Cabin Fever

Bud did not remember, bat for all that his thoughts went back across

those two years and clung to his own baby, and he wished poignantly that

he knew how it was getting along; and wondered if it had grown to be

as big a handful as this youngster, and how Marie would handle the

emergency he was struggling with now: a lost, lonesome baby boy that

would not go to sleep and could not tell why.

Yet Lovin Child was answering every one of Bud's mute questions. Lying

there in his "Daddy Bud's" arms, wrapped comically in his Daddy Bud's

softest undershirt, Lovin Child was proving to his Daddy Bud that his

own man-child was strong and beautiful and had a keen little brain

behind those twinkling blue eyes. He was telling why he cried. He wanted

Marie to take him and rock him to sleep, just as she had rocked him

to sleep every night of his young memory, until that time when he had

toddled out of her life and into a new and peculiar world that held no

Marie.

By and by he slept, still clinging to the watch that had Marie's picture

in the back. When he was all limp and rosy and breathing softly against

Bud's heart, Bud tiptoed over to the bunk, reached down inconveniently

with one hand and turned back the blankets, and laid Lovin Child in his

bed and covered him carefully. On his bench beyond the dead line Cash

sat leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and sucked at a pipe

gone cold, and stared abstractedly into the fire.

Bud looked at him sitting there. For the first time since their trails

had joined, he wondered what Cash was thinking about; wondered with a

new kind of sympathy about Cash's lonely life, that held no ties, no

warmth of love. For the first time it struck him as significant that

in the two years, almost, of their constant companionship, Cash's

reminiscences had stopped abruptly about fifteen years back. Beyond that

he never went, save now and then when he jumped a space, to the time

when he was a boy. Of what dark years lay between, Bud had never been

permitted a glimpse.

"Some kid--that kid," Bud observed involuntarily, for the first time in

over three weeks speaking when he was not compelled to speak to Cash. "I

wish I knew where he came from. He wants his mother."

Cash stirred a little, like a sleeper only half awakened. But he did not

reply, and Bud gave an impatient snort, tiptoed over and picked up the

discarded clothes of Lovin Child, that held still a faint odor of wood

smoke and rancid grease, and, removing his shoes that he might move

silently, went to work.

He washed Lovin Child's clothes, even to the red sweater suit and the

fuzzy red "bunny" cap. He rigged a line before the fireplace--on his

side of the dead line, to be sure--hung the little garments upon it and

sat up to watch the fire while they dried.