Chapter I: Part 1

Books by Mary Hallock Foote.

=THE CHOSEN VALLEY.= A Novel. 16mo, $1.25; paper, 50 cents.

=THE LED-HORSE CLAIM.= Illustrated. 16mo, $1.25; paper, 50 cents.

=JOHN BODEWIN’S TESTIMONY.= 12mo, $1.50; paper, 50 cents.

=THE LAST ASSEMBLY BALL=, and =THE FATE OF A VOICE=. 16mo, $1.25.

=IN EXILE, AND OTHER STORIES.= 16mo, $1.25.

=CŒUR D’ALÉNE.= A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.

=THE CUP OF TREMBLING, AND OTHER STORIES.= 16mo, $1.25.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

THE

LITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES

BY

MARY HALLOCK FOOTE

_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR_

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1899

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY MARY HALLOCK FOOTE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

These stories were originally published in the St. Nicholas Magazine, and are reprinted here by kind permission of the Century Company.

The profits of the volume are dedicated to the Children’s Hospital of San Francisco.

CONTENTS

PAGE

FLOWER OF THE ALMOND AND FRUIT OF THE FIG 1

THE LAMB THAT COULDN’T “KEEP UP” 17

DREAM HORSES 32

AN IDAHO PICNIC 44

A VISIT TO JOHN’S CAMP 92

NOVEMBER IN THE CAÑON 107

THE GATES ON GRANDFATHER’S FARM 120

THE GARRET AT GRANDFATHER’S 144

THE SPARE BEDROOM AT GRANDFATHER’S 167

THE

LITTLE FIG-TREE STORIES

FLOWER OF THE ALMOND AND FRUIT OF THE FIG

There is a garden on a hill slope between the snows of the Sierra Nevada and the warm, rich valleys of the coast. It is in that region of Northern California where the pine belt and the fruit belt interlace. Both pine and fruit trees grow in that mountain garden, and there, in the new moon of February, six young Almond trees burst into flower.

The Peach and Plum trees in the upper garden felt a glow of sympathy with their forward sisters of the south, but the matronly Cherry trees shook their heads at such an untimely show of blossoms. They foresaw the trouble to come.

“The Almond trees,” they said, “will lose their fruit buds this year, as they did last and the year before. Poor things, they are so emotional! The first whisper of spring that wanders up the foothills sets them all aflame; out they rush, with their hearts on their sleeves, for the frosts to peck at. But what can one do? If you try to reason with them, ‘Our parents and grandparents always bloomed in February,’ they will tell you, ‘and _they_ did not lose their fruit buds.’”

“The Almond trees come of very ancient stock,” said the Normandy Pear, who herself bore one of the oldest names in France. “Inherited tendencies are strong in people of good blood. One of their ancestors, I have heard, was born in a queen’s garden in Persia, a thousand years ago; and beautiful women, whose faces the sun never shone upon, wore its blossoms in their hair. And as you probably know, their forefathers are spoken of in the Bible.”

“A number of persons, my dear, are spoken of in the Bible who were no better than they should be,” said the eldest Apple tree. “We go back to the ‘Mayflower,’--that is far enough for us; and none of our family ever dreamed of putting on white and pink in February. It would be flying in the face of Providence.”

“White and pink are for Easter,” said the Pear tree, whose grandparents were raised in a bishop’s garden. “I should not wish to put my blossoms on in Lent.”

The Apple tree straightened herself stiffly.

“We do not keep the church fasts and feasts,” she said; “but every one knows that faith without works is dead. What are these vain blossoms that we put forth for a few days in the spring, without the harvest that comes after?”

“Now the Apple tree is going to preach,” said the light-hearted Peach tree, stepping on the Plum tree’s toes. “If we must have preaching, I had rather listen to the Pines. They, at least, have good voices.”

“Those misguided Almonds are putting out all their strength in fleshly flowers,” the Apple tree continued; “but how when the gardener comes to look for his crop? We all know, as the Cherry trees said, what happened last year and the year before. It cannot be expected that the Master of the Garden will have patience with them forever.”

“The Master of the Garden!” Four young Fig trees, who stood apart and listened in sorrowful silence to this talk of blossoms, repeated the words with fear and trembling.

“How long,--how much longer,”--they asked themselves, “will he have patience with us?”

It was now the third spring since they had been planted, but not one of the four sisters had yet produced a single flower. With deep, shy desire they longed to know what the flower of the fig might be like. They were all of one age, and they had no parent tree to tell them. They knew nothing of their own nature or race or history. Two seasons in succession, a strange, distressful change had come upon them. They had felt the spring thrills, and the sap mounting in their veins; but instead of breaking out into pink and white flowers, like the happy trees around them, ugly little hard green knobs had crept out of their tender bark, and these had swollen and increased in size till they were bowed with the burden of their deformity. Fruit this could not be, for they had seen that fruit comes from a flower, and no sign of blossom or bud had ever been vouchsafed them. When inquisitive hands came groping, and feeling of the purple excrescences upon their limbs, they covered them up in shame and tried to hide them with their broad green leaves. In time they were mercifully eased of this affliction; but then the frosts came, and the winter’s dull suspense, and then another spring’s awakening to hope and fear.

