Collected Works of Zane Grey, page 829
“Hey, Joe!” called Edd. “Round up that outfit to pack honey back home. There’s more here than we got buckets to hold. Tell them I’ll fetch it part way, so they won’t get stung no more.”
Lucy caught glimpses of the members of the party collecting a goodly, safe distance away, along the edge of the timber. Judging by gestures and the sound of excited voices coming faintly, Lucy concluded that the storm party was divided in its attitude toward Edd. Sadie Purdue evidently was in a tantrum, the brunt of which fell upon Sam. Amy’s high, sweet laugh pealed out. Presently the girls were seen entering the forest, no doubt on their way back to the cabin; the boys showed indications of standing by Edd, at least to the extent of waiting for him to collect the honey.
Lucy saw him filling the buckets. He used a small wooden spoon or spade, with which he reamed the honey out of the hollow log. She was intensely eager to see this bee hive and Edd’s work at close hand, but felt it wise to remain under cover. The screams of the girls who had been stung were a rather potent inhibition to curiosity.
The honey had a greyish-yellow cast and a deep amber colour, from which Lucy deducted that one was the comb, the other the honey. When Edd had filled four buckets he took them up and proceeded to carry them toward the waiting boys. A number of bees kept him company. How grotesque he looked with that home-made hood over his head!
“Hey! you better lay low,” he called to Lucy, seeing her peeping out of her brushy covert, “unless you want your pretty little pink nose stung!”
“Edd Denmeade, my nose isn’t little — or pink!” protested Lucy.
“Wal, no matter; it shore will be pink if you don’t watch out. Didn’t you get stung on it once?”
Half-way between the bee tree and the boys Edd set the buckets down on a rock, and cutting some brush he covered them with it. Then he shouted:
“Pack these home, you storm-party suckers!”
Upon his return to the fallen sycamore he scraped up a bundle of dead grass and sticks, and kindled a fire, then added green boughs to make a heavy smoke. Lucy saw him vigorously slap his back and his legs, from which action she surmised that he too was getting stung Next with two leafy boughs he made an onslaught on the whirling, shining mill-wheel of bees. He broke that wheel, and either killed or scattered most of the swarm. Then he proceeded to fill more buckets, which he carried away as before. Meanwhile Joe and Gerd Claypool had come for the first buckets.
Lucy crawled back through the bushes to where she had left Clara. She found her prone on the grasp, her chin propped on her hands, musingly watching the proceedings.
“Funny how we are,” she said. “It’s a long time since I felt so good over anything. Sam and Sadie were immense...Pride — and conceit, too — go before a fall!”
“You remember I was stung on the nose by one of these wild bees,” replied Lucy. “It hurts terribly.”
They remained in the shade and security of this covert until Edd had filled all his buckets.
“Hello, girls! Go back through the bushes to the bank, an’ get down,” he called. “Wait for us below.”
Lucy and Clara scrambled away into the thicket and down into the stream bed, which they followed to the woods. Joe and Gerd and Dick came along laden with heavy buckets, and rather harassed by a few persistent bees.
“Keep away from us,” cried Lucy. “I’ve been initiated into the wild-bee fraternity.”
“But Clara hasn’t,” replied Joe.
“Young man, if you know when you’re well off, you’ll not lead any wild bees to me,” warned Clara, gathering up her skirts ready to flee into the woods. She was smiling, yet earnest. How pretty she looked, her eyes flashing, her brown cheeks flushed, her blue veil flying round her golden hair! Lucy saw what Joe saw.
Next Edd came striding out of the willows, down into the gully. He carried four buckets, all manifestly laden. He had removed his hood, and his face was wet with sweat and wreathed in smiles.
“Run along ahead till she gets tired followin’ me,” he called to the girls.
They were not slow to act upon his advice, yet did not get so far ahead that they could not see the boys coming. The forest seemed so shady and cool after the hot sunny open.
“Why does Edd speak of bees as she?” queried Clara curiously.
