Garry Finds a Job
FREEZING still, but the bitterness had gone from the air. It was good to stand outdoors again, to be able to draw breath freely.
Edna drove over to see them. She had telephoned twice during the combined cold-and-flu siege to ask how they were getting along, but had not been able to visit.
“Just a lame shoulder,” she explained, “but I wouldn’t have dared try and hold the wheel straight over these roads. But I was bound to get up and see you all today, even if I had to drive with my teeth!”
Edna was resplendent in a new hat, a new scarf and sweater, and a pair of smart fur-lined driving gloves, a Christmas gift from one of her devoted “old ladies.”
“I put everything on to show you,” she laughed. “I got a pair of red bedroom slippers, too, and if it wasn’t for driving I’d have worn them. And that reminds me: back in the car there’s a Christmas present we got and couldn’t keep, because we’ve two like it already, so I brought it along for Caroline.”
“Couldn’t you get it exchanged?” Kay asked.
“Not this one you can’t. It comes in all sizes, but only one make.” She went back to the car and returned carrying a square grocer’s carton tied securely with twine. “Open it and see.”
Garry cut the string. There was a stirring and rustling inside, and a black suspicious nose poked out from a nest of tissue paper.
“A coon kitten from the state of Maine,” said Edna. “My aunt and uncle up there have more cats than you can shake a stick at. Every so often they send us one down. He runs a dairy farm there, and the barns are simply running with cats. Summer visitors always like them, so they get rid of a few that way. Uncle is always talking about getting his gun and clearing some of those cats out, but when it comes right down to it he wouldn’t touch a hair of ’em, and there’s plenty of milk and scraps going, so I guess they don’t bother anyone much. This ’un looked real smart to me, but we’ve two cats already and that’s too many for anyone living in town. I wish clothes lasted as long as cats do! Our old Susie will be thirteen next month.”
The coon kitten had hoisted himself out of the carton and was beginning a wary tour of the room. His long thick hair was jet black all over, his eyes a deep glowing amber. While Garry ran for a saucer of milk Kay exclaimed:
“Caroline will love him. He’s just like a Persian, only prettier. Are they always that color?”
“Black or yellow, mostly. Though there was a grand black and white with white paws I remember as a child; he used to run wild in the woods back of the house and no one could ever get near him. You’d just get a glimpse of him sometimes, along towards fall when the hunting began to grow scarce. Aunt has a family of yellow ones, too, but the yellow kittens mostly get picked up by the summer folk. Either black or yellow’s a good color for cats in the country; if you have one of these grays or tabbies they’re like to get taken for a rabbit or a squirrel some fine day, and you lose ’em. Neal Rowe’s more careful with his gun than most, but there’s lots of hunters don’t bother to look twice when they see something moving.”
Caroline had gone back to school that day for the first time. Edna had brought sliced ham and a home-baked pie, so the three of them ate lunch together in the living room while the coon kitten prowled and explored.
“I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone today,” Edna said as she drank her third cup of coffee. “There was a job up this way I’d heard about, but I guess I can’t take it. It’s the woman down here on the state road, right opposite the milk station where the school bus stops. They’ve got a little nursery business called Roadside—raise flowers and seedlings. We always get our tomato and pepper plants from them in spring. The husband’s lame. She had her first baby a few days ago—right in the middle of that cold spell it was—and her sister was staying there but now she’s had to go home and they wanted someone to look after things round the house till Mrs. Collins gets about again. But it would mean going there every day, and I can’t manage it.”
“I didn’t know you took jobs,” Kay said.
“Anything I can get, when the taxi business is slack. I clean folks’ summer cottages and close up for them, and I do spring cleaning once in a while. When you live in the country you learn to turn your hand to most anything. I felt sorry about these folks—she’s a real nice woman—but the most I can do is to try and find someone else for them.”
There was the latest Santa Fé news to be told, scraps from Penny’s letters to be read aloud; all the exchange of local and family gossip that always took place on Edna’s visits. When at last she rose to go Garry said:
“Guess I’ll ride down the road with you a little way, and walk back.”
She pulled on rubber boots and a windbreaker. When they were halfway down the hill she said:
“I’m going after that job myself, if I can get it.”
