Was She a Boy?
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No matter what business or what pleasure
took me, I once, not long ago, went to Colfax.
Whisper it not to each other that I was seeking
a foreign appointment through the influence
of my fellow Hoosier, the late Vice-President
of the United States. O no, I didn't go
to the Hon. Schuyler Colfax at all; but I went
to Colfax, simply, which is a little dingy town,
in Clinton County, that was formerly called
Midway, because it is half way between Lafayette
and Indianapolis. It was and is a place
of some three hundred inhabitants, eking out
an aguish subsistence, maintaining a swampy,
malarious aspect, keeping up a bilious, nay,
an atra-bilious color, the year round, by sucking
like an attenuated leech at the junction,
or, rather, the crossing of the I. C. & L., and
the L. C. & S. W. railroads. It lay mouldering,
like something lost and forgotten, slowly
rotting in the swamp.
I do not mean to attack the inhabitants of
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Colfax, for they were good people, and deserved
a better fate than the eternal rattling the ague
took them through from year's end to year's
end. Why, they had had the ague so long
that they had no respect for it at all. I've
seen a woman in Colfax shaking with a chill,
spanking a baby that had a chill, and scolding
a husband who had a chill, all at once—and
I had a dreadful ague on me at the same time!
But, as I have said, they were good people, and
I suppose they are still. They go quietly about
the usual business of dead towns. They have
“stores” in which they offer for sale calico, of
the big-figured, orange and red sort, surprisingly
cheap. They smoke those little Cuba
sixes at a half cent apiece, and call them
cigars; they hang round the dépôt, and trade
jack-knives and lottery watches on the afternoons
of lazy Sundays; they make harmless
sport of the incoming and outgoing country
folk; and, in a word, keep pretty busy at one
thing or another, and above all—they shake.
In Colfax the chief sources of exciting
amusement are dog fights and an occasional
row at Sheehan's saloon, a doggery of the
regular old-fashioned, drink, gamble, rob and
fight sort—a low place, known to all the hard
bats in the State.
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As you pass through the town you will not
fail to notice a big sign, outhanging from the
front of the largest building on the principal
street, which reads: “Union Hotel, 1865.”
From the muddy suburbs of the place, in
every direction, stretch black muck swamps,
for the most part heavily timbered with a
variety of oaks, interspersed with sycamores,
ash, and elms. In the damp, shady laby-rinths
of these boggy woods millions of
lively, wide awake, tuneful mosquitoes are
daily manufactured; and out from decaying
logs and piles of fermenting leaves, from the
green pools and sluggish ditch streams, creeps
a noxious gas, known in that region as the
“double refined, high pressure, forty hoss
power quintessential of the ager!” So, at
least, I was told by the landlord of the Union
Hotel, and his skin had the color of one who
knew.
Notwithstanding what I have said, Colfax,
in summer, is not wholly without attractions
of a certain kind. It has some yellow dogs
and some brindle ones; it has some cattle and
some swine; it has some swallows and some
spotted pigeons; it has cool, fresh smelling
winds, and, after the water has sufficiently
dried out, the woods are really glorious with
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wild roses, violets, turkey-pea blossoms, and
wild pinks. But to my story.
I was sitting on the long veranda of the
Union Hotel, when a rough but kindly voice
said to me:
“Mornin', stranger; gi' me a light, will ye?”
I looked up from the miserable dime novel
at which I had been tugging for the last hour,
and saw before me a corpulent man of, perhaps,
forty-five years of age, who stood quite
ready to thrust the charred end of a cigar
stump into the bowl of my meerschaum. I
gave him a match, and would fain have returned
to Angelina St. Fortescue, the heroine
of the novel, whom I had left standing on the
extreme giddy verge of a sheer Alpine precipice,
known, by actual triangulation, to be just
seven thousand feet high, swearing she would
leap off if Donald Gougerizeout, the robber,
persisted further in his rough addresses; but
my new friend, the corpulent smoker, seemed
bent on a little bit of conversation.
“Thankee, sir. Fine mornin', sir, a'n't it?”
“Beautiful,” I replied, raising my head,
elevating my arms, and, by a kind of yawn,
taking in a deep draught of the fresh spring
weather, absorbing it, assimilating it, till, like
a wave of retarded electricity, it set my nerves
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in tune for enjoying the bird songs, and filled
my blood with the ecstasy of vigorous health
and youth. I, no doubt, just then felt the
burden of life much less than did the big yellow
dog at my feet, who snapped lazily at the
flies.
“Yes, yes, this 'ere's a fine mornin'—julicious,
sir, julicious, indeed; but le' me tell ye,
sir, this 'ere wind's mighty deceitful—for a fact
it is, sir, jist as full of ager as a acorn is of
meat. It's blowin' right off'n ponds, and is
loaded chock down with the miasm—for a fact
it is, sir.”
While delivering this speech, the fat man
sat down on the bench beside me there in the
veranda. By this time I had my thumbs in
the arm holes of my vest, and my chest expanded
to its utmost—my lungs going like a
steam bellows, which is a way I have in fine
weather.
“Monstrous set o' respiratory organs, them
o' your'n,” he said, eyeing my manœuvres.
Just then I discovered that he was a physician
of the steam doctor sort, for, glancing
down at my feet, I espied his well worn leather
medicine bags. I immediately grew polite.
Possibly I might ere long need some quinine,
or mandrake, or a hot steam bath—anything
for the ague!
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“Yes, I've got lungs like a porpoise,” I replied,
“but still the ague may get me. Much
sickness about here, Doctor—a—a—
what do they call your name?”
“Benjamin Hurd—Doctor Hurd, they call
me. I'm the only thorer bred botanic that's in
these parts. I do poorty much all the practice
about here. Yes, there's considerable of
ager and phthisic and bilious fever. Keeps
me busy most of my time. These nasty
swamps, you know.”
After a time our conversation flagged, and
the doctor having lit a fresh cigar, we smoked
in silence. The wind was driving the dust
along the street in heavy waves, and I sat
watching a couple of lean, spotted calves
making their way against the tide. They held
their heads low and shut their eyes, now and
then bawling vigorously. Some one up stairs
was playing “Days of Absence” on a wretched
wheezing accordeon.
“There's a case of asthma, doctor,” I said,
intending to be witty. But my remark was
not noticed. The doctor was in a brown study,
from which my words had not startled him.
Presently he said, as if talking to himself, and
without taking the cigar from his mouth:
“'Twas just a year ago to-night, the 28th
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day of May, 'at they took 'er away. And he'll
die afore day to a dead certainty. Beats all
the derned queer things I ever seed or heerd
of.”
He was poking with the toe of his boot in
the dust on the veranda floor, as he spoke,
and stealing a glance at his face, I saw that it
wore an abstracted, dreamy, perplexed look.
“What was your remark, doctor?” I asked,
more to arouse him than from any hope of being
interested.
“Hum!—ah, yes,” he said, starting, and beginning
a vigorous puffing. “Ah, yes, I was
cogitatin' over this matter o' Berry Young's.
Never have been able to 'count for that, no
how. Think about it more an' more every
day. What's your theory of it?”
“Can't say, never having heard anything of
it,” I replied.
“Well, I do say! Thought everybody had
hearn of that, any how! It's a rale romance,
a reg'lar mystery, sir. It's been talked about,
and writ about in the papers so much 'at I
s'posed 'at it was knowed of far and wide.”
“I've been in California for several years
past,” I replied, by way of excuse for my ignorance
of even the vaguest outline of the affair,
whatever it might be.
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“Well, you see, a leetle more'n a year ago
a gal an' her father come here and stopped at
this 'ere very hotel. The man must 'a' been
som'res near sixty years old; but the gal was
young, and jist the poortiest thing I ever seed
in all my life. I couldn't describe how she
looked at all; but everybody 'at saw her said
she was the beautifulest creatur they ever laid
eyes onto. Where these two folks come from
nobody ever knowed, but they seemed like
mighty nice sort of persons, and everybody
liked 'em, 'specially the gal. Somehow, from
the very start, a kind of mystery hung 'round
'em. They seemed always to have gobs o'
money, and onct in awhile some little thing 'd
turn up to make folks kinder juberous somehow
'at they wasn't jist what they ginerally
seemed to be. But that gal was fascinatin' as
a snake, and as poorty as any picter. Her
flesh looked like tinted wax mixed with moon-shine,
and her eyes was as clear as a limestone
spring — though they was dark as
night. She was that full of restless animal
life 'at she couldn't set still—she roamed round
like a leopard in a cage, and she'd romp equal
to a ten-year-old boy. Well, as mought be expected,
sich a gal as that 'ere 'd 'tract attention
in these parts, and I must say 'at the young
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fellows here did git 'bominable sweet on her.
'Casionally two of 'em 'd git out in the swamps
and have a awful fight on her 'count; but she
'peared to pay precious little 'tention to any of
'em till finally Berry Young stepped in and
jist went for 'er like mad, and she took to 'm.
Berry was r'ally the nicest and intelligentest
young man in all this country. He writ poetry
for the papers, sir—snatchin' good poetry,
too—and had got to be talked of a right smart
for his larnin', an' 'complishments. He was
good lookin', too; powerful handsome, for a
fact, sir. So they was to be married, Berry
and the gal, an' the time it was sot, an' the
day it come, an' all was ready, an' the young
folks was on the floor, and the 'squire was jist
a commencin' to say the ceremony, when lo!
and beholden, four big, awful, rough lookin'
men rushed in with big pistols and mighty terrible
bowie knives, and big papers and big
seals, and said they was a sheriff and possum
from Kaintucky. They jist jumped right onto
the gal an' her father an' han'cuffed 'em, an'
took 'em!”
“Handcuffed them and took them!” I repeated,
suddenly growing intensely interested.
This was beating my dime novel, for sensation,
all hollow.
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“Yes, sir, han'cuffed 'em an' took 'em, an'
away they went, an' they've not been hearn of
since to this day. But the mysteriousest thing
about the whole business was that when the
sheriff grabbed the gal he called her George,
and said she wasn't no gal at all, but jist a
terrible onery boy 'at had been stealin' an'
counterfeitin' an' robbin' all round everywhere.
What d'ye think of that?”
“A remarkably strange affair, certainly,” I
replied; “and do you say that the father and
the girl have not since been heard from?”
“Never a breath. The thing got into all
the newspapers and raised a awful rumpus,
and it turned out that it wasn't no sheriff 'at
come there; but some dark, mysterious kidnappin'
transaction 'at nobody could account
for. Detectives was put on their track an'
follered 'em to Injun territory an' there lost
'em. Some big robberies was connected with
the affair, but folks could never git head nor
tail of the partic'lers.”
“And it wasn't a real sheriff's arrest, then?”
said I.
“No, sir, 'twas jist a mystery. Some kind
of a dodge of a band of desperadoes to avoid
the law some way. The papers tried to explain
it, but I never could see any sense to it. 'Twas
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a clean, dead mystery. But I was goin' on to
tell ye 'at Berry Young took it awful hard
'bout the gal, an' he's been sort o' sinkin' away
ever sence, an' now he's jist ready to wink out.
Yonder's where Berry lives, in that 'ere white
cottage house with the vines round the winder.
He's desp'rit sick—a sort o' consumption. I'm
goin' to see 'im now; good mornin' to ye.”
Thus abruptly ending our interview, the
doctor took up his medicine bag and went his
way. He left me in a really excited state of
mind; the story of itself was so strange, and
the narrator had told it so solemnly and
graphically. I suppose, too, that I must have
been in just the proper state of mind for that
rough outline, that cartoon of a most startling
and mysterious affair, to become deeply impressed
in my mind, perhaps, in the most
fascinating and fantastic light possible. A
thirst to know more of the story took strong
hold on my mind, as if I had been reading a
tantalizing romance and had found the leaves
torn out just where the mystery was to be explained.
I half closed my eyes to better keep
in the lines and shades of the strange picture.
Its influence lay upon me like a spell. I enjoyed
it. It was a luxury.
The wings of the morning wind fanned the
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heat into broken waves, rising and sinking, and
flowing on, with murmur and flash and glimmer,
to the cool green ways of the woods, and,
like the wind, my fancy went out among golden
fleece clouds and into shady places, following
the thread of this new romance. I cannot give
a sufficient reason why the story took so fast
a hold on me. But it did grip my mind and
master it. It appeared to me the most intensely
strange affair I had ever heard of.
While I sat there, lost in reflection, with my
eyes bent on a very unpromising pig, that
wallowed in the damp earth by the town
pump, the landlord of the hotel came out and
took a seat beside me. I gave him a pipe of
my tobacco and forthwith began plying him
with questions touching the affair of which the
doctor had spoken. He confirmed the story,
and added to its mystery by going minutely
into its details. He gave the names of the
father and daughter as Charles Afton and
Ollie Afton.
Ollie Afton! Certainly no name sounds
sweeter! How is it that these gifted, mysteriously
beautiful persons always have musical
names!
“Ah,” said the landlord, “you'd ort to have
seen that boy!”
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“Boy!” I echoed.
“Well, gal or boy, one or t'other, the
wonderfulest human bein' I ever see in all the
days o' my life! Lips as red as ripe cur'n's,
and for ever smilin'. Such smiles—oonkoo!
they hurt a feller all over, they was so sweet.
She was tall an' dark, an' had black hair that
curled short all 'round her head. Her skin
was wonderful clear and so was her eyes. But
it was the way she looked at you that got you.
Ah, sir, she had a power in them eyes, to be
sure!”
The pig got up from his muddy place by the
pump, grunted, as if satisfied, and slowly
strolled off; a country lad drove past, riding
astride the hounds of a wagon; a pigeon lit
on the comb of the roof of Sheehan's saloon,
which was just across the street, and began
pluming itself. Just then the landlord's little
sharp-nosed, weasel-eyed boy came out and
said, in a very subdued tone of voice:
“Pap, mam says 'at if you don't kill 'er
that 'ere chicken for dinner you kin go widout
any fing to eat all she cares.”
The landlord's spouse was a red-headed
woman, so he got up very suddenly and took
himself into the house. But before he got out
of hearing the little boy remarked:
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“Pap, I speaks for the gizzard of that 'ere
chicken, d'ye hear, now?”
I sat there till the dinner hour, watching the
soft pink and white vapors that rolled round
the verge of the horizon. I was thoroughly
saturated with romance. Strange, that here,
in this dingy little out-of-the-way village, should
have transpired one of the most wonderful
mysteries history may ever hold!
At dinner the landlord talked volubly of the
Afton affair, giving it as his opinion that the
Aftons were persons tinged with negro blood,
and had been kidnapped into slavery.
“They was jist as white, an' whiter, too,
than I am,” he went on, “but them Southerners
'd jist as soon sell one person as 'nother,
anyhow.”
I noticed particularly that the little boy got
his choice bit of the fowl. He turned his head
one side and ate like a cat.
When the meal was over I was again joined
by Doctor Hurd on the verandah. He reported
Berry Young still alive, but not able to live
till midnight. I noticed that the doctor was
nervous and kept his eyes fixed on Sheehan's
saloon.
“Stranger,” said he, leaning over close to
me, and speaking in a low, guarded way,
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“things is workin' dasted curious 'bout now—
sure's gun's iron they jist is!”
“Where—how—in what way, doctor?” I
stammered, taken aback by his behavior.
“Sumpum's up, as sure as Ned!” he replied,
wagging his head.
“Doctor,” I said, petulantly, “if you would
be a trifle more explicit I could probably guess,
with some show of certainty, at what you
mean!”
“Can't ye hear? Are ye deaf? Did ye
ever, in all yer born days, hear a voice like
that ere 'un? Listen!”
Sure enough, a voice of thrilling power, a
rich, heavy, quavering alto, accompanied by
some one thrumming on a guitar, trickled and
gurgled, and poured through the open window
of Sheehan's saloon. The song was a wild,
drinking carol, full of rough, reckless wit, but
I listened, entranced, till it was done.
“There now, say, what d'ye think o' that?
Ain't things a workin' round awful curious,
as I said?”
Delivering himself thus, the doctor got up
and walked off.
When I again had an opportunity to speak
to the landlord, I asked him if Doctor Hurd
was not thought to be slightly demented.
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“What! crazy, do you mean? No, sir;
bright as a pin!”
“Well,” said I, “he's a very queer fellow
any how. By the way, who was that singing
just now over in the saloon there?”
“Don't know, didn't hear 'em. Some of the
boys, I s'pose. They have some lively swells
over there sometimes. Awful hole.”
I resumed my dime novel, and nothing further
transpired to aggravate or satisfy my curiosity
concerning the strange story I had heard, till
night came down and the bats began to wheel
through the moonless blackness above the
dingy town. At the coming on of dusk I
flung away the book and took to my pipe.
Some one touched me on the shoulder, rousing
me from a deep reverie, if not a doze.
“Ha, stranger, this you, eh? Berry Young's
a dyin'; go over there wi' me, will ye?”
It was the voice of Doctor Hurd.
“What need for me have you?” I replied,
rather stiffly, not much relishing this too obtrusive
familiarity.
“Well—I—I jist kinder wanted ye to go
over. The poor boy's 'bout passin' away, an'
things is a workin' so tarnation curious! Come
'long wi' me, friend, will ye?”
Something in the fellow's voice touched me,
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and without another word I arose and followed
him to the cottage. The night was intensely
black. I think it was clear, but a heavy fog
from the swamps had settled over everything,
and through this dismal veil the voices of
owls from far and near struck with hollow,
sepulchral effect.
“A heart is the trump!” sang out that alto
voice from within the saloon as we passed.
Doctor Hurd clutched my arm and muttered:
“That's that voice ag'in! Strange—strange!
Poor Berry Young!”
We entered the cottage and found ourselves
in a cosy little room, where, on a low bed, a
pale, intelligent looking young man lay, evidently
dying. He was very much emaciated,
his eyes, wonderfully large and luminous, were
sunken, and his breathing quick and difficult.
A haggard, watching-worn woman sat by his
bed. From her resemblance to him I took her
to be his sister. She was evidently very unwell
herself. We sat in silence by his bedside,
watching his life flow into eternity, till the
little clock on the mantel struck, sharp and
clear, the hour of ten.
The sound of the bell startled the sick man,
and after some incoherent mumbling he said,
quite distinctly:
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“Sister, if you ever again see Ollie Afton,
tell him—tell her—tell, say I forgive him—
say to her—him—I loved her all my life—tell
him—ah! what was I saying? Don't cry, sis,
please. What a sweet, faithful sister! Ah!
it's almost over, dear— Ah, me!”
For some minutes the sister's sobbing echoed
strangely through the house. The dying man
drew his head far down in the soft pillow. A
breath of damp air stole through the room.
All at once, right under the window by
which the bed sat, arose a touching guitar prelude—
a tangled mesh of melody—gusty, throbbing,
wandering through the room and straying
off into the night, tossing back its trembling
echoes fainter and fainter, till, as it began to
die, that same splendid alto voice caught the
key and flooded the darkness with song. The
sick man raised himself on his elbow, and his
face flashed out the terrible smile of death.
He listened eagerly. It was the song “Come
Where my Love lies Dreaming,” but who has
heard it rendered as it was that night? Every
chord of the voice was as sweet and witching
as a wind harp's, and the low, humming undertone
of the accompaniment was perfection.
Tenderly but awfully sweet, the music at
length faded into utter silence, and Berry
Young sank limp and pallid upon his pillows.
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“It is Ollie,” he hoarsely whispered. “Tell
her—tell him—O say to her for me—ah! water,
sis, it's all over!”
The woman hastened, but before she could
get the water to his lips he was dead. His
last word was Ollie.
The sister cast herself upon the dead man's
bosom and sobbed wildly, piteously. Soon
after this some neighbors came in, which gave
me an opportunity to quietly take my leave.
The night was so foggy and dark that, but
for a bright stream of light from a window of
Sheehan's saloon, it would have been hard for
me to find my way back to the hotel. I did
find it, however, and sat down upon the verandah.
I had nearly fallen asleep, thinking
over the strange occurrences of the past few
hours, when the rumble of an approaching
train of cars on the I. C. & L. from the east
aroused me, and, at the same moment, a great
noise began over in the saloon. High words,
a few bitter oaths, a struggle as of persons
fighting, a loud, sonorous crash like the crushing
of a musical instrument, and then I saw
the burly bar tender hurl some one out through
the doorway just as the express train stopped
close by.
“All aboard!” cried the conductor, waving
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his lantern. At the same time, as the bar-tender
stood in the light of his doorway, a
brickbat, whizzing from the darkness, struck
him full in the face, knocking him precipitately
back at full length on to the floor of the saloon.
“All aboard!” repeated the conductor.
“All aboard!” jeeringly echoed a delicious
alto voice; and I saw a slender man step up
on the rear platform of the smoking car. A
flash from the conductor's lantern lit up for a
moment this fellow's face, and it was the most
beautiful visage I have ever seen. Extremely
youthful, dark, resplendent, glorious, set round
with waves and ringlets of black hair—it was
such a countenance as I have imagined a
young Chaldean might have had who was
destined to the high calling of astrology. It
was a face to charm, to electrify the beholder
with its indescribable, almost unearthly loveliness
of features and expression.
The engine whistled, the bell rang, and as
the train moved on, that slender, almost
fragile form and wonderful face disappeared
in the darkness.
