Daniel Plainway - Or The Holiday Haunting of the Moosepath League

by Van Reid

  “What should I do?” wondered Eagleton aloud.

  “I should count it a worthy charm,” said the driver.

  The chain had slipped beneath Eagleton’s collar, and he could feel the tiny silver cross (it was plated silver, to be sure, though the old woman had never suspected) just above his breastbone. The cross was strange, even problematic to him; Eagleton was a “good Methodist,” which persuasion did not hold with wearing such symbols. But if it seemed awkward as a religious emblem, it rather warmed him as a gift from the old woman’s heart and indirectly the same from her long-dead and well-remembered son.

  Eagleton was a little nonplussed as well because he could not follow her directive; his own dear mother had died some years past.

  “That was a good piece of work, mister,” said Eagleton’s driver. “You’re going to the Grand Trunk then?”

  “I am, thank you.” Eagleton thought to express something further to the old woman, but she was gone from the sidewalk when he looked for her. “Yes,” he said to the driver. “I am. Storm increasing by the hour,” he informed the man. “Expected to taper off after midnight. Winds twenty to thirty knots, in the northwest.”

  “Consider the fare paid,” said the driver as he opened the carriage door.

  19. The Undisclosed Motives of Roger Noble

  Charlotte Burnbrake brought her uncle’s bags into their apartment’s little parlor while her uncle roasted his old bones by the fire, in anticipation of the cold and the snow that he would encounter between the hotel and the train at the Grand Trunk Station.

  “Is Pacif a coming soon?” asked Ezra Burnbrake.

  “In an hour or so,” answered his niece. She sat beside him and took his hand.

  “I hate to leave you alone.” He spoke quietly. Without wife or children, the old man had an appreciation for the vast power of loneliness and hardly understood that Charlotte might relish time by herself. “What will you do?” he asked.

  “In the hour before she arrives or when she’s here?” asked Charlotte with sympathetic amusement.

  “Whenever,” he said, sensing, though not hurt by, the small bit of teasing in her voice; he was simply interested in everything she did, he loved her so. His brother could have done nothing more for him than provide this niece, who had been light and song in his elder years. “I am glad you will have time with Pacifa,” he said. “I like her very much.”

  Charlotte, to be truthful, would be a little glad to have her uncle gone for a few days and felt guilty for it-contradictory impulses. “We shall take a walk in the snow,” she said, and the thought of strolling the streets of Portland with Pacif a made her happy.

  Uncle Ezra began a litany of dangers to avoid upon the street but cut himself short with a laugh and finished with “I warrant you’ll be safe with Pacifa.” Pacif a Means, contrary to her name, could be a turbulent creature and a force to reckon with.

  “I warrant you will be safe with the Moosepath League,” she returned with a smile. She had been touched and amused by the club members, but she wondered if they would really show; their visit the day before seemed so strange now. “Give them my best,” she added as a mark of faith.

  The hotel manager himself came to announce that Mr. Noble had arrived, and there was a hint in his bearing that Mr. Noble had not been pleased to wait downstairs. Uncle Ezra rose from his chair, embraced his niece, and allowed the manager to escort him down the hall. a porter came soon after and retrieved his bags.

  Charlotte waited at the window, where she could watch, through a crack in the curtains, the bent shape of her uncle and the straight, arrogant figure of her cousin Roger Noble entering a cab at the sidewalk. Noble paused before he disappeared into the carriage and looked up at the very window. She knew he couldn’t see her, but she flinched. She held the curtain steady, however, and gave him no token of her observance. The snow had begun, just barely, to drift from the clouded sky.

  Charlotte lost herself in the contemplation of these first flakes and was finally roused by the sound of Pacifa’s energetic knock upon the door.