Edna smiled as her foot pressed down on the brake.
“Good for you. I can drop you right there. She’ll be pretty glad.”
“What does it mean?”
“Housework, getting the dinner—maybe a little washing. Miss Hussey comes in every day, so you won’t have much to do with the baby.”
“I guess I can do all that. I don’t know an awful lot about cooking, but she can tell me how she wants things done.”
“I always said you’d fit in anywhere, all right,” Edna said. “You see, there isn’t much of regular hired help around here, but when folks are in a fix anyone will do what they can. I guess they haven’t got an awful lot of money, but she’s willing to pay ten dollars a week.”
“That’s ten dollars more than I ever earned before,” Garry returned. “Just the other day I was saying that there wasn’t any way to earn money in the country, and here it is. Only I didn’t want to say anything in front of Kay—not till I know whether I’ve got the job or not.” There was another reason too perhaps, which Edna perfectly understood.
“I remember as well as yesterday,” she said as they turned the corner into the lower road, “the time I was fourteen and I wanted to get a new dress for the church picnic where we lived, and I didn’t have more’n a few cents saved up for it. So I marched off and hired me out, to a woman that took in boarders, to wash dishes and clean the kitchen up twice a day. My aunt was staying on a visit with us, and the way she carried on when she heard about it you’d have thought there was something disgraceful in washing other folks’ dishes instead of one’s own. But my mother was the sensible kind. She said: ‘If Edna wants money let her set to and earn it, and then it’ll mean something to her. As long as there’s dishes to wash I never heard that it mattered what house you wash ’em in, so long as you wash ’em clean.’ So I got my dress, and a nice dress it was, too. I spent all of eight dollars on it, and that was a lot in those days.”
When Garry reached home a couple of hours later, having trudged the long steep hill road with more buoyancy and self-confidence than she had felt in some time, she found Martin and Caroline already back from school. She entered whistling, tossed her cap on the table and announced:
“Well, I’ve got a job!”
Caroline was too absorbed in the coon kitten to pay any attention, but Martin lifted his head.
“What job?” And Kay exclaimed: “Garry, not that job Edna was talking about? I might have known you were up to something when you sneaked off that way. You can’t do that sort of thing!”
Garry’s chin went up.
“I don’t see why. It wouldn’t be the first time an Ellis turned her lily-white hands to something useful. And I want to tell you that I feel right like a million dollars this minute. I never knew anything could give one such a lift. The only thing is I hate to take their money for doing just everyday things, because I don’t believe by the look of the place they’ve got a cent more than they can manage with, and the woman is a dear. She’s young and pretty—she looks a little bit like you, Kay—and the baby’s a darling5 I never saw anything so tiny! If you’d been there yourself, Kay, you wouldn’t have thought twice about it. She was sitting up in bed there with a pink jacket on, with the baby tucked up in a clothes basket beside her, and she was peeling potatoes and hushing the baby at the same time. When I said what I’d come for she acted kind of scared of me at first because she’d heard we were city people, till I told her all about the family and how we were fixed, and I took the potatoes right out of her hands and started doing them myself, for I thought I’d show her I could do that much, anyway.”
Garry smiled, remembering the expression on Mrs. Collins’s face when the potato bowl was whisked away so promptly. Edna had sensibly refused to come in, feeling that Garry would make her way better alone, as she certainly had. But it was the baby who had really settled the question, for Garry adored all small things, and the sight of her eager face bent over the clothes basket had outweighed any last doubts Mrs. Collins might have had about “city people.”
“Ten dollars a week, and I start tomorrow. I wish it would last all winter, but it won’t. Still, it’s given me a good idea. If I suit all right I shall get Mrs. Collins to give me a reference. In the country people are always having babies and if I keep in touch with Miss Hussey I might get a lot more jobs when this one’s over.”
Kay had to laugh, for Garry’s ideas always spread in widening circles like a stone thrown into water.
“Wait till you see how you like this one. Are you really sure you want it?”
