VIII

THE DRAKE WHO HAD MEANS OF HIS OWN

So then he remarked bitterly: “I suppose ducks crow back East—or bark.”

He was perfectly welcome to all the satire he could invent; I was not to be turned from my curiosity about the clamor in the water outside, and as I watched I said aloud: “There’s something behind it.”

This brought him to the window, where, as he stood silent beside me, I could feel his impatience as definitely as if it had been a radiator. The matter was that he had his mind running on something and I had my mind running on something—and they weren’t the same things; and each of us wished the other to be interested in his own thing.

“Something behind it,” echoed Scipio slightingly. “Behind every quack you’ll find a duck.”

To this I returned no answer.

“Maybe they have forgot themselves and laid eggs in the water,” suggested Scipio.

“Do your Western ducks lay much in September?” I inquired, with chill.

The noise in the pond, which had died down for an instant, was now set up again—loud, remonstrant, voluble; the two birds sat in the middle of the water and lifted up their heads and screamed to the sky.

“That’s what they’ve done,” said Scipio; “and they can’t locate the eggs. Well, it’d make me holler too. Say,” he pleaded, “what’s the point in your point, anyhow? I want to show you about those game laws.”

“Must I hear it all over again and must I say it all over again?” I responded, not taking my eye from the pond.

“You’ve never heard it wunst yet, for you’ve never listened.”

“I did. I didn’t begin to wander till you began repeating the whole thing for the third time. And now I’ll say, for the fourth time, it’s a close season till 1912. There they go out of the pond, single file—Duchess in the lead. The Duchess has purple in her wings; the Countess has none.”

“Oh, soap fat!” said Scipio.

“And they’ve gone to feed on the grain in the haystack. There’s Sir Francis waiting for them by the woodpile. He’s the drake.”

“Oh, soap fat!” repeated Scipio.

I followed the ducks until they had waddled out of sight.

“Every now and then, during the day,” I said, “they go through that same performance: sit in the water and scream louder each minute, then come out and head for the haystack in the most orderly, quiet manner, just after having given every symptom of falling into convulsions. Now I’m going to find out what that means. And what I am wondering at,” I continued, “is why you do not suggest that they are screaming at the game laws.”

Well, we sat down then and had it out about those game laws; and it is but right to confess that they were more important to poor Scipio than the ducks were to me. First we took section 25 to pieces, dug its sentences to the bottom, and carefully lifted out every scrap which gave promise of containing sense. It was no child’s task. You didn’t reach the first full stop for a hundred and twelve words—nothing but commas; it was like being lost in the sage-brush—and, by the time the full stop did come, your head—but let me quote the sentence:—

“It shall be unlawful for any person or persons to kill any antelope until the open season for other game animals in 1915, when only one antelope may be killed by any person hunting legally, or to kill any moose, elk or mountain sheep until the open season for other game animals, in 1912, when only one male moose may be killed by any person hunting legally, or to kill any elk or mountain sheep in any part of this state, except in Fremont County, Uinta County, Carbon County and that part of Bighorn County and Park County west of the Bighorn River, until the open season for game animals in 1915.”

To tell you all that we said before we had finished with this would be worse than useless—it would be profane; enough that I stuck to the conclusion I had reached when I read the section in the East—no hunting anything anywhere for anybody until 1912. On the strength of it I had left my rifle at home and brought only my fishing rod.

“If it is your way,” said Scipio, “what do you make of section 26? ‘It shall be unlawful for any person or persons to hunt, pursue or kill any elk, deer or mountain sheep except from September twenty-fifth to November thirtieth of each year.’” He yelled the last two words at me.

But I merely clapped my hands to my brow.

“And if it is your way,” Scipio pursued, playing his ace, “what do you make of Honey Wiggin taking a party out next Monday for six weeks?”

“Why, they’ll simply all be arrested.”

“No; they’ll not. I’ve saw Honey’s license with this year stamped in red figures right acrost it, just as plain as headlines.”

What could one reply to that? I picked up the pamphlet and stared at the page.

Scipio ruminated. “Will you tell me,” he said, “why, in a country where everybody’s born equal, the legislature should be a bigger fool than anybody else?”

“It’s a free country,” I reminded him. “Every man has the right to be an ass here.”

But Scipio still brooded. “Well,” he said, “if I was a legislator—” he stopped.

“You’re not qualified,” said I.

“Not?”

“You haven’t sufficient command of the English language.”

“What!” cried Scipio; for vocabulary is his chief pride and I had actually touched him.

“No. You couldn’t cook up two paragraphs of your mother tongue that would defy any sane human intelligence.”

“They have done worse than that to me,” he said ruefully. “They have lost me my season’s job. The party I was to take out read them laws same as you did, and they stayed back East and made other plans. That’s what I got in last night’s mail”

“Well, I haven’t stayed back East,” I said. “The fishing’s about done, but I want an excuse for another month or two of outing. My things can get here in twelve days—we’ll hunt, and I’ll be your season’s job. And,” I added, “now I shall have time to study the ducks.”

