by B. M. Bower
Bud started a fire in the fireplace and heaped the dry limbs high. Cash fried his bacon, made his tea, and set the table for his midday meal. Bud waited for the baby to wake, looking at his watch every minute or two, and making frequent cautious trips to the bunk, peeking and peering to see if the child was all right. It seemed unnatural that it should sleep so long in the daytime. No telling what that squaw had done to it; she might have doped it or something. He thought the kid’s face looked red, as if it had fever, and he reached down and touched anxiously the hand that was uncovered. The hand was warm—too warm, in Bud’s opinion. It would be just his luck if the kid got sick, he’d have to pack it clear in to Alpine in his arms. Fifteen miles of that did not appeal to Bud, whose arms ached after the two-mile trip with that solid little body lying at ease in the cradle they made.
His back to that end of the room, Cash sat stiff-necked and stubbornly speechless, and ate and drank as though he were alone in the cabin. Whenever Bud’s mind left Lovin Child long enough to think about it, he watched Cash furtively for some sign of yielding, some softening of that grim grudge. It seemed to him as though Cash was not human, or he would show some signs of life when a live baby was brought to camp and laid down right under his nose.
Cash finished and began washing his dishes, keeping his back turned toward Bud and Bud’s new possession, and trying to make it appear that he did so unconsciously. He did not fool Bud for a minute. Bud knew that Cash was nearly bursting with curiosity, and he had occasional fleeting impulses to provoke Cash to speech of some sort. Perhaps Cash knew what was in Bud’s mind. At any rate he left the cabin and went out and chopped wood for an hour, furiously raining chips into the snow.
When he went in with his arms piled full of cut wood, Bud had the baby sitting on one corner of the table, and was feeding it bread and gravy as the nearest approach to baby food he could think of. During occasional interludes in the steady procession of bits of bread from the plate to the baby’s mouth, Lovin Child would suck a bacon rind which he held firmly grasped in a greasy little fist. Now and then Bud would reach into his hip pocket, pull out his handkerchief as a make-shift napkin, and would carefully wipe the border of gravy from the baby’s mouth, and stuff the handkerchief back into his pocket again.
Both seemed abominably happy and self-satisfied. Lovin Child kicked his heels against the rough table frame and gurgled unintelligible conversation whenever he was able to articulate sounds. Bud replied with a rambling monologue that implied a perfect understanding of Lovin Child’s talk—and incidentally doled out information for Cash’s benefit.
Cash cocked an eye at the two as he went by, threw the wood down on his side of the hearth, and began to replenish the fire. If he heard, he gave no sign of understanding or interest.
“I’ll bet that old squaw musta half starved yah,” Bud addressed the baby while he spooned gravy out of a white enamel bowl on to the second slice of bread. “You’re putting away grub like a nigger at a barbecue. I’ll tell the world I don’t know what woulda happened if I hadn’t run across yuh and made her hand yuh over.”
“Ja—ja—ja—jah!” said Lovin Child, nodding his head and regarding Bud with the twinkle in his eyes.
“And that’s where you’re dead right, Boy. I sure do wish you’d tell me your name; but I reckon that’s too much to ask of a little geezer like you. Here. Help yourself, kid—you ain’t in no Injun camp now. You’re with white folks now.”
Cash sat down on the bench he had made for himself, and stared into the fire. His whole attitude spelled abstraction; nevertheless he missed no little sound behind him.
He knew that Bud was talking largely for his benefit, and he knew that here was the psychological time for breaking the spell of silence between them. Yet he let the minutes slip past and would not yield. The quarrel had been of Bud’s making in the first place. Let Bud do the yielding, make the first step toward amity.
But Bud had other things to occupy him just then. Having eaten all his small stomach would hold, Lovin Child wanted to get down and explore. Bud had other ideas, but they did not seem to count for much with Lovin Child, who had an insistent way that was scarcely to be combated or ignored.
“But listen here, Boy!” Bud protested, after he had for the third time prevented Lovin Child from backing off the table. “I was going to take off these dirty duds and wash some of the Injun smell off yuh. I’ll tell a waiting world you need a bath, and your clothes washed.”
