Windsor/'Leave to Presume—'

by Ralph Stock

"LEAVE TO PRESUME—"

By RALPH STOCK

"FAMILY!" complained Grouch in slightly thickened accents to the world at large. "What is it?"

The world at large, consisting at the moment of the Rocky Mountains and James Strode, made no answer.

"What is it but an accident, and a nasty one at that sometimes? Who cares a continental these days whether you're descended from William the Conqueror or the last word in sausage kings?"

"You do," said Strode.

Grouch's rhetoric was arrested in full flight. He turned, a dilapidated yet arresting figure, with his tangled grey beard and fine head, and subjected Strode to a quick glance of suspicion.

"What do you know about me?" he demanded.

"Nothing," said Strode.

"Well, then?" muttered Grouch.

Which was, perhaps, a curious conversation for the teamster and loader of a British Columbian shingle mill to indulge in. But after wrestling with knife-edged cedar throughout the day, these two were in the habit of perching themselves on a trellis bridge that spanned a glacial torrent, and there, blessedly immune from mosquitoes, they swung their legs in space and conversed as the spirit moved them.

The spirit—in both senses of the word—was moving Grouch this evening. Strode had never known him so communicative.

"I'd like to know what family's done for me," he mused absently. "Leightham—pronounced Leetham, just to make it more difficult. Silly name! Silly family! What's it done except live for a few centuries in solid English comfort while its poor relations and such riff-raff scratch for a living at the ends of the earth? And why do we do it?"

Grouch's lean shanks and enormous feet beat the air like overweighted pendulums.

"Why don't we drift in with the port some fine evening, and claim the job of gardener or boot boy? Because it's 'not done.' Because our precious people would throw a fit and expire if we did half at home what we do out here. And we humour 'em. Why?"

"I wonder," ventured Strode.

Grouch glared at him unseeingly for a space. "Because we're fools," he jerked out. "Because we're hidebound, hamstrung, everlastingly damned by something—something I can't put a name to."

"Why not call it tradition?" suggested Strode.

"All right, anything you like." Grouch rocked with scorn on the edge of the bridge. "But it's got to be shaken off before a feller will do any good for himself. I'm going to shake it off," he announced firmly.

"You'll find it goes deeper than you think," warned Strode.

"Oh, shall I? Well, let me tell you that the minute I've saved enough to get out of these cursed mountains, I'm going to show my family what it owes me. It'll give 'em a shock, but that's what's coming to them."

Strode saw fit to change the subject.

"What's the matter with the mountains?" he inquired.

"Matter!" Grouch pounced on this new grievance with a vigour that justified the only name he was known by. "Wait till you've had ten years of 'em, my lad. Wait till they're your gaolers."

"Gaolers?"

"Yes, that's what they are, and you'll find it out before you've done. Look at 'em standing there laughing at a poor devil sentenced to hard labour for life under their ugly noses. 'You'll never get out,' that's what they say. 'We're here to stop you!'" He shook a hairy fist at the crimsoning peaks of The Three Sisters, and had recourse to the flask that seldom left him. "But they won't stop me—not when I get going!"

"And when will that be?"

For answer Grouch extracted a wallet from some hidden cranny of his disreputable person and fingered it reflectively.

"Another two hundred," he said at last, "and you won't see me for dust. Two hundred—at the rate of three dollars a day. Oughtn't to take long, eh?"

Strode contrived not to smile, even at the wallet that had taken ten years to reach its present lean proportions.

"Why, no," he encouraged. "You're doing fine."

Grouch raised his eyes to the mountains with new-born defiance.

"Then I'll be able to laugh back," he pointed out. "See those two big fellers with the pass between? Well, that's the way I'm going out of here, just so that I can look 'em in the face and laugh. I'm waiting for that as much as I'm waiting to drift in with the port. … What the devil am I talking about? he added suddenly.

"Nothing much," said Strode. "We'd better be making a move."

Grouch suffered himself to be conducted back to camp, and, after a last glance at his beloved team of Percherons, turned in and slept like a child. Strode was used to him by now. To-morrow he would have forgotten everything he had said on the trellis bridge—which was, perhaps, as well.

But Strode would not. One meets strange folk in the course of world wanderings, but there was something about a Leightham, buried for life here in the heart of the Rockies, that stirred his imagination. He knew the name well. What Englishman did not? And it carried him back to a glimpse of Leightham Court through the trees of a Sussex lane. No wonder Grouch was at war with his world. No wonder he harboured dreams of "drifting in with the port …"

When Strode came up from the prairie a few months ago, the bunk-house of the Summit Shingle Mill was full. That was how he came to be sharing Grouch's shack on the edge of the clearing. That the old man should have offered accommodation to anyone was a unique event in the annals of a camp where he had long since reached the status of an institution, and Strode was duly grateful. Since then the two had sweated side by side, and Strode had come to think that he knew his man. How far he was out in his calculations had been demonstrated by a flask on a trellis bridge. By such narrow margins may a man betray his soul.

