The Sound of the Axe
FOR two days the rain slopped down prodigally over the wilderness and the high barrens. Then the weather turned. It froze, sharp as the closing of a trap, and caught many a small thing that could have done with another month of careless life. Of human life there was none, till in the late afternoon of the day of frost McNally stood alone on the high lands, and hugged himself together in his canvas coat that had been sodden and now was frozen over his wet woolen shirt. He looked up at the iron sky, and remembered that the month was November. He spoke to himself with sudden peevish anger: —
“It’s unseasonable weather — unseasonable ! ” he said. In his hateful fatigue he had not sense to move out of the wind; he stood and stared around and before him.
It was a sufficiently depressing prospect for a dry man; for a wet one who was also homeless, hungry, and lost, it was a wicked prospect. Behind and around him lay the high barrens, a waste of withered blueberry bushes, spruce scrub, and gray boulders. There was not a sign of a path. How he had come there he knew less than any one.
In front of him opened out a valley. There the boulders were bigger, closer together; farther on, and down, they were packed, the size of cabs, then of houses. Out of the scanty crevices between them grew tall pine trees, solitary black pillars or sombre groups, as their roots could find mould. Over all there lay a palpable silence. A thin shiver ran through McNally as he stood.
The place was a place to die in; no more! He had always had the thought that it would be best to die in bed, and a whisper of chill wind that came up the valley made him more sure of it than ever. He was suddenly cold inside him, colder than outside; he shivered in his empty stomach, at his heart. This hollow was hostile, menacing; it could not be the valley he had meant to come to; and yet, somewhere in his dim thoughts, he had the lingering hope that it was; that it only eluded him. He was babyish in his exhaustion, and he spoke aloud again, resentfully: —
“It ought to be here! It shan’t go back on me! ” His anger gave him strength, even in the face of the great contemptuous silence around him; he pushed forward with trembling knees, up and down a rise, and up again. “It must be here! ”
He meant the dark lake that lay far back from civilization, in a hopeless country for lumberers. Any man might cut good logs there, but five hundred could not get them out, with profit. It was shunned, too; he had never known why. All lie knew was that he had had it in his mind for weeks as his only refuge, the one place in the world that was ready and waiting for Bernard McNally. He had been making to it for days, like a homing pigeon, and he had missed it in the end. His instinct, that had lain fallow for ten years, had failed him; he had made a mistake. And he had not life in him to afford to make mistakes; this was his last in a world of them, and his body told him so. His mind refused to hear it.
He made for a boulder, crawled along by it, staggered to another, and hauled himself up till he sprawled on top of it and had to shut his eyes to steady the rocks and trees that rushed past him. He dared not lie like that; even the relief of it told him so. He sat up and dragged his eyes open. He did not know that he was sobbing. His only feeling was rage that he had missed his way. The disappointment of it was the worst pang of all his life, sharp as the sting of death that must soon come after it. He stared before him to see this place where he must die.
The last light of the November day lay gray on the yellow-brown bushes, the gray rocks, the black trees; on all the inhospitable ugliness of the place. McNally fell more than scrambled off the boulder, and fled madly down the valley to the trees, between the rocks and the blueberry bushes. The black patch below him was water. He had made no mistake; his long search had brought him out at the Matoun. What matter that it was on the wrong side of the lake ? He could skirt round it! He knew where he was! He had only to find his refuge, if the light held to do it.
The way was all rocks now, with tall pine trees struggling up between them; it was slippery with pine droppings, riddled with crevices and porcupine holes. McNally hurried and slipped and fell and went on again, racing with the light that can out-travel man. He slithered helplessly across a rock and caught hold of a low bough, just in time ; his feet had shot from under him, and hung out over the black depths of the freezing lake. But he hardly noticed that a little more would have drowned him. He had his bearings! He was on the north side of the lake now, the right side. He could see the hills that locked the western end of it, the swamp on the south shore opposite ; but he wasted no time in looking. The place he wanted must be just back of him, over the rocks and the porcupine holes back to the solid north wall of hill. He forgot he was cold, in the deadly fear that the dark might come and make him miss his goal. He clawed to his feet, crashed through the boughs that swept the high rocks, slipped twice his own height to the ground, and fell softly in the frozen bushes; worked on, step by step. He stopped, as if he were stunned.
