The Helpers

When her father was gone, Constance sat down to piece out the discoveries, comforting and harrowing, of the foregone hour, and to set them over against each other in a field which was as yet too near to be retrospective. She tried to stand aside for herself, and to see and consider only those to whom her heart went out in loving compassion and sympathy; but it was inevitable that she should finally come to a re-reading of the letter taken from its hiding-place in the photograph frame. She dwelt upon it with a soft flush spreading slowly from neck to cheek, reading it twice and yet once again before she laid it in the little wall-pocket of a grate and touched a match to it.

"For his sake and for mine," she said softly, as she watched it shrivel and blacken in the flame. "That is what I must do – burn my ships so that I can't go back."

The charred wraith of the letter went up the chimney in the expiring gasp of the flame, and there was the sound of a familiar step in the corridor. She went quickly to open the door for the late visitor. It was Lansdale, come to say what must be said on the eve of parting, and to ask for his answer to a conditional plea made in a moment when the consumptive's optimism had carried him off his feet.

CHAPTER XXXIII

The periods of the scene-shifter, in life as in life's mimicking on any stage, have fallen into disesteem. In any flight of fancy or plodding journey of fact these are flat countries to be traversed; interregnums which, however replete with incident for the actors themselves, are deemed alike unworthy of the playwright's outworking or the chronicler's recording. To the audience waiting beyond the footlights these are mere breathing spaces of music-hastened minutes standing for whatever lapses of days, weeks or months the story of the play involves; but for the scene-shifter they are gaps toil-filled, with fierce strivings and wrestlings and doughty compellings of the animate and inanimate perversities.

None the less, for the toiler behind the scenes there are compensations, for the audience, the entr'acte is a solution of continuity, more or less skillfully bridged, according to the playwright's gift; but the worker of transformations knows no break in the action. For him the story of the play is complete, marching evenly to its climax through spoken line and drop-curtained interregnum.

The curtain has rung down upon an interior in an apartment house. It is to rise upon a flashlight picture of a summer night scene in a mountain-girt valley. The walls of the homelike interior vanish, and in their stead dim reaches of the forest-clad mountains suggest themselves. A stream tumbles over the boulders in its bed with a hollow roar hinting at canyoned plungings above; and on the margin of it a quaking aspen blinks its many-lidded eyes in the light of a camp fire.

Against the pillared background of forest, primeval firs whose sombre greens become murky black in the firelight, a campers' wagon is drawn up; and the picket pins of the grazing horses are driven in a grass grown extension of the glade to the right. There is a silken whisper abroad in the night, rising and falling upon the sound waves of the tumbling stream: the voices of the trees as they call to each other in the night wind pouring softly down from the sky-pitched peaks.

The scene is set and the actors are in their places. They are two men clad in flannel shirts and brown duck overalls and shooting-coats. One of them is bearded and bronzed, with the well-knit figure of conscious strength. The other is of slighter frame, and on his clean-shaven face the prolonged holiday in the open is but now beginning to impress the stamp of returning health and vigor. The bearded man is on his back beside the fire, with his clasped hands for a pillow and an extinct pipe between his teeth. The clean-shaven one is propped against the bole of a tree; his eyes are closed, and his pipe has slipped from his fingers.

A brand falls into the glowing mass of embers, and the sparks fly upward in a crackling shower. It is the prompter's call-bell. The man reclining at the tree-foot opens his eyes, and the bearded one sits up and feels mechanically for the tobacco pouch.

"Here it is," says Lansdale. "I was just about to fill up again when the realities slipped away. It's astonishing how one can sleep overtime in these upper levels."

The athletic one rises and stretches till his joints crack. "Been asleep, have you? So have I. There's no opiate in the world like a day's tramping in the altitudes. Freshen you up any?"

"As to body, yes. But I've had a curious dream – if it were a dream." Silence while the sob of the river rises and falls on the night wind, and then a half-hesitant query. "Jeffard, do you believe in presentiments?"

The bearded one is on his knees before the fire, pressing a live coal into the bowl of his pipe, and the answer is delayed.

"I don't know whether I do or not; I have never had one."

"But you have known of others having them, haven't you?"

"Of one other: but in that instance it was foreknowledge rather than a foreboding. The presentiment should have been mine; and I had none."

"Would you mind telling me about it?"

"No. It was while I was making the survey for a logging railway in Quebec. I expected to be out all summer, but in the middle of it the company called a halt and I went home. I hadn't wired or written, but when I reached Hinsdale my father was at the station to meet me. For three days my mother had been insisting that I would come, and to quiet her they had been meeting the trains. She died the next evening."

"And you had no premonition?"

"None whatever. For a month or more I had been beyond the reach of the mails; and I had left her in her usual health. It was a bolt out of a clear sky."

Again the brawling stream and the whispering leaves fill the gap of silence; and as before, Lansdale is the first to speak.

"I have always scouted such things, as sanity seems to demand. Stories with any element of the supernatural in them have never appealed to me because, however well authenticated, they were always stories, and never actual happenings in which I had any part. But for the last day or two I've had a growing sense of impending calamity, and I can't shake it off."

There is the brusquerie of heartening in Jeffard's rejoinder.