“Perhaps we were not old enough before,” they whispered encouragement to one another. “Blossoms no doubt are a great responsibility. Had we had them earlier, we might have been foolish and brought ourselves to blame, like the Almond trees. Let us not be impatient; the sun is warm, but the nights are cold. Do not despair, dear sisters; we may have flowers yet. And when they do come, no doubt they will be fair enough to reward us for our long waiting.”

They passed the word on softly, even to the littlest Fig-tree sister that stood in rocky ground close to the wall that shut the garden in from the pine wood at its back. The Pines were always chanting and singing anthems in the wood; but though the sound was beautiful, it oppressed the little Fig tree, and filled her with melancholy. Moreover, it was very dry in the ground where she stood, and a Fig tree must have drink.

“Sisters, I am very thirsty!” she cried. “Have you a little, a very little water that you could spare?”

The sister Fig trees had not much of anything to spare; they were spreading and growing fast, and their own soil was coarse and stony. The water that had so delicious a sound in coming seemed to leak away before their eager rootlets had more than tasted it; still they would have shared what they had, could they have passed it to their weaker sister. But the water would not go uphill; it ran away down, instead, and the Peach and Plum and Pear trees grew fat with what the Fig trees lacked.

“Courage, little sister!” they called to the fainting young tree by the wall. “The morning sun is strong, but soon the shadow of the wood will reach us. Cover thy face and keep a good heart. When our turn shall come, it will be thy turn too; one of us will not bloom without the others.”

It was only February, and the Almond trees stood alone, without a rival in their beauty. They stood in the proudest place in the garden, in full view both from the road and from a high gallery that ran across the front of the house where the Master of the Garden lived. The house faced the west, and whenever the people came out to look at the sunset they admired the beauty of the Almond trees, with their upright shoots, tipped and starred with luminous blossoms, against the deep, rich colors in the west; and when the west faded, as it did every evening, a lamp on a high post by the gate, bigger and brighter than the brightest star, was set burning,--“for what purpose,” thought the Almond trees, “but to show our beauty in the night?” So they watched through the dark hours, and felt the intoxication of the keen light upon them, and marveled at their own shadows on the grass.

They were somewhat troubled because so many of their blossoms were being picked; but the tree that stood nearest the house windows rose on tiptoe, and behold! each gathered spray had been kept for especial honor. Some were grouped in vases in the room, or massed against the chimney-piece; others were set in a silver bowl in the centre of a white table, under a shaded lamp, where a circle of people gazed at them, and every one praised their delicate, sumptuous beauty.

But peepers as well as listeners sometimes learn unpleasant truths about themselves.

“Aren’t we picking too many of these blossoms?” asked the lady of the house. “I’m afraid we are wasting our almond crop.”

“Almond trees will never bear in this climate,” said the Master of the Garden. “Better make the most of the blossoms while they last. The frost will catch them in a week or two.”

So the mother and children gathered the blossoms recklessly,--to save them, they said. Then a snow fall came, and those that had been left on the trees were whiter than ever for one day, and the next day they were dead. Each had died with a black spot at its core, which means the death that has no resurrection in the fruit to come.

After the snow came rain and frost, and snow again. The white Sierra descended and shook its storm cloak in the face of laughing Spring, and she fled away downward into the warm valleys. Alas, the flatterer! But the Almond trees alone had trusted her, and again their hope of fruit was lost.

“Did we not say so?” muttered the Apple tree between her chattering teeth. She was the most crabbed and censorious of the sisters, and by her talk of fruit one might have supposed her own to be of the finest quality; but this was not the case, and the gardener only that year had been threatening, though she did not know it, to cut off her top and graft her with a sweeter kind.

The leaves of the Almond tree are not beautiful, neither is her shape a thing to boast of. When spring did at last come back to stay, the Almonds were the plainest of all the trees. Their blossoms were like bright candles burned to the socket, that would light no more; their “corruptible crown” of beauty had passed to other heads. No one looked at them, no one pitied them, except the Fig trees, who wondered which had most cause to mourn,--they, who had never had a blossom, or the Almond trees, who had risked theirs and lost them all before the time of blossoms came.

The Fig trees’ reproach had not been taken away. While every tree around them was dressed in the pride of the crop to come, they stood flowerless and leafless, and burned with shame through all their barren shoots.

When the Master of the Garden came with his children to look at them, they hung their heads and were afraid.

“When will they blossom, like the other trees,” the children asked, “and what sort of flower will _they_ bear?”

The Fig trees held their breath to hear the answer.

“A Fig tree has no flower, like the other fruit trees,” said the Master of the Garden. “Its blossom is contained in the fruit. You cannot see it unless you cut open the budding figs, and then you would not know it was a flower.”

“What is the use of having blossoms, if no one ever sees them?” one of the children asked.

