The Girl From Tim's Place. Charles Clark Munn
and protruding teeth were always tobacco-stained. For three months now, he had made weekly calls at Tim’s Place, in pursuit of Chip. His wooing, as might be expected, had been a persistent leering at her with his one sinister eye, oft-repeated innuendoes and insinuations of lascivious nature, scarce understood by her, with now and then attempted familiarity. These advances had met with much the same reception once accorded him by the wildcat.
Both these visitors were now with the group below. That fact was of no interest to Chip, except in connection with a more pertinent one–a long conference she had observed between them that day. What it was about, she could not guess, and yet some queer intuition told her that it concerned her. Ordinarily, she would have sought sleep in her box-on-legs bed; now she crouched on the floor, listening.
For an hour the game and its medley of sounds continued; then cessation, the tramp of heavily shod feet, the light extinguished, and finally–silence. A few minutes of this, and then the sound of whispered converse, low yet distinct, reached Chip from outside. Cautiously she crept to her window.
“I gif you one hunerd dollars now, for ze gal,” Pete was saying, “an’ one hunerd more when you fotch her.”
“It’s three hundred down, I’ve told ye, or we don’t do business,” was her father’s answer, in almost a hiss.
A pain like a knife piercing her heart came to Chip.
“But s’pose she run away?” came in Pete’s voice.
“What, sixty miles to a settlement? You must be a damn fool!”
“An’ if she no mind me?”
“Wal, thrash her then; she’s yours.”
“But I no gif so much,” parleyed Pete; “I gif you one-feefty now, an’ one hunerd when she come.”
“You’ll give what I say, and be quick about it, or I’ll take her out to-morrow, and you’ll never see her again; so fork over.”
“And you fotch her to-morrow?”
“Yes, I told you.” And so the bargain was concluded.
Only a moment more, while Chip sat numb and dazed, then came the sound of footsteps, as the two men separated, and then silence over Tim’s Place.
And yet, what a horror for Chip! Sold like a horse or a pig to this worse than disgusting half-breed, and on the morrow to be taken–no, dragged–to the half-breed’s hut by her hated father.
Hardly conscious of the real intent and object of this purchase, she yet understood it dimly. Life here was bad enough–it was coarse, unloved, even filthy, and yet, hard as it was, it was a thousand times better than slavery with such an owner.
And now, still weak and trembling from the shock, she raised her head cautiously and peeped out of the window. A faint spectral light from the rising moon outlined the log barn, the two log cabins, and pigsty, which, with the frame house she was in, comprised Tim’s Place. Above and beyond where the forest enclosed the hillside, it shone brighter, and as Chip looked out upon the ethereal silvered view, away to the right she saw the dark opening into the old tote road. Up this they had brought her, eight years before. Never since had she traversed it; and yet, as she looked at it now, an inspiration born of her father’s sneer came to her.
It was a desperate chance, a foolhardy step–a journey so appalling, so almost hopeless, she might well hesitate; and yet, escape that way was her one chance. Only a moment longer she waited, then gathering her few belongings–a pair of old shoes, the moccasins Old Tomah had given her, a skirt and jacket fashioned from Tim’s cast-off garments, a fur cap, and soft felt hat–she thrust them into a soiled pillow-case and crept down the stairs.
Once out, she looked about, listened, then darted up the hillside, straight for the tote road entrance. Here she paused, put on her moccasins, and looked back.
The moon, now above the tree-tops, shone full upon Tim’s Place, softening and silvering all its ugliness and all its squalor. Away to the left stood Tomah’s hut, across the river, a shining path bright and rippled.
In spite of the awful dread of her situation and the years of her hard, unpaid, and ofttimes cursed toil, a pang of regret now came to her. This was her home, wretched as it was. Here she had at least been fed and warmed in winters, and here Old Tomah had shown her kindness. Oh, if he were only in his hut now, that she might go and waken him softly, and beg him to take her in his canoe and speed down the river!
But no! only her own desperate courage would now avail, and realizing that this look upon Tim’s Place was the last one, she turned and fled down the path. Sixty miles of stony, bush-encumbered, brier-grown, seldom-travelled road lay ahead of her! Sixty miles of mingled swamp, morass, and rock-ribbed hill! Sixty miles through the sombre silence and persistent menace of a wilderness, peopled only by death-intending creatures, yellow-eyed and sharp-fanged!
With only a sickening, soul-nauseating fate awaiting her at Tim’s Place, and her sole escape this almost insane flight, she sped on. The faint, spectral rifts of moonlight through interlaced fir and spruce as often deceived as aided her; bending boughs whipped her, bushes and logs tripped her, sharp stones and pointed sticks bit her; she hurried over hillocks, wallowed through sloughs and dashed into tangles of briers, heedless of all except her one mad impulse to escape.
Soon the ever present menace of a wilderness assailed her,–the yowl of a wildcat close at hand; in a swamp, the sharp bark of a wolf; on a hillside above her, the hoot of an owl; and when after two hours of this desperate flight had exhausted her and she was forced to halt, strange creeping, crawling things seemed all about.
And now the erratic, fantastic belief of Old Tomah returned to her. With him the forest was peopled by a weird, uncanny race, sometimes visible and sometimes not–“spites,” he called them, and they were the souls of both man and beast; sometimes good, sometimes evil, according as they had been in life, and all good or ill luck was due to their ghostly influences. They followed the hunter and trapper day and night, luring him into safety or danger, as they chose. They were everywhere, and in countless numbers, ready and sure to avenge all wrongs and reward all virtues. They had a Chieftain also, a great white spectre who came forth from the north in winter, and swept across the wilderness, spreading death and terror.
Many times at Tim’s Place, Chip had sat enthralled on winter evenings, while Old Tomah described these mystic genii. They were so real to him that he made them real to her, and now, alone in this vast wilderness, spectral in the faint moonlight and filled with countless terrors, they returned in full force. On every side she could see them, creeping, crawling, through the undergrowth or along the interlaced boughs above her. She could hear the faint hiss of their breath in the night wind, see the gleam of their little eyes in dark places–they were crossing the path in front of her, following close behind, and gathering about her from every direction.
Beneath bright sunlight, a vast wilderness is at best a place peopled by many terrors. Its solitude seems uncanny, its shadow fearsome, its silence ominous. The creaking of limbs moving in the breeze sounds like the shriek of demons; the rush of winds becomes the hiss of serpents. Vague terrors assail one on every hand, and the rustle of each dry leaf, or breaking of every twig, becomes the footfall of a savage beast. We advance only with caution, oft halting to look and listen. A stern, defiant Presence seems everywhere confronting us, and the weird mysticism of Nature bids us beware. By night this invisible Something becomes of monstrous proportions. Ghosts fashion themselves out of each rift of light, and every rock, thick-grown tree-top, or dark shadow becomes a goblin.
To Chip, educated only in the fantastic lore of Old Tomah, these terrors now became insanity-breeding. She could not turn back–better death among the spites than slaving to the half-breed; and so, faint from awful fear, gasping from miles of running, she stumbled on. And now a little hope came, for the road bent down beside the river, and its low voice seemed a word of cheer. Into its cool depths she could at least plunge and die, as a last resort.
Soon an opening showed ahead, and a bridge appeared. Here, for the first time,