If you will leave a wire hairpin or two on this stone I can get bigger fish. What do you mean to do with all those rabbit skins?
(Signed) P.
Tish was touched by the fish, I think. She smoothed off the sand carefully and wrote a reply:--
Here are the hairpins. Thank you. Do you want the rabbit skins?
L.C.
All day we were in a state of expectancy. The mosquitoes were very bad, and had it not been for the excitement of the P---- person I should have given up and gone home. I wanted mashed potatoes and lima beans with b.u.t.ter dressing, and a cup of hot tea, and m.u.f.fins, and ice--in fact, I cannot think of anything I did not want, except rabbits and fish and puffb.a.l.l.s and such blackberries as the birds did not fancy. Although we were well enough--almost too well--the better I felt the hungrier I got.
Tish thought the time had now come to rest and invite our souls. She set the example that day by going out on a flat rock in the lake and preparing to think all the things she"d been waiting most of her life to consider.
"I am ready to form my own opinions about some things," she said.
"I realize now that all my life the newspapers and stupid people and books have formed my opinions. Now I"m going to think along my own lines. Is there another life after this? Do I really desire the suffrage? Why am I a Baptist?"
Aggie said she would like to invite her soul that day also, not to form any opinions,--Tish always does that for her,--but she had to get some clothes in September and she might as well think them out.
So it happened that I was alone when I met the P---- person"s young woman.
I had intended to wander only a short way along the trail, but after I had gone a mile or two it occurred to me as likely that the spring-wagon driver would come back that way before long out of curiosity, and I thought I might leave a message for him to bring out some fresh eggs and leave them there. I could tell Tish I had found a nest, or perhaps, since that would be lying, I could put them in a nest and let her find them. I"d have ordered tea, too, if I could have thought of any way to account for it.
"I"m going to do some meditating myself to-day," I remarked, "but I think better when I"m moving. If I don"t come back in an hour or so don"t imagine I"ve been kidnaped."
Tish turned on her stone and looked at me.
"You will not be kidnaped," she said shortly. "I cannot imagine any one safer than you are in that costume."
Well, I made my way along the trail as rapidly as I could. It was twenty miles there and back and I"ve seen the day when two city blocks would send me home to soak my feet in hot water. But the sandals were easy to walk in and my calico skirt was short and light.
I had no paper to write my message on, of course, but on the way I gathered a large white fungus and I sc.r.a.ped a note on it with a pin.
With the fungus under my arm I walked briskly along, planning an omelet with the eggs, if we got any, and gathering mushrooms here and there. It was the mushrooms that led me to the discovery of a camping-place that was prehistoric in its primitiveness--a clearing, surrounded by low bushes, and in the center a fireplace of stones with a fire smouldering.
At one side a heap of leaves and small twigs for a bed, a stump for a seat, and lying on top of it a sort of stone axe, made by inserting a sharp stone into the cleft of a sapling and tying it into place with a wild-grape tendril. Pegged out on the ground to cure was a rabbit skin, indifferently sc.r.a.ped. It made our aluminum kettle and canvas tepee look like a marble-vestibuled apartment on Riverside Drive.
The whole thing looked pitiful, hungry. I thought of Tish sitting on a stone inviting her soul, while rabbits came from miles round to stick their heads through our nooses and hang themselves for our dinner; and it seemed to me that we should share our plenty. I thought it probable that the gentleman of the woods lived here, and from the appearance of the place he carried all his possessions with him when he wore his bathing-trunks. If I had been in any doubt, the sight of Aggie"s wire hairpin, sharpened and bent into a serviceable fishhook, decided me. I scratched a message for him on another fungus and left it:--
If you need anything come to the Indian tepee at the lake. We have no clothing to spare, but are always glad to help in time of trouble.
(Signed) ONE OF THE SIMPLE LIFERS.
I went on after that and about noon reached our point of exodus from the wagon. I was tired and hot and I kept thinking of my little dining-room at home, with the electric fan going, and iced cantaloupe, and n.o.body worrying about her soul or thinking her own thoughts, and no rabbits.
Our suitcases were safe enough in the hollow tree, and I thought the spring wagon had been back already, for there were fresh tracks. This discouraged me and I sat down on a log to rest. It was then that I heard the girl crying.
She was crying softly, but in the woods sounds travel. I found her on her face on the pine needles about twenty yards away, wailing her heart out into a pink automobile veil, and she was so absorbed in her misery that I had to stoop and touch her before she looked up.
