THE POET'S SECOND STORY
This story has been told elsewhere, and has been blamed for its lack of a moral. People seem to expect one so to put to the rack the facts in the case that they will shriek out some well-tried message. Some have behaved as if they thought the moral here, but faulty. Colonel Loree of the Solar Selling Company, however, thinks the affair rich in the _hic-fabula-docet_ element. So does Williamson, soliciting-agent for the Mid-Continent Life; and so--emphatically so--does the Mid-Continent itself. Trudeau, the "breed" guide, has had so few years in which to turn it over in his slow-moving mind as he has lain rolled in his blankets while the snow sifted through the moaning pines, that he has not made up his mind. As for Foster Van Dorn and Gwendolyn, their opinions--but the story itself is not long.
Williamson says that when he left Van Dorn's office with the application, he was as near walking on air as insurance men ever are.
People had been so slow in writing their autographs on the dotted line--and here was a six-figure application, with a check. These, accompanied by the wide-eyed Williamson, exploded into the mid-December calm of the agency headquarters like the news of a Tonopah strike in the poker-playing ennui of a Poverty Flat.
"What's that, Williamson?" ejaculated the cashier. "Five hundred--you don't mean _thousand_?"
"Why, confound you," sneered Williamson, "look at that application!"
"Let me see it!" panted the manager, bursting in. "'Foster G. Van Dorn;'
half a million! Holy cat, Williamson; but this will put you and the agency in the lead, for--Is he good for it, Williamson?"
"Why don't you see that _check_?" inquired the lofty solicitor. "I tell you, fellows, there's always a way to land any man. Why, for a year, I've--by George! I'm forgetting to send Doctor Watson over to make the examination. Van Dorn's going on a hunting trip, and we've got to hustle, and get him nailed before he goes!"
The manager stood by Williamson during the telephoning. "Who is Mr. Van Dorn?" he asked, as the agent hung up the receiver.
"President of the Kosmos Chemical Company," replied Williamson.
"Son-in-law and enemy of Colonel Loree of the Solar Selling Company, you know," said the cashier.
"Oh-h-h-h!" replied the manager, as if recalling something. "I remember the 'romance' in the newspapers; but I thought the young fellow was poor. Fixed it up with the colonel, I suppose--the usual thing."
"Not on your life!" replied Williamson. "Loree would kill him if he dared--old aristocrat, you know; but Van Dorn's too smart for him. You remember he was an engineer for Loree's company, and met the daughter on some inspection trip. Love at first sight--moonlight on the mountains--runaway and wedding on the sly--father's curse--turned out to starve, and all that."
"I remember that," answered the manager; "but it doesn't seem to lead logically up to this application."
"Well," went on Williamson, "Van Dorn turns up with a company formed to work a deposit of the sal-ammoniac, or asphaltum, or whatever the stuff the Solar Company had cornered may be, and began trust-busting. The colonel swore the new deposit really belonged to his company because Van Dorn found it while in his employ, and called him all sorts of a scoundrel. But the young man's gone on, all the same, floating his company, and flying high."
"I heard that Loree was sure to ruin him," interposed the cashier.
"Ruin nothing!" said Williamson. "It was a case of the whale and the swordfish. Van Dorn's got him licked--why, don't you see that check!"
"That does look like success," replied the manager. "I hope his strenuous life hasn't hurt his health--Watson is fussy about hearts and lungs."
"That's the least of my troubles," replied Williamson. "Van Dorn's an athlete, and a first-class risk. There's nothing the matter with Van Dorn!"
And yet, Trudeau the guide, far up in the Minnesota woods, looked at the young man and wondered if there wasn't something the matter with Van Dorn. They had come by the old "tote-road" to the deserted lumber-camp armed and equipped to hunt deer. Most young men in Van Dorn's situation were keen-eyed, eager for the trail and the chase--at least until tamed by weariness. But Van Dorn was like a somnambulist. Once Trudeau had left him behind on the road, and on retracing his steps to find him, had discovered him standing by the path, gazing at nothing, his lips slowly moving as if repeating something under his breath--and he had started as if in fright at Trudeau's hail. He had been careful to give Trudeau his card, and admonished him to keep it; but he seemed careless of all opportunities of following up the acquaintance. Most of these city hunters were anxious to talk; but what troubled Trudeau, was the manner in which Van Dorn sat by the fire, wrote in a book from time to time, and gazed into the flames. Now that they had reached the old camp, Trudeau hoped that actual hunting would bring to his man's eyes the fire of interest in the thing he had come so far to enjoy.
"I'll fix up camp," said he. "If you like, you hunt. Big par_tie_ Chicageau men ove' by lake--keep othe' way."
"How far to their camp?" asked the fire-gazer.
"'Bout two mile," answered Trudeau.
"Chicago men?" queried Van Dorn. "How many?"
"Mebbe ten," answered Trudeau; "mebbe six. She have car on track down at depot. Big man--come ev'ry wintaire. Jacques Lacroix guide heem, Colonel Lorie--big man!"
"Colonel Loree! From Chicago?" cried Van Dorn.
"_Oui_, yes!" replied Trudeau. "You know heem?"
"No," said Van Dorn.
The man who did not know Loree went to his knapsack and took out a jacket made of deerskin tanned with the hair on. It was lined with red flannel. He held it up and looked at it fixedly. Trudeau started as it met his gaze, and he came up to Van Dorn and pointed to the garment.