As the roar and clash of the receding cars
began to grow faint in the distance, a gurgling,
grunting sound over in the saloon reminded
me that the bar-tender might need some
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attention, so I stepped across the street and went
in. He was just taking himself up from the
floor, with his nose badly smashed, spurting
blood over him pretty freely. He was in an
ecstasy of fury and swore fearfully. I rendered
him all the aid I could, getting the blood
stopped, at length, and a plaster over the
wound.
“Who struck you?” I asked.
“Who struck me? Who hit me with that
'ere brick, d'ye say? Who but that little baby-faced,
hawk-eyed cuss 'at got off here yesterday!
He's a thief and a dog!—he's chowzed
me out'n my last cent! Where is he?—I'll
kill 'im yet! where is he?”
“Gone off on the train,” I replied, “but
who is he? what's his name?”
“Blamed if I know. Gone, you say? Got
every derned red o' my money! Every derned
red!”
“Don't you know anything at all about
him?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I know 'at he's the derndest, alfiredest,
snatchin'est, best poker-player 'at ever dealt
a card!”
“Is that all?”
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“That's enough, I'd say. If you'd been
beat out'n two hundred an' odd dollars you'd
think you know'd a right smart, wouldn't ye?”
“Perhaps,” said I. The question had a
world of philosophy and logic in it.
The shattered wreck of a magnificent guitar
lay in the middle of the floor. I picked it up,
and, engraved on a heavy silver plate set in
the ebony neck, I read the name, Georgina
Olive Afton.
-- -- p722-034
Trout's Luck.
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As early as eight o'clock the grand entrance
gateway to the Kokomo fair ground was
thronged with vehicles of almost every kind;
horsemen, pedestrians, dogs and dust were
borne forward together in clouds that boiled
and swayed and tumbled. Noise seemed to
be the chief purpose of every one and the one
certain result of every thing in the crowd.
This had been advertised as the merriest
day that might ever befall the quiet, honest
folk of the rural regions circumjacent to
Kokomo, and it is even hinted that aristocratic
dames and business plethoric men of the town
itself had caught somewhat of the excitement
spread abroad by the announcement in the
county papers, and by huge bills posted in
conspicuous places, touching Le Papillon and
his monster balloon, which balloon and which
Le Papillon were pictured to the life, on the
said posters, in the act of sailing over the sun,
and under the picture, in remarkably distinct
letters, “No humbug! go to the fair!”
-- 030 --
[figure description] Page 030.[end figure description]
Dozier's minstrel troupe was dancing and
singing attendance on this agricultural exhibition,
too, and somebody's whirling pavilion,
a shooting gallery, a monkey show, the glass
works, and what not of tempting promises of
entertainments, “amusing and instructive.”
Until eleven o'clock the entrance gateway
to the fair ground was crowded. Farm wagons
trundled in, drawn by sleek, well fed plough
nags, and stowed full of smiling folk, old and
young, male and female, from the out townships;
buggies with youths and maidens, the
sparkle of breastpins and flutter of ribbons;
spring wagons full of students and hard bats
from town; carriages brimming with laces,
flounces, over skirts, fancy kid gloves, funny
little hats and less bonnets, all fermented into
languid ebullition by mild-eyed ladies; omnibuses
that bore fleshy gentlemen, who wore
linen dusters and silk hats and smoked fine
cigars; and jammed in among all these were
boys on skittish colts, old fellows on flea-bit
gray mares, with now and then a reckless
stripling on a mule. Occasionally a dog got
kicked or run over, giving the assistance of
his howls and yelps to the general din, and
over all the dust hung heavily in a yellow
cloud, shot through with the lightning of
-- 031 --
[figure description] Page 031.[end figure description]
burnished trappings and echoing with the hoarse
thunder of the trampling, shouting rumbling
multitude. Indeed, that hot aguish autumn
day let fall its sunshine on the heads and blew
its feverish breath through the rifts of the
greatest and liveliest mass of people ever
assembled in Howard county.
Inside the extensive enclosure the multitude
divided itself into streams, ponds, eddies, refluent
currents and noisy whirlpools of people.
Some rare attraction was everywhere.
Early in the day the eyes of certain of the
rustic misses followed admiringly the forms of
Jack Trout and Bill Powell, handsome young
fellows dressed in homespun clothes, who,
arm in arm, strolled leisurely across the
grounds, looking sharply about for some
proper place to begin the expenditure of what
few dimes they had each been able to hoard
up against this gala day. They had not long
to hunt. On every hand the “hawkers
hawked their wares.”
Rising and falling, tender-toned, deftly managed,
a voice rang out across the crowd pleading
with those who had long desired a good
investment for their money, and begging them
to be sure and not let slip this last golden
opportunity.
-- 032 --
[figure description] Page 032.[end figure description]
“Only a half a dollah! Come right along
this way now! Here's the great golden scheme
by which thousands have amassed untold fortunes!
Here's your only and last chance to
get two ounces of first class candy, with the
probability of five dollars in gold coin, all for
the small sum of half a dollah! And the cry
is—still they come!”
The speaker was such a man as one often
observes in a first class railway car, with a
stout valise beside him containing samples,
dressed with remarkable care, and ever on the
alert to make one's acquaintance. He stood
on top of a small table or tripod, holding in
his hand a green pasteboard package just
taken from a box at his feet.
“Only a half a dollah and a fortune in your
grasp! Here's the gold! Roll right this way
and run your pockets over!”
Drifting round with the tide of impulsive
pleasure seekers into which they happened to
fall, Jack Trout and Bill Powell floated past a
bevy of lasses, the prettiest of whom was
Minny Hart, a girl whose healthy, vivid beauty
was fast luring Jack on to the rock of matrimonial
proposals.
“Jimminy, but ain't she a little sweety!”
exclaimed the latter, pinching Bill's arm as
they passed, and glancing lovingly at Minny.
-- 033 --
[figure description] Page 033.[end figure description]
“You're tellin' the truth and talkin' it
smooth,” replied Bill, bowing to the girls with
the swagger peculiar to a rustic who imagines
he has turned a fine period. And with fluttering
hearts the boys passed on.
“Roll on ye torrents! Only a half a dollah!
Right this way if you want to become a bloated
aristocrat in less than no time! Five dollahs
in gold for only a half a dollah! And whose
the next lucky man?”
Blown by the fickle, gusty breath of luck,
our two young friends were finally wafted to
the feet of this oily vendor of prize packages,
and they there lodged, becalmed in breathless
interest, to await their turn, each full of faith
in the yellow star of his fortune—a gold coin
of the value of five dollars. They stood attentively
watching the results of other men's investments,
feeling their fingers tingle when
now and then some lucky fellow drew the coveted
prize. Five dollars is a mighty temptation
to a poor country boy in Indiana. That
sum will buy oceans of fun at a fair where
almost any “sight” is to be seen for the
“small sum of twenty-five cents!”
Without stopping to take into consideration
the possible, or rather, the probable result of
such a venture, Bill Powell handed up his
-- 034 --
[figure description] Page 034.[end figure description]
half dollar to the prize man, thus risking the
major part of all the money he had, and stood
trembling with excitement while the fellow
broke open the chosen package. Was it significant
of anything that a blue jay fluttered
for a moment right over the crier's head just
at the point of his detaching some glittering
object from the contents of the box?
“Here you are, my friend; luck's a fortune!”
yelled the man, as he held the gold coin high
above his head, shaking it in full view of all
eyes in the multitude. “Here you are! which
'd you rather have, the gold or five and a half
in greenbacks?”
“Hand me in the rag chips—gold don't feel
good to my fingers,” answered Bill Powell,
swaggering again and grasping the currency
with a hand that shook with eagerness.
Jack Trout stood by, clutching in his feverish
palm a two-dollar bill. His face was pale,
his lips set, his muscles rigid. He hesitated
to trust in the star of his destiny. He stood
eyeing the bridge of Lodi, the dykes of Arcole.
Would he risk all on a bold venture? His
right shoulder began to twitch convulsively.
“Still it rolls, and who's the next lucky
man? Don't all speak at once! Who wants
five dollahs in gold and two ounces of
-- 035 --
[figure description] Page 035.[end figure description]
delicious candy, all for the small sum of half a
dollah?”
Jack made a mighty effort and passed up
his two dollar bill.
“Bravely done; select your packages!”
cried the vendor. Jack tremblingly pointed
them out. Very carelessly and quietly the fellow
opened them, and with a ludicrous grimace
remarked—
“Eight ounces of mighty sweet candy, but
nary a prize! Better luck next time! Only a
half a dollah! And who's the next lucky man?”
A yell of laughter from the crowd greeted
this occurrence, and Jack floated back on the
recoiling waves of his chagrin till he was hidden
in the dense concourse, and the uppermost
thought in his mind found forcible expression
in the three monosyllables: “Hang
the luck!”
It is quite probable that of all the unfortunate
adventurers that day singed in the yellow
fire of that expert gambler's gold, Jack
recognized himself as the most terribly burned.
Putting his hands into his empty pockets, he
sauntered dolefully about, scarcely able to
look straight into the face of such friends as
he chanced to meet. He acted as if hunting
for something lost on the ground. Poor
-- 036 --
[figure description] Page 036.[end figure description]
fellow, it was a real relief to him when some one
treated him to a glass of lemonade, and, indeed,
so much were his feelings relieved by
the cool potation, that when, soon after, he met
Minny Hart, he was actually smiling.
“O, Jack!” cried the pretty girl, “I'm so
glad to see you just now, for I do want to go
into the minstrel show so bad!” She shot a
glance of coquettish tenderness right into Jack's
heart. For a single moment he was blessed,
but on feeling for his money and recalling the
luckless result of his late venture, he felt a
chill creep up his back, and a lump of the size
of his fist jump up into his throat. Here was
a bad affair for him. He stood for a single
point of time staring into the face of his
despair, then, acting on the only plan he could
think of to escape from the predicament, he
said:
“Wait a bit, Minny, I've got to go jist down
here a piece to see a feller. I'll be back
d'rectly. You stay right here and when I
come back I'll trot you in.”
So speaking, as if in a great hurry, and
sweating cold drops, with a ghastly smile
flickering on his face, the young man slipped
away into the crowd.
Minny failed to notice his confusion, and so
-- 037 --
[figure description] Page 037.[end figure description]
called after him cheerily: “Well, hurry, Jack,
for I'm most dead to see the show!”
What could Trout do? He spun round and
round in that vast flood of people like a fish
with but one eye. He rushed here, he darted
there, and ever and anon, as a lost man returns
upon his starting point, he came in sight of
sweet Minny Hart patiently waiting for his
return. Then he would spring back into the
crowd like a deer leaping back into a thicket
at sight of a hunter. Penniless at the fair,
with Minny Hart waiting for him to take her
into the show! Few persons can realize how
keenly he now felt the loss of his money. He
ought, no doubt, to have told the lass at once
just how financial matters stood; but nothing
was more remote from his mind than doing
anything of the kind. He was too vain.
“Tell 'er I 'ain't got no money! No, sir-ee!”
he muttered. “But what am I to do? Bust
the luck! Hang the luck! Rot the luck!”
He hurried hither and thither, intent on
nothing and taking no heed of the course he
pursued. His cheeks were livid and his eyes
had in them that painful, worried, wistful look
so often seen in the eyes of men going home
from ruin on Wall street.
Meantime that sea of persons surged this
-- 038 --
[figure description] Page 038.[end figure description]
way and that, flecked with a foam of ribbons
and dancing bubbles of hats, now flowing
slowly through the exhibition rooms a tide of
critics, now breaking into groups and scattered
throngs of babblers, anon uniting to roar
round some novel engine suddenly set to work,
or to break on the barrier of the trolling ring
into a spray of cravats and a mist of flounces.
Swimming round in this turbulent tide like a
crazy flounder with but one fin, Jack finally
found himself hard by the pavilion of the
minstrels. He could hear somewhat of the
side-splitting jokes, with the laughs that
followed, the tinkle of banjo accompaniments
and the mellow cadences of plantation songs,
the rattle of castanets and the tattoo of the jig
dancers' feet. A thirst like the thirst of fever
took hold of him.
“Come straight along gentlemen and ladies!
This celebrated troupe is now performing and
twenty-five cents pays the bill! Only a
quawtah of a dollah!” bawled the fat crier
from his lofty perch. “That's right, my young
man, take the young lady in! She's sure to
love you better; walk right along!”
“Her lip am sweet as sugah,
Her eye am bright as wine,
Dat yaller little boogah
Her name am Emiline!”
-- 039 --
[figure description] Page 039.[end figure description]
sung by four fine voices, came bubbling from
within. The music thrilled Jack to the bone,
and he felt once more for his money. Not a
cent. This was bad.
“You're the lad for me,” continued the fat
man on the high seat; “take your nice little
sweetheart right in and let her see the fun.
Walk right in!”
Jack looked to see who it was, and a pang
shot through his heart and settled in the very
marrow of his bones; for lo! arm in arm, Bill
Powell and Minny Hart passed under the
pavilion into the full glory of the show!
“O cut me up for fish bait
An' feed me to de swine,
Don't care where I goes to
So I has Emiline!”
sang the minstrel chorus.
“Dast him, he's got me!” muttered Jack as
Bill and Minny disappeared within. He turned
away, sick at heart, and this was far from the
first throe of jealousy he had suffered on Bill's
account. Indeed it had given him no little
uneasiness lately to see how sweetly Minny
sometimes smiled on young Powell.
“Yes, sir,” Jack continued to mutter to
himself, “yes, sir, he's got me! He's about
-- 040 --
[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]
three lengths ahead o' me, as these hoss fellers
says, an' I don't know but what I'm distanced.
Blow the blasted luck!”
Heartily tired of the fair, burning with rage,
and jealousy, and despair, but still vaguely
hoping against hope for some better luck from
some visionary source, Jack strolled about,
chewing the bitter cud of his feelings, his
hands up to his elbows in his trowser pockets
and his soul up to its ears in the flood of discontent.
He puckered his mouth into whistling
position, but it refused to whistle. He felt as
if he had a corn cob crossways in his throat.
The wind blew his new hat off and a mule
kicked the top out of the crown.
“Only a half a dollah! Who's the next
lucky man?” cried the prize package fellow.
“I'm now going to sell a new sort of packages,
each of which, beside the usual amount of
choice candy, contains a piece of jewelry of
pure gold! Who takes the first chance for
only a half a dollah?”
“'Ere's your mule!” answered Bill Powell,
as with Minny still clinging to his arm, he
pushed through the crowd and handed up the
money.
“Bravely done!” shouted the crier; “see
what a beautiful locket and chain! Luck's a
-- 041 --
[figure description] Page 041.[end figure description]
fortune! And who's the next to invest?
Come right along and don't be afraid of a little
risk! Only a half a dollah!”
Jack saw Bill put the glittering chain round
Minny's neck and fasten the locket in her belt;
saw the eyes of the sweet girl gleam proudly,
gratefully; saw black spots dancing before
his own eyes; saw Bill swagger and toss his
head. He turned dizzily away, whispering
savagely, “Dern 'im!”
Just here let me say that such an expression
is not a profane one. I once saw a preacher
kick at a little dog that got in his way on the
sidewalk. The minister's foot missed the
little dog and hit an iron fence, and the little
dog bit the minister's other leg and jumped
through the fence. The minister performed
a pas de zephyr and very distinctly said “Dern
'im!” Wherefore I don't think it can be anything
more than a mere puff of fretfulness.
After this Jack was for some time standing
near the entrance to the “glass-works,” a
place where transparent steam engines and
wonderful fountains were on exhibition. He
felt a grim delight in tantalizing himself with
looking at the pictures of these things and
wishing he had money enough to pay the
entrance fee. He saw persons pass in eagerly
-- 042 --
[figure description] Page 042.[end figure description]
and come out calm and satisfied—men with
their wives and children, young men with girls
on their arms, prominent among whom were
Bill and Minny, and one dapper sportsman
even bought a ticket for his setter, and, patting
the brute on the head, took him in.
“Onery nor a dog!” hissed Jack, shambling
off, and once more taking a long deep dive
under the surface of the crowd. A ground
swell cast him again near the vender of prize
packages.
“Only a half a dollah!” he yelled; “come
where fortune smiles, and cares and poverty
take flight, for only a half a dollah!”
“Jist fifty cents more'n I've got about my
clothes!” replied Jack, and the bystanders,
taking this for great wit, joined in a roar of
laughter, while with a grim smile the desperate
youth passed on till he found himself
near the toe mark of a shooting gallery, where
for five cents one might have two shots with
an air gun. He stood there for a time watching
a number of persons try their marksmanship.
It was small joy to know that he was
a fine off-hand shot, so long as he had not a
nickel in his pocket, but still he stood there
wishing he might try his hand.
“Cl'ar the track here! Let this 'ere lady
-- 043 --
[figure description] Page 043.[end figure description]
take a shoot!” cried a familiar voice; and a
way was opened for Bill Powell and Minny
Hart. The little maiden was placed at the
toe mark and a gun given to her. She handled
the weapon like one used to it. She raised it,
shut one eye, took deliberate aim and fired.
“Centre!” roared the marker, as to the sound
of a bell the funny little puppet leaped up and
grinned above the target. Every body standing
near laughed and some of the boys cheered
vociferously. Minny looked sweeter than ever.
Jack Trout felt famished. He begged a chew
of tobacco of a stranger, and, grinding the
weed furiously, walked off to where the yellow
pavilion with its painted air-boats was whirling
its cargoes of happy boys and girls round
and round for the “Small sum of ten cents.”
A long, lean, red-headed fellow in one of the
boats was paying for a ride of limitless length
by scraping on a miserable fiddle. To Jack
this seemed small labor for so much fun. How
he envied the fiddler as he flew round, trailing
his tunes behind him!
“Wo'erp there! Stop yer old merchine!
We'll take a ride ef ye don't keer!”
The pavilion was stopped, a boat lowered
for Bill Powell and Minny Hart, who got in
side by side, and the fiddler struck up the
-- 044 --
[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]
tune of “Black-eyed Susie.” Jack watched
that happy couple go round and round, till,
by the increased velocity, their two faces
melted into one, which was neither Bill's nor
Minny's—it was Luck's!
“He's got one onto me,” muttered Jack;
“I've got no money, can't fiddle for a ride, nor
nothin', and I don't keer a ding what becomes
o' me, nohow!”
With these words Jack wended his way to a
remote part of the fair ground, where, under
gay awnings, the sutlers had spread their
tempting variety of cakes, pies, fruits, nuts
and loaves. Here were persons of all ages and
sizes—men, women and children—eating at
well supplied tables. The sight was a fascinating
one, and, though seeing others eat did not
in the least appease his own hunger, Jack
stood for a long time watching the departure
of pies and the steady lessening of huge pyramids
of sweet cakes. He particularly noticed
one little table that had on its centre a huge
peach pie, which table was yet unoccupied.
While he was actually thinking over the plan
of eating the pie and trusting to his legs to
bear him beyond the reach of a dun, Bill and
Minny sat down by the table and proceeded to
discuss the delicious, red-hearted heap of pastry.
At this point Bill caught Jack's eye:
-- 045 --
[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]
“Come here, Jack,” said he; “this pie's
more'n we can eat, come and help us.”
“Yes, come along, Jack,” put in Minny in
her sweetest way; “I want to tell you what a
lot of fun we've had, and more than that, I
want to know why you didn't come back and
take me into the show!”
“I ain't hungry,” muttered Jack, “and besides
I've got to go see a feller.”
He turned away almost choking.
“Bill's got me. 'Taint no use talkin', I'm
played out for good. I'm a trumped Jack!”
He smiled a sort of flinty smile at his poor
wit, and shuffled aimlessly along through the
densest clots of the crowd.
And it so continued to happen, that wherever
Jack happened to stop for any considerable
length of time he was sure to see Bill and
Minny enjoying some rare treat, or disappearing
in or emerging from some place of amusement.
At last, driven to desperation, he determined
on trying to borrow a dollar from his father.
He immediately set about to find the old gentleman;
a task of no little difficulty in such a
crowd. It was Jack's forlorn hope, and it had
a gloomy outlook; for old 'Squire Trout was
thought by competent judges to be the stin
-- 048 --
[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]
giest man in the county. But hoping for the
best, Jack hunted him here, there and everywhere,
till at length he met a friend who said
hc had seen the 'Squire in the act of leaving
the fair ground for home just a few minutes
before.
Taking no heed of what folks might say,
Jack, on receiving this intelligence, darted
across the ground, out at the gate and down
the road at a speed worthy of success; but
alas! his hopes were doomed to wilt. At the
first turn of the road he met a man who informed
him that he had passed 'Squire Trout
some three miles out on his way home, which
home was full nine miles distant!
Panting, crestfallen, defeated, done for, poor
Jack slowly plodded back to the fair ground
gate, little dreaming of the new trouble that
awaited him there.
“Ticket!” said a gruff voice as he was about
to pass in. He recoiled, amazed at his own
stupidity, as he recollected that hc had not
thought to get a check as he went out! He
tried to explain, but it was no go.
“You needn't try that game on me,” said
the gatekeeper. “So just plank down your
money or stay outside.”
Then Jack got furious, but the gatekeeper
-- 047 --
[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]
remarked that he had frequently “hearn it
thunder afore this!”
Jack smiled like a corpse and turned away.
Going a short distance down the road he climbed
up and sat down on top of the fence of a late
mown clover field. Then he took out his jack-knife
and began to whittle a splinter plucked
from a rail. His face was gloomy, his eyes
lustreless. Finally he stretched himself, hungry,
jealous, envious, hateful, on top of the
fence with his head between the crossed stakes.
