Mantrap E-Book

Sinclair Lewis

• Herausgeber: idb
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 344

Beschreibung

Ralph Prescott, a lawyer with a New York City firm, is feeling the stress and strain of the demands placed on him by city and career. With a fellow club-member, E. Wesson Woodbury, he decides to travel west into the Canadian wilderness for a vacation of fishing and canoeing. After several misadventures in both canoeing and camping, they are openly hostile to one another ...

Leseprobe

* An idb eBook *

Mantrap

Sinclair Lewis

isbn 9783962240790

NOVELS BY SINCLAIR LEWIS

OUR MR. WRENN

THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK

THE JOB

FREE AIR

MAIN STREET

BABBITT

MANTRAP

By

SINCLAIR  LEWIS

COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY

P. F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY IN THE

UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN

To

MANTRAP

CHAPTER ONE

PRICKLY heat jabbed its claws into Ralph’s sweaty neck as he staggered under the load. All through the long portage and the torture of paddling afterward, he had looked forward to the shooting of Ghost Rapids, as anxiously as he looked backward to the man who was in pursuit.

He was glad to get it done, to come at last to those notorious rapids and see Lawrence Jackfish leap up in the bow, pointing with his paddle toward the one safe passage through the frenzy of broken currents. The stream poured between gnarled rocks in a gush smooth as a sculpture of polished bronze. Ralph fancied that if he touched that swelling sleekness of water it would be hard and slippery to his hot fingers. But beyond the gate of danger the churning and frightened river spread into a hundred whirlpools among rocks half hidden in the foam.

As he bent over the paddle, bringing the canoe’s head sharply to the right to follow the fantastic jagged course which Lawrence was choosing, the rocks ashore caught the tail of his eye and he realized that the canoe was going with aeroplane speed into the maelstrom.

Suddenly they were in the calm waters beyond the rapids, and in relief Ralph sobbed above his lifted paddle, so that the girl looked back in wonder, and the Indian snickered. There was a sacred moment of security. But always Ralph knew that they were fleeing from the angry man who might be following them—angry and swift and menacing.

Ralph Prescott was perhaps the most conservative member of that extraordinarily conservative firm of New York lawyers, Beaseley, Prescott, Braun and Braun. He played law as he played chess. A squabble was as inconceivable to him as a fist-fight, and it was a shock to find himself twitchy, irritable, likely to quarrel with clients and waiters and taxi-drivers.

He muttered, “Overwork—must take it a little easy—too much strain in the hydro-electric negotiations—try a little golf.” But the little golf, or even the unprecedented dissipation of going to the “Follies” instead of staying home working over the documents with which his sober brief-case was always crammed, was insufficient to lull his jangling nerves, and night by night he awoke to obscure panics, lay rigid with black and anonymous apprehensions.

At forty Ralph Prescott was more than ever a bachelor. The explanation was a mother so much more serene and fine and instantly understanding than any girl he encountered that he had preferred her dear presence to insinuating romance. But she had been dead these two years, and where she had once coaxed him away from his desk at midnight for a chat and easy laughter and a glass of milk before she ordered him off to bed, he sought now to fill the vacuum of her absence by working till one—till two—till weary dawn.

A friendly, grave man was Ralph, quietly popular among his friends, the dozen lawyers, doctors, engineers, and brokers whom he had known in college and whom he met nightly at the Yale Club; a man slight and eyeglassed and perhaps a little naïve.

However sharp he was, and however formidably solid about following up a point of law, he was still as respectful toward all the Arts and all the Politenesses as he had been in college, when he had listened to Professor Phelps in literature classes and from afar, with a small flame of worship for sweetness and light, made his bow to Thoreau and Emerson and Ruskin. It was concentration, with a trick of being obligingly friendly to judges and juries, which had won his legal prestige, not that thrusting power to bully and bluff and dazzle which distinguishes more realistic attorneys.

On a May day in the nineteen-hundred-twenties Ralph Prescott perceived how badly his nerves were frayed.

He was driving, this Saturday afternoon, to the Buckingham Moors Country Club, beyond White Plains, for eighteen holes. He was driving his own coupé, which, with its prim nickel bumpers, its windows of speckless plate-glass, its chaste seat-coverings of much-laundered crash, was as depressingly proper as an undertaking parlor.