The rocky hill was in front of him, but it was grown up with young spruce ; the points and landmarks were gone! It all looked alike. And this time he knew he sobbed. But he knew, too, that he went on. If he had to feel that hillside foot by foot he would go on, till his body failed him. In the growing dusk he looked back at the rocks that cut off the lake, and tried to remember the line; but it was all a tumble of confusion to him. He crushed forward through an endless stretch of bay, its withered leaves breast high, and never smelt the scent of it; stumbled to higher ground, and forced his way through the spruce trees, to the virgin wall of rock behind them. And as he did the light failed palpably, as if some one had drawn a curtain between him and the sky. In the dimness he peered at the rock, felt it, struggled through another clump of spruces and felt again. He found nothing; what he sought was not there. But he kept on feeling, till the rock under his fingers stopped, and he knew that the ridge had ended, even before he had sense enough to look up and see the sky. He went back again, bent double, one hand dragging at the spruces, the other never off the rock behind them. The light was less with every second, yet it came on him suddenly that it was dark. In the anguish of it he sank to his knees and fell forward ; as he tried to save himself his hand slipped a foot lower on the rock, and clawed at smooth stone.
The revulsion that came over him was sickening ; he could not have moved to keep from dying. The words he said aloud were not appropriate either, but perhaps they served his turn as well as any, “ Whoa, mare; whoa, pet! ” whispered McNally weakly; and found he could crawl forward on his hands and knees.
He had been a fool, for he had forgotten ! He had been feeling the rock at his own height, where he might have felt forever. Now his hand was on the two courses of dressed stone; now on the Dutch arch ; now — his heart pumped hard at his slow blood — on the wood of the door. A corner at the top had decayed away ; his fingers went through the hole. He found his tin box of matches, his candle end. (It goes hard to make a man who has been a miner lose the candle-end habit.) The damp wick sputtered, then lit, a pale flame between the spruces and the rock; and it showed a queer sight, for Lake Matoun.
In the rock, for a yard or so on each side of where he knelt, were set two courses of dressed granite; above it, as the natural spring of a cave had needed it, neat fillings of cut stone, jointed and mortared. The Swede had known his work. The door under the Dutch arch was not three feet high, but it was broad out of all proportion, broad enough to pass the shoulders of a giant. McNally put his shoulder to it with the strength of a child; but it gave, at the hinges. The candle flickered as the draft rushed in the crack. The man put his head in, and snuffed like an animal ; he had no mind to spend the night picking out porcupine quills. He smelt nothing but a cold closeness, yet he lit a bunch of dead spruce and flung it in. Nothing stirred. He pushed the door wide, and crawled in on hands and knees, as he had always done. The smoke from the spruce made him cough; he threw the smouldering mass to one side of him casually, as of old habit. It blazed up, and the smoke followed the draft of it. In the sudden light McNally stood up, and saw his home.
Nothing had been here; there were no tracks on the floor as there was no scent of life in the air. His spruce torch was dying on the stone hearth, the sparks of it flying up the queer chimney he had so often marveled at. He held up his candle and looked around him. It was all exactly as it had been, only strangely smaller. The clean vault of the natural cave was nowhere more than a foot above his head. At his left it had been let alone, to slope down to the corner where the bunk was; and in the bunk were dead spruce boughs still, sticks with the spines dropped off them long ago. At his right the wall was straight, built up by the same hand as the outside. Neat courses of granite met the roof above the stone fireplace, the wide hearth where the burnt spruce was a red mass. Before him there was no wall. The cave sloped to a sort of tunnel, and the man went to it; if there were porcupines they would be here. But his candle showed him only the rough rock of the floor; then a heap of earth and small stones, the cleanings of the cave. Over the heap the tunnel sloped abruptly to the ground and stopped. A rusty oil-can lay there, and apparently nothing else; but McNally knew better. He set down his candle and groped a little till he found the woodpile. It was tinder dry and rotten, but it would serve his turn for the night. His legs shook as he went back with a load from it; when the flame of it leapt up the chimney he stretched his hands to it as a man who prays. But prayer and McNally had never met.