We launched then into discussion of horses and camp outfit, copiously arguing what the legislature would let a man hunt, pursue, or kill in a season it declared to be open for no big game at all, until from eleven the clock went round to noon; and in the kitchen the voice of Mrs. Culloden was heard, calling clearly to her young bridegroom in the corral—calling too clearly.

“Well, Jimsy,” the voice said, “are you going to get me any wood for this stove—or ain’t you?”

Our discussion dropped; we sat still; it was time for Scipio to be getting back across the river to his own cabin and dinner. He rose, put on his hat, and stood looking at me for a moment. Then he took his hat off and scratched his head, glancing toward the kitchen.

“Jimsy, did you hear me telling you about that wood?” came the voice of the young bride, a trifle clearer. “I seem to have to remind you of everything.”

Scipio’s bleached blue eye and his long, eccentric nose turned slowly once more on me. “My, but it’s turrable easy to get married,” was his word. He shoved his hat on again and was out of the door and on his horse; and I watched him ride down to the river and ford it. As he grew distant, my three ducks waddled back from the haystack to the pond. The Duchess led, the Countess followed; Sir Francis brought up the rear. But how could I attend to them while the following reached me through the door from the kitchen?

“If dinner’s late you can thank yourself, Jimsy.”

“Why, May, I split the wood for you right after breakfast. That corral gate—”

“Split the wood and leave me to carry it!”

“Well, I’ve been about as busy as I could be on the ditch; and that gate needs—”

“Never mind. Wash your hands and get ready now. Kiss me first.”

At this point it seemed best to go out of the sitting-room door and come presently into the kitchen by the other way, at the moment when my hostess was placing the hot food upon the table. It was good food, well cooked; and all the spoons and things were bright and clean. Bright and clean too, and very pretty, was the little bride. She was not twenty yet; Jimsy was not twenty-four; and as he sat down to his meal I saw her look at him with a look which I understood plainly: had no stranger been there to see, some more kissing would have occurred. Yet, what did she now find to say to him—she that so visibly adored him?

“Jimsy Culloden! Well, I guess you’ll never learn to brush your hair!”

Jimsy suddenly grinned. “Others have enjoyed it pretty well this way,” said he. “Tangled their hands all through it.” And his gray eyes twinkled at me. But the little woman’s blue eyes flashed and she sat up very stiff. “Before I asked you, that was,” Jimsy added.

Have I ever told you how Jimsy became married? I believe not—but it would take too long now; it will have to wait. His bachelor liveliness had not contributed to his mother’s peace of mind, but all was now well; the poker chips had gone I don’t know where; our beloved old card-table of past years stood now in the bridal bedroom, stifled in feminine drapery beyond

recognition; the bottles that in these days lay empty beyond the corral had contained merely tomato ketchup and such things; and here was Jimsy Culloden a stable citizen, an anchored man, county commissioner, selling vegetables, alfalfa, and horses, with me for a paying boarder in that new-established Wyoming industry which is locally termed dude-wrangling. The eastern “dude” is destined to replace Hereford cattle in Wyoming—and sheep also.

Jimsy was an anchored man, to be sure: might he possibly some day drag his anchor? I glanced at his blue-eyed May, so fair and competent, and I hoped her voice would not grow much clearer. I glanced at Jimsy, quietly eating, and wondered if a new look lately lurking in his eye—a look of slight bewilderment—would increase or pass.

“Didn’t I see Scipio Le Moyne ride away?” he asked me.

“Yes. It was dinner-time.”

“Couldn’t he stay here and eat?”

“There you go, Jimsy Culloden; wanting to feed this whole valley every day, just like you was rich!”

Jimsy’s gray eyes blinked and he attended to his plate. The failure of that little joke about tangled hair was the probable cause of his present silence, and the bride appealed to me.

“Ain’t that so?” she said. “You’ve been here before. You know how folks loaf around up and down this valley and stop to dinner, and stay for supper, and just eat people up!”

She was so perfectly right in principle that my only refuge from the perilous error of taking sides was the somewhat lame remark: “Well, Scipio isn’t a dead-beat, you know.”

“There!” cried Jimsy, triumphantly.

“Mr. Culloden would have fed a dead-beat just the same,” returned the lady promptly.

Again she was entirely right. From good heart and long habit Jimsy made welcome every passing traveler and his horse. When Wyoming was young and its ranches lay wide, desert miles apart, such hospitality was the natural, unwritten law; but now, in this day of increasing settlements and of rainbowed folders of railroads painting a promised land for all comers, a young ranchman could easily be kept poor by the perpetual drain on his groceries and his oats. Jimsy’s wife was stepping between him and his bachelor shiftlessness in all directions, and the propitious signs oi her influence were everywhere. Indoors and out, a crisp, new appearance of things harbingered good fortune. Why, she had actually started him on reforming his gates! Did you ever see the thing they were frequently satisfied to call a gate in Wyoming? A sordid wreck of barbed wire and rotten wood, hung across the fence-gap by a rusty loop, raggedly dangling like the ribs of a broken umbrella.