His face thus upturned to heaven, he watched
two crows drift over, high up in the torrid
reaches of autumn air, hot as summer, even
hotter, and allowed his lips free privilege to
anathematize his luck. For a long time he lay
thus, dimly conscious of the blue bird's song
and the water-like ripple of the grass in the
fence corners. “Minny, Minny Hart, Minny!”
sang the meadow larks, and the burden of the
grasshopper's ditty was— “Only a half a
dollah!”
All at once there arose from the fair ground
a mighty chorus of yells, that went echoing off
across the country to the bluffs of Wild-cat
Creek and died far off in the woods toward
Greentown. Jack did not raise his head, but
lay there in a sort of morose stupor, knowing
-- 048 --
[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]
well that whatever the sport might be, he had
no hand in it.
“Let 'em rip!” he muttered, “Bill's got me!”
Presently the wagons and other vehicles began
to leave the ground, from one of which he
caught the sound of a sweet, familiar voice.
He looked just in time to get a glimpse of Mr.
Hart's wagon, and in it, side by side, Bill Powell
and Minny! A cloud of yellow dust soon hid
them, and turning away his head, happening
to glance upward, Jack saw, just disappearing
in a thin white cloud, the golden disc of Le
Papillon's balloon!
He immediately descended from his perch
and began plodding his way home, muttering
as he did so—
“Dast the luck! Ding the prize package
feller! Doggone Bill Powell! Blame the old
b'loon! Dern everybody!”
It was long after nightfall when he reached
his father's gate. Hungry, weak, foot-sore,
collapsed, he leaned his chin on the top rail
of the gate and stood there for a moment while
the starlight fell around him, sifted through
the dusky foliage of the old beech trees, and
from the far dim caverns of the night a voice
smote on his ear, crying out tenderly, mockingly,
persuasively —
-- 049 --
[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]
“Only a half a dollah!”
And Jack slipped to his room and went supperless
to bed, often during the night muttering,
through the interstices of his sleep—
“Bill's got me!”
-- -- p722-055
Big Medicine.
[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]
The corner brick storehouse—in fact the
only brick building in Jimtown—was to be
sold at auction; and, consequently, by ten
o'clock in the morning, a considerable body of
men had collected near the somewhat dilapidated
house, directly in front of which the
auctioneer, a fat man from Indianapolis,
mounted on an old goods box, began crying,
partly through his tobacco-filled mouth and
partly through his very unmusical nose, as
follows:—
“Come up, gentlemen, and examine the
new, beautiful and commodious property I
now offer for sale! Walk round the house,
men, and view it from every side. Go into it,
if you like, up stairs and down, and then give
me a bid, somebody, to start with. It is a
very desirable house, indeed, gentlemen.”
With this preliminary puff, the speaker
paused and glanced slowly over his audience
with the air of a practiced physiognomist.
-- 051 --
[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]
The crowd before him was, in many respects,
an interesting one. Its most prominent individual,
and the hero of this sketch, was Dave
Cook, sometimes called Dr. Cook, but more
commonly answering to the somewhat savage
sounding sobriquet of Big Medicine—a man
some thirty-five years of age, standing six feet
six in his ponderous boots; broad, bony, muscular,
a real giant, with a strongly marked
Roman face, and brown, shaggy hair. He was
dressed in a soiled and somewhat patched suit
of butternut jeans, topped off with a wide
rimmed wool hat, wonderfully battered, and
lopped in every conceivable way. He wore a
watch, the chain of which, depending from the
waistband of his pants, was of iron, and would
have weighed fully a pound avoirdupois. He
stood quite still, near the auctioneer, smoking
a clay pipe, his herculean arms folded on his
breast, his feet far apart. As for the others
of the crowd, they were, taken collectively,
about such as one used always to see in the
“dark corners” of Indiana, such as Boone
county used to be before the building of any
railroads through it, such as the particular
locality of Jimtown was before the ditching
law and the I. B. & W. Railway had lifted
the fog and enlightened the miasmatic swamps
-- 052 --
[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]
and densely timbered bog lands of that region
of elms, burr oaks, frogs and herons. Big
Medicine seemed to be the only utterly complacent
man in the assembly. All the others
discovered evidences of much inward disturbance,
muttering mysteriously to each other,
and casting curious, inquiring glances at an
individual, a stranger in the place, who, with
a pair of queer green spectacles astride his
nose, and his arms crossed behind him, was
slowly sauntering about the building offered
for sale, apparently examining it with some
care. His general appearance was that of a
well dressed gentleman, which of itself was
enough to excite remark in Jimtown, especially
when an auction was on hand, and
everybody felt jolly.
“Them specs sticks to that nose o' his'n like
a squir'l to a knot!” said one.
“His pantaloons is ruther inclined to be
knock-kneed,” put in an old, grimy sinner
leaning on a single barrelled shot gun.
“Got lard enough onto his hair to shorten a
mess o' pie crust,” added a liver colored boy.
“Walks like he'd swallered a fence rail,
too,” chimed in a humpbacked fellow split
almost to his chin.
“Chaws mighty fine terbacker, you bet.”
-- 053 --
[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]
“Them there boots o' his'n set goin' an'
comin' like a grubbin' hoe onto a crooked
han'le.”
“Well, take 'm up one side and down t'other,
he's a mod'rately onery lookin' feller.”
These remarks were reckoned smart by those
who perpetrated them, and were by no means
meant for real slurs on the individual at whom
they were pointed. Indeed they were delivered
in guarded undertones, so that he might
not hear them; and he, meanwhile, utterly
ignorant of affording any sport, continued his
examination of the house, the while some happy
frogs in a neighboring pond rolled out a rattling,
jubilant chorus, and the summer wind
poured through the leafy tops of the tall elms
and athletic burr oaks with a swash and roar
like a turbulent river.
“What am I now offered for this magnificent
property? Come, give me a bid! Speak
up lively! What do I hear for the house?”
The auctioneer, as he spoke, let his eyes
wander up the walls of the old, dingy building,
to where the blue birds and the peewees had
built in the cracks and along the warped cornice
and broken window frames, and just then
it chanced that a woman's face appeared at
one of those staring holes, which, with broken
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lattice and shattered glass, still might be
called a window. The face was a plump,
cheerful one, the more radiant from contrast
with the dull wall around it—a face one could
never forget, however, and would recall often,
if for nothing but the fine fall of yellow hair
that framed it in. It was a sweet, winning,
intellectual face, full of the gentlest womanly
charms.
“Forty dollars for the house, 'oman and
all!” cried Big Medicine, gazing up at the
window in which, for the merest moment, the
face appeared.
The man with the green spectacles darted a
quick glance at the speaker.
“I am bid forty dollars, gentlemen, forty
dollars, do all hear? Agoing for forty dollars!
Who says fifty?” bawled the auctioneer.
The crowd now swayed earnestly forward,
closing in solid order around the goods box.
Many whiskered, uncouth, but not unkindly
faces were upturned to the window only in
time to see the beautiful woman disappear
quite hastily.
“Hooray for the gal!” cried a lusty youth,
whose pale blue eyes made no show of contrast
with his faded hair and aguish complexion.
“Dad, can't ye bid agin the doctor so as I kin
claim 'er?”
-- 055 --
[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]
“Fifty dollars!” shouted the sunburnt man
addressed as Dad.
This made the crowd lively. Every man
nudged his neighbor, and the aguish, blue-eyed
boy grinned in a ghastly, self-satisfied
way.
“Agoing at fifty dollars! Fiddlesticks! The
house is worth four thousand. No fooling here
now! Agoing at only fifty dollars—going—”
“Six hundred dollars,” said he of the green
glasses in a clear, pleasant voice.
“Six hundred dollars!” echoed the auctioneer
in a triumphant thunderous tone.
“That sounds like business. Who says the
other hundred?”
“Hooray for hooray, and hooray for hooray's
daddy!” shouted the tallow-faced lad.
The frogs pitched their song an octave
higher, the blue birds and peewees wheeled
through the falling floods of yellow sunlight,
and lower and sweeter rose the murmur of the
tide of pulsating air as it lifted and swayed
the fresh sprays of the oaks and elms. The
well dressed stranger lighted a cigar, took off
his green glasses and put them carefully in his
pocket, then took a cool straight look at Big
Medicine.
The Roman face of the latter was just then
-- 056 --
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a most interesting one. It was expressive of
more than words could rightly convey. Six
hundred dollars, cash down, was a big sum
for the crazy old house, but he had made up
his mind to buy it, and now he seemed likely
to have to let it go or pay more than it was
worth. The stem of his clay pipe settled back
full three inches into his firmly-set mouth, so
that there seemed imminent danger to the
huge brown moustache that overhung the
fiery bowl. He returned the stare of the
stranger with interest, and said—
“Six hundred an' ten dollars.”
“Agoing, a—,” began the auctioneer.
“Six twenty,” said the stranger.
“Ago—.”
“Six twenty-one!” growled Big Medicine.
“Six twenty-five!” quickly added his antagonist.
Big Medicine glanced heavenward, and for
a moment allowed his eyes to follow the flight
of a great blue heron that slowly winged its
way, high up in the yellow summer reaches of
splendor, toward the distant swamps where
the white sycamores spread their fanciful arms
above the dark green maples and dusky witchhazel
thickets. The auctioneer, a close observer,
saw an ashy hue, a barely discernible
-- 057 --
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shade, ripple across the great Roman face as
Big Medicine said, in a jerking tone:
“Six twenty-five and a half!”
The stranger took his cigar from his mouth
and smiled placidly. No more imperturbable
countenance could be imagined.
“Six twenty-six!” he said gently.
“Take the ole house an' be derned to you!”
cried Big Medicine, looking furiously at his
antagonist. “Take the blamed ole shacke-merack
an' all the cussed blue-birds an' peer-weers
to boot, for all I keer!”
Everybody laughed, and the auctioneer continued:
“Agoing for six twenty-six! Who says
seven hundred? Bid up lively! Agoing
once, agoing twice—once, twice, three-e-e-e-e
times! Sold to Abner Golding for six hundred
and twenty-six dollars, and as cheap as dirt
itself!”
“Hooray for the man who hed the most
money!” shouted the tallow-faced boy.
The sale was at an end. The auctioneer
came down from his box and wiped his face
with a red handkerchief. The crowd, as if
blown apart by a puff of wind, scattered this
way and that, drifting into small, grotesque
groups to converse together on whatever topic
-- 058 --
[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]
might happen to suggest itself. Big Medicine
seemed inclined to be alone, but the irrepressible
youth of the saffron skin ambled up
to him and said, in a tone intended for comic:
“Golly, doctor, but didn't that 'ere gal
projuce a orful demand for the ole house!
Didn't she set the ole trap off when she peeked
out'n the winder!”
Big Medicine looked down at the strapping
boy, much as a lion might look at a field rat
or a weasel, then he doubled his hand into
an enormous fist and held it under the youth's
nose, saying in a sort of growl as he did so:
“You see this 'ere bundle o' bones, don't
ye?”
“Guess so,” replied the youth.
“Well, would you like a small mess of it?”
“Not as anybody knows of.”
“Well, then, keep yer derned mouth shet!”
Which, accordingly, the boy proceeded to
do, ambling off as quickly as possible.
About this time, the stranger, having put
the green spectacles back upon his nose,
walked in the direction of 'Squire Tadmore's
office, accompanied by the young woman who
had looked from the window. When Big
Medicine saw them he picked up a stick and
began furiously to whittle it with his
-- 059 --
[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]
jackknife. His face wore a comically mingled
look of chagrin, wonder, and something like a
new and thrilling delight. He puffed out
great volumes of smoke, making his pipe
wheeze audibly under the vigor of his draughts.
He was certainly excited.
“Orful joke the boys 'll have on me arter
this,” he muttered to himself. “Wonder if
the 'oman's the feller's wife? Monstrous
poorty, shore's yer born!”
He soon whittled up one stick. He immediately
dived for another, this time getting
hold of a walnut knot. A tough thing to
whittle, but he attacked it as if it had been a
bit of white pine. Soon after this 'Squire Tadmore's
little boy came running down from his
father's office to where Big Medicine stood.
“Mr. Big Medicine,” cried he, all out of
breath, “that 'ere man what bought the ole
house wants to see you partic'ler!”
“Mischief he does! Tell 'im to go to—;
no, wait a bit. Guess I'll go tell 'im myself.”
And, so saying, he moved at a slashing
pace down to the door of the 'Squire's office.
He thrust his great hirsute head inside the
room, and glaring at the mild mannered
stranger, said:
“D'ye want to see me?”
-- 060 --
[figure description] Page 060.[end figure description]
Mr. Golding got up from his seat and coming
out took Big Medicine familiarly by the arm,
meanwhile smiling in the most friendly way.
“Come one side a little, I wish to speak
with you privately, confidentially.”
Big Medicine went rather sulkily along.
When they had gone some distance from the
house Mr. Golding lifted his spectacles from
his nose, and turning his calm, smiling eyes
full upon those of Big Medicine, said, with a
shrug of his finely cut shoulders:
“I outbid you a little, my friend, but I'm
blessed if I haven't got myself into a ridiculous
scrape on account of it.”
“How so?” growled Big Medicine.
“Why, when I come to count my funds I'm
short a half dollar.”
“You're what?”
“I lack just a half dollar of having enough
money to pay for the house, and I thought I'd
rather ask you to loan me the money than anybody
else here.”
Big Medicine stood for a time in silence, whittling
away, as if for dear life, on the curly knot.
Dreamy gusts of perfumed heat swept by from
adjacent clover and wheat fields, where the
blooms hung thick; little whirlwinds played
in the dust at their feet as little whirlwinds
-- 061 --
[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]
always do in summer; and far away, faint, and
made tenderly musical by distance, were heard
the notes of a country dinner-horn. Big Medicine's
ample chest swelled, and swelled, and
then he burst at the mouth with a mighty bass
laugh, that went battling and echoing round
the place. Mr. Golding laughed too, in his own
quiet, gentlemanly way. They looked at each
other and laughed, then looked off toward the
swamps and laughed. Big Medicine put his
hands in his pockets almost up to the elbows,
and leaned back and laughed out of one corner
of his mouth while holding his pipe in the other.
“I say, mister,” said he at length, “a'n't you
railly got but six hundred and twenty-five an'
a half?”
“Just that much to a cent, and no more,”
replied Mr. Golding, with a comical smile and
bow.
Big Medicine took his pipe from his mouth,
gave the walnut knot he had dropped a little
kick and guffawed louder and longer than before.
To have been off at a little distance
watching them would have convinced any one
that Mr. Golding was telling some rare anecdote,
and that Big Medicine was convulsed
with mirth, listening.
“Well I'm derned if 'taint quare,” cried the
-- 062 --
[figure description] Page 062.[end figure description]
latter, wringing himself into all sorts of grotesque
attitudes in the ecstasy of his amusement.
“You outbid me half a dollar and then
didn't have the half a dollar neither! Wha,
wha, wha-ee!” and his cachinnations sounded
like rolling of moderate thunder.
At the end of this he took out a greasy wallet
and paid Mr. Golding the required amount
in silver coin. His chagrin had vanished before
the stranger's quiet way of making friends.
A week passed over Jimtown. A week of
as rare June weather as ever lingered about
the cool places of the woods, or glimmered
over the sweet clover fields all red with a blush
of bloom, where the field larks twittered and
the buntings chirped, and where the laden bees
rose heavily to seek their wild homes in the
hollows of the forests. By this time it was
generally known in Jimtown that Mr. Golding
would soon receive a stock of goods with which
to open a “store” in the old corner brick; but
Big Medicine knew more than any of his neighbors,
for he and Golding had formed a partnership
to do business under the “name and
style” of Cook & Golding.
This Abner Golding had lately been a
wealthy retail man in Cincinnati, and had lost
everything by the sudden suspension of a bank
-- 063 --
[figure description] Page 063.[end figure description]
wherein the bulk of his fortune was on deposit.
His creditors had made a run on him and he
had been able to save just the merest remnant
of his goods, and a few hundred dollars in
money. Thus he came to Jimtown to begin
life and business anew.
To Big Medicine the week had been a long
one; why, it would not be easy to tell. No
doubt there had come a turning point in his
life. In those days, and in that particular
region, to be a `store keeper' was no small
honor. But Big Medicine acted strangely.
He wandered about, with his hands in his
pockets, whistling plaintive tunes, and often
he was seen standing out before the old corner
brick, gazing up at one of the vacant windows
where pieces of broken lattice were swaying
in the wind. At such times he muttered softly
to himself:
“Ther's wher I fust seed the gal.”
Four big road wagons (loaded with boxes),
three of them containing the merchandise and
one the scanty household furniture of Mr.
Golding and his daughter Carrie, came rumbling
into Jimtown. Big Medicine was on
hand, a perfect Hercules at unloading and unpacking.
Mr. Golding was sadly pleasant;
Carrie was roguishly observant, but womanly
and quiet.
-- 064 --
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The tallow-faced youth and two or three
others stood by watching the proceedings. The
former occasionally made a remark at which
the others never failed to laugh.
“Ef ye'll notice, now,” said he, “it's a fac 'at
whenever Big Medicine goes to make a big
surge to lift a box, he fust takes a peep at the
gal, an' that 'ere seems to kinder make 'im
`wax strong an' multiply,' as the preacher
says, an' then over goes the box!”
“Has a awful effect on his narves,” some
one replied.
“I'm a thinkin',” added tallow-face, “'at ef
Big Medicine happens to look at the gal about
the time he goes to make a trade, it 'll have
sich a power on 'im 'at he'll sell a yard o' caliker
for nigh onto forty dollars!”
“Er a blanket overcoat for 'bout twelve an'
a half cents!” put in another.
“I'm kinder weakly,” resumed tallow-face
with a comical leer at Big Medicine; “wonder
if 't wouldn't be kinder strengthnin' on me ef
I'd kinder sidle up towards the gal myself?”
“I'll sidle up to you!” growled Big Medicine;
and making two strides of near ten feet
each, he took the youth by his faded flaxen
hair, and holding him clear of the ground, administered
a half dozen or so of resounding
-- 065 --
[figure description] Page 065.[end figure description]
kicks, then tossed him to one side, where he
fell in a heap on the ground. When he got on
his feet again he began to bristle up and show
fight, but when Big Medicine reached for him
he ambled off.
In due time the goods were all placed on the
shelves and Mr. Golding's household furniture
arranged in the upper rooms where he purposed
living, Carrie acting as housekeeper.
On the first evening after all things had been
put to rights, Mr. Golding said to Big Medicine:
“I suppose we ought to advertise.”
“Do how?”
“Advertise.”
“Sartinly,” said Big Medicine, having not
the faintest idea of what his partner meant.
“Who can we get to paint our fence advertisements?”
A gleam of intelligence shot from Big Medicine's
eyes. He knew now what was wanted.
He remembered once, on a visit to Crawfordsville,
seeing these fence advertisements. He
comprehended in a moment.
“O, I know what ye mean, now,” he said,
with a grin, as if communing with himself on
some novel suggestion. “I guess I kin 'tend
to that my own self. The moon shines to-night,
don't it?”
-- 066 --
[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]
“Yes; why?”
“I'll do the paintin' to-night. A good ijee
has jist struck me. You jist leave it all to me.”
So the thing was settled, and Big Medicine
was gone all night.
The next day was a sluice of rain. It poured
incessantly from daylight till dark. Big Medicine
sat on the counter in the corner brick
and chuckled. His thoughts were evidently
very pleasant ones. Mr. Golding was busy
marking goods and Carrie was helping him.
The great grey eyes of Big Medicine followed
the winsome girl all the time. When night
came, and she went up stairs, he said to
Golding:
“That gal o' your'n is a mighty smart little
'oman.”
“Yes, and she's all I have left,” replied Mr.
Golding in a sad tone.
Big Medicine stroked his brown beard, whistled
a few turns of a jig tune, and, jumping
down from the counter, went out into the drizzly
night. A few rods from the house he turned
and looked up at the window. A little form
was just vanishing from it.
“Ther's wher I fust seed the gal,” he murmured,
then turned and went his way, occupied
with strange, sweet imaginings. As a matter
-- 067 --
[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]
of the merest conjecture, it is interesting to
dwell upon the probable turn taken by his
thoughts as he slowly stalked through the
darkness and rain that night; but I shall not
trench on what, knowing all that I do, seems
sanctified and hallowed. It would be breaking
a sacred confidence. Who has stood and
watched for a form at a window? Who has
expressed, in language more refined, to the
inner fountain of human sympathy, the idea
conveyed in the rough fellow's remark? Who
that has, let him recall the time and the place
holy in his memory.
“Ther's wher I fust seed the gal,” said the
man, and went away to his lonely bed to dream
the old new dream. All night the rain fell,
making rich music on the roof and pouring
through his healthy slumber a sound like
the flowing of strange rivers in a land of new
delights—a land into which he had strayed
hand in hand with some one, the merest touch
of whose hand was rapture, the simplest utterance
of whose voice was charming beyond
expression. The old new dream. The dream
of flesh that is divine—the vision of blood
that is love's wine—the apocalypse that bewildered
the eyes of the old singer when from
a flower of foam in the sweet green sea rose
-- 068 --
[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]
the Cytherean Venus. We have all dreamed
the dream and found it sweet.
It is quite probable that no fence advertisements
ever paid as well, or stirred up as big a
“muss” as those painted by Big Medicine on
the night mentioned heretofore. As an artist
our Hoosier was not a genius, but he certainly
understood how to manufacture a notoriety.