“What is the use of doing good, unless we tell everybody and brag about it beforehand?” the father questioned, smiling.

“I thought the best way was--you know--to do it in secret,” said the child.

“That’s what we are taught; and some persons do good in that way, and cover it up as if they were ashamed of it. And so the Fig tree doesn’t tell anybody when it is going to bear fruit.”

The Fig trees had heard their doom. To the words that followed they had not listened; nor would they have understood much more of it than the child of its father’s meaning.

“What is this he calls our fruit?” they asked each other in fear and loathing. “Was _that_ our fruit,--those green and purple swellings, that unspeakable weight of ugliness? Will it come year after year, and shall we never have a flower? The burden without the honor, without the love and praise, that beauty brings. That is the beginning and the end with us. Little sister, thou art happier than we, for soon thy burden-bearing will be done. Uncover thy head and let the sunbeams slay thee, for why should such as we encumber the ground!”

Trees that grow in gardens may have long memories and nature teaches them a few things by degrees, but they can know little of what goes on in the dwellings or the brains of men, or why one man should plant and call it good and later another come and dig up the first man’s planting. But so it happened in this garden. “The stone which the builders rejected, the same was made the head of the corner.”

“These little Fig trees with their strange, great leaves,--why were they put off here by themselves, I wonder?” A lady spoke who had lately come to the cottage. She was the wife of the new Master of the Garden. “I wish we had them where we could see them from the house,” she said. “All the other trees are commonplace beside them.”

“They are not doing well here,” said her husband. “This one, you see, is nearly dead. They must be transplanted, or we shall lose them all.”

Then followed talk which set the Fig trees a-tremble with doubt and amazement and joy. They were to be moved from that arid spot,--where, they knew not, but to some place of high distinction! They--the little aliens who had stood nearest the wall and thirsted for a bare existence--were to be called to the front of the garden and have honor in the presence of all! The despised burden which they had called their deformity they heard spoken of as the rarest fruit of the garden, and themselves outvalued beyond all the other trees, for that, having so little, they had done so much.

Beauty too was theirs, it appeared, as well as excellence, though they could scarcely believe what their own ears told them; and they had a history and a family as old as those of the Almond tree, who can remember nothing that did not happen a thousand years ago and so has never learned anything in the present.

But the Fig trees would have been deeply troubled at their promotion could they have known what it was to cost their neighbors the Almond trees.

“Two we will keep for the sake of their flowers, but the others must go, and give room for the Figs.” So said the new Master, and so it was done. The unfruitful Almond trees were dug up and thrown over the wall,--all but the two whom their sisters had ransomed with their lives; for beauty has its price in this world and there must be some one to pay it.

When another spring came round, it was the little Fig tree that stood in the bright corner where the splendor of the road lamp shone upon its leaves all night. Its leaves were now as broad as a man’s outspread hand, and its fruit was twice the size it had been the season before.

Its sister trees stood round and interlaced their boughs about it.

“Lean on us, little one,” they said, regarding it with pride.

“But you have your own load to bear.”

“We scarcely feel it,” said the happy trees.

This was true; for the burden that had seemed beyond their strength, when their hearts were heavy with shame and despondency, they could bear up lightly now, since they had learned its meaning and its worth.

The new Master’s children were so full of the joy of spring in that mountain garden--for they too, like the little Fig trees, had been transplanted from arid ground--they had no words of their own in which to utter it. So their mother taught them some words from a song as old, almost, as the oldest garden that was ever planted:--

“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.”

* * * * *

“Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out.”

THE LAMB THAT COULDN’T “KEEP UP”

Until Jack Gilmour was seven years old his home had been at his grandfather’s house in a country “well wooded and watered,” as the Dutch captain who discovered it described it to his king.

There was water in the river; there was water in the ponds that lay linked together by falling streams among the hills above the mill; there was water in the spring lot; there was water in the brook that ran through the meadow across the road; there was water in the fountain that plashed quietly all through the dark, close summer nights, when not a leaf stirred, even of the weeping ash, and the children lay tossing in their beds, with only their nightgowns covering them. And besides all these living, flowing waters, there was water in the cistern that lay concealed under the foundations of the house. Not one of the grandchildren knew who had dug it, or cemented it, or sealed it up, for children and children’s children to receive their first bath from its waters. The good grandfather’s care had placed it there; but even that fact the little ones took for granted, as they took the grandfather himself,--as they took the fact that the ground was under their feet when they ran about in the sunshine.

In an outer room, which had been a kitchen once (before Jack’s mother was born), there was a certain place in the floor that gave out a hollow sound, like that from the planking of a covered bridge, whenever Jack stamped upon it. Somebody found him, one day, trying the echoes on this queer spot in the floor, and advised him to keep off it. It was the trapdoor which led down into the cistern; and although it was solidly made and rested upon a broad ledge of wood--well, it had rested there on that same ledge for many years, and it wasn’t a pleasant thought that a little boy in kilts should be prancing about with only a few ancestral planks between him and a hidden pit of water.

