by Zane Grey
Poor as were the words of his compliment they brought damask roses to Beryl’s cheeks and unmistakable delight to her dark eyes.
“This dress! You should see me in my good one,” she exclaimed. “But that must wait till Dad takes us to Portland…. Dad, when will that be?”
“Wal, if we have a good winter trappin’, why, I’d say next spring,” replied Aard.
“If it depends on that, Dad Aard, I don’t care to go,” retorted Beryl.
“All right, you stay home an’ keep house. Kev an’ I will have more fun, mebbe.”
She shot him and Keven a glance that gave manifestation of what a magnificent blaze her eyes might be capable of if she were really angered.
“Wal, son, did you buy out the store at Illahe?” went on Aard, as he seated himself at the table.
“No, I didn’t. Beryl did. I couldn’t ride all the way. She went on and did the purchasing…. Heaven help her when she gets a husband—unless he’s rich.”
“Heaven help her, indeed, if she ever gets him,” was Beryl’s startling rejoinder.
“Haw! Haw! Haw!” roared Aard.
Keven stared down at his steaming plate. He would have to be careful how he bandied wit with this girl. He felt at a loss just how to take that sally of hers. Silently then he waived reply and applied himself to the supper. After a time, however, he looked up at Beryl, to find her eyes downcast.
Emboldened by this, Keven glanced at her then, and from time to time afterward, but he could not catch her eye. There was a heightened color in her cheeks, almost a red spot. Twice when she rose to go into the kitchen his gaze followed her. In the white dress she looked slight, compared to the stalwart girl she appeared in rougher garb. Keven found himself becoming critical.
Later in the bright lamplight he had better opportunity to observe her unobtrusively. She was a little over the medium height for women, compactly, beautifully built, though not on delicate lines. She had a firm strong hand, brown, well shaped, and a rounded superb arm, upon which the muscles played. She stood erect as an Indian, lithe, almost pantherish in movement, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, giving singular impression of tremendous vitality. He had no fault to find with her feet and ankles, for they conformed to the rest of her splendid physical equipment. If Beryl Aard could not wade over the slippery stones of the swift Rogue and climb to the peaks of the mountains, he very much missed his guess. Once before he had compared her with the erotic Rosamond Brandeth; and when he did it again all the finality of that decision swung immeasurably to Beryl’s benefit.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
NEXT morning, bright and early, Keven went to work. Standing and bending were much harder for him than sitting in a boat rowing. Moreover he missed the stimulus of liquor. On the other hand there was a remarkable inspiration in the mere surroundings of Solitude. He felt it without looking. The resistless sense of loneliness, of wild solitude, of nature in its prodigality of forest and stream, of primitive life, began to insulate his nerves and almost imperceptibly to come between him and the thinking, brooding, introspective man. Vaguely he recognized this as good for him, and aided it all he could.
Beryl did not let him forget her. From time to time that first day she appeared much interested in how he was progressing, and visited him while he worked under Aard’s direction. Invariably, however, she would wander away into the shade of the firs, or to the bank of the ravine, or down toward the calling river. Keven was quick to grasp that she was an unconscious worshiper of nature. A butterfly, a colored leaf, a flower could instantly obsess her. He liked her all the better for this. But while she did stay near him, attentive to his task, her humor seemed paramount.
“Kev, you might become a great fisherman—under expert advice, if you would heed it—but you’ll never make a farm hand,” was a final example of her remarks.
“My dear Miss Aard,” replied Keven, standing erect to fix her with grave eyes. “I am a great fisherman. As for the rest, beggars can’t be choosers. At that, I like this kind of work better than rowing all day and half the night, wet and cold, covered with fish slime.”
“You’re so slow and awkward, Kev,” she objected. “You bend as if you were afraid of breaking a wire in your back.”
“I am. That’s my spine. You forget my body stopped the recoil of a cannon. I will never again be a man such as you could admire.”
Quick tears dimmed the fun in her eyes, and she turned away. He had hurt her. And this would ever be so, if she continuously kept making remarks, however innocent, that threw his oversensitive mind on his frailty.
