The Oxbow Wizard

Young Dan Evans lived in the back country on the Oxbow with his parents and his brothers and sisters. For as long as he could remember, his Uncle Bill Tangler, his mother’s brother, had been an irregular member of the household.

Young Dan obtained a meagre and intermittent schooling between his ninth and sixteenth years, at the Bend, three miles below his father’s farm. His terms were frequently broken by the weather, the conditions of the road and matters of domestic economy. Sometimes Uncle Bill helped him with his books. There seemed to be nothing that Uncle Bill did not know something about.

In October of Young Dan’s last year of school, Uncle Bill brought a sportsman from New York or London or Chicago or Montreal—from one of those outside places, anyhow—to Dan’l Evans’s house. Uncle Bill and the sportsman were on their way in to the former’s camp far up beyond the Prongs. They arrived, by canoe, just before dusk and were off again half an hour after sun-up.

Young Dan was sent by his mother to the spare bedroom, to make up the bed that had been occupied by the sportsman. In five minutes he was due to start for school. He had no more than crossed the threshold when he exclaimed, “He was smokin’ in bed!” On the chair near the dented pillow, about the base of the little lamp, lay two cigar butts and several deposits of ashes. Young Dan was distressed, for by what little he had seen of the stranger he had considered him to be a very superior person; and yet here was proof positive that he was possessed of a habit that was looked upon, in that household, as both low and reckless. He recollected a few of the words which his mother had addressed to Uncle Bill on the occasion of her finding that versatile bachelor smoking in bed. “It’s lazy an’ it’s dangerous an’ it ain’t respectable,” she had said—among other things.

Young Dan approached the bed.

“And him from a city full of street cars and schools,” he murmured. “He’d ought to know better.”

Then something caught his eye and distracted his attention from the tell-tale butts and ashes. It was a book with a green cover. It lay open and face down on the bright rag-carpet, just beneath the edge of the bed. He stared at it for a moment, then snatched it up and thrust it inside his coat. At one glance he had seen that it was a story book. Good! On the Oxbow story books were almost as rare as ropes of pearls; Young Dan was as unacquainted with fiction as a city alley-cat is with yellow cream. In this case discovery of the discarded book seemed to imply ownership and he appropriated the volume with the intention of exploring its pages undisturbed by his younger brothers and sisters who would be sure to demand a share in the volume once their eyes fell upon its bright cover.

Young Dan hurried through the task that had been set for him and started for the schoolhouse at the Bend, accompanied by Molly, aged eleven, and Amos, aged nine. His canvas-wrapped school books and the lunch for three were in his bag; and the book with the green cover was still inside his coat. Here, against his very ribs, lay an unknown treasure—a treasure of valuable information concerning far lands or the stars themselves, perhaps, or perhaps a treasure of magical entertainment. How was he to make an opportunity for investigating it unobserved?

Suddenly he thought of a plan. He suggested a race.

“You two go on to Frenchman’s Spring, and I’ll stop right here,” he said. “When you git to the spring, give a holler and keep right on a-goin’ as fast as you like and I’ll try to catch you up this side the school.”

“You can’t do it, and you know you can’t,” said Molly. “Even Amos will git there ahead of you.”

“That’s as may be,” replied Young Dan, with dignity.

So the others left him and hastened forward; and he immediately sat down beside the road and fished out the book. He opened it at the title-page with fingers a-tremble with eagerness. He began to read, running a finger from word to word, from line to line. Here were people of types and callings unknown to him, moving in the streets of a city unguessed by him, talking in a way foreign to the Oxbow of things unheard of even by Uncle Bill; and yet he read in a fever of intensity, with moving lips and wrinkled brows. A faint shout of childish voices, touched with a note of derision, came back, but it failed to reach the ears of Young Dan, whose whole attention was fixed on the magic under his eye. He had intended to keep his agreement, but he had completely forgotten Molly and Amos; he turned page after page slowly and so at last came to the end of the first tale.

“Gee, but that feller was smart!” he whispered.

He glanced up, observed the sun and jumped to his feet. He was late for school that morning and accepted the reprimand of Miss Carten, the teacher, and the jeers of Molly and Amos without turning a hair. At the conclusion of the afternoon session he managed to get away by himself and read another story.

With the green-covered book safe in his bosom and the secret of it in his heart, a change came over Young Dan. Molly and Amos were the first to notice it, but they could make nothing of it.

One evening, within a week of the passing of the sportsman, he appeared at the supper-table when the other members of the family were already in their chairs. After eating pancakes for a minute or two in silence, he said, “You set the table to-night, hey, Lucy?”

Lucy, aged six, replied in the affirmative, with evident pride.

“And Molly fried the pancakes, because Ma was busy writin’ a letter to Gran’ma,” continued Young Dan.

“An’ what of it?” asked his father.

“Did you spy on us through the window?” asked his mother.

“No, I was over in the tool-house,” replied the boy; “and when I got nigh enough to look in at the window you was all set down to table.”

“Land’s sakes! How d’you know Lucy set the table?”

“Because everything’s so close to the edge. She ain’t tall enough to push ’em on very far.”

“But how’d you know Molly fried the pancakes?”

“Because most every one was cracked across, or messed about, when it was bein’ turned. You don’t do that, Ma, with the turner—but Molly always tries to turn ’em with a knife.”

“Sakes alive! That’s the livin’ truth! But how’d you come to figger out about me writin’ to Gran’ma?”

“There’s ink on your finger, Ma; and Gran’ma is the only person you ever write to.”

“Land’s sakes! That’s reel smart.”

“Seein’s how you’ve growed so all-fired smart so suddent, maybe you’ll tell me who went up the old loggin’ road t’other night and robbed me of nigh onto a cord of dry stove-wood?” said Dan’l Evans.

“Maybe I will, Pa. What’ll you give me if I tell you?”

“Give you? Nothin’! You don’t know, anyhow.”

“Don’t I know who’s got a horse that’s lame on the nigh fore-foot and a wagon with a hind wheel that wobbles? I see the tracks yesterday and studied ’em.”

“You figger it was Tim Swan stole the wood. Well, you’re wrong. I suspicioned him myself, the minute I see the wood was gone, because Tim’s a born thief an’ lives handy. But it warn’t Tim took the wood. I mooched round his place for over an hour an’ couldn’t find a stick of it. Maybe it was the tracks of a rabbit you studied so hard.”

“Maybe it was, Pa. Anyhow, I follered them rabbit-tracks along to Tim’s gate and past it and clear on to Widow Craig’s yard; and there’s the wood in her wood-shed; and she paid the rabbit three dollars for it.”

“Well, I never!” exclaimed Mrs. Evans.

A few days after the frying of the family pancakes by Molly and within two weeks after the passing of the sportsman in the care of Uncle Bill Tangler, seven of the scholars who attended the little school at the Bend came down with the mumps and on Thursday Miss Carten announced that the school would close for a week at least—and perhaps longer. The Evanses had escaped the epidemic, having been victims of the malady two years before. Molly and Amos went racing home, making the echoes repeat their whoops of joy. Young Dan walked more soberly behind them, for there were many things on his mind and he meant to use his time—while the mumps kept the schoolhouse closed—to test several theories that, ever since he had read the book with the green cover, had been simmering away in the back of his head.

But Young Dan got no leisure in which to test his theories—at least he was not able to try them in the exact manner he had planned—for a stirring and mysterious event that roused excitement in the whole Oxbow region occurred less than twenty-four hours after the vacation began. Miss Carten disappeared. She dropped from sight as completely and as mysteriously as if a silent airplane had swooped down at night out of a dark sky and had carried her aloft like a great-horned owl stealing a birdling. On Friday someone asked for Miss Carten at the Troller farm where she boarded.

“She went to a party over to Cameron’s las’ night an’ took her suitcase with her; I thought as how she’d stop the night with Lizzy Cameron,” said Mrs. Troller.

At the Cameron place, two miles away—as it developed later—Miss Carten had not been seen. No member of the family, in fact, had heard from her in the last twenty-four hours.