Fanny Gilkan's face darkened, and she glanced swiftly at Howat Penny. He was filling a pipe, unmoved. Such a trip as he had outlined, with Fanny, was fastening upon his thoughts. It would at once express his entire attitude toward the world, opinion, and the resentful charcoal burners.
"You wouldn't really go," he said aloud, half consciously.
The girl frowned in an effort of concentration, gazing into the thin light of the dying fire and two watery tallow dips. Her coarsely spun dress, coloured with sassafras bark and darker than the yellow hickory stain, drew about her fine shoulders and full, plastic breast. "I'd like it," she repeated; "but afterward. There is father—"
She had said father, but Howat Penny determined that she was thinking of Dan Hesa; Dan was as strong as himself, if heavier; a personable young man. He would make a good husband. But that, he added, was in the future; Dan Hesa apparently didn't want to marry Fanny to-morrow, that week. Meanwhile a trip with him to the headwaters of a creek would not injure her in the least. His contempt of a world petty and iron-bound in endless pretence, fanning his smouldering and sullen resentment in general, flamed out in a determination to take her with him if possible. It would conclusively define, state, his attitude toward "men herding like cattle." He did not stop to consider what it might define for Fanny Gilkan. In the stir of his rebellious self there was no pause for vicarious approximations. If he thought of her at all it was in the indirect opinion that she was better without such a noodle as Dan Hesa threatened to become.
"I'd get two horses from the Forge," he continued, apparently to his mildly speculative self; "a few things, not much would be necessary. That gun you carry," he addressed Fanny indirectly, "is too heavy. I'll get you a lighter, bound in brass."
She repeated sombrely, leaning with elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, "And afterwards—"
"I thought you were free of that," he observed; "it sounds like the town women, the barnyard crowd. I thought you were an independent person. Certainly," he went on coldly, "you can't mistake my attitude. I like you, but I am not in the least interested in any way that—that jour mother might appreciate. I am neither a seducer nor the type that marries."
"I understand that, Howat," she assured him; "and I think, I'm not sure but I think, that what you mean wouldn't bother me either. Anyhow it shouldn't spoil the fun of our trip. But no one else in the world would believe that simple truth. If you could stay there, in those splendid woods or a world like them, why, it would be heaven. But you have to come back, you have to live on, perhaps for a great while, in the world of Shadrach and Myrtle Forge. I'm not sure that I'd refuse if you asked me to go, Howat. I just don't know if a woman can stand alone, for that's what it would come to afterward, against a whole lifeful of misjudgment. It might be better in the end, for everybody, if she continued home, made the best of things with the others."
"You may possibly be right," he told her with a sudden resumption of indifference. After all, it was unimportant whether or not Fanny Gilkan went with him to the source of the stream he had discovered. Every one, it became more and more evident, was alike, monotonous. He wondered again, lounging back against the wall, about the French forts, outposts in a vast wilderness. There was an increasing friction between the Province and France, the legacy of King George's War, but Howat Penny's allegiance to place was as conspicuous by its absence as the other communal traits. Beside that, beyond Kaskaskia, at St. Navier and the North, there was little thought of French or English; the sheer problem of existence there drowned other considerations. He would, he thought, go out in the spring … leave Myrtle Forge with its droning anvil, the endless, unvaried turning of water wheel, and the facile, trivial chatter in and about the house. David Forsythe, back from England in the capacity of master of fluxing metals, might acquire his, Howat's, interest in the Penny iron.
Fanny Gilkan said, "You'll burn a hole in your coat with that pipe." He roused himself, and she moved across the room and pinched the smoking wicks. The embers on the hearth had expired, and the fireplace was a sooty, black cavern. Fanny, at the candles, was the only thing clearly visible; the thin radiance slid over the turn of her cheek; her hovering hand was like a cut-paper silhouette. It was growing late; Thomas Gilkan would soon be back from the Furnace; he must go. Howat had no will to avoid Gilkan, but the thought of the necessary conversational exchange wearied him.
The sound of footsteps approached the house from without; it was, he thought, slightly annoyed, the founderman; but the progress deflected by the door, circled to a window at the side. A voice called low and urgent, "Seemy! Seemy!" It was repeated, and there was an answering mutter from the stair, a thick murmur and a deep sigh.
The cast boy slipped crumpled and silent in bare feet across the floor. "Yes," he called back, rapidly waking.
The voice from without continued, "They're going to start up the Oley."
"What is it?" Fanny demanded.
"The raccoon dogs," the boy paused at the door. "A lot of the furnacemen and woodcutters from round about are hunting."
Fanny Gilkan leaned across the table to Howat, her face glowing with interest. "Come ahead," she urged; "we can do this anyhow. I like to hear the dogs yelping, and follow them through the night. You can bring your gun, I'll leave mine back, and perhaps we'll get something really big."
Howat himself responded thoroughly to such an expedition; to the mystery of the primitive woods, doubly withdrawn in the dark; the calls of the others, near or far, or completely lost in a silence of stars; the still immensity of a land unguessed, mythical—endless trees, endless mountains, endless rivers with their headwaters buried in arctic countries beyond human experience, and emptying into the miraculous blue and gilded seas of the tropics.
Fanny Gilkan would follow the dogs closely, too, with infinite swing and zest. She knew the country better than himself, better almost than any one else at the Furnace. He stirred at her urgency, and she caught his arm, dragging him from behind the table. She tied a linsey-woolsey jacket by its arms about her waist, and put out the candles. Outside the blast was steadily in progress at the stack; the clear glow of the flame shifted over the nearby walls, glinted on the new yellow of more distant foliage, fell in sharp or blurred traceries against the surrounding night.
They could hear the short, impatient yelps of the dogs; but, before they reached them, the hunt was away. A lantern flickered far ahead, a minute blur vanishing through files of trees. Fanny turned to the right, mounting an abrupt slope thickly wooded toward the crown. A late moon, past full, shed an unsteady light through interlaced boughs, matted grape vines, creepers flung from tree to tree; it shone on a hurrying rill, a bright thread drawn through the brush. Fanny Gilkan jumped lightly from bank to bank. She made her way with lithe ease through apparently unbroken tangles. It was Fanny who went ahead, who waited for Howat to follow across a fallen trunk higher than his waist. She even mocked him gaily, declared that, through his slowness, they were hopelessly losing the hunt.
However, the persistent barking of the dogs contrived to draw them on. They easily passed the stragglers, left a group gathered about a lantern and a black bottle. They caught up to the body of men, but preferred to follow a little outside of the breathless comments and main, stumbling progress. They stirred great areas of pigeons and countless indifferent coveys of partridges barely moved to avoid the swiftly falling feet. But no deer crossed near them, and the crashing of a heavy animal through the bushes diminished into such a steep gulley that they relinquished thought of pursuit. The chase continued for an unusual distance; the moon sank into the far, unbroken forest; the stars brightened through the darkest hour of the night.
Fanny Gilkan and Howat proceeded more slowly now, but still they went directly, without hesitation, in the direction they chose. They crossed a log felled over a shallow, hurrying creek; the course grew steeper, more densely wooded. "Ruscomb Manor," Fanny pronounced over her shoulder. "Since a long way back," he agreed. Finally a sharper, stationary clamour announced that the object of the hunt had been achieved, and a raccoon treed. They made their way to the dim illumination cast on moving forms and a ring of dogs throwing