The Keeper of the Bees, page 3
He could not have told how long it had been since he had reverently said, “I thank thee, Lord.” He had been figuring that in the few years past he had not experienced very much for which to thank the Lord, at least not since a fire had been eating in his breast and weakness had assailed his limbs and shaken his big, capable hands. He did not stop to reflect either that the Lord might not have had much to do with the fact that he was wearing another man’s trousers, but, after all, Jamie felt that he needed the trousers, he needed them exceedingly, and he had given his own, which were much better looking and infinitely cleaner, in exchange for the ones he had acquired, the looking down upon which filled his fastidious soul with repulsion. He reflected that if he had been in a position to see the trousers he might have risked one more day wearing his uniform.
Having no idea when the Brunsons might return to their car, and being increasingly hungry since there was money in his fingers and he need not delude himself with the idea that he was not hungry, he squared his shoulders and looked around to see if his particularly sensitive nostrils could detect from which of the surrounding places where food was being cooked exactly the most delicious odors were emanating. That recalled him to the change he held in his palm. He spread his right hand in line of vision and with the forefinger of the left slowly pushed the coins around. He was so rejoiced over his findings that he could have shouted like a small boy. The half and the quarters made a dollar; the nickels and the dimes and a few pennies for good measure totaled eighty-seven cents.
He reflected that by judicious ordering, by making it mostly coffee with a little toast and bacon to add backbone, he would not be utterly at the mercy of the world for another day at least. Since he had thanked the Lord merely for the feel of small change in his hands, it occurred to Jamie, even in his hunger and his desire to keep near the car, that he might ride further if possible, that it would be a good thing once more to pay tribute. So again he looked to the sky, and this time with a burr that might have descended to him from the tongue of a grandfather on either side of his house, he said, right out loud there on the sidewalk of the California town: “It’s unco gude o’ you, Lord.” And when his ears heard him talking like a Scot they telegraphed the strange proceeding to his brain and Jamie, who a few minutes before had felt decidedly aggrieved, laughed aloud and, turning, started down the street toward the most insistent odor of bacon and coffee that he could detect.
It was while he was sitting on a high stool with his feet on a railing before a counter that the clothing he had adopted drew closely around him and he became aware that he was wearing a hip pocket that contained something that from the feel of it might have been several things; but at first shot Jamie decided that he would guess a bill book. Then it occurred to him that it might be a good thing, since one pocket had yielded a living for a day at least, to go through all of them. And so he began on the outside breast pocket of the coat in which he found a couple of cheap cigars. In the other pockets there were some bits of string and several buttons and a filthy handkerchief, the big revolver and a handful of cartridges. Then he tried the inside pockets and found a couple of letters which he decided to attend to later. Then he ran his hand in his left pants pocket and brought it away empty. And then, to finish the job, he reached around to the hip pocket and brought out the bill book.
It really happened to be a bill book, and it really happened to have several bills in it, and instantly Scot caution asserted itself in Jamie’s mind. He had heard considerable about bandits and light-fingered gentlemen and taking your neighbor’s property without his knowledge or consent. On the mere knowledge that there were two or three bills that might be of reasonable denominations, he slipped the book shut and slid it back in his pocket, and then he leaned his elbows on the counter and thought deep and fast.
He was not a thief. He never had been. But he was on a great adventure. It was becoming greater every minute. He reflected that if his little mother, up close to the throne, had been looking down at him and praying with all her might for his safety and his success in his undertaking, and if the Lord had been bending her way and listening with loving, indulging ears, Jamie thought he could not have gotten along much better so far. Only half a day, only a night, and through the blessing of an automobile—two automobiles, to be exact—he was more than two hundred miles from where he had started, and since those two hundred miles led to the north and the west, he must be considerably nearer the sea.
Precisely why all his being had begun clamoring for the sea the minute he had gotten to his feet and made his start, Jamie did not know. He had not taken time to analyze himself or to try to find out why he wanted water, worlds of water, clean, jade-green and sky-blue and indigo-blue water, salty water, and foam, great swaths of snowy foam. He wanted to see waves, big waves, piling up high on a beach, and then he was obsessed with the ridiculous feeling, probably because he missed his morning bath, that he wanted to get in that water. Then he wanted to lie on the sand and bake in the sun and sleep endlessly and go back to the sea water again. Possibly it was not boiling water from an interior spring that was needed to fit his peculiar conditions. Maybe it was cold water, salt water, sea water that would turn the trick.
He was thinking so intently of the bare possibility that the sea might do something for him that the springs had not done that he almost forgot the odors of food around him. He could afford to forget, since he would not be forced to abstain. He was going to have a cup of coffee, with thick, rich cream in it, and crispy toast and real bacon in only a minute. About the money in his pocket—he did not know precisely what the man to whom the breeches he was wearing belonged, owed society in general, but he had an idea from the enterprise in which he had found him engaged, from his talk and familiarity with the situation, that this man might owe a fairly heavy debt.