“Wal, son, don’t mind Beryl,” spoke up Aard, who had heard the byplay. “She’s a girl an’ a woman an’ a mystery. She’s full of the Old Nick…. As for your condition, I reckon you exaggerate it. You’re a better man than you think. Just now you’re run down. You’re starved. But even so you work pretty good. Forget about everythin’. When you tire out go lay down. Soon we’ll have these little jobs done. Then you can fish an’ hunt, an’ later take to the trappin’ with me. By that time you won’t know yourself.”
Aard was always helpful. He radiated quiet strength and assurance, like the great dark mountains under which he had lived so long. Keven could not help being influenced for the better. Aard was a man to look up to.
Keven stuck on the job till just before sunset, when he repaired to his cabin to clean up and rest. The call to supper interrupted a dreamy contemplation of the river.
“I called you three times,” announced Beryl, when he presented himself at the other cabin.
“You did! I’m sorry. I get sort of absent-minded sometimes.”
“You go into a trance. Anyone might think you were in love with one of those Grant’s Pass girls…. Rosamond Brandeth, for instance, with, her bobbed hair and her painted face, and her silky finery—what little there is of it!”
“Anyone might think anything if she hasn’t control over her mind,” retorted Keven, hiding the start he had sustained. Had Beryl heard gossip? “It happens, however, that I am not suffering from such affliction.”
But Beryl was not suspicious or in possession of facts embarrassing to Keven. The magnificent flash of her black eyes seemed merely jealousy of his absorption. She stirred so many conflicting sensations in him.
After the meal he said, “Beryl, I’ve just strength enough left to drag myself to bed. Please excuse me.”
Considering the variety of her moods, Keven rather expected her to pout or to tell him tartly to go, if he would rather sleep than have her society for an hour before the fire. But she said nothing and walked with him through the dusk to his cabin. It was the gloaming hour, with the last of the afterglow on the river, and everything was permeated with the wonderful peace and silence of Solitude.
“I put a bag of fir cones and pine needles in your cabin,” she said. “They’re nice to start a quick little fire. They smell so sweet when burning.”
“Thanks, Beryl, that was thoughtful of you.”
She touched his arm and looked up at him, her face in shadow.
“It makes me happy to realize you’re actually here at my beloved Solitude,” she said. “To see you can work! To know you can rest! … Dad says you are already improving. I think so, too, and that is well…. Good night.”
She left him then, and Keven went into his cabin, to start his little fire, before which he sat a few moments, marveling, thoughtful and sad. How could he prevent the recurrence of his poignant state of consciousness? Work was one way—sleep another. So he went to bed.
Two weeks sped by, bringing the end of summer and the beginning of the colorful days of autumn. The Rogue Valley was famous for its blazing beauty of foliage, but Solitude was magnificent beyond comparison with any other place along the river. It flaunted its frosted maples and oaks, the madroña, the myrtle, and the manzanita, the ferns and rock vines.
Keven’s application to his tasks, which precluded all else for this period, was not in any sense slavish, though too hard and exhausting to
be enjoyable. But more than duty to the Aards drove him; he realized he was toiling and sweating the pangs of rum from his body. At first it was something he felt he owed Beryl for her faith, and then something deep and still unconquered in himself.
The dawn came when he awoke without any particular craving, and that focused thought on things he had persistently kept out of mind.
“After all it was nothing,” he soliloquized. “I wasn’t a drunkard. Whisky had no great hold on me. And now it’s over with.”
Then no longer could he blind himself to other facts. His appetite had imperceptibly come back; he was gaining weight slowly but surely. This astounding circumstance added to his freedom, carried him to the trembling verge of possibility, of realization, of hope. What could he do with such feelings, which seemed so antagonistic to the facts of his permanent disablement, so ridiculous in the face of his broken heart and ruined life? Yet they persisted, and would continue to persist, until he lost himself in that vague sensorial perception which had grown upon him.