It was the first brilliant Saturday of late spring, and every one in New York who could drag out any sort of motor vehicle, from a 1910 Ford to a new Rolls-Royce, from a limousine to a passionately trembling old motorcycle, had been seized by the same enthusiastic notion and had dashed out to view Westchester County. When Ralph carefully turned from East Thirty-seventh, where was his small restrained flat, to Fifth Avenue, he found himself too tired to cope with the cruel and unyielding mass of cars.

Only by acrobatics and the risk of death could he zigzag his way ahead of the others. For miles he crept behind a venerable sedan, stopping in a panic whenever it stopped, till he came to hate the refulgence of the sedan-driver’s bald head. Always he had to be attentive to the opposing line of cars so close to his left fender; had to be conscious of the car just behind him, which was apparently ambitious to run him down.

“And I’m supposed to be having an afternoon holiday!” he groaned. “I’ve simply got to get away. This isn’t living. I’d like to go some place where I can have elbow-room and breathe again.”

Once, when a traffic policeman halted him just as he came to a crossing, once, when a small boy ran out into the street in front of him, his heart almost stopped, in a panic as grotesque and alarming as the shriek of a lunatic. Through all the drive he never relaxed but only waited desperately for the end of this ordeal.

He finally won past the distasteful litter of gas stations, hot-dog stands, ugly frame houses, and came into the spacious peace of the Buckingham Country Club grounds. He halted his car on the curving gravel road hedged with rhododendrons, and drooped flabbily over the wheel.

“Got to take more care of myself,” he meditated. “Rotten shape. Smoking too much—”

In that limp mood he was more than usually depressed by the locker-room of the club.

Damp cement walls, gritty cement floor, odors of sweat and gin and ancient bath-towels, sight of paunchy middle-aged men trying to be boyish in athletic undershirts, sound of overconfident laughter and more or less humorous boasting about scores—he had always felt fastidious about this den, but today it was intolerable. It was a relief to be taken up, bolstered up, by the compelling breeziness of Mr. E. Wesson Woodbury.

Woodbury was the chairman of the greens committee, and vice-president and sales-manager of the fabulously powerful Twinkletoe Stocking Company, whose sleek wares are to be observed on the ankles of half the girls in the country, from Japanese cannery hands in Seattle to chorus ladies in New York. Mr. Woodbury was a round, thick, self-satisfied man. He gave the impression of a particularly large and juicy drumstick from the fricasseed chicken at Sunday dinner, and his loud sudden laughter had all the horror of gears jammed by an unskilled driver.

Woodbury was dressing at a locker only four removed from Ralph’s. He was donning checked knickers, and stockings with rings of crimson and yellow and pea-soup green, diversified by a few pretty adornments in the way of diamond-shaped blotches. While he dressed he shouted as though Ralph were a mile away:

“Better come join us—got three of a foursome—just got three—me and Judge Withers and Tom Ebenauer—just got three, but some gang, boy, some gang, great gang. Better join us—better come join us—the Judge might let you off easy when you come up for transporting liquor.”

Usually Ralph avoided Woodbury. He preferred men quieter and more deft and honest. But today, in his alarming shakiness, he was buoyed up by Woodbury’s pink, swelling, shining self-confidence. He felt like the small boy in prep school who may not esteem greatly the football captain’s notion of Latin declensions but who is glowingly flattered by his friendliness.

“Well—” he said.

Somehow, Woodbury was the sort of chap who would take care of him. He needed some one to lift him out of his shaky depression.

Ralph played a precise and conscientious game of golf, and for all his recent quiverings he was easily the best of the foursome. Woodbury had faith that by bellowing, “Well, by golly, how’d I happen t’ do that?” he could make up for any slicing. As the four of them trailed along the serene pastures of the elm-shadowed course, Ralph found peace again and strength, and a certain affection for his jesting companions.

Woodbury was not always jesting, however. He had a grievance:

“I’ve certainly been having tough luck. Been planning a great ol’ fishing and canoeing hike in northern Canada—way up north of railhead, along the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border—the Mantrap River country. Great place—get entirely away from civilization; just forget there are any doggone desks and phone-calls and bad accounts. I was up there three years ago—didn’t quite get to Mantrap but nearly there. And fishing? Say! Muskalonge, pike (only they call ’em dorés in Canada), ten-pound, fifteen-pound lake trout—boy! I had it all planned out to go up there this summer with a friend of mine lives in Winnipeg—canoes bought, route picked, four corking Indians hired for guides; and then Lou—my friend—he had the rotten taste to up and get sick on me. Say, Prescott, you better think about coming along in his place. You lawyers don’t have anything important to do anyway. Why don’t you let up on your poor old clients for a while and give ’em a chance to grab a little money that you can take away from ’em next fall!”

