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Jerome K. Jerome - ""

E. R. Punshon - "The Bittermeads Mystery"

Mary Roberts Rinehart - "The Man in Lower Ten"

Edumud G. Ross - "History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson,"

Cabin Fever

B >> B. M. Bower >> Cabin Fever




His back to that end of the room, Cash sat stiff-necked and
stubbornly speechless, and ate and drank as though he were alone
in the cabin. Whenever Bud's mind left Lovin Child long enough to
think about it, he watched Cash furtively for some sign of
yielding, some softening of that grim grudge. It seemed to him as
though Cash was not human, or he would show some signs of life
when a live baby was brought to camp and laid down right under
his nose.

Cash finished and began washing his dishes, keeping his back
turned toward Bud and Bud's new possession, and trying to make it
appear that he did so unconsciously. He did not fool Bud for a
minute. Bud knew that Cash was nearly bursting with curiosity,
and he had occasional fleeting impulses to provoke Cash to speech
of some sort. Perhaps Cash knew what was in Bud's mind. At any
rate he left the cabin and went out and chopped wood for an hour,
furiously raining chips into the snow.

When he went in with his arms piled full of cut wood, Bud had
the baby sitting on one corner of the table, and was feeding it
bread and gravy as the nearest approach to baby food he could
think of. During occasional interludes in the steady procession
of bits of bread from the plate to the baby's mouth, Lovin Child
would suck a bacon rind which he held firmly grasped in a greasy
little fist. Now and then Bud would reach into his hip pocket,
pull out his handkerchief as a make-shift napkin, and would
carefully wipe the border of gravy from the baby's mouth, and
stuff the handkerchief back into his pocket again.

Both seemed abominably happy and self-satisfied. Lovin Child
kicked his heels against the rough table frame and gurgled
unintelligible conversation whenever he was able to articulate
sounds. Bud replied with a rambling monologue that implied a
perfect understanding of Lovin Child's talk--and incidentally
doled out information for Cash's benefit.

Cash cocked an eye at the two as he went by, threw the wood
down on his side of the hearth, and began to replenish the fire.
If he heard, he gave no sign of understanding or interest.

"I'll bet that old squaw musta half starved yah," Bud addressed
the baby while he spooned gravy out of a white enamel bowl on to
the second slice of bread. "You're putting away grub like a
nigger at a barbecue. I'll tell the world I don't know what
woulda happened if I hadn't run across yuh and made her hand yuh
over."

"Ja--ja--ja--jah!" said Lovin Child, nodding his head
and regarding Bud with the twinkle in his eyes.

"And that's where you're dead right, Boy. I sure do wish you'd
tell me your name; but I reckon that's too much to ask of a
little geezer like you. Here. Help yourself, kid--you ain't in
no Injun camp now. You're with white folks now."

Cash sat down on the bench he had made for himself, and stared
into the fire. His whole attitude spelled abstraction;
nevertheless he missed no little sound behind him.

He knew that Bud was talking largely for his benefit, and he
knew that here was the psychological time for breaking the spell
of silence between them. Yet he let the minutes slip past and
would not yield. The quarrel had been of Bud's making in the
first place. Let Bud do the yielding, make the first step toward
amity.

But Bud had other things to occupy him just then. Having eaten
all his small stomach would hold, Lovin Child wanted to get down
and explore. Bud had other ideas, but they did not seem to count
for much with Lovin Child, who had an insistent way that was
scarcely to be combated or ignored.

"But listen here, Boy!" Bud protested, after he had for the
third time prevented Lovin Child from backing off the table. "I
was going to take off these dirty duds and wash some of the Injun
smell off yuh. I'll tell a waiting world you need a bath, and
your clothes washed."

"Ugh, ugh, ugh," persisted Lovin Child, and pointed to the
floor.

So Bud sighed and made a virtue of defeat. "Oh, well, they say
it's bad policy to take a bath right after yuh eat. We'll let it
ride awhile, but you sure have got to be scrubbed a plenty before
you can crawl in with me, old-timer," he said, and set him down
on the floor.

Lovin Child went immediately about the business that seemed
most important. He got down on his hands and knees and gravely
inspected the broad black line, hopefully testing it with tongue
and with fingers to see if it would yield him anything in the way
of flavor or stickiness. It did not. It had been there long
enough to be thoroughly dry and tasteless. He got up, planted
both feet on it and teetered back and forth, chuckling up at Bud
with his eyes squinted.

He teetered so enthusiastically that he sat down unexpectedly
and with much emphasis. That put him between two impulses, and
while they battled he stared round-eyed at Bud. But he decided
not to cry, and straightway turned himself into a growly bear and
went down the line on all fours toward Cash, growling "Ooooooo!"
as fearsomely as his baby throat was capable of growling.

