At these last words, something fell away in Louis’s solar plexus, sometimes known as the sensorium, and Minnie said: “Never mind, never mind, you’ll outgrow it, Louis, you are fourteen, I’m eighteen. While it lasts, let us be dear friends together; the dearest comrades ever known. Your heart’s in mine and mine in yours, I know. Let these great oaks, as witnesses, betrothe us in such way, and prophesy a lovely memory.”
Louis with unheard-of stoicism held back his tears. And Minnie said: “Come now, let’s be going; don’t refer to this again. Let’s be as we’ve always been, together, carefree—and let laughter ring again.”
Such was Minnie’s way of doing and of saying. She was Louis’s loyal friend. She mothered him in sprightly malice and in tenderness alike. All her vagaries and sweetness came from one constant nature. She was ever thoughful of the needs of others. She was exquisitely human. To Louis, long adapted to the elderly, she was held by him as in a shrine, to be the only truly human he had ever known; and her kindness in adopting him, and making him her own, not for a day, but for all the glad summer long, made him feel as though his life, before her floating into it, had been but a blank. How could he ever repay! She had come, it seemed to him, out of the invisible that lies behind all things, all dreams, to be his faerie queen.
And now it seems as though a half a century had stood still.
IX
Boston—The English High School
While at Lyons Falls, Louis made acquaintance of the sons of the tenant farmer; twins, two or three years older than he, and he appraised them accordingly. Broad shouldered, heavily built throughout, with large-featured homely faces evenly browned by the sun, they had big coarse hands which Louis envied. They swayed and lurched in talking, shifting their feet; good natured, heavy-minded fellows, taller than Louis. One day they said they were bound for Brown’s Tract and would have as guide a trapper, a grown man; that they would head for a certain lake twenty miles away, where the trapper had a shack and a canoe; that they were after game; they asked Louis if he would like to come along. Louis jumped at a chance he had been aching for. Many a day he had wondered what a forest could be, within its depths, as he gazed at the mass of sombre and silentious green rising from the dark waters of the river and had seen no hope to solve the mystery. The boys warned him that it would be rough, heavy work, with some danger; but he said the rougher the better, and that as to the dangers he was curious.
Now, afoot, heavy laden, they have passed the fringe of the forest, and begun the ascent of a rough stony trail, climbing and descending the hills in a winding obscure way. Five miles in, they cross a “bark road,” so called, a ragged gash through the woods with stumps of trees, loose boulders and corduroy for roadbed. Strewn along the way of the road lie huge naked hemlocks stripped of bark for the tanneries to southward. No trail beyond this road; the real hard work, the stern hardship begins in the utter wildness of ancient fallen trees, tangled wildwood, precipitous ravines, the crossing of raging torrents—feeders of the Moose River—roaring under masses of forest wreckage, involving high danger in the crossing, their waters dark brown, forbidding, foaming brown-white; detours to be made around impassable rock outcroppings; wadings through cedar swamps; a bit of smooth needle-carpeted floor, for relief at times; many panting rests, many restarts, grimly wending their way between close-set uprearing shafts of mighty hemlocks, and tamaracks, with recurring narrow vistas quickly closing as the trampers cross a plateau, and then again descent and climb and hardship, hidden danger of falling aged trees, no warning but the groan, then a crash and trembling earth; so pass four weary ones through a long August day, amid cathedral gloom, the roaring and the stillness of primeval forest.
By sundown they have made ten miles. A hasty camp—no tent, a quick fire—coffee, bacon, hardtack, water from canteens; a small tamarack felled, its delicate fragrant boughs laid thick for a bed, a circle of smudge-fires, and shortly, four humans, in soaking boots, and clothing soaked with sweat and spray, sleep the instant sleep of exhaustion, in the dark of the moon, in the pitch black forest, as the circle of smudge fires faintly smolders.
At early dawn the trapper blows no horn, he rings no bell, but in bright good humor emits the awful siren of the screech-owl; the dead turn in their slumber-graves. Once more—the dead jump up. Campfire lighted, hurry-up, fires trod out, packs again on sore backs, stiff legs start and shortly limber. That day six miles of going, and again death-asleep. Next day four miles of easy going as they reach the margin of a wide basin or valley, with level floor and stop at one end of a sumptuous lake, resting placid and serene as a fathomless mirror upheld by forest walls. At this point is a limited natural clearing; nearby is the shack, a large rough-hewn affair of unbarked sapling logs; and, bottom up, in the deep shade are found canoe and paddles. It is early afternoon. They take their ease, lying awhile on the green sward, then spread boots and clothing in the sun to dry, bathe in the cool shallows safe from the icy spring-fed deep of the lake, resume half-dried boots and clothes and leisurely arrange the camp. Meanwhile the trapper, tall and lank, brings in a brace of partridge. Now all is joy, the pains forgot, the prize attained—they