In the heartening firelight he propped up the door; the stone slab the Swede had used to make it fast against the walkers of the night he could not lift, but he made a shift of it. And it was not till then that he had the sense to take from his back the few things he had had strength to carry this last day of his weariness. He cooked as unhandily as he dried his coat; there was no woodcraft about him, any more than there was about the strange hutlike cave he sat in. Any Indian would have laughed at the useless trouble spent on the stones of the place, but again no Indian could have achieved the dryness of it, the wonderful defiance of ten years of time. McNally knew mines were wet; he never wondered why a cave should be dry. He lay and nestled by his fire, thawing and steaming and drying at long last. When he was bone dry, the joy of it was like no joy he had ever known, except the sleep that weighed him down with slow thrills of rapture. He had been hunted and wet and frozen, had been lost and despairing ; he was warm and dry and at home. Perfect peace lapped him as he lay. He was at home. It had been waiting for him all these years, just as the Swede had said it would wait; he remembered, as of some stranger, that he had sobbed as he fought his way here. He had just sense enough to get more wood and pile his fire for the night before sleep took him, a man at home, and at peace. The candle end burned out where he had stuck it in its own grease, the fire flickered to its fall, and under the changing lights the sleep of Bernard McNally, failure and blackguard, was the sleep of a little child. Outside the walkers of the night went their separate ways no freer, and with no more conscience.
It was a day and another night before McNally crawled out of the low door. He had worked his body to its worth, and more; and that merciless creditor was taking its arrears. Food and fire and sleep he paid it, till it let him go, and he stood up outside his house without an ache in him. A tall man too, and clean made; not a man to hunt with impunity, as he had been hunted. But all that, and the thought of it, was behind him, so that he had not a care in the world. As he passed through the thicket of bay to the lake he picked a handful, liking the keen scent of it; he had not known that dead bay was sweet. He stuck a sprig of it in his coat as he trod lightly over the rocks that had seemed insurmountable two days ago. When he came out on the barrens his feet struck by instinct into the easy half-trot of the wood walker, straight-footed, devouring the way. He was going on an errand, an innocent, necessary errand; there was a novelty about it that was exhilarating; that it was also a little uncertain did not worry him. He wanted his pack, that he had nearly thrown away because it weighed too much; he plumed himself now that he had stuck it in a tree instead. Luck held, and he found the pack, but he put it down to genius. With joy at the weight of it he slung it awkwardly over his shoulder, but there was no awkwardness about the way he retrieved his gun; he knew about guns. Then he set back again, light-hearted and his own man,for there was enough in his pack to last him a month, and only yesterday he had envied common lumberers with a wongan to dip into. But yesterday his cache had seemed a day’s journey away; he knew now he had only made a scant five miles the day he had sobbed; he had nearly seen his finish when he lit on the Swede’s cave.
Once back there, he worked. When he had new boughed the bunk, he cut wood till the trees rang. There was no one to hear him; the Swede had been right when he said no man ever came there. He had added something, in his queer English, which McNally had not understood: “And they should fear, if they should come, the sound of the axe; yes, the sound of the axe! ” He was a superstitious man, the Swede; but McNally never thought of axes and superstition going together. Afterwards he was wiser.