But Cash would not be scared. He refused absolutely to jump up
and back off in wild-eyed terror, crying out "Ooh! Here comes a
bear!" the way Marie had always done--the way every one had
always done, when Lovin Child got down and came at them growling.
Cash sat rigid with his face to the fire, and would not look.

Lovin Child crawled all around him and growled his terriblest.
For some unexplainable reason it did not work. Cash sat stiff as
though he had turned to some insensate metal. From where he sat
watching--curious to see what Cash would do--Bud saw him
flinch and stiffen as a man does under pain. And because Bud had
a sore spot in his own heart, Bud felt a quick stab of
understanding and sympathy. Cash Markham's past could not have
been a blank; more likely it held too much of sorrow for the
salve of speech to lighten its hurt. There might have been a
child....

"Aw, come back here!" Bud commanded Lovin Child gruffly.

But Lovin Child was too busy. He had discovered in his circling
of Cash, the fanny buckles on Cash's high overshoes. He was
investigating them as he had investigated the line, with fingers
and with pink tongue, like a puppy. From the lowest buckle he
went on to the top one, where Cash's khaki trousers were tucked
inside with a deep fold on top. Lovin Child's small forefinger
went sliding up in the mysterious recesses of the fold until they
reached the flat surface of the knee. He looked up farther,
studying Cash's set face, sitting back on his little heels while
he did so. Cash tried to keep on staring into the fire, but in
spite of himself his eyes lowered to meet the upward look.

"Pik-k?" chirped Lovin Child, spreading his fingers over one
eye and twinkling up at Cash with the other.

Cash flinched again, wavered, swallowed twice, and got up so
abruptly that Lovin Child sat down again with a plunk. Cash
muttered something in his throat and rushed out into the wind and
the slow-falling tiny white flakes that presaged the storm.

Until the door slammed shut Lovin Child looked after him,
scowling, his eyes a blaze of resentment. He brought his palms
together with a vicious slap, leaned over, and bumped his
forehead deliberately and painfully upon the flat rock hearth,
and set up a howl that could have been heard for three city
blocks.


CHAPTER FIFTEEN. AND BUD NEVER GUESSED

That night, when he had been given a bath in the little zinc
tub they used for washing clothes, and had been carefully
buttoned inside a clean undershirt of Bud's, for want of better
raiment, Lovin Child missed something out of his sleepytime
cudding. He wanted Marie, and he did not know how to make his
want known to this big, tender, awkward man who had befriended
him and filled his thoughts till bedtime. He began to whimper and
look seekingly around the little cabin. The whimper grew to a cry
which Bud's rude rocking back and forth on the box before the
fireplace could not still.

"M'ee--take!" wailed Lovin Child, sitting up and listening.
"M'ee take--Uvin Chal!"

"Aw, now, you don't wanta go and act like that. Listen here,
Boy. You lay down here and go to sleep. You can search me for
what it is you're trying to say, but I guess you want your mama,
maybe, or your bottle, chances are. Aw, looky!" Bud pulled his
watch from his pocket--a man's infallible remedy for the
weeping of infant charges--and dangled it anxiously before
Lovin Child.

With some difficulty he extracted the small hands from the long
limp tunnels of sleeves, and placed the watch in the eager
fingers.

"Listen to the tick-tick! Aw, I wouldn't bite into it... oh,
well, darn it, if nothing else'll do yuh, why, eat it up!"

Lovin Child stopped crying and condescended to take a languid
interest in the watch--which had a picture of Marie pasted
inside the back of the case, by the way. "Ee?" he inquired, with
a pitiful little catch in his breath, and held it up for Bud to
see the busy little second hand. "Ee?" he smiled tearily and
tried to show Cash, sitting aloof on his bench beside the head of
his bunk and staring into the fire. But Cash gave no sign that he
heard or saw anything save the visions his memory was conjuring
in the dancing flames.

"Lay down, now, like a good boy, and go to sleep," Bud
wheedled. "You can hold it if you want to--only don't drop it
on the floor--here! Quit kickin' your feet out like that! You
wanta freeze? I'll tell the world straight, it's plumb cold and
snaky outside to-night, and you're pretty darn lucky to be here
instead of in some Injun camp where you'd have to bed down with a
mess of mangy dogs, most likely. Come on, now--lay down like a
good boy!"

