November Joe/Chapter 16

Although Dandy Tomlinson's bullet had passed through Joe's shoulder, it had left a very ugly wound, but the young woodsman's clean and healthy life stood him in good stead and the process of healing went on rapidly. The chief trouble was his weakness, for he had lost a large amount of blood before I found him.

We had fetched a doctor from Priamville, who left a string of instructions which Linda carried out as closely as she could. Indeed, she would have devoted most of her time to Joe, but he managed to make her spend a good part of each day out of doors. Sometimes he would beg for a fish for his supper and she must catch it herself to prove how well she had profited by his teaching; there were half a hundred things he suggested, not one of which was obvious or trifling, until I marvelled at his ingenuity.

During those days he perforce kept his bunk, ​where he lay very silent and quiet. I usually found him with his eyes shut as if sleeping, but at the sound of my footstep, if I were alone, he would raise his lashes and look gravely at me.

"You are finding the time long, Joe?" I said on one occasion.

"No, Mr. Quaritch, the hours slip past quick enough. I've never had a lie-by and a while for thinking since I been a man. There's a good few puzzles to life that wants facing one time or another, I s'pose."

"Which puzzle is it that you are facing now?"

"Mr. Petersham wants to be the making of me."

"Then you're about the luckiest young man in this hemisphere!"

"But I have everything I want! . . . Besides, I ain't done nothing for him."

"What about saving his daughter's life?"

"Huh! You'd 'a' done the same."

"I have no particular anxiety to be shot."

Joe shook his head. "If you notioned Miss Linda was to be hurt, you'd not stand off running a bit of a risk to stop it?"

​"Perhaps not."

"Just so, and I feel his kindness is more'n I deserve. He'd make me head warden here for a bit first, and then send some kind of a professor to teach me how to talk and fix me up generally." He paused.

"Well, that sounds very reasonable," I commented.

"And after they'd scraped some of the moss off me, he'd put me into his office."

I hid the astonishment I felt at this announcement. "After that?" I asked.

"After that it'd be up to me to make good. He'd help all he knew."

"It sounds a very brilliant future for you, November."

Joe was silent for a moment. "It does, Mr. Quaritch," he said at length in a different tone. "And it gives me something to think about. . . . So they caught Muppy all right? Him and Puttick 'll find prison a poor place after the woods."

"I can feel for them," said I, "for I am leaving the woods to-morrow myself. I must get back to Quebec."

​He turned his eyes upon me with a look I had never seen in them before.

"That so, Mr. Quaritch?"

"Yes. It is lucky the two men from St. Amiel's have arrived, as it leaves me free to go. The new wardens are sure to be satisfactory, as you recommended them to Mr. Petersham. Besides, all the trouble seems to be over, the squatters are contented enough; the blackmailing plot evidently lay entirely between Puttick and those two scoundrels the Tomlinsons."

"Huh, yes! It was put up among them three, I guess. Kalmacks is safe enough now; there's no call for you to stay longer. Charley Paul and Tom Miller is two good men; I known 'em since I was a boy down to St. Amiel. Mr. Petersham won't never have no better."

"As to that, you'll be here for quite a while yourself."

He made no reply, and when I turned from the window to look at him, he was lying with his eyes closed; and thinking he was tired, I left him.

At the end of the south verandah was situated a small detached room, which we had ​turned into a workshop, and early the same afternoon I went round there to repair a favourite fishing-rod. The verandah was empty as I passed through it, but presently Petersham joined me.

He did not speak, but sat down in an armchair beside the bench where I was working, and pulling a bundle of letters from his pocket began to open and look them through.

"That fellow, November Joe, is an infernal fool," he said presently. "He is a dolt without an ounce of ambition."

"In his own sphere . . ." I began.

"He is all very well in his own sphere, but he should try to rise above it."

"You think so?"

"Are you mad, James?"

"He has done uncommonly well for himself so far," I said. "He has made good use of his brains and his experience. In his own way he is very, very capable."

"That is true enough, but he has got about as far as he can go without help. As you say, he has done all this for himself. Now I am ready to do a good deal more for him. I'll back him in ​any line of business he chooses to follow. I owe him that and more. Heaven knows what might have happened to Linda but for him. Those ruffians Puttick and the Tomlinsons were wild to lay hands on money. If Joe had not been here, they would probably have been successful. . . . Perhaps they might have kidnapped her or hurt her in the hope of putting the screw on me!"

"You owe a good deal to November."

"I am well aware of it," replied Petersham. "I am convinced I owe him Linda's life."

Something in his tone showed me his further meaning. I dropped my fishing-rod and stared at him. I knew Linda had enormous influence over her father, but this was beyond imagination.

"You'd never allow it!" I exclaimed.

"Why not?" he retorted angrily. "Is n't Joe better than the Hipper dude? Or Phil Bitshiem . . . or than that—Italian Count with his pedigree from Noah in his pocket? Tell me, where is she going to find a man like Joe? Why, he's got it in him to do things, big things, and I hope I'm a good enough Republican not to see the ​injustice of nailing a fellow down to the spot where he was born."

"But November would never dare look so high! He's modest."

"He'll get over that!"

"I doubt it," I said. "Besides, you are reckoning without Linda . . . how do you know that she . . ."

"Naturally I don't know for sure about Linda," he answered shortly; then glancing at his watch he got up. "Just about time to get my mail ready."