“He told me once he had captured and tamed queen bees, and after that always called bees she, whether collectively or individually. It is funny.”
“He’ll be making you queen bee of his hive some day,” said Clara tantalisingly.
“Oh, will he? It requires the consent of the queen, I imagine...As to queen-bee hives; Joe’s is being built, I hear.”
Clara squeezed Lucy’s arm and cringed close to her, as if to hide a shamed or happy face. “Oh, what will become of us?...When I don’t think, I’m full of some new kind of joy. When I remember, I’m wretched.”
“Clara, we are two babes lost in the woods,” declared Lucy, half sadly. “But if you must think, do it intelligently. We could be worse off.”
“I love it here,” answered Clara swiftly, with a flash of passion.
Then Edd’s halloo halted them. Presently Lucy had opportunity to see wild honey fresh from the hive The buckets were full of the yellow combs and amber honey, all massed together, in which numbers of bees had been drowned.
“Shore it’s got to be strained,” explained Edd.
“What’ll become of the bees — those you didn’t kill?” she inquired.
“Wal, now, I wish you hadn’t asked that,” complained Edd. “Shore you always hit at the sufferers...Lucy, I hate to treat a bee tree like we did this one. But I can’t capture an’ tame the old swarms. They’re too wild. I have to destroy them. Sometimes I burn them out...She’ll hang round that sycamore, an’ starve to death or freeze. It’s too bad. I reckon I’m no better than the yellow-jackets.”
That bee-tree episode had taken the younger element of the storm party away from the Denmeade home for the greater part of the afternoon, a fact for which Mrs. Denmeade was devoutly thankful. She and Allie, with the kind assistance of the Claypool women, prepared on short notice an adequate feast for this formidable array of uninvited guests.
Lucy learned this, and much more, upon her arrival at the cabin. Mertie had torn the bright silk dress and was inconsolable. She did not seem to mind so much the sundry stings she had sustained. But Sadie Purdue almost disrupted the hilarious and joyful tone of the occasion. She had been severely stung on hands and arms and face. Sam Johnson, however, was the one who had suffered most. All the members of that expedition, except Lucy and Clara, had reason to vow vengeance upon Edd.
“Oh, wait, you wild hunter of bees! Wait till you’re married!” was the reiterated threat.
“Shore I’m safe,” drawled Edd. “No girl would ever throw herself away on me.”
Sam took his punishment like a man, and made up for the ravings of his fiancée. She had the grace, presently, to get over her fury. And by supper-time, when Mertie was won back to a happy appreciation of the honour of having the largest storm party ever known in that country, the jarring notes were as if they had never been.
All the chair, bench, and porch space was necessary to seat this merry company. It was quite impossible for Lucy to keep track of what followed. But she had never seen the like of that dinner. Uproarious, even violent, it yet gave expression to the joy and significance of marriage in that wilderness.
White mule flowed freely, but in marked contrast with its effect at the dances, it added only to the mirth and the noise. After dinner the young people nearly tore the cabin down with their onslaughts upon the bride and groom, the former of whom they hugged and kissed, and the latter mauled. Dancing was not on this programme. Then, evidently, for the young backwoodsmen present, it was a natural climax to fly from their felicitations of the bride to salutations to the possible brides-to-be in that gathering. They were like young bears.
Lucy and Clara fled to the security of their tent, and refused to come out. Certain it was that both of them were more than amused and frightened. Manifestly a storm party on a bride was regarded as an unexampled opportunity.
“Whew!” gasped Clara, with wide eyes on Lucy. “I thought cowboys were wild. But alongside these fellows they’re tame.”
“Deliver — me!” panted Lucy. “Almost it’d be — safer to be — in Mertie’s boots!”
The celebration, however, turned out to be as short as it had been intense. Before dark the older people were riding down the lane, calling back their merry good-nights, and not long after the boys and girls followed. Soon the homestead of the Denmeades was as quiet as ever; and a little later, when Lucy peeped out, yard and cabin were shrouded in the blackness of the melancholy autumn night.
