting out a hand to ward him off. touched the hot bulk of his flank. Then came a porcupine at a stupid trot, and a scurry of squirrels, and mice and toads. "We'll stop here, I guess," spoke a young man from the Valley, to whom leadership had fallen by silent agreement, and with the word axes went crashing in a long line, while in another line a dozen picks were tearing at the inflammable cedar mould, although, as the leader knew, and the ra-n suspected, one might as well try to delay an angry bull by the cast of a pebble. "It seems," the leader drawled between his active strokes, "as If that foire was more anxious to meet us than we are to meet it." And they worked faster. All but the Prince. Among the clamor he had heard a faint call from the direction of the flames. Anything sounding like a cry for help from that direction must be answered. He ran forward, listened, heard it again, and with a shout turned from the trail into a grove of beech trees whose juicy young leaves had welcomed the fire more coldly than the crisp balsam. He leaped over a small dark brook, and the

voice cried out almost at his feet. He vaulted the trunk of a prostrate tree, and the white face of Hiram Patno looked up at him from the ground. "You got to get a crow-bar." said the bell-boy. 'If 'twas just my leg you could chop it off, but this is a dead-fall, this is. . . . Chop one of them young maples." The Prince held his flask to Hiram's lips, tilting it '"until half of its contents were gone. "Thank you," said Hiram, quietly, then turned his fj head upon hi3 shoulder so that he might see not th jj approaching brightness of the fire, but a brightness H among the treetops, where the moonlight, calmly shining through a space which the smoke had not filled, washed the beech leaves with silver and made their 6mooth branches as white as birches. The Prince nervously struck at a maple. "Take your time," drawled Hiram, noting the unsteady sound. It seemed to the Prince that it took him as long to cut through the four-inch butt of the sapling as it takes two men with a bucksaw to level a three-foot tre, yet it was done at last. He thrust it carefully under the log. "Now," said Hiram, "easy. Or if you do let it fall again, let it be a dead-fall, sure enough. I don't want to die any messier than I have to." The Prince pried, and the weight lifted put forth more strength, and his crowbar bent and cracked, but before the log could fall back he had managed to reenforce it with his shoulder. It made a cruel weight. "If you can hold on a minute more," panted up from beside him, "I'll pull myself out" As some animal shot through the spine drags itself feebly ahead for a little, so Hiram, laying hold of roots, digging his fingers deep into the needles, pulled himself by inches free of the tree. Then the Prince dropped his burden with a groan of exhaustion. "I guess, maybe, you'd better have the rest of that whiskev " said Hiram, but the wistfulness of mortal jj pain was in his voice. The Prince held the flask to S the other s lips until it was empty. Making a funnel of his hands in the direction of the choppers he shouted, but no answer came. With a (TTsmav hp nntpd the sound of the axes had stonDed. Their position had shifted, then, or there had been Jj some change of tactics. Trees were still crashing. 1 but the noise of them came from the otner direction, where the fire was felline them. When Hiram sooke asrain it was in a voice already changing and fading. "That there brook leads to the Pughole," said he. "There's a boat. . . . Better get there Boon's we can on both our accounts. You're a big chap, and I ain't Guess I'd try to do the same by you." The wind that so far had been kindly keeping the air clear for them gave it up with a sigh, like a guardian spirit that had helped all it could and must now let them do their best alone. The young beech leaves that had withstood the Are were shriveled now and burning with the best of them. The Prince lifted Hiram with what care was possible and waded into the brook, a cruel little brook with its many boulders, its choking tangle of brush, and here and there a rippling fall of three or four feet. Hiram's stoicism was unequal to the strain. He cried out sharply, now and again, as the Prince stumbled. 