Once, when the trapdoor had been raised for the purpose of measuring the depth of the water in the cistern, Jack had looked down and had watched a single spot of light wavering over the face of the dark, still pool. It gave him a strange, uncomfortable feeling, as if this water were something quite unlike the outdoor waters, which reflected the sky instead of the under side of a board floor. This water was imprisoned, alone and silent; and if ever a sunbeam reached it, it was only a stray gleam wandering where it could not have felt at home, and must have been glad to leap out again when the sunbeam moved away from the crack in the floor that had let it in.

That same night a thunderstorm descended; the chimneys bellowed, and the rain made a loud trampling upon the roof. Jack woke and felt for his mother’s hand. As he lay still, listening to the rain lessening to a steady, quiet drip, drip, he heard another sound, very mysterious in the sleeping house,--a sound as of a small stream of water falling from a height into an echoing vault. His mother told him it was the rain water pouring from all the roofs and gutters into the cistern, and that the echoing sound was because the cistern was “low.” Next morning the bath water was deliciously fresh and sweet; and Jack had no more unpleasant thoughts about the silent, sluggish old cistern.

Now, there are parts of our country where the prayer “Give us this day our daily water” might be added to the prayer “Give us this day our daily bread;” unless we take the word “bread” to mean all that men and women require to preserve life to themselves and their children. That sad people of the East to whom this prayer was given so long ago could never have forgotten the cost and value of water.

If you turn the pages of a Bible concordance to the word “water,” you will find it repeated hundreds of times, in the language of supplication, of longing, of prophecy, of awful warning, of beautiful imagery, of love and aspiration. The history of the Jewish people in their wanderings, their wars and temptations, to their final occupation of the promised land, might be traced through the different meanings and applications of this one word. It was bargained, begged, and fought for, and was apportioned from generation to generation. We read among the many stories of those thirsty lands how Achsah, daughter of Caleb the Kenizzite, not content with her dowry, asked of her father yet another gift, without which the first were valueless: “For thou hast given me a south land; give me also springs of water. And Caleb gave her the upper springs and the nether springs.”

Now, our little boy Jack was seven years old, and had to be taken more than halfway across the continent before he learned that water is a precious thing. He was taken to an engineer’s camp in a cañon of a little, wild river that is within the borders of that region of the far West known as the “arid belt.”

Well, there was water in this river; but after the placer-mining began, in the month of May, and Moore’s Creek brought down the “tailings” from the mines and mingled them with the current of the river, its waters became as yellow as those of the famous Tiber as it “rolls by the towers of Rome,”--yellow with silt, which is not injurious; but it is not pleasant to drink essence of granite rock, nor yet to wash one’s face in it. They made a filter and filtered it; but every pailful had to be “packed,” as they say in the West, by the Chinese cook and the cook’s assistant. Economy in the use of water became no more than a matter of common consideration for human flesh.

In addition to the river there was a stream that came down the gulch close beside the camp. This little stream was a spendthrift in the spring and wasted its small patrimony of water; by the middle of summer it had begun to economize, and by September it was a niggard,--letting only a small dribble come down for those at its mouth to cherish in pools or pots or pails, or in whatever it could be gathered. This water of the gulch was frequently fouled by the range cattle that came crowding down to drink, mornings and evenings. Dead leaves and vegetation lay soaking in it, as summer waned. It was therefore condemned for drinking, but served for bathing or for washing the camp clothing, and was exceedingly precious by reason of its small and steadily decreasing quantity.

One morning, late in July, Jack was fast asleep and dreaming. The sun was hot on the great hills toward the east,--hills that had been faintly green for a few weeks in the spring, but were now given up to the mingled colors of the gray-green sagebrush and the dun-yellow soil.

They would have been hills of paradise, could rain have fallen upon them as often as it falls upon the cedar-crowned knolls of the Hudson; for these hills are noble in form and of great size,--a family of giants as they march skyward, arm in arm and shoulder to shoulder,--and the sky above them is the sky we call “Italian.” The “down-cañon wind,” that all night long had swept the gulch from its source in the hills to its mouth in the river, had fainted dead away in the heat of the sun. Presently the counter wind from the great hot plains would begin to blow, but this was the breathless pause between.

The flies were tickling Jack’s bare legs and creeping into the neck of his nightgown, where the button was off, as usually it is from a seven-year-old’s nightgown. He was restless, “like a dog that hunts in dreams,” for he was taking the old paths again that once he had known so well.

From the eastern hills came the mingled, far-off bleating, the ululation of a multitude of driven sheep. The sound had reached Jack’s dreaming ear. Suddenly his dream took shape, and for an instant he was a happy boy.

