Montana Oil And Mining Journal

Farewell
Miss Julie Logan
Published by Special Arrangement With The
Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. Inc.
(Copyright in all countries by the author. Re-production in whole or in part. forbidden.)
(PART THREE)
IV. THE LOCKING OF THE GLEN
Dec. 19 In this white world the dreariest moment is when custom makes you wind up your watch. Were it not for the Sabbath I would get lost in my dates. Not a word has gone into my diary for a fortnight. Now would be the time if there were anything to chronicle, but nothing happens, unless one counts as events that I have brought my hens, whose toes I found frozen to the perch, and my two sheep into the manse, or that yesterday my garden slithered off to the burn with me on it like a passenger. I have sat down whiles to the diary to try to fill up with old matter, but the whiteness of the sheets gives me a scunner, and I put it away. The snow has choked my diary as well as the glen.
The glen road, on which our intercourse with ourselves as well as with the world so largely depends, was among the first to disappear under the blanket. White hillocks, which we have been unacquainted with in any color, are here and there, and dangerous, too, for they wobble as though some great beast beneath were trying to turn round. The mountains are so rounded that they have ceased to be landmarks. The farm-towns look to me to be smored. I pull down my blinds so that I may rest my eyes on my blues and reds indoors.
Though the Five Houses are barely a hundred yards away, I have to pick out signs of life with my spyglass.
"I am practically cut off from my kind. Even the few trees are bearing white ropes, thick as my wrist, instead of branches, and the only thing that is a bonny black is the burn, once a mere driblet but now deep and boastful, and unchancey to cross. At ordinary times they cross here to the kirk in two easy jumps on boulders placed there for the purpose, and called the brig, but the boulders are now like sunk boats and, of the sprinkling of members who reached the kirk on the 9th, one used a vaulting pole and lost it.
Last Sabbath I did not open the kirk, but got down to the burn and preached to a handful standing on the other side. My heart rose with pride in the smith's bairns, every one of whom was there, but I have cried a notice across the burn that next Sabbath the bell will ring as a solemn reminder, but the service will be in the smiddy, whether I find that man's pole or not.
Two or three times Posty, without his velocipede, has penetrated to Branders, and delivered my letters and a paper to me by casting them over the burn tied to stones. There is no word of Dr. John. For nearly a week, except for an occasional shout, I have heard no voice but Christilly's. It is a treat to me now, though formerly when I had company an irritation to see her friendly foot keeping the study door open. I sit up here reading and nodding, or I go out and shovel, though all I shovel away, and more, may be back by morning.
Of an evening Posty sometimes struts up and down in front of the Five Houses, playing on his pipes. I can just see him passing and repassing the glints of light like a pendulum. But I can hear him from the manse, and still better from the burnside, if I slip down to listen in the dark. On one of those nights I got a dirl in the breast of me. It was when I went back to the manse after hearing him finish with a merely amusing piece. "My Name It is Little Jock Eilliott." The glen was in silence now, but as I opened the manse door I heard my fiddle playing. "My Name It Is Little Jock Elliott." For a moment I thought that Christilly-but then I knew she must be bedded, and she had no ear, and it was grandeur playing than Posty's, though he is a kittle hand. I suppose I did not stand still in my darkened passage for more than half a minute, and when I struck a match to get at a candle the music stopped.
There is no denying that the stories about the Spectrum flitted through me, and it needed a shove from myself to take me up the stair. Of course there was nobody. I had come back with the tune in my ears, or it was caused by some vibrations in the air. I found my fiddle in the locked press just as I had left it, except that it must have been leaning against the door, for it fell into my arms as I opened the press, and I had the queer notion that it clung to me. I could not compose myself till I had gone through my manse with the candle, and even after that I let my fiddle sleep with me.
More reasonable thoughts came to me in the morning as that it might be hard on an instrument never to be let do the one thing it can do, and that, maybe, like the fiddlers, they have a swelling to cry out to rivals. "I can do better than that." Any enticement I may have felt to take advantage of this fancy and put the neck-rest beneath by chin again I suppressed, but I let Posty know he could have the loan of my instrument on condition that he got it across the burn dry.