"M'ee! M'ee take!" teased Lovin Child, and wept again;
steadily, insistently, with a monotonous vigor that rasped Bud's
nerves and nagged him with a vague memory of something familiar
and unpleasant. He rocked his body backward and forward, and
frowned while he tried to lay hold of the memory. It was the
high-keyed wailing of this same man-child wanting his bottle, but
it eluded Bud completely. There was a tantalizing sense of
familiarity with the sound, but the lungs and the vocal chords of
Lovin Child had developed amazingly in two years, and he had lost
the small-infant wah-hah.

Bud did not remember, bat for all that his thoughts went back
across those two years and clung to his own baby, and he wished
poignantly that he knew how it was getting along; and wondered if
it had grown to be as big a handful as this youngster, and how
Marie would handle the emergency he was struggling with now: a
lost, lonesome baby boy that would not go to sleep and could not
tell why.

Yet Lovin Child was answering every one of Bud's mute
questions. Lying there in his "Daddy Bud's" arms, wrapped
comically in his Daddy Bud's softest undershirt, Lovin Child was
proving to his Daddy Bud that his own man-child was strong and
beautiful and had a keen little brain behind those twinkling blue
eyes. He was telling why he cried. He wanted Marie to take him
and rock him to sleep, just as she had rocked him to sleep every
night of his young memory, until that time when he had toddled
out of her life and into a new and peculiar world that held no
Marie.

By and by he slept, still clinging to the watch that had
Marie's picture in the back. When he was all limp and rosy and
breathing softly against Bud's heart, Bud tiptoed over to the
bunk, reached down inconveniently with one hand and turned back
the blankets, and laid Lovin Child in his bed and covered him
carefully. On his bench beyond the dead line Cash sat leaning
forward with his elbows on his knees, and sucked at a pipe gone
cold, and stared abstractedly into the fire.

Bud looked at him sitting there. For the first time since their
trails had joined, he wondered what Cash was thinking about;
wondered with a new kind of sympathy about Cash's lonely life,
that held no ties, no warmth of love. For the first time it
struck him as significant that in the two years, almost, of their
constant companionship, Cash's reminiscences had stopped abruptly
about fifteen years back. Beyond that he never went, save now and
then when he jumped a space, to the time when he was a boy. Of
what dark years lay between, Bud had never been permitted a
glimpse.

"Some kid--that kid," Bud observed involuntarily, for the
first time in over three weeks speaking when he was not compelled
to speak to Cash. "I wish I knew where he came from. He wants his
mother."

Cash stirred a little, like a sleeper only half awakened. But
he did not reply, and Bud gave an impatient snort, tiptoed over
and picked up the discarded clothes of Lovin Child, that held
still a faint odor of wood smoke and rancid grease, and, removing
his shoes that he might move silently, went to work

He washed Lovin Child's clothes, even to the red sweater suit
and the fuzzy red "bunny" cap. He rigged a line before the
fireplace--on his side of the dead line, to be sure--hung
the little garments upon it and sat up to watch the fire while
they dried.

While he rubbed and rinsed and wrung and hung to dry, he had
planned the details of taking the baby to Alpine and placing it
in good hands there until its parents could be found. It was
stolen, he had no doubt at all. He could picture quite plainly
the agony of the parents, and common humanity imposed upon him
the duty of shortening their misery as much as possible. But one
day of the baby's presence he had taken, with the excuse that it
needed immediate warmth and wholesome food. His conscience did
not trouble him over that short delay, for he was honest enough
in his intentions and convinced that he had done the right thing.

Cash had long ago undressed and gone to bed, turning his back
to the warm, fire-lighted room and pulling the blankets up to his
ears. He either slept or pretended to sleep, Bud did not know
which. Of the baby's healthy slumber there was no doubt at all.
Bud put on his overshoes and went outside after more wood, so
that there would be no delay in starting the fire in the morning
and having the cabin warm before the baby woke.

It was snowing fiercely, and the wind was biting cold. Already
the woodpile was drifted under, so that Bud had to go back and
light the lantern and hang it on a nail in the cabin wall before
he could make any headway at shovelling off the heaped snow and
getting at the wood beneath. He worked hard for half an hour, and
carried in all the wood that had been cut. He even piled Cash's
end of the hearth high with the surplus, after his own side was
heaped full.

A storm like that meant that plenty of fuel would be needed to
keep the cabin snug and warm, and he was thinking of the baby's
comfort now, and would not be hampered by any grudge.

When he had done everything he could do that would add to the
baby's comfort, he folded the little garments and laid them on a
box ready for morning. Then, moving carefully, he crawled into
the bed made warm by the little body. Lovin Child, half wakened
by the movement, gave a little throaty chuckle, murmured "M'ee,"
and threw one fat arm over Bud's neck and left it there.

