“Nora has a sister,” said the trapper.
There was another gasp from the cowpuncher. “Well,” he said with feeling, “I’ll be eternally lost. You beat all get out with a tin hat on it, Joe. But go on. She has a sister, eh? And you’re going to marry the sister so’s she can take care of the kids that Nora left behind her when she died?”
This question the big man considered for a time with great care.
“She has the same eyes that Nora had,” he replied after a time, “bright, snapping ones. They are black.”
It was another blow to Jack.
“How old is she?” he asked.
“Twenty.”
“Twenty. And you’re thirty-two. That’s a good deal of difference in the ages, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is. But what difference does time make?”
Again Jack was staggered. He had thought, before he began this conversation, that he knew the other from A to Z. Now he began to feel that he knew nothing except about the surface of Joe Bigot. Time meant nothing to Joe. Why should it mean anything to other persons?
“There is a funny thing,” said Joe, sighing. “She must have letters. Every week she must have a letter.”
“I’ve seen you writing them. But why? The mail only leaves once in two weeks.”
“Why? I didn’t ask her,” replied the trapper. “All I know is that she wants me to write to her every week, a separate letter. And so I do it.” Sorrow spread over his face darkly. “I write a letter every week,” he reiterated. He said it as a man might speak of a plague. “It is very hard,” and he sighed. “But, you see, it angers her when she doesn’t get the letters, and yet it angers her when she gets them. Look!”
He took out his wallet. From it he removed a sheaf of letters written upon very thin white paper. He selected one of these letters and presented it to Jack. The letter under his hand showed a swift-moving and rather delicate script flowing across the page. It was a “dashed-off” hand, so to speak. He read:
Dear Joe:
I was away last Saturday at Jessie Haines’s place. When I came back, I got three letters from you in a bunch. Oh, Joe, why do you write such letters?
I could sit in this room and write more about the mountains in five minutes, and more about love, too, than you write in a whole winter.
I know you’re brave and strong and good, but a girl can’t live forever on courage and strength and goodness. She needs something else.
Alice
Jack lowered the letter with a black scowl and passed it back to Bigot.
“So, you see,” said Bigot, “that is why I am glad that I have the blue fox…that we have it, rather. It will be something for her to live on, eh?”
“You think that’s what she meant…that she wanted money?” said Jack.
“Now you are laughing at me?” queried Bigot pathetically. “I know I am stupid. When people talk, I feel like when I was a little boy at the end of the line and they played crack the whip. That’s the way when people talk, sometimes. I go sailing off into nothing. I don’t understand what they are saying.”
Jack Trainor, still smiling in spite of himself, shook his head. “I wouldn’t mock you, Joe. In the first place, I like you too well. In the second place, I respect you too much. In the third place, I’m afraid to.”
“Afraid to?” echoed the big man. He laughed softly. “You, Jack, fear nothing. You don’t know what fear is.”
“You think not?”
“I know it. Otherwise, you would never have walked into the mountains in that thin suit without food.”
Jack Trainor shook his head. He had long before discovered that it was useless to argue with the trapper on this point. Joseph Bigot had decided to his own satisfaction that Trainor was a daredevil, and he could not be convinced to the contrary. He would have it that the braving of winter in the mountains, by a man to all intents and purposes unclothed and helpless, was a sign of sublime daring rather than ignorance.
“We’ll drop that, then,” said Jack. “But this Alice Cary…Joe, she sure knows what she wants and what she doesn’t want, and one of the things that she doesn’t want is the sort of letter that you write to her. I’d like to see one of ’em if it wasn’t so personal you couldn’t show it to me.”
“Personal?” echoed the mild-eyed giant. “Why, Jack, why shouldn’t you see it? Here’s a couple of ’em here.”
“Ones you didn’t send?”
“I sent ’em just the way they stand, except that I copied ’em clean.”
He handed the two to Trainor, and the second one read:
Dear Alice:
I was glad to get your last letter. I hope you are feeling well now. I am getting along pretty well now. Last week I caught three red foxes and eighteen…
“Say, Joe,” called Trainor, “doesn’t it strike you that she might be interested in something a pile more than she’d be interested in the sort of furs you collected?”
“In what, then? Ain’t that what we got to live on?”
“Forget what you got to live on,” said Jack. “A girl ain’t interested in that. She’ll live on grass seed and hope and be plumb happy, so long as she’s got a gent around handy to tell her every once in a while that he’s mighty fond of her. That’s the way a woman is put together.”
Joe Bigot sighed. “You know pretty near everything, Jack,” he said. “If I had you to coach me, maybe I could write a letter that would keep her interested. Would you show me how it’s done?”
“Why, look here”—Jack chuckled—“I ain’t no professional slinger of fancy English. The best I can do is to work up an interest talking about what I want and why I want it.”
“But,” began Joe, “that won’t help me.”
“Why won’t it?”
“What d’you mean?”
“Joe, tell me just why you want to marry Alice. Is it simply because she’s her sister’s sister?”
The big man pondered. “She’s prettier than Nora ever was,” he decided. “And she’s brighter. And she’s kinder.”
“Did you ever tell her all those things?” asked Jack.
“Ain’t she got a mirror? Can’t she look in her mirror and see a pile more than I could ever tell her?”
“That right there,” cried Jack, “would be good enough to put into a letter! The thing for you to do is to loosen up. You got plenty to say. But you’re like a good pitcher at the beginning of the season…you’re afraid to put any stuff on the ball in the cold weather. Thing for you to do, Joe, is to thaw out. Show a few signs of spring…”
“In January?” said Joseph Bigot, bewildered. “Spring in January? I don’t know what you mean, my friend Jack.”
Trainor threw up his hands. “Here,” he said. “Are you dead certain that Alice Cary is more interested in you than she is in any other young gent down in those parts?”
“She has promised to be my wife,” said Joe with an air of conclusiveness.
Jack sighed. “Because she gave you a promise,” he said, “that’s a pretty good reason for her to want to change her mind…or for her to think about changing her mind…ain’t it? Man, man, when you tie up a dog with a rope, don’t that make the dog want to get away, even if the place you tied him is all covered with marrow bones?”
“If he has the bones to eat,” said Joe, “why should the dog wish to go? Such a dog would be a fool, my friend Jack.”
Jack Trainor studied his friend’s face with the air of one somewhere between anger and amusement and despair. At length he said: “If I sit down and work out a letter for you, will you use it to sort of get you started on a letter of your own?”
“Sure,” said Joe. “Why not? Good Lord, Jack, that would be more than gold in my pocket.”