Jamie had the feeling that, since he had captured two guns and defeated the brutes, the two of them, in what he had heard them saying aloud in clear English that they intended to inflict upon a man who evidently was a very decent man and who, through long years of economy and hard work, had amply earned the vacation he was taking, he was entitled to the contents of their pockets. As for the fresh young girl and her equally wholesome and interesting mother, a wave of nausea swept Jamie’s whole being, and regardless of who might be looking, he pulled the bill book from his hip pocket and opened it wide and emptied it, and found in his amazed fingers exactly forty-nine dollars even, in ones, fives, and tens. This time he was really stunned, and the ceiling of the restaurant was so uninviting that, if he did glance upward, even involuntarily, He forgot his thanks. He made a wild and desperate resolve on the instant: When he had eaten the food he had ordered, he was going to have a bath, he was going to have clean, fresh underclothing, he was going to have trousers and a coat that fitted and would not fill him with repulsion, and he was going to have a hat in which he might appear at least as attractive as it was possible for him to look.
He gave the ethics of the case very slight consideration. He had frustrated the attack on the camp; he had gotten away from two men with their artillery. He had been of sufficient benefit to William Brunson and his wife and daughter so that they should be willing for him to have forty-nine dollars as his reward, and from the depth of his soul and the ceaseless grind of the wound in his left breast he felt that the Lord would absolve him for buying clothes that were new and clean. What was it the doctor had said? That he was the best breeding ground imaginable for germs? One glance at the legs of the trousers he was wearing made him feel like the original factory in which germs had been invented. So he stuck his long arms as far out of the coat sleeves as he could and pushed the side lapels as far back as they would go and gulped coffee so hot it almost scalded him and ate bacon that really was crisp and toast that was properly browned. He paid his bill and, carrying the wealth of a mint on his person, went back to the sidewalk and looked for the Brunson car.
It was standing where he had left it, so he went over and walked past the hotel office. He could see no sign of any of the Brunsons, so he went to the clerk and asked to see the register. When he found what he was looking for, he told the clerk to tell his friends, if they came down before he returned, that he had gone to get a shave and some fresh clothing. Some way he got a decided feeling of uplift from the fact that he would not have to tell William Brunson and his wife and daughter that he was whipped and sore, a broken hulk of a man with not a penny in his pockets and fleeing from a government with whose regulations he was not even familiar so slight was his own prospect of release.
Such a thing as walking from the care of the Government without any notion as to where he was going or what would happen to him had never occurred to him, even among far-reaching possibilities, and now that he was doing the thing, he had to admit that he did not know whether he was a deserter or not. Certainly he could not be a deserter, because the war had been over for so many long months. Of course, there was some formality that probably had been gone through with to keep him on record and in care of the Government. There was the barest possibility that a day might come in which he would want to ask for the official history pertaining to the decorations he carried.
He left the hotel with instructions from the clerk as to where the best outfitting store of the town could be found and bought himself the clothing he needed to make him clean and comfortable. Sparingly, of the cheapest things he could find that would possibly serve his needs, he bought what he felt he required, and then he went into a barber shop, and when his hair was cut and he was freshly shaved, he paid for a bath, and this he followed up by a change into his new clothes. When before a mirror in the bathroom he tried on his new hat, he reflected that if he had red blood in his veins and a hundred pounds of beef steak on his bones, he might not be such a bad looking man. Tall he would always be, and big boned like his Scottish ancestors; his lean hands were tapering, his features were finely cut, and his deep, blue-gray eyes at least looked as if they might be honest eyes, kind eyes, interesting eyes.
So Jamie went back to the hotel carrying a neatly wrapped bundle which contained another man’s coat and yet another man’s trousers. He meant to drop it by the wayside somewhere along his journey, merely in case some man as sorely pressed as he had been might find it and it might fill a need, even as his needs had been served.
When William Brunson walked into the office, Jamie, fortified by neat gray trousers and a coat that really fitted him and a shirt that was clean and fresh, arose smilingly, holding out a hand, but instead of recognition he received a cold stare. He had to remove his hat and work his Scottish burr before William Brunson would accept him as his passenger of the previous day; while the wonder with which he had gone to sleep as to whether he was leaving his car in the possession of a third bandit for ever vanished from his mind. There had not been even the ghost of a bandit for ten generations in the ancestry of the man before him. On that William Brunson would have taken oath. As he stood holding Jamie’s hand, he looked at him laughingly and said: “Well, I’ll be darned! I didn’t know you, and if I stand away from you, I bet Ma and Susy won’t either!”
Jamie laughed in return. “I made that lightning change in the dark last night,” he said. “Moonlight is a mighty deceptive thing. I only wanted to shed the uniform of Uncle Sam pronto, so I took the first chance that offered, but when I woke up this morning and found that my clothes were better fitted to walk than I was, I decided that I’d see how quick I could change them.” “Come on to breakfast,” said William Brunson. “Thank you, I’ve had my breakfast,” said Jamie MacFarlane. “If you are going to be good enough to let me ride with you so long as you are going north and west, that will be fine.”