"Gawd," Bud whispered in a swift passion of longing, "I wish
you was my own kid!" He snuggled Lovin Child close in his arms
and held him there, and stared dim-eyed at the flickering shadows
on the wall. What he thought, what visions filled his vigil, who
can say?



CHAPTER SIXTEEN. THE ANTIDOTE

Three days it stormed with never a break, stormed so that the
men dreaded the carrying of water from the spring that became
ice-rimmed but never froze over; that clogged with sodden masses
of snow half melted and sent faint wisps of steam up into the
chill air. Cutting wood was an ordeal, every armload an
achievement. Cash did not even attempt to visit his trap line,
but sat before the fire smoking or staring into the flames, or
pottered about the little domestic duties that could not half
fill the days.

With melted snow water, a bar of yellow soap, and one leg of an
old pair of drawers, he scrubbed on his knees the floor on his
side of the dead line, and tried not to notice Lovin Child. He
failed only because Lovin Child refused to be ignored, but
insisted upon occupying the immediate foreground and in helping
--much as he had helped Marie pack her suit case one fateful
afternoon not so long before.

When Lovin Child was not permitted to dabble in the pan of
soapy water, he revenged himself by bringing Cash's mitten and
throwing that in, and crying "Ee? Ee?" with a shameless delight
because it sailed round and round until Cash turned and saw it,
and threw it out.

"No, no, no!" Lovin Child admonished himself gravely, and got
it and threw it back again.

Cash did not say anything. Indeed, he hid a grin under his
thick, curling beard which he had grown since the first frost as
a protection against cold. He picked up the mitten and laid it to
dry on the slab mantel, and when he returned, Lovin Child was
sitting in the pan, rocking back and forth and crooning "'Ock-a-
by! 'Ock-a-by!" with the impish twinkle in his eyes.

Cash was just picking him out of the pan when Bud came in with
a load of wood. Bud hastily dropped the wood, and without a word
Cash handed Lovin Child across the dead line, much as he would
have handed over a wet puppy. Without a word Bud took him, but
the quirky smile hid at the corners of his mouth, and under
Cash's beard still lurked the grin.

"No, no, no!" Lovin Child kept repeating smugly, all the while
Bud was stripping off his wet clothes and chucking him into the
undershirt he wore for a nightgown, and trying a man's size pair
of socks on his legs.

"I should say no-no-no! You doggone little rascal, I'd rather
herd a flea on a hot plate! I've a plumb good notion to hog-tie
yuh for awhile. Can't trust yuh a minute nowhere. Now look what
you got to wear while your clothes dry!"

"Ee? Ee?" invited Lovin Child, gleefully holding up a muffled
little foot lost in the depths of Bud's sock.

"Oh, I see, all right! I'll tell the world I see you're a
doggone nuisance! Now see if you can keep outa mischief till I
get the wood carried in." Bud set him down on the bunk, gave him
a mail-order catalogue to look at, and went out again into the
storm. When he came back, Lovin Child was sitting on the hearth
with the socks off, and was picking bits of charcoal from the
ashes and crunching them like candy in his small, white teeth.
Cash was hurrying to finish his scrubbing before the charcoal
gave out, and was keeping an eye on the crunching to see that
Lovin Child did not get a hot ember.

"H'yah! You young imp!" Bud shouted, stubbing his toe as he
hurried forward. "Watcha think you are--a fire-eater, for gosh
sake?"

Cash bent his head low--it may have been to hide a chuckle.
Bud was having his hands full with the kid, and he was trying to
be stern against the handicap of a growing worship of Lovin Child
and all his little ways. Now Lovin Child was all over ashes, and
the clean undershirt was clean no longer, after having much
charcoal rubbed into its texture. Bud was not overstocked with
clothes; much traveling had formed the habit of buying as he
needed for immediate use. With Lovin Child held firmly under one
arm, where he would he sure of him, he emptied his "war-bag" on
the bunk and hunted out another shirt

Lovin Child got a bath, that time, because of the ashes he had
managed to gather on his feet and his hands and his head. Bud was
patient, and Lovin Child was delightedly unrepentant--until he
was buttoned into another shirt of Bud's, and the socks were tied
on him.

"Now, doggone yuh, I'm goin' to stake you out, or hobble yuh,
or some darn thing, till I get that wood in!" he thundered, with
his eyes laughing. "You want to freeze? Hey? Now you're goin' to
stay right on this bunk till I get through, because I'm goin' to
tie yuh on. You may holler--but you little son of a gun,
you'll stay safe!"

So Bud tied him, with a necktie around his body for a belt, and
a strap fastened to that and to a stout nail in the wall over the
bunk. And Lovin Child, when he discovered that it was not a new
game but instead a check upon his activities, threw himself on
his back and held his breath until he was purple, and then
screeched with rage.