If space permitted I would copy all those rude
notices for your inspection; but I must be content
with a few random specimens taken from
memory, with an eye to brevity. They are
characteristic of the man and in somewhat an
index of the then state of society in and
around Jimtown. On Deacon Jones's fence
was scrawled the following: “Dern yer ole
sole, ef yer want good Koffy go to Cook &
Golding's nu stoar.”
John Butler, a nice old quaker, had the
following daubed on his gate: “Yu thievin'
duk-legged ya and na ole cuss, ef the sperit
muves ye, go git a broad-brimmed straw hat
at Cook & Golding's great stand at Jimtown.”
The side of William Smith's pig pen bore
this: “Bill, ye ornery sucker, come traid with
Cook & Golding at the ole corner brick in Jimtown.”
Old Peter Gurley found writing to the
following effect on his new wagon bed: “Ef
-- 069 --
[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]
yoor dri or anything, you'll find a virtoous Kag
of ri licker at Cook & Golding's.” On a large
plank nailed to a tree at Canaan's Cross Roads
all passers by saw the following: “Git up
an brindle! Here's yer ole and faithful mewl!
Come in gals and git yer dofunny tricks and
fixens, hats, caps, bonnets, parrysols, silk
petty-coat-sleeves and other injucements too
noomerous too menshen! Rip in—we're on it!
Call at Cook & Golding's great corner brick!”
These are fair specimens of what appeared
everywhere. How one man could have done
so much in one night remains a mystery.
Some people swore, some threatened to prosecute,
but finally everybody went to the corner
brick to trade. Jimtown became famous on
account of Big Medicine and the corner brick
store.
The sun rose through the morning gate beyond
the quagmires east of Jimtown and set
through the evening gate past the ponds and
maple swamps to the west. The winds blew
and there were days of calm. The weather
ran through its mutations of heat and cold.
The herons flew over, the blue birds twittered
and went away and came again, and the peewees
disappeared and returned. A whole year
had rolled round and it was June again, with
-- 070 --
[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]
the air full of rumors about the building of a
railroad through Jimtown.
During this flow of time Big Medicine had
feasted his eyes on the bright curls and brighter
eyes of Carrie Golding, till his heart had become
tender and happy as a child's. They
rarely conversed more than for him to say,
“Miss Carrie, look there,” or for her to call out,
“Please, Mr. Cook, hand me down this bolt of
muslin.” But Big Medicine was content.
It was June the 8th, about ten o'clock in the
morning, and Big Medicine was slowly making
his way from his comfortable bachelor's cabin
to the corner brick. A peculiar smile was on
his face, his heart was fluttering strangely,
and all on account of a little circumstance of
the preceding day, now fresh in his memory.
Great boy that he was, he was poring over a
single sweet smile Carrie Golding had given
him!
The mail hack stood at the post-office door,
whence Mr. Golding was coming with a letter
in his hand. Big Medicine stopped and looked
up at the window. There stood Carrie. She
was looking hopefully toward her father. Big
Medicine smiled and murmured:
“Ther's wher I fust seed the gal—bless her
sweet soul!” There was a whole world of sincere
happiness in the tones of his voice.
-- 071 --
[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]
Mr. Golding passed him hastily, his green
spectacles on his nose, and a great excitement
flashing from his face. Big Medicine gazed
wonderingly after his partner till he saw him
run up stairs to Carrie's room. Then he thought
he heard Carrie cry out joyfully, but it may
have been the wind.
When an hour had passed Mr. Golding and
Carrie came down dressed for travelling.
How strangely, wondrously beautiful the girl
now looked! Mr. Golding was as nervous as
an old woman. He rubbed his thin white
hands together rapidly and said:
“Mr. Cook, I have glorious news this morning!”
“And what mought it be?” asked Big Medicine,
as a damp chilliness crept over him, and
his face grew pinched and almost as white as
his shirt bosom.
“Krofton & Kelly, the bankers, have resumed
payment, and I'll get all my money!
It is glorious news, is it not, my friend?”
Big Medicine was silent. He tried to speak,
but his mouth was dry and powerless. A
mist drifted across his eyes. He hardly realized
where he was or what was said, but he
knew all.
“I have concluded to give you this house and
-- 072 --
[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]
all my interest in this store. You must not
refuse. I haven't time to make the transfer
now, but I'll not neglect it. Carrie and I must
hasten at once to Cincinnati. The hack is
waiting; so good bye, my dear friend, God
bless you!” Mr. Golding wrung his partner's
cold, limp hand, without noticing how fearfully
haggard that Roman face had suddenly grown.
“Good bye, Mr. Cook,” said Carrie in her
sweet, sincere way. “I'm real sorry to leave
you and the dear old house—but—but—good
bye, Mr. Cook. Come to see us in Cincinnati.
Good bye.” She gave him her hand also.
He smiled a wan, flickering smile, like the
last flare of a fire whose fuel is exhausted.
Carrie's woman's heart sank under that look,
though she knew not wherefore.
The hack passed round the curve of the
road.
They were gone!
Big Medicine stood alone in the door of the
corner brick. He looked back over his shoulders
at the well filled shelves and muttered:
“She ain't here, and what do I want of the
derned old store?”
The wind rustled the elm leaves and tossed
the brown locks of the man over his great forehead;
the blue birds sang on the roof; the
-- 073 --
[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]
dust rose in little columns along the street;
and, high over head, in the yellow mist of the
fine June weather, sailed a great blue heron,
going to the lakes. Big Medicine felt like one
deserted in the wilderness. He stood there a
while, then closed and locked the door and
went into the woods. A month passed before
he returned. Jimtown wondered and wondered.
But when he did return his neighbors
could not get a word out of him. He was
silent, moody, listless. Where had he been?
Only hunting for Mr. Golding and Carrie. He
found them, after a long search, in a splendid
residence on the heights just out of Cincinnati.
Mr. Golding greeted him cordially, but somehow
Big Medicine felt as though he were
shaking hands with some one over an insurmountable
barrier. That was not the Mr.
Golding he had known.
“Carrie is out in the garden. She will be
glad to see you. Go along the hall there.
You will see the gate.”
Mr. Golding waved his hand after the manner
of a very rich man, and a patronizing tone
would creep into his voice. Somehow Big
Medicine looked terribly uncouth.
With a hesitating step and a heart full of
unreal sensations, Big Medicine opened the
-- 074 --
[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]
little gate and strode into the flower garden.
Suddenly a vision, such as his fancy had never
pictured, burst on his dazzled eyes. Flowers
and vines and statues and fountains; on every
hand rich colors; perfumes so mixed and intensified
that his senses almost gave way;
long winding walks; fairy-like bowers and
music. He paused and listened. A heavy
voice, rich and manly, singing a ballad—some
popular love song—to the sweet accompaniment
of a violin, and blended through it all,
like a silvery thread, the low sweet voice of
Carrie Golding. The poor fellow held his
breath till the song was done.
Two steps forward and Big Medicine towered
above the lovers.
Carrie sprang to her feet with a startled
cry; then, recognizing the intruder, she held
out her little hand and welcomed him. Turning
to her lover she said:
“Henry, this is Mr. Cook, lately papa's
partner in Indiana.”
The lover was a true gentleman, so he took
the big hard hand of the visitor and said he
was glad to see him.
Big Medicine stood for a few moments holding
a hand of each of the lovers. Presently a
tremor took possession of his burly frame.
He did not speak a word. His breast swelled
-- 075 --
[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]
and his face grew awfully white. He put
Carrie's hand in that of her lover and turned
away. As he did so a tear, a great bitter drop,
rolled down his haggard cheek. A few long
strides and Big Medicine was gone.
Shrilly piped the blue birds, plaintively sang
the peewees, sweetly through the elms and
burr oaks by the corner brick blew the fresh
summer wind, as, just at sunset, Big Medicine
once more stood in front of the old building
with his eyes fixed on the vacant, staring window.
It was scarcely a minute that he stood
there, but long enough for a tender outline of
the circumstances of the past year to rise in
his memory.
A rustling at the broken lattice, a sudden
thrill through the iron frame of the watching
man, a glimpse of a sweet face—no, it was
only a fancy. The house was still, and old and
desolate. It stared at him like a death's head.
Big Medicine raised his eyes toward heaven,
which was now golden and flashing resplendently
with sunset glories. High up, as if
almost touching the calm sky, a great blue
heron was toiling heavily westward. Taking
the course chosen by the lone bird, Big Medicine
went away, and the places that knew him
once know him no more forever.
-- -- p722-081
The Venus of Balhinch.
[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]
When I returned from Europe with a finished
education, I found that my fortune also
was finished in the most approved modern
style, so I left New York and drifted westward
in search of employment. At length I came
to Indiana, and, having not even a cent left,
and mustering but one presentable suit of
clothes, I looked about me in a hungry, half
desperate sort of way, till I pounced upon the
school in Balhinch. Now Balhinch is not a
town, nor a cross-road place, nor a post-office—
it is simply a neighborhood in the southwestern
corner of Union Township, Montgomery
County — a neighborhood sui generis, stowed
away in the breaks of Sugar Creek, containing
as good, quiet, law-abiding folk as can be found
anywhere outside of Switzerland. My school
was a small one in numbers, but the pupils
ranged from four to six feet three in altitude,
and well proportioned. The most advanced
class had thumbed along pretty well through
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the spelling book. I need not take up your
time with the school, however, for it has nothing
at all to do with my story, excepting merely
to explain how I came to be in Balhinch, in the
State of Indiana.
My first sight of Susie Adair was on Sunday
at the Methodist prayer meeting. I was sitting
with my back to a window and facing the
door of the log meeting house when she entered.
It was July—a hot glary day, but a
steady wind blew cool and sweet from the
southwest, bringing in all sorts of woodland
odors. The grasshoppers were chirruping in
the little timothy field hard by, and over in a
bit of woodland pasture a swarm of blue jays
were worrying a crow, keeping up an incessant
squeaking and chattering. The dumpy little
class leader—the only little man in Balhinch—
had just begun to give out the hymn
“Love is the sweetest bud that blows,
Its beauties never die,
On earth among the saints it grows
And ripens in the sky,” &c.,
when Susie came in. Ben Crane was sitting
by me. He nudged me with his elbow and
whispered:
“How's that 'ere for poorty?”
I made him no answer, but remained staring
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at the girl till long after she had taken her seat.
Nature plays strange tricks. Susie, the daughter
of farmer Adair, was as beautiful in the
face as any angel could be, and her form was
as perfect as that of the Cnidian Venus. Her
motion when she walked was music, and as
she sat in statuesque repose, the undulations
of her queenly form were those of perfect ease,
grace and strength. Her hands were small
and taper, a little browned from exposure, as
was also her face. Her hair was the real classic
gold, and her grey eyes were riant with health
and content. When her red lips parted to sing,
they discovered small even teeth, as white
as ivory. I can give you no idea of her.
Physically she was perfection's self in the
mould of a Venus of the grandest type. Her
head, too, was an intellectual one (though
feminine), in the best sense of the word. The
first thought that flashed across my mind was
embodied in the words—A Venus—and I still
think of her as the best model I ever saw.
“How's that for poorty?” repeated Crane.
“Who is she?” I replied interrogatively.
“She's my jewlarker,” said he.
“Your what?”
“My sweetheart.”
“What is her name?”
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“Susie Adair.”
So I came to know her and admire her, and
even before that little prayer meeting was over
I loved her. Introductions were an unknown
institution in Balhinch, but I was not long in
finding a way to the personal acquaintance of
Susie. I found her remarkably intelligent for
one of her limited opportunities, very fond of
reading, sprightly in conversation, womanly,
modest, sweet tempered, and, indeed, altogether
charming as well as superbly beautiful.
As for me, I am an insignificant looking man,
and then I was even more so than now. My
hair is terribly stiff and red, you know, and
my eyes are very pale blue, nearly white. My
neck is very long and has a large Adam's
apple. I am small and narrow chested, and have
slender bow legs. My teeth are uneven and
my nose is pug. I have a very fine thin voice,
decidedly nasal, as you perceive. One thing,
however, I am well educated, polite, and not a
bad conversationalist.
Susie was a most entertaining and perplexing
study for me from the start. She treated
me with decided consideration and kindness,
seemed deeply interested in my accounts of my
travels, asked me many questions about the
old world and good society, sat for hours at a
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time listening to me as I read aloud. In fact
I felt that I was impressing her deeply, but she
would go with Ben Crane, that long, awkward,
ignorant gawk. How could a young
woman of such fine magnetic presence, and endowed
with such genuine, instinctive purity of
taste in everything else, bear the presence of a
rough greenhorn like that? Finally I said to
myself: she is kind and good; she cannot
bear to slight Ben, though she cares nothing
for him.
What a strange state being in love is! It is
like dreaming in the grass. One hears the
flow of the wind—it is the breath of love—one
smells the flowers, and it is the perfume of a
young cheek, the sharp fragrance of blonde
curls. What dreams I had in those days! I
could scarcely endure my school to the end of
the first three months. Then I gave it up, and
collecting my wages purchased me some fine
clothes—that is, fine for the time and the place.
I recollect that suit now, and wonder how a
man of my taste could have borne to wear it.
A black coat, a scarlet vest and white pants,
ending with calf boots and a very tall silk hat!
If you should see me dressed that way now
you would laugh till your ribs would hurt. I
do not know how true it is, but, from a pretty
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good source, I heard that Ben Crane said I
looked like a red-headed woodpecker. One
thing I do know, I never saw a woodpecker
with a freckled face. I have a freckled face.
Ben soon recognized me as his rival and
treated me with supreme impertinence, even
going so far as to rub his fist under my nose
and swear at me—a thing at which I felt profoundly
indignant, and considering which I
was surely justified in sticking a lucifer match
into Ben's six valuable hay stacks one night
thereafter. It was a great fire, and two hundred
dollars loss to Ben. Let him keep his fist out
from under my nose.
But I must come to my story, cutting short
these preliminaries. It is a story I never tire
of telling, and a story which has elicited ejaculations
from many.
It was a ripe sweet day in the latter part of
September—clear, but hazy and dreamful—a
prelude to the Indian summer. I stood before
the glass in my room at 'Squire Jones's, where
I boarded, and very carefully arranged my
bright blue neck-tie. Then I combed my hair.
I never have got thoroughly familiar with my
hair. I cannot, even now, comb it, while looking
in a glass, without cringing for fear of
burning my fingers. The long, wavy red locks
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flow through the comb like flames, and underneath
is a gleam of live coals and red hot
ashes. Ben Crane said he believed my head
had set his hay stacks a-fire. Maybe it did.
I wished that a stray flash from the same source
would kindle the heart of Susie Adair and
heat it until it lay under her Cytherean
breasts a puddle of molten love. I put my
silk hat carefully upon my head and wriggled
my hands into a pair of kid gloves; then,
walking-stick in hand, I set out to know my
fate at the hands of Susie. My way was across
a stubble field in which the young clover, sown
in the spring, displayed itself in a variety of
fantastic modes. Have you ever noticed how
much grass is like water? Some one, Hawthorne,
perhaps, has spoken of “a gush of
violets,” and Swinburne, going into one of his
musical frenzies, cries:
“Where tides of grass break into foam of flowers.”
I have seen pools of clover and streams of
timothy; I have stood ankle deep in shoal
blue grass and have watched for hours the
liquid ripples of the red top. I have seen the
field sparrows dive into the green waves of
young wheat, and the black starlings wade
about in the sink-foil of southern countries.
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Grass is a liquid that washes earth's face till
it shines like that of a clean, healthy child.
But clover prefers to stand in pools and
eddies, in which oft and oft I have seen the
breasts of meadow larks shine like gold, the
while a few sweet notes, like rung silver, rose
and trembled above the trefoil, all woven, in
and out, through the swash of the wind's palpitant
currents—a music of unspeakable influence.
Swallows skim the surface of grass
just as they do that of water. When the summer
air agitates the smooth bosom of a broad
green meadow field, you will see these little
random arrows glancing along the emerald
surface, cutting with barbed wings through
the tossing, bloom-capped waves, thence ricochetting
high into the bright air to whirl
and fall again as swiftly as before. Many a
time I have traced streams of grass to their
fresh fountains, where jets of tender foliage
and bubbles of tinted flowers welled up from
dark, rich earth, and flowed away, with a
velvet rustle and a ripple like blown floss, to
break and recoil and eddy against the dark
shadows of a distant grove. Such a fountain
is a place of fragrance and joy. The bees go
thither to get the sweetest honey, and find it
a very Hybla. The butterflies float about it
-- 084 --
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in a dreamful trance, while in the cool, damp
shade of a dock leaf squats a great toad, like
a slimy dragon guarding the gate of a paradise.
As I slowly walked across that stubble field,
now and then stepping into a tuft of clover,
out from which a quail would start, whirling
away in a convulsion of flight, I allowed
dreams of bliss to steal rosily across my brain.
I scarcely saw the great gold-sharded beetles
that hummed and glanced in the mellow sun-light.
I heard like one half asleep, as if far
away, the sharp twitter of the blue bird and
the tender piping of the meadow lark. Susie
Adair was all my thought. I recollect that,
just as I climbed the fence at the farther side
of the clover field, I saw a white winged, red
headed woodpecker pounce upon and carry off
a starry opal-tinted butterfly, and I thought
how sweet it would be if I could thus steal
away into the free regions of space the object
of my gentler passion. But then what wonderful
big wings I should have needed, for my
Venus of the hollow of the hill of Balhinch
was no airy thing. Her tall, strong body and
magnificent limbs equalled one hundred and
forty pounds avoirdupois! My own weight
was about one hundred and twenty.
As I neared Susie's home I began, for the
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first time in my life, to suffer from palpitation.
The shadow of a doubt floated in the autumn
sun-light. I set my teeth together and resolved
not to be faint hearted. I must go in
boldly and plead my cause and win.
When I reached the gate of the Adair farmhouse
I had to look straight over the head of
a very large, sanctimonious-faced bull-dog to
get a view of the vine covered porch. This
dog looked up at me and smiled ineffably;
then he came to the gate and stood over
against me, peeping between the slats. I
hesitated. About this time Ben Crane came
out of the house with a banjo in his hand.
He had been playing for Susie. He was a
natural musician.
“'Feared o' the dog, Mr. Woodpecker?”
said he. “Begone, Bull!” and he kicked the
big-headed canine aside so that I could go in.
I heard him thrumming on his banjo far
down the road as Susie met me at the door.
How wondrously beautiful she was!
“Sit down Mr. —, and, if you do not
care, I'll bring the churn in and finish getting
the butter while we talk.”
I was delighted—I was charmed—fascinated.
Susie's father had gone to a distant village,
and her mother, a gentle work-worn matron,
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was in the other room spinning flax, humming,
meantime, snatches of camp meeting hymns.
The sound of that spinning-wheel seemed to
me strangely mournful and sad, but Susie's
deep, clear gray eyes and cheerful voice were
the very soul of joyousness, health and youth.
She brought in a great fragrant cedar churn,
made to hold six or eight gallons of cream,
and forthwith began her labor. She stood as
she worked, and the exercise throwing her
entire body into gentle but well-defined motion,
displayed all the riches of her contour. The
sleeves of her calico gown were rolled up
above the elbows, leaving her plump, muscular
arms bare, and her skirt was pinned away
from her really small feet and shapely ankles
in such a way as to give one an idea, a suggestion,
of supreme innocence and grace. Her
long, crinkled gold hair was unbound, hanging
far below her waist, and shining like silk.
Her lips, carmine red, seemed to overflow
with tender utterances.
Ever since that day I have thought churning
a kind of sacred, charmingly blessed work,
which ought to be, if really it is not, the pastime
of those delightful beings the ancients
called deities. Cream is more fragrant, more
delicious, more potent than nectar or ambrosia.
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A cedar churn is more delicately perfumed
than any patera of the gods. And, I say it
with reverence, I have seen, swaying lily-like
above the churn, a beauty more perfect than
that which bloomed full grown from the bright
focus of the sea's ecstatic travail.
What a talk Susie and I had that day!
Slowly, stealthily I crept nearer and nearer to
the subject burning in my heart. I watched
Susie closely, for her face was an enigma to
me. I never think of her and of that day
without recalling Baudelaire's dream of a
giantess. More happy than the poet, I really
saw my colossal beauty stand full grown
before me, but, like him, I wondered—
* * * “Si son cœur couve une sombre flamme
Aux humides brouillards qui nagent dans ses yeux.”
I could not tell, from any outward sign,
what was going on in her heart. No sphinx
could have been more utterly calm and mysterious.
She had a most baffling way about her,
too. When at last I had reached the point of a
confession of my maddening love, she broke
into one of my charmingest sentences to say—
“Mr. —, you'd better move farther away
from the churn or I might spatter your
clothes.”
This, somehow, disconcerted and bothered
-- 088 --
[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]
me. But Susie was so calm and sweet about
it, her gray eyes beamed so mysteriously innocent
of any impropriety, that I soon regained
my lost eloquence.
How sharply and indelibly cut in my memory,
like intaglios in ivory, the surroundings
of that scene, even to the minutest detail!
For instance, I can see as plainly as then my
new silk hat on the floor between my knees,
containing a red handkerchief and a paper of
chewing tobacco. I recall, also, that a sliptrod
shoe lay careened to one side near the
centre of the room. The bull-dog came to the
door and peeped solemnly in a time or two.
A string of dried pumpkin cuts hung by the
fireplace, and under a small wooden table in
one corner were piled a few balls of “carpet
rags.” I sat in a very low chair. A picture
of George Washington hung above a small
square window. The floor was ash boards uncarpeted.