  Since the first light of morning the skies over Portland Harbor had been that unvariegated gray that drains color from the water and the snow and the rock, mutes the shadows of day, and appears to draw so close that mariner and landsman alike might wonder if a ceiling had been constructed while they were sleeping. Before the first train was pulled alongside the platform of the Grand Trunk Station, lazy spirals of snow had already drifted out of that gray field, only visible as they crossed the dark shapes of buildings or perhaps not till they had lighted upon a shoulder or a glove.

  “What’s the wire saying?” wondered the conductor when he came into the station from his routine inspection of the train.

  “They’ve hardly seen daylight west of York County,” informed the stationmaster, in what may have been an exaggeration.

  The conductor nodded. He was philosophical. Some would get where they were going, and others would not. Anywhere on the rail was his place; the train itself was as much home as his little rooms on Warren Street. out of the roundhouse, though the snow had hardly started and there was From the side windows he could see that the yardmen had dollied a plow only a freckling of white over the tracks. The flakes were fat but sparse, falling like spring fluff. The engine blew a preliminary gout of steam and the damp cloud burst from the stack into a roiling confluence of scattered snow.

  “What’s the wire say?” said the engineer, when he stepped into the station.

  Together the stationmaster, the ticket man, and the conductor painted a picture that was as bleak or cheery as their distinctive personalities.

  “I suppose that it will snow whether we keep school or not,” said the engineer, who was himself philosophical. He and the conductor were more interested in the weather than they let on, however; the running of their train and the safety of their passengers were points of honor with them, though they faced these issues with bland expressions. They had returned to their train before the Grand Trunk Station’s customers and other people began to arrive.

  The first of these came under the heading “other people,” it seemed, for they got off the first trolley of the day and wandered into the station with none of the purpose that radiates from the ready traveler. The three of them looked about the waiting room as if it were oddly familiar.

  “I think I could sit down,” said Humphrey Brink.

  “Remember not to lie down, or they will exact a toll,” said Aldicott Durwood.

  “Do not ask for whom the bench tolls,” intoned Brink, “it tolls for me,” and he answered his own poetic call.

  “Does anyone see Mister Walton anyplace?” wondered Roderick Waverley.

  “Would it be a terrible encumbrance,” wondered the ticket man, “if I were to ask why you gentlemen seem to have no homes?”

  “Don’t believe everything that seems,” suggested Brink.

  “It’s an illusion,” said Waverley.

  “It’s the result of a poorly conceived wager,” explained Durwood. “Our acquaintance here,” he continued, indicating Waverley, “was exhorting certain ruffians with news of our youth, wherein he described an entire week in which purportedly we never made use of our own beds. For a week.”

  “If we are to believe our acquaintance,” said Brink, “then we made the streets and the docks and such places as this our domicile.”

  “For a week,” said Durwood again. “When we were younger. Home wasn’t safe at the time. Our fathers wanted us to work.”

  “I don’t remember it,” said Brink.

  “That’s no proof against,” said Waverley.

  “No doubt it was summer,” said Durwood. “And we were young.”

  “Waverley made a wager…” said Brink. He spoke with his eyes closed. Perhaps they had forgotten the ticket man entirely; they might almost have been talking among themselves or even to themselves. “… that it could be done again.”

  “Though it is winter,” said Durwood.

&n
bsp; “I hope it was a sizable bet,” said the ticket man. From his expression one could not tell if he were amused.

  “Moreover,” said Waverley, “it is an affair of honor.” Durwood and Brink nearly came to their feet at this communication, and he assured them, “But it was a sizable bet.”

  Brink’s attention was taken up by something new at this juncture. Through the glass doors of the station entrance he could see two men one elderly, another of similar age to his friends and himself-mounting the steps slowly. The younger man was haranguing his companion in tones that could be heard well ahead of them. a door was opened, and the volume of this tirade grew respectively.

  “I tell you, you have no right to keep me from speaking to her!” the man was saying, and some quality of his own voice in that place (perhaps the echo, as if some sentient creature were repeating his words) brought him up short.

  Durwood, Waverley, and Brink made no pretense of uninterest but blinked at the man. “It’s the amiable Roger Noble,” said Brink. His voice carried through the station in the sudden quiet.