As he swung at His tree now, unhandily but effectually, he thought of the Swede, — a silent gray giant of a man, working in the wet of the lower levels of the Wisowsoole mine, shoveling the low grade ore into the ore carts. McNally had been a boy then, sent to learn his practical work; some day he would be a manager. He swung harder at his tree as he thought of it. But in the meantime he learned from the Swede; and, he never knew why, the silent man took to him. In their sixhour shifts they talked; after McNally was sent into the office they talked at odd minutes; on Sundays, when the mine was silent from noon till midnight, they talked all day. As far as either had it in him he loved the other; the difference between them was that the man understood the boy ; and McNally, at twenty, took the Swede as he found him. And the Swede brought him to Matoun, with secrecy, the summer the mine shut down for want of water. McNally stared round-eyed at the queer place that was ready for them, and the Swede frowned. “I am quarryman, also mason,” he said. “You should be my guest. I make your shelter for you with my hands.” And it never dawned on McNally why he should have made it so far away, or so strong. He fished there till he learned to fish, shot till he could shoot; he got his growth and his breadth there, and a smattering of the Swede’s strange woodcraft, —a woodcraft of shifts, not of matter of course cause and effect. Time and again he saw the Swede’s eyes on him as if he had in his mind what he would not say; he never did say it, because it was precisely at those times that McNally asked questions and displeased him. He was proving the boy, who did not know it, any more than the man who swung the axe now knew he had been found wanting, in everything but silence about Matoun. The autumn rainfall was as good as a telegram to call them back to the Wisowsoole; McNally, then nor ever, told where he had been that summer, and the Swede knew it. They worked again all that winter, the Swede in the mine, McNally where fate and the manager sent him. The day there was the affair of the ladders, fate had McNally in the mine. What he did is matter of history in the Wisowsoole to this day, and it was Lake Matoun that had given him muscles to do it. Forty men owed their lives to him, and one of the forty was the Swede. But when they came triumphant out of the old workings he was leaning hard on the hoy’s shoulder, and McNally took him home to get away from the shouts and the cheering. He saw the Swede now, lowering himself into a chair and shivering as he did it.
“Have a drink,” commanded McNally; he remembered his own contemptuous voice.
The big man drank in silence; afterwards he spoke, to the marvel of his hearer. “I should be done here! I go. I will always to die in Stockholm, where they shall not call me ‘the Swede,’ but by my name.”
“Well, I call you by your name! ” scoffed McNally. “Brace up, Munthe! Nothing ails you.”
“You cannot call what you should not know. You think me some peasant fellow when you speak. And to-morrow I go. I will always to die in Stockholm. ”
“ Oh, hold your jaw about dying! ” The questions and answers came to McNally with his axe as if he were reading out of a book. “ What d’ ye mean ?”
The Swede turned dull eyes on him. “She has betrayed me. If she should betray again, I die. And I will die in Stockholm. To-morrow I go.”
“But you haven’t any money.”
“ Oh, ” the answer was absent, “ I have always that money! Plenty I have. Look! ” Out of an unlocked drawer in the table he took something that made McNally open his hard young eyes. For a moment he thought the man had been robbing the mine; but only for a moment. The Wisowsoole was a low grade ore; this was a different gold indeed. They never saw a nugget in the Wisowsoole.
“This was mine,” said the Swede, while McNally handled the wonderful lumps, “and being so I go. I have but you to leave.”
McNally remembered nodding; he had known he could not speak, but not why.
“I have done always the best for you, if I did not die I should do more best.” The old man spoke out suddenly. “You will never be manager of a mine. You will go — so! ” he pointed to the floor. “ What do they call that ? Down. And I should not save you being alive, much less dead. But I do what I can. I give you my house at the Matoun water, my secret house that no one but you has known of. You shall go there, when you go — what do you call it ? — down. No one comes there, but the sound of the axe that I love. One year, five year, ten year she waits, — my house on the Matoun. But you will be back there, in ten year; she need not to wait longer. All of my house I give you. It was as my son always! You see that? As my son. 1 have not any son, but you should serve. For I also have gone down; I come up now. Up! ” His voice rang out sudden and joyful as his fist fell like a hammer on the quaking table, “And being up,” he shouted exultantly, “I will die in Stockholm ! No man can prevent me from Stockholm. But you,” the eyes were another man’s, “you shall die at Matoun. One year, fifty, how should I know? But at Matoun. For you have never seen Stockholm; you do not know always how good a place it should be to die in. ” His heavy hand fell light on the boy’s shoulder. “Life you give me to-day, so life I give you some tomorrow. Life and Matoun! You laugh, because I am always alive and you can see me; when I am always dead you will not laugh. You should see that, when you go down. ” He had pushed McNally slowly to the door, without a good-night,but the boy looking back saw that he blessed him with upheld hands. He saw him no more, for in the morning the Swede was gone. He, and his nuggets, and his “always ” to die in Stockholm.