I heard some chickens clucking and
cackling under the house.
Finally, I recollect it as if it were but yesterday,
I said:
“I love you, Susie—I love you, and I have
loved you ever since I first saw you!”
How tame the words sound now! but then
they came forth in a tremulous murmur that
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[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]
gave them character and power. Susie looked
straight at me a moment, and I thought I saw
a softer light gather in her eyes. Then she
took away the churn dasher and lid and
fetched a large bowl from a cupboard. What
a fine golden pile of butter she fished up into
the bowl!
I drew my chair somewhat nearer, and
watched her pat and roll and squeeze the
plastic mass with the cherry ladle. A little
gray kitten came and rubbed and purred
round her. Again the bull-dog peeped in. A
breeze gathered some force and began to ripple
pleasantly through the room. Far away
in the fields I heard the quails whistling to
each other. An old cow strolled up the lane
by the house and round the corner of the
orchard, plaintively tinkling her bell. Steadily
hummed Mrs. Adair's spinning wheel. I
slipped my hat and my chair a little closer to
Susie, and by a mighty effort directed my
burning words straight to the point. I cannot
repeat all I said. I would not if I could.
Such things are sacred.
“Susie, I love you, madly, blindly, dearly,
truly! O, Susie! will you love me—will you
be my wife?”
Again she turned on me that strange, sweet,
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half smiling look. Her lips quivered. The
flush on her cheeks almost died out.
“Answer me, Susie, and say you will make
me happy.”
She walked to the cupboard, put away the
bowl of butter and the ladle, then came back
and stood by the churn and me. How indescribably
charming she looked! She smiled
strangely and made a motion with her round
strong arms. I answered the movement. I
spread wide my arms and half rose to clasp
her to my bosom. A whole life was centred in
the emotion of that moment. Susie's arms
missed me and lifted the churn. I sank back
into my chair. How gracefully Susie swayed
herself to her immense height, toying with the
ponderous churn held far above her head. I
saw a kitten fairly fly out of the room, its tail
as level as a gun barrel; I saw the bull-dog's
face hastily withdraw from the door; I saw
the carpet balls, the pumpkin cuts and the
print of Washington all through a perpendicular
cataract of deliciously fragrant buttermilk!
I saw my hat fill up to the brim, with my
handkerchief afloat. I heaved an awful sigh
and leaped to my feet. I saw old Mrs. Adair
standing in the partition door, with her arms
akimbo, and heard her say—
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[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]
“W'y, Susan Jane Samantha Ann! What
'pon airth hev ye done?”
And the Venus replied:
“I've been givin' this 'ere little woodpecker
a good dose of buttermilk!”
I seized my hat and shuffled out of the door,
feeling the milk gush from the tops of my
boots at each hasty step I made. I ran to the
gate, went through and slammed it after me.
As I did so I heard a report like the closing of
a strong steel trap. It was the bull-dog's
teeth shutting on a slat of the gate as he made
a dive at me from behind. I smiled grimly,
thinking how I'd taste served in buttermilk.
On my way home I passed Ben Crane's
house. He was sitting at a window playing
his banjo, and singing in a stentorian voice:
“O! Woodpecker Jim,
Yer chance is mighty slim!
Jest draw yer red head into yer hole
And there die easy, dern your soul,
O! slim Woodpecker Jim!”
I was so mad that I sweat great drops of
pure buttermilk, but over in the fields the
quails whistled just as clear and sweet as ever,
and I heard the wind pouring through the
stubble as it always does in autumn!
-- -- p722-097
The Legend of Potato Creek.
[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]
Big yellow butterflies were wheeling about
in the drowsy summer air, and hovering above
the moist little sand bars of Potato Creek. A
shady dell, wrapped in the hot lull of August,
sent up the spires and domes of its walnut and
poplar trees, clearly defined and sheeny, while
underneath the forest roof the hazel and wild
rose bushes had wrung themselves into dusky
mats. The late violets bloomed here and
there, side by side with those waxlike yellow
blossoms, called by the country folk “butter
and eggs.” Through this dell Potato Creek
meandered fantastically, washing bare the
roots of a few gnarled sycamores, and murmuring
among the small bowlders that almost
covered its bed. It was not a strikingly
romantic or picturesque place—rather the contrary—
much after the usual type of ragged
little dells. “A scrubby little holler” the neighborhood
folk called it.
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Perched on the topmost tangle of the dry,
tough roots of an old upturned tree, sat little
Rose Turpin, sixteen that very August day;
pretty, nay beautiful, her school life just ended,
her womanhood just beginning to clothe
her face and form in that mysterious mantle
of tenderness—the blossom, the flower that
brings the rich sweet fruit of love. From her
high perch she leaned over and gazed down
into the clear water of the creek and smiled at
the gambols of the minnows that glanced here
and there, now in shadowy swarms and anon
glancing singly, like sparks of dull fire, in the
limpid current. Some small cray-fishes, too,
delighted her with their retrograde and sidewise
movements among the variegated pebbles
at the bottom of the water. A small sketch
book and a case of pencils lay beside her. So
busy was she with her observations, that a
fretful, peevish, but decidedly masculine voice
near by startled her as if from a doze. She
had imagined herself so utterly alone.
“Wo-erp 'ere, now can't ye! Wo, I say!
Turn yer ole head roun' this way now, blast
yer ole picter! No foolin', now; wo-erp, I tell
ye!
Rose was so frightened at first that she
seemed about to rise in the air and fly away;
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but her quick glance in the direction of the
sound discovered the speaker, who, a few rods
farther down the creek, stood holding the
halter rein of a forlorn looking horse in one
hand, and in the other a heavy woodman's
axe.
“Wo-erp, now! I hate like the nation to
slatherate ye; but I said I'd do it if ye did'nt
get well by this August the fifteenth; an' shore
'nuff, here ye are with the fistleo gittin' wus
and wus every day o' yer life. So now ye may
expect ter git what I tole ye! Stan' still now,
will ye, till I knock the life out'n ye!”
By this time Rose had come to understand
the features of the situation. The horse was
sadly diseased with that scourge of the equine
race, scrofulous shoulder or fistula, commonly
called, among the country folk, fistleo, and
because the animal could not get well the man
was on the point of killing it by knocking it on
the head with the axe.
Of all dumb things a horse was Rose's
favorite. She had always, since her very baby-hood,
loved horses.
“Wo-wo-wo-erp, here! Ha'n't ye got no sense
at all? Ding it, how d'ye 'spect me to hit yer
blamed ole head when ye keep it a waggin'
'round in that sort o' style? Wo-erp!”
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The fellow had tied the halter rein around a
sapling about two feet from the ground, and
was now preparing to deal the horse a blow
with the axe between its eyes. The animal
seemed unaware of any danger, but kept its
head going from side to side, trying to fight
certain bothersome gad-flies.
“O, sir, stop; don't, don't; please, sir, don't!”
cried the girl, her sweet voice breaking into
silvery echo fragments in every nook of the
little hollow.
The man gazed all around, and, seeing no
one, let fall the axe by his side. The birds,
taking advantage of the silence, lifted a twittering
chorus through the dense dark tops of
the trees. The slimmest breath of air languidly
caressed the leaves of the rose vines. The
bubbling of the brook seemed to touch a
mellower key, and the yellow butterflies settled
all together on a little sand bar, their bright
wings shut straight and sharp above their
bodies. The man seemed intently listening.
“Tw'an't mammy's voice, nohow,” he muttered;
“but l'd like to know who 'twas, though.”
He stood a moment longer, as if in doubt,
then again raising his axe he continued:
“Must 'a' been a jay bird squeaked. Wo-erp
'ere now! I'm not goin' to fool wi' ye all
day, so hold yer head still!”
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[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]
That was a critical moment for the lean,
miserable horse. It lowered its head and held
it quite still. The axe was steadily poised in
the air. The man's face wore a look of determination—
grim, stone-like. He was, perhaps,
twenty-five, tall and bony, with a countenance
sallow almost to greenness, sunken pale blue
eyes, sun burnt hair, thin flaxy beard, and
irregular, half decayed teeth. Although his
body and limbs were shrunken to the last degree
of attenuation, still the big cords of his
neck and wrists stood out taut, suggesting
great strength. The blow would be a terrible
one. The horse would die almost without a
struggle.
“O, O, O! Indeed, sir, you must not!
Stop that, sir, instantly! You shall not do it,
sir! O, sir!”
And fluttering down from her perch, Rose
flew to the spot where the tragedy was pending,
and cast herself pale and trembling between
the horse and its would-be executioner.
The axe fell from the man's hands.
His eyes became exactly circular.
His under jaw dropped so that his mouth
was open to its fullest gaping capacity. His
shoulders fell till their points almost met in
front of his sunken chest. He was a picture
of overwhelming surprise.
-- 097 --
[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]
High up on the dead spire of a walnut tree
a woodpecker began to beat a long, rattling
tattoo. The horse very lazily and innocently
winked his brown eyes, and putting forth his
nose sniffed at the skirt of the girl's dress.
“I'm glad—O I'm ever so glad you'll not kill
him!” murmured the little lady when she saw
the axe fall to the ground.
The man stood a long moment, as if petrified
or frozen into position, then somewhat recovering,
he re-seized the axe, and flourishing it high
in the air, cried in a voice that, cracked and
shrill, rang petulantly through the woods:
“I said I'd kill 'im if that garglin' oil didn't
cure 'im, 'an I'm derned ef I don't, too!”
“O, sir, if you please! The poor horse is
not to blame!” exclaimed the excited girl.
“'Taint no use o' beggin'; he's no 'count but
to jist eat up corn, an' hay, an' paster an' the
likes; and his blasted fistleo gits wus an' wus
all the time. An't I spent more'n he's wo'th a
tryin' to cure 'm, an' don't everybody laugh at
me 'cause I've got sich a derned ole slummux
of a hoss? Jist blame my picter if I'll stand
it! So now you've hearn me toot my tin horn,
an' ye may as well stan' out'n the way!”
“But, sir, I'll take him off your hands, may
I? Say, sir? O please let me take him!”
-- 098 --
[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]
“An' what in thunder do you want of him?
What good's he goin' to do you? 'Cause, you
see, he can't work nor be rid on nor nothin'.”
“O never mind, sir, just please give him to
me and I'll take him and care for him. Poor
horsey! Poor horsey! See, he loves me already!”
The beast had thrust its nose against the
maiden's hand.
“Well, I don't know 'bout this. I'd as soon
'at you have 'im as not if I hadn't swore to
kill 'im, an' I musn't lie to 'im. An' besides,
I've had sich a pesky derned time wi' 'im 'at it
looks kinder mean 'at I shouldn't have the satisfaction
of bustin' his head for it. I'm goin'
to knock 'im, an' ye jist mought as well stan'
aside!”
Just then the peculiarities of the man's character
were written on his face. His nose denoted
pugnacity, his lips sensuality, but not
of a base sort, his eyes ignorance and rough
kindness, his chin firmness, his jaw tenacity of
purpose, and his complexion the ague. He
had sworn to kill the horse, and kill him he
would. You could see that in the very wrinkles
of his neck. He evidently felt that it was a
duty he owed to his conscience—a duty made
doubly imperative by the horse's refusal to get
well by the exact time prescribed.
-- 099 --
[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]
While he stood with his axe raised, Rose
was very diligently and nervously tugging at
the knot that fastened the halter rein to the
tree, and ere he was aware of her intent, she
had untied it and was resolutely leading the
poor old animal away.
The man's eyes got longest the short way as
he gazed at the retreating figure.
“Well now, that's as cool as a cowcumber
and twicet as juicy! Gal, ye'r' a brick! ye'r' a
knot! Ye'r' a born pacer! Take 'im 'long for
all I keer! Take 'im 'long!”
He put down his axe, placed his hands
against his sides and smiled, as he spoke, a
big wrinkling smile that covered the whole of
his sallow, skinny face and ran clear down to
the neck band of his homespun shirt.
“Pluck, no eend to it!” he muttered; “wonder
who she is? Poorty—geeroody!”
The wild birds sang a triumphant hymn, the
breeze freshened till the whole woods rustled,
and louder still rose the bubbling of the stream
among its bowlders.
“Well, I'll jist be dorged! The poortiest gal
in all Injianny! An' she's tuck my ole hoss
whether or no! She's a knot! Sort o' a cool
proceedin', it 'pears to me, but she's orful welcome
to the hoss! Howdsomever it's mighty
-- 100 --
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much of a joke on me, 'r my name's not Zach
Jones!”
He laughed long and loud. The birds
laughed, too, and still the wind freshened.
The girl and the horse had quickly disappeared
behind the hazel and papaw bushes.
Zach Jones was alone with his axe and his reflections.
“Yender's where she sot—right up yender
on that ole clay root. She must 'a' been a
fishin', I reckon.”
Another admiring chuckle.
He went to the spot and clambered up among
the roots. There lay Rose's sketch book and
pencil case. He took up the book and curiously
turned the leaves, his eyes running with something
like childish delight over the flowers and
bits of landscape. He had never before seen
a drawing.
“Poorty as the gal 'erself, 'most,” he said,
“an' seein' 'at she's tuck my ole hoss, I spose
I'll have to take these 'ere jimcracks o' her'n.
I'll take 'em 'long anyhow, jist to 'member her
by!”
This argument seemed logical and conclusive,
and with a quick glance over his shoulder
he crammed book and pencil case into the
capacious depths of the side pocket of his
pants.
-- 101 --
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“Now then it's about time for my chill, an'
I'd better go home. Hang the luck; s'pose I'll
allus have the ager!” This last sentence was
uttered in a tone of comical half despair, and
accompanied by a facial contortion possible to
no one but a person thoroughly saturated with
ague in its chronic form.
After he left the dell, Zach had a hot walk
across a clover field before he reached the
dilapidated log house where he lived with his
widowed mother. In a short time his chill set
in, and it was a fearful one. His teeth chattered
and his bony frame rattled like a bundle
of dry sticks in a strong wind. After it had
shaken him thus for about an hour, his brother
Sammy, a lad of ten years, came in with a jug
of buttermilk brought from a neighbor's.
“Mammy, 'ere's yer buttermilk,” said he,
setting the jug on the floor. “Shakin' like
forty—a'n't ye, Zach?” he added, glancing
with a sad, lugubrious smile at his brother;
then, changing his tone and also his countenance,
he continued, with a broader grin: “Bet
ye a dollar ye can't guess what I seed over to
'Squire Martin's!”
“No, nor I don't care a cuss; so put off an'
don't come yawpin' round me!” replied Zach.
“Yes ye do, too; an' I know ye do, for 'twas
-- 102 --
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yer ole fistleo hoss. That 'ere fine gal 'at stays
over there is havin' a man wash 'im an' doctor
'im.” Sammy winked and hitched up his pants
as he spoke.
“Do say, Sammy, is that so, now?” cried the
widow, holding up her hands. “How on 'arth
come she by the hoss? Zach, I thought you'd
killed that creater'!”
“Mammy, ef you an' Sammy 'll jist let me
'joy this 'ere ager in peace I'll be orful 'bleeged
to ye,” said Zach, making his chair creak and
quiver with the ecstasy of his convulsion.
But Sammy's tongue would go. He thought
he had a “good 'un” on Zach, and nothing
short of lightning could have killed him quick
enough to prevent his telling it.
“The gal says as how Zach gin 'er the ole
hoss for to 'member 'im by!” he blurted out,
shying briskly from Zach's foot, which otherwise
would have landed him in the door yard.
“Lookee here now, Zach, you jist try the
likes o' that ag'in an' I'll give ye sich a broom-stickin'
as ye a'n't had lately. Ye mought 'a'
injured the child's insides!” and as she spoke
the widow flourished the broom.
So Zach dropped his head upon his chest and
employed himself exclusively with his chill.
When his mother was not looking at him,
-- 103 --
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however, he would occasionally slip the sketch
book partly out of his pocket and peep between
its leaves. When his fever came on he
got “flighty” and horrified the widow with
talk about an angel on a clay root and a sweet
little “hoss thief” from whom he had stolen
the “picters!”
I cannot exactly say how Zach got to going
over to 'Squire Martin's so often after this.
But his first visit was a compulsory one. His
mother happening to discover his possession
of the sketch book and pencil case, made him
return them with his own hand to Rose. He
at once became deeply interested in the progress
of his former patient's convalescence;
for, strange to say, the poor horse began almost
immediately to get well, and in two months
was sound, glossy and fat. Nor was he an illlooking
animal. On the contrary, when Rose
sat on his back and stroked his mane, he arched
his neck and pawed the ground like a thoroughbred.
'Squire Martin was a good man, and seeing
how Zach seemed to enjoy Rose's company, he
one day took the girl aside and said to her:
“You must be somewhat of a doctor, my
dear, seeing how you've touched up the old
hoss, and I propose for you to try your hand
-- 104 --
[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]
on another subject. There's poor Zach Jones,
who's had the chills for six or eight years as
constant as sunrise and sunset, and no medicine
can't do him any good. Now I'll be bound
if you'll try you can cure him sound and well.
All you need to do in the world is to pet him
up some'at as you have the ole hoss. Jist take
a little interest in the feller an' he'll come out
all right. All he wants is to forget he ever
had the ager and take some light exercise and
have some fun. Fun is the only medicine to
cure the chills with. Quinine is no 'count but
to make a racket in a feller's head, and calomel
'll kill 'im, sure. Now I propose to let Zach
have a hoss and saddle and you must go out a
riding with 'im and try to divert his mind from
his sorrows and aches and pains—now that's
a good girl, Rosie.”
Rose, whose healthful, impulsive, generous
nature would not allow her to refuse so well
intended and withal so small a request, readily
agreed to do all she could in the matter, and
very soon thereafter she and Zach were the
very best of friends, taking long rides together
through woodlands and up and down the pleasant
lanes of 'Squire Martin's broad estates.
The young girl soon found the companionship
of Zach, novel and most awkward as it was at
-- 105 --
[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]
first, agreeable and almost charming in its
freshness and sincerity. As for Zach himself,
he was the girl's slave from the start. He
could not do too much for her in his earnest,
respectful way. Women are always tyrants,
and their tyranny seems to be inversely as
their size and directly as the size of the man
upon whom it is exerted. Rose was a very
little chit of a maiden, and Zach was a great
big bony frame of a fellow. The result, of
course, was despotism. But, although Zach
was a democrat, he seemed to like the oppression,
and ran after big-winged butterflies,
opened gates, pulled down and put up innumerable
fences, climbed trees after empty bird
nests, gathered flowers and ferns—did everything,
in fact, required of him by his little
queen. He became a daily visitor at the
'Squire's, and seemed to have entirely forgotten
everything else or utterly submerged it in
his unselfish devotion to the girl. The good
'Squire saw this with unbounded delight.
So August quietly drifted by, and September
hung its yellow banner on the corn and said
farewell with a sigh that had in it a smack of
winter.
Rose's parents were wealthy and lived in
Indianapolis, and now came the time for the
-- 106 --
[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]
girl's return to her city home. Meanwhile a
remarkable change had taken place in the
health and spirits of Zach Jones. The ague
had departed, the sallowness was gone from
his skin, somewhat of flesh had gathered on
his cheeks, and in his eyes shone a cheerful
light. He was straight and almost plump, and
his hair and beard had assumed a gloss and
liveliness they had never before known. He
had thrown away quinine and calomel, and his
sleep at night was soft and sweet, broken only
by fair, happy dreams, that lingered long after
he was awake. At home his mother had far
less trouble with him, and Sammy never got
a kick even if he did occasionally mention old
fistleo in an equivocal way. The amount of
provender it required to satisfy Zach's appetite
now was a constant source of amazement to
the widow.
The evening preceding Rose's departure was
a fine one. The woods were gold, the sky was
turquoise. Instead of riding, as usual, the young
people took a stroll in the 'Squire's immense
orchard. The apples were ripe and ready to
be gathered into the cellars; their mellow fragrance
flavored the autumn air so delicately
that Zach said it smelt sweeter than an oven
full of sugar cakes.
-- 107 --
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When the young folk returned from their
walk the 'Squire was standing on the door
step of his house. His quick eyes caught a
glimpse of something unsatisfactory in the
faces of the approaching couple—Zach, particularly,
despite his evident effort to choke
down something, discovered unmistakable
signs of suffering. Rose was simply sober and
thoughtful.
“What now, Zach?” asked the 'Squire,
“sick, eh?” “D'know; guess I'm in for a
shake; wish to the Lord it 'd shake my back
bone clean out'n me!” was the reply, in a queer
gurgling voice. A bunch of fall roses fell
from his vest button-hole, but he did not pick
it up. A hot flush, in the midst of a ghastly
pallor, burned on the cheeks of the speaker.
Rose tapped the ground with the toe of her
kid boot, but did not speak.
The man and the girl stood there close
together a while, and the 'Squire did not catch
what they said as they shook hands and parted.
When Zach had gone home the 'Squire
told Rose that he wished she would stay a
little longer, till the ague season was over,
just on Zach's account. Rose quietly replied,
“I have already stayed too long;” but her voice
had an infinity of pity and sorrow in it that
the 'Squire did not detect.
-- 108 --
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Next morning Rose went home to the city
and soon after made a brilliant debut in society,
for she was really a charming little thing.
That winter was a festive one—a season of
great social activity—and some of its most
direct and prominent results were a few notable
marriages in the spring, among which was
that of Rose to a banker of P—, Kentucky,
the happy union being consummated in May.