“There isn’t any question about how long you may ride with the Brunsons,” said the husband and father of the Brunson family. “You may ride just as long as you darn please. It doesn’t make any difference to me if it is all the way to Iowa!”
So Jamie picked up a morning paper and read until Mrs. Brunson and Susy came into the office, and they really did not know him, so he had to work the burr on them before they would believe that he was their passenger of the previous night. Both of them quite agreed with the judgment of their husband and father: They did not care how long this man rode with them, and he did not care either.
So they went a considerable distance that day, with dinner by the wayside and the night at a small hotel, and then Jamie felt that the time had come when he must turn west. He could journey by easy stages. He had enough change in his pockets to carry him through food and lodging for several days, he figured, and so, throughout the long, sunny day, plodding along, he made his way west. Then he found he had gone too far north, so he laid his course west by south.
He had no desire to go where cold would wrack his aching bones. He wanted to stay where the sunshine was uninterrupted and penetrant. He went slowly and sat awhile frequently and at a noon rest when he felt that it was almost time to be thinking about lunch, in the mottled sunshine of a live oak, with his arm on a stone for a pillow, he fell sound asleep, and when a passing drove of cattle finally awakened him he rose, picked up the stick he was carrying, and stretched himself for his journey. As he did so he missed something. He had to think a minute to recall what it could be. It struck him that his trousers were not setting exactly as they had when he fell asleep, and running his hands around his body he encountered an empty hip pocket, and then an empty coat pocket—the gun, too!
Almost sick with shock and disappointment, Jamie sat back on the rock and looked around him. Lying on the ground a few yards up the mountain-side he could see the bill book he had appropriated. There was no use in exerting himself even to climb to it. It lay spread open, rifled of course, and so he was once more about where he had started. Enough remained of the nickels and dimes in his breeches to carry him through that day and perhaps breakfast for the morning, but the bed which he needed almost more than food had gone as mysteriously as it had come.
Jamie looked more nearly Scot than he did American as he sat on the stone, dourly frowning. Exactly why he had not put that bill book in his breast pocket and buttoned his coat he could not imagine. He had found it in the hip pocket, it fitted there, and he had put it back mechanically. If he had been using his brains, he reflected, he would have practiced caution. He reflected, also, that there must be something in the fact that a large part of the world had lost its ancient sense of honor. There had been no question of honor between the bandits who meant to prey on the Brunsons.
They had talked as if anything the Brunsons had might belong legitimately to them. Jamie recalled the fact that he had not been troubled by any particular qualms about taking what he had found in the bandit’s trousers. He spent a minute on the subject and still remained firm in his convictions that he had acquired a right to it, and that was why he was feeling so particularly sore that he had not taken better care of it. When a bed meant the question of whether he lived slightly longer or died very speedily, and probably very painfully, why had he been so careless with that which meant necessities and fresh bandages that he would soon be needing?
After a while Jamie arose to his feet and laid out his course still west by south. The honest hunger that had been in the pit of his stomach an hour before was replaced by a flat nausea and he had not gone far when he found a cold perspiration beginning to break out in his palms, at his temples, on his body. He did not even look up at the sky to decide whether he would voice an appeal or not. He deliberately walked in all the sunshine he could find because, from a taste of night out of doors, he thought he would need all the stored warmth he could accumulate.
At his last resting place he took all the change from his pocket and carefully divided it. He might reach a town where for fifty cents at some cheapest of lodgings he could hire a bed. What remained would have to be equally divided between supper and breakfast. After that he was at the mercy of the world again, and at that minute he was feeling that the world might very possibly be quite as much against him as it was for him. The one consolation upon which he could rest was that if a call had been sent out from the hospital and descriptions of him had been posted, thanks to the bandit, he was so changed that no one would feel that he was the man who answered the descriptions that would be given. So Jamie followed his program until after breakfast the next morning, and then, with only a few cents left, still headed west by south, he stumbled on. He realized that he was almost at the limit of endurance. Persistent walking had tired his feet and legs until they were beginning to swell so that his shoes were feeling too small. The sun had beaten on his unaccustomed head until he was dizzy. His eyes were so tired that he could have cried for the relief of dark glasses, and the price he might have paid for them at that time yesterday was lacking when he needed it so badly today.
Of the greater part of that day Jamie had no very clear memory remaining. The most he knew was that he had alternated walking as long as he could walk with dropping any place he could sit or lie when he could go no farther. Just where he got into a road that led him into a canyon, he did not know. He had been pushing on so nearly insensible to everything around him that he had not realized that the road had narrowed to a bridle path and the bridle path had narrowed to a footpath, and the footpath had begun to wind around the base of one side of a mountain that in the general upheaval of things had been split asunder from top to bottom. He had rounded a curve and faced the panorama before him suddenly, and at one and the same time he realized two things. He was hearing singing water. He was hearing water that was rushing and falling and spilling and laughing and doing all the heartening things that water knows how to do when it is left to follow a rocky bed down a canyon.
