CHAPTER XXIII.
BROTHERS' WORK.
They buried Chris upon Katahdin's breast. It was a good cemetery forwoodsmen, so Herb said, granite above and forest beneath.
But, good or bad, this was the one thing to be done. An attempt totransfer the body to a distant settlement would be objectless labor;for, as far as the guide knew, the half-breed had not a friend to beinterested in his fate, father and mother having died before Herb foundhim in the snow-heaped forest.
There were three reliable witnesses, besides the man who was known tohave a grudge against him, to testify as to the cause and manner of hisdeath when the party returned to Greenville; so no suspicious fingercould point at Herb Heal, with a hint that he had carried out his oldthreat.
How long Chris, in lonely, crazed repentance, had sheltered in the campon the mountain-side could only be a matter of guess. Herb inclined tothink that he had been there for weeks,--months, perhaps,--judging fromthe withered spruce bed and the dry boughs and sticks upon thecamping-ground, which had evidently been gathered and broken for fuel.His ravings made it clear that, on returning to the old haunts afteryears of absence, he had missed the trail he used to know, and wanderedwearily in the dense woods about the foot of Katahdin before he escapedfrom the prison of trees, and climbed to the hut he sought.
Such wanderings, Herb declared, generally ended in "a man having wheelsin his head," being half or wholly insane, though he might keepsufficient wits to provide himself with food and warmth, as Chris haddone while his strength held out. This was not long; for thehalf-breed's words suggested that he felt near to the great change heroughly called "keeling over," when he started to find his cheatedpartner.
But Cyrus, while he watched the guide making preparations for themountain burial, pictured the poor weakling tramping for hundreds ofmiles through rugged forest-land, doubtless with aching knee-joints andfeet, that he might make upon his own skin justice for the skins whichhe had stolen, and so, in the only way he knew, square things with hiswronged chum. And the city man thought, with a tear of pity, that eventhat poor drink-fuddled mind must have been lit by some ray of longingfor goodness.
It was a strange funeral.
The guide chose a spot where the earth had been much softened by therecent rain; and, with the ingenuity of a man accustomed to wildernessshifts, he broke up the drenched ground with the axe which he took fromhis shoulders.
That axe, which had so often made camp, had never before made a grave;the Farrars doubted that it ever would. But Herb worked away upon hisknees, moisture dripping from his skin, putting sorrow for years ofanger into every blow of his arms. Then, stopping a while, he went offdown the mountain to the nearest belt of trees, and cut a limb from one,out of which, with his hunting-knife, he fashioned a rude woodenimplement, a cross between a spade and shovel.
With this he scooped out the broken earth until a grave appeared overthree feet deep. He lined it with fragrant spruce-boughs from thewind-beaten tangle below.
These Cyrus and Dol had busied themselves in cutting. Neal thought ofother work for his fingers. Getting hold of Herb's axe when the ownerwas not using it, he felled one of the dwarf white birches. Out of itslight, delicate wood, with the help of his big pocket-knife and a ballof twine that was hidden somewhere about him, he made a very presentablecross, to point out to future hunters on Katahdin the otherwise unmarkedgrave.
He was a bit of a genius at wood-carving, and surveyed his work withsatisfaction when he considered it finished, having neatly cut upon itthe name, "Chris Kemp," with the date, "October 20th, 1891."
"Couldn't you add a text or motto of some kind?" suggested Dol, glancingover his shoulder. "Twould make it more like the things one sees incemeteries. You're such a dab at that sort of work."
"Can't think of anything," answered the elder brother.
Then, with a sudden lighting of his face, he seized the knife again, andworked in, in fine lettering, the frightened prayer he had heard on thehalf-breed's lips:--
"God, I am weak; pity me!"
Herb and Cyrus lowered the body into its resting-place, and covered itwith the green spruces.
The four campers knelt bare-headed by the grave.
"Couldn't one of you boys say a bit of a prayer?" asked Herb in a thickvoice. "I ain't used to spouting."
All former help had been easily given. This was a harder matter, yet notso difficult as it would have been amid a city congregation.
Garst tried to recall some suitable prayer from a funeral service; sodid Neal. Both failed.
But here upon Katahdin's side, where, in the large forces of storm andslide, in forest and granite, through every wind-swept bush, wavingblade, and tinted lichen, breathed a whisper from God, it seemed nounnatural thing for a man or a boy to speak to his Father.
"Can't one of you fellers say a prayer?" asked Herb again.
Then the river of feeling in Cyrus broke the dam of reserve, and flowedover his lips in a prayer such as he had never before uttered.
It was the prayer of a son who was for the minute absorbed in hisFather.
It left the five, those who were camping here and one who had gone tounseen camping-grounds, with son-like trust to the Father's dealings.
Herb and the Farrars responded to it with heart-eager "Amens!" thefervor of which was new to their lips.
"I thank you as if he were my own brother, boys," said the woodsman,while he filled in the grave, and planted Neal's cross at its head."Sho! when it comes to a time like we've been through to-day, a man, ifhe has anything but a gizzard in him, must feel as how we're allbrothers,--every man-jack of us,--white men, red men, half-and-half men,whatever we are or wherever we sprung."
"A fellow is always hearing that sort of thing," said Neal Farrar toCyrus. "But I'm blessed if I ever felt it stick in me before! that we'reall of the one stuff, you know--we and that poor beggar. Some of usseem to get such precious long odds over the others."
"All the more reason why we should do our level best to pull thebackward ones up to us," answered the American.
The words struck into the ears of Dol--that youngster listening with asoberness of attention seldom seen in his flash-light eyes.
A few years afterwards, when Neal Farrar was a newly blown lieutenant inhis Queen's Twelfth Lancers, as full of heroic impulses and enthusiasmsas a modern young officer may be,--while his half-fledged ambitions werehanging on the chances of active service, and the golden, remotepossibility of his one day being a V.C.,--there was a peaceful honorwhich clung to him unsought.
During his first year of army life, he became the paragon of every poorprivate and raw recruit struggling with the miseries of goose-step, withwhom he came even into momentary contact. For sometimes through a wordor act, sometimes through a flash of the eye, or a look about the mouth,during the brief interchange of a military salute, these "backward ones"saw that the progressive young officer looked on them, not asmen-machines, but as brothers, as important in the great schemes of thenation and the world as he was himself; that he was proud to serve withthem, and would be prouder still to help them if he could.
It was an understanding which inspired many a tempted or newly joinedfellow to drill himself morally as his sergeant drilled him physically,with a determination to become as fine a soldier and forward a man ashis paragon.
But only one American friend of Lieutenant Farrar's, who has let out thesecret to the writer, knows that the binding truth of human brotherhoodwas first born into him when, on Katahdin's side, he helped to bury athieving half-Indian.