On the very day of her wedding Rose received
from her uncle the following note:
“Dear Niece:
“Come to see us, even if you won't stay but
one day. Come right off, if you're a Christian
girl. Zach Jones is dying of consumption and
is begging to see you night and day. He says
he's got something on his mind he wants to
say to you, and when he says it he can die
happy. The poor fellow is monstrous bad off,
and I think you ought to be sure and come.
We're all well. Your loving uncle,
“Jared Martin.”
Something in this homely letter so deeply
affected Rose that she prevailed on her husband,
a few days after their marriage, to take
her to 'Squire Martin's.
It was nearly sundown when the young
-- 109 --
[figure description] Page 109.[end figure description]
wife, accompanied by the 'Squire, entered the
room of the dying man. He lay on a low bed
by an open window, through which, with hollow
hungry eyes, he was gazing into the blue distance
that is called the sky of May. Birds
were singing in the trees all around the house,
and a cool breath of violet-scented air rippled
through the window. The widow Jones, worn
out with watching by the sick bed, sat sleeping
in her rude arm-chair; Sammy had gone
after the cow—a gift from the 'Squire.
The visitors entered softly, but Zach heard
them and feebly turned his head. He put out
a bloodless hand and clasped the warm fingers
of Rose, pulling her into a seat by his couch.
A wan smile flitted across his face as he fixed
his eyes, burning like sparks in the gray
ash of a spent fire, on her's, dewy with rising
tears.
“The same little Rose you use to wus,” he
said, in a low faltering voice, that had in it an
unconquerable allegiance to the one dream of
his manhood. His unnaturally bright eyes
ran swiftly over her face and form, then closed,
as if to fasten the vision within, that it might
follow him to eternity.
“The same little Rose you use to wus,” he
repeated, “only now you're picked off the vine
-- 110 --
[figure description] Page 110.[end figure description]
an' nobody can't touch ye but the owner. I'm
a poor, no 'count dyin' man, Rose, but you'll
never—.” His voice choked a little and he
did not finish the sentence. Perhaps he thought
it were better not finished.
A few moments of utter silence followed,
during which, faintly, far out in the field behind
the house, was heard the childish voice
of Sammy, singing an old hymn, two lines of
which were most distinctly heard by those in
the house.
“Ah, yes—
“This world's a wilderness of woe,
This world it ain't my home,”
chimed in the trembling voice of the sick man.
Then, by an effort that evidently taxed his
fading powers to the last degree, he fixed his
eyes firmly on those of the young woman.
Here was a martyr of the divine sort, true and
unchangeable in the flame of the torture.
“Rose, little Rose,” he said, glancing uneasily
at the 'Squire, “I've got something
private like to say to you.”
The young woman trembled. Memory was
at work.
“'Squire, go out a minute, will ye?” continued
Zach.
The sick man's request was promptly obeyed,
-- 111 --
[figure description] Page 111.[end figure description]
and Rose sat, drooping, alone beside the bed,
while the widow snored away.
Zach now more nervously clasped the hand
of the young woman. A spot of faint sunshine
glimmered on the pillow close by the man's
head. The out-door sounds of the wind in the
young grass, and the rustle of the new soft
leaves of the trees, crept into the room gently,
as if not to drown the low voice of the dying
man.
“It's been on my mind ever since we parted,
Rose, and I ort 'a' said it then, but I choked
an' couldn't; but I kin say it now and I will.”
He paused a moment and Rose looked pitifully
at him. His chin was thrust out firmly and
his lips had a determined set. He looked just
as he did when about to knock the poor old
horse on the head over in the dell that day.
How vividly the tragic situation was recalled
in Rose's mind!
“Yes, I will say it now, so I will,” he resumed.
“Since things turned out jist as they have,
Rose, I do wish I'd 'a' paid no 'tention to ye
an' jist gone on and knocked that derned ole
fistleoed hoss so dead 'at he'd 'a' never kicked—
I do—I do, 'i hokey! I don't want to make
ye feel bad, but I'm goin' away now, an' it
'pears to me like as if I'd go easy if I know'd
-- 112 --
[figure description] Page 112.[end figure description]
you'd—.” He turned away his face and
drew just one little fluttering breath. When,
after only a few minutes' absence, the 'Squire
came in, the widow still slept, the sweet air still
rippled through the room, but Rose held a dead
hand; Zach was at rest! The 'Squire placed
his hand on the bright hair of Rose and gazed
mournfully down into the pinched, pallid face
of the dead. How awfully calm a dead face is!
The widow stirred in her chair, groaned, and
awoke. For a moment she bent her eyes
wonderingly, inquiringly on the young woman;
then, rising, she clasped her in her great
bony arms.
“You are the Rose, the little Rose he's been
goin' on so about. O, honey, I'm orful glad
you've come. You ort jist to 'a' heerd him
talk about ye when he got flighty like—
but O—O—my! O Lor'! Zach—Zachy, dear!
O, Miss, O, he's dead—he's dead!”
“Dead, yes, dead!” echoed the 'Squire, his
words dropping with the weight of lead.
Across the fields of young green wheat ran
waves of the spring wind, murmuring and
sighing, while the dust of blossoms wheeled,
and rose and fell in the last soft rays of the
going sun. A big yellow butterfly flitted
through the room.
-- 113 --
[figure description] Page 113.[end figure description]
Presently Sammy entered. He came in like
a gust of wind, making things rattle with his
impetuous motion.
“O, mammy! O, Zach! I's got s'thin' to
tell ye, an' I'll bet a biscuit you can't guess
what 't is!” he cried breathlessly.
“O, Sammy, honey, O, dear!” groaned the
widow.
“S-s-h!” said the 'Squire solemnly.
“Well, I jist wanted 'm to guess,” replied
Sammy, “for it's awful doggone cur'u's
'at—”
“S-s-h!”
“The fistleo is broke out on Zach's ole hoss
ten times as wuss as ever!”
“S-s-s-s-h!”
“It's so, for I seed it. It's layin' down over
in the hollow by 'tater creek, where the ole
clay root is, an' its jist about to d—.”
“S-s-h!”
The child caught a glimpse of the face and
was struck mute. And darkness stole athwart
the earth, but the morrow's sun drove it away.
Never, however, did any sun or any season
chase from the heart of little Rose the shadow
that was the memory of the man who died in
that cabin.
-- -- p722-119
Stealing a Conductor.
[figure description] Page 114.[end figure description]
He shambled into the bar-room of the hotel
at Thorntown, a Boone County village, and,
with a bow and a hearty “how-de do to you
all,” took the only vacant chair. He scratched
a match and lighted his pipe. “Now we'll be
bored with some sort of a long-winded story,”
whispered some to others of the loungers
present. “Never knowed him to fail,” said a
lank fellow, almost loud enough for the subject
to hear. “He's our travelled man,” added a
youth, who winked as if he were extremely intelligent
and didn't mind letting folks know
it.
The man himself whiffed away carelessly at
his pipe, now and then raising one eye higher
than the other, to take a sort of side survey of
the persons present. That eye was not long
in settling upon me, and after a short, searching
look, gleamed in a well pleased way. He
was a stout formed man of about fifty years,
dressed rather seedily, and wearing a plug hat
-- 115 --
[figure description] Page 115.[end figure description]
of enormous height, the crown of which was
battered into the last degree of grotesqueness.
He got right up, and, dragging his chair behind
him, came over and settled close down
in front of me.
“Stranger here, a'n't you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your name's Fuller, a'n't it?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, mebbe I'm mistaken, but you're just
the picter o' Fuller. Never was a conductor
on a railroad, was you?”
“Never, sir.”
“Never was down in the swamps o' South-Eastern
Georgy, was you?”
“Never, sir.”
“Well, that beats four aces! I could 'a'
bet on your bein' Fuller.” He paused a
moment, and then added in a very insinuating
tone: “If you are Fuller you needn't be afeard
to say so, for I don't hold any grudge 'gin you
about that little matter. Now, sure enough,
a'n't your name Fuller, in fact?”
I glared at the man a moment, hesitating
about whether or not I should plant my fist in
his eye. But something of almost child-like
simplicity and sincerity beaming from his face
restrained me. Surely the fellow did not wish
to be as impudent as his words would imply.
-- 116 --
[figure description] Page 116.[end figure description]
“Well, stranger, I see I've got to explain, but
the story's not overly long,” said he, hitching
up a little closer to me and settling himself
comfortably.
I was about to get up and walk out of the
room, when some one of the by-sitters filliped
a little roll of paper to me. Unrolling it I
read —
“Let him go on, he'll give you a lively one.
He's a brick.”
So, concluding that possibly I might be entertained,
I lounged back in my seat.
“You see,” said he, “I thought you was
Fuller, an' Fuller was the only conductor I
ever stole.”
“Stole a conductor,” whispered somebody,
“that's a new one!”
“I've stole a good many things in my time,
but I'm here to bet that no other living Hoosier
ever stole a railroad conductor, an' Fuller was
the only one I ever stole. I stole him slicker
'n a eel. I had him 'fore he knowed it, and you
jist better bet he was one clean beat conductor
fore I was done wi' 'im.
“I kin tell you the whole affair in a few minutes,
and I da' say you'll laugh a good deal
'fore I'm through. You see I went down to
Floridy for my health, and when I had about
-- 117 --
[figure description] Page 117.[end figure description]
recivered I got onto a bum in Jacksonville
and spent all my money and everything else
but my very oldest suit o' clothes and my pistol,
a Colt's repeater, ten inch barrel. None o'
you can't tell how a feller feels in a predicament
o' that sort. Somethin' got into my
throat 'bout as big as a egg, and I felt kinder
moist about the eyes when I had to stare the
fact in the face that I was nigh onto, or possibly
quite a thousand miles from home without
ary a dime in my pocket. But if there's one
thing I do have more 'n another in my nater
it's common sense grit. Well, what you s'pose
I done? W'y I jest lit out for home afoot.
Well, sir, the derndest swamps is them Floridy
and Georgy swamps. It's ra'lly all one swamp—
the Okeefenokee. I follered the railroad that
goes up to Savanny, and it led me deeper and
deeper into the outlying fringes of that terrible
old bog. When I had travelled a considerable
distance into Georgy, and had pretty
well wore my feet off up to my ankle j'ints, and
was about as close onto starvation as a 'tater
failure in Ireland, and when my under lip had
got to hanging down like the skirt o' a wore
out saddle, and when every step seemed like
it 'd be my last, I jest got clean despairing like
and concluded to pray a little. So I got down
-- 118 --
[figure description] Page 118.[end figure description]
upon my knee j'ints and put up a most extraornary
supplication. I felt every word o' it,
too, in all the marrer of my bones. The place
where I was a prayin' was a sort o' hummock
spot in a mighty bad part o' the swamp. Some
awful tall pines towered stupenjisly above me.
Well, jest as I was finished, and was a saying
amen, the lordy mercy what a yowl something
did give right over me in a tree! I think I
jumped as high as your head, stranger, and
come down flat-footed onto a railroad cross tie.
Whillikins, how I was scared! It was one o'
them whooping owls they have down there.
It was while I was a running from that 'ere
owl a thinkin' it was a panther, that the thought
struck me somewhere in the back o' the head
that I might steal a ride to Savanny on the
first train 'at might pass. `I'll try it!' says I,
and so I sot right down there in the swamp
and calmly waited for a train. In about a hour
here come one, like the de'il a braking hemp,
jist more'n a roaring through the swamp. I
forgot to tell you 'at it was after dark, but the
moon was dimly a shining through the fog that
covers everything there o' nights. Well, here
come the train, and as she passed I made a
lunge at the hind platform of the last car and
some how or another got onto it and away I
-- 119 --
[figure description] Page 119.[end figure description]
went. It was mighty much softer 'n walking,
I tell you, and I was pleased as a monkey with
a red cap on. My, how fast that train did go!
I could hardly hold onto where I wus. You
may jist bet I clung on though, and finally I
got myself setting down on the steps and then
I was all hunkey. But I didn't have much
time to enjoy myself there, though, for all of a
sudden the light of a lantern shined on me and
then somebody touched me and said—
“Ticket!”
“Mebbe you don't know how onery a feller
'll feel sometimes when he hears that 'ere word
ticket—'specially when he a'n't got no ticket
nor no money to pay his fare, and too, when he
does want to ride a little of the derndest! That
was my fix! I'd 'a' give a thousand dollars
for a half dollar!
“Ticket!”
“He shook me a little this time and held his
lantern down low, so's to see into my face. I
know I must 'a' looked like the de'il.
“Ticket here, quick!”
“I've done paid,” said I.
“Show your check then.”
“Lost it,” says I.
“Money, then, quick!”
“Got none,” says I.
-- 120 --
[figure description] Page 120.[end figure description]
“What the — did you git onto my train
for without ticket or money? How do you expect
to travel without paying, you — lousy
vagabond! You can't steal from me; out with
your — wallet and gi' me the money! Hurry
up!”
“A'n't got no wallet nor no money,” says I.
“Well, I'll dump you off right here, then,”
said he, reaching for the bell-rope to stop the
train.
“For the Lord's sake let me ride to Savanny!”
says I.
“A dam Northerner, I know from your
voice!” said he, pulling the rope. The train
began to slack and soon stopped.
“Get off!” said the conductor.
“Please l'me ride!” says I.
“Off with you!”
“Jist a few miles here on the steps!”
“Off, quick!”
“Please—”
“Here you go!” and as he said the words he
tried to kick me off.
“In a second I was like a Bengal tiger. I
jumped up and gethered him and we went at
it. I'm as good as ever fluttered, and pretty
soon I give him one flat on the nose, and we
both went off 'n the platform together. As I
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started off I happened to think of it, so I
grabbed up and pulled the bell-rope to signal
the engineer to drive on. “Hoot-toot!” says
the whistle, and away lick-to-split went the
train, and slashy-to-splashy, rattle-o-bangle,
kewoppyty-whop, bump, thud! down me and
that 'ere conductor come onto a pile o' wore
out cross ties in the side ditch, and there we
laid a fightin'!
“But you jest bet it didn't take me long to
settle him. He soon began to sing out `'nuff!
'nuff! take 'm off!' and so I took him by the
hair and dragged him off 'n the cross ties,
shot him one or two more under the ear with
my fist, and then dropped him. He crawled
up and stood looking at me as if I was the
awfulest thing in the world. I s'pect I did
look scary, for I was terrible mad. His face
was bruised up mightily, but he wasn't a
bleeding much. He was mostly swelled.
“Where's my train?” says he, in a sort o'
blank, hollow way.
“Don't ye hear it?” I answered him, “it's
gone on to Savanny!”
“Gone! who told 'm to go on? what 'd they
go leave me for?”
“I pulled the bell rope,” says I.
“You?”
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“Yes, me!”
“What in the world did you do that for,
man?”
“'Cause you wouldn't let me ride to Savanny!”
“What 'll I do! what 'll I do!” he cried, beginning
to waltz 'round like one possessed.
“I laughed—I couldn't help it—and at the
same time I pulled out my old pistol.
“Yah-hoo-a!” yelled another owl.
“For the sake o' humanity don't kill me!”
said the conductor.
“I'm jest a going to shoot you a little bit for
the fun o' the thing,” says I.
“Mercy, man!” he prayed.
“Ticket!” says I.
“He groaned the awfulest kind, and, by the
moonlight, I saw 'at the big tears was running
down his face. I felt sorry for him, but I
kinder thought 'at after what he'd done he'd
better pray a little, so I mentioned it to him.”
“I guess it mought be best if you'd pray a
little,” says I, cocking the pistol. My voice
had a decided sepulchreal sound. The pistol
clicked very sharp.
“O, kind sir,” says he, “O, dear sir, I
never did pray, I don't know how to pray!”
“Ticket or check!” says I, and he knowed I
was talking kind o' sarcasm. “Pray quick!”
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“He got down and prayed like a Methodist
preacher at his very best licks. He must 'a'
prayed afore.
“About the time his prayer was ended I
heard a train coming in the distance. He
jumped up and listened.
“Glory! Heaven be praised!” says he,
capering around like a mad monkey, “they've
missed me and are backing down to hunt me!
where's my lantern? Have you a match?
Gi'me your handkerchief!”
“Not so fast,” says I; “you jest be moderate
now, will you? I've no notion o' you getting
on that train any more. You jest walk
along wi' me, will you?”
“Where?” says he.
“Into the swamp,” says I; “step off lively,
too, d'you hear me?”
“O mercy, mercy, man!” says he.
“Ticket!” says I, and then he walked along
wi' me into the swamp some two or three hundred
yards from the railroad.
“I took him into a very thickety place, and
made him back up agin a tree and put back
his arms around it. Then I took one o' his
suspenders and tied him hard and fast. Then
I gagged him with my handkerchief. So far,
so good.
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“Here come the train slowly backing down,
the brakesman a swinging lanterns, and the
passengers all swarming onto the platforms.
Poorty soon they stopped right opposite us.
The conductor began to struggle. I poked the
pistol in his face and jammed the gag furder
into his mouth. He saw I meant work and got
quiet.
“The passengers was swarming off 'n the
train and I saw 'at I must git about poorty
fast if I was to do anything. I soon hit on a
plan. I jist stepped back a piece out o' sight o'
the conductor and turned my coat, which was
one o' these two-sided affairs, one side white,
t'other brown. I turned the white side out.
Then I flung away my greasy skull cap and
took a soft hat out 'n my pocket and put it on.
Then I watched my chance and mixed in with
the passengers who was a hunting for the conductor.
“Strange what's become o' him,” says I to
a fat man, who was puffing along.
“Dim strange, dim strange,” says the big
fellow, in a keen, wheezing voice.
“Well, you never saw jist sich hunting as
was done for that conductor. Everybody
slopped around in the swamp till their clothes
was as wet and muddy as mine. I was
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monstrous active in the search. I hunted everywhere
'cepting where the conductor was.
Finally he got the gag spit out and lordy how
he did squeal for help. Everybody rushed to
him and soon had him free.
“It tickled me awful to hear that conductor
explaining the matter. He told it something
like this:
“Devil of a great big ruffian on hind platform.
Asked him for ticket. Refused. Tried
to put him off. Grabbed me. Smashed my
nose. Flung me off. Pulled the bell-rope,
then lit out on me. Mauled —— out o' me.
Had a pistol two feet long. Made me pray.
Heard train a coming. Took me to swamp.
Tied me and sloped. Lord but I'm glad to see
you all!”
“We all went aboard o' the train and I rode
to Savanny onmolested. The conductor didn't
mistrust me. He asked me for my check and
I told him 'at I'd lost it a thrashing round in
the bushes a hunting him. That was all right.
“When we got to Savanny I couldn't help
letting the conductor know me, so as I passed
down the steps of the car I whispered savagely
in his ear:
“Ticket! dod blast you!”
“He tried to grab me as I shambled off into
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the crowd, but I knowed the ropes. I heard
him a shoutin'—
“There he goes! Ketch him, dern him,
ketch him!” But they didn't.
“That conductor's name was Fuller, and I
swear, stranger, 'at you look jest like him! Gi'
me a match, will you, my pipe's out. Thanky.
Hope I ha'n't bored you. Good bye all.”
He shambled out and I never saw him again.
-- -- p722-132
Hoiden.
[figure description] Page 127.[end figure description]
The house was known as Rackenshack
throughout the neighborhood for miles around.
It was a frame structure, originally of sorry
workmanship, at least thirty years old, and
upon which not a cent's worth of repairing had
been done since first erected, wherefore the
name was peculiarly appropriate. It was not
only old, rickety, paintless, half rotten and
sadly sunken at one end, but the fencing
around the place was broken, grown over with
weeds, and slanted in as many ways as there
were panels. The lawn or yard in front of the
house had some old cherry trees, gnarled and
decaying, growing in what had once been
straight rows, but storms and more insidious
vicissitudes had twisted and curled them
about till they looked as though they had been
thrown end foremost at the ground hap-hazard.
Under and all round these trees young sprouts,
from the scattered cherry seeds of many years
of fruiting, had grown so thick that one could
with difficulty get through them. A narrow,
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well-beaten path led from the gate, which
lazily lolled on one hinge, up to the decayed
and sunken porch, in front of which was the
well, with its lop-eared windlass and dilapidated
curb and shed.
A country thoroughfare, one of the old State
roads leading westward to a ferry on the Wabash
river near the village of Attica and eastward
to either Crawfordsville, Indianapolis or
Lafayette. This road was in the direct line of
emigration, and in the proper seasons long lines
of covered wagons rolled past, the drivers, a
jolly set, hallooing to each other and bandying
sharp wit and rude sarcasm at the expense of
Rackenshack. Poor old house, it leered at the
passers, with its windows askew, and clattered
its loose boards and battered shutters in utter
and complacent defiance of all their jeers!
Rackenshack belonged to Luke Plunkett
and Betsy, his sister; the latter an old maid
beyond all cavil, the former a bachelor of about
thirty. The lands of the estate were pretty
broad, comprising some two thousand acres
of rich prairie and “river bottom” land, which
had been kept in a much better state of improvement
than the house had. In fact, Luke
was considered a careful, industrious, frugal
farmer. He had large, well regulated barns
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and stock sheds and stables—plenty of fine
horses, cattle, hogs, sheep and mules, all well
fed and cared for, and it was generally understood
that he had a pretty round deposit in a
bank.
Perhaps 'Squire Rube Fink, sometimes called
“the Rev. Major Fink” and sometimes “Talking
Rube,” gives the best description of Luke's
condition, habits and surroundings, that I can
offer. It is truthful and singularly graphic.