“Ugh, ugh, ugh,” persisted Lovin Child, and pointed to the floor.
So Bud sighed and made a virtue of defeat. “Oh, well, they say it’s bad policy to take a bath right after yuh eat. We’ll let it ride awhile, but you sure have got to be scrubbed a plenty before you can crawl in with me, old-timer,” he said, and set him down on the floor.
Lovin Child went immediately about the business that seemed most important. He got down on his hands and knees and gravely inspected the broad black line, hopefully testing it with tongue and with fingers to see if it would yield him anything in the way of flavor or stickiness. It did not. It had been there long enough to be thoroughly dry and tasteless. He got up, planted both feet on it and teetered back and forth, chuckling up at Bud with his eyes squinted.
He teetered so enthusiastically that he sat down unexpectedly and with much emphasis. That put him between two impulses, and while they battled he stared round-eyed at Bud. But he decided not to cry, and straightway turned himself into a growly bear and went down the line on all fours toward Cash, growling “Ooooooo!” as fearsomely as his baby throat was capable of growling.
But Cash would not be scared. He refused absolutely to jump up and back off in wild-eyed terror, crying out “Ooh! Here comes a bear!” the way Marie had always done—the way every one had always done, when Lovin Child got down and came at them growling. Cash sat rigid with his face to the fire, and would not look.
Lovin Child crawled all around him and growled his terriblest. For some unexplainable reason it did not work. Cash sat stiff as though he had turned to some insensate metal. From where he sat watching—curious to see what Cash would do—Bud saw him flinch and stiffen as a man does under pain. And because Bud had a sore spot in his own heart, Bud felt a quick stab of understanding and sympathy. Cash Markham’s past could not have been a blank; more likely it held too much of sorrow for the salve of speech to lighten its hurt. There might have been a child.…
“Aw, come back here!” Bud commanded Lovin Child gruffly.
But Lovin Child was too busy. He had discovered in his circling of Cash, the fanny buckles on Cash’s high overshoes. He was investigating them as he had investigated the line, with fingers and with pink tongue, like a puppy. From the lowest buckle he went on to the top one, where Cash’s khaki trousers were tucked inside with a deep fold on top. Lovin Child’s small forefinger went sliding up in the mysterious recesses of the fold until they reached the flat surface of the knee. He looked up farther, studying Cash’s set face, sitting back on his little heels while he did so. Cash tried to keep on staring into the fire, but in spite of himself his eyes lowered to meet the upward look.
“Pik-k?” chirped Lovin Child, spreading his fingers over one eye and twinkling up at Cash with the other.
Cash flinched again, wavered, swallowed twice, and got up so abruptly that Lovin Child sat down again with a plunk. Cash muttered something in his throat and rushed out into the wind and the slow-falling tiny white flakes that presaged the storm.
Until the door slammed shut Lovin Child looked after him, scowling, his eyes a blaze of resentment. He brought his palms together with a vicious slap, leaned over, and bumped his forehead deliberately and painfully upon the flat rock hearth, and set up a howl that could have been heard for three city blocks.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
AND BUD NEVER GUESSED
That night, when he had been given a bath in the little zinc tub they used for washing clothes, and had been carefully buttoned inside a clean undershirt of Bud’s,
for want of better raiment, Lovin Child missed something out of his sleepytime cudding. He wanted Marie, and he did not know how to make his want known to this big, tender, awkward man who had befriended him and filled his thoughts till bedtime. He began to whimper and look seekingly around the little cabin. The whimper grew to a cry which Bud’s rude rocking back and forth on the box before the fireplace could not still.
“M’ee—take!” wailed Lovin Child, sitting up and listening. “M’ee take—Uvin Chal!”
“Aw, now, you don’t wanta go and act like that. Listen here, Boy. You lay down here and go to sleep. You can search me for what it is you’re trying to say, but I guess you want your mama, maybe, or your bottle, chances are. Aw, looky!” Bud pulled his watch from his pocket—a man’s infallible remedy for the weeping of infant charges—and dangled it anxiously before Lovin Child.
