Part 12 (2/2)

There, if you will have it! Sonny--my son! It--it's like startin' a snow-slide.”

The sick man broke down and sobbed childishly.

”Take it quietly! Oh, take it quietly!” Paul s.h.i.+vered. ”I have known it a long time.”

Hours later they were still awake, the packer in his bunk, Paul in his blankets by the winking brands. The pines were moving, and in pauses of the wind they could hear the incessant soft crowding of the snow.

”When they find us here in the spring,” said the packer humbly, ”it won't matter much which on us was 'Mister' and which was 'John.'”

”Are you thinking of that!” Paul answered with nervous irritation. ”I thought you had lived in the woods long enough to have got rid of all that nonsense!”

”I guess there was some of it where you've been living.”

”We are done with all that now. Go to sleep,--Father.” He p.r.o.nounced the word conscientiously to punish himself for dreading it. The darkness seemed to ring with it and give it back to him ironically. ”Father!”

muttered the pines outside, and the snow, listening, let fall the word in elfin whispers. Paul turned over desperately in his blankets.

”Father!” he repeated out loud. ”Do _you_ believe it? Does it do you any good?”

”I wouldn't distress myself, one way or t' other, if it don't come natural,” the packer spoke, out of his corner in the darkness. ”Wait till you can feel to say it. The word ain't nothing.”

”But do you feel it? Is it any comfort to you at all?”

”I ain't in any hurry to feel it. We'll get there. Don't worry. And s'pose we don't! We're men. Man to man is good enough for me.”

Paul spent some wakeful hours after that, trying not to think of Moya, of his mother and Christine. They were of another world,--a world that dies hard at twenty-four. Towards morning he slept, but not without dreams.

He was in the pent-road at Stone Ridge. It was sunset and long shadows striped the lane. A man stood, back towards him, leaning both arms on the stone fence that bounds the lane to the eastward,--a plain farmer figure, gazing down across the misty fields as he might have stood a hundred times in that place at that hour. Paul could not see his face, but something told him who it must be. His heart stood still, for he saw his mother coming up the lane. She carried something in her hand covered with a napkin, and she smiled, walking carefully as if carrying a treat to a sick child. She pa.s.sed the man at the fence, not appearing to have seen him.

”Won't you speak to him, mother? Won't you speak to”--He could not utter the name. She looked at him bewildered. ”Speak? who shall I speak to?”

The man at the fence had turned and he watched her, or so Paul imagined.

He felt himself choking, faint, with the effort to speak that one word.

Too late! The moment pa.s.sed. The man whom he knew was his father, the solemn, quiet figure, moved away up the road unquestioned. He never looked back. Paul grew dizzy with the lines of shadow; they stretched on and on, they became the ties of a railroad--interminable. He awoke, very faint and tired, with a lost feeling and the sense upon him of some great catastrophe. The old man was sleeping deeply in his bunk, a ray of white sunlight falling on his yellow features. He looked like one who would never wake again. But as Paul gazed at him he smiled, and sighed heavily. His lips formed a name; and all the blood in Paul's body dyed his face crimson. The name was his mother's.

XII

THE BLOOD-WITE

A few hours seemed days, after the great disclosure. Both men had recoiled from it and were feeling the strain of the new relation. Three times since their first meeting the elder had adjusted himself quietly to a change in the younger's manner to him. First there had been respectful curiosity in the presence of a new type, combined with the deference due a leader and an expert in strange fields. Then indignant partisans.h.i.+p, pity, and the slight condescension of the nurse. This had hurt the packer, but he took it as he accepted his physical downfall.

The last change was hardest to bear; for now the time was short, and, as Paul himself had said, they were in the presence of the final unveiling.

So when Paul made artificial remarks to break the pauses, avoiding his father's eye and giving him neither name nor t.i.tle, the latter became silent and lay staring at the logs and picking at his hands.

”If I was hunting up a father,” he said to himself aloud one day, ”I'd try to find a better lookin' one. I wouldn't pa'm off on myself no such old warped stick as I be.” The remark seemed a tentative one.

”I had the choice, to take or leave you,” Paul responded. ”You were an unconscious witness. Why should I have opened the subject at all?”

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