The telephone bell called Mrs. Culloden to the sitting-room near the end of dinner.

Mrs. Sedlaw, her dear friend and schoolmate living five miles up the valley, was inviting them to dinner next day to eat roast grouse.

“Let’s go,” said Jimsy.

“And you quit your ditch and me quit my ironing?” answered the clear voice. “Thank you ever so much, Susie; we’d just love to, but Jimsy can’t go off the ranch this week and I’d not like to leave him all alone, even if I wasn’t as busy as I can be with our wash.” There followed exchange of gossip and laughter over it, and much love sent to and fro—and the receiver was hung up.

“As for grouse,” I said to Jimsy, for his silence was on my nerves, “I will now go and catch you some trout superior to any bird that flies.”

Sir Francis, the snow-white drake, stood by the woodpile as I crossed the enclosure on my way to the river. In the pond the lady ducks were loudly quacking, but I passed them by. I desired the solitude of Buffalo Horn, its pools, its cottonwoods, its quiet presiding mountains; and I walked up its stream for a mile, safe from that clear voice and from the bewildered eye of Jimsy, my once blithe, careless friend.

Unless it be from respect for Izaak Walton and tradition, I know not why I ever carry in my fly-book, or ever use, a brown-hackle; it has wasted hours of fishing time for me. The hours this afternoon it did not waste, because, under the spell of the large day that shone upon the valley, my thoughts dwelt not on fish, but with delicious vagueness upon matrimony, the game laws and those ducks. With the waters of Buffalo Horn talking near by and singing far off, I watched all things rather than my line and often wholly stopped to smell the wild, clean odor of the sage-brush and draw the beauty of everything into my very depths. So from pool to pool I waded down the south fork of Buffalo Horn and had caught nothing when I reached Sheep Creek, by Scipio’s ranch. Here I changed to a grizzly king and soon had killed four trout.

Scipio was out in his meadow gathering horses, and he came to the bank with a question:—

“Find the eggs them ducks laid in the water?”

“Jimsy wanted to know why you didn’t stay to dinner,” was my answer.

“Huh!” Scipio watched me land a half-pound fish. Then: “They ain’t been married a year yet.”

I cast below a sunken log and took a small trout, which I threw back, while Scipio resumed:

“Why I didn’t stop to dinner! Huh! Say, when did they quit havin’ several wives at wunst?”

“Who quit?”

“Why, them sheep-men back in the Bible—Laban and Solomon and them old-timers. What made ’em quit?”

“They didn’t all quit. There, you’ve made me lose that fish. Are you thinking two wives would be twice as bad as one?”

“You’ll get another fish. I’m thinking they wouldn’t be half as bad as one.”

Certain passages in Scipio’s earlier days came into my mind, but I did not mention them to him. Possibly he was thinking of them himself.

“Two at once is not considered moral in this country,” I said.

Scipio mused. “I’m not sure I’ve ever clearly understood about morals,” he muttered. “Are you going to keep that whitefish?”

“I always keep a few for the hens. Makes ’em lay.”

This caused Scipio to look frowningly across Buffalo Horn to where the Culloden Ranch buildings lay clear in the blue crystal of the afternoon light. “Marriage ain’t learned in a day,” he remarked, “any more than ropin’ stock is. He ain’t learned how to be married yet.”

Again I thought of Scipio’s past adventures and remembered that the best critics are they who have failed in art.

“Did you mean what you said about hunting with me?” Scipio now inquired.

“Sure thing!” I returned, “if you’re right about Honey Wiggin.”

“Oh, I’m right enough. You’ll see him come by here Monday.”

“Then I’ll send East for my things,” I said.

“Well, I’ll be looking for a man to cook and horse-wrangle,” said Scipio.

As I approached the ranch across the level pasture with my fish, I could hear from afar the quack of the ducks, invisible in the pond, and could see from afar the snow-white figure of the drake, stationary by the woodpile. Now for the first time the idea glimmered upon me that he had something to do with it. But what? I came to the breast of the little pond and stood upon it to watch the Countess and the Duchess. They were making a great noise; but over what? Sometimes they sat still and screamed together; a punctuation of silence would then follow. Next one or the other would take it up alone. Was it a sort of service they were holding to celebrate the sunset? I looked up at the lustrous crimson on the mountain wall—a mile of giant battlements sending forth a rose glow as if from within, like something in a legend; birds and beasts might well celebrate such a marvel—but the Countess and Duchess were doing this at other hours, when nothing particular seemed to be happening. I looked at the drake by the woodpile. He had not moved a quarter of an inch. He stood in profile, most becomingly. His neat, spotless white, his lemon-colored bill, his orange-colored legs, his benign yet confident attitude, as if of personal achievement taken for granted but not thrust forward—all this put me in mind of something, but so faintly that I could not just then make out what it was. Shouts from the Duchess at the top of her voice hastily recalled my attention to the pond.