By the smith's connivance this was accomplished in a cart. It is now my fiddle Posty plays instead of his pipes, which are not in much better condition than his velocipede and are repaired in a similar manner. I extracted just one promise from him, that he would abstain from the baneful Jacobite lilts he was so fond of, but he sometimes forgets or excuses himself across the burn by crying, "She likes them fine, and she is ill to control once she's off." It is pretty to hear him in the gloaming, letting the songs loose like pigoons:
I will now go and say good-night to the Old Lady, for though it is barely 9 o'clock we keep early hours in the snow. This is a moment I owe to her ingenuity. The Grand House, which has, of course, a statelier name of its own, is a steep climb from here, and is at present inaccessible but it is visible, and at 9 o'clock she shoots her blind up and down twice, and I reply with mine. Hers, I am thankful to say, is red, or the lamp behind it has a red shade, and this shooting of the blinds is our way of saying goodnight. There is a warmth about it when the glen is so still that I am thinking you could hear a whit-rit on the move. Sometimes I stand by my window long after hers is dark, and I have felt that night was waiting, as it must have done once, for the first day. It is the stillness that is so terrible. If only something would crackle the stillness.
Dec. 21-For the first time since the glen was locked, Dr. John "threw in," as we say, this morning. He came straight to the study, where he found us at family exercise. I did not look up from my knees, but Christilly whispered to me, "Be short," which I daresay made me in consequence a little longer. Yet I knew she would not have taken such a liberty unless there was something untoward with the man, and though I found when I rose that he was on his knees with us, I saw that he had gone to sleep on them.
His face was so peaked that I sent Christilly hurriedly for the bottle of brandy that has lain in the manse uncorked since I came here six months ago, and as soon as he had partaken she hauled off his boots and rushed him into the lobby to scrape him, for he was getting on to the carpet. I saw he wanted to be rid of her before communicating something by-ordinar to me, and he took the best way to effect this by saying in a sentence that he had got through to Joanna Minch and it was a girl and both were doing well; whereupon Christilly was off to cry the tidings across the burn.
He was nodding in his chair with fatigue, so that it looked as if only by sudden jerks could he keep his head on, but he brought out the words. "There is more in it than I told Christilly. I have been to the shieling, but I did not get through in time. There were two lives saved in that bit house in the small hours, but don't be congratulating me, for I had naught to do with it." Having said this he fell into a torpor, and I had ill rousing him, which I was sweer to do, but he made it plain that he wanted to say more.
"It's such a camsterie tale," he said, as might banish sleep in any man, but I am dog tired and unless you keep pulling my beard with all the strength that is in you we'll never come to the end of it." I may say here that I had to do as he instructed me several times. We must have looked a strange pair, the doctor yawning and going off as if for the winter months, while I tugged fiercely at the beard.
I will put his bewildering tale together as best I can. He had forced his way last evening to an outlying farm where a herd was lying with two broken legs. While he was there Fargie Routh, the husband of Joanna, had tracked him down to say that she was terrible near her reckoning. The doc-tor started off with him rather anxious, for Fargie was "through ither," and it was Joanna's first. Dr. John had floundered into worse drifts, but the wind was lashing his face and the visibility was so bad that they soon lost each other. He tumbled and rumbled down in a way at which he is a master hand, and reached the shieling hours before the husband, who is a decent stock but very unusual in the legs. The distance is a short mile when the track is above ground. Dr. John was relieved to smell smoke for he dreaded that Fargie might not have had the sense to heap on the peat and that the woman might be found frozen.
I told him I knew the house, which is a lonesome one roomed cot of double stone and divot. I asked if he had found Joanna alone, but he had taken the opportunity of my making a re-mark to fall asleep again. I got his eyes open in the manner recommended by him, and he said with even a little leer at me, "She was not quite alone; but may be you are one of those who do not count an infant till it be christened."
"If there is any haste for that," I cried, looking for my boots.
"There is none," he said.
"But who had been with her? Was she in such a bad condition that she could give you no information about that?"
"She was in fine condition, and she could and she did," he said. "I was with her till Fargie, who had gone back to the farm, brought down the wife, and I have no doubt Joanna is now giving the particulars to them. They are such uncommon particulars," he went on, "that I can fancy even the proud infant sitting up to listen to them."
Then who was it that had acted in his place, I asked, not daring to be more prolix lest he should again be overtaken.
That, he said, was what he was asking me.
"Dr. John"
"Be assured," said he, "that I am too dung ower with sleep to be trifling with you; but this will become more your affair than mine. It is not to me they will look to be told who she was but to their minister."
