The Night-Born | Page 5

it chilled me to the
marrow, sent those little thrills Marathoning up and down my spinal
column, meeting a white woman out there at the head of a tribe of
savages a thousand miles the other side of No Man's Land.
"'Stranger," she said, 'I reckon you're sure the first white that ever set
foot in this valley. Set down an' talk a spell, and then we'll have a bite
to eat. Which way might you be comin'?'
"There it was, that tang again. But from now to the end of the yarn I
want you to forget it. I tell you I forgot it, sitting there on the edge of
that swan-skin robe and listening and looking at the most wonderful
woman that ever stepped out of the pages of Thoreau or of any other
man's book.

"I stayed on there a week. It was on her invitation. She promised to fit
me out with dogs and sleds and with Indians that would put me across
the best pass of the Rockies in five hundred miles. Her fly was pitched
apart from the others, on the high bank by the river, and a couple of
Indian girls did her cooking for her and the camp work. And so we
talked and talked, while the first snow fell and continued to fall and
make a surface for my sleds. And this was her story.
"She was frontier-born, of poor settlers, and you know what that
means--work, work, always work, work in plenty and without end.
"'I never seen the glory of the world,' she said. 'I had no time. I knew it
was right out there, anywhere, all around the cabin, but there was
always the bread to set, the scrubbin' and the washin' and the work that
was never done. I used to be plumb sick at times, jes' to get out into it
all, especially in the spring when the songs of the birds drove me most
clean crazy. I wanted to run out through the long pasture grass, wetting
my legs with the dew of it, and to climb the rail fence, and keep on
through the timber and up and up over the divide so as to get a look
around. Oh, I had all kinds of hankerings--to follow up the canyon beds
and slosh around from pool to pool, making friends with the water-dogs
and the speckly trout; to peep on the sly and watch the squirrels and
rabbits and small furry things and see what they was doing and learn
the secrets of their ways. Seemed to me, if I had time, I could crawl
among the flowers, and, if I was good and quiet, catch them whispering
with themselves, telling all kinds of wise things that mere humans
never know.'"
Trefethan paused to see that his glass had been refilled.
"Another time she said: 'I wanted to run nights like a wild thing, just to
run through the moonshine and under the stars, to run white and naked
in the darkness that I knew must feel like cool velvet, and to run and
run and keep on running. One evening, plumb tuckered out--it had been
a dreadful hard hot day, and the bread wouldn't raise and the churning
had gone wrong, and I was all irritated and jerky--well, that evening I
made mention to dad of this wanting to run of mine. He looked at me
curious-some and a bit scared. And then he gave me two pills to take.

Said to go to bed and get a good sleep and I'd be all hunky-dory in the
morning. So I never mentioned my hankerings to him, or any one any
more.'
"The mountain home broke up--starved out, I imagine--and the family
came to Seattle to live. There she worked in a factory--long hours, you
know, and all the rest, deadly work. And after a year of that she became
waitress in a cheap restaurant--hash-slinger, she called it. "She said to
me once, 'Romance I guess was what I wanted. But there wan't no
romance floating around in dishpans and washtubs, or in factories and
hash-joints.'
"When she was eighteen she married--a man who was going up to
Juneau to start a restaurant. He had a few dollars saved, and appeared
prosperous. She didn't love him--she was emphatic about that, but she
was all tired out, and she wanted to get away from the unending
drudgery. Besides, Juneau was in Alaska, and her yearning took the
form of a desire to see that wonderland. But little she saw of it. He
started the restaurant, a little cheap one, and she quickly learned what
he had married her for..... to save paying wages. She came pretty close
to running the joint and doing all the work from