With some difficulty he extracted the small hands from the long limp tunnels of sleeves, and placed the watch in the eager fingers.
“Listen to the tick-tick! Aw, I wouldn’t bite into it… oh, well, darn it, if nothing else’ll do yuh, why, eat it up!”
Lovin Child stopped crying and condescended to take a languid interest in the watch—which had a picture of Marie pasted inside the back of the case, by the way. “Ee?” he inquired, with a pitiful little catch in his breath, and held it up for Bud to see the busy little second hand. “Ee?” he smiled tearily and tried to show Cash, sitting aloof on his bench beside the head of his bunk and staring into the fire. But Cash gave no sign that he heard or saw anything save the visions his memory was conjuring in the dancing flames.
“Lay down, now, like a good boy, and go to sleep,” Bud wheedled. “You can hold it if you want to—only don’t drop it on the floor—here! Quit kickin’ your feet out like that! You wanta freeze? I’ll tell the world straight, it’s plumb cold and snaky outside tonight, and you’re pretty darn lucky to be here instead of in some Injun camp where you’d have to bed down with a mess of mangy dogs, most likely. Come on, now—lay down like a good boy!”
“M’ee! M’ee take!” teased Lovin Child, and wept again; steadily, insistently, with a monotonous vigor that rasped Bud’s nerves and nagged him with a vague memory of something familiar and unpleasant. He rocked his body backward and forward, and frowned while he tried to lay hold of the memory. It was the high-keyed wailing of this same man-child wanting his bottle, but it eluded Bud completely. There was a tantalizing sense of familiarity with the sound, but the lungs and the vocal chords of Lovin Child had developed amazingly in two years, and he had lost the small-infant wah-hah.
Bud did not remember, bat for all that his thoughts went back across those two years and clung to his own baby, and he wished poignantly that he knew how it was getting along; and wondered if it had grown to be as big a handful as this youngster, and how Marie would handle the emergency he was struggling with now: a lost, lonesome baby boy that would not go to sleep and could not tell why.
Yet Lovin Child was answering every one of Bud’s mute questions. Lying there in his “Daddy Bud’s” arms, wrapped comically in his Daddy Bud’s softest undershirt, Lovin Child was proving to his Daddy Bud that his own man-child was strong and beautiful and had a keen little brain behind those twinkling blue eyes. He was telling why he cried. He wanted Marie to take him and rock him to sleep, just as she had rocked him to sleep every night of his young memory, until that time when he had toddled out of her life and into a new and peculiar world that held no Marie.
By and by he slept, still clinging to the watch that had Marie’s picture in the back. When he was all limp and rosy and breathing softly against Bud’s heart, Bud tiptoed over to the bunk, reached down inconveniently with one hand and turned back the blankets, and laid Lovin Child in his bed and covered him carefully. On his bench beyond the dead line Cash sat leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and sucked at a pipe gone cold, and stared abstractedly into the fire.
Bud looked at him sitting there. For the first time since their trails had joined, he wondered what Cash was thinking about; wondered with a new kind of sympathy about Cash’s lonely life, that held no ties, no warmth of love. For the first time it struck him as significant that in the two years, almost, of their constant companionship, Cash’s reminiscences had stopped abruptly about fifteen years back. Beyond that he never went, save now and then when he jumped a space, to the time when he was a boy. Of what dark years lay between, Bud had never been permitted a glimpse.
“Some kid—that kid,” Bud observed involuntarily, for the first time in over three weeks speaking when he was not compelled to speak to Cash. “I wish I knew where he came from. He wants his mother.”
Cash stirred a little, like a sleeper only half awakened. But he did not reply, and Bud gave an impatient snort, tiptoed over and picked up the discarded clothes of Lovin Child, that held still a faint odor of wood smoke and rancid grease, and, removing his shoes that he might move silently, went to work.
He washed Lovin Child’s clothes, even to the red sweater suit and the fuzzy red “bunny” cap. He rigged a line before the fireplace—on his side of the dead line, to be sure—hung the little garments upon it and sat up to watch the fire while they dried.