"You wear zat?" asked he.
"Yes," said the other. "It is a good warm jacket."
"A man w'at wear deerskin zhaquette," said Trudeau, "in zese wood', in shoo_ting_ sea_sone_, sartaine go home in wooden ove'coat--sure's hell!"
"Oh, I guess there's no danger!" said Van Dorn, his lips parting with a mirthless smile.
"_Non?_" queried Trudeau. "You ben in zese wood' before?"
"Oh, yes!" replied Van Dorn. "Lots of times!"
"Zen you know!" asserted Trudeau. "Zen you are zho_king_ wiz me. Zese huntaire sink brown cloth coat, gray coat, black coat, anysing zat move--she sink zem every time a deer. Las' wintaire lots men killed for deer. Pete St. Cyr's boy kill deer, hang heem in tree, and nex' morning take heem on back an' tote. A city huntaire see deer-hide wiz hair on mov_ing_, an him! sof'-nose bullet go thoo deer, thoo Pete St. Cyr's boy's head! Zat zhaquette damn-fool thing!"
"It goes either side out," said the hunter. "I can turn it, you know."
"_I_ turn heem! _I_ turn heem!" said Trudeau, suiting the action to the word. "Red is bettaire, by gosh--in zese wood'."
Trudeau watched his companion as he made his laborious way through the cut-over chaos until he disappeared; but he did not see him pause when out of sight of camp, and turn toward the lake.
"I would rather it were any one else," said Van Dorn, as if to something that walked by his side; "but what difference does it make? Why not let him finish his work?"
The sheer difficulty of the country brought back to Van Dorn something like the forester's alertness. The lust for lumber had ravaged the spiry forest, and left, inextricably tangled, the wrecks of the noble trees--forest maidens whose beauty had been their destruction; only the crooked and ugly having escaped. So deep and complex was the wreckage that it seemed like the spilikins of a giants' game of jack-straws--gnarled logs, limbs like _chevaux-de-frise_, saplings and underbrush growing up through chaos. And spread over and sifted through all was the snow, as light as down.
Van Dorn must have told the truth as to his former visits; for he went on like one used to this terrible maze. Nowhere could he take three steps straight forward: it was always climbing up, or leaping down, or going around, or crawling under. Here thick leaves upheld the snow, and in the dry pine straw on the ground he could hear the forest mice rustle and scurry. There a field was smoothed over by the snow, as a trap is hidden by sand, covering debris just high enough to imperil the limbs of the pedestrian. Yonder was a tamarack swamp too thick to be pierced: and everywhere it was over and under and up and down, and desperately hard, for miles and miles, with no place for repose.
He gazed away over the strange abomination of desolation, blindly reflecting upon man's way of coming, doing his worst, and passing on with sated appetite, leaving ruin--as he had done here. He wondered why that tall tract of virgin pine over at the right had been allowed to escape, standing against the sky like a black wall, spiked with tall rampikes. He stared fixedly at the snow, the blue shadows, the black pines, somnambulistic again.
To the something that seemed to walk by his side, he spoke of these things, as if it had been visible. Strange actions, strange thoughts for the president of the Kosmos Chemical Company, the great antagonist of Loree of the Solar Selling Company, the David to Loree's Goliath, the swordfish to the colonel's whale! Think, however, of David, with all the stones spent against the giant's buckler, and cowering within the lethal reach of that spear like a weaver's beam; or of the swordfish, with broken weapon, hunted to the uttermost black depths by the oncoming silent yawning destruction. And in Van Dorn's case, the enemy was an avenger as well as a natural foe.
Poor little Kosmos Chemical Company with its big name, its great deposits of "a prime commercial necessity"--see prospectus--its dependence on railways with which Loree was on terms of which Van Dorn never dreamed, its old and wily foe, skilled to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, raging for the loss of his ewe lamb, whom, notwithstanding his giantship, he had loved for twenty years to Van Dorn's two, and had dreamed dreams and committed crimes for! Not very strange after all, perhaps, that the man went on muttering somnambulistically. They say that one gripped in the lion's mouth is numb and filled with delusions.
Suddenly, putting life into the dead scene, a bounding form came into view past a thicket--a noble buck with many-pointed antlers, moving with great deliberate leaps among the giants' spilikins. The delicate, glassy hoofs, the slender, brittle limbs and horns, fragile as china, seemed courting destruction in those terrific entanglements. Yet the beautiful animal, as if by some magic levitation, rose lightly from a perilous crevice between two logs, turned smoothly in mid-leap, struck the four pipe-stem limbs into the only safe landing-place, shot thence with arrowy spring between two bayonet-like branches to another foothold, and so on and on, every rod of progress a miracle.
He stopped, snuffing the air. Instinctively the hunter leveled his rifle; and then came into view the buck's retinue, two does, one large and matronly, the other a last summer's fawn. The sleep-walker's eyes softened, the rifle swung downward from the point-blank aim, snapping a twig in its descent, and with swift, mighty bounds, the deer vanished, putting a clump of bushes between themselves and the foe with unerring strategy.
"Toward the lake," said the hunter. "I'll follow!"
There came the report of a distant rifle from the direction of the deer's flight, then another and another. Some one was working a repeater rapidly. The hunter stopped, took off his deerskin jacket, turned it hair side out, and like a soldier making for the firing-line, pressed forward after the deer.