I expected to find something sudden was wrong. Not at all. The water was without a wrinkle, the ducks floated motionless: yet there had been a note, a quality, urgent, piercingly remonstrant, in those quacks of the Duchess. She might have been calling for the constabulary, the fire brigade, and the health department. And then, without change for better or for worse in anything around us that I could see, the two birds swam placidly to land. They got out on the bank, wiggled their tails, stood on their toes to flap their wings, and, this brief drying process being over, they took their way to the drake. He stood by the woodpile, stock-still in profile; he had not yet moved a quarter of an inch; it seemed to me—but I was not certain—that his ladies raced as they drew near him. When they reached him he turned with gravity and headed for the haystack. They fell in behind him and the three waddled and wobbled solemnly toward their goal, squeezed under the fence and were lost to view.

I took in my trout to Mrs. Culloden, who praised their size and my skill. On the subject of giving her hens a diet of whitefish, she told me it was her great ambition so to manage that before the moulting fowls should wholly stop laying the spring pullets should have begun to lay.

“Jimsy is real fond of eggs,” she explained, “and I want him to have them.”

I further learned that whitefish cooked were better than whitefish raw, which often tainted the eggs with a fishy taste. I stood high in the little bride’s favor because I was helping her to please Jimsy. Lying abed that night in my one-room cabin, I said aloud, abruptly: “That was a protest.”

I know nothing about what they call our subconscious workings, save that I am choke-full of them; I meant the Duchess. Apparently my subconscious works had been dealing with her ever since the scene at the pond. Thus a conclusion had popped out of my mouth full-fledged before I knew it was there. “Yes,” I repeated; “she was protesting. They both were.”

The works, however, must have stopped after that for the night—or turned to other activity—for next morning I went down to the pond with nothing beyond the two theories of yesterday: that it was protest and that the drake was somehow at the bottom of it. But I scored no advance in my knowledge. All three birds were in the water and did not come out while I remained there; nothing more of their plan of life was revealed to me. Still, I saw one new thing. Sir Francis swam about, with the Duchess and Countess in a suite, following close, but never crowding him. What they did do was crowd each other. A struggle for place occurred between them from time to time; and, although all the rest of the time they were like sisters, when the struggle was on it was bitter.

I must have stayed watching them for half an hour to make sure of this and I know that there were moments when they would have gladly killed each other. Sir Francis never took the slightest notice of it, though he must have been well aware of it, since it always went on some six inches behind his back. The Countess would attempt to swim up closer to him, at which the Duchess would instantly crook her neck sidewise at her and, savagely undulating her head, would utter quick, poisonous sounds that trembled with fury. To these the Countess would retort, crooking and undulating too; thus they would swim with their necks at right angles, raging at each other and crowding for place. Sometimes the Duchess darted her bill out and bit the Countess, who was of a milder nature, I gradually discerned. The admirable ignorance which Sir Francis preserved of all this testified plainly to his moral balance, and filled me with curiosity and respect. Whatever was going on behind him, whether peace or war, he swam quietly on or stopped as it pleased him, with never a change in the urbanity of his eye and carriage.

It came to me that afternoon what his attitude at the woodpile essentially was. He stood there again alone—the ducks were quacking in the pond—and as I looked at his neat white body and the lemon-colored bill and orange-colored legs, all presented in the same dignified profile, I saw that his was by instinct the historical portrait attitude: Perry after Lake Erie, Webster before replying to Hayne, Washington on being notified of his appointment as Commander-in-Chief—you will understand what I mean. And if you smile at my absorption in these little straws from the farmyard you have never known the blessing of true leisure. To drop clean out of my mind for a while the law and investment of trust funds and the self-induced hysterics of Wall Street, and study a perfectly irrelevant, unuseful trifle, such as the family life of Sir Francis and his ladies, brings a pastoral health to the spirit and to the biliary duct.

There was an error in my conclusions about the Countess and Duchess which I did not have a chance to perceive for a day or two, because our domestic harmony was mysteriously disturbed. That clear note in May’s voice waked up again, this time a tone or so higher; and it was kept awake by one thing after another. It began after a wagonful of people had passed the ranch on its way down the valley to town. I was off by the river when they stopped a few minutes on the road outside the fence. One could not see who they were at that distance. Jimsy left his ditch work and talked to them and when they had gone returned to it. At our next meal Jimsy’s eye was bewildered—and something more—and May’s voice was bad for digestion. As soon as my last mouthful was swallowed I sought the solitude of my cabin and read a book until bedtime. How should one connect that wagonload of people with the new and higher tide of unrest? Nothing was more the custom than this stopping

of neighbors to chat over the fence. May’s voice and Jimsy’s eye kept me as often and as far from their neighborhood as I could get.