And McNally, just ten years after, stood and chopped trees at Matoun. It was a queer coincidence, but he was jubilant with returned strength, and he laughed aloud at the idea of dying here. Yet to get rid of the thought he struck his axe into a fallen tree, and looked about him. He was a leisurely man, with a month’s supplies, and a good house to go to; he looked at it just to make sure of the fact. And then stared, because there was something the matter with the day. There was no sun; it had been gray in the morning as it was gray now. What, then, brought out the masses of gorgeous color everywhere, and banished the blackness that had stood in every tree and lain on the new ice of the lake ? Now the pine trunks were purple with warmth, in the green of their crowns; warmth, too, in the sharper color of the spruces, whose every cone was wine-red. Every yellow and brown he had ever dreamed of shone at him from the withered bracken; the pine droppings on top of the rocks were sudden astounding patches of dull scarlet ; the dead and frozen bay was mulberry, just as the blackberry stalks and the moosewood boughs were rose-red. The whole world was a world he had never seen; a lovely intimate world that smiled, and kept its mystery just a little, as from a friend. Even the distance across the lake melted away in chocolate and crimson. He did not know that he was looking on the yearly miracle of the deep woods that the Indians call The Day of Color; the carnival that comes before the snow. He had learnt but one thing that day, that dead and frozen bay smells sweet as August green. But, after all, that was a good deal to learn in one day, for McNally. He wheeled to go on with his chopping, and saw something that turned his life as on a pivot, though it was nothing but the wonderful light in a rock at his feet. He knelt down and chipped at it with the butt of his axe, softly, then madly. As he broke small pieces from it he would not look at them, because he was afraid. It was not till he had a little heap of broken stones that he trembled ; not till he had passed them one by one through his shaking fingers, scanned them with fierce eyes, that he dared think. There was color in the quartz; a trace, no more; but color. Had the Swede been mad, not to know that there was gold at Matoun ? Or had he known, and the nuggets —
McNally saw his future that had been dead and hopeless leap up alive under his eyes. Here was gold. It made everything so simple and easy that he laughed; lie did not see how he had ever despaired. Here was gold. Bernard McNally, who had been a fool and taken Benson’s money (Benson being dead, and not objecting), need be a fugitive in the wood no more. He would mine. By and by he would make a good strike! He would go out into the big world carefully, till he got to a place where they had never heard of him —or Benson. He would live. He would come up as the Swede had done. “Up! ” he said it aloud in his triumph. “Up!” And somewhere in the woods it echoed. It was odd, but he did not like the sound. It cooled him where he sat with his bits of rock in his hands. As he looked at them he came to himself, and the vision in his eyes faded.
They had called the Wisowsoole a low-grade ore. This was so much lower that he threw it down. It would take unknown tons of it and a crusher to get half an ounce of gold. It was beyond human labor. It wanted a mill. He shut his eyes, and could hear the ninety stamps of the Wisowsoole mill, which was curious, for he had not thought of it for years. He had given up mining, had McNally, and gone down. He saw now how far. Presently he stood up and looked for more rocks, clear eyed, without the hope that blinds. He did not find one. By nightfall he was back at the first, dinting the head of his axe on it, when he thought he heard something and stopped to listen. There was nothing. It had been fancy that some one was chopping down a tree. He went home and slept before he had eaten. His last thought was that the Swede never got those nuggets at Matoun, but somewhere in the north, and that he must go north as soon as it was safe and the hue and cry had died ; north, to the place where there were nuggets and men asked no questions. And while he slept the weather laughed at him. At midnight a keen sweet dampness woke him, to put yet another patch on the corner of his door before he made up his fire. As the fresh logs kindled he heard the sudden wind come down the valley. It came with a leap, a long soughing roar. From somewhere far behind him, in the very rocks of the hill, it echoed like the siren of a steamer in the St. Lawrence channel; and the likeness made McNally afraid. He had been a failure all his life, even to going off with that money of Benson’s. He did not call it stealing to himself; the man was dead when he took it. Was he going to be a coward too ? He could not get the dead man out of his head, nor the siren shouting in the fog while he ransacked the cabin for the money. He crouched from the thoughts in his mind and could not shrink far enough away from them, because the wind kept yelling for somebody to show a light. All night it yelled and herded its restless woods; if it lulled a little it whickered like a living thing at McNally’s patched door; McNally keeping up his fire that he might not have to listen to that wind in the dark. After all, he was guiltless ; he had no need to shake! It was true he had taken the money, but on second thoughts he would have sent it back; if only he had not lost it. That was where the failure of him came in; he had lost it. He sat and let the long centuries of the night go by, till at last it was morning in his house beyond the daylight. He crept out, and saw a raging smother of wind and drift and deep snow. He was fast. There could be no getting away now without snowshoes ; but even if he had them, he dared not leave a clear track to the only place he knew to be safe. McNally crawled in again, and shut his door. He knew that yesterday’s hopes had been a dream; he could neither find gold at Matoun nor leave it. Suddenly he longed beyond words for a pane of glass; he hungered for the light of day. If he had a pane of glass to put in his door he could be happy. He sat thinking of that in the dark.