“I’d rather like a vacation,” mumbled Ralph, more attentive to the probable lie of his ball than to the Great Open Spaces.

“Like it? Ma-an! Pulling in a fifteen-pounder! Sitting by the camp-fire, listening to the Old Timers pull the long bow about pioneering! Sleeping in a tent, without any autos honking! And look, Prescott: seriously now: an awful easy trip, the way I make it. The Injuns do all the carrying on the portages; they cook the chow and clean the fish and put up the tents. And when we don’t use the outboard motor, they do the paddling, not us.”

“Motors? On canoes? In northern Canada?” gasped Ralph. It was sacrilegious.

Woodbury waved his midiron in an hysteria of laughter.

“You poor old tenderfoot! You Manhattan backwoodsman! Every Cree chief in Canada—  I suppose you expect ’em to wear buckskin and paddle birch-bark canoes! Why, there isn’t hardly a chief there that hasn’t got an outboard motor and a white man’s canvas canoe. Lord, you fellows make me tired. You—why, you know all about London and Paris and the Riviera—I’ve heard you gassing about ’em with Eddie Leroy—and you don’t know these here North America no more’n a rabbit. Gosh, you’re ignorant! Better come along and meet some real folks for a change!”

Ralph was both nettled and conscience-ridden. It was true. He knew nothing, nothing whatever, of the trappers and prospectors who still guard the frontier. He had never slept on the ground. He was soft. He was soft and timorous—he with his pretty little vacations in Brittany and Devon and the Bavarian Oberland! But also he was irritated by Woodbury’s superior manner as he explained, like a radio lecturer, that there were six methods of propelling the big cargo canoes used for the long northern hikes: paddling, poling, motoring, lining, sailing, and even, in high waves, oars.

Mr. Woodbury evidently viewed with scorn the dainty canoes with red cushions and fancy names which are to be found at summer resorts. Now as those were the only canoes Ralph had ever known, as he remembered with fondness a certain lake, a certain canoe, and a certain girl whom he had paddled as much as a whole mile in the golden days of twenty years ago, he felt that Woodbury was a boor. . . . Horrible sort of chap to have with you in the strained intimacies of a wilderness journey!

But at the end of the game, as they tramped back to the clubhouse and to the gin and ginger ale for which a hard week of sentencing people for selling gin had made Judge Withers peculiarly thirsty, Woodbury flung his arm about Ralph’s shoulder and cried in a boyish and fetching manner he had now and then:

“Don’t mind my kidding you, Prescott. You’re not used to the wilds, but you’d learn—you’ve got nerve and sense. If you could make it, I’d love to have you come along. Think of it! Up towards Hudson Bay, where you begin to get the Northern Lights streaking across the sky in August!”

Though he had not taken the proposal seriously, all the way home from the country club Ralph drove easily, unconscious now of the press of traffic, absorbed in visions of the North—visions derived from the yarns which he absorbed in bed, after midnight, when he was too twitchy to sleep. . . .

The long trail. A dim path among enormous spruces. Overhead, gold-green light slipping through the branches. Lost lakes, reflecting as ebony the silver of birch groves. The iron night, and in the vast silence more brilliant stars. Grim wordless Indians, tall and hawk-nosed, following for league on league the trail of a wounded moose. A log cabin, and at the door a lovely Indian princess. A trapper bearing a pack of furs—luxuriant ermine and cross-fox and beaver.

Dreaming thus, cheered by an excellent dinner at a Japanese restaurant on the Croton River, Ralph drove home and left his car in the huge humming garage where live like royalty the motors of corporation counsels and millionaire bootleggers and even movie actresses. He came whistling home to the old brownstone residence turned into flats, and he whistled as he opened his fantastic black and orange door.

He stopped short, gasping with terror, his heart somersaulting. Facing him was an intruder, his arm out, holding a revolver . . .

In two seconds he saw that the intruder was himself, imaged vaguely in the full-length mirror of the bathroom door; that the outstretched arm was his own, and the shining revolver his conservative door-key. But the shock left him panting as he wobbled down the hall, into the heavily ornate and bookish living-room, and lay limp in a red leather chair.

“I’ve—I’ve got to do something, or it’ll be a breakdown! I will go to Canada with Woodbury! After all, he’s a mighty good fellow, despite his bellowing and his confounded pep and punch. I’ll go!”

