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When The Mail Came In
by
“Look here, son, when I quit salt water I left all that garbage and bilge-water talk about ‘guilt’ and ‘responsibility’ behind. The days are too short, the nights are too cold, and grub is too dear for me to spare time to theorize. I take people the way I take work and play–just as they come–and I’d advise you to do the same.”
“No, sir; I won’t associate with gamblers and crooks, so why should I hobnob with these women? They’re worse than the men, for all the gamblers have lost is their honesty. Every time I see these girls I think of the little mother back home. It’s awful. Suppose she saw me dancing with them?”
Well, that’s a bad line of talk and I couldn’t say much.
Of course, when the actresses found out how he felt they came back at him strong, but he wrapped himself up in his dignity and held himself aloof when he came to town, so he didn’t seem to mind it.
It was one afternoon in January, cold and sharp, that Ollie Marceau’s team went through the ice just below our camp. She was a great dog-puncher and had the best team in camp–seven fine malamoots–which she drove every day. When the animals smelled our place they ran away and dragged her into the open water below the hot springs. She was wet for ten minutes, and by the time she had got out and stumbled to our bunk-house she was all in. Another ten minutes with the “quick” at thirty below would have finished her, but we rushed her in by the fire and made her drink a glass of “hootch.” Martin got her parka off somehow while I slashed the strings to her mukluks and had her little feet rubbed red as berries before she’d quit apologizing for the trouble she’d made. A fellow learns to watch toes pretty close in the winter.
“Lord! stop your talk,” we said. “This is the first chance we have had to do anything for a lady in two years. It’s a downright pleasure for us to take you in this way.”
“Indeed!” she chattered. “Well, it isn’t mutual–” And we all laughed.
We roused up a good fire and made her take off all the wet clothes she felt she could afford to, then wrung them out and hung them up to dry. We made her gulp down another whisky, too, after which I gave her some footgear and she slipped into one of Martin’s Mackinaw shirts. We knew just how faint and shaky she felt, but she was dead game and joked with us about it.
I never realized what a cute trick she was till I saw her in that great, coarse, blue shirt with her feet in beaded moccasins, her yellow hair tousled, and the sparkle of adventure in her bright eyes. She stood out like a nugget by candle-light, backed as she was, by the dingy bark walls of our cabin.
I suppose it was a bad instant for Prosser to appear. He certainly cued in wrong and found the sight shocking to his Plymouth Rock proprieties.
The raw liquor we had forced on her had gone to her head a bit, as it will when you’re fresh from the cold and your stomach is empty, so her face was flushed and had a pretty, reckless, daring look to it. She had her feet high up on a chair, too–not so very high, either–where they were thawing out under the warmth of the oven, and we were all laughing at her story of the mishap.
Monty stopped on recognizing who she was, while the surprise in his face gave way to disapproval. We could see it as plain as if it was blazoned there in printer’s ink, and it sobered us. The girl removed her feet and stood up.
“Miss Marceau has just had an accident,” I began, but I saw his eyes were fastened on the bottle on the table, and I saw also that he knew what caused the fever in her cheeks.