It was Scipio, the next time I saw him, who began at once: “Did you see Mrs. Faxon?”

“Who’s she?”

“Gracious! I thought everybody in this country knowed her. She’s an alfalfa widow.”

“Well, I seem to have somehow missed her.”

“She went down to town the other day. Pity you’ve missed her. Awful good-looker.”

“Well, I’ll try to meet her.”

“Her and Jimsy used to meet a whole heap,” said Scipio.

“Oh!” said I. “H’m! All the same May’s a fool.”

“Did she get mad? Did she get mad?” demanded Scipio, vivaciously.

“Lord!” said I, thinking of it. I told Scipio how Jimsy had talked over the fence to the scarlet fragment of his past for perhaps three minutes in the safe presence of a wagonload of witnesses, and how in consequence May had gone up into the air. “To love acceptably needs tact,” I moralized; but while I expatiated on this, Scipio’s attention wandered.

“You saw Honey Wiggin go up the river with his dudes?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And two other parties go up?”

“Yes.”

“Any further notions about the game laws?”

“Nothing—except it’s the merest charity to assume they made them when they were drunk.”

“Sure thing! I guess I’ll have a cook when your camping stuff comes.”

My stuff was due in not many days; and as I walked home from Scipio’s cabin I felt gratitude to the game laws for the part they had played in delaying me in this valley where each day seemed the essence distilled from the beauty of seven usual days. Even as I waded Buffalo Horn I stopped to look up and down the course that it made between its bordering cottonwoods. A week ago these had been green; but autumn had come one night and now here was Buffalo Horn unwinding its golden miles between the castle walls of the mountains. Amid all this august serenity I walked the slower through fear of having it marred by the voice of May. I lingered outside the house and it was the voice of the Duchess that I heard. Yes, I was grateful to the game laws. They, too, caused me to learn the whole truth about Sir Francis.

On this particular evening I saw where had been my error regarding the Countess and Duchess. I have spoken of the Countess’ milder nature, which I thought always put her behind the Duchess in their struggle for precedence. It did not. Quite often she made up in skill what she lacked in force and I now saw the first example of it. They were all coming to the pond for their evening swim, the two ducks scolding and walking with their necks at right angles. Sir Francis was in the lead, his head gently inclined toward the water. As he got in the Duchess made an evident miscalculation. She thought he was going to swim to the right, and she splashed hastily in that direction. But he swam to the left. The Countess was there in a flash. She got herself next to him and held her place round and round the pond, crooking her neck and quacking backward at the enraged, defeated Duchess.

Twice in the following forenoon I saw this recur; and before supper I knew that it was a part of their daily lives. Sometimes it happened on land, sometimes in the water, and always in the same way—a miscalculation as to which way the drake was going to turn. It was the duck who had been nearest to him that always made the miscalculation, and she invariably lost her place by it. Then she would rage in the rear while the other scoffed back at her. Neither of them could have been entirely a lady or they would have known how to conduct their quarrel without all this displeasing publicity. But there can be no doubt that Sir Francis was a perfect gentleman. Not only was he never aware of what was happening, but he so bore himself as wholly to avoid being made ridiculous. That the Duchess was a little near-sighted I learned when I took to feeding them with toast brought from breakfast.

My time was growing short and I began to fear that I might be gone hunting before I had penetrated the mystery of the historical portrait attitude near the woodpile and the protests of the ducks in the water. This was going on straight along, only I had never managed to see the beginning of it. Therefore I fed them on toast to draw closer to them, and I tried to give each a piece, turn about; but only too often, when toast meant for the Duchess had fallen in the water directly under her nose, she would peer helplessly about and the Countess would dip down quickly and get it. Sometimes the Duchess saw it one second too late, when their heads would literally collide, and the Duchess, under the impression she had got it, would snap her bill two or three times on nothing, and then perceive the Countess chewing the morsel. At this she always savagely bit the Countess; and still, through it all, the drake sustained his admirable ignorance. My feeding device triumphed. I did learn about the woodpile.

This is what I saw. They had been swimming for a while after eating the toast. Sir Francis had finally swallowed a last hard bit of crust after repeatedly soaking it in the water. He looked about and evidently decided it was time for the haystack. He got out on the bank, but the ladies did not. He turned and looked at them; they continued swimming. Then he walked slowly away in silence, and as he grew distant their swimming became agitated. Reaching the woodpile, he turned and stood in bland, eminent profile. Then the ducks in the pond began. The Duchess quacked; the Countess quacked; their voices rose and became positively wild. A person who did not know would have hastened to see if they needed assistance. This performance lasted four minutes by my watch—the drake statuesque by the woodpile, the ducks screaming in the water. Then, as I have before described, they succumbed to the power at the woodpile. They swam ashore, flapped to dry themselves, and made for Sir Francis like people catching a train. He did not move until they had reached him, when all sought the haystack.