“Wal,” remarked Aard, at supper, “we sure eat up those jobs. Firewood an’ shacks must wait for snow. We have to snake the wood from on top. Reckon it’s up to you an’ Beryl to ketch about a ton of steelhead for smokin’. An’ right now some venison would go fine.”
“Kev, have you as much as looked at the river lately?” inquired Beryl.
“I’m always looking at it.”
“Seen anything?”
“Nothing unusual,” replied Keven, almost nettled by her demure tone, her mysterious smile.
“It’s full of steelhead. There’s a run on.”
“No!”
“Yes indeedy.”
“Have you been fishing?” asked Keven eagerly.
“Not yet. I wouldn’t be so mean as to go to the river without you.”
“You’re very good, Beryl,” he replied constrainedly. “Why not? Your father says we need the fish to smoke.”
“I’d hate to make you feel badly,” Beryl admitted.
“That wouldn’t make me feel badly,” went on Keven, puzzled. “I’d be only too glad to see you go.”
“Yes, you would,” she protested. “I always make Dad very tired, and I’m sure I’d make you sick.”
“How so?”
“I’d catch a lot of steelhead. Then, when you saw them you’d rush down to the river. And when you couldn’t catch any you’d be wretched.”
“Is that so?” returned Keven spiritedly. “Well, to be honest, maybe I would if I couldn’t get results. But, Beryl Aard, I can raise and catch steelhead in the Rogue as well as anyone.”
“Most likely, up the river. But this fishing down here is different. You never did catch any—except a couple of little ones. Five pounds or so. And I don’t keep that size. Here at Solitude you must know the river. Where they lie—what they take. And if I remember rightly you just wouldn’t listen to me.”
She was not teasing, but deliberately in earnest. And the fact was she thought poorly indeed of Keven’s fishing. Whatever else Keven might have been reasonable about, he certainly was not reasonable when it came to fishing. He recalled flashes of illumination, after some particularly tragic and blundering loss, when humility overcame egotism, and he had thought himself the most asinine of all anglers who ever cast a fly. But far indeed was this humility from him now. He would teach this amazing girl of Solitude something about the one thing he did know.
“Beryl, you don’t honestly mean you could beat me fishing?” he queried frankly.
Her merry laughter pealed out. And Aard chuckled over his pipe.
“Beat you! Why, Kev, I could do it with my left hand and never get my feet wet.”
“That last is impossible in the Rogue. And as for beating me, why child, you are crazy.”
Beryl smiled adorably at him and then at her amused father.
“Dad, the war you predicted is on. Will you be stakeholder and judge?”
“I reckon I’ll have to be, though it’s a risky job, considerin’ how much I like you both.”
“You really have the nerve to bet?” asked Keven, admiration and respect wrung from him.
“Yes, I’ll bet you. What is more, I’ll let you set the conditions. One day, or two days, or three. You can choose where you want to fish.”
“Say, don’t rub it in,” retorted Keven, feeling the fun and thrill of a promised contest, such as many and many a time he had entered in the past. “We’ll draw lots…. Aard, hold these two pine needles in your hand. One short and one long. Whoever gets the long one has the choice…. There. Now draw, Beryl.”
She drew the short one, which not one whit diminished her smiling assurance.
“I hate to do this, Aard,” said Keven, waving the longer needle triumphantly. “It’s like taking candy from the baby…. Beryl, I’ll go up the river and fish down.”
“Splendid. Just where I want you to go,” she returned, with elation. “Oh, Kev, I feel so sorry for you. If only you’ll be a good sport and not get mad!”
“Do you wish to make any conditions?” asked Keven condescendingly.
“Only one. Not a single word about flies and leaders until after the contest. Do you agree?”
“Certainly. Now I’d like to make a condition. That I give you odds.”
“No. I’ll not consent to that, though if I did, Mister Upriver, it would make your defeat more crushing.”
“Very well. Now what will I bet you?”
“Let’s make it the same for both—the best tackle we can buy.”
“Whew! There’s nothing sky-high about your gambling. Not at all! I’ll go you, though…. Aard, you have got all this data in your mind?”
“Sure. All you have to do now is set the time to start.”
“After breakfast,” replied Beryl promptly.