  “You won’t be able to rest here for long,” explained the man in the ticket booth to Brink, “bet or no bet. There’ll be a lot of folk through here this morning, hoping to beat the storm.”

  Roger Noble shot darts around the room, to Brink and his associates, then back to the elderly man, his uncle, Ezra Burnbrake. To look at, Noble, tall and blond, was all that one would ask for in a man of that name; his were straight good looks and a clear eye. He kept his chin high, but his mouth had taken a twist, brought on no doubt by a growing propensity to frown or even to sneer. He had struggled against his boyish features and had won out only too well.

  “Roger,” said Durwood as the nephew and uncle advanced to the ticket booth.

  “These aren’t the fellows you were talking about?” wondered Noble.

  “These men?” said the elderly man. He peered at Durwood, Waverley, and Brink, adjusting his spectacles as he took each of them into account. “No, these aren’t them. Do you know them?” He was out of breath, but Noble did not offer to lead him to a seat, nor did he answer the question.

  “I thought,” said Noble accusingly, “anything like the Moosepath League sounded too suspicious to be right!” Clearly he had not listened to his uncle or had simply discounted what the man had said.

  “The Moosepath League!” said Brink; Durwood and Waverley echoed him. “You couldn’t have a thing to do with Mister Walton!” added Brink.

  “That was the name of their chairman,” said Mr. Burnbrake.

  “Don’t feel you have to come along,” said Noble darkly.

  “We won’t,” said Brink, who had no idea what the man was referring to.

  “We simply haven’t bought our tickets yet,” said Waverley.

  “We haven’t?” said Durwood.

  “We aren’t part of the Moosepath League, are we?” wondered Brink of his companions.

  “I don’t think so,” said Waverley.

  “I thought perhaps Mister Walton had inducted us without our knowing.”

  “Then we wouldn’t know, would we?” said Waverley.

  “That is very true. I hadn’t thought.”

  The doors to the station opened just then, and three men hurried inside. They were very different from one another, except that each carried a newspaper under one arm and took his hat in the opposite hand upon entering.

  “I have a feeling about these gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Durwood.

  “Could it be?” wondered Waverley.

  “Mr. Burnbrake!” called the first of these newcomers. “How good to see you again, sir.”

  “Ah!” said the old man. “These are the fellows!”

  Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump strode up to the small assemblage, even while-from other doors, and behind them-the station began to fill with travelers and baggage. Several porters and a driver stumbled in with a great load of bags and followed the Moosepathians.

  The members of the club had discussed among themselves the best way to greet Charlotte Burnbrake’s “troublesome cousin,” and their decision was to face such a personality with a manner that was cordial yet guarded.

  “Matthew Ephram,” said that worthy, and he held out his hand.

  Noble took it, but sparingly, as if he had only so much greeting allotted to him, and it was Ephram’s motivation that pumped their hands.

  Eagleton and Thump introduced themselves, and since the first three men seemed to be of the party, they were drawn into the circle of introductions and handshakes. When Durwood, Waverley, and Brink offered their cognomens, however, Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump were astonished.

  “Good heavens!” said Eagleton. “The Dash-It-All Boys!”

  Brink’s head shot up.

  “We are the Moosepath League!” declared Ephram, as if he were announcing himself to a long lost relative.

  “It is like dire fate!” said Waverley.

  “The Moosepath League!” said Durwood. “Mister Walton!”

  Thump, who was then shaking Durwood’s hand, beamed to hear his chairman’s name spoken in exclamatory tones. Durwood peered into the great density of Thump’s beard in hopes of ascertaining what the bared teeth meant.

  Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump were very eager to be shaking hands; they made the rounds of their new acquaintances more than once (and in fact found themselves shaking with one another). Durwood, Waverley, and Brink peered at their own hands, as if expecting these appendages to be somehow altered by all this agitation. Mr. Burnbrake was also greeted affably, and Eagleton insisted that the elderly fellow take a bench.