We had been speaking in low tones, for the subject of our conversation naturally did not lend itself to loud talk, and besides, during the last quarter of an hour or so a murmur of voices from the verandah had warned us to be careful. We had not shut the door leading to the verandah, as it was the only one, and we needed it open for light and air. Petersham walked towards it, but, instead of stepping out, he turned and laid a hand like a vice on my arm.

"Quiet! Quiet for your life!" he whispered. "She must never know we were here!"

"But, Joe, you're mistaken, Joe . . . I wish ​it!" It was Linda's voice, shy and trembling as I had never heard it.

"Ah, that's all your great goodness, Miss Linda, and I have n't earned none of it."

I pointed frantically to the door . . . we must shut that door and shut out those voices, but Petersham swore at me under his breath.

"Darn! you know those hinges screech like a wildcat! It can't be helped, for it would kill her to know we heard a word of this."

We crept away into the farthest corner of the workshop, but even there phrases floated to us, though mercifully we could not hear all.

"But father would help you, for you know you are a genius, Joe."

"All I could ever do lies in the woods, Miss Linda; woodsways is the whole of it. A yard outside the wood, and the meanest chap bred on the streets could beat me easy. I can't thank you nor Mr. Petersham the way I'd like to, for my tongue is slow . . ." Here his voice fell.

A period of relief came to me; for some minutes the interchange of speech, low and earnest as it was, reached us only in a vague murmuring.

​"But if you hate the city life so much, you must not go to the city,"—it was Linda again. "Live your life in the woods . . . I love the woods too."

"The woods is bleak and black enough to them that's not born among the trees. Them that's lived outside allus wants more, Miss Linda. The change of colour, the fall o' the leaf, the snow, by 'n by the hot summer under the thick trees—that's all we wild men want. But it's different for them that's seen all the changes o' the big world beyond."

A long interval followed before the voices became audible again.

"Oh, no, no, Joe!"

Petersham clutched my arm once more at the sound.

"You're so young, Miss Linda, you don't know. . . . I'd give my right hand to believe different, but I can't! It would n't be best . . . not for you."

November's tone moved me more than Linda's passion. He was a man fighting it out against his own heart. I knew well the power of attraction Linda possessed, but somehow I had ​not guessed how it had worked on Joe. When I came to think of it, I understood how blind I had been, that the influence was inevitable. It was not only her beauty, it was more than that. November, untaught woodsman though he might be, had found in her the answering note to his own high nature. I had, indeed, been right in so far that he had not dreamed of aspiring to her; nevertheless the episode would mean pain and loss to him, I feared, for many a day.

Once more I heard him.

"Don't you think I'll be proud every hour I have to live that you was so good to me, Miss Linda? I shan't never forget it."

"Joe, I think I hate you!" she cried, and then the quick tap of her footsteps told us she had run into the house.

There was absolute silence for a minute or two. At length Joe sighed heavily, and with the slow laborious movement of weakness went to his room.

When all seemed safe, Petersham and I stole out of hiding like thieves, and, though we exchanged no word, Petersham was swearing vio​lently under his breath until he shut his office door.

Rather to my surprise, November Joe came out for a while after supper, because he said it was my last evening at Kalmacks. Neither he nor Linda gave any sign that anything unusual had passed between them. Indeed, we were gay enough and we had Charley Paul in to sing us some French-Canadian songs.

After saying good-bye as well as good-night to Linda and her father, I followed Joe to his room.

"I won't wake you up in the morning, November," I said. "There's nothing like rest and sleep to put you on your legs again."

"I've been trying that cure, Mr. Quaritch, and I won't be long behind you."

"Oh, where are you going to?"

"To my shack on Charley's Brook. I'm kind o' homesick-like, and that's the truth."

"But how about Mr. Petersham's wish to give you a start in his business in New York or Montreal?"

"I'm not the kind of a guy for a city, Mr. Quaritch. All the chaps'd get turning round to ​stare at the poor wild fella, and I'd sure be scairt to sleep in one of them up-in-the-blue-sky houses, anyway!" He laughed.

"But you would soon be used to city ways, and perhaps become a great man and rich!"

"That was what the mink said to the otter. 'Go you to the city and see the sights,' says he, but the otter knew the only way he'd ever see the city would be around some lovely gal's neck."

November Joe had no idea how far I could read into his fable.

"And what did the otter say?"

"Huh! Nothing. He just went down his slide into the lake and got chasin' fish, and I guess he soon forgot he missed seein' the city, all right."

"And how about you, Joe?"

"I guess I'll get chasin' fish, too, Mr. Quaritch."

When I arrived at the depot at Priamsville in the morning, to my surprise I found November Joe there before me.

"Why, Joe!" I exclaimed, "you're not fit to travel."

​"I thought I'd go on the cars with you, Mr. Quaritch, if you'll have me. There's a good many times to change before we gets to Silent Water, and I'm not so wonderful quick on my feet yet."

"You'd better come right through to Quebec," I said, "and let my sister feed you up for a few days."

But he insisted on leaving me at Silent Water, and I sent a wire to Mrs. Harding to look after him. During the journey, I spoke several times of Kalmacks, but November had little or nothing to say in reply.

He soon grew strong again and he wrote me of his trapping and shooting, so at any rate he is trying to forget all that he renounced at Kalmacks. But will Linda have no further word to say? And if she . . .

I wonder.