In all of his guarded and carefully planned existence he had never sounded so desperately resolute.

His voice seemed frightened as he gave Woodbury’s number on the telephone and as he addressed that good man in his West End Avenue residence; it sounded but a little less frightened as he summoned a taxicab and said good night to the janitress, who leered from the vestibule at the spectacle of the well-behaved Mr. Prescott starting out at eleven P.M.

“You bet—you bet—come right up—don’t matter how late, and I’ll tell the wife to have the Jap stick some real genuwine beer on the ice,” Woodbury had greeted him. As Ralph bounced northward in the taxi, his heart was warm with the friendliness of the quartermaster-colonel of progress.

“—quit all this cross-word-puzzle mongering of the law, and these concerts and highbrow English weeklies and cautious games of bridge. Get out among real men and eat real grub and sleep on Mother Earth,” he murmured. “Good old Woodbury—what a generous fellow he is!”

Woodbury was waiting in the lower hall when Ralph arrived. He greeted him by thrice shaking hands, thrice pounding his shoulders, and led him up the highly carven black-walnut staircase to the Den, a room rich and slightly stuffy, profuse in mounted ducks, old pipes hanging on a pyrographed rack celebrating the valor of Colgate University, and the originals of those very paintings of girls with lovely silk-smooth legs whereby the good tidings about Twinkletoe Stockings had been made known to a yearning world.

He produced Mrs. Woodbury, a pretty woman of thirty, who gulped:

“Oh, Mr. Prescott, I do think it would be too delightful if you could go with Wesson. The old bear! He pretends to be such a husky man of the wilds, but he’s as soft as a baby, and I do hope you’ll go along with him and keep him in shape. You say you aren’t used to roughing it, but honestly you look quite athletic—like a track-runner.”

Her lord admitted: “Yes, I guess that’s about right. I’m not so good as I let on. But I get along on bacon and bannock a lot better than the little woman here thinks, and it’d be just as well for you to make your first stab at the Big Woods with a man who wasn’t too hard-boiled, and wouldn’t keep you hiking maybe eighteen hours a day.”

Their modesty about Woodbury’s achievements as a Hardy Pioneer did more than hours of boasting to convince Ralph that it would be agreeable to accompany him; and as Woodbury, like a rather bloated but very jolly small boy, dragged all his beloved playthings out of closets and cedar chests, what won Ralph’s affection more than the beauties of a varnished fish (looking too disagreeably dead to suggest any joy in the catching), more than the cleverness of an agate-mounted reel, was a worn and wrinkled pair of laced boots.

“Now there’s some real Ritzy dancing-pumps,” yearned Woodbury. “Look at those spikes—like they’d been sprinkled on with a salt-shaker. Had ’em done specially. And that foot—soft as a moccasin. Those boots—why, say, they’ve been with me in Maine and Michigan and Canada. Many’s the big ol’ bass I’ve pulled out wearing them! Many’s the hill I’ve climbed! And now let me show you something that is something!”

He flipped open a linen-backed map bearing the legend “Mantrap River and Vicinity.” There was Winnipeg, at the lower right-hand edge; there was the Flambeau River; there were Lake Warwick and the Mantrap River, Mantrap Landing and Lac Qui Rêve, Ghost Squaw River and Ghost Rapids, Lost River and Weeping River and Lake Midnight.

Ralph could more or less picture Winnipeg, though he had never been west of Chicago; and he had heard of the Flambeau River. He imagined its sulky yellow flood, rolling for a thousand miles through a wilderness of pines and willow thicket and lone swamp melancholy at sunset. But most of the map, whether the Manitoba side or Saskatchewan, was as unfamiliar to him as central Tibet, and the names lured him: War Drum Rapids; Singing Rapids; Lake Neepegosis; Mudhen Creek; Thunderbird Lake; Jackpine Point. And settlements named Whitewater and Kittiko and Mantrap Landing—villages, no doubt, entrancing with swart Indians, papooses on the backs of squaws, the log cabins of Hudson’s Bay Company posts, and trappers gay in checked shirts of red and black.