The next day was the same as any other. At daylight, and in answer to the mill whistle, that pierced the silence of the mountains like a knife, Grouch rolled from his bunk, added a few clothes to those he seemed never to discard, and went out to groom his team. The process of saving two hundred dollars at the rate of three a day had begun.

From high up on the mountain-side cedar logs came hurtling down the skidway and plunged like ungainly giants into a pool at its foot. Here cat-footed men leapt upon them, steering them with peavies in endless procession to the mill. A slow but inexorable ascent on the teeth of an endless chain, a series of shrieks as from a torture chamber, and the saw had done its work. They passed, slashed out of recognition, to the steaming shed, where their sap—their very life-blood—was extracted from them, and finally made their appearance in neatly- bound bundles bearing the stencilled and more or less truthful legend: Summit Shingles Withstand the Weather.

And it was Strode's fate at this juncture to load them on a wagon, and Grouch's to drive them to the depot with his incomparable team four times a day. And in the evening it was the trellis bridge and the flask again.

Grouch seemed more than usually restrained that night, but presently broke silence.

"Bit over the odds last night, wasn't I?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Strode. He was aware that the old man was studying him from under his shaggy brows.

"I have a notion I was talking drivel, that's all."

"What does it matter if you were?"

Grouch was assured. He nodded his leonine head. "You're right there. What does it matter? What does anything matter? Clem's got greased heel," he added gravely. Clem was the off-horse in Grouch's team.

"I noticed he was a bit lame. What do you do about that sort of thing?"

"Axle grease."

So their conversation—if it could be called that—waxed and waned, or ceased altogether in favour of gazing at the mountains and thinking their own thoughts.

It was at a moment such as this that the silence was broken by a crackling of underbrush behind them, and a man broke from the bush. For a moment he stood as though dazed at sight of the clearing, then noticed the occupants of the bridge and stumbled towards them.

"Thought I heard a saw this way," he observed, with an evident effort to steady his voice. "I've been lost."

"How long?" demanded Grouch.

"Quite long enough," replied the other, and, with an attempt at a smile, slumped down against the bridge.

Grouch's flask was in immediate action. The patient was young, good-looking, and nattily dressed. Grouch summed him up: "One of these dude big-game-hunting parties. Ought to be hobbled, and picketed, and tame grizzlies set up for 'em at twenty feet. But he's a fine lad!"

He was. There, in the heart of the Rockies, the embodiment of youth and lithe strength unmarred by the coarsening influence of manual toil, he might have come from another planet. By contrast he made Grouch, bending over him with the flask, look uncommonly like a gorilla.

When he opened his eyes there was terror still in them, but that was gone the instant he found fellow-creatures at his side. He scrambled to his feet and shook himself like a young mastiff.

"Well, that's that!" he laughed apologetically. "And many thanks. Where am I?"

Grouch told him. "You'd better come back with us," he added. "I guess you can eat."

Apparently he could. But after a two-inch steak and a pyramid of slapjacks, Grouch cried a halt.

"You're right," agreed the boy, and pushed the plate obediently aside. "It wasn't so much being lost," he explained over a pipe of cut plug, "although that wasn't exactly pleasant. It was some queer beast that kept following me—a sort of dun-coloured shadow all day, and just a pair of eyes at night. I wasted most of my ammunition trying to shoot the thing."

"Mountain lion," supplied Grouch. "Panthers they are, really, and that's what they do—follow you up until you're done. You've been up against it, my lad?"

"I rather felt that way," admitted the boy, and five minutes later was sleeping the sleep of exhaustion on Strode's bed.

The shriek of the mill whistle failed to arouse him the next morning, and it was not until Grouch had come in from grooming his team that the guest was up and about. "By Jove," he exclaimed, standing in the shack doorway, looking out on the mountains, "this is great!"

"Think so?" said Grouch. "Well, come and see if breakfast's greater."

Over the meal it transpired that Grouch's summing up of the stranger was correct. He had started on a hunting trip from Fernie five days ago, had somehow lost touch with the guides, and had wandered the bush ever since. The miracle was that he had come out alive.

"I suppose I'd better let someone know I'm here," he suggested, and admitted to having left "a man" and "a car" at the Railway Hotel.

"You can wire him from the freight depot," Grouch advised—"that is, if you fancy getting there on a load of shingles."

Not only did the boy fancy it, but he seemed to get considerable pleasure out of helping to hitch up the team, load and unload, manufacture misshapen slapjacks for dinner, and swing his legs from the trellis bridge in the evening.

"We'll make a lumberjack of you yet," Grouch told him.

A shadow seemed to fall on the boy's face. "I wish to goodness you would!" he exclaimed vehemently. "This is the life."

"Yes, for a day," railed Grouch.

