X

DANNIE'S RENUNCIATION

So they stretched Jimmy's length on Five Mile Hill beside the three
babies that had lacked the "vital spark." Mary went to the Dolans for
the winter and Dannie was left, sole occupant of Rainbow Bottom.
Because so much fruit and food that would freeze were stored there, he
was even asked to live in Jimmy's cabin.

Dannie began the winter stolidly. All day long and as far as he could
find anything to do in the night, he worked. He mended everything about
both farms, rebuilt all the fences and as a never-failing resource, he
cut wood. He cut so much that he began to realize that it would get too
dry and the burning of it would become extravagant, so he stopped that
and began making some changes he had long contemplated. During fur time
he set his line of traps on his side of the river and on the other he
religiously set Jimmy's.

But he divided the proceeds from the skins exactly in half, no matter
whose traps caught them, and with Jimmy's share of the money he started
a bank account for Mary. As he could not use all of them he sold
Jimmy's horses, cattle and pigs. With half the stock gone he needed
only half the hay and grain stored for feeding. He disposed of the
chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese that Mary wanted sold, and placed
the money to her credit. He sent her a beautiful little red bank book
and an explanation of all these transactions by Dolan. Mary threw the
book across the room because she wanted Dannie to keep her money
himself, and then cried herself to sleep that night, because Dannie had
sent the book instead of bringing it. But when she fully understood the
transactions and realized that if she chose she could spend several
hundred dollars, she grew very proud of that book.

About the empty cabins and the barns, working on the farms, wading the
mud and water of the river bank, or tingling with cold on the ice went
two Dannies. The one a dull, listless man, mechanically forcing a
tired, overworked body to action, and the other a self-accused murderer.

"I am responsible for the whole thing," he told himself many times a
day. "I always humored Jimmy. I always took the muddy side of the road,
and the big end of the log, and the hard part of the work, and filled
his traps wi' rats from my own; why in God's name did I let the Deil o'
stubbornness in me drive him to his death, noo? Why didna I let him
have the Black Bass? Why didna I make him come home and put on dry
clothes?