"I hope I shall not fail them," I said loftily. Nevertheless I dreed was what coming, and I insisted on his keeping awake, "or I would lay a hot iron on the beard." He said he had found a kettle on a bright fire and Joanna in her bed with the child, who was fittingly swaddled in a shawl. He would not let her talk until he had satisfied himself that everything necessary had been done, and then (for the curiosity was mounting in his brain) he said with pretended casualness, "I see you and your friend have been having a nice cup of tea."
"And merry she was at the making of it," replied Joanna, turning merry herself.
"I forget," said he, "if you mentioned who she was?"
"Of course it was one of the Strangers," she said.
"Of course it would be one of those curiosities," said he, "but I never chanced to fall in with one; what was she like?"
"O," said Joanna, "she was like the little gentleman that sits under his tail"-meaning a squirrel.
"I thought," she would be something like that," he said, "but had you no fear of her?"
"Never," said Joanna, "till the bairn was born, and then for just a short time, when she capered about mad-like with glee, holding it high in the air and dressing and undressing it in the shawl, so as to have another peep at it, and very proud of what she had done till a queer change came over her and I had a sinking that she was going to bite it. I snatched it from her."
"To bite them is not my usual procedure at a birth," the doctor had said, "but we all have our different ways."
Joanna gave him a fuller story of the night than, as he said, would be of any profit to a summph of a bachelor like Adam Yestreen, but he told me some of its events. The door had blown open soon after Fargie's departure, leaving naught but reek to heat her, and when the fire went down she would have been glad to cry back the reek. She thought the cold candle of her life was at the flicker.
The Stranger re-lit the fire, but there was no way she could conceive of heating that body on the box-bed. Then the grand thought came to her. "She strippit herself naked," Joanna said, "and lay at my feet and made me keep them on her, as if she were one of them pig bottles for toasting the feet of the gentry, and when my feet were warm she lay close to me, first on one side and then on the other. She was as warm as a browning bannock when she began, but by the time the heat of her had passed into me I'se uphaud she was as cold as a trout."
As to the actual birth, though this was Joanna's first child, she knew more about the business than did her visitor, who seems to have been in a dither of importance over the novelty of the occasion. She was sometimes very daring and sometimes at such a loss that, in Joanna's words, "she could just pet me and kiss me and draw droll faces at me with the intent to help me through, and when she got me through she went skeer with triumph crying out as she strutted up and down that we were the three wonders of the world."
The whole affair, Dr. John decided, must have been strange enough "to put the wits of any medical onlooker in a creel," and if he let his mind rest on it he would forget how to sleep as well as to practice surgery; so in the name of Charity would I let him sink into the land of Nod for a few hours while I thought out some simple explanation for my glenfolk.
He got his few hours, though sorely did I grudge them, for I was in a creel myself. When he woke refreshed I was by his side to say at once, as if there had not been a moment's interruption, "Of course, she was some neighbor."
There was a glint in his blue eyes now, but he said decisively, "There is no way out by that road, my man; Joanna is acquainted with every neighbor in the glen."
"An outside woman of flesh and blood," I prigged with him, "must have contrived to force the glen; as, after all, you did yourself."
That, he maintained, was even less possible than the other. I was stout for there being some natural explanation, and he reminded me unnecessarily that there was the one Joanna gave. At this I told him sternly to get behind me. He saw in what distress I was, and dropping his banter, came bravely to my relief. "Do you really think," he said, in his helpful, confident way, "that I have any more belief in warlocks and 'strangers' than you have yourself? I'll tell you my conclusion, which my sleep makes clearer. It is that Joanna did the whole thing by herself, as many a woman has done before her. She must at some time, though, have been in a trance, which are things I cannot pretend to fathom, and have thought a woman was about her who never came in. It cows to think of Joanna, even in her hour of genius, having such an imagination; that bit about nearly biting the bairn is worthy of Mr. H.'s Spectrum."
"She no doubt got it out of that old story," I said.
"Ay," he granted, "that might account for it. And at any rate, it is of no importance as we are both agreed that she was by her lonesome self. But what a pity for us to have to let that joyous visitor go down the wind."
It was far from a pity to me. I was so thankful to him for getting rid of her that I pressed his hand repeatedly. I was feeling very young.
(To Be Continued)