The Bull Moose by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-10-28T16:45:31+00:00

Chapter XVIII

Wanita Faces Her World

Wanita moved quickly amongst the queer litter of habitations that still showed no sign of any wakefulness among their occupants. The camp dogs were stirring, but that was all. With the exception of those who sought their morning “eye-opener” at Marthe’s store Reliance usually came to as noon approached, and the process was generally sluggish, ill-tempered, and grudging.

Wanita was unconcerned for the habits of the township. But she was glad enough for the absence of curious eyes; and more curious tongues. She wanted time to think, she wanted to figure out just where hot impulse had placed her; she felt that, so far as Marthe was concerned, she had burnt even her boat. And Marthe was not only Sandy’s mother. She was a hard, powerful creature whom she had deliberately antagonized. So she hurried up to the little old barricaded cabin, which had been her winter home for so long, with her blanket roll shouldered, and her strong young arms loaded with her camp outfit.

She found the two-roomed shanty, with its added leanto, just as it had been left when the ice went out of the river, and a melting world had summoned a gold-hungry people to its summer labors. She tore down the boarding nailed over glassless windows, and forced the heavy door. And now she was alone in the little living room with her outfit strewn about her feet, an addition to the general litter left behind them at the time of their spring exodus.

Her eyes were gazing somberly. They glanced slowly from one squalid detail to another. And as they did so it all came back to her. In those poignant moments the little place was peopled with the shadows of two loved souls who were gone.

There was the small rusted cookstove at which she had prepared so many frugal meals for those she would serve no more; there was the stout old chair to which her dead father had added a pair of roughly made rockers, and which had always been his; there was the little three-legged stool upon which her brown-skinned mother had always squatted in her Indian fire-worship; then there was the backless windsor chair where she, herself, used to sit listening and laughing while Sha’s cheerful Irish brogue poured out its easy flow of half humorous philosophy, which was the very essence of the man. It was all crude, mean, and devoid of grace. But, oh, it was friendly to her.

Makeshift? How could it have been otherwise? Wanita saw nothing in its squalor to hurt. Were they not of the human flotsam of the northern gold world, always on the move, seeking, ready on the instant to move on, to migrate to any new field offering better prospect? It was just shelter, temporary shelter, in a life in which any week, or day, or even hour might bring them change. Makeshift? Of course. But with those two it had been–home.

It was a moment for Wanita when the full of her disaster swept in upon her.

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