Chapter XIII
IT WAS MIDWINTER. Lucy’s tent was cosy and warm, softly coloured with its shaded lamplight, falling on bear rugs and bright blankets, on the many paper pictures. The Clara that sat there beside the little stove, occupied with needlework, was not the Clara who had arrived at Cedar Ridge one memorable day last summer. Lucy was having leisure for books.
The tent seemed to be full of the faint fragrance of juniper, and that came from the wood which the little stove burned so avidly. Lucy was wont to say that of all Clara’s homestead accomplishments that of feeding wood to a fire was what she did best and liked most. “Maybe I’ll have to chop wood myself some day. I could do worse,” was Clara’s enigmatic reply.
Outside, the snow seeped down, rustling like the fall of leaves on dry grass, floating softly against the window. No mournful wail of wind broke the dead silence. The homestead of the Denmeades was locked in winter. Lucy and Clara had long since grown used to it. For a while they had suffered from cold, but that was owing to their susceptibility rather than severe weather. Denmeade’s heavy bear rugs on the floor had added much to the comfort of the tent. The girls wore woollen sweaters and no longer noticed the cold. At ten o’clock they went to bed, enjoying to the utmost this most important factor of outdoor life. Night after night, for weeks, they had spent like this, reading, sewing, studying, writing, talking, and then sleeping.
The zero mornings had put them to the test. With the fire long dead, the cold was practically the same inside as outside. They had taken turn about kindling a fire, and the one whose morning it was to lie snug and warm in bed while the other slipped out into the icy air seldom failed to tease and crow.
When the tent was warm they got up and dressed, and made coffee or tea, and cooked some breakfast. No matter how deep the new-fallen snow, there was always a path shovelled from their tent to the cabin, Edd and Joe vying with each other to see who could beat the other at this task. Lucy’s work now was confined to instructing the children, and Clara was studying hard to enable her to take Mr. Jenks’s place as teacher of the school. The afternoons were usually sunny and clear. After a snowstorm the warm sun melted the snow away in a few days. But there were unexampled opportunities to tramp and romp and play in the snow, things in which the girls found much pleasure. They had been born and brought up in a snowless country, where the summers were torrid and the winters pleasant.
The Denmeades, however, might as well have been snowed in. Lucy marvelled at this, and came to understand it as a feature of backwoods life. The men kept the fires burning and fed the stock, outside of which they had nothing, or thought they had nothing, to do. The women cooked, sewed, and washed, almost as actively as in summer. No visitors called any more on Sundays. They saw no outsiders. Once a week Dick or Joe would ride down to Johnson’s for, the mail, or for supplies that had been sent for. It seemed a lonely, peaceful, unproductive existence.
Edd, being the eldest of the Denmeade boys, had received the least schooling, a fact he keenly deplored, and through these winter days he laboriously pored over the books Lucy gave him. Joe was the keenest of the children, as well as the quietest, and he seconded Edd in this pursuit of knowledge.
Lucy and Clara had supper with the Denmeades, which they endeavoured to serve before dark. Sometimes, when the meal was late, the light in the kitchen was so dim they could hardly see to eat. After supper the children and young people would make a rush into the other cabin where Denmeade kept a huge log or stump burning in the open fire-place. Mertie was gone, and her absence seemed a benefit. Allie and Joe were the thoughtful ones who helped Mrs. Denmeade. Seldom was a lamp lighted until Edd stamped in to resort to his books.
Every time the door was opened the dogs would try to slip in, and always one or more of them succeeded, and occupied a warm place in front of the fire. The children played until put to bed. Uncle Bill was not long in climbing to his bed in the attic. Denmeade smoked his pipe and sat gazing at the blazing log. How many hours of his life must have been spent so! Lucy and Clara always passed part of the early evening hours in this living-room. Seldom or never did they have a moment alone with the boys. It was a family gathering, this after-supper vigil in front of the big fire.
Denmeade typified the homesteader of that high altitude. Winter was a time of waiting. Almost he was like a bear. Spring, summer, fall were his active seasons. The snow, the sleet, the icy winds of winter shut him in.