He says:
“Luke Plunkett's no fool if he does live at
Rack-a-me-shack and 'spect the ole rotten tabernacle
to fall down on him every time a rooster
crows close by. That feller's long-headed,
he is. To be sure, sartinly, his barn's a dern
sight better 'n his house, but his head's level,
for, d'ye see, that's the way to make money.
A house don't never make no money for a feller—
it's nothin' but dead capital to put money
into a fine dwellin'. Luke's pilin' his money in
the bank. He's been doin' a sharp thing in
wheat and live stock at Cincinnati, and I guess
he knows what he's about. He don't keer
about what sort o' house he lives in. But I
tell you that red haired sister o' his'n is lightning.
She's what bosses the job all round that
ole shanty; but she can't red-hair it over Luke
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[figure description] Page 130.[end figure description]
in the farm matters. He has his own way.
He's so quiet and peculiar; a still, say nothin',
bull-dog sort o' man he is.”
Indeed, Luke was one of that quiet sort of
men who, without ever once loudly asserting a
right or disputing any word you say, invariably
go ahead on their own judgment and carry
their point in everything. Nevertheless, he
was a man of fine, generous nature at bottom,
a good brother and a worthy friend.
But it was with Luke just as it is, more or
less, with us all. He absorbed into his life the
spirit of his surroundings. He grew somewhat
to resemble Rackenshack in outward appearance.
He became slovenly in his dress and
let his hair and beard grow wild. His naturally
handsome face gradually took on a sort of
good humored ugliness, and his heavy shoulders
slanted over like the uneven gables of his house
He became an inveterate chewer and smoker
of tobacco. What time a quid of the weed
was not in his mouth, the short thick stem of a
dark, nicotine-coated briar-root pipe took its
place there.
Luke was an early riser; therefore it happens
that our story properly begins on a fine
June morning, just before sunrise. The birds
seemed to suspect that a story was to date
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[figure description] Page 131.[end figure description]
from that hour, for they were up earlier than
usual and made a great rustle of wings and a
sweet Babel of voices in the old cherry trees.
There were the oriole, the cat bird, the yellow
throat, the brown thrush and the red bird, all
putting forth at once their charmingest efforts.
The old cherry trees, knee deep in the foliage
of their under growing seedlings, gleamed
dusky green in the early light, as Luke, bareheaded,
barefooted and in his “shirt sleeves,”
as the phrase goes, issued from the front door
of Rackenshack, and walked down the path
across the yard to the gate at the road. Of
late he had been in the habit of “taking a
smoke” the first thing after getting up in the
morning, and somehow the gate, though off
one hinge and having doubtful tenure of the
other, was his favorite thing to lean upon
while watching the whiffs of blue smoke slowly
float away.
On this particular morning he seemed a little
agitated; and, indeed, he was vexed more
deeply than he had ever before been. Just
the preceding evening he had learned that a
corps of civil engineers were rapidly approaching
his premises with a line of survey, and
that the purpose was to locate and build a
railway right through the middle of his farm.
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To Luke the very idea was outrageous. He
felt that he could never stand such an imposition.
His land was his own, and when he
wanted it dug up and leveled down and a track
laid across it he would do it himself. He did
not want his farm cut in two, his fields disarranged
and his fences moved, nor did he
wish to see his live stock killed by locomotives.
The truth is he was bitterly opposed to railroads,
any how. They were innovations. They
were enemies to liberty. They brought fashion,
and spendthrift ways, and speculation, and all
that along with them. Other folks might have
railroads if they wanted them, but they must
not bother him with them. He could take care
of his affairs without any railroads. Besides,
if he wanted one he could build it. He hung
heavily upon the gate, thinking the matter
over, and would not have bestowed a second
glance at the carriage that came trundling
past if he had not caught the starry flash of a
pair of blue eyes and a rosy, roguish girl's face
within. The beauty of that countenance struck
the great rough fellow like a blow. He stared
in a dazed, bewildered way. He took his pipe
from his mouth and involuntarily tried to hide
his great big bare feet behind the gate post.
He felt a queer, dreamy thrill steal all over
-- 133 --
[figure description] Page 133.[end figure description]
him. It was his first definite impression of
feminine beauty. Instantly that round, happy,
mischievous face, with its dimples and indescribable
shining lines of half latent mirth, set
itself in his heart forever.
The carriage trundled on in the direction of
the ferry. Luke followed it with his eyes till
it disappeared round a turn in the road; then
he put the pipe to his mouth again and began
puffing vigorously, wagging his head in a way
that indicated great confusion of mind. There
are times when a glimpse of a face, the sudden
half-mastering of a new, grand idea, a
view of a rare landscape or even a cadence in
some new tune, will start afresh the long dried
up wells of a heart. Something like this had
happened to Luke.
“Sich a gal! sich a gal!” he murmured from
the corner of his mouth opposite his pipe stem.
“I don't guess I'm a dreamin' now, though I
feel a right smart like it. I hev dreamed of
that 'ere face though, many of times. I've
seed it in my sleep a thousand times, but I
never s'posed 'at I'd see it shore enough when
I'd be awake! Sweetest dreams I ever had—
sweetest face God ever made! I wonder who
she is?” As if to supplement Luke's soliloquy
at this point, a cardinal red bird flung out
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[figure description] Page 134.[end figure description]
from the dusky depths of the oldest cherry
tree an ecstatic carol, and a swallow, swooping
down from the clear purple heights, almost
touched the man's cheek with its shining
wings, and the sun lifted its flaming face in
the east and flooded the fields with gold.
Luke turned slowly toward the old house.
The breeze that came up with the sun poured
through the orchard with a broad, joyous
surge, while something like blowing of strange
winds and streaming of soft sunlight made
strangely happy the inner world of the smitten
Hoosier. His big strong heart fluttered
mysteriously. He actually took his pipe from
his lips and broke into a snatch of merry song,
that startled Betsy, his sister, from her morning
nap.
For the time the hated railroad survey was
forgotten. The landscape at Rackenshack, as
if by a turn of the great prisms of nature,
suddenly took on rainbow hues. The fields
flashed with jewels, and the woods, a wall of
dusky emerald, were wrapped in a roseate
mist, stirred into dreamy motion by the breeze.
A light, grateful fragrance seemed to pervade
all space, as if flung from the sun to soften and
enhance the charm of his gift of light and heat.
Such a hold did all this take upon Luke, and
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so utterly abstracted was he, that when breakfast
was ready Betsy was obliged to remind
him of the fact that he had neglected to wash
his face and hands, and comb his hair and
beard—things absolutely prerequisite to eating
at her table.
“Forgot it, sure's the world,” said Luke;
“don't know what ever possessed me.”
“Maybe you've forgot to turn the cows into
the milk stalls, too?” said Betsy.
“If I ha'n't I'm a gourd!” and Luke scratched
his head distractedly.
“What 'd I tell you, Luke Plunkett? It's
come at last, O lordy! You're as crazy as a
June bug all along of smoking that old pipe!
Rot the nasty, stinking old thing! It's a perfect
shame, Luke, for a man to just smoke
what little brains he's got clean out. You
ought to be ashamed of yourself, so you
ought!”
While she was speaking Betsy got the big
wooden washbowl for her brother, whereupon
he proceeded to make his ablutions in a most
energetic way, taking up great double handfuls
of water and sousing his face therein with
loud puffings, that enveloped his head in a
cloud of spray.
When a clean tow linen towel had served
its purpose, Luke remarked:
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“Don't know but what I am some'at crazy
in good earnest, Betsy, since I come to think
it all over. I'm r'ally onto it a right smart.
What 'd you think, Betsy, if I'd commence
talkin' 'oman to ye?”
“Luke, Luke! are you crazy? Is your
mind clean gone out of your poor smoky
head?”
“That's not much of a answer to my question.”
“Well, what do you mean, anyhow?”
“I mean business, that's what!”
“Luke!”
“Yes 'm.”
“Do try to act sensible now. What is it,
Luke? What makes your eyes look so strange
and dance about so? What do you mean by
all this queer talk?”
Luke finished combing, and, going to the
table, sat down and was proceeding to discuss
the fried chicken and coffee without further
remark, but Betsy was not so easily balked.
She, like most red haired women, wished her
questions to be fully and immediately answered,
wherefore some indications of a storm
began to appear.
Luke smiled a quiet little smile that had
hard work getting out through his beard.
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Betsy trotted her foot under the table. Her
hand trembled as she poured the coffee—trembled
so violently that she scalded her left
thumb. It was about time for Luke to speak
or have trouble, so, in a very gentle voice, he
said:
“Well, I saw a gal—a gal an' her father, I
reckon—go by this mornin'.”
“Well, what of it? S'pose there's plenty
of girls and their fathers, ain't there?” snapped
Betsy.
Luke drew a chicken leg through his mouth,
laid down the bone, leered comically at his
sister from under his bushy eyebrows, and
said:
“But the gal was purty, Betsy—purty as a
pictur', sweet as a peach, juicy an' temptin'
as a ripe, red cored watermillion! You can't
begin to guess how sweet an' nice she did
look. My heart just flolloped and flopped
about, an' it's at it yet!”
“Luke Plunkett, you are crazy! You're
just as distracted as a blind dog in high rye.
Drink a cup of hot coffee, Luke, and go lie
down a bit, you'll feel better.” The spinster
was horrified beyond measure. She really
thought her brother crazy.
The man finished his meal in silence, smiling
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the while more grimly than before, after which
he took his shot gun and a pan of salt and
trudged off to a distant field to salt some cattle.
He always carried his gun with him on
such occasions, and not unfrequently brought
back a brace of partridges or some young
squirrels. As he strode along, thinking all
the time of the girl in the carriage, he suddenly
came upon a corps of engineers with transit,
level, rod and chain, staking out, through the
centre of a choice field, a line of survey for a
railroad. In an instant he was like a roaring
lion. He glared for a second or so at the intruders,
then lowering his gun he charged
them at a run, storming out as he did so:
“What you doin' here, you onery cusses,
you! Leave here! Get out! Scratch! Sift!
Dern yer onery skins, I'll shoot every dog of
ye! Git out 'n here, I say—out, out!”
The corps stampeded at once. The surveyor
seized his transit, the leveller his level, the
rod man his rod, the axe men and chain men
their respective implements, and away they
went, “lick-to-split, like a passel o' scart hogs,”
as Luke afterwards said, “as fast as they
could ever wiggle along!”
No wonder they ran, for Luke looked like a
demon of destruction. It was a wild race for
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the line fence, a full half mile away. The
leveler, being the hindmost man, rolled over
this fence just as a heavy bowlder, hurled by
Luke, struck the top rail. It was a close shave,
a miss of a hair's breadth, a marvelous escape.
Luke rushed up to the fence and glared over
at his intended victims. Here he knew he
must stop, for he doubted the legality of pursuing
them beyond the confines of his own
premises. Somewhat out of breath he leaned
on the fence and proceeded to swear at the
corps individually and collectively, shaking his
fists at them excitedly, till the appearance of
a new man on the scene made him start and
stare as if looking at a ghost. He was a well
dressed, gentlemanly appearing person of about
the age of forty-five, pale and thoughtful—
calm, gray eyed, commanding. Luke recognized
him at once as the man he had seen in
the carriage, and, indeed, the vehicle itself
stood hard by, with a beautiful, laughing,
roguish face looking out of one of the windows.
The lion in the stalwart farmer was quelled in
an instant. He felt his legs grow weak. He
set his gun by the fence and touched his hat
to the little lady.
“Your name, I believe, is Luke Plunkett?”
said the approaching gentleman.
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“Yes, sir,” said Luke.
“You own two thousand acres of land here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your residence is called Rackenshack?”
“Yes, sir.” (Suppressed titter from the carriage.)
“So I thought. Pull back, men (addressing
the corps), pull back to where you dropped
the line and bring it right along. Mr. Plunkett
will not harm you now.”
The corps began to move. Luke fiercely
seized his gun; but before he could lift it or
utter a word, a ten-inch Colt's repeater was
thrust into his face by the calm gentleman,
and a steady hand held it there.
“Mr. Plunkett,” said the man, “I am the
chief engineer of the — Railroad. I am
making a location. The laws of this State
give me the right to go upon your land with
my corps and have the survey made. I am
not to be trifled with. If you offer to cock
that gun I'll put six holes through you. What
do you say, now?”
The voice was that of a cold man of business.
There was a coffin in every word. The
muzzle of the pistol steadily covered Luke's
left eye. The situation was rigid. Luke hesitated—
his face ashy with anger and fear, his
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eyes alternating their glances between the
muzzle of the pistol and that wonderful shining
face at the carriage.
“Shoot him, papa, shoot him! Shoot him!”
Sweet as a silver bell rang out the girl's voice,
more like a ripple of idle song than a murderous
request, and then a clear, happy laugh
went echoing off through the woods in which
the carriage stood.
Slowly, steadily, Luke let fall the breech of
his gun upon the ground beside him. The
engineer smiled grimly and lowered his pistol,
while the corps, headed by the surveyor, took
up its line of march to the point where work had
been so suddenly left off.
The young lady clapped her tiny white hands
for joy.
A big black woodpecker began to cackle in a
tree hard by.
Luke felt like a man in a dream.
The whole adventure, so far, had been
clothed in most unreal seeming.
It can hardly be told how, by rapid transitions
from one thing to another in his talk,
the engineer drew Luke's mind away from the
late difficulty and gradually aroused in him a
kindly feeling. In less than ten minutes the
two men were sitting side by side on a log,
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[figure description] Page 142.[end figure description]
smoking cigars from the engineer's pouch and
chatting calmly, amicably.
Luke's eyes often rested steadily fixed in the
direction of the carriage. Through the thin
veil of tobacco smoke the face of the young
girl seemed to the farmer angelic in its beauty.
All around the sweets of summer rose and
fell, and drifted like scarcely visible shining
mists, fraught with the spice of leaf and perfume
of blossom, agitated by swells of tricksy
wind, going on and on to the mysterious goal
of the season.
The two men talked on until the corps had
pushed the line of survey far past them into
the cool, shady deeps of the woods, whence
their voices came back fainter and fainter
every moment. At length the engineer arose,
and stretching out his hand to Luke, said:
“Mr. Plunkett, I'm sure I'll be able to serve
you some time; let us be friends. I shall be in
this vicinity most of the time till the road is
built. No doubt I can show a way to profit by
the construction of a railroad across your land.
If you are sharp it will make your fortune. I
like your independent way, sir, and hope to
know you better. Here is my card.”
Luke took the bit of pasteboard without
saying a word. They shook hands and the
engineer got into his carriage.
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“Here's my card, too, Mr. Plunkett,” cried
the girl. She said something more, but the
horses were made to plunge rapidly away, and
the words were lost; but the flash of a white
jewelled hand caught Luke's eye as a delicately
tinted card came fluttering towards him. He
sprang and seized it. If a bag of diamonds
had been flung at his feet he could not have
been more excited. His hands trembled. All
the incidents of the only fairy tale he had ever
read came at once into his mind. He stood
with his feet turned in, like some great awkward
boy, a bashful, shame-faced look lurking
about his mouth and eyes. He filled his pipe
and lighted it from the stump of his cigar with
nervous eagerness. A squirrel came down to
the lowest limbs of a beech tree hard by and
barked at him, but he did not notice it. He
read the names on the cards:
“Elliot Pearl, C. E.”
“Hoiden Pearl.”
The first printed in small capitals, the second
written in a delicate, rather cramped feminine
hand. He stood for a long time dreamily employed
in turning these bits of paper over and
over. His thoughts were so vague in outline
and so dim in filling up that they cannot be
reproduced. They slipped away on the
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summer air, like little puffs of perfume, and were
lost, to be found by many and many a one in
the ineffable places of dreamland. Finally,
shaking himself as if to break the charm that
held him in its meshes, he took up his gun and
slowly made his way homeward. All along his
walk he kept smiling to himself and talking
aloud, but his words were such that it would
be sacrilege to repeat them now. Let them
hover about in the sunlight of summer, where
he uttered them, as things too delicate to be
pressed between the lids of a book.
Betsy had trouble with Luke for some days
after this. He lay about the house, saying little,
eating little, giving little attention to the many
tenants who worked his estate. He was in good
health, was not in trouble (so he said to his
sister), but he did not care to be bothered with
business. He was tired and would rest awhile.
“He smoked pretty near all the time,” as
Betsy declared. But not a hint fell from his
lips as to what might be running in his mind.
So the days slipped past till July hung golden
mists on the horizon and filled the woods with
that rare stillness and dusky slumbrousness
that follows the maturing of the foliage and the
coming on of fruit. The cherry trees at Rackenshack
had grown ragged and dull, and the
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birds, excepting a few swallows wheeling about
the old chimney tops, had all flown away to
the woods and fields. The wheat had been
cut and stacked, the corn had received its last
ploughing. Still Luke hung about the house
annoying Betsey with his pipe and his utter
carelessness. That he was “distracted” Betsy
did not for a moment doubt. She used every
means her small stock of wit could invent to
urge him out of his singular mood, but without
avail. He took to the few old novels he
could find about the house, but sometimes he
would gaze blankly at a single paragraph for
a whole hour.
One morning as he lay on the porch, his head
resting upon the back of a chair, reading, or
pretending to read an odd volume of “The
Scottish Chiefs,” a little boy, 'Squire Brown's
son, came to bring home a monkey-wrench his
father had borrowed some time before. The
boy was a bright, rattle-box, say-everything,
pop-eyed sort of child, and was not long telling
all the news of the neighborhood. Luke
gave little attention to what he was saying,
till at length he let fall something about a
young lady—a fine, rich young lady, staying at
Judge Barnett's—a young lady who could out-run
him, out jump him, beat him playing
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marbles and ball, who could climb away up in the
June apple tree, who could ride a colt bareback,
who could beat Jim Barnett shooting at
a mark, who could, in fact, do a half a hundred
things to perfection that strict persons would
think a young lady should never do at all, but
which seemed to make a heroine of her in the
narrator's boyish view.
“What's the gal's name?” queried Luke in
a slow, lazy way, but his eyes shot a gleam of
hope.
“Hoidy Pearl,” replied the lad.
Hoiden Pearl! That name had been woven
into every sound that had reached Luke's ears
for days and nights and nights together, and
now, like a sweet tune nearly mastered, it took
a deeper, tenderer meaning as the boy pronounced
it in his childish way.
“Hoidy Pearl is her name,” the lad continued.
“She's come to stay at the Judge's all
summer till the new railroad's finished. Her
father's the boss of the road. She's jest the
funniest girl, o-o-e! And she likes me, too!”
Luke raised himself to a sitting posture and
looked at the boy so earnestly that he drew
back a pace or two as if afraid.
“Boy, you're not lyin', are ye?” said the man
in a low, earnest tone.
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“No I'm not, neither,” was the quick reply.
Luke got up, flung aside his book and strolled
off into the woods. Wandering there in the
cool, silent places, he dreamed his dream. For
hours he sat by a little spring stream in the
dense shadow of a big cotton-wood tree. The
birds congregated about him, and chirped and
sang; the squirrels came out chattering and
frisking from branch to branch; but he gave
them no look of recognition—he saw them not,
heard them not. The birds might have lit
upon his head and the squirrels might have
run in and out of his pockets with impunity.
He smoked all the time, refilling and relighting
his pipe whenever it burned out. He did
not know how much he was smoking, nor that
he was smoking at all. A bright face set in a
mass of yellow curls, a wee white hand all
spangled with jewels, a voice sweeter than any
bird's, a name—Hoiden Pearl—these rang,
and danced, and echoed, and shone in the recesses
of his brain and heart to the exclusion
of all else. He was trying to think, but he
could not. He wanted to mature a plan, but
not even an outline could find room in his head.
It was full. Strange, indeed, it may seem, that
a rough farmer of Luke's age should thus fall
into the ways of the imaginative, sentimental
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stripling; but, after all, the fit must come on
some time in life. No doubt it goes harder
with some constitutions than with others.
Luke may have been unwittingly strongly predisposed
that way. Neither the exterior of
a man nor his surroundings will do to judge
him by. Nature is that mysterious in all her
ways. Luke talked aloud, sometimes gesticulating
in a quiet way.
“I must see the gal—I will see the gal,” he
muttered at last. “It's no use talkin', I jist
will see her!”
Suddenly a light broke from his face. He
smiled like one who has victory in his grasp—
like an editor who has an idea, like a reviewer
who has found some bad verse. He got up
immediately, went back to the barn, hitched a
horse to a small road wagon and drove to town.
There he spent time and money with a merchant
tailor and other vendors of clothing.
He was very fastidious in his selection. Nothing
but the finest would do him. A few days
after this he brought home a trunk full of
princely raiment—broad cloth and fine linen.
Betsy was struck dumb with amazement when
the trunk was opened. A dream of such costly
things, such reckless extravagance, would have
driven her mad. Silent, open-eyed, wondering,
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she came in and stood behind Luke while he
was unpacking. He looked up presently and
saw her. His face flushed violently, and in a
half-whining, half-ashamed tone he muttered:
“Now, Betsy, you jest git out'n here faster'n
ye come in, for I'm not goin' to stan' no foolin'
at all, now. These 'ere's my clothes and paid
for out'n my money, an' I'm the jedge of what
I need. I ha'n't had any good duds for a long
time, and I'm tired o' lookin' like a scarecrow
made out 'n a salt bag. I've been thinkin' for
a long time I'd git these 'ere things, an' now
I've got 'm. You kin git you some if ye like,
but I don't want ye a standin' round here gawpin'
at me on 'count o' my clothes; so you go
off an' mind yer own affairs. It's no great sight
to see some shirts, an' coats, and pants, an' collars,
an' vests, an' sich like, is it?”
