by Zane Grey
“You are most kind, young fellow. I sure appreciate it. My friend, too, will be pleased. We have had rotten luck. By the way, what’s your name?”
“Bell. Keven Bell.”
“I see you’ve been in the service,” the other went on.
“Yes, sir,” replied Keven, surprised. “But I didn’t get to France.”
“You were lucky. I thought you had been at the front. Excuse my being personal. By profession I am a dentist. And it’s a habit for me to see things a layman wouldn’t.”
“I got hurt though, without going to the front,” replied Keven, and then briefly told of his accident and its consequences.
The fisherman exclaimed his sympathy and interest and then introduced himself.
“I am Dr. Allan Ames, and my friend is Dr. McIntire, an eye specialist. It is very evident you have not had proper medical attention. May I call him out to meet you?”
“Why—certainly,” stammered Keven.
The other doctor was a stout little man with a merry face, also sunburned.
“Doc, shake hands with this young man, Keven Bell…. He has done us a favor, giving us some killing flies and good advice about the river. We certainly must return the kindness. It seems he saw service at an army training camp, where the breechblock of a gun nearly blew his head off. Lost part of his lower jaw and injured his eye. He has not had proper treatment. Let’s look him over.”
These kindly gentlemen took Keven to the more secluded porch of the inn near by. And when Keven removed his iron jaw Dr. Ames swore and his colleague stared his amaze.
“What a hideous contraption!” went on the dentist. “How could he ever have worn it?” Then he made a careful examination of Keven’s mouth and jaw. “Compound fracture, with a section of bone missing. Unhealed tissue, and ulcerated stomatitis…. Bell, you’ve had rather a bad time of it, haven’t you?”
“Yes, Doctor. My mouth is sore always, and now and then it gets fearful. So I can’t eat.”
“I’m glad to tell you that can all be corrected. You throw this iron junk away. I’ll give you some medicine to use, and mail you more. Then when your mouth gets well come to my office in Portland and I’ll fix you up.”
“Wouldn’t it cost a good deal?” asked Keven anxiously.
“Yes, it’ll be expensive. You’ll have to have a gold-and-platinum piece to fit in there, with teeth, of course. It must be heavy, so that its weight will hold it in place till the muscles grow accustomed to it…. Your case is really not so bad. I’ve seen far worse.”
“What would it cost?” asked Keven eagerly.
“I don’t know precisely. But don’t worry about that. I’ll do it as cheaply as possible—say around five hundred dollars. It will be worth a million to you.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll come, just as soon as I can raise the money.”
“Don’t wait too long for that. I’ll trust you…. Now, Doc, take a look at that bum lamp of his.”
Whereupon Dr. McIntire bent over Keven and made close scrutiny of the injured eyeball, using a small magnifying glass.
“Not so bad, I’d say, on superficial examination,” he said cheerfully. “Partial paralysis of the optic nerve, probably. Young man, you need a glass to do the focusing for that eye. I’ll give you a shield to wear until you come to Portland. Don’t strain that eye any more.”
Then he went inside, to come out presently with a black eye shield attached to a rubber band.
“I always stick a few things like this in my kit, wherever I go,” he said, adjusting the shield. “There now—doesn’t that make the good eye feel better?”
“I think I can see better,” replied Keven, as he gazed about him. “And I must keep this thing on?”
“Yes, when the light’s bright. Early morning and late evening you needn’t wear it. But as Doc here said, don’t wait too long. I may help that eye to recover. At the least I can relieve the pain and the strain.”
“Gentlemen, I surely thank you,” replied Keven gratefully. “Give me your addresses. I will go to Portland as soon as I can.”
Keven took leave of them presently and, returning to the store, found Aard waiting with the last mule packed.
“Hey, what’s happened to you?” he ejaculated, gaping at Keven’s transformed features.
“Aard, do I look very bad?”
“Tumble. Like someone blacked your eye and kicked in your chin.”