So now I understood clearly that it was he who made their plans, timed all their comings and goings, and that they, bitterly as they disliked leaving the water until they were ready, nevertheless had to leave it when he was ready. Of course, if either of them had had any real mind, they would have realized long before that it was of no use to attempt to cope with him and they would have got out quickly when he did, instead of making this scene several times every day. But why did they get out at all when they didn’t want to? Why didn’t they let him go to the haystack by himself? What was the secret of his power? It was they who were always fighting and biting; his serenity was flawless.

I stood on the breast of the pond, turning this over. If you have outrun me and arrived at the truth, it just shows once again how superior readers are to writers in intelligence. I was not destined to fathom it. Many a problem has taken two to solve it and it was Jimsy who—but let that wait. Jimsy came across from the stable and spoke to me now:—

“What are you studying?”

“I have been studying your ducks.”

He looked over at the cabin, where May could be seen moving about in the kitchen, and I saw his face grow suddenly tender. “They’re hers,” he said softly. “She kind o’ wanted ducks round here and so one day I brought ’em to her from town. Then I made this pond for ’em—just dammed the creek across this little gully. Nothing’s wrong with ’em?”

“Oh, no. But they’ve set me guessing.”

He did not believe my story, though he listened with his gray eyes fixed on mine. “That’s wonderful,” he said; “but you’ve made it up. I’d have noticed a thing like that.”

“I don’t think you would. You’re working all day with your stock and your ditches. Think what a loafer I am.”

“It’s most too extraordinary,” he said, and stood looking at the woodpile. He was not really thinking about what I had told him; I could feel that.

“Well, Jimsy!”

We both started a little. It was May, who had come round the corner of the house, and the setting sun shone upon her and made her quite lovely, where she stood shading her eyes, with a little hair floating one side of her forehead.

“Well, Jimsy! Dreaming again! Do you know what time it is? The way you’ve took to dreaming is something terrible!”

Jimsy went into the house.

I was glad that two days more would see me out of this.

Next morning I stood justified—oh, more than justified—in Jimsy’s eyes. No one could have anticipated such a performance at the pond as I was able to show him—it bore me out and surpassed anything I had told him—and no one could have foretold that it would fire Jimsy with a curiosity equal to mine.

The ceremony of the toast was in progress when Jimsy, crossing to the corral, saw me thus engaged. He stuck his hands into his pockets and strolled across to the water’s edge, wearing a broad grin of indulgence.

“Awful busy, you are!” said he.

“Just watch them,” said I.

“Oh, I’ve got a day’s work to do.”

“I’m aware,” I retorted, “that scientific observation doesn’t look like work to the ignorant.”

“What’re you trying to find out?”

“I told you last night. I can’t see how that drake keeps those ducks in order.”

“Oh, I guess he don’t keep ’em in order.”

“I tell you he has them under his thumb.”

Jimsy cast a careless eye upon the birds. They had finished the toast and were swimming about. The quacks of the Duchess were merely quacks to him; he did not hear that she was saying to the Countess: “Hah, Hah, Hah! How do you fancy a back seat this morning?”

“One feels mortified, of course,” I explained to Jimsy, “that she should betray her spite so crudely—a sad but common thing in our country.”

“In the name of God, what are you talking about?” demanded Jimsy.

“Oh, I’m not in the least crazy. New York stinks with people like that.”

At this moment the usual thing happened in the pond—the Duchess made a miscalculation. The drake swam suddenly left instead of right, and the Countess jumped to the favored place. Now it was she who quacked backward at her discountenanced rival.

“She is really the sweeter nature of the two,” I said. But Jimsy was attending to the ducks with an awakened interest; in fact, he was now caught in the same fascination that had held me for so many days. He took his hands out of his pockets and followed the ducks keenly.

“I believe you weren’t lyin’ to me,” he remarked presently.

“You wait! Just you wait!” I exclaimed.

He watched a little longer. “D’you suppose,” he said, “it’s his feathers they love so?”

“His feathers?” I repeated.

“Those two curly ones in his tail. They’re crooked plumb enticing, like they were saying, ‘Come, girls!’”

This reminded me of Jimsy’s unbrushed mound of hair and May’s coldness at his reference to it. “Feathers would hardly account for everything,” I said.

A last spark of doubt flickered in Jimsy. “Are you joshing about this thing?” he asked.

“Just you wait,” I said again.

We did not have to wait. In the judgment of the drake it was time for the haystack; the ducks thought it too soon. All began as usual. Sir Francis had reached the woodpile and taken his attitude, the first protesting scream from the pond had risen to the sky, Jimsy’s face was causing me acute pleasure, when the Duchess did an entirely new thing. She swam to the inlet and began to waddle slowly up the trickling stream. Then I perceived a few yards beyond her the cleanings of some fish which had been thrown out. It was for these she was making.

“She has ruined everything!” I lamented.

“Wait!” said Jimsy. He whispered it. His new faith was completer than mine.