While he rubbed and rinsed and wrung and hung to dry, he had planned the details of taking the baby to Alpine and placing it in good hands there until its parents could be found. It was stolen, he had no doubt at all. He could picture quite plainly the agony of the parents, and common humanity imposed upon him the duty of shortening their misery as much as possible. But one day of the baby’s presence he had taken, with the excuse that it needed immediate warmth and wholesome food. His conscience did not trouble him over that short delay, for he was honest enough in his intentions and convinced that he had done the right thing.
Cash had long ago undressed and gone to bed, turning his back to the warm, fire-lighted room and pulling the blankets up to his ears. He either slept or pretended to sleep, Bud did not know which. Of the baby’s healthy slumber there was no doubt at all. Bud put on his overshoes and went outside after more wood, so that there would be no delay in starting the fire in the morning and having the cabin warm before the baby woke.
It was snowing fiercely, and the wind was biting cold. Already the woodpile was drifted under, so that Bud had to go back and light the lantern and hang it on a nail in the cabin wall before he could make any headway at shovelling off the heaped snow and getting at the wood beneath. He worked hard for half an hour, and carried in all the wood that had been cut. He even piled Cash’s end of the hearth high with the surplus, after his own side was heaped full.
A storm like that meant that plenty of fuel would be needed to keep the cabin snug and warm, and he was thinking of the baby’s comfort now, and would not be hampered by any grudge.
When he had done everything he could do that would add to the baby’s comfort, he folded the little garments and laid them on a box ready for morning. Then, moving carefully, he crawled into the bed made warm by the little body. Lovin Child, half wakened by the movement, gave a little throaty chuckle, murmured “M’ee,” and threw one fat arm over Bud’s neck and left it there.
“Gawd,” Bud whispered in a swift passion of longing, “I wish you was my own kid!” He snuggled Lovin Child close in his arms and held him there, and stared dim-eyed at the flickering shadows on the wall. What he thought, what visions filled his vigil, who can say?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE ANTIDOTE
Three days it stormed with never a break, stormed so that the men dreaded the carrying of water from the spring that became ice-rimmed but never froze over; that clogged with sodden masses of snow half melted and sent faint wisps of steam up into the chill air. Cutting wood was an ordeal, every armload an achievement. Cash did not even attempt to visit his trap line, but sat before the fire smoking or staring into the flames, or pottered about the little domestic duties that could not half fill the days.
With melted snow water, a bar of ye
llow soap, and one leg of an old pair of drawers, he scrubbed on his knees the floor on his side of the dead line, and tried not to notice Lovin Child. He failed only because Lovin Child refused to be ignored, but insisted upon occupying the immediate foreground and in helping—much as he had helped Marie pack her suit case one fateful afternoon not so long before.
When Lovin Child was not permitted to dabble in the pan of soapy water, he revenged himself by bringing Cash’s mitten and throwing that in, and crying “Ee? Ee?” with a shameless delight because it sailed round and round until Cash turned and saw it, and threw it out.
“No, no, no!” Lovin Child admonished himself gravely, and got it and threw it back again.
Cash did not say anything. Indeed, he hid a grin under his thick, curling beard which he had grown since the first frost as a protection against cold. He picked up the mitten and laid it to dry on the slab mantel, and when he returned, Lovin Child was sitting in the pan, rocking back and forth and crooning “’Ock-a-by! ’Ock-a-by!” with the impish twinkle in his eyes.
Cash was just picking him out of the pan when Bud came in with a load of wood. Bud hastily dropped the wood, and without a word Cash handed Lovin Child across the dead line, much as he would have handed over a wet puppy. Without a word Bud took him, but the quirky smile hid at the corners of his mouth, and under Cash’s beard still lurked the grin.
“No, no, no!” Lovin Child kept repeating smugly, all the while Bud was stripping off his wet clothes and chucking him into the undershirt he wore for a nightgown, and trying a man’s size pair of socks on his legs.
“I should say no-no-no! You doggone little rascal, I’d rather herd a flea on a hot plate! I’ve a plumb good notion to hog-tie yuh for awhile. Can’t trust yuh a minute nowhere. Now look what you got to wear while your clothes dry!”