'Td a lot rather you'd knock me on the head," he groaned, "but I suppose it's no use arguing that." And again he said: "Maybe the Are wouldn't be so bad at least it would be different. O Lord, ain't ? there no end to it!" And among other mutterings: "But I can pay yon. I can do that, all right," which caused the Prince to wonder, even as he fought with the slippery stones. But at last they came out into a quiet black pool, whose further edge was walled by Are. A small boat lay among folded water-lilies as still as a log. The Prince cast into it a hasty armful of spruce boughs and laid Hiram along the bottom, then bending his head low to escape the smoke he knelt down and paddled out. The rush of flames was like a great water-fall, but their light was obscured by the great white smoke from the green leaves, which lay on the water like a mist. Through this he paddled doubtfully until he thought he had reached the middle of the tiny lake, then crouched down with his face in the spruce boughs beside Hiram. "I guess," said Hiram, speaking in the slow and difficult manner of the dying, "we'd better settle up while we can." His hand found the Prince's through the suffocating obscurity and pressed into it a thick, oolong package. "That's something belongs to me. Maybe there's some would say it didn't, but I guess it did, all right. That and more they hadn't no right. . . ." He stopped with a shudder that made the boat tremble. "I haven't time to go into it the way I'd like," he resumed, wearily, "but I guess you needn't fear to use it . . . It's the price . . . of a whole lot of things that were never paid for. . . . You can do what you like with it. . . . " The Prince had taken the package mechanically, but when he realized by its size and shape what it contained, he dropped it like something dangerous. "What have you been doing?" he shouted into the dying ears. "Doing?" muttered Hiram. "Well, I didn't kill anybody. Tell, he killed Gessler. ... I might have too, easy as not, but I didn't, for I guess they mostly didn't do it just for meanness, the way Gessler did. But when it came to their starting this bank, I thought I might as well have what was owing to me." "Did you set this fire?" thundered the Prince. "Fires don't need no settin this weather," answered Hiram, calmly. "I guess likely somebody was smoking in the woods. . . . As to this money, now it's quite a lot, I guess enough for you and your girl. . . . You done pretty well by me." Turning his head gently to one side he seemed to watch the crumbling black and red of the trees on the bank, but his contemplation of them was so fixed and so peaceful that the Prince bent down with suspicion. THE Chapin

He closed the eyes, and covered the face with b&lsaa boughs. "Enough for you and your girl." The words seemed to go on In spite of the balsaa boughs that hid the lipa. Probably Hiram had over estimated the purchasing power of the packet. Th Prince began to wonder how much there was na that it made any difference. He ricked It up from th bottom of the boat at lea6t it could not lie there The seal was already broken. A spruce shooting lnt sudden flame made the place like day and showed the crisp yellow ends of the bills. "One hundred." he read on the uppermost. If V were a package of hundreds Hiram had not underestimated so badly. It would be interesting at least to know how many bills a package like that contained He counted them, grew very pale, and stared for I long time at the mysterious obscurity of the evergreen in the bottom of the boat. Then his eyes sought the red shore carefully, as though there were thi possibility of a spectator in that lifeless arena. H delayed for a long time, and his thoughts were manj and whirling. At last, with only the flaming trees U see, he put the package in the pocket of his trousers "Just for a start." he muttered to the gesticulatini flames which whispered and crackled as if comment ing upon his action. "He's partly right, you know, in a way why should it shock one so to get down t first principles like that? It wasn't any worse than their roundabout way of robbing him." But the treei only whispered among their flames, and the roar o! the forest was like a water-fall. "Just for a start." argued the Prince. "I'm sure ta win out then I can make it all right." But somehow, even to the trees he did not mention it as tha price of the Princess. "Right isn't always right," said the Prince, "not wrong, wrong." And with that he sat down In tha boat to wait for morning. V. When parents are averse to one's friends. It becomes necessary to be surreptitious, and have trysting places. A week after the fire the Prince and the Princess met among the musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum. He was there before she came, his nervous and absent-minded fingers drumming out a rogue's march upon the tom-tom, and h!s face wa like burnt-out ashes. "You are ill!" "No." said he, "but " Then he eqnared his shoulders and looking her between the eyes told her ati the story of the night upon the mountains, what manner of giant he had met there, and how it had nearly done him to death during the past week. He took the neat, oblong package from his pocket, ran his thumb across the crisp, exposed edges cf the bills that she might see the face of his tempter, and laid the thing upon the