He was “at home” in the East. It was sheep-washing time, the last week in May; the apple orchards were a mass of bloom and the deep, old, winding lanes were sweet with their perfume. Jack was hurrying up the lane by the Long Pond to the sheep-washing place, where the water came down from the pond in a dark, old, leaky, wooden flume, and was held in a pool into which the sheep were plunged by twos and by threes, squeezed and tumbled about and lifted out to stagger away under the apple trees and dry their heavy fleeces in the sun. Jack was kicking in his sleep, when his name was called by a voice outside the window and he woke. Nothing was left of the dream, with all its sweets of sight and sound and smell, but the noise of the river’s continuous wrestle with the rocks of the upper bend, and that far-off multitudinous clamor from over the sun-baked hills.

“Jack, come out!” said the voice of Jack’s big cousin. “They are going to ‘sheep’ us. There’s a band of eight thousand coming!”

There was a great scattering of flies and of bedclothes, as Jack leaped out. He wasted no regrets upon the past,--one isn’t so foolish as that at seven years old,--but was ready for the joys of the present. Eight thousand sheep, or half that number (allowing for a big cousin’s liberal computation), were a sight worth seeing. As to being “sheeped,” what was there in an engineer’s camp to “sheep,” unless the eight thousand woolly range-trotters should trot over tents and house roofs and stovepipes and all, like Santa Claus’s team of reindeer!

Jack was out of bed and into his clothes in a hurry, and off over the hill with his cousin, buttoning the buttons of his “star” shirt waist on the way.

The “band” was pouring over the hill slopes in all directions, making at full speed for the river. The hills themselves seemed to be dizzily moving. The masses of distant small gray objects swarmed, they drifted, they swam, with a curious motionless motion. They looked like nothing more animated than a crop of gray stones, nearly of a size, spreading broadly over the hills and descending toward the river with an impulse which seemed scarcely more than the force of gravitation.

The dogs were barking, the shepherds were racing and shouting to head off the sheep and check their speed, lest the hundreds behind should press upon the hundreds in front and force them out into deep water. The hot air throbbed with the tumult.

When the thirst of every panting throat had been slaked and the band began to scatter along the hill slopes, the boys went forward to speak with the sheepmen.

A few moments afterward both lads were returning to the camp on a run, to ask permission to accept from the shepherds the gift of a lamb that couldn’t “keep up” with the band. It had run beside its mother as far as its strength would carry it, and then it had fallen and been trampled; and there it must lie unless help could revive it. A night on the hills, with the coyotes about, would finish it.

Permission was given, and breakfast was a perfunctory meal for the children by reason of the lamb lying on the strip of shade outside. After breakfast they sopped its mouth with warm milk, they sponged it with cold water, they tried to force a spoonful of mild stimulant between its teeth. They hovered and watched for signs of returning life. The lamb lay with its eyes closed; its sides, that were beginning to swell, rose and sank in long, heavy gasps. Once it moved an ear, and the children thought it must be “coming to.” Upon this hopeful sign they began at once to make plans for the lamb’s future life and joys with them in the cañon.

It should be led down to the river, night and morning, to drink; it should have bran soaked in milk; it should nibble the grass on the green strip; they would build it a house, for fear the coyotes should come prowling about at night; it should follow them up the gulch and over the hills, and race with them in the evenings on the river beach, as “Daisy,” the pet fawn, had done--until something happened to her (the children never knew what), and the lovely creature disappeared from the cañon and out of their lives forever.

When the strip of morning shadow was gone, they lifted the lamb tenderly and carried it to the strip of afternoon shadow on the other side of the house; and still it took no notice of the water or the milk, or of all the children’s care, nor seemed to hear that they were planning a happy life for it, if only it would get well.

When twilight came, and still it had not moved, the children held anxious consultation on the subject of their neighbors, the coyotes; but their father assured them there would be no danger, so near to the house; and it seemed a pity to disturb the poor lamb.

When the cool night wind began to blow down the cañon again, and the children were asleep, the lamb made its last effort. It is the instinct of all dumb creatures to keep upon their feet as long as they can stand; for when they have fallen the herd has no compassion,--or it may be that its comrades press around the sufferer out of curiosity or mistaken sympathy, and so trample it out of existence without meaning the least harm. The little nursling of the range obeyed this instinct in its last moments,--struggled to its feet and fell, a few steps farther on; and the lamb that couldn’t keep up was at rest.

No more toiling over hills and mountains and across hot valleys, packed in the midst of the band, breathing the dust, stunned with the noise, always hungry, almost always athirst, baked by the sun, chilled by the snow, driven by the wind,--drifting on, from mountain to river, from river to plain.

This one, out of eight thousand, could rest at last, on cool grass, with the peace and the silence and the room of a summer night around it.

The band slept upon the hills that night; the next morning they crossed the gulch above the camp, and drank up by the way _all_ the water of the little stream. Not another drop was seen for days. At length it gathered strength enough to trickle down again, but it was necessary to dip it up and let it stand in casks to settle before it was fit for use; and meanwhile the Chinamen carriers did double duty.

Those eastern hills in spring had been covered with wild flowers,--the moss pink, lupines both white and blue, wild phlox, the small yellow crocus, beds of tiny sweet-scented wild pansies, the camas flower, and a tall-stemmed, pale lilac lily,--the queen of the hill garden. But when spring came again, the old pathways were like an ash heap. The beautiful hill garden was a desert.