Before his usually shrewd and unromantic eye had half traced the map, he knew that he was going to break away from his neat little accustomed life and plunge into mystery; and before he had half finished the bottle of beer which Woodbury proudly opened for him (under the handle of a drawer in the kitchen cabinet, in the astounding but surely temporary absence of all openers), Ralph flung out what was for him an almost hysterically incautious statement:

“I really think I might try to see if I couldn’t arrange to get away, and I’m most frightfully obliged to Mrs. Woodbury and you for welcoming me at this indecently late hour, and—”

That night, very late, he walked all the way back to Thirty-seventh Street. He felt brawny and tall and free, and as his trim feet, supercilious in black tie-shoes and linen spats, clacked on the pavement, to him they were padding in the mold and moss of far northern trails.

CHAPTER TWO

AMONG the Fifth Avenue windows given over to silver cocktail-shakers, emerald bracelets, and gowns direct from the Faubourg St. Honoré, is the magnificent display of Messrs. Fulton & Hutchinson, the great sports outfitters.

It is a camping scene. How green the cotton grass, how aqueous the glass water, how affecting to any exiled Dan’l Boone must be the stuffed blackbird singing a soundless lyric on a lifeless reed. And how necessary for hardy camp-life are the portable radio set, the pneumatic cushion which becomes a life-belt, and the four-burner gasoline stove.

Ralph Prescott stared at this realistic scene reverently, marched into the store, and was directed to the Outing Garments Department, on the seventh floor.

“I’m going to northern Canada, fishing, and I want something durable and quite simple in the way of clothes,” he said modestly to the clerk who glided up.

“Certainly, sir. The entire outfit? May I recommend these whipcord riding-breeches, with laced boots, a real Ouspewidgeon flannel shirt, and a waterproofed canvas jacket with game pockets? Now these breeches, for example, they’ll last a lifetime, and they’re a very nice value at only sixty-eight dollars,” beamed the clerk.

Ralph winced, and squeaked slightly, but let himself be led into them. He chose two pea-soup shirts—one of black and crimson checks, one of green and yellow plaid. He added a bold two-gallon Bill Hart hat with an ornamental leather band, and in a triple mirror he regarded himself in all his bravery.

To Ralph, as to most males, trying on clothes was ordinarily a torture, and the newness of a new suit made everything he had worn before seem frayed and shabby. But out of his camping armor he had all the pleasure of a masquerade. He looked very virile and competent, he told himself. He straightened up with ferocity, he put both fists on his hips with a swagger, then he removed the rimless eyeglasses which took away slightly from his appearance as a tough man of action. At that moment he had no doubt of his competence to shoot rapids, tote three hundred pounds on the portage, and whip the most aggressive Indian.

“I’ll order some big round spectacles, like Wes Woodbury’s—look more outdoorish,” he determined.

The expert clerk, whose training in perilous exploration had not been entirely within the establishment of Messrs. Fulton & Hutchinson, but had included three weeks in a Y.M.C.A. camp on Lake Chautauqua, unloaded upon Ralph a few large red bandannas, coat and trousers and hat of oilskin, self-ventilating gloves, folding slippers, woolen socks especially made by some special firm for some special purpose about which the clerk was a little hazy, high laced boots, low laced boots, and shoes of canvas with rubber soles an inch thick.

By this time Ralph was recalling Wes Woodbury’s tense prayer, “Whatever you do, for the love of Mike keep your outfit small!”

He escaped from the seventh floor after buying, under the clerk’s ardent counsel, a duffle-bag so large that if it were entirely filled no Indian yet born could have carried it across a portage. It was a charming and tricky duffle-bag. It had inside pockets, outside pockets, and topside pockets, each with straps and flaps and delightful little padlocks. It had loops and whorls and thongs. There was only one trouble: the top flap was so ingenious that there was no way of fastening it to prevent its bulging open and admitting all the rains of heaven. Ralph did not discover this until he was in a canoe on Lake Warwick.

The rest of his outfit he purchased on the main floor.

Tents, blankets, canoes, and the like had been arranged for by Woodbury’s friend in Winnipeg, and would be awaiting them at railhead, at Whitewater, so Ralph contented himself with not more than two or three times as many things as he needed.

The sports-specialists managed to unload upon him certain toys which were later to give his Indian guides unmitigated delight: a ball-bearing compass, mosquito dope which the grateful mosquitoes regarded as nectar, an emergency ration of highly condensed and entirely indigestible food-tablets, and an apparatus which was variously a knife, a nail-file, an auger, a corkscrew, a pair of pliers, and a screw-driver. But several objects really were more or less useful on the trail: a magnificent electric torch, a twenty-gauge shotgun, and some small part of the reels, rods, flies, trolling-hooks, and fish-nets which the tackle-expert assured him were necessary.