"Nonsense! It's only the imaginative part of you kicking against the pricks of a longish holiday."

"That is ingenious, but I can't quite accept it. I've eaten and slept with the imaginative fiend long enough to be pretty well acquainted with his vagaries. This is altogether different. It is precisely the feeling you have had just before a storm; a sense of depression as intangible as darkness, but quite as real. It was with me a few minutes ago when I fell asleep, and the dream seemed to be a part of it."

"Oh, dreams," says the scoffer; "I thought they had been accounted for by the dietists. I told you that last batch of panbread held possibilities. But go on and unload your dream. I'm shudder-proof."

Lansdale tells it circumstantially, keeping his pipe alight in the periods.

"It didn't seem like a dream; at least, not in the beginning of it. I was sitting here just as I am now, and you were on your back over there, with the pipe in your mouth. The surroundings were the same, except that the fire was burning low. I remember thinking that you must have fallen asleep, and wondering why the pipe didn't fall and wake you. After a time the roar of the stream seemed to quiet down, and I heard the clink of horseshoes upon stone. The sound came from across the stream, and as I looked I saw a trail and a horseman coming down it. It was all so real that I wondered why I hadn't noticed the trail before. The man rode down to the water's edge and made as if he would cross. I saw him quite distinctly, and thought it curious, because the fire was too low to give much light. He merely glanced at the stream, and then turned his horse's head and rode down the opposite bank. He passed out of sight among the trees, and a moment later I heard the horse's hoofs again, this time as if he were on a bridge of poles."

Jeffard has been listening with attention no more than decently alert, but at this point he breaks in to say: "You've been walking in your sleep. Go on."

"It was just here that the supernatural came in. I told you that the man had passed out of sight, but all at once I seemed to see him again. He was on a corduroy bridge crossing the stream, and I saw plainly what he did not, – that the bridge was unsafe, and that a step or two would plunge him into the torrent. I don't remember what followed, save that I tried to call out, first to him and then to you; but my voice seemed to be swallowed up in the thunder of the water. There was a little gap filled with fierce strugglings, and then I seemed to be here again, lying by the wagon with a blanket over me; and you were walking up and down with another man, – a stranger. That is all; except that I tried to tell you that you were wet through and would take cold, – tried and couldn't, and awoke."

Jeffard has risen to put another log on the fire.

"It's the panbread," he says, with the air of one who sweeps the board for a resetting of the pieces. But after a little he adds: "I was wondering how you came to know about the bridge. That is the only unaccountable twist in it."

"Is there a bridge?"

"Yes; it's just below that farther clump of aspens. But there is nothing the matter with it that I could see. I noticed it while I was picketing the horses."

"And is there a trail on the other side of the stream?"

"There is. There used to be a ford just here, but it was dangerous, and we built the bridge."

"Then you have been here before?"

"Yes, many times. I spent the better half of a summer and all of one winter in this valley. The Midas is just below here. I meant to surprise you to-morrow morning."

Lansdale's gaze is in the heart of the fire and his voice is low. "Do you know, Henry, I'm rather glad you didn't wait? Don't ask me why, because I can't tell you in terms divisible by the realities. But somehow the to-morrows don't seem to be assured."

"Oh, pshaw! that's your dream – and the panbread its father. If you had talked that way a month ago, when you were really living from hand to mouth" —

Lansdale spreads his hands palms down and looks at them.

"You promised me a new lease of life, Henry, and you've given it me, – or the key to it. I didn't believe it could be done, and my chief trouble in those first days was the thought that you'd have to bury me alone. And when we camped in a particularly rocky spot, I used to wonder how you would manage it."

Jeffard's smile is of grimness. "If you had mentioned it, I could have helped you off with that burden. These mountains are full of graves, ready-made; prospect holes, where the better part of many a man lies buried. Do you see that heap of earth and stone over yonder?"

Lansdale shades his eyes from the firelight and looks and sees.

"That is one of them. Just behind that heap there is a shaft with a windlass across it, and for six weeks two men worked early and late digging a hole, – which turned out to be an excellent well when the water came in and stopped them."

"And the water was bitter," says Lansdale. "Did you drink of it, Henry?"

"No; but the other man did, and he went mad."

Once more the stream and the sighing night wind share the silence. For many days Lansdale has been assuring himself that the golden moment for speech of the helpful sort must ultimately be made and not waited for. In the hour when he had consented to Bartrow's urgings he had been given to see his opportunity and had determined to grasp it, – had made the determination the excuse for sharing Jeffard's hospitality. He can look back upon that resolve now and see that it was perfunctory; that the prompting had been of duty and not at all of love for the man. But the weeks of close companionship have wrought more miracles than one, and not the least among them is a great amazement builded upon the daily renewal of Jeffard's loving-kindnesses. For the man with the world-quarrel has been a brother indeed; nurse, physician, kinsman, and succoring friend; with the world-quarrel put aside from the moment of outsetting, and with apparently no object in life less worthy than that of fighting a vicarious battle for a sick man. The summary of it is humanizing, and the last upholdings of the crust of reserve break down in the warmth of it.

"May I speak as the spirit moves, Henry?"