rich and venerable case of a harp, sichord. There was gray rain upon the window, and no fear of an intruder. "The Patno chap didn't seem to have any doubt about having done the right thing, but that was his business, and he's dead. I reasoned for a while that his title to it was good enough to give him a right to pass it over to me. I reasoned all sons of wavs. I've had a rather bad time. It's been worse carrying ttat about than it was carrying poor Patno down the brook. I knew even less where I was going . . only. It seemed as if any road that led to you couldn't be wrong. If I had been aure that t was leading to you . . . but I began to fhink it wasn't. . . . Are you that is you'll probably throw me over for ever dreaming of ke-jplnr It." Her eyes were old with the wisdom of women the wisdom of understanding and forgiving. If something of the former hero worship was gone out of them, perhaps it was of little consequence. She came over to him and kissed him. The color came back to his face with a rush, r.nd he lifted his head as he had not lifted it for a week. "Princes if you mean that, really and trulywill you wait?" "I'll wait," eald the Princess. VI. When at last the safe of the Nimrod Accommodation Bank was dug out of the hot ashes and opened, the ofbtials of that institution becanv? very grave and silent, all but the cashier, who buret into a storm oi assertions. The fire came, he swore, at the moment when he was putting the envelope iuco the safe. While it was in his hand there was a flash at the window and he saw the dry undergrowth of tho foiest's edge alight Then came the screams of the women, and the stampede of teams Into which tha guests were packed like passengers Into the boats of a burning ship, and hurried down the road to the Valley; but all this, asserted the cashier, had njt prevented him front putting that newly arrived sieaf of notes into the safe. Of course he admitted, he ought to have taken it with him, but at such times one does things mechanically surely the gentlemen would bear him out in that they bowed with grave assent and he put It into the safe and locked it before he fled. The president asked the president was the father of the girl called the Princess the president asked whether any one had been near him at that moment: and first he answered. "No" then, confusedly. "Yes he thought he remembered a bell-boy running in as if on some errand he seemed to remember the light from the window shining In on his brass buttonsyes, he remembered. It might have been the one called Hiram, he thought the ene that had been killed by a tree that night. "Of course, if I didn't put it In the safe or. If I hadn't locked the safe I thought I put it in the safe," he muttered, sadly. The president, the Princess's father, had listened throughout with a face more grave and puzzled than any of the others. Now be eyed the uncomfortable cashier long and searchingly, as though trying to fit him into some role that was not altogether convincing. But at the end of his scrutiny he took out of his pocket the missing bills and laid them on the blistered safe. "As I have the notes, perhaps we had better let this problem remain a problem. It is possible under the Influence of fear to do strange things. Perhaps Mr. Grimshaw even dropped them and ran, and the bell-boy evidently not Hiram, since he died that night, and his only companion at the time was a young man of whose honesty there can be no doubtbut some bell-boy, we will admit, picked up the bills as Mr. Grimshaw dropped them. As to their coming into my possession, they were returned under very peculiar circumstances. They were on the table in my room in my New York hotel yesterday morning, when I awoke. My door locks with a spring on the inside, and there are bars at the windows. I could have sworn that my daughter was the last person who entered that night She read me to sleep as usual, and I know she closed the door as she went out, for it was locked in the morning. My explanation is that the thief well, not thief, I suppose was concealed in the clothes closet durlns; the evening. That he came out very cautiously, for I am a light sleeper, and departed by the same means as my daughter." "Unless." broke In the cashier breathlessly, "your daughter put them there!" "My dear Mr. Grimshaw!" smiled the president coldly. The others broke into a shout of laughter at the suggestion. "Conscience is a singular thing," murmured the president to an acquiescent audience, when in their presence he had counted out the bills and found none missing. He put ttem square with his fat white fingers, bound them with elastics, and restored tha package to his own pocket "Conscience some consciences are certainly very singular things," said he. ,

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