For a first adventure in outfitting, Ralph had really been very self-denying, when it is considered with what dreadful hypnotized fascination he looked at tents with phonographs and folding ice-boxes and portraits of Roosevelt; at lovely duck-hunting suits of grass, like the costumes of Hawaiian dancers; and compellingly real wax models slumbering with every sign of comfort in eiderdown sleeping-bags.

It was done. Ralph shook hands with six, several clerks and the concierge, and took proud leave. All his purchases went with him in the taxicab. They were too delightful to wait for, and in their knobby suggestive packages they surrounded him on the seat and the floor of the taxi.

At home he did on his armor and stood before the long door-mirror which so recently had frightened him. He was a splendor of wide-brimmed hat, canvas jacket with huge pockets for game—yet uncaught—red and black checked shirt, whipcord breeches, boots, and the startling, the ferocious, spectacles which he had picked up at the oculist’s on the way home.

“Heh! I don’t look so bad! I look like the real thing! I—”

Inexplicably all the magic was shattered, and he was no longer a child playing at being a hero, at being free and swift and strong; he was only a tired scholar on the slope of middle age.

“Hell, I look like Ralph Prescott, dressed up in baggy clothes! I look like amateur theatricals! Those clerks at Fulton & Hutchinson’s are probably laughing themselves sick at me!”

He was suddenly as deep in self-conscious doubt as he had been high in selfless joy. In his costume of the wilds, stained as yet by no streak of mold, no drop of blood, no blot of rain, he sat miserable again and doubtful in a humorless red leather chair.

But out of his melancholy came one fact: He had a friend!

All his life he had known tepid and cautious acquaintances; loyal enough and sufficiently charted, intelligent and easy, but afraid of life, sore afraid of the sacrifices and hot partisanship of veritable friends. And in the same E. Wesson Woodbury at whom he had often laughed as a noisy and shallow fool, he had found the one enduring friendship.

“We’ll have a bully time in the wilds. Wes is a real he-man. He’ll make me get over my confounded cautiousness.”

With a pale reflection of his afternoon’s ecstasy, Ralph began packing. But it had come to him that this expedition might be perilous, and as he fussily arranged his treasures in the vast duffle-bag, he thought of canoes smashed in rapids, of broken legs in the wilderness, of bears prowling about lonely tents, of city weaklings lost in pathless forests.

CHAPTER THREE

WHEN Ralph awoke and rolled up the blind, the train was steaming through the Manitoba prairie.

He had seen the immensity of the Alps, he had seen steamers dwarfed in the unending round of ocean, but he had never felt the boundlessness of the world so sharply as now, looking across these level acres broken only by distant farmhouses with scant cottonwood windbreaks. It was a land valiant and young. As he lay relaxed and expectant in his swaying berth, he wanted to ride on forever.

They saw the pleasant city of Winnipeg; they had a night at Bearpaw Junction; then all day long they lumbered through swamp and jack-pine forest on the mixed train to Whitewater, which is on the Flambeau River.

The train had a caboose and an aged passenger car behind the long brown creaking line of freight-cars. Trains had to Ralph been affairs of steel Pullmans, disdaining the country through which they dashed, and it had never occurred to him that it might be agreeable to talk with a trainman. Now he sat in the caboose, tilted back in a wooden chair, and listened to the aged conductor, who had woolly hair in his ears and a drawling endless wisdom in his gossip of weather and government and traveling-men and the reason why wives are, of many, accounted irritable.

It was Woodbury who had secured for them the chance to ride in the caboose, sacred to trainmen, instead of in the crammed passenger car. Woodbury was the sort of man who knew how to get passes to theaters, discounts on tires, and tables in restaurants on a holiday eve. By the time they had been aboard for five minutes, he knew that the conductor had a grandson in business college, he had advised the brakeman regarding his dyspepsia, and moved Ralph and himself into the caboose.

It was like the office of a lumber-camp, the interior of the little red car at the end of the train. There was a desk, a shelf-table which could be folded up against the wall, and hard-looking chairs. Here gathered the aristocracy of the train: the conductor, a traveling salesman for groceries who knew every person and every scandal from Bearpaw to Kittiko, and a real sergeant of the Royal Mounted Police, as good as a movie in his taut scarlet coat, his broad hat, his incredibly well-cut riding breeches.