Lucy counteracted this growing habit in the boys. She convinced them that winter was the time to improve the mind and to learn something of what was going on in the outside world. Her success in this she considered equal to any of her achievements here. The old folks, of course, could not be changed; and Lucy confined herself to the children. Many times she thought of how all over the wild parts of the west, in high districts, children and young people were wasting golden hours, with nothing to do but what their parents had done before them. What a splendid work she would accomplish if she could make known the benefits of home instruction! But it really did not seem like work. Thus the winter days and nights passed.
The coming of spring was marked by Allie Denmeade’s marriage to Gerd Claypool. These young people, wise in their generation, invited everybody to their wedding, which took place in Cedar Ridge. Lucy and Clara remained at home with the children.
March brought surprisingly fine weather, the mornings and evenings cold, but the middle of the day sunny and warm. Soon the wet, red soil dried out. The men, liberated from the confines of winter, were busy taking up the tasks that had been interrupted by the first fall of snow. One of these was the completion of Joe’s cabin. Lucy, using a walk with the children as excuse, climbed the mesa trail to see the men at work. Clara did not want to go. She was more studious and complex than ever, yet seemed strangely, dreamily happy.
The mesa, with its open glades, its thickets of red manzanita, its clumps of live oak, and giant junipers and lofty pines, manifested a difference hard to define. Lucy thought it had to do with spring. The birds and squirrels and turkeys voiced the joyfulness of the season.
Joe’s homestead edifice was a two-cabin affair, similar to that of the Denmeades. Lucy particularly liked the clean, freshly-cut pine and its fragrant odour. She urged Joe to build in several closets and to insist on windows, and kitchen shelves, and a number of improvements new to the cabin of the backwoodsman.
“Joe, are you going to live here alone?” queried Lucy.
“On an’ off, while I prove up on my homesteadin’ patent,” he replied. “You see, I have to put in so many days here for three years before the government will give me the land.”
His frank answer relieved Lucy, who had of late been subtly influenced by a strangeness, an aloofness, in Clara, which mood somehow she had attributed to Joe’s infatuation for her. The boy had no pretence. His soul was as clear as his grey eyes. Lucy was compelled to believe that the erecting of this cabin was solely to forestall a threatened invasion of the mesa by other homesteaders.
On the way home Lucy stopped awhile at the beautiful site Edd had selected for his cabin. She found that thought of the place, during the fall and winter months, had somehow endeared it to her. Long communion with the secret affection of her heart had brought happiness with resignation. She knew where she stood; and daily she gathered strength to bear, to serve, to go on, to find a wonderful good in her ordeal.
The forest had wrought incalculable change in her. It was something she felt rush over her thrillingly when she approached the green wall of pines and entered it, as if going into her home. She thought more actively, she worked better, she developed more under its influence than in the city. This she knew to be because the old bitter social feud under which her youth had been oppressed was not present here. Lucy was ashamed of that relief, but she could never change it.
As she was soon to go to the Claypools to take up her work there, Lucy knew it might be long before she had the strange, inexplicable joy of dreaming here in this spot of perfect solitude and wild beauty. So while the children played at keeping house among the bears and turkeys, she gazed around her and listened and felt. She was quite at the mercy of unknown forces and she had ceased to beat and bruise her heart against them, as might have a bird against the bars of its cage. Above all, there came to her the great, simple fact of a harmony with this environment. She could not resist it and she ceased to try.
Mr. Jenks arrived at the Johnsons’ in the latter part of March and attended the meeting of the school board. He wanted to turn over the teaching to Clara, but in case she did not accept the position he would be glad to remain another summer. Denmeade returned from that board meeting to place a proposition squarely before Clara. And in his own words it was this: “Reckon we don’t want to change teachers so often. Every schoolmarm we’ve had just up an’ married one of the boys. Wal, if you will agree to teach two years, whether you get married or not, we’ll shore be glad to let you have the job.”
