Part 1 (2/2)

”Is everything off the table? There's not much,” she turned to him, ”but the end of the pork barrel.” A meagre fire was burning in the large, untidy hearth; battered tin ovens had been drawn aside, and a pair of wood-soled shoes were drying. The rough slab of the table, pushed back against a long seat made of a partly hewed and pegged log, was empty but for some dull scarred pewter and sc.r.a.ps of salt meat. On the narrow stair that led above, a small, touselled form was sleeping--one of the cast boys at the Furnace.

A thin, peering woman in a hickory-dyed wool dress moved forward obsequiously. ”Mr. Penny!” she echoed the girl's announcement; ”and here I haven't got a thing fit for you. Thomas Gilkan has been too busy to get out, and f.a.n.n.y she'll fetch nothing unless the mood's on her. If I only had a fish I could turn over.” She brushed the end of the table with a frayed sleeve. ”You might just take a seat, and I'll look around.”

f.a.n.n.y Gilkan listened to her mother with a comprehending smile. f.a.n.n.y's face was gaunt, but her grey eyes were wide and compelling, her mouth was firm and bright; and her hair, her father often said, resembled the fire at the top of Shadrach. Howat knew that she was as impersonal, as essentially unstirred, as himself; but he had a clear doubt of Mrs.

Gilkan. The latter was too anxious to welcome him to their unpretending home; she obviously moved to throw f.a.n.n.y and himself together, and to disparage such suits as honest Dan Hesa's. He wondered if the older woman thought he might marry her daughter. And wondering he came to the conclusion that the other thing would please the mother almost as well.

She had given him to understand that at f.a.n.n.y's age she would know how to please any Mr. Howat Penny that chance fortune might bring her.

That some such worldly advice had been poured into f.a.n.n.y's ears he could not doubt; and he admired the girl's obvious scorn of such wiles and surrenders. She sat frankly beside him now, as he finished a wretched supper, and asked about the country in regions to which she had not penetrated. ”It's a three days' trip,” he finished a recital of an excursion of his own.

”I'd like to go,” she returned; ”but I suppose I couldn't find it alone.”

He was considering the possibility of such a journey with her--it would be pleasant in the extreme--when her mother interrupted them from the foot of the stair.

”A sensible girl,” she declared, ”would think about seeing the sights of a city, and of a cherry-derry dress with ribbons, instead of all this about tramping off through the woods with a ragged skirt about your naked knees.”

f.a.n.n.y Gilkan's face darkened, and she glanced swiftly at Howat Penny. He was filling a pipe, unmoved. Such a trip as he had outlined, with f.a.n.n.y, was fastening upon his thoughts. It would at once express his entire att.i.tude toward the world, opinion, and the resentful charcoal burners.

”You wouldn't really go,” he said aloud, half consciously.

The girl frowned in an effort of concentration, gazing into the thin light of the dying fire and two watery tallow dips. Her coa.r.s.ely spun dress, coloured with sa.s.safras bark and darker than the yellow hickory stain, drew about her fine shoulders and full, plastic breast. ”I'd like it,” she repeated; ”but afterward. There is father--”

She had said father, but Howat Penny determined that she was thinking of Dan Hesa; Dan was as strong as himself, if heavier; a personable young man. He would make a good husband. But that, he added, was in the future; Dan Hesa apparently didn't want to marry f.a.n.n.y to-morrow, that week. Meanwhile a trip with him to the headwaters of a creek would not injure her in the least. His contempt of a world petty and iron-bound in endless pretence, fanning his smouldering and sullen resentment in general, flamed out in a determination to take her with him if possible.

It would conclusively define, state, his att.i.tude toward ”men herding like cattle.” He did not stop to consider what it might define for f.a.n.n.y Gilkan. In the stir of his rebellious self there was no pause for vicarious approximations. If he thought of her at all it was in the indirect opinion that she was better without such a noodle as Dan Hesa threatened to become.

”I'd get two horses from the Forge,” he continued, apparently to his mildly speculative self; ”a few things, not much would be necessary.

That gun you carry,” he addressed f.a.n.n.y indirectly, ”is too heavy. I'll get you a lighter, bound in bra.s.s.”

She repeated sombrely, leaning with elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, ”And afterwards--”

”I thought you were free of that,” he observed; ”it sounds like the town women, the barnyard crowd. I thought you were an independent person. Certainly,” he went on coldly, ”you can't mistake my att.i.tude. I like you, but I am not in the least interested in any way that--that jour mother might appreciate. I am neither a seducer nor the type that marries.”

”I understand that, Howat,” she a.s.sured him; ”and I think, I'm not sure but I think, that what you mean wouldn't bother me either. Anyhow it shouldn't spoil the fun of our trip. But no one else in the world would believe that simple truth. If you could stay there, in those splendid woods or a world like them, why, it would be heaven. But you have to come back, you have to live on, perhaps for a great while, in the world of Shadrach and Myrtle Forge. I'm not sure that I'd refuse if you asked me to go, Howat. I just don't know if a woman can stand alone, for that's what it would come to afterward, against a whole lifeful of misjudgment. It might be better in the end, for everybody, if she continued home, made the best of things with the others.”

”You may possibly be right,” he told her with a sudden resumption of indifference. After all, it was unimportant whether or not f.a.n.n.y Gilkan went with him to the source of the stream he had discovered. Every one, it became more and more evident, was alike, monotonous. He wondered again, lounging back against the wall, about the French forts, outposts in a vast wilderness. There was an increasing friction between the Province and France, the legacy of King George's War, but Howat Penny's allegiance to place was as conspicuous by its absence as the other communal traits. Beside that, beyond Kaskaskia, at St. Navier and the North, there was little thought of French or English; the sheer problem of existence there drowned other considerations. He would, he thought, go out in the spring ... leave Myrtle Forge with its droning anvil, the endless, unvaried turning of water wheel, and the facile, trivial chatter in and about the house. David Forsythe, back from England in the capacity of master of fluxing metals, might acquire his, Howat's, interest in the Penny iron.

f.a.n.n.y Gilkan said, ”You'll burn a hole in your coat with that pipe.” He roused himself, and she moved across the room and pinched the smoking wicks. The embers on the hearth had expired, and the fireplace was a sooty, black cavern. f.a.n.n.y, at the candles, was the only thing clearly visible; the thin radiance slid over the turn of her cheek; her hovering hand was like a cut-paper silhouette. It was growing late; Thomas Gilkan would soon be back from the Furnace; he must go. Howat had no will to avoid Gilkan, but the thought of the necessary conversational exchange wearied him.

The sound of footsteps approached the house from without; it was, he thought, slightly annoyed, the founderman; but the progress deflected by the door, circled to a window at the side. A voice called low and urgent, ”Seemy! Seemy!” It was repeated, and there was an answering mutter from the stair, a thick murmur and a deep sigh.

The cast boy slipped crumpled and silent in bare feet across the floor.

”Yes,” he called back, rapidly waking.

The voice from without continued, ”They're going to start up the Oley.”

”What is it?” f.a.n.n.y demanded.

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