The Duchess heavily proceeded. In my childhood I used sometimes to see old ladies walking slowly, shod in soft, wide, heelless things made of silk or satin—certainly not of leather, except the soles—which seem to have gone out. The Duchess trod as if she had these same mid-Victorian feet and she began gobbling the fish. If this was any strain upon the drake, he did not show it. The Countess now discerned from the pond what the Duchess was doing and she was instantly riven with contending emotions. The waves from her legs agitated the whole pond as she swam wildly; sometimes she looked at the drake, sometimes at the fish, and between the looks she quacked as if she would die. Then she, too, got out and went toward the fish. I looked apprehensively at the figure by the woodpile, but it might have been a painted figure in very truth. I think Jimsy was holding his breath. When a moral conflict becomes visible to the naked eye there is something in it that far outmatches any mere thumping of fists; here was Sir Francis battling for his empire in silence and immobility, with his ladies getting all the fish. And just then the Countess wavered. She saw Sir Francis, white and monumental, thirty yards away; and she saw the Duchess and the fish about three more steps from her nose. She stood still and then she broke down. She turned and fled back to her lord. It cannot be known what the more forcible Duchess would have done but for this. As it was, she looked up and saw the Countess—and immediately went to pieces herself. I had not known that she had it in her to run so.

I cannot repeat Jimsy’s first oath as he stared at the triumphant drake leading his family to the haystack. After silence he turned to me. “Wouldn’t that kill you?” he said very quietly; and said no more, but began to walk slowly away.

“Now,” I called after him, “will you tell me how he manages to keep head of his house like that?”

If Jimsy had any hypothesis to offer then, he did not offer it, and before he had reached the corral May appeared. I’ll not report her talk this time, it was the usual nursery governess affair: did Jimsy know that he had wasted half an hour when he ought to have hitched up and gone for wood up Dead Timber Creek, and didn’t he know there was wood for just one day left and it would take him the whole day? I escaped to my fishing before she had done and I took my dinner with Scipio.

It is wicked to fish in October, but we ate the trout; and I must tell you of a discovery: when artificial flies fail, and frost has finished the grasshoppers, the housefly is a deadly bait! I am glad at last to have accounted for the presence of the housefly in a universe of infinite love.

At supper I was sorry that Scipio and I had not got off to the mountains that day. Jimsy was still out. He had brought, it appeared, one load of wood from Dead Timber Creek and had gone for another. It was May’s opinion that he should have returned by now. I hardly thought so, but this made small difference to May. She was up from table and listening at the open door three times before our restless meal was over. Next she lighted a lantern and hung it out upon a gate-post of one of the outer corrals, that Jimsy might be guided home from afar. In the following thirty minutes she went out twice again to listen and soon after this she sent me out to the lantern to make sure it was burning brightly.

“He would see the windows at any rate,” I told her.

But now she had begun to be frightened and could not sit in her chair for more than a few moments at a time.

“What o’clock is it?” she asked me.

It was seven forty-five and I think she fancied it was midnight. If Jimsy had been six years old and a perfect fool to boot she could not have been more distracted than she presently became.

“Why, Mrs. Culloden,” I remonstrated, “Jimsy was raised in this valley. He knows his way about.”

She did not hear me and now she seized the telephone. Into the ears of one neighbor after another she poured questions up and down the valley. It was idle to remind her that Dead Timber Creek was five miles to the south of us and that the Whitlows, who lived six miles to the north, were not likely to have seen Jimsy. The whole valley quickly learned that he had not come back with his second load of wood by eight o’clock and that she was asking them all if they knew anything about it. In the space of twenty minutes with the telephone she had made him ridiculous throughout the precinct; and then at ten minutes past eight, while she was ringing up her friend Mrs. Sedlaw for the second time, in came Jimsy. The wood and the wagon were safe in the corral, he was safe in the house and hungry; and, of course, she hadn’t heard him arrive because of the noise of the telephone. He had been at the stable for the last ten minutes, attending to the horses.

“And you never had the sense to tell me!” she cried.

“Tell you what?” He had not taken it in. “Gosh, but that chicken looks good! What’s that lantern out there for?” He was now seated and helping himself to the food.

“And that’s all you’ve got to say to me!” she said. And then the deluge came—not of tears, but words.

Somewhere inside of Jimsy was an angel, whatever else he contained. Throughout that foolish, galling scene made in my presence before I could escape, never a syllable of what he must have been feeling came from him, but only good-natured ejaculations—not many and rather brief, to be sure. When he learned the reason for the lantern he laughed aloud. This set her off and she rushed into the story of her telephoning. Then, and then alone, it was on the verge of being too much for him. He laid down his knife and fork and leaned back for a second, but the angel won. He resumed his meal; only a brick-red sunset of color spread from his collar to his hair—and his eyes were not gray, but black.