The train jogged on so slowly, the earth, seen through the open rear door of the car, was so close, that Ralph felt identified with its drowsy strength. He no longer belonged to the hectic city. No, he was one with these brown swamps stretching to a far horizon tragic with black skeletons of trees burned in forest fires. He liked the roughness of the caboose; he was released by it—released from all the stuffy neatness of offices and polite flats. He was strong and serene and ungarrulous; he was—

Then he was highly uncomfortable, jarred out of his reverie by the talk of the policeman.

“Terrible thing—never found his body—must have smashed all to pieces among the rocks—found part of his canoe and a paddle—never could understand how as good a waterman as he was ever tried to shoot Singing Rapids,” the policeman was fretting.

“Wh-what rapids are those?” Ralph mumbled to Woodbury.

“Singing Rapids, on the Mantrap. The sergeant was just telling us about how a half-breed—corking good canoeman he was, too—how he got drowned in ’em.”

Suddenly Ralph knew that he was a coward.

He knew that he was afraid, and deathly afraid, of rapids and of all the unknown risks of the wilderness. And because he was afraid he sought to sound careless as he chuckled:

“Hum. Really? Well, then, I hope we won’t shoot ’em, Wes!”

“No. We go up ’em. Our route is up river.”

“I see. But would, uh—  What do you think about that sort of thing? Would you take a chance and try to shoot ’em if they were so kind as to be going our way? And what do you do? Line up ’em, or what?”

“Prob’ly portage around ’em. Time enough to think of that when we come to ’em. . . . They getting much moonshine up here now, sergeant?” said Woodbury, with booming amiability.

“Time enough to think of them. . . .”

Ralph’s time to think of them, he shuddered, began right now.

“Am I going to be afraid all the while?” he agonized. His joy in adventure had dimmed; it almost vanished as he listened to the chatter, as he heard of wolves, of forest fires, of canoes capsized while sailing on lakes ten miles wide, of canoes sinking in a storm when they struck hidden snags.

And with his dreary apprehensions was a certain boredom.

For nearly four days he had been constantly with E. Wesson Woodbury, and he was a shade weary of that barking laugh, that loud patronage, that story about monkey glands which he had heard now seven times.

“Just as well we’ll have separate canoes. Wes is a prince, but he’s never learned to be quiet,” Ralph sighed; and, “Now if we were in the rapids—if the canoe struck a rock and you had to swim—  What if the current banged your head against a rock?”

Thus afraid of being afraid, which is of all fears the most unmanning and pitiful, Ralph sat paralyzed; and hour by tedious hour, as they crept through the dusty jackpines, as the train stopped at every lone wheat-elevator, and switched box-cars for interminable vacuities, his torpor was broken only by irritation at Woodbury’s manly laughter.

It was a relief when the train reluctantly staggered into Whitewater, on the Flambeau River—end of rail, jumping-off place, end of what is called civilization—and it was a relief to see his first rapids and get it over.

The Flambeau crawls like a bloated boa constrictor through the shaggy woods. At the edge of town, beside the railroad, it breaks into the Whitewater Rapids. The whole stream is flung between two black granite bastions, gushing as smoothly as though it were poured from a million-gallon bottle. But below, among the slippery boulders, it is broken up into a welter of milky foam. No canoe could live in that chaos, where the tortured water is dashed up in rainbow-streaked foam, to fall in a curdle of snowy whirlpools.

Yet Ralph was comforted.

Like most silent and too-imaginative men, he was chiefly afraid of what he could not see. He had pictured all rapids as cloaked in menacing darkness, and however turbulent this cataract, it was something real and conquerable, under the light of the tardy northern sun. Swim it?—certainly he could swim it—well, perhaps he could—if he had to!

With a renewed joy of adventure and, tangentially, a renewed liking for E. Wesson Woodbury, he climbed down from the train, his shotgun and fishing-tackle clattering and his new boots making the most touching and satisfactory clump on the plank platform, and came to his first frontier town.

CHAPTER FOUR

WHITEWATER was once a sawmill town of fifteen hundred persons. But the patriotic lumber company has slashed away all the timber, that is, all the timber that was not carelessly burned, and the place has dwindled to a hundred souls—a cluster of tumbling shanties in a prickly wilderness of stumps and bogs.

The chief adornment is a tall iron sawmill chimney, covered with a dome of wire netting to keep in the sparks. But the chimney is ruined now and likely to collapse in the next storm. The secondary pride of Whitewater, rising loftily among the tar-paper shanties, is the Bunger House: Meals and Lodging.