"No, for keeps." The boy turned almost fiercely. "If you only knew what it is to get clean out and away from all the pettifogging things a fellow's surrounded by at home! I hate 'em! A Leightham's not built for them."

The name came unconsciously in the heat of the moment, and Grouch's thin shanks and enormous feet ceased to swing; that was all.

"Life's pettifogging anywhere when you get down to it," he muttered after a pause.

"Oh, yes, there are details, of course, but look at yours compared to mine I What's fairer and squarer than driving a good pair of horses for a living? It's a man's job."

"Well, isn't yours?"

"Mine?" The boy gave a short laugh. "I haven't got one—yet. That's the trouble. I'm the pawn in a game of grab. I wish I could tell you—get it off my chest."

"Why not?"

"I doubt if you'd understand. In the Old Country we're cluttered up with things that don't seem to exist out here."

"Such as?"

"Oh, family trees—longer than your cedars, and a sight more complicated— entail, and all the other tinpot trappings of the past. But I don't mind them so much. It's the lawyers—herds and droves of queer little sleek fellows who do queer little sleek things. I came out here to get away from them for a bit."

"And what's it all about?"

"You may well ask," laughed the boy. "It's all about me."

"You?"

"Yes. I may not look as if I amounted to much—especially when I'm lost, with a mountain lion on my track—but apparently I do. I amount to considerable property at home—if there's anything left when the lawyers have finished. I'm the last of the Leighthams."

"You don't say?" commented Grouch.

The boy regarded him with the quick suspicion of the sensitive. "I say," he said, "you're laughing at me."

"Laughing? What should I laugh at you for?" growled Grouch.

"Oh, I don't know! All this must sound like Greek, or worse, in a country where it's not who you are, but what you are that counts. I'd better cut it out."

"You go right on from where you left off" commanded Grouch. "It's mighty interesting."

"Well, so long as it amuses you. I'm the last of a family called Leightham, it seems. They dug me out of a provincial bank—two pounds a week and find your own socks. Three Leighthams had died in quick succession, and 'without issue,' as they say in the best legal circles."

"Three?" echoed Grouch.

"Yes. Quick work, wasn't it? One was thrown, hunting, another was killed in the War, and the third disappeared years ago, and hasn't been heard of since."

"Ah, yes," mused Grouch, with a slow movement of the head, "I know those disappearing ones."

"The sleek ones have advertised, done everything."

"Scared to death of finding him, too, I'll bet."

"I expect so," laughed the boy. "But they didn't. So now they've applied for leave to presume death, and seem to think they'll get it. That's why they're backing me."

Grouch turned on him slowly with a puzzled frown. "Then what's your trouble?" he demanded. "If you're getting leave to presume things, why don't you presume them and hit the high spots for your ancestral home, and all that?"

"I'm not sure that I want to," said the boy quietly.

"Oh!" Grouch continued to subject the last of the Leighthams to a speculative scrutiny. "Well, we'll have to help you make up your mind."

And with that the evening session of leg-swinging and small-talk came to an abrupt end.

It was about midnight that Strode awoke and found Grouch's bunk empty. He was gone. So was his flask. And Strode found both precisely where he expected to find them.

A full moon rode clear overhead, illuminating the mountain world with an unearthly brilliance. Each peak was a silhouette, and Grouch was sitting on the trellis bridge, laughing at them.

"Grouch!" Strode called softly.

The old man turned with an air of ludicrous dignity. "Lord Leightham to you," he corrected, and giggled into his beard.

"I know," said Strode, "but you'd better come and turn in, all the same."

"What, on a night like this?" Grouch was seized by another paroxysm of mirth. "Not by a jugful! That you, Strode?"

"Yes?"

"Well, prepare to receive the Order of Grand High Master of the Bed Socks, or anything else you fancy. We're going out of here—to-morrow. Come and help me to laugh!"

It took something like an hour of alternate cajolery and threat to get him back to his bunk, and then he was astir before the mill whistle had blown the next morning.

Strode feigned sleep and watched him. For some time he stood in contemplative pose, staring down at the sleeping boy. Then he crossed to the cracked and frameless mirror hanging over the wash-basin, and for the first time in Strode's memory looked into it. What he saw there it is impossible to determine, because in the midst of the process the mill whistle blew, and he went out to groom his team.

After that there was little time to determine anything, for the Summit Shingle Mill was treated to a mild sensation in the form of a shimmering touring car and an equally shimmering chauffeur, bent on collecting someone of importance named Leightham.

"Good-bye," said the boy, "and thanks most awfully."

Grouch was hitching up at the time. "So you're hitting the high spots, after all," he commented drily.

"Yes, I think perhaps I'd better."

"I think perhaps you had," said Grouch.

And a few minutes after the car and its waving occupant had been lost to sight, the incomparable team of Percherons plodded up the hill.

Their driver leant forward, apparently lost in thought, then looked up.

"Clem's greased heel's all right," he told Strode. "Wonderful stuff, that axle grease."