When these great sheep bands pass over the country, from range to range, from territory to territory, they devour not only the vegetation of one year, but the seeds, the roots, and, with these, the promise of the next.

It is the migration of the Hungry and the Thirsty; and a cry goes out against them, like the cry of Moab when the children of Israel camped within its borders:--

“Surely this multitude will lick up all that is round about us.”

DREAM-HORSES

There is a little girl who hangs upon her mother’s chair, getting her head between her mother’s work and the light, and begs for pictures.

She expects her mother to make these pictures on some bit of paper treasured for the purpose which she offers, with a book to rest it on, and a stubby pencil notched with small toothmarks, the record of moments of perplexity when Polly was making her own pictures.

It is generally after a bad failure of her own that she comes to her mother. The pang of disappointment with her own efforts is apt to sharpen her temper a little; it does not make Polly more patient with her mother’s mistakes that she makes mistakes herself. But between critic and artist, with such light as the dark lantern of a little girl’s head permits to fall upon the paper, the picture gets made somehow, and before it is finished Polly’s heart will be so full of sunshine that she will insist upon comparisons most flattering to the feelings of her artist, between their different essays at the same subject.

It is a subject they are both familiar with; and it is wonderful, considering the extent of Polly’s patronage, that her artist’s work does not better itself.

It is always a picture of a young person on horseback,--a young person about the age of Polly, but much handsomer and more grown-up looking. And the horse must be a pony with a flowing mane and tail, and his legs must be flung out, fore and aft, so that in action he resembles one of those “crazy-bugs” (so we children used to call them) that go scuttling like mad things across the still surface of a pond. In other respects he may be as like an ordinary pony as mamma and the stubby pencil can make him. But the young person on the pony must be drawn in profile, because Polly cannot make profiles, except horses’ profiles; her young persons always look straight out of the picture as they ride along, and the effect, at full speed, on a horse with his legs widely extended from his body, is extremely gay and nonchalant.

With the picture in her hand, the little girl will go away by herself and proceed to “dream and to dote.”

She lives in a horsey country. Horses in troops or “bands” go past by the trails, on the one side of the river or the other. Sometimes they ford where the water is breast-high over the bar. It is wild and delicious to hear the mares whinnying to their foals in midstream, and the echo of their voices, with the rushing of the loud water pent among the hills.

Often the riders who are in charge of the band encamp for the night on the upper bend of the river, and the red spark of their camp-fire glows brightly about the time the little girl must be going to bed; for it is in spring or fall the bands of horses go up into the hills or down into the valleys, or off, one does not know where,--to a “round up,” perhaps, where each stockman counts his own, and puts his brand on the young colts. Over the hills, where Polly and her big brother go wild-flower hunting, horses wander loose and look down from the summits, mere specks, like black mice, against the sky; they are plainly to be seen from miles away, for there is not a tree anywhere upon these hills. Sometimes a single horse, the chieftain of a troop, will stand alone on a hilltop and take a look all the wide country round, and call, in his splendid voice like “sounding brass,” to the mares and colts that have scattered in search of alkali mud to lick, or just to show, perhaps, that they are able to get on without his lordship. He will call, and if his troop do not answer, he will condescend to go a little way to meet them, halting and inquiring with short whinnies what they are about. Sometimes, in spite of discipline, they will compel him to go all the way to meet them; for even a horse soon tires of dignity on a hilltop all alone, with no one to see how it becomes him.

Polly likes to meet stray horses on her walks, close enough to see their colors and tell which are the pretty ones, the ones she calls hers. They stare at her from under breezy forelocks, and no doubt think themselves much finer creatures than little girls who have only two feet to go upon. And the little girl thinks so, too,--or so it would seem; for every evening after sunset when she runs about the house bareheaded she plays she is a horse herself. And not satisfied with being a horse, she plays she is a rider, too. Such a complex ideal as that surely never came into the brain of a “cayuse,” for all his big eyes and his tangle of hair which Polly thinks so magnificent.

The head and the feet of Polly and her tossing locks are pure horse; that is evident at a glance as she prances past the window. But the clinched, controlling hands are the hands of the rider,--a thrilling combination on a western summer evening, when the brassy sunset in the gate of the cañon is like a trumpet-note, and the cold, pink light on the hills is as keen as a bugle-call, and the very spirit of “boots and saddles” is in the wind that gustily blows up from the plains, turning all the poplars white, and searching the quiet house from room to room for any laggard stay-indoors.

Within a mile of the house, in the cañon which Polly calls home, there is a horse ranch in a lovely valley opening toward the river. All around it are these treeless hills that look so barren and feed so many wild lives. The horses have a beautiful range, from the sheltered valley up the gulches to the summits of the hills and down again to the river to drink. The men live in a long, low cabin, attached to a corral much bigger than the cabin, and have an extremely horsey time of it.

