Part 10

"Sartain," agreed Blackstock, jumping down to fetch the edibles from behind the counter. Like most of the regular customers, he knew the store and its contents almost as well as Zeb Smith himself.

During the last few minutes an immense, rough-haired black dog had been sniffing the stranger over with suspicious minuteness. The stranger at first paid no attention whatever, though it was an ordeal that many might have shrunk from. At last, seeming to notice the animal for the first time, he recognized his presence by indifferently laying his hand upon his neck. Instead of instantly drawing off with a resentful growl, after his manner with strangers, the dog acknowledged the casual caress by a slight wag of the tail, and then, after a few moments, turned away amicably and lay down.

"If Jim finds him all right," thought Blackstock to himself, "ther' can't be much wrong with him, though I can't say I take to him myself." And he weighed off a much bigger piece of cheese than he had at first intended to offer, marking down his indebtedness on a slate which served the proprietor as a sort of day-book. The stranger fell to devouring it with an eagerness which showed that his lunch must have been of the lightest.

"Ye was sayin' as how ye'd jest come up from Cribb's Ridge?" put in a long-legged, heavy-shouldered man who was sprawling on a cracker box behind the door. He had short sandy hair, rapidly thinning, eyes of a cold grey, set rather close together, and a face that suggested a cross between a fox and a fish-hawk. He was somewhat conspicuous among his fellows by the trimness of his dress, his shirt being of dark blue flannel with a rolled-up collar and a scarlet knotted kerchief, while the rest of the mill hands wore collarless shirts of grey homespun, with no thought of neckerchiefs.

His trousers were of brown corduroy, and were held up by a broad belt of white dressed buckskin, elaborately decorated with Navajo designs in black and red. He stuck to this adornment tenaciously as a sort of inoffensive proclamation of the fact that he was not an ordinary backwoods mill hand, but a wanderer, one who had travelled far, and tried his wits at many ventures in the wilder West.

"Right you are," assented the stranger, brushing some white cracker crumbs out of his black whiskers.

"I was jest a-wonderin'," went on Hawker, giving a hitch to the elaborate belt and leaning forward a little to spit out through the doorway, "if ye've seed anything o' Jake Sanderson on the road."

The stranger, having his mouth full of cheese, did not answer for a moment.

"The boys are lookin' for him rather anxious," explained Blackstock with a grin. "He brings the leetle fat roll that pays their wages here at the mill, an' he's due some time to day."

"I seen him at Cribb's Ridge this morning," answered the stranger at last. "Said he'd hurt his foot, or strained his knee, or something, an' would have to come on a bit slow. He'll be along some time to-night, I guess. Didn't seem to me to have much wrong with him. No, ye can't have none o' that cheese. Go 'way an' lay down," he added suddenly to the great black dog, who had returned to his side and laid his head on the stranger's knee.

With a disappointed air the dog obeyed.

"'Tain't often Jim's so civil to a stranger," muttered Blackstock to himself.

A little boy in a scarlet jacket, with round eyes of china blue, and an immense mop of curly, fluffy, silky hair so palely flaxen as to be almost white, came hopping and skipping into the store. He was greeted with friendly grins, while several voices drawled, "Hullo, Woolly Billy!" He beamed cheerfully upon the whole company, with a special gleam of intimate confidence for Tug Blackstock and the big black dog. Then he stepped up to the stranger's knee, and stood staring with respectful admiration at those flowing jet-black side-whiskers.

The stranger in return looked with a cold curiosity at the child's singular hair. Neither children nor dogs had any particular appeal for him, but that hair was certainly queer.

"Most an albino, ain't he?" he suggested.

"No, he ain't," replied Tug Blackstock curtly. The dog, detecting a note of resentment in his master's voice, got up and stood beside the child, and gazed about the circle with an air of anxious interrogation. Had any one been disagreeable to Woolly Billy? And if so, who?

But the little one was not in the least rebuffed by the stranger's unresponsiveness.

"What's that?" he inquired, patting admiringly the stranger's shiny leather case.

The stranger grew cordial to him at once.

"Ah, now ye're talkin'," said he enthusiastically, undoing the flap of the case. "It's a book, sonny. The greatest book, the most interestin' book, the most useful book--and next to the Bible the most high-toned, uplifting book that was ever written. Ye can't read yet, sonny, but this book has the loveliest pictures ye ever seen, and the greatest lot of 'em for the money."

He drew reverently forth from the case a large, fat volume, bound sumptuously in embossed sky-blue imitation leather, lavishly gilt, and opened it upon his knees with a spacious gesture.

"There," he continued proudly. "It's called 'Mother, Home, and Heaven!' Ain't that a title for ye? Don't it show ye right off the kind of book it is? With this book by ye, ye don't need any other book in the house at all, except maybe the almanack an' the Bible--an' this book has lots o' the best bits out of the Bible in it, scattered through among the receipts an' things to keep it all wholesome an' upliftin'.

"It'll tell ye such useful things as how to get a cork out of a bottle without breakin' the bottle, when he haven't got a corkscrew, or what to do when the baby's got croup, and there ain't a doctor this side of Tourdulac. An' it'll tell ye how to live, so as when things happen that no medicines an' no doctors and no receipts--not even such great receipts as these here ones" (and he slapped his hand on the counter) "can help ye through--such as when a tree falls on to ye, or you trip and stumble on to the saws, or git drawn down under half-a-mile o' raft--then ye'll be ready to go right up aloft, an' no questions asked ye at the Great White Gate.

"An' it has po'try in it, too, reel heart po'try, such as'll take ye back to the time when ye was all white an' innocent o' sin at yer mother's knee, an' make ye wish ye was like that now. In fact, boys, this book I'm goin' to show ye, with your kind permission, is handier than a pocket in a shirt, an' at the same time the blessed fragrance of it is like a rose o' Sharon in the household. It's in three styles o' bindin', all reel handsome, but----"

"I want to look at another picture now," protested Woolly Billy. "I'm tired of this one of the angels sayin' their prayers."

His amazing shock of silver-gold curls was bent intently over the book in the stranger's lap. The woodsmen, on the other hand, kept on smoking with a far-off look, as if they heard not a word of the fluent harangue. They had a deep distrust and dread of this black-whiskered stranger, now that he stood revealed as the Man-Wanting-to-Sell-Something. The majority of them would not even glance in the direction of the gaudy book, lest by doing so they should find themselves involved in some expensive and complicated obligation.

The stranger responded to Woolly Billy's appeal by shutting the book firmly. "There's lots more pictures purtier than that one, sonny," said he. "But ye must ask yer dad to buy it fer ye. He won't regret it." And he passed the volume on to Hawker, who, having no dread of book-agents, began to turn over the leaves with a superior smile.

"Dad's gone away ever so far," answered Woolly Billy sadly. "It's an awfully pretty book." And he looked at Tug Blackstock appealingly.