Chapter XXIV - "Keeping Things Even"

"Now, you musn't be moping, boys, because of this day's work that you took a hand in, and that wasn't in your play-bill when you come to these woods. We'll have to try and even things up to-morrow with some big sport. You look kind o' wilted."

So said Herb when the tired party were half-way back to camp, doing the descent of the mountain in a silence clouded by the scene which they had been through.

The woodsman seemed troubled with a rasping in his throat. He cleared it twice and spat before he could open a passage for a decently cheerful voice in which to suggest a rise of spirits. But Herb was too faithful a guide to bear the thought that his employers' trip should end in any gloom because the one painful chapter in his own life had closed forever. Moreover, although more than once, as he fought his way through a jungle or jumped a windfall, something nipped his heart, pinching him up inside, and making his eyes leak, he felt that the thing had ended well for him—and for Chris.

Herb, in his simple faith, scarcely doubted that the old chum, whom he had forgiven, had reached a Home-Camp where his broken will and stunted life might be repaired, and grow as they had poor chance to grow here.

"Say, boys!" he burst forth, a few minutes after his protest against "moping," and when the band were within sight of the spring whence they had started, an age back, as it seemed, on the trail of the moose. "Say, boys! I've been all these years raging at Chris. Seems to me now as if he was a poor sort of overgrowed baby, and not so bad a thief as the chump who gave him that whiskey, and stole his senses. It's a thundering big pity that man hadn't the burying of him to-day.

"He was always the under dog,—was Chris," he went on slowly, as if he was seeking from his own heart an excuse for those unforeseen impulses which had worked it and his body during the past five hours. "Whites and Injuns jumped on him. They said he was criss-cross all through, same as his eyes. But he warn't. Never seed a half-breed that had less gall and more grit, except when the hanker for whiskey would creep up in him, and boss him. He could no more stand agen it, and the things it made him do, than a jack-rabbit."

"Another reason why we Americans ought to feel our responsibility towards every man in whose veins runs Indian blood, a thousand times more hotly than we do!" burst out Cyrus. "It maddens a fellow to think that we made them the under dogs, and as much by giving them a 'boss,' as you say, in fire-water, as by anything else."

"I kind o' think that way myself sometimes," said Herb.

And there was silence until the guide cried:—

"Here's our camp, boys. I'll bet you're glad to see it. I must get the kettle, and cruise off for water. 'Tain't likely I'll trust one of you fellers after last night. But you can hustle round and build the camp-fire while I'm gone."

Herb had a shrewd motive in this. He knew that there is nothing which will cure the blues in a camper, if he is touched by that affliction, rare in forest life, like the building of his fire, watching the little flames creep from the dull, dead wood, to roar and soar aloft in gold-red pennons of good cheer.

The result proved his wisdom. When he returned in a very short time from that ever-to-be-famous spring, with his brimming kettle, he found a glorious fire, and three tired but cheerful fellows watching it, its reflection playing like a jack-o'-lantern in each pair of eyes.

"Now I'll have supper ready in a jiffy," he said. "I guess you boys feel like eating one another. Jerusha! we never touched our snack—nary a crumb of it."

In the strange happenings and chaotic feelings of the day, hunger, together with the bread and pork for satisfying it which Herb had carried up the mountain, were forgotten until now.

"Never mind! We'll make up for it. Only hurry up!" pleaded Dol. "We're like bears, we're so hungry."

"Like bears! You're a sight more like calves with their mouths open, waiting for something to swallow," answered Herb, his eyes flashing impudence, while, with an energy apparently no less brisk than when he started out in the morning, he rushed his preparations for supper.

"Say I'm like a Sukey, and I'll go for you!" roared Dol, a gurgling laugh breaking from him, the first which had been heard since the four struggled through that tangle on Katahdin to a sight of the old camp.

Once or twice during supper the mirth, which had been frozen in each camper's breast by a sight of the drifted wreck of a human life, warmed again spasmodically. Herb did his manly best to fan its flame, though his heart was still pinched by a feeling of double loss.

Later in the evening, when the party were huddling close to the camp-fire, he lifted his right hand and looked at it blankly.

"My!" he gasped, "but it will feel awful queer and empty without Old Blazes. That rifle was a reg'lar corker, boys. I was saving up for three years to buy it. An' it never went back on me. Times when I've gone far off hunting, and had nary a chance to speak to a human for weeks, I'd get to talking to it like as if 'twas a living thing. When I wasn't afeard of scaring game, I'd fire a round to make it answer back and drive away lonesomeness. Folks might ha' thought I was loony, only there was none to see. Well, it's smashed to chips now, 'long with the old camp."

"What awfully selfish jackasses we were, to skip off with our own rifles, and never think of yours, or that you couldn't save it, carrying that poor fellow! I feel like kicking myself," said Cyrus, sharp vexation in his voice. "But that slide business sprang on us so quickly. The sudden rumbling, rattling, and pounding jumbled a fellow's wits. I scarcely understood what was up, even when we were scooting for our lives."

"I felt a bit white-livered myself, I tell ye; and I'm more hardened to slides than you are," was the woodsman's answer.

The confession, taken in the light of his conduct, made him doubly a hero to his city friends.

They thought of him staggering along the mountain, blinded, bewildered, pelted by clay, with that dragging burden in his arms, a heart tossed by danger's keenest realization in his breast. And they were silent before the high courage which can recognize fear, yet refuse to it the mastery.

Neal, whose secret musings were generally crossed by a military thread, seeing that he had chosen the career of a cavalry-soldier, and hoped soon to enter Sandhurst College, stared into the heart of the camp-fire, glowering at fate, because she had not ordained that Herb should serve the queen with him, and wear upon his resolute heart—as it might reasonably be expected he would—the Victoria Cross.

Young Farrar's feeling was so strong that it swept his lips at last.

"Blow it all! Herb," he cried. "It's a tearing pity that you can't come into the English Lancers with me. I don't suppose I'll ever be a V.C., but you would sooner or later as sure as gun's iron."

"A 'V.C.!' What's that?" asked Herb.

"A Vigorous Christian, to be sure!" put in Cyrus, who was progressive and peaceful, teasingly.

But the English boy, full of the dignity of the subject to him, summoned his best eloquence to describe to the American backwoodsman that little cross of iron, Victoria's guerdon, which entitles its possessor to write those two notable letters after his name, and which only hero-hearts may wear.

But a vision of himself, stripped of "sweater" and moccasins, in cavalry rig, becrossed and beribboned, serving under another flag than the Stars and Stripes, was too much for Herb's gravity and for the grim regrets which wrung him to-night.

"Oh, sugar!" he gasped; and his laughter was like a rocket shooting up from his mighty throat, and exploding in a hundred sparkles of merriment.

He laughed long. He laughed insistently. His comrades were won to join in.

When the fun had subsided, Garst said:—

"Herb Heal, old man, there's something in you to-night which reminds me of a line I'm rather stuck on."

"Let's have it!" cried Herb.

And Cyrus quoted:—

"Now you've hit it! The man that wrote that had a pile o' sense. Come, boys, it's been an awful full day. Let's turn in!"

As he spoke, Herb began to replenish the fire, and make things snug in the camp for the night.

But shortly after, when he threw himself on the spuce-boughs near them, the boys heard him murmur, deep in his throat, as if he took strength from the words:—