It rises three whole stories. It has never been painted, and the dinginess of its gray clapboards is broken only by the clean yellowness of such new boards as Mr. Bert Bunger has been compelled to tack on to keep out the rain. Most of its windows are broken. Where once the lumber kings, or at least lumber knights, had suites of two rooms (both without bath—one room to sleep in and one to play poker), where once the dining-hall banged to the tread of lumberjacks’ clogs, now Mr. Bunger is lucky if he has a single roomer, and six mealers festive over the pork and beans.

But Mr. Bunger in poverty cannot forget that once he was powerful. It hurts him to have to do anything for guests. It disturbs his games of solitaire and his sense of seigniory to receive perfect strangers.

Ralph and Woodbury were to spend the night here before taking the river steamer Emily C. Just up the Flambeau River to Kittiko, where they would finally embark in canoes. They came mildly into the office of the Bunger House. Behind them was the sergeant of Mounted Police, as respectful as they. The Royal Mounted are not noted for timidity, but Mr. Bert Bunger was the only person in Whitewater who could provide food and lodging.

The office was rather like a pigsty. Then again it was like an attic filled with furniture of 1870. It was a largish room. On one side was a pile of rickety chairs and warped tables. Beside them was a porcelain bathtub, indecently public. Probably somebody had intended to install it in a room upstairs and connect it with water-pipes sometime; probably nobody ever would connect it with anything any time. (It must not be supposed that it was the only bathtub in the house. There was one other, in a room the key of which Mr. Bunger had chronically lost. But this was a scaly structure of tin with peeling paint, an extraordinarily rough object for plump and meditative persons to sit in.)

The rest of the office was agreeably filled with a pool-table of torn green cloth, a round pine table on which rested, for hotel library, a copy of the Montreal Star of six weeks ago, and the grained pine counter behind which Mr. Bunger played solitaire with cards over which soup—at least—must have been spilled.

Of the dust in corners, of the spider-webs in electroliers without electricity, of the general mixture of red mud, sawdust, and cigarette butts, it would not be refined to speak.

As Woodbury and Ralph and the sergeant filed up to the desk, Mr. Bunger raised his head in irritation.

“Could we get a couple of rooms for tonight, and supper?” inquired Woodbury, in his most flamboyant good-fellowship.

Mr. Bunger (and a skinny little man he was) carefully placed the nine of spades upon the eight thereof, dusted his hands, looked learned, placed the ten upon the nine, looked up again, and groaned, “Huh?”

“We’d like two rooms, and I guess the sergeant wants one. Be all right, eh, all right?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” sighed Mr. Bunger. “Will you guys register? Now who the hell has taken that register away? Somebody always monkeying with things here! I’m getting good and tired of it!”

Ralph, genially permitted by Mr. Bunger to carry his own bag and find his own room, discovered that it had most of the legal equipment of hotel rooms, namely a bed, a bureau, and a chair, though the bed was of so sensitive a nature that it squeaked when he merely looked at it, the bureau drawers would not open, and the lone chair had been unsuccessfully repaired with fence-wire. But one thing generally found in hotel rooms it did vigorously lack: breathable air. He found that the window had been nailed down. As a substitute for air there was an ancient scent of pink soap, crushed insects, and moldy linen.

He dumped his duffle-bag on the floor, took out only a handkerchief or two, and fled into the corridor.

Woodbury was fleeing with him. They met at the stairs.

“Fierce place! I think I’ll tell Brother Bunger how much I love him before we leave here,” growled Woodbury, and Ralph admired him again for that surly hardihood.

It was half-past five now, and the Bunger supper was at six. But they had to see that their Indian guides, their canoes and tents, had arrived. Ralph lost the feeling of desolation which had oppressed him, as they passed through the street of rotting log cabins and crazy shacks and came to a camp of white tents and wigwams in the shadow of jackpines.

“I really am in the North, among Indians!” he exulted.

Their Indian guides, who had come on by themselves from Bearpaw, escorting the supplies, were encamped with a band of Crees. When Woodbury inquired for them, they came filing out of their tent.

Ralph Prescott had been brought up on the Fenimore Cooper tradition of Indians. He expected all of them to look like the chieftain on the buffalo nickel, like the statue which in all proper parks stands between Goethe in marble and General Sherman in bronze—a sachem eagle-nosed, tall, magnificently grave. His heart was pinched as he saw shambling toward them four swart and runty loafers, introduced as Jesse, Louey, Charley, and Nick.