"Don"t cry," I said. "If you are lost, I can direct you to a settlement."
She looked up at me, and from being very red and suffused she went quite pale. It seems that with my bare legs and sandals and my hair down, which was Tish"s idea for making it come in thick and not gray, and what with my being sunburned and stained with berries, she thought I was a wild woman. I realized what was wrong.
"Don"t be alarmed," I said somewhat grimly. "I"m rational enough; if I hop about instead of walking, it"s because I"m the tomb of more rabbits than I care to remember, but aside from that I"m all right. Are you lost?"
She sat up, still staring, and wiped her eyes.
"No. I have a machine over there among the trees. Are there--are there plenty of rabbits in the woods?"
"Thousands." She was a pretty little thing, very young, and dressed in a white motor coat with white shoes and hat.
"And--and berries?"
"There aren"t many berries," I admitted. "The birds eat "em. We get the ones they don"t fancy."
Now I didn"t think for a moment that she was worried about my diet, but she was worried about the food supply in the woods, that was sure. So I sat down on a stump and told her about puffb.a.l.l.s, and what Tish had read about ants being edible but acid, and that wood mice, roasted and not cooked too dry, were good food, but that Aggie had made us liberate the only ones we had caught, because a man she was once engaged to used to carry a pet mouse in his pocket.
Nothing had really appealed to her until I mentioned Mr. Wiggins. Then unexpectedly she began to cry again. And after that I got the whole story.
It seems she was in love with a young man who was everything a young man ought to be and had money as well. But the money was the barrier really, for the girl"s father wouldn"t believe that a youth who played polo, and did not have to work for a living, and led cotillons, and paid calls in the afternoon could have really good red blood in him. He had a man in view for her, she said, one who had made his money himself, and had to have his valet lay out his clothes for fear he"d make a mistake. Once the valet had to go to have a tooth pulled and the man had to decline a dinner.
"Father said," finished the little girl tearfully, "that if Percy--that"s his name, and it counted against him too--that if Percy was a real man he"d do something. And then he hap-happened on a book of my small brother"s, telling how people used to live in the woods, and kill their own food and make their own fire--"
"The "Young Woodsman," of course," I put in.
"And how the strong survived, but the weak succ.u.mbed, and he said if Percy was a man, and not a t-tailor"s dummy, he"d go out in the woods, j-just primitive man, without anything but a pair of bathing trunks, and keep himself alive for a month. If he s-stood the test father was willing to forget the "Percy." He said that he knew Mr. Willoughby could do it--that"s the other man--and that he"d come in at the end of the time with a deed for the forest and mortgages on all the surrounding camps."
"And Percy agreed?"
"He didn"t want to. He said it took mentality and physical endurance as well as some courage to play polo. Father said it did--on the part of the pony. Then s-some of the men heard of it, and there were bets on it--ten to one he wouldn"t do it and twenty to one he couldn"t do it. So Percy decided to try. Father was so afraid that some of the campers and guides would help him that he had notices sent out at Mr. Willoughby"s suggestion offering a reward if Percy could be shown to have asked any a.s.sistance. Oh, I know he"s sick in there somewhere, or starving or--dead!"
I had had a great light break over me, and now I stooped and patted the girl on the shoulder.
"Dead! Certainly not," I said. "I saw him last night."
"Saw him!"
"Well, not exactly saw him--there wasn"t much light. But he"s alive and well, and--do you really want him to win?"
"Do I?" She sat up with shining eyes. "I don"t care whether he owns anything in the world but the trunks. If I didn"t think I"d add to his troubles I"d go into the woods this minute and find him and suffer with him."
"You"d have to be married to him first," I objected, rather startled.
But she looked at me with her cheeks as red strawberries. "Why?" she demanded. "Father"s crazy about primitive man--did primitive man take his woman to church to be married, with eight brides maids and a reception after the ceremony? Of course not. He grabbed her and carried her off."
"Good Heavens! You"re not in earnest?" "I think I am," she said slowly.
"I"d rather live in the woods with Percy and no ceremony than live without him anywhere in the world. And I"ll bet primitive man would have been wiped off the earth if he hadn"t had primitive woman to add her wits to his strength. If Percy only had a woman to help him!"
"My dear," I said solemnly, "he has! He has, not one, but three!"