William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean HowellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
cutaway, his well-fitting trousers, his scarf with a pin in it, had been too much for these young fellows in their long 'stoga boots and flannel shirts. They looked at him askance, and despatched their meal with more than their wonted swiftness, and were off again into the woods without any demonstrations of satisfaction in Bartley's presence.
He had perceived their grudge, for he had felt it in his time. But it did not displease him; he had none of the pain with which Kinney, who had so long bragged of him to the loggers, saw that his guest was a failure.
"I guess they'll come out all right in the end," he said. In this warm atmosphere, after the gross and heavy dinner he had eaten, he yawned again and again. He folded his overcoat into a pillow for his bench and lay down, and lazily watched Kinney about his work. Presently he saw Kinney seated on a block of wood beside the stove, with his elbow propped in one hand, and holding a magazine, out of which he was reading; he wore spectacles, which gave him a fresh and interesting touch of grotesqueness. Bartley found that an empty barrel had been placed on each side of him, evidently to keep him from rolling off his bench.
"Hello!" he said. "Much obliged to you, Kinney. I haven't been taken such good care of since I can remember. Been asleep, haven't I?"
"About an hour," said Kinney, with a glance at the clock, and ignoring his agency in Bartley's comfort.
"Food for the brain!" said Bartley, sitting up. "I should think so. I've dreamt a perfect New American Cyclopaedia, and a pronouncing gazetteer thrown in."
"Is that so?" said Kinney, as if pleased with the suggestive character of his cookery, now established by eminent experiment.
Bartley yawned a yawn of satisfied sleepiness, and rubbed his hand over his face. "I suppose," he said, "if I'm going to write anything about Camp Kinney, I had better see all there is to see."
"Well, yes, I presume you had," said Kinney. "We'll go over to where they're cuttin', pretty soon, and you can see all there is in an hour. But I presume you'll want to see it so as to ring in some description, hey? Well, that's all right. But what you going to do with it, when you've done it, now you're out of the Free Press?"
"Oh, I shouldn't have printed it in the Free Press, anyway Coals to Newcastle, you know. I'll tell you what I think I'll do, Kinney: I'll get my outlines, and then you post me with a lot of facts,—queer characters, accidents, romantic incidents, snowings-up, threatened starvation, adventures with wild animals,—and I can make something worth while; get out two or three columns, so they can print it in their Sunday edition. And then I'll take it up to Boston with me, and seek my fortune with it."
"Well, sir, I'll do it," said Kinney, fired with the poetry of the idea. "I'll post you! Dumn 'f I don't wish I could write! Well, I did use to scribble once for an agricultural paper; but I don't call that writin'. I've set down, well, I guess as much as sixty times, to try to write out what I know about loggin'—"
"Hold on!" cried Bartley, whipping out his notebook. "That's first-rate. That'll do for the first line in the head,—What I Know About Logging,—large caps. Well!"
Kinney shut his magazine, and took his knee between his hands, closing one of his eyes in order to sharpen his recollection. He poured forth a stream of reminiscence, mingled observation, and personal experience. Bartley followed him with his pencil, jotting down points, striking in sub-head lines, and now and then interrupting him with cries of "Good!" "Capital!" "It's a perfect mine,—it's a mint! By Jove!" he exclaimed, "I'll make six columns of this! I'll offer it to one of the magazines, and it'll come out illustrated! Go on, Kinney."
"Hark!" said Kinney, craning his neck forward to listen. "I thought I heard sleigh-bells. But I guess it wa'n't. Well, sir, as I was sayin', they fetched that fellow into camp with both feet frozen to the knees—Dumn 'f it wa'n't bells!"
He unlimbered himself, and hurried to the door at the other end of the cabin, which he opened, letting in a clear block of the afternoon sunshine, and a gush of sleigh-bell music, shot with men's voices, and the cries and laughter of women.
"Well, sir," said Kinney, coming back and making haste to roll down his sleeves and put on his coat. "Here's a nuisance! A whole party of folks—two sleigh-loads—right on us. I don't know who they be, or where they're from. But I know where I wish they was. Well, of course, it's natural they should want to see a loggin'-camp," added Kinney, taking himself to task for his inhospitable mind, "and there ain't any harm in it. But I wish they'd give a fellow a little notice!"
The voices and bells drew nearer, but Kinney seemed resolved to observe the decorum of not going to the door till some one knocked.
"Kinney! Kinney! Hello, Kinney!" shouted a man's voice, as the bells hushed before the door, and broke into a musical clash when one of the horses tossed his head.
"Well, sir," said Kinney, rising, "I guess it's old Willett himself. He's the owner; lives up to Portland, and been threatening to come down here all winter, with a party of friends. You just stay still," he added; and he paid himself the deference which every true American owes himself in his dealings with his employer: he went to the door very deliberately, and made no haste on account of the repeated cries of "Kinney! Kinney!" in which others of the party outside now joined.
When he opened the door again, the first voice saluted him with a roar of laughter. "Why, Kinney, I began to think you were dead!"
"No, sir," Bartley heard Kinney reply, "it takes more to kill me than you suppose." But now he stepped outside, and the talk became unintelligible.
Finally Bartley heard what was imaginably Mr. Willett's voice saying, "Well, let's go in and have a look at it now"; and with much outcry and laughter the ladies were invisibly helped to dismount, and presently the whole party came stamping and rustling in.
Bartley's blood tingled. He liked this, and he stood quite self-possessed, with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets and his elbows dropped, while Mr. Willett advanced in a friendly way.
"Ah, Mr. Hubbard! Kinney told us you were in here, and asked me to introduce myself while he looked after the horses. My name's Willett. These are my daughters; this is Mrs. Macallister, of Montreal; Mrs. Witherby, of Boston; Miss Witherby, and Mr. Witherby. You ought to know each other; Mr. Hubbard is the editor of the Equity Free Press. Mr. Witherby, of The Boston Events, Mr. Hubbard. Oh, and Mr. Macallister."
Bartley bowed to the Willett and Witherby ladies, and shook hands with Mr. Witherby, a large, solemn man, with a purse-mouth and tight rings of white hair, who treated him with the pomp inevitable to the owner of a city newspaper in meeting a country editor.
At the mention of his name, Mr. Macallister, a slight little straight man, in a long ulster and a sealskin cap, tiddled farcically forward on his toes, and, giving Bartley his hand, said, "Ah, haow d'e-do, haow d'e-do!"
Mrs. Macallister fixed upon him the eye of the flirt who knows her man. She was of the dark-eyed English type; her eyes were very large and full, and her smooth black hair was drawn flatly backward, and fastened in a knot just under her dashing fur cap. She wore a fur sack, and she was equipped against the cold as exquisitely as her Southern sisters defend themselves from the summer. Bits of warm color, in ribbon and scarf, flashed out here and there; when she flung open her sack, she showed herself much more lavishly buttoned and bugled and bangled than the Americans. She sat clown on the movable bench which Bartley had vacated, and crossed her feet, very small and saucy, even in their arctics, on a stick of fire-wood, and cast up her neat profile, and rapidly made eyes at every part of the interior. "Why, it's delicious, you know. I never saw anything so comfortable. I want to spend the rest of me life here, you know." She spoke very far down in her throat, and with a rising inflection in each sentence. "I'm going to have a quarrel with you, Mr. Willett, for not telling me what a delightful surprise you had for us here. Oh, but I'd no idea of it, I assure you!"
"Well, I'm glad you like it, Mrs. Macallister," said Mr. Willett, with the clumsiness of American middle-age when summoned to say something gallant. "If I'd told you what a surprise I had for you, it wouldn't have been one."
"Oh,