I shouldn’t be surprised if it were among Polly’s dreams to be one of a picked company of little-girl riders, in charge of a band of long-tailed ponies, just the right size for little girls to manage; to follow the ponies over the hills all day, and at evening to fetch water from the river and cook their own little-girl suppers in the dingy cabin by the corral; to have envious visits from other little girls, and occasionally to go home and tell mother all about it.

Now, in this country of real horses there were not many play-horses, and these few not of the first quality. Hobby-horses in the shops of the town were most trivial in size, meant only for riders of a very tender age. Some of them were merely heads of horses, fastened to a seat upon rockers, with a shelf in front to keep the inexperienced rider in his place.

There were people in the town, no doubt, who had noble rocking-horses for their little six-year-olds, but they must have sent for them on purpose; the storekeepers did not “handle” this variety.

So Polly’s papa, assisted by John Brown, the children’s most delightful companion and slave and story-teller, concluded to build a hobby-horse that would outdo the hobby-horse of commerce. (Brown was a modest, tender-hearted man, who had been a sailor off the coast of Norway, among the islands and fiords, a miner where the Indians were “bad,” a cowboy, a ranchman; and he was now irrigating the garden and driving the team in the cañon.)

Children like best the things they invent and make themselves, and plenty of grown people are children in this respect; they like their own vain imaginings better than some of the world’s realities.

But Polly’s rocking-horse was no “vain thing,” although her father and John did have their own fun out of it before she had even heard of it.

His head wasn’t “made of pease-straw,” nor his tail “of hay,” but in his own way he was quite as successful a combination.

His eyes were two of Brother’s marbles. They were not mates, which was a pity, as they were set somewhat closely together so you couldn’t help seeing them both at once; but as one of them soon dropped out it didn’t so much matter. His mane was a strip of long leather fringe. His tail was made up of precious contributions extorted from the real tails of Billy and Blue Pete and the team-horses, and twined most lovingly together by John, the friend of all the parties to the transfer.

The saddle was a McClellan tree, which is the framework of a kind of man’s saddle; a wooden spike, fixed to the left side of it and covered with leather, made a horn, and the saddle-blanket was a Turkish towel.

It was rainy weather, and the cañon days were short, when this unique creation of love and friendship--which are things more precious, it is to be hoped, even than horseflesh--took its place among Polly’s idols, and was at once clothed on with all her dreams of life in action.

When she mounted the hobby-horse she mounted her dream-horse as well; they were as like as Don Quixote’s helmet and the barber’s basin.

She rode him by firelight in the last half-hour before bedtime. She rode him just after breakfast in the morning. She “took” to him when she was in trouble, as older dream-riders take to _their_ favorite “hobbies.” She rocked and she rode, from restlessness and wretchedness into peace, from unsatisfied longings into temporary content, from bad tempers into smiles and sunshine.

She rode out the winter, and she rode in the wild and windy spring. She got well of the measles pounding back and forth on that well-worn seat. She took cold afterward, before the winds grew soft, experimenting with draughts in a corner of the piazza.

Now that summer gives to her fancies and her footsteps a wider range, the hard-worked hobby gets an occasional rest. (Often he is to be seen with his wooden nose resting on the seat of a chair which is bestrewed with clover blossoms, withered wild-roses, and bits of grass; for Polly, like other worshipers of graven images, believes that her idol can eat and drink and appreciate substantial offerings.) But when the dream grows too strong, the picture too vivid,--not mamma’s picture, but the one in the child’s heart,--she takes to the saddle again, and the horsehair switch and the leather fringes float upon the wind, and her fancies mount, far above the lava bluffs that confine her vision.

Will our little girl-riders be as happy on their real horses, when they get them, as they are upon their dream-horses? Is the actual possession of “back hair” and the wearing of long petticoats more blissful than the knot, hard-twisted, of the ends of a silk handkerchief, which the child-woman binds about her brows when she walks--like Troy’s proud dames whose garments sweep the ground--in the skirt of her mother’s “cast-off gown”?

It depends upon the direction these imperious dream-horses will take with our small women. Will the rider be in bondage to the steed? Heaven forbid! for dream-horses make good servants but very bad masters. Will they bear her fast and far, and will she keep a quiet eye ahead and a constant hand upon the rein? Will they flag and flounder down in the middle-ways, where so many of us have parted with our dream-steeds and taken the footpath, consoled to find that we have plenty of company and are not altogether dismayed? The dream-horses carry their child-riders beyond the mother’s following, so that the eyes and the heart ache with straining after the fleeting vision.

It is better she should not see too much nor too far along the way they go, since “to travel joyfully is better than to arrive.”

If only they could know their own “blessedness” while the way is long before them!

AN IDAHO PICNIC

At the camp in the cañon they had a cow. It is true she sometimes broke away and went off with the herds on the range and had to be chased on horseback and caught with a lasso. They had chickens,--all that were left them from night raids by the coyotes;[1] and a garden, the products of which they shared with the jack-rabbits and the gophers. But the supply wagon brought fresh fruit from the town, ten miles away, and new butter from the valley ranches. There were no mosquitoes, no peddlers, no tramps, no book agents, no undesirable neighbor’s children, whom one cannot scare away as one may the neighbor’s dogs and chickens when they creep through the fence, but must be civil to for the sake of peace and good-will,--which are good things in a neighborhood.

