A Fortnight of Folly. Maurice Thompson
“Yes.”
“A boardin’ there?”
“Yes.”
“For all summer?”
“Possibly.”
Again there was a silence, during which the water trickled off the mountaineer’s clothes and ran over the little stones at his feet.
“Goin’ ter make fun o’ me when ye git up thar?” the catechism was at length resumed. Dufour laughed.
“I could tell a pretty good thing on you,” he answered, taking a sweeping observation of the stalwart fellow’s appearance as he stood there with his loose jeans trousers and blue cotton shirt clinging to his shivering limbs.
“See yer, now,” said the latter, in a wheedling tone, and wringing his light, thin beard with one sinewy dark hand, “see yer, now, I’d like for ye not ter do thet, strenger.”
“Why?”
“Well,” said the mountaineer, after some picturesque hesitation and faltering, “ ’cause I hev a ’quaintance o’ mine up ther’ at thet tavern.”
“Indeed, have you? Who is it?”
“Mebbe ye mought be erquainted with Miss Sarah Anna Crabb?”
“No.”
“Well, she’s up ther’, she stayed all night at our house las’ night an’ went on up ther’ this mornin’; she’s a literary woman an’ purty, an’ smart, an’ a mighty much of a talker.”
“Ugh!”
“Jest tell her ’at ye met me down yer, an’ ’at I’m tol’ble well; but don’t say nothin’ ’bout this ’ere duckin’ ’at ye gi’ me, will ye?”
“Oh, of course, that’s all right,” Dufour hastened to say, feeling an indescribable thrill of sympathy for the man.
“Yer’s my hand, strenger, an’ w’en Wesley Tolliver gives a feller his hand hit means all there air ter mean,” exclaimed the latter, as warmly as his condition would permit, “an’ w’en ye need er friend in these parts jest come ter me.”
He shouldered his gun, thereupon, and remarking that he might as well be going, strode away over a spur of the mountain, his clothes still dripping and sticking close to his muscular limbs. Dufour found his rod broken and his reel injured, by having felt the weight of Wesley Tolliver’s foot, and so he too turned to retrace his steps.
Such an adventure could not fail to gain in spectacular grotesqueness as it took its place in the memory and imagination of Dufour. He had been in the habit of seeing such things on the stage and of condemning them out of hand as the baldest melodramatic nonsense, so that now he could not fairly realize the matter as something that had taken place in his life.
He was very tired and hungry when he reached Hotel Helicon.
VI.
“Oh, yes, I walked all the way up the mountain from the railroad depot,” explained the young woman whose arrival we chronicled in another chapter, “but I stopped over night at a cabin on the way and discovered some just delightful characters—the Tollivers—regular Craddock sort of people, an old lady and her son.”
By some method known only to herself she had put herself upon a speaking-plane with Dufour, who, as she approached him, was standing in an angle of the wide wooden veranda waiting for the moon to rise over the distant peaks of the eastern mountains.
“I saw Mr. Tolliver to-day while whipping a brook down here,” said he, turning to look her squarely in the face.
“Oh, did you! Isn’t he a virile, villainous, noble, and altogether melodramatic looking man? I wish there was some one here who could sketch him for me. But, say, Mr. Dufour, what do you mean, please, when you speak of whipping a brook?”
She took from her pocket a little red note-book and a pencil as he promptly responded: “Whipping a brook? oh, that’s angler’s nonsense, it means casting the line into the water, you know.”
“That’s funny,” she remarked, making a note.
She was taller than Dufour, and so slender and angular that in comparison with his excessive plumpness she looked gaunt and bony. In speaking her lips made all sorts of wild contortions showing her uneven teeth to great effect, and the extreme rapidity of her utterance gave an explosive emphasis to her voice. Over her forehead, which projected, a fluffy mass of pale yellow hair sprang almost fiercely as if to attack her scared and receding chin.
“You are from Michigan, I believe, Miss Crabb,” remarked Dufour.
“Oh, dear, no!” she answered, growing red in the face, “No, indeed. I am from Indiana, from Ringville, associate editor of the Star.”
“Pardon, I meant Indiana. Of course I knew you were not from Michigan.”
“Thanks,” with a little laugh and a shrug, “I am glad you see the point.”
“I usually do—a little late,” he remarked complacently.
“You are from Boston, then, I infer,” she glibly responded.
“Not precisely,” he said, with an approving laugh, “but I admit that I have some Bostonian qualities.”
At this point in the conversation she was drooping over him, so to say, and he was sturdily looking up into her bright, insistent face.
“What a group!” said Crane to Mrs. Bridges, a New York fashion editor. “I’d give the best farm in Kentucky (so far as my title goes) for a photograph of it! Doesn’t she appear to be just about to peck out his eyes!”
“Your lofty imagination plays you fantastic tricks,” said Mrs. Bridges. “Is she the famous Western lady reporter?”
“The same, of the Ringville Star. I met her at the Cincinnati convention. It was there that Bascom of the Bugle called her a bag of gimlets, because she bored him so.”
“Oh!”
This exclamation was not in response to what Crane had said, but it was an involuntary tribute to the moon-flower just flaring into bloom between twin peaks lying dusky and heavy against the mist of silver and gold that veiled the sweet sky beyond. A semi-circle of pale straw-colored fire gleamed in the lowest angle of the notch and sent up long, wavering lines of light almost to the zenith, paling the strongest stars and intensifying the shadows in the mountain gorges and valleys. Grim as angry gods, the pines stood along the slopes, as if gloomily contemplating some dark scheme of vengeance.
“A real Sapphic,” said Crane, dropping into a poetical tone, as an elocutionist does when he is hungry for an opportunity to recite a favorite sketch.
“Why a Sapphic?” inquired the matter-of-fact fashion-editor.
“Oh, don’t you remember that fragment, that glorious picture Sappho’s divine genius has made for us—”
He quoted some Greek.
“About as divine as Choctaw or Kickapoo,” she said. “I understand the moon-shine better. In fact I have a sincere contempt for all this transparent clap-trap you poets and critics indulge in when you got upon your Greek hobby. Divine Sappho, indeed! A lot of bald bits of jargon made famous by the comments of fogies. Let’s look at the moon, please, and be sincere.”
“Sincere!”
“Yes, you know very well that if you had written the Sapphic fragments the critics would——”
“The