But Garry was quite serious, even though it meant getting up early every morning to walk the mile and a half to the state road. There was a thrill in having a j ob of any kind for the first time, and she was still young enough to feel work in another person’s house more of an adventure than a task. She washed dishes, scrubbed pantry shelves, swept floors and cooked dinner in a businesslike way; she did the baby’s laundry without wincing; and she even learned to sterilize feeding bottles and to prepare formulas as though she had been used to it all her life. Miss Hussey, coming in on her visit to bathe the baby, gave her a friendly approving smile.
“Well, well, so you’ve got a new job these days! Not enough to do up home, huh? How’s the family?”
“All fine. Caroline’s back at school again.”
“Good.”
Garry enjoyed these daily visits. She liked Miss Hussey’s brisk cheery ways and amusing gossip, and hurried to get her work forward so that she could watch the bathing and dressing rites. It was all good experience, for she had never had anything to do with a baby as tiny as this, and she learned a lot that she had not known before. Anything small and young Garry loved; baby animals, baby plants, she was used to tending and handling, but this human specimen was something new and every detail of its care absorbed her.
Mrs. Collins, her first shyness worn off, was friendly and talkative, glad of Garry’s company as well as her help. Both she and her husband were newcomers in the neighborhood; before their marriage Mr. Collins had worked for a firm of nursery gardeners and had only started in business for himself three years ago. He was a kindly, rather silent man, lame from a shell wound in the War; Garry rarely saw him except at mealtimes, or when he tiptoed in once or twice during the morning to look at the baby and perhaps stroke its small hand gently with the tip of one finger as though it were some rare and delicate seedling that he was almost afraid to touch. Most of the time he was busy in the greenhouse or potting shed.
Garry longed to talk to him about his work but never quite found the courage. The greenhouse where he raised his plants and cuttings had been built onto the house and opened directly from the small living room; as Garry stood at the kitchen sink rinsing clothes or washing dishes she could see the rows of flowerpots behind the glass panes and whenever the door was opened a warm breath of earth and moisture filled the house. Many a time she was sorely tempted to cross the floor and open that door herself, just to take a sniff and look inside, but she reminded herself sternly that she was there to do chores and keep house, not to indulge her own particular hobby. Still the temptation was very strong and one morning she gave in to it. Her hands happened to be still soapy; the doorhandle slipped unexpectedly in her grasp and she all but fell down the two steps on to Mr. Collins’s broad back as he stooped over a tray on the lower shelf. He looked taken aback at this entry but relieved to find it was not an urgent summons for help, and grinned as he pulled her to her feet.
“Those steps are a bit tricky when you aren’t used to ’em,” he said. “Did you hurt yourself any?”
“Not a bit. I’m awfully sorry, but I just had a minute to spare and I’ve so wanted to have a look at your plants. I love greenhouses and I hardly ever get a chance to poke round in them.”
“Look at all you want to,” said Mr. Collins.
He stopped his work goodnaturedly to show her round, explained how the house was heated and the moisture controlled, let her linger over the rows of potted seedlings and the cuttings set to root in trays of wet sand. Following him as he limped down the aisle between the growing plants Garry found that here was a man who loved his work and could forget all his awkwardness in talking about it. She was full of eager questions and real understanding, and the time flew till she suddenly remembered the potatoes on the stove and the unset dinner table.
After that she was free of the greenhouse whenever there were odd moments to spare, and as Mrs. Collins was now sitting up and the district nurse’s visits becoming fewer, Garry could generally manage by working at extra speed to gain a little time. When the baby was fed and sleeping, Mrs. Collins settled for her afternoon nap, and the dishes put away, she would slip out and help Mr. Collins. There were plants to spray and water, sometimes seedlings to be re-potted or rooted cuttings set out, empty pots to be scrubbed and stacked away, or potting mold mixed in the big trough at the end of the greenhouse—jobs she enjoyed far more than scraping saucepans and mopping floors.
“Well, I’ll give you a regular job any time you want it,” he said one day jokingly, and Garry took him up at once.
“Would you let me work here, if you want extra help later on?”
“Well, there’s always plenty to do, come spring. But I don’t know as you’d call it a young lady’s work, exactly, except once in a while like now, when you feel in the mood.” He seemed to overlook entirely the kind of work Garry had been doing, this last week. “Handlin’ earth and pots an’ that isn’t any too good on your hands.”