Jack Gilmour worked at his crude inventions in the shop, and was allowed to use grown-up tools under certain not too hard conditions; and Polly rode up and down the steep path to the river beach on the shoulders of the young assistant engineers--and assistant everything-elses. The mother was waited on and spoiled, as women are in camp; she was even invited to go fishing with her husband and Mr. Dane, one of the young assistants-in-general. It was a dull time for work in the camp, and there were good care-takers with whom Mrs. Gilmour could trust the children. The boy was the elder. He was learning those two most important elements of a boy’s education, up to nine years, according to Sir Walter Scott,--to ride and to speak the truth. But he was only eight, and perhaps was not quite perfect in either.

He watched the three happy ones ride away, and as they turned on the hilltop and waved good-by to the little figure on the trail below, he was longing, with all the strength of desire an eight-year-old heart can know, for the time to come when he too should climb the hills and wave his hand against the sky before turning the crest, where he had so often stood and felt so small, gazing up into those higher hills that locked the last bright bend of the river from sight.

They were to go up Charcoal Creek; they were to cross the “Divide;” they were to go down Grouse Creek on the other side and camp on some unknown bit of the river’s shore.

The boy went stumbling back down the dusty path to his unfinished work in the shop,--the engine for a toy elevated road he was making. But the painfully fashioned fragments of his plan had no meaning for eyes that still saw only the hills against the morning sky, and the three happy ones riding away.

This first trip led to a second and longer one, to the fishing-grounds up the river, by the trail on the opposite shore. Jack heard his father and Mr. Dane talking one morning at the breakfast-table about riding down to Turner’s and getting a pack-animal and some more riding animals,--and mamma was going again! What good times the grown-ups did have! And John Brown, Jack’s particular crony from the men’s camp, was going, to cook and take care of the animals. This word “animal” is used in the West to describe anything that is ridden or “packed,”--horse, mule, Indian pony, or “burro.” It is never applied to cattle or unbroken horses on the range; these are “stock.”

The party were to take a tent and stay perhaps a week, if no word came from the home camp to call them back.

Jack slipped away from the table and went out and hung upon the railing of a footbridge that crossed the brook. Beside learning how to ride and to speak the truth, Jack was learning to whistle. He was practicing this last more persistently, perhaps, than either of the more important branches of knowledge,--let us hope because there was more need of practice; for he was as yet very far from being a perfect whistler. It was but a melancholy, tuneless little note in which he gave vent to his feelings, as he watched the trickling water.

“I’d like to take the boy,” his father was that moment saying at the breakfast-table in the cook-tent, “if we had anything he could ride.” And then he added, smiling, “There’s Mrs. O’Dowd.” The smile went around the table.

Mrs. O’Dowd, or “Peggy,” as she was variously called, was a gray donkey of uncertain age and mild but inflexible disposition who sometimes consented to carry the children over the hills at a moderate pace, her usual equipment being a side-saddle, which did not fit her oval figure (the curves of which turned the wrong way for beauty); so the side-saddle was always slipping off, obliging the children to slide down and “cinch up.”

The engineer’s house was built against a hill; from the end of the upper piazza a short bridge, or gang-plank, joined the hill and met a steep trail which led upward to the tents, the garden, the road to the lower camp, the road up the bluffs, and all the rest of the children’s world beyond the gulch. One of their favorite exercises with Mrs. O’Dowd was to ride her down the trail, and try to force her over this gang-plank. She would put her small feet cautiously one before the other, hanging her great white head and sniffing her way. The instant her toes touched the resonant boards of the bridge, she stopped, and then the exercises began. Mrs. O’Dowd’s gravity and resignation, in the midst of the children’s laughing and shouting and pulling and whacking, was most edifying to see; but she never budged. She saw the darlings of the household dance back and forth before her in safety; the engineers in their big boots would push past her and tramp over the bridge. Mrs. O’Dowd was a creature of fixed habits. Useless, flighty children, and people with unaccountable ways of their own might do as they liked; it had never been her habit to trust Mrs. O’D. on such a place as that, and she never did.

“Yes, the boy might ride Peggy,” said Jack’s father. “He could keep her up with John and the pack-mule, if not with us.”

“Oh, I should not want him behind with the men,” said Jack’s mother,--“and those high trails! If he’s to go over such places, he must ride where you can look after his saddle-girths.” She could hear Jack’s disconsolate whistle as she spoke. “I hope he does not hear us,” she said. “It would break his heart to think he is going, and be left behind after all.”

“If the boy’s heart is going to break as easily as that, it is time it was toughened,” said his father, but not ungently. “I should tell him there is a chance of his going; but if it can’t be managed, he must not whine about it.”