“That’s what I expected of a lazy, luxurious girl,” agreed Keven. “But I always used to be on the river at daybreak.”
“What for?” asked Beryl.
“Why, to fish, of course.”
“I hope you’re not one of those early-birds-catching-the-worm sort of fishermen. Steelhead don’t rise till the mist is off the river. Down here in these canyons that’s after sunup.”
For the first time Keven had a vague notion that this Aard girl might really know something about the science of trout fishing, but like all fishermen he scouted such probability for one of the gentler sex.
“Well, good night, Beryl,” he said, rising to go. “I want to look over my tackle and rig up…. It’s too bad we’ll never be friends again.”
“Aren’t you of a forgiving nature? … Good night, Isaac.”
“Isaac! Why call me a jayhawker name like that?”
“Don’t you know Isaac Walton?”
“Sorry to say I never met the gentleman,” returned Keven, from the door.
He repaired to his cabin, and after lighting his lamp and kindling his little fire of cones he got out the tackle Minton had sold him on credit long months before.
“Fine chap, Minton. Doggone, I’m glad I paid for this tackle. And gladder that I hung onto it,” he said to himself.
Whereupon he spent a pleasant hour of task and anticipation, after which he went to bed. He got up early next morning, to put on the discarded market-fishing clothes, and to spend another half hour trying to select flies for the day. At length he decided to take them all.
While he was at breakfast with Aard, Beryl came out of her room, carrying a queer-looking limber rod, evidently homemade. It appeared to be a jointed out, however, and looked whippy. Beryl in short skirt, heavy woolen stockings, and hobnailed shoes looked as businesslike as her tackle.
“I’ve had my breakfast, Kev,” she said. “You’ll find me when you come down the river. Good luck.”
“Same to you,” replied Keven. “Don’t fall down, don’t get wet, and don’t lose your tackle.”
“Where’d that antediluvian tackle of hers come from?” asked Keven, after she had gone.
“It
was made by an old friend of mine who lives on the Umpqua. I gave it to Beryl. That yew wood is too limber for me.”
“Yew? Never heard of it. Split bamboo is the only wood for rods.”
“I reckon the rod don’t cut much ice, nohow. It’s part your leader and part your fly—then most the way you work ’em. I’ll give you another tip, Kev. Use small dark flies with some buff in them. Or gray with tan wings.”
“Haven’t any such flies,” replied Keven.
“Wal, you ought to, if you’re buckin’ up against that girl. An’ another thing, stay out of the water.”
“Aard, are you too telling me how to fish the Rogue?” queried Keven, with a hearty laugh. “Well, you want to be around when we get back.”
“Don’t worry, son, I wouldn’t miss that for anythin’.”
Soon Keven was on his way up the trail, trying to adjust himself to resurging sensations. He walked a mile or more and then made his way down to the river. It appeared a little high, but was clear. The places he had in memory were gone, and he was too eager to begin fishing to look about him.
Almost at the outset he made a remarkable and humiliating discovery. There did not seem to be any co-ordination whatever between his theory of casting, the skill he fondly had believed was unforgettable, and the actual physical accomplishment. His casting was atrocious; in fact, he could not cast at all. He hooked the bushes on his back throw, the trees, and himself. But he persevered and waded on downstream. Presently he raised a nice trout, that leaped on a slack line and escaped. Keven recovered the hook to find that the point had broken. He was convinced it had been done by the trout. This was his first bad luck, and it augured ill. But he persevered, and the harder he tried the worse things became. He could not wade out far, owing to the depth of the water; he could not remain in it long, owing to its icy nature. The most annoying feature of his return to fly-fishing, after four years and more, was the way he snagged the brush behind him. Several flies were lost this way and leaders broken. He tried to woo patience which would not be wooed.
At a likely pool, the first where he saw steelhead rising, he slipped off a rock, like an elephant, and spoiled that place. At another spot he cast his favorite fly, and cast and cast, until he did get a smashing strike. The fish felt heavy. He was about to whoop when it got off. Again Keven found the point of his hook broken.