“I’ve handled plenty,” Garry told him. “I’m only a beginner, Mr. Collins, and I wouldn’t want you to pay me. But there’s a whole lot I could learn working with you, and I’d be glad to do it. I could take care of some of the easier jobs and leave you more time for the rest.”
Mr. Collins considered.
“There’s rock-garden plants,” he said. “Folks are crazy about them, right now. If I had money it would pay me to go in for the real Alpines, but there’s plenty others that I’m beginning to have a steady sale for, for there’s one thing they can’t always raise from a packet of seed. Divisions they increase from, mostly. I’ve got a lot of young plants on hand in the cold-frames and I thought I might do a good bit in that line this year. That’ll call for a lot of dividing and settin’ out, and I don’t know but you might try your hand at that, if you’d care to. But we’ll see later on. Come spring you’ll have plenty doing in your own garden.”
“I couldn’t get a promise out of him,” she told Kay that evening, “but I mean to try again in the spring. It’s just the chance I need and I don’t mean to let it slip.”
There was little doing in the way of business at Roadside Nurseries just now. So far not a single customer had stopped by during the week that Garry had spent there, but towards the end of her stay one car actually did draw up, a smart sedan with two well-dressed women in it. Mr. Collins had gone to town that afternoon; Mrs. Collins was giving the baby her two-o’clock bottle, and Garry had just finished her third batch of diapers and was hanging them on the line behind the kitchen stove.
“Good afternoon. I got such nice cyclamens here last year, and my friend was wondering if you had any more.”
Mrs. Collins looked flustered.
“Mr. Collins would know, but he’s out just now. That’s too bad. I suppose you couldn’t …”
Garry turned promptly.
“There are some nice ones just coming into bloom. Would you like to see them?”
She left the washtub, gave a businesslike hitch to her overalls, and led the way into the greenhouse. Roadside Nurseries wasn’t going to miss its one sale of the week if she could help it.
“They’re down at the end here. Mr. Collins had to go into town to see about a new consignment of plants, but I expect I can help you just as well.”
Mr. Collins’s trip had been to arrange for a renewal of his bank loan, as Garry very well knew, being by now practically a member of the family, but that explanation wouldn’t sound quite so impressive. The cyclamens (Garry thanked heaven it was an everyday plant she did know, not something unusual with a long Latin name) were on a warm shelf at the far end of the house, and she led her visitors purposely by the aisle where the best-looking plants and seedlings were ranged. The elder of the two women happened to be a genuine gardener; she had taken a fancy to Garry’s voice and appearance and was inclined to linger more than once on the way to chat about this or that.
“They’re all very nice,” said the younger woman presently, as Garry reached down pot after pot to set before her. “I don’t like dark red so much, do you, Mary? There’s a white one up there … is that the only one you have? It looks rather …”
Garry patiently took the last pot down from its shelf.
“The only one; I’m sorry. But this pale pink is lovely, and it’s full of buds. It ought to be perfect in just a few days.” (What, oh what did Mr. Collins charge for cyclamens?)
The young woman still hemmed and hawed, turning the pots about.
“I saw some just like this in town. They were asking forty-five cents. Isn’t that what you paid last year, Mary?”
Garry looked at the elder woman’s smooth ringed hands, at her companion’s costly fur coat, and thought of the Collins baby, asleep at this moment in a clothes basket under two cheap cotton blankets.
“These are seventy-five cents each,” she said firmly. “They ought to be more, really, but they’re the last we have.”
“That seems very dear, doesn’t it?”
“Detestable female!” thought Garry, and added aloud: “These are particularly well-grown plants, Mr. Collins won’t stock anything that isn’t good.”
“Hm. …” Her eyes rested on Garry inquisitively. “Do you work here all the time?”
“Only when Mr. Collins is short-handed.”
In the end she chose three after much deliberation, while the elder woman, left to wander by herself, had discovered other things that she wanted. Garry swathed the pots carefully, carried them out to the back of the car, and returned proudly to lay six dollars and a fifty-cent piece on the baby’s blanket.
“That’ll help to buy her something useful, I guess!”
“How much did you dare charge them?”