I don't suppose Bud ever carried in wood so fast in his life.
He might as well have taken his time, for Lovin Child was in one
of his fits of temper, the kind that his grandmother invariably
called his father's cussedness coming out in him. He howled for
an hour and had both men nearly frantic before he suddenly
stopped and began to play with the things he had scorned before
to touch; the things that had made him bow his back and scream
when they were offered to him hopefully.

Bud, his sleeves rolled up, his hair rumpled and the
perspiration standing thick on his forehead, stood over him with
his hands on his hips, the picture of perturbed helplessness.

"You doggone little devil!" he breathed, his mind torn between
amusement and exasperation. "If you was my own kid, I'd spank
yuh! But," he added with a little chuckle, "if you was my own
kid, I'd tell the world you come by that temper honestly. Darned
if I wouldn't"

Cash, sitting dejected on the side of his own bunk, lifted his
head, and after that his hawklike brows, and stared from the face
of Bud to the face of Lovin Child. For the first time he was
struck with the resemblance between the two. The twinkle in the
eyes, the quirk of the lips, the shape of the forehead and,
emphasizing them all, the expression of having a secret joke,
struck him with a kind of shock. If it were possible... But, even
in the delirium of fever, Bud had never hinted that he had a
child, or a wife even. He had firmly planted in Cash's mind the
impression that his life had never held any close ties
whatsoever. So, lacking the clue, Cash only wondered and did not
suspect.

What most troubled Cash was the fact that he had unwittingly
caused all the trouble for Lovin Child. He should not have tried
to scrub the floor with the kid running loose all over the place.
As a slight token of his responsibility in the matter, he watched
his chance when Bud was busy at the old cookstove, and tossed a
rabbit fur across to Lovin Child to play with; a risky thing to
do, since he did not know what were Lovin Child's little
peculiarities in the way of receiving strange gifts. But he was
lucky. Lovin Child was enraptured with the soft fur and rubbed it
over his baby cheeks and cooed to it and kissed it, and said "Ee?
Ee?" to Cash, which was reward enough.

There was a strained moment when Bud came over and discovered
what it was he was having so much fun with. Having had three days
of experience by which to judge, he jumped to the conclusion that
Lovin Child had been in mischief again.

"Now what yuh up to, you little scallywag? " he demanded. "How
did you get hold of that? Consarn your little hide, Boy..."

"Let the kid have it," Cash muttered gruffly. "I gave it to him."
He got up abruptly and went outside, and came in with wood for
the cookstove, and became exceedingly busy, never once looking
toward the other end of the room, where Bud was sprawled upon his
back on the bunk, with Lovin Child astride his middle, having a
high old time with a wonderful new game of "bronk riding."

Now and then Bud would stop bucking long enough to slap Lovin
Child in the face with the soft side of the rabbit fur, and Lovin
Child would squint his eyes and wrinkle his nose and laugh until
he seemed likely to choke. Then Bud would cry, "Ride 'im, Boy!
Ride 'im an' scratch 'im. Go get 'im, cowboy--he's your meat!"
and would bounce Lovin Child till he squealed with glee.

Cash tried to ignore all that. Tried to keep his back to it.
But he was human, and Bud was changed so completely in the last
three days that Cash could scarcely credit his eyes and his ears.
The old surly scowl was gone from Bud's face, his eyes held again
the twinkle. Cash listened to the whoops, the baby laughter, the
old, rodeo catch-phrases, and grinned while he fried his bacon.

Presently Bud gave a whoop, forgetting the feud in his play.
"Lookit, Cash! He's ridin' straight up and whippin' as he rides!
He's so-o-me bronk-fighter, buh-lieve me!"

Cash turned and looked, grinned and turned away again--but
only to strip the rind off a fresh-fried slice of bacon the full
width of the piece. He came down the room on his own side the
dead line, and tossed the rind across to the bunk.

"Quirt him with that, Boy," he grunted, "and then you can eat
it if you want."



CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. LOVIN CHILD WRIGGLES IN

On the fourth day Bud's conscience pricked him into making a
sort of apology to Cash, under the guise of speaking to Lovin
Child, for still keeping the baby in camp.

"I've got a blame good notion to pack you to town to-day, Boy,
and try and find out where you belong," he said, while he was
feeding him oatmeal mush with sugar and canned milk. "It's pretty
cold, though ..." He cast a slant-eyed glance at Cash, dourly
frying his own hotcakes. "We'll see what it looks like after a
while. I sure have got to hunt up your folks soon as I can. Ain't
I, old-timer?"

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