  “It was very good of you to come to the aid of our chairman,” Ephram said to Brink.

  “Was it?” Brink couldn’t recall doing any such thing and was a little shocked by the suggestion.

  “He never found his hat,” said Durwood.

  “He didn’t, thank you,” said Eagleton.

  “Oh, don’t thank me.”

  “And are you coming with us?” asked Thump.

  “For a bit,” replied Brink. “Waverley, you were going to get our tickets.”

  “Was I?”

  “Come,” said Thump, “let us go together!” He half accompanied, half led Waverley to the ticket booth, where the seller was watching with interest. Thump thought it terrifically congenial (and even jolly) to be performing such a function with his Dashian counterpart.

  Ephram and Eagleton meanwhile were astonished to hear that the Dash-It-All Boys had seen their chairman only the day before as he and Sundry left with the Covingtons. The news precipitated another round of handshakes that Thump was loath to miss, and though he had not been informed of this new turn of events, he took Waverley’s hand at the ticket booth and shook it heartily.

  Roger Noble stared at all this bonhomie with something like disgust.

  Ezra Burnbrake looked up from his bench with a quiet smile, considered his nephew and thought it good for him.

  It is curious how goodwill is irksome to some people, how sincerity of spirit and honesty of heart can rile particular tempers to the boiling point, as if every pleasing word and unmitigated smile were the bite of a gnat or the buzz of a mosquito.

  Misery loves company, it is said, and so perhaps does choler. Roger Noble, who arrived at the Grand Trunk Station in an absolute fury because he had been denied an audience with his cousin Charlotte, found his indignation further prodded by the unaffected pleasantness of the Moosepathians, as well as by the somewhat wryer amiability of the Dashians.

  The storm’s advance guard had pushed past the environs of Portland, and the first serious regiments of snow fell upon the city even as the train pulled out from the eastern end of Commercial Street and began its peripheral march below the promenade. Back Cove disappeared behind the snow distance on the one side of the trestle that led toward Falmouth, and the great harbor paled on the other. Noble stared at his half reflection without perceiving the storm, and the Dash-It-All Boys were involved in earnest conversation wi
th the Moosepath League; Ezra Burnbrake felt he was able to sleep in such agreeable company, and he closed his eyes.

  At first the Dash-It-All Boys were up to this new diversion, and their conversation was mightily perplexing to the members of the Moosepath League, no more so than when Eagleton announced his great desire to see the Smoking Pine of Hallowell.

  “Has it been smoking long?” wondered Brink.

  “Oh, yes!” said Eagleton. “For years!”

  “It must be very charred by now,” suggested Durwood.

  “It is a wonder there’s anything left to see,” added Waverley.

  “It isn’t on fire,” explained Ephram. “But there is an odd sort of effluence that hovers above it sometimes, so that it appears to be smoking.”

  “It is part of a grove of pines,” continued Eagleton, “thought to be the reincarnated spirits of the last Wawenocks.”

  “How long did the Wawenocks last?” asked Durwood.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Eagleton.

  “I believe I would rather return as a hackmatack,” observed Waverley.

  “And why is that?” wondered Brink.

  “I don’t know, but I like saying hackmatack.”

  “Durwood saw a smoking oak once, didn’t you, Durwood,” remembered Brink.

  “Did I?”

  “You should know if anyone does.”

  “There does seem to be a fleeting recollection.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder,” said Brink. Then to Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump he added, “Nearly burnt his aunt’s house to the ground.”

  “Not to the ground, I don’t think,” said Durwood in his own defense. “The third floor was a little poorly.”

  “Good heavens!” said Eagleton. “What started it?”

  “Some of her parlor furniture, I think,” said Durwood blandly.

  The Moosepathians were flabbergasted.

  “Three sheets to the wind,” said Brink.

  “I beg your pardon,” chorused the Moosepathians.