“Seventy-five for the cyclamens and two dollars each for the little evergreens. There are plenty more of the same kind, but those two happened to be standing all by themselves and she took a shine to them. She was so pleased I was scared after that I’d undercharged her, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t,” said Garry. “And I let her have a strawberry begonia for a quarter, just to make up.”
“The first sale in ages.” Mrs. Collins smiled gratefully. “Wait till George hears about it. I guess you brought us luck!”
“The older woman will be back again; she said so, and she likes the place. She’s interested in rock plants, too. I wouldn’t care if we never saw the other one again. Wearing a three-hundred-dollar coat and wants to save thirty cents on flowers!”
“Lots of ’em are that way,” said Mrs. Collins, who had had experience. And she added: “I wish you could stay here always.”
So did Garry. In these ten days she had come to feel so much a part of the little household that when she pulled her rubber boots on for the last time, hung up her apron, and stooped to kiss the small curled fist lying outside the covers it seemed as if she was leaving a part of herself behind. It was with an empty almost homesick feeling that she climbed the hill that evening with ten dollars in her pocket (she had stubbornly refused to take more for the extra days), a promise to stand godmother to small Julia when the time came, and a store of new experience and self-confidence that was worth far more to her than any wages.
Much of the snow had melted, but a new light fall had come to cover the unsightly patches of bare earth. It was a soft misty night; there was no wind and though the mercury stood at just about freezing the air felt mild. Just the night for fox hunting, Neal announced. He had long promised the two boys a moonlight fox hunt, and the moon would rise about nine.
When Garry reached home she found Martin all excited. He fairly bolted his supper and was ready long before Neal and Jimmie knocked at the door.
“You wrap up well,” Kay admonished.
“Walkin’ll keep ’em warm,” drawled Neal. “We ain’t settin’ out for the North Pole. That leather jacket’s all you need, son, with a good sweater under it, and I bet you find that too much. I’ll look out for him all right.” He winked at the two girls. “Sorry you ain’t coming, Garry. I reckon if we git one fox apiece that’s all we’ll want to carry, but maybe if we meet up with a fourth one and he’s extra good, we might bring him back for you.”
“I’ll bet you don’t get one!” Garry scoffed.
“Is that kind? Didn’t I pick this night special? Moon just right, everything just right, and old Sam fairly bustin’ hisself to get out on the job. Wait till you hear him singin’, once he hits a good scent. We’re goin’ out over Crooked Hill and work round towards Bear Hollow and the big ledges. I ain’t hunted over there yet this winter and I bet you we pick up something before we’re through.”
His deep leather pockets bulged with a package of sandwiches on one side and a thermos flask on the other. “See you later,” he nodded as he picked up his gun from the corner by the door.
“Why didn’t you go along?” Kay asked when the door had closed behind them.
“It’s Martin’s party,” Garry said. “Besides, I don’t like seeing things shot, even if Neal does the shooting. … Well, it seems funny to be home for keeps again.” She opened the stove door and pushed a fresh log into Big Bertha. “Remember how we hated this stove when Penny first brought it home? I bet if there are any auctions in Santa Fe she’s having the time of her life. Think of all the things she’ll want to bring back with her!—Kay, I want to make something for that baby down the road, and I’ve got to think what.”
“There was that pink sweater wool,” Kay debated. “Only I gave it to Caroline to learn knitting with when she was sick and I guess it’s pretty mussy by now—what’s left of it.”
“Uh-uh. I hate knitting anyway. I’ll go and take a look round.”
She went upstairs, where Kay could hear her dragging trunks out in the room overhead.
“Just the thing,” she exclaimed when she came down again. “That peach robe I got Christmas before last. The front’s worn but the back is all right, and I had it cleaned just before we came up here. It’ll make a grand cot cover.”
“Are you going to cut that up?” Kay looked ruefully at the shimmering quilted silk.
“Can you see me trailing a peach silk negligee around this place—or anywhere else for that matter! It’s lamb’s wool inside, so it will be beautifully warm.” She took the scissors and began to slash. “If I piece a bit more in these two top corners and just turn the edges in all round it makes quite a good-size spread. I can use that pink sewing silk out of your workbox. Kay, now that Penny has to stay longer than she thought, don’t you think it would be fun to get the house fixed up a bit by the time she gets home?”