Then with eager excitement Keven imparted his good news.
“Doggone my picture! That’s just fine. It’ll make Beryl so happy she’ll be wild…. Kev, I reckon you should go to Portland soon. Anyways before the snow sets in.”
“But, Aard, I must earn the money first. That’ll take long, a year or more. All the same I’m happy. I just don’t know——”
“I’ll lend you the money,” interrupted Aard dryly.
“You will not—you bighearted backwoodsman,” declared Keven forcibly. “My word, Aard! You’ve already done more for me than I can ever repay.”
“Wal, it’s between friends. An’ you’re doin’ a lot for me.”
“Humph! I’d like to know what.”
“You’re makin’ my lass happy. She’s been a different girl since you came.”
“You think so, Aard, really?” queried Keven, strangely moved.
“Hell, I know it,” replied the trapper gruffly. “Let’s hit the trail.”
All the way home Keven dwelt upon this incident whereby two strangers, in return for a simple kindness, had changed his world. He saw the river, the foaming rapids, the steelhead shining in the red light of the westering sun, the yellow flare of the woods, the dark fir slopes, with an eye which seemed to have magnified its powers to discern the beautiful in nature.
Solitude was veiled in its transparent shadows of pink and lilac, of golden rays that pierced through the trees.
Keven was in the lead, with the line of bobbing pack mules between him and Aard. The hounds bayed till the welkin rang. Beryl came running out onto the cabin porch. Her red lips had opened to cry gay Welcome when she caught sight of Keven’s face. Her own lengthened and turned pale. She took a hesitating step and halted.
“Howdy, Solitude,” said Keven, and he knew his voice was gruff and strange, because of the removal of his iron jaw.
“Kev! … You’ve—you’ve——”
“I should smile I have—if you mean got my face pushed in,” interrupted Keven.
“Oh! A fight?”
“I reckon.”
The swift changes of feeling in Beryl were unutterably sweet to Keven, and sometimes he could not resist inspiring them. But this grew tragic.
“Someone hurt you?”
“Well, I guess. ’Most as bad as you did that day when you slammed me one.”
“Who struck you, Kev?” she cried, white now, with eye beginning to blaze.
“Ask your Dad.”
“Did he dare!”
She seemed to rise up in majestic royal wrath.
“Oh, Lord, no, Beryl,” shouted Keven, suddenly confounded. “I was only teasing. Honest! I felt so good I had to see if—if you … Well, I feel awful good.”
Then he related his experience with the doctors and concluded: “All because I gave one of them those three dinky flies of yours!”
“Kev Bell! You will make me angry someday,” she said gravely, with a slow recession of the white from her skin. “I’m very, very happy for you.”
After supper, when Aard had gone early to bed, Beryl left Keven before the fire and went to her room. Presently she returned and laid a goodly roll of bills upon his lap.
“There, Kev. Go to Portland at once,” she said.
“You too? Darn you Aards!” He fingered the money, spread it out, counted it, and then turned to her in surprise. “Five hundred dollars! … Beryl, where did you get so much money?”
“I earned it and saved it.”
“Well! … Forgive me for being so inquisitive. That seems a good deal of money—to me…. Bery
l, I thank you with all my heart. You’re just the best girl ever. But I can’t take it.”
“Why not, Kev?” she asked softly.
“I—I suppose because I’m not sure how or when I could ever pay it back,” he replied.
“If our situations were reversed I would take it from you,” she said, with ever so slight a lift of head.
Keven divined he was skating on thin ice.
“That is different, Beryl. You are a woman and I’m a man.”
“Why is it different?”
“I suppose because custom has made a man feel he could help a woman, but he could not take money from her.”
“Oh, I—see,” she said curtly. But she did not see. She grew white to the lips.
Though Keven’s objection was not so grave as he had apparently made it seem, still it affected him seriously. He divined, however, that this would never do. He must make amends and swiftly.
