Excerpt
CHAPTER I
Chip was very tired. All that long June day, since Tim’s harsh, “Come, out wid ye,” had roused her to daily toil, until now, wearied and disconsolate, she had crept, barefoot, up the back stairs to her room, not one moment’s rest or one kindly word had been hers.
Below, in the one living room of Tim’s Place, the men were grouped playing cards, and the medley of their oaths, their laughter, the thump of knuckles on the bare table, and the pungent odor of pipes, reached her through the floor cracks. Outside the fireflies twinkled above the slow-running river and along the stump-dotted hillside. Close by, a few pigs dozed contentedly in their rudely constructed sty.
A servant to those scarce fit for servants, a menial at the beck and call of all Tim’s Place, and laboring with the men in the fields, Chip, a girl of almost sixteen, felt her soul revolt at the filth, the brutality, the coarse existence of those whose slave she was.
And what a group they were!
First, Tim Connor, the owner and master of this oasis in the wilderness, sixty miles from the nearest settlement; his brother Mike, as coarse; their wives and a half a dozen children who played with the pigs, squealed as often for food, and were left to grow up the same way; and Pierre Lubec, the hired man, completed the score.
There was another transient resident here, an old Indian named Tomah, who came with the snow, and deserted his hut below on the river bank when spring unlocked that stream.
Two occasional visitors also came here, both even more objectionable to Chip than Tim and his family. One was her father, known to her to be an outlaw and escaped murderer in hiding; the other a half-breed named Bolduc, but known as One-eyed Pete, a trapper and hunter whose abode was a log cabin on the Fox Hole, ten miles away. His face was horribly scarred by a wildcat’s claws; one eye-socket was empty; his lips, chin, and protruding teeth were always tobacco-stained. For three months now, he had made weekly calls at Tim’s Place, in pursuit of Chip. His wooing, as might be expected, had been a persistent leering at her with his one sinister eye, oft-repeated innuendoes and insinuations of lascivious nature, scarce understood by her, with now and then attempted familiarity. These advances had met with much the same reception once accorded him by the wildcat.
Both these visitors were now with the group below. That fact was of no interest to Chip, except in connection with a more pertinent one–a long conference she had observed between them that day. What it was about, she could not guess, and yet some queer intuition told her that it concerned her. Ordinarily, she would have sought sleep in her box-on-legs bed; now she crouched on the floor, listening.
For an hour the game and its medley of sounds continued; then cessation, the tramp of heavily shod feet, the light extinguished, and finally–silence. A few minutes of this, and then the sound of whispered converse, low yet distinct, reached Chip from outside. Cautiously she crept to her window.
“I gif you one hunerd dollars now, for ze gal,” Pete was saying, “an’ one hunerd more when you fotch her.”
“It’s three hundred down, I’ve told ye, or we don’t do business,” was her father’s answer, in almost a hiss.
A pain like a knife piercing her heart came to Chip.
“But s’pose she run away?” came in Pete’s voice.
“What, sixty miles to a settlement? You must be a damn fool!”
“An’ if she no mind me?”
“Wal, thrash her then; she’s yours.”
“But I no gif so much,” parleyed Pete; “I gif you one-feefty now, an’ one hunerd when she come.”
“You’ll give what I say, and be quick about it, or I’ll take her out to-morrow, and you’ll never see her again; so fork over.”
“And you fotch her to-morrow?”
“Yes, I told you.” And so the bargain was concluded.
Only a moment more, while Chip sat numb and dazed, then came the sound of footsteps, as the two men separated, and then silence over Tim’s Place....