“I’d love to. Only …”
“There’s this ten dollars; part of it anyway. I might get another job of some kind, and if we ever hear anything from our advertisement woman there’d be some of that money, too.”
“She’d have written long ago if she was coming,” Kay said. “We’ll never hear from her.”
“The old buzzard,” Garry commented. “People just make me sick anyway. I think she might answer even if she isn’t coming.” She spread the silk out, viewing it critically as it lay across her knee. “What’s your trouble now?”
A faint wail had drifted down through the register from the room where Caroline was supposed to be asleep.
“All right. I’ll get him for you.” Garry laid aside her work to hunt round the room for the coon kitten, who, with the ingratitude of all cats towards those who seek to do them undesired kindness, had fled the warmth of Caroline’s bed and was sitting with tucked-in paws as far under the sofa as he could squeeze. “That’s the third time I’ve hauled that wretched kitten upstairs. Nothing will persuade Caroline that coon cats don’t like being cuddled. I hope the next time someone gives her a pet it’ll be a tortoise; at least they can’t run so fast.
“Do you know, Kay,” she went on when they were settled once more, “I had an idea the other day. I don’t know that it’s brilliant, but it might work. Remember those funny pictures you used to make up for the kids when they were little—the Pilliwig family?”
“Those things?” Kay looked puzzled. “Martin used to like them. I haven’t thought of them in years. I don’t even remember how they went.”
“I do. I’d remember Mrs. Pilliwig’s hat and the way the little Pilliwigs looked if I lived to be a hundred. You used to make up the story and draw the pictures as you went along. Kay, I believe if you were to do a series of those any children’s magazine in the world would want them.”
“But they were just nonsense.”
“Some of the best stuff in the world is nonsense,” said Garry stoutly. “It’s what everyone likes, anyway, and there’s precious little of it that’s any good. Those were fine just because they were nonsense and you weren’t worrying about how they came out, but just went ahead and drew them.”
“Wait a minute. I remember now I once made some on the back of another drawing.”
Kay crossed the room to rummage through a portfolio of old sketches.
“It was when that little Cary girl came to tea. I wanted… Yes, here it is. It’s about the zoo.”
She smiled as she held out the paper for Garry to see. Garry was right. There was life and humor in the ridiculous little figures. There was more, too: a freedom of expression and a sure use of line that Kay didn’t always get in her more studied drawings.
“See what I mean?”
“I don’t know. I might be able to make something out of them if they were better drawn.”
“There you go!” said Garry. “They don’t want to be better drawn. They want to be just like you have them there.”
“Eleven o’clock.” Neal looked at his wrist watch. “What do you say we push on towards the ledges there and find a place to eat our sandwiches?”
They were halfway up the last rise of hillside. Below them there stretched a bare sparkling slope broken only by the track of their own footsteps and by a few gray bowlders thrusting here and there above the snow. Overhead the moon sailed in a sky dotted by tiny scudding clouds.
They had walked for miles, but Martin didn’t even feel tired. There was something in the pure keen air, the dazzle of moonlight on the snow, just the excitement of being out at night in an unfamiliar place, that went to his head like wine and made him feel wider awake, more alert to every sight and sound about him, than ever he had felt in the daytime. Everything looked strange and different. The patches of black shadow cast by bush or pasture wall stood out sharp and distinct; an old twisted wild-apple tree took fantastic shape in the moonlight, and the occasional faint lights of houses snuggled far down in the valley seemed to belong to another world.
So far they had seen one fox only. They were following an old wood road when he crossed their path unexpectedly in a clearing just ahead, a silent furtive shape that stood for a moment, head turned, and vanished. Jimmie had fired, but his hands shook with excitement and when the smoke cleared only some scattered pellet holes in the snow showed where the fox had stood.
“Passed clean through his fur and never touched him,” Neal said, pointing to the marks. “Too bad!”
Across the shoulder of the hill now they could hear old Sam baying on another scent, two high-pitched notes, clear and mournful, like the sound of a bell at intervals on the frosty air. Neal listened.
