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Page 83
"Too late! Just promised Jim Jacobs," said he, speaking up quick; it was
just business to him, you know.
I turned off, and I didn't say a word. I wouldn't have believed it, I
never would have believed it, that I could have felt so cut up about
such a little thing. Cullen looked round at me sharp.
"Hilloa, Hollis!" said he. "What's to pay?"
"Nothing, thank you, sir," says I, and walked off, whistling.
I had a little talk with Jim alone. He said he would take good care of
anything I'd give him, and carry it straight. So when night came I went
and borrowed Mr. Cullen's pencil, and Holt tore me off a bit of clean
brown paper he found in the flour-barrel, and I went off among the trees
with it alone. I built a little fire for myself out of a
huckleberry-bush, and sat down there on the snow to write. I couldn't do
it in the shanty, with the noise and singing. The little brown paper
wouldn't hold much; but these were the words I wrote,--I remember every
one of them,--it is curious now I should, and that more than twenty
years ago:--
"Dear Nancy,"--that was it,--"Dear Nancy, I can't get over it, and I
take them all back. And if anything happens coming down on the logs--"
I couldn't finish that anyhow, so I just wrote "Aaron" down in the
corner, and folded the brown paper up. It didn't look any more like
"Aaron" than it did like "Abimelech," though; for I didn't see a single
letter I wrote,--not one.
After that I went to bed, and wished I was Jim Jacobs.
Next morning somebody woke me up with a push, and there was the boss.
"Why, Mr. Cullen!" says I, with a jump.
"Hurry up, man, and eat your breakfast," said he; "Jacobs is down sick
with his cold."
"_Oh!_" said I.
"You and the pork must be back here day after to-morrow,--so be spry,"
said he.
I rather think I was, Johnny.
It was just eight o'clock when I started; it took some time to get
breakfast, and feed the nags, and get orders. I stood there, slapping
the snow with my whip, crazy to be off, hearing the last of what Mr.
Cullen had to say.
They gave me the two horses,--we hadn't but two,--oxen are tougher for
going in, as a general thing,--and the lightest team on the ground; it
was considerably lighter than Bob Stokes's. If it hadn't been for the
snow, I might have put the thing through in two days, but the snow was
up to the creatures' knees in the shady places all along; off from the
road, in among the gullies, you could stick a four-foot measure down
anywhere. So they didn't look for me back before Wednesday night.
"I must have that pork Wednesday night sure," says Cullen.
"Well, sir," says I, "you shall have it Wednesday noon, Providence
permitting; and you shall have it Wednesday night anyway."
"You will have a storm to do it in, I'm afraid," said he, looking at the
clouds, just as I was whipping up. "You're all right on the road, I
suppose?"
"All right," said I; and I'm sure I ought to have been, for the times
I'd been over it.
Bess and Beauty--they were the horses, and of all the ugly nags that
ever I saw Beauty was the ugliest--started off on a round trot, slewing
along down the hill; they knew they were going home just as well as I
did. I looked back, as we turned the corner, to see the boys standing
round in their red shirts, with the snow behind them, and the fire and
the shanties. I felt a mite lonely when I couldn't see them any more;
the snow was so dead still, and there were thirty miles of it to cross
before I could see human face again.
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