Before this speech was finished Betsy had
backed out of the room and closed the door.
As she did so she let go a sigh that came back
to Luke like a Parthian arrow; but it happened
just then that he was holding up in front of
him a buff linen vest which kept the missile
from his heart.
He dressed himself with great care, and an
hour later he slipped out of the house unseen,
and took his way towards the rather
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pretentious residence of Judge Barnett, the gables
of which, a mile away, gleamed between rows
of Lombardy poplars. The Judge was one or
those half cultivated men who, in every country
neighborhood, pass for prodigies of learning
and ability. He was the autocrat of the
county in political and social affairs—one of
those men who really know a great deal, but
who arrogate more. He got his title from
having been County Commissioner when the
court house was building. Some said he made
money out of the transaction, but our story is
silent there.
It would have been an interesting study for
a philosopher to have watched Luke throughout
the singular ramble he took that morning.
It would have been such a manifest revelation
of the state of the fellow's feelings. It would
have minutely disclosed, and more eloquently
than any verbal confession, the rise and fall,
the ebb and flow, the alternating strength and
weakness of his purpose, and the will behind
it. Then, too, it would have let fall delightful
hints of the unselfishness of his new and all-engrossing
passion, and of the charming simplicity
and sincerity of his great rugged nature
at its inner core. At first he struck out boldly
a direct line to Judge Barnett's residence, his
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face beaming with the light of settled happiness,
but as he neared the pleasant grounds
surrounding the house he began to discover
some trepidation. His gait wavered, the expression
of his face shifted with each step, and
soon his course was indeterminate—a fitful
sauntering from this place to that—a tricksy,
uneven flight, like that of a lazy butterfly, if
one may indulge the comparison—a meandering
in and out among the trees of a small walnut
grove—a strolling here and there, now
along the verge of a well set old orchard, now
down the low hedge behind the garden, and
anon leaning over the board fence that inclosed
the Judge's ample barn and stable lot;
he gazed wistfully, half comically, in the direction
of the upper windows of the farm house.
It was one of those peculiarly yellow days of
summer, when everything swims in a golden
mist. The blue birds floated aimlessly about
from stake to stake of the fences; the wind,
felt only in jerky puffs, blew no particular
way, and as idly and as eccentrically as any
blue bird, and in full accord with the fitful will
of the wind, Luke drifted through the sheen
of summer all round Barnett Place. He lazed
about, humming a tune, and, for a wonder, not
smoking—half restless, half contented, looking
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for something, scarcely expecting anything.
When once a great rough man does get into a
childish way, he is a child of which ordinary
children would be ashamed, and just then
Luke, the big bashful fellow, was an instance
strikingly in point. Occasionally he talked
half aloud to himself. Once, while lounging
on the orchard fence, gazing down between the
long rows of russet and pippin trees, he said
dreamily,
“I must see her. I can't go back 'ithout
seein' her.” It so chanced that just then a
shower of blackbirds fell upon the orchard,
covering the trees and the ground, flying over
and over each other, twittering and whistling
as only blackbirds can. Their wings smote
together with a tender rustling sound like that
of a spring wind in young foliage, or of a
thousand lovers whispering together by moonlight.
Luke watched them a long while, a
doleful shade gathering in his face. “The
little things loves each other,” he muttered;
“everything loves something; an' jest dern my
lights ef I don't love the gal, an' I'm boun' to
see her!” Seemingly nerved by sudden resolution,
he climbed over the fence and started
at a slashing pace across the orchard towards
the house, scaring all the birds into an ecstasy
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of flight, so that they dashed themselves
against the foliage of the apple trees, making
it rustle and sway as if blown on by a strong
wind. He did not keep on, however. His
resolution seemed to burn out about midway
the orchard. He began to drift around again,
his pace becoming slower and slower. His
shoulders drooped forward as if burdened
with a great load, his eyes turned restlessly
from side to side.
“I jest can't do it!” he murmured—“I jest
can't do it, an' I mought as well go back!”
There was a petulant ring to his voice—a
nervous, worried tone, that had despair in it.
Out of a June apple tree right over his head
fell a sweet, silvery, half child's, half woman's
voice, that thrilled him through every fibre to
the marrow of his bones.
“What's the matter, Goosey?” What have
you lost? What are you hunting for? Want
a good apple?”
Luke looked up just in time to catch squarely
on his nose a fine, ripe June apple, and
through a mist of juice and a sheeny curtain
of leaves he saw the lovely face he had come
to look for. A thump on the nose from an
apple, no matter if it is ripe and soft, is a little
embarrassing, and it only makes it more so
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when the racy wine of the fruit flies into one's
eyes and all over one's new clothes. But there
are moments of supreme bliss when such a
mishap passes unnoticed. Luke felt as if the
blow had been the touch of a magician conjuring
up a scene that held him rapt and speechless.
“O, my! I didn't go to hit you! Please
excuse me, sir—do. I thought you 'd catch it
in your hands.”
She came lightly down from the tree, descending
like a bird, easily, gracefully, as if
she had been born to climb. She murmured
many apologies, but the genius of fun danced
in her saucy, almost impertinent eyes, belying
her regretful words. Luke looked down at
her dazed and speechless. She, however, was
full of prattle—half childish, half womanly,
half serious, half bantering—her eyes upturned
to his, her voice a very bird's in melody. In
the more innocent sense of the word she
looked like her name, Hoiden. Nothing unchaste
or indelicate about her appearance; just
a sort of want of restraint; a freedom that
amounted to an utter lack of responsibility to
the ordinary claims and dictates of propriety.
A close, trained, intelligent observer would
have seen at once that she was wilful, spoiled,
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unbridled, but not bad, not in the least vicious;
really innocent and full of good impulses. She
was beautiful, too—wonderfully beautiful—just
on the hither side of womanhood, plump, budding,
bewitching. How she did it can never
be known, but she soon had Luke racing with
her all over the orchard. They climbed trees
together, they scrambled for the same apple,
they laughed, and shouted, and played till the
horn at the farmhouse called the field hands
to dinner. They parted then, as children
part, promising to meet again the next day.
The girl's cheeks were rosy with exercise, so
were Luke's.
How strange! Day after day that great,
bearded, almost middle-aged, uncouth farmer
went and played slave to that chit of a girl,
doing whatever ridiculous or childish thing
she proposed, caring for nothing, asking for
nothing but to be with her, listen to her voice
and feast his eyes upon her beauty. He
gladly bore everything she heaped upon him,
and to be called “Goosey” by her was to him
inexpressibly charming.
Betsy's womanly nature was not to be deceived.
She soon comprehended all; but she
dared not mention the subject to Luke. He
was in no mood to be opposed. So he went
on—and Betsy sighed.
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The summer softened into autumn. The
maple leaves reddened. The long grass turned
brown and lolled over. A softness and tenderness
lurked in the deep blue sky, and the
air had a sharp racy fragrance from ripe fruit
and grain. Meantime the railroad had been
pushed with amazing rapidity nearly to completion.
Every day long construction trains
went crashing across Luke's farm. Passenger
coaches were to be put on in a few days. Luke
was the very picture of happiness. He seemed
to grow younger every day. His worldly
prospects, too, were flattering. A station had
been located on his land, around which a town
had already begun to spring up. The vast
value of Luke's timber, walnut and oak, was
just beginning to appear; indeed, immense
wealth lay in his hands. But his happiness
was of a deeper and purer sort than that generated
by simple pecuniary prosperity. Hoiden
Pearl was in the focus of all his thoughts;
her face lighted his dreams, her voice made
the music that charmed him into a wonderland
of bliss. He said little about her, even
to Betsy, but it needed no sharpness of sight
to discover from his face what was going on
in his heart. He had even forgotten his pipe.
He had not smoked since that first day in the
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orchard. He had straightened up and looked
a span taller.
The girl did not seem to dream of any tender
attachment on Luke's part. In fact he gave
her no cause for it. He fed on his love inwardly
and never thought of telling it. To be
with her was enough. It satisfied all his
wants. She was frank and free with him, but
tyrannized over him—ordered him about like
a servant, scolded him, flattered him, pouted
at him, smiled on him, indeed kept him crazy
with rapture all the time. Once only she became
confidentially communicative. It was
one day, sitting on an old mossy log in the
Judge's woodland pasture, she told him the
story of her past life. How thrillingly beautiful
her face became as it sobered down with
the history of early orphanage! Her father
had died first; then her mother, who left her
four years old in the care of Mr. Pearl, her
paternal uncle, with whom she had ever since
been, going from place to place, as the calls of
his nomadic profession made it necessary,
from survey to survey, from this State to that,
seeing all sorts of people, and receiving her
education in small, detached parcels. The
story was a sad, unsatisfactory one, breathing
neglect, yet full of a certain kind of
-- 158 --
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sprightliness, and touched here and there with the
fascination of true romance.
It is hard to say when Luke would have
awakened from his tender trance to the strong
reality of love. He was too contented for self-questioning,
and no act or word of Hoiden's
invited him to consider what he was doing or
whither he was drifting.
It was well for Luke and the girl, too, that
it was a sparsely settled neighborhood, for evil
tongues might have made much of their constant
companionship and childish behavior.
As for the Judge, after it was all over he
admitted that he felt some qualms of conscience
about allowing such unlimited intimacy
to go on, but he excused himself by saying that
the girl, when confined to the house, was such
an unmitigated nuisance that he was glad for
some one to monopolize her company.
“Why,” said he, in his peculiar way, “she
set the whole house by the ears. She made
more clatter and racket than a four-horse Pennsylvania
wagon coming down a rocky hill.
She would go from garret to cellar like a whirlwind
and twist things wrong side out as she
went— she was a tart!”
But at length, toward the middle of autumn
the end came. Luke had business with some
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hog-buyers in Cincinnati, whither he was gone
several days. Meantime the railroad was
completed, and Mr. Pearl came to the Judge's
early one morning and called for Hoiden. His
business with his employers was ended, and
he had just finished an arrangement that had
long been on foot to go to one of the South
American States and take charge of a vast
engineering scheme there. The girl was de
lighted. Such a prospect of travel and adventure
was enough to set one of her temperament
wild with enthusiasm. She flew to
packing her trunk, her face radiant with joy.
Only an hour later Mr. Pearl and Hoiden
stood at the new station on Luke's land, waiting
for the east-going train. Mr. Pearl happened
to think of a business message he wished
to leave for Luke, so he went into the depôt
building and wrote it. When Hoiden saw the
letter was for Luke she begged leave to put in
a few words of postscript, and she had her
way.
The train came and the man and girl were
whirled away to New York, and thence they
took ship for South America, never to return.
Next day Luke came back, bringing with
him a beautifully carved mahogany box
mounted in silver. Betsy met him at the
-- 160 --
[figure description] Page 160.[end figure description]
door, and, woman-like, told the story of
Hoiden's departure almost at the first breath.
“Gone all the way to South America,” she
added, after premising that she would never
return.
A peculiarly grim, grayish smile mantled
the face of Luke. He swallowed a time or
two before he could speak.
“Come now, sis” (he always said “sis”
when he felt somewhat at Betsy's mercy),
“come now, sis, don't try to fool me. I'm
goin' right over to see the gal now, an' I've
got what'll tickle her awfully right here in
this 'ere box.”
Out in the yard the blue jays and wood-peckers
were quarrelling over the late apples
heaped up by the cider mill. The sky was
clear, but the sunlight, coming through a
smoky atmosphere, was pale, like the smile of
a sick man. The wind of autumn ran steadily
through the shrubby weedy lawn with a sigh
that had in it the very essence of sadness.
“I tell you, Luke, I'm not trying to fool you;
they've gone clean to South America to stay
always,” reiterated Betsy.
Luke gazed for a moment steadily into his
sister's eyes, as if looking for a sign. Slowly
his stalwart body and muscular limbs relazed
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and collapsed. The box fell to the floor with
a crash, where it burst, letting roll out great
hoops of gold and starry rings and pins—a
gold watch and chain, a beautiful gold pen
and pencil case, and trinkets and gew-gaw
things almost innumerable. They must have
cost the full profits of his business trip.
Luke staggered into a chair. Betsy just
then happened to think of the letter that had
been left for her brother. This she fetched
and handed to him. It was the note of business
from Mr. Pearl. There was a postscript
in a different hand:
“Good-bye, Goosey!
Hoidy Pearl.”
That was all. Luke is more morose and
petulant than he used to be. He is decaying
about apace with Rackenshack, and he smokes
constantly. He is vastly wealthy and unmarried.
Betsy is quiet and kind. Up stairs in her
chest is hidden the mahogany coffer full of
golden testimonials of her brother's days of
happiness and the one dark hour of his despair!
-- -- p722-167
The Pedagogue.
[figure description] Page 162.[end figure description]
He was one of the farmer princes of Hoosierdom,
a man of more than average education, a
fluent talker and ready with a story. Knowing
that I was looking up reminiscences of
Hoosier life and specimens of Hoosier character,
he volunteered one evening to give me the
following, vouching for the truth of it. Here
it is, as I “short-handed” it from his own lips.
I omit quotation marks.
The study of one's past life is not unlike the
study of geology. If the presence of the remains
of extinct species of animals and vegetables
in the ancient rocks calls up in one's
mind a host of speculative thoughts touching
the progress of creation, so, as we cut with
the pick of retrospection through the strata
of bygone days, do the remains of departed
things, constantly turning up, put one into his
studying cap to puzzle over specimens fully as
curious and interesting in their way as the
cephalaspis.
-- 163 --
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The first stratum of my intellectual formation
contains most conspicuously the remains
of dog-eared spelling books, a score or more of
them by different names, among which the
Elementary of Webster is the best preserved
and most clearly defined. It was finding an
old, yellow, badly thumbed and dirt soiled
copy of Webster's spelling book in the bottom
of an old chest of odds and ends, on the fly-leaf
of which book was written “T. Blodgett,”
that lately brightened my memory of the things
I am about to tell you.
The old time pedagogue is a thing of the
past—pars temporis acti is the Latin of it, may
be, but I'm not sure—I'm rusty in the Latin
now. When I quit school I could read it a
good deal. But of the pedagogue. The twenty
years since he ceased to flourish seem, on reflection,
like an age—an œon, as the Greeks
would say. I never did know much Greek. I
got most of my education from pedagogues of
the old sort. They kept pouring it on to me
till it soaked in. That's the way I got it. I
have had corns and bunions on my back for
not being sufficiently porous to absorb the
multiplication table rapidly enough to suit the
whim of one of those learned tyrants. But the
pedagogue became extinct and passed into the
-- 164 --
[figure description] Page 164.[end figure description]
fossil state some twenty years ago, when free
schools took good hold. He scampered away
when he heard the whistle of the steam engine
along iron highways and the cry of small boys
on the streets of the towns hawking the daily
papers. He could live nowhere within the pale
of innovation. He was born an exemplar of
rigidity. The very name of reform was hateful
to him. We older fellows remember him
well, but to the younger fry he is not even a
fossil, he is a myth. Of course pedagogues
differed slightly in the matter of particular
disposition and real character, but in a general
way they had a close family resemblance.
I purpose to write of one Blodgett—T. Blodgett,
as it was written in the fly-leaf of Webster's
Elementary—and he was an extraordinary
specimen of the genus pedagogue. But
before I introduce him, let me, by way of preface
and prelude, give you a view of the
salients of the history of the days when poleribbed
school houses—log cabin school houses—
flourished, with each a pedagogue for supreme,
“unquestioned and unquestionable”
despot.
In those fine days boys from five to fifteen
years of age wore tow linen pants held up by
suspenders (often made of tow strings), and
-- 165 --
[figure description] Page 165.[end figure description]
having at each side pockets that reached down
to about the wearer's knees. These pockets
held as much as a moderate sized bushel
basket will now. The girls, big and little,
wore mere tow linen slips, that hung loose
from the shoulders. Democracy, pure and undefiled,
flourished like a green buckeye tree.
Society was in about the same condition as a
boy is when his voice is changing. You know
when a boy's voice is changing if you hear
him in another room getting his lesson by saying
it over aloud, you think there's about fourteen
girls, two old men, and a dog barking in
the room. Society was much the same. The
elements of everything were in it, but not developed
and separated yet. Women rode behind
their husbands on the same horse, occasionally
reaching round in the man's lap to
feel if the baby was properly fixed. Sometimes
the girls rode to singing school behind
their sweethearts. At such times the horses
always kicked up, and, of course, the girls had
to hold on. The boys liked the holding on
part. Young men went courting always on
Saturday night. The girls wouldn't suffer any
hugging before eleven o'clock—unless the old
folk were remarkably early to bed. Candles
were scarce in those days, so that billing and
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[figure description] Page 166.[end figure description]
cooing was done by very dim fire-light. O, le
bon temps! I've forgot whether that's Latin
or French.
The pedagogue was the intellectual and
moral centre of the neighborhood. He was of
higher authority, even in the law, than the
Justice of the Peace. He was consulted on
all subjects, and, as a rule, his decisions were
final, and went upon the people's record as
law. His jurisdiction was unlimited, as to subject
matter or amount, and, as to the person,
was unquestioned. Of course his territory
was bounded by the circumstances of each
particular case.
I just now recollect quite a number of pedagogues
who in turn ruled me in my youthful
days. Of one of them I never think without
feeling a strange sadness steal over me. He
was a young fellow whom to know was to love;
pale, delicate, tender-hearted. He taught us
two terms and we all thought him the best
teacher in the world. He was so kind to us,
so gentle and mild-voiced, so prone to pat us
on our heads and encourage us. Some of the
old people found fault with him because, as
they alleged, he did not whip us enough, but
we saw no force in the objection. Well, he
took a cough and began to fail. He dismissed
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us one fine May evening and we saw him no
more alive. We all followed him, in a solemn
line, to his grave, and for a long time thereafter
we never spoke of him except in a low,
sad whisper. As for me, till long afterwards,
the hushed wonder of his white face haunted
my dreams. I have now in my possession a
little bead money-purse he gave me.
Blodgett came next, and here my story
properly begins. Blodgett — who, having once
seen him, could ever forget Blodgett? Not I.
He was too marked a man to ever wholly fade
from memory. He was, as I have said, a perfect
type of his kind, and his kind was such as
should not be sneered at. He was one of the
humble pioneers of American letters. He was
a character of which our national history must
take account. He was one of the vital forces
of our earlier national growth. He was in
love with learning. He considered the matter
of imparting knowledge a mere question of
effort, in which the physical element preponderated.
If he couldn't talk or read it into
one he took a stick and mauled it into him.
This mauling method, though somewhat distasteful
to the subject, always had a charming
result—red eyes, a few blubbers and a good
lesson. The technical name of this method
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was “Warming the Jacket.” It always seemed
to me that the peewee birds sang very dolefully
after I had had my jacket warmed. I recollect
my floggings at school with so much
aversion that I do think, if a teacher should
whale one of my little ruddy-faced boys, I'd
spread his (the teacher's) nose over his face
as thin as a rabbit skin! I'd run both his
eyes into one and chew his ears off close to his
head, sir! Forgive my earnestness, but I
can't stand flogging in schools. It's brutal.
From the first day that Blodgett came circulating
his school “articles” among us, we
took to him by common consent as a wonderfully
learned man. I think his strong, wise
looking face, and reserved, pompous manners,
had much to do with making this impression.
We believed in him fully, and for a long time
gave him unfaltering loyalty. As for me, I
never have wholly withdrawn my allegiance.
I look back, even now, and admire him. I
sigh, thinking of the merry days when he
flourished. I solemnly avow my faith in progress.
I know the world advances every day,
still I doubt if men and women are more worthy
now than they were in the time of the pedagogues.
I don't know but what, after all, I
am somewhat of a fogy. Any how, I will not,
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for the sake of pleasing your literary swallows—
your eclectics of to-day—turn in and berate
my dear old Blodgett. In his day men could
not and did not skim the surface of things like
swallows on a mill pond. They dived, and got
what they did get from the bottom, and by
honest labor. Whenever one of your silk-winged
swallows skims past me and whispers
progress, I cannot help thinking of Heyne,
Jean Paul and—Blodgett. Somehow genius
and poverty are great cronies. It used to be
more so than it is now. Blodgett was a
genius, and, consequently, poor. He was virtuous,
and, of course, happy. He was a Democrat
and a Hard Shell Baptist, and he might
never have swerved from the path of rectitude,
even to the extent of a hair's breadth, if it had
not been for the coming of a not over scrupulous
rival into the neighboring village. But I
must not hasten. A little more and I would
have blurted out the whole nub of my story.
Bear with me. I have nothing of the “lightning
calculator” in me. I must take my time.
It has been agreed that biography must
include somewhat of physical portraiture.
“What sort of looking man was Blodgett?”
I will tell you as nearly as I can, but bear in
mind it is a long time since I saw him, and, in
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the meanwhile, the world has been so washed,
and combed, and trimmed, and pearl powdered,
that one can scarcely be sure he recollects
things rightly. The seedy dandy who
teaches the free schools of to-day, is, no doubt,
all right as things go; but then the way they
go—that's it! As for finding some one of
these dapper, umbrella-lugging, green-spectacled,
cadaverous teachers to compare with
our burly Blodgett, the thing is preposterous.
Our pