“Hey! Is that bear-sign we smell? Is them doughnuts?”
“Cost you,” I said. “I’m set up for business. Three doughnuts for two bits.”
That man set right down and ate two dollars’ worth and by the time he was finished there was a crowd around reaching for them fast as they came out of the Dutch oven.
Folks along that creek lived on skimpy bacon and beans, sometimes some soda biscuits, and real baking was unheard-of. Back to home no woman could make doughnuts fast enough for we Sackett boys who were all good eaters, so we took to making them ourselves. Ma often said nobody could make bear-sign like her son, William Tell Sackett.
By noon I was off to the settlement for more makings, and by nightfall everybody on the creek knew I was in business. Next day I sold a barrel of doughnuts, and by nightfall I had the barrel full again and a washtub also. That washtub was the only one along the creek, and it looked like nobody would get a bath until I’d run out of bear-sign.
You have to understand how tired a man can get of grease and beans to understand how glad they were to taste some honest-to-gosh, down-to-earth doughnuts.
Sun-up and here came Arvie Wilt. Arvie was a big man with a big appetite and he set right down and ran up a bill of four dollars. I was making money.
Arvie sat there eating doughnuts and forgetting all about his claim.
Come noon, Griselda showed up. She came a-prancing and a-preening it up the road and she stayed around, eating a few doughnuts and talking with me. The more she talked the meaner Arvie got.
“Griselda,” he said, “you’d best get along home. You know how your pa feels about you trailing around with just any drifter.”
Well, sir, I put down my bowl and wiped the flour off my hands. “Are you aiming that at me?” I asked. “If you are, you just pay me my four dollars and get off down the pike.”
He was mean, like I’ve said, and he did what I hoped he’d do. He balled up a fist and threw it at me. Trouble was, he took so much time getting his fist ready and his feet in position that I knew what he was going to do, so when he flung that punch, I just stepped inside and hit him where he’d been putting those doughnuts.
He gulped and turned green around the jowls and white around the eyes, so I knocked down a hand he stuck at me and belted him again in the same place. Then I caught him by the shirt front before he could fall and backhanded him twice across the mouth for good measure.
Griselda was a-hauling at my arms. “Stop it, you awful man! You hurt him!”
“That ain’t surprising, Griselda,” I said. “It was what I had in mind.”
So I went back to making bear-sign, and after a bit Arvie got up, with Griselda helping, and he wiped the blood off his lips and he said, “I’ll get even! I’ll get even with you if it’s the last thing I do!”
“And it just might be,” I said, and watched them walk off together.
There went Griselda. Right out of my life, and with Arvie Wilt, too.
Two days later I was out of business and broke. Two days later I had a barrel of doughnuts I couldn’t give away and my private gold rush was over. Worst of all, I’d put all I’d made back into the business and there I was, stuck with it. And it was Arvie Wilt who did it to me.
As soon as he washed the blood off his face he went down to the settlement. He had heard of a woman down there who was a baker, and he fetched her back up the creek. She was a big, round, jolly woman with pink cheeks, and she was a first-rate cook. She settled down to making apple pies three inches thick and fourteen inches across and she sold a cut of a pie for two bits and each pie made just four pieces.
She also baked cakes with high-grade all over them. In mining country rich ore is called high-grade, so miners got to calling the icing on cake high-grade, and there I sat with a barrel full of bear-sign and everybody over to the baker woman’s buying cake and pie and such-like.
Then Popley came by with Griselda riding behind him on that brown mule, headed for the baker woman’s. “See what a head for business Arvie’s got? He’ll make a fine husband for Griselda.”
Griselda? She didn’t even look at me. She passed me up like a pay-car passing a tramp, and I felt so low I could have walked under a snake with a high hat on.
Three days later I was back to wild onions. My grub gave out, I couldn’t peddle my flour, and the red ants got into my sugar. All one day I tried sifting red ants out of sugar; as fast as I got them out they got back in until there was more ants than sugar.
So I gave up and went hunting. I hunted for two days and couldn’t find a deer, nor anything else but wild onions.
Down to the settlement they had a fandango, a real old-time square dance, and I had seen nothing of the kind since my brother Orrin used to fiddle for them back to home. So I brushed up my clothes and rubbed some deer grease on my boots, and I went to that dance.
Sure enough, Griselda was there, and she was with Arvie Wilt.
Arvie was all slicked out in a black broadcloth suit that fit him a little too soon, and black boots so tight he winced when he put a foot down.
Arvie spotted me and they fetched to a halt right beside me. “Sackett,” Arvie said, “I hear you’re scraping bottom again. Now my baker woman needs a helper to rev up her pots and pans, and if you want the job – ”
“I don’t.”
“Just thought I’d ask,” – he grinned maliciously – “seein’ you so good at woman’s work.”
He saw it in my eyes so he grabbed Griselda and they waltzed away, grinning. Thing that hurt, she was grinning, too.
“That Arvie Wilt,” somebody said, “there’s a man will amount to something. Popley says he has a fine head for business.”
“For the amount of work he does,” somebody else said, “he sure has a lot of gold. He ain’t spent a day in that shaft in a week.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Ask them down to the settlement. He does more gambling than mining, according to some.”
That baker woman was there, waltzing around like she was light as a feather, and seeing her made me think of a Welshman I knew. Now you take a genuine Welshman, he can talk a bird right out of a tree … I started wondering … how would he do with a widow woman who was a fine baker?
That Welshman wasn’t far away, and we’d talked often, the year before. He liked a big woman, he said, the jolly kind and who could enjoy making good food. I sat down and wrote him a letter.
Next morning early I met up with Griselda. “You actually marrying that Arvie?”
Her pert little chin came up and her eyes were defiant. “A girl has to think of her future, Tell Sackett! She can’t be tying herself to a – a – ne’er-do-well! Mr. Wilt is a serious man. His mine is very successful,” her nose tilted, “and so is the bakery!”
She turned away, then looked back, “And if you expect any girl to like you, you’d better stop eating those onions! They’re simply awful!”
And if I stopped eating wild onions, I’d starve to death.
Not that I wasn’t half-starved, anyway.
That day I went further up the creek than ever, and the canyon narrowed to high walls and the creek filled the bottom, wall to wall, and I walked ankle deep in water going through the narrows. And there on a sandy beach were deer tracks, old tracks and fresh tracks, and I decided this was where they came to drink.
So I found a grassy ledge above the pool and alongside an outcropping of rock, and there I settled down to wait for a deer. It was early afternoon and a good bit of time remained to me.
There were pines on the ridge behind me, and the wind sounded fine, humming through their needles. I sat there for a bit, enjoying the shade, and then I reached around and pulled a wild onion from the grass, lifting it up to brush away the sand and gravel clinging to the roots …