Wherefore he stood up and gazed straight into the proud hurt eyes, bent so darkly upon him. Most certainly they changed what he had intended to say. Smilingly he returned the money.
“Beryl, you save this till I earn enough to pay for that dental job. You’ll need it—for you’ll be going with me.”
She actually staggered back.
“Going with you?” she whispered, utterly bewildered.
“Why, sure. At least I hope you will,” he hastened to respond. He felt his own face chill and tighten, while he saw hers change and glow and suddenly flame dusky red.
“Keven!” She tried to stem the tide of shy and unexpected joy which stormed her, and tried in vain. Her eyelids fell to hide strange radiance that yet filtered through her long lashes. She was overwhelmed. Then with a gasp she fled.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE dark gray dawn came with a breath of frost from the high peaks above the singing river. October was well on its way.
Keven took to the tunnel-like trail through the forest; and, rod in hand, with the spring of a mountaineer in his step, with dancing blood, and his mind full of vague winged expectation of the long, long hours to come, he brushed the asters aside and trod the fallen leaves.
At the head of Solitude Valley, where the river turned north to seem lost in the gloom of the walled canyon, Keven struck off the trail and descended out of the woods to the open bank. He saw his own footprints, three weeks old, in a strip of sand which ran between the brush and the boulders of the riverbank. Deer tracks showed their cloven marks, and otter and mink and other wild denizens of the forest made their patterns, but Keven’s were the only ones contributed by man.
He sat down on a flat rock at the edge of the water and dropped his leader in to let it soak thoroughly before attaching a fly. A familiar pleasurable sensation ran along his veins. The long, long day was all before him, and here ran the glancing river. From far above the dark bend floated a very faint, almost indistinguishable song of running waters; from far below where the river wound out of the jealous clutch of Solitude came the same voice though of different note and melody.
The gray curtain of mist overhead was as dense as fog; it hid the mountain slopes; it had not yet begun to rise or move. The light under the cloud bank was dull gray, and the river reflected it, except in places where a thin cold vapor rose off the surface. A tiny whistling sound pierced Keven’s ears and increased as he tried to locate its source. Then a flock of wild ducks bore down to swoop up over his head and whistle on. They had white barred wings. He saw them streak down to the ledge pool above Solitude and make long sliding splashes as they alighted.
No other signs of life were manifest. The river might have been empty of steelhead and salmon, for any disturbance on its somber gliding surface. They might be there in the favorite resting places and then again they might not.
Keven picked up his leader and stretched it, before attaching it to his line. Then he applied himself to the task of choosing a fly. He had many, but only a few favorites, any one of which he was loath to start in with so early, All the long, long day ahead! So he selected a Coachman.
There beside the rock lay the strong sharpened staff which he used to aid him in wading across the river. He noted that the water was half a foot lower than when he had crossed last time. This would render the task far easier and lessen the risk. Whereupon he waded in boldly, soon to discover that though the water was low and without swift current there, it was far colder than before. It made him jump, and he was at some pains to go slowly, lining his marks on the bank, so that he could keep to the shallows. It was no fun to wade the Rogue in October. When the water edged up from his knees to his hips it was all he could do to step cautiously; and when he reached the center of the river, to be immersed up to his waist, the icy touch was breathtaking.
On the opposite bank he laid aside rod and staff to exercise briskly. His hands were numb and his legs shaking. Presently his blood was running free and warm again. Then, rod in hand, he stepped to the river, facing downstream, and was about to begin casting when a moving object caught the tail of his eye. A big buck, with magnificent antlers, was crossing the wide bar below. Keven watched him disappear in the brush.
Keven made his first cast, and time was annihilated. When next he looked up, the valley had lightened; dark blue rifts showed in the rising canopy of mist; the river seemed strangely, vastly changed. He marveled at it. Again he sat down, just to look and listen. Spots of color stood out of the dark green; the gray shadow in the notch where the river disappeared had turned to purple. And at the moment there awoke the wild sweet rising and falling notes of a water ouzel, herald of the sunrise.