“He’s working round towards this way. We’ll sit up there by the ledges and wait for him.”
They climbed the slope to a little plateau between flat outcropping ledges of granite. Neal found a sheltered hollow where they could sit, their backs to the rock and facing the open.
“See that big flat rock ledge straight in front of us?” he said. “When a fox is bein’ hunted and he gets far enough ahead he’ll always make for the highest place he can, so’s he can take a good look round. Once you know that, and you know the country pretty well, you don’t need to waste time followin’ the hounds. You can get a good idea of which way they are workin’ by listenin’ to ’em, and then you go ahead and wait right where you know the fox is bound to come out. He’ll be comin’ up the other side of the hill now, and right there on that flat ledge is where he’ll be likely to show himself, square against the skyline. He ain’t in any hurry, no mor’n we are. We’ll hear from old Sam when he’s getting nearer.”
He laid the gun down beside him and pulled the sandwiches out of his pocket.
“Guess some hot coffee’ll taste good. You ain’t cold, Martin?”
“Not a bit.”
They ate their sandwiches and drank their coffee in turn from the little cup on the flask, talking in whispers. At intervals old Sam’s voice reached them on the still air, sometimes nearer, sometimes further off.
“Workin’ in a circle,” Neal said. “He’ll be another half hour, maybe.”
Yesterday’s wind had blown the loose snow from the ledges; in this sheltered angle it was warm and still. Martin finished his sandwich and leaned back against the flat slope of rock, his hands behind his head. Watching the moon as it fled in and out between the small fleecy clouds, rainbow hued in its halo, he felt as if the whole hillside were turning under him, and he sat up suddenly to find everything about him dizzy and strange. Neal laughed.
“That’s the way folks get moon struck. When I was a kid mother was always telling me if I lay in the moonlight I’d go looney. That was one of her ideas, and the other was about night air being bad for you. Well, I managed to grow up in spite of both of ’em!”
The sandwiches were gone, the coffee finished. Neal racked his brain for hunting stories to while away the time as the minutes slowly passed. Jimmie was getting chilled and restless; he hated to keep still for long at a stretch and his missed shot earlier in the evening still rankled. He shifted his position several times to peer about, fidgeted here and there, and finally settled down again facing the other two, the .22 always ready in his hands. For a long time old Sam had been silent.
Suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, Neal’s voice paused. He made a movement towards his gun, then drew his hand noiselessly back, and instead his fingers tightened on Martin’s arm beside him. Martin looked up.
There on the flat rock just above and behind Jimmie’s head stood the fox. Unseen he had crept round behind them and now he was so near that Jimmie, had he known it, could have put out a hand and touched him. Martin could see the drawn-back silent snarl of his lips, the fixed eyes staring. Every hair of his coat stood out sharp and electric like spun glass in the moonlight. For what seemed a full minute he stood there motionless, one paw lifted, while Martin scarcely dared draw breath. Then Jimmie turned his head; the spell was broken. There was a blur and a flurry on the snow, something whipped past them like a flash of color and was gone. Neal rose to his feet, but it was too late.
“What a shot! Oh boy, what a shot!”
“Where—where?” Jimmie clutched at his rifle, staring wildly round.
“Right back of your head! I could have got him easy, but I wouldn’t have risked it. Just sneaked up on us from round those bowlders, and us sittin’ here all the time. Well, he got the laugh on us this time, I reckon.”
A moment later old Sam loped up to them, puzzled and disappointed, to stare from one to the other and then thrust his black muzzle reproachfully into Neal’s hand.
“No more hunting tonight,” said Neal cheerfully, shouldering his gun. “That’s settled it, hey, Sam? Don’t know about you boys, but I’m just about chilled through all of a sudden. Guess we’ll make tracks for home, and better luck next time.”
It was as Neal said. For the first time Martin felt suddenly chilled and stiff. The excitement of the evening had dropped from him; drowsiness was creeping through his limbs. There was still a long walk before them, and by the time they had crossed the last stone wall into the pasture and saw the lighted kitchen window shining through the dusk he was ready to drop with sleep.
As he closed his eyes that night he seemed to see again, like a picture flashed on darkness, that swift moonlit vision of the fox in the snow.