When the snow stopped, the crows came. McNally fed the crows. The blue jays screamed for meat, and he gave them pork. In the clear sunset the wind died, and he rejoiced. He stood at the door of his hut and looked abroad. Everything was snow; the quiet of the place was piercing. He would have given worlds to see the crows come back; to hear a sound of life. And even as he thought it, there came one, plain and near, — the sound of an axe on a tree.
McNally dropped as flat on the snow as if it had been an axe on his own head. Some one else was at Matoun; lumberers, men who read the papers. They would have a box on the nearest postroad, and once a month they would go to it and get the news; the news of McNally.
It sent him through the snow for fifty yards to listen. It was true; some one was chopping. He looked to the red west, and on the hill against it saw a tree quiver ; there were men there; there was no harbor for him, even at Matoun. That drove him on again, to make sure, toiling through the deep snow and round the rocks, cunningly, till he gained a ridge where he could lie down and stare at the hill. There was not a sign that any living thing but he was near Matoun ; no smoke, no more quivering trees; and the sound of the axe was still. He wormed round to go home, and the axe called to him. Slow and regular fell the blows of it, near at his hand, and not a sight nor scent of man. McNally, without knowing why, turned and fled back on his own tracks, and as he ran a wild cat cried. He lifted the Swede’s stone into place with a thud, and sat down, sweating. The thing at those trees was not human! He tried to think it had something to do with wild cats, but he could not do it because he knew he was not afraid of wild cats, and of this he was afraid. As he wiped his wet upper lip the Swede’s words came back to him: —
“No one comes there but the sound of the axe that I love.”
Then, whatever it was, the Swede had known; and not cared. It heartened McNally that the Swede had not cared. He rolled his blanket round him and went to sleep.
Yet it shook him a little when the next evening he heard it again. It took him by surprise, close to him, and in his surprise he gazed. In plain sight a tree quivered; but in plain sight there was no one there. He thought of the giant woodpecker (which was absurd, but McNally was no woodsman); at that moment a wild cat cried, and the hacking sound never stopped. It was something real, because the tree quivered. He remembered, out of dead time, that he had heard there was an Indian superstition about an invisible spirit that chopped in the woods; there was something about seeing a tree fall without seeing what cut it down; he could not remember whether it were good or bad to see the tree fall. Anyhow he did not believe in it. He decided it had something to do with a wild cat. By the end of a week he had grown to look for it, to feel it friendly; he had gone back, in his loneliness, to searching for gold, though he knew it was not there. He scraped through the snow all day long for gold, and always at sunset the sound of the axe signaled him to stop. It seemed to him now to chop out words; to say something that quieted his soul: —
“Lost — Man’s — Harbor,” it hewed. “Lost — Man’s — Harbor.” He would stand and listen to the kindly sound. Sometimes it seemed to set a wild cat whining, but he never saw one, nor did he hunt for it. Its cry and the sound of the axe were his only companions. It was from pure habit now that he barred his door at night, for he was no longer afraid. He was brother to the wailing beast he never saw. He grew leaner and hungrier every day, and less human. He had no past IIOAV ; all he cared for was to look for gold; till he woke up one morning and had nothing to eat. That same day he thought he gave up for good and all the hope of gold at Matoun. He went out for food, but he saw nothing but porcupines, and he had no stomach for porcupines. There were no hares, no partridges; he looked for them all day long, and night after night came back as he had gone out, the sound of the axe welcoming him as he struck his own valley. And the night he came down to caribou moss and sickening at it, the world swam round him and the blows of the axe took a new voice. “ Pay ! ” it chopped. “Pay! Pay!”