He resumed fishing, and eventually changed his fly to a favorite he had named Beryl. He had tied it himself, to his sweetheart’s vast amusement. It was not a thing of beauty and therefore no compliment to the vivid Beryl, but somehow he just had to name it after her.
On his first cast with this new fly he raised and hooked a steelhead; and there came another change in the world. With a five-pounder on his string the long, long day had begun.
Some time after that a broad bar of pink and silver flashed under Keven’s fly. That bar was a foot deep. Another cast again raised this giant of a steelhead. He rose boldly, he showed clearly, but he missed the fly and turned to leave a hole in the water. Keven let out gaspingly the breath he had held for tingling seconds.
Then with the lust of battle and for capture seizing him, and the sheer unrealized joy of his environment, Keven set himself to outwit that king of trout. He raised the wary, lazy, gorgeous monster many times, but all in vain. Curiosity was not hunger; play was not feeding. And at last that deep dark eddying hole under the golden ledge of rock became blank.
Keven went on. Anything had the power to gain distraction. The color or ripple of a rising trout would set him to vigorously casting, until he either caught the fish or put it down. He watched two playful otters for a long time, as sure that they saw him as he was that he saw them. Halfway down to Solitude the singing of the river swelled to deep and murmuring music. Small trout, crayfish, water spiders all came in for serious attention. He just watched them, after the abstracted manner of an Indian.
All at once something drew his interest from the level of the flowing river. The valley burned gold and purple; clouds had melted away in the radiant blue; the mountain slopes seemed bursting in full autumnal glory, the dark green boldly infringed upon by the reds, the scarlets, the cerise and magenta, and the dominating splashes of gold. And there under it all wound and murmured the river in an endless solitude. It descended upon Keven like a mantle, it enveloped him, it bore the warmth of the sun and the fragrance of the forest. He looked and looked, felt it all as one in a dream, and went on fishing.
Like a boy in the serious pursuit of his most cherished pleasure he went on fishing, and everything was an event. A yellow leaf fluttered down from the high slope to alight upon his arm. A yellow oak leaf, with tinge of bronze and hint of green. It suggested the dry colorful aisles of the oak forests, high above the river,
where the deer browsed for acorns, the wild pigeons fluttered, and the doves mourned. He put the stem in his mouth.
The river sang on, glided on, ever the same, yet ever changing. It shaded from green to gold, and then to a deep rose. The rapid below appeared crested with fire. But again, as so many times before this day, a rising steelhead claimed Keven’s attention. He caught that one—and another—before he noticed that the color of the river had again changed. It was purple, deep rich purple like the shadows in the bends of the fir slopes. And presently he found it hard to see his fly.
Looking up, he stood aghast.
“What! Night already?”
The hounds bayed Keven welcome as he staggered into the dusk of the clearing under his load of trout.
Beryl ran out onto the porch, her white apron showing against the dark background.
“Oh, Kev, you had a fine day!” she cried. “How many?”
“Nineteen, I think,” he replied lightly, as if that were nothing for him.
Straightway Beryl underwent that strange transformation inevitable to a true fisherman. She touched several of Keven’s string of beauties with the toe of her boot.
“Under five pounds, Kev. You should have let these go.”
“What? Why, they’ll weigh six, at least.”
“Ump-umm, my boy,” she returned, shaking her head. “You can’t see a steelhead right. Your eyes magnify. It’s the habit of a novice.”
“Novice! Me? … With nineteen to my credit?”
“Kev, you’re still a city fisherman,” she replied.
“What did you do today, may I ask?”
“Oh, I had a lot of work before I went out. But I didn’t lose much. You know steelhead won’t rise when the mist is on the river. Dad went down to Missouri. So I followed this afternoon.”
“Did you catch any?” queried Keven, as if forced.
“We had a good day, especially after the sun was off the water.”