That was what I saw after I had got away to my cabin and was in bed: the man’s black eyes fixed on his plate and the pretty girl standing by the stove and working off her needless fright in an unbearable harangue.

Audibly I sighed, sighed with audible relief, when the Culloden Ranch lay a mile behind Scipio and me and our packhorses the next day. Jimsy had been as self-controlled in the morning as on the night before—except that no man can control the color of his eyes. The murky storm that hung in Jimsy’s eyes was the kind that does not blow over, but breaks. Was May blind to such a sign? At breakfast she told him that the next time he went for wood she would go to see that he got back for supper! I told Scipio that if things were not different when we returned I should move over to his cabin.

“You’d never have figured a girl could get Jimsy buffaloed!” said Scipio.

“He’s not buffaloed a little bit,” I returned.

“Ain’t he goin’ to do nothin’?”

“I don’t know what he’ll do.”

Scipio rode for a while, thinking it over. “If I had a wife,” he said, “and she got to thinkin’ she was my mother, I’d take a dally with her.” His meaning was not clear; but he made it so: “I’d take her—well, not on my knee, but acrost it.”

This I doubted, but said nothing. By and by we were passing the Sedlaw Ranch and Mrs. Sedlaw came running out rather hastily—and began speaking before she reached the gate.

“Oh, howdy-do?” said she; and she stood looking at me.

“Isn’t it perfect weather?” said I.

“Yes, indeed. And so you’re going hunting?”

“Yes. Want to come?”

“Why, wouldn’t that be nice! I thought Jimsy and May might be going with you.”

“Oh, they’re too busy. Good-by.”

She stood looking after me for some time and I saw her walk back to the house quite slowly.

There’s no need to tell of our hunting, or of the games of Cœur d’Alène Solo which Scipio and I and the useful cook played at night. In twenty days the snow drove us out of the mountains and we came down to human habitations—and to rife rumors. I don’t recall what we heard at the first cabin—or the second or the others—but we heard something everywhere. The valley was agog over Jimsy and May. Amid the wealth of details, I shall never know precisely what did happen. Jimsy had left her and gone to Alaska. He hadn’t gone to Alaska, but to New York, with Mrs. Faxon, the alfalfa widow. May had gone to her mother in Iowa. She hadn’t gone to Iowa; she was under the protection of Mrs. Sedlaw. Jimsy and the widow were living in open shame at the ranch. The ranch was shut up and old man Birdsall had seen Jimsy in town, driving a companion who wore splendid feathers. There was more, much more, but the only certainty seemed to be that Jimsy had broken loose and gone somewhere—and over this somewhere hovered an episodic bigamy. But where was Jimsy now? And May? Had the explosion blown them asunder forever? Was their marriage lying in fragments? On our last night in camp we talked of this more than we played Cœur d’Alène Solo. If anybody could tell me the true state of things it would be Mrs. Sedlaw, and at her door I knocked as I passed the next morning.

“Oh, howdy-do?” said I; and she sat looking at me for some moments.

“What luck?” said she. “Get an elk?”

“Yes,” said I. “How are things in general?”

“Elegant,” said she. “Give my love to dear May.”

“Thank you,” said I, not very appropriately.

The lady followed me to my horse. “Seems like only yesterday you came by,” was her parting word. She had certainly squared our accounts.

As we drew in sight of the Culloden Ranch you may imagine how I wondered what we should find there. A peaceful smoke rose from the kitchen chimney into the quiet air. Through the window I saw—yes, it was May!—most domestically preparing food. Outside by the pond a figure stood. It was Jimsy. He was feeding the ducks. I swung off my horse and hurried to Jimsy. Sir Francis was eating from his hand.

“How!” said he in cheerful greeting.

“How!” I returned.

“Get an elk?”

“Yes.”

“Sheep?”

“Yes.”

“Good!”

“You—you’re—you’re feeding the ducks.”

“Sure thing!—Say, I’ve found out his game.”

I pointed to Sir Francis. “His control, you mean?—how he keeps his hold?”

“Sure thing!” Jimsy pointed to the ducks. “Has ’em competin’ for him. Keeps ’em a-guessing. That’s his game.”

It stunned me for a second. Of course he didn’t know that the valley had talked to me.

“Why, how do you do?” cried May, cheerfully, coming out of the house.

Then I took it all in and I broke into scandalous, irredeemable laughter.

A bright flash came into Jimsy’s eyes as he took it all in—then he also gave way, but he blushed heavily.

“Whatever are you two laughing at?” exclaimed May. She looked radiant. That clear note was all melted from her voice. “Mr. Le Moyne, aren’t you going to stay to dinner?”

“Why, thank you!” said Scipio—polite, and embarrassed almost to stuttering.

To Sir Francis Jimsy gave the last piece of toast. It was a large one. If the drake was aware of the tie between Jimsy’s marital methods and his own, he betrayed it as little as he betrayed knowledge of all things which it is best never to notice.

Yes, I am grateful to the game laws. The next legislature made them intelligible.