McNally cried out like an echo, “Pay ? ” His past, that he had forgotten, rushed back on him and overwhelmed him. Pay? He had never thought of paying, only of saving his skin. How was it possible that he should pay ? And the axe went on relentlessly, mocking at him standing hungry with his miserable hopes of gold scattered by his woodpile, “ Pay! ”
“My God! ” muttered McNally, and it was the first time he had thought of God, “if I could, I’d pay! ” It was the nearest he had ever come to praying in all his life, and as he spoke his eyes fell on the woods. Had he been blind not to see that the snow was nearly gone, that he could come and go to a settlement without leaving a trace — to matter? That he had been starving like a fool, when there was only thirty miles between him and a shop? He tied up the flapping soles of his boots and started, just as the sunset cry came from the hidden cat on the hill. He stopped and called back.
“Good-by,” said McNally to his only friends. “If I can, I’ll pay! ” He came back a week after, deviously, carrying all he could stagger under. No one had noticed him, but no one had given him a decent word either ; he did not know there was that in his face which said he was better let alone. He was so little human now that he was sorry to get home after dark, and too late for the thing that chopped on the hill. He wanted to tell it that he meant to find gold grain by grain, till he paid ; that he had brought back a pick.
If he had brought back the mill from the Wisowsoole it would have done him no good. He found no more gold, nor the sign of it, and every day at sunset the steady axe called to him to “Pay! pay! pay ! ”.
By the third time he was frenzied. He stood up and answered it, very politely; he had been a polite man. “ How can I pay ? Have the goodness to tell me that, or let me alone! ” He looked at his worldly assets, one pick and a little food; he knew he would never have another shifting mood that told him he might yet make his strike. He stood and spoke again into the sunset. “How can I pay? ”
And once more the axe answered him. It sounded now exactly like the tap of a pick in a tunnel. He had a pick, he had no tunnel. Why should old sounds come out of the past and mock at him ? A wild cat keened while he thought, and it made him shiver. He went home and came back with meat, threw it down and left it. If he must live and die here, let him, for God’s sake, at least have a wild cat to tame! That night he prayed to have a beast to tame.
In the morning the pork was gone, and a dull something went, too, from McNally’s eyes. He turned deliberately back into his cave, to the rubbish heap where the Swede had left the gravel cleared from his house. He swung his pick and cut away the earth to the clean run of the rock; to — At the sight of the standing timber he lit two candles and dug with his might; at the sight of the downward slope and the rotten ladder he knew why his cave was dry. When the crack of the axe came at sundown, McNally was not where he could hear it.
It was two days before he came out into the light of day, and, though it was sunset, it blinded him. He sat down at his door, heedless that he was hungry because of what he held in his hands. He knew now what the Swede had meant when he said, “I give you my house at Matoun, all of it I give you.” It was a mine; a small, tunneled, timbered mine, running down into the hill; and out of it had come those nuggets that were brothers to these he polished on his coat. He was rich. He could have thousands. And, if he could have had them when first he came to Matoun, would have had no thought but how best to get away with them and find a world he could spend them in. But not now. He was not the McNally who had come to Matoun as a mere temporary convenience and to save his skin. Something had sucked the slackness out of his blood. He remembered things, responsibly. He had stolen (he said stolen now that he was rich). Into his thoughts came the slow chopping that never failed at evening, and he answered it aloud.
“I’m going to pay,” he called at the top of his shout. “ Pay ! ” And the axe ceased on the word, or he thought so. He had long given up wondering what it was. He chose to think of the sound as a personal signal to himself, bequeathed to him, like the cabin, by the Swede. Whatever it was, it had made him able to pay; and when he had paid he could be free. He could go up, as the Swede had said, “Up! ”
It would be easy. He had not been in the Wisowsoole for nothing; he knew how to get rid of gold out of a stolen claim, how it could be paid at last from very far from here. He must pack the stuff out, little by little. He could send it to Peele, — if he could trust Peele. It came to McNally that he would make an oracle and abide by it. If it were safe to trust Peele and pay back that money, he would be able to tame that wild cat he had never seen; if he could not tame it, he would know that signaling he had made out of the blows of a phantom axe was pure foolishness and he could never pay. That night he laid out an oblation of pork scraps, and waited. After twenty years or so something like a gray shadow went by him where he stood motionless in the dark; it pounced noiselessly on the meat and was gone. But he had at least seen the beast that had always kept hidden, and his heart lightened. It lightened still more as the days lengthened and his heap of nuggets grew in his cave, for his self-made oracle was working his way; or not his, but that of the unseen axe which had told him how to pay and be free. Little by little, night after night, McNally was taming his wild cat. By mid-April it ate close to his feet. And in mid-April he began to go away with his pack heavy and come back with it light. In the intervals between those weary, anxious journeys his wild cat would come when he called it. It let him touch it the day he set off with his last payment for Peele.
When that was gone, and his underground agent’s receipt for it in his hand, McNally stood up in a dirty little town another man. He was free; he had paid. He saw his life stretching out before him, he that was to die at Matoun. He was drunk with the sight of it; he forgot he could not yet dare to be McNally. He went into the barber’s and was shaved; he bought new clothes, new boots; he walked the street placidly. That was in the morning.
When he was stabbed that night in the row at “Pat’s Place,” he had just sense enough left to see that at the farther end of the room stood a man he knew. Of all men, Peele; come in by the back door and staring at him. McNally saw him in that fraction of a minute when he stood with his hand to his side; the next, he was out of the house and gone. Nobody knew him, or cared where he went. They did kick the Italian miner with the knife, but there was no blood on it, and it was decided it had not touched the other man. If Peele knew or cared he did not say so. He and an Indian were going fishing at dawn, and they went.
It took them a whole day to hit McNally’s trail, which was why he did not know he was followed by a white man and an Indian when at last he staggered into his house. Where he lay down he fainted. That was all he knew when he came to himself and wanted water, except that his wild cat cried restlessly at his open door. On a sudden it ran for its life, but being in one of McNally’s faints he did not know. What he did know was that he woke quite comfortably and saw Peele kneeling by him ; it all seemed perfectly natural to McNally, even to Sabiel Paul looking over Peele’s shoulder.
“Hullo! ” said he. He tried to sit up and did not move. He looked his visitor square in the eyes. “I ’ve paid,” he said hastily, “I suppose you got it.”
“Good God, McNally! ” croaked Peele. He looked round him at the ghastly place, the dead ashes on the hearth, the dying man. “I know; we all know. But we thought you were in Rossland. No one ever thought you were so near.” He touched McNally with quick, knowledgeable fingers, and marveled how he could have crawled over thirty miles of country with so little blood in him. “You needn’t have run. We ’d have helped you; we all like you, ” he broke out, for there was no sense in keeping McNally quiet. He listened to a sound outside, even while he went on stripping him; he had not thought he would be sick at the sight of his wound. He turned on Sabiel in the doorway. “Get out and get those lumberers ! Even at their camp would be better than here. I might save him! ”
McNally, who had not been meant to hear, laughed; an ugly, bubbling laugh.
“Stop!” said Peele fiercely. “Shut up! Ho you want to kill yourself ? ”
“I ’m — not — dying,” gasped McNally, “I’ve paid. I’ve — come up.”
“You fool! ” said Peele. He tried to put some whiskey in McNally’s mouth, and it ran out of the corners.
The man who loved him turned and swore at the silent Indian. “Who’s that chopping? Get them here.”
Sabiel never moved. “ Keáskunóogwejit, the mighty chopper,” said he. “No man here. You hear chopping, you never see axe, — but the tree fall! This man die? That chop coffin. The tree fall! ”
Peele shouldered him from the door and stared out into the sunset. On the hilltop against the sky, a tree fell; but there was no man there. On the heel of the fall of it came the cry of a wild cat, and Sabiel stooping caught at Peele’s arm.
“Those his friends, ” said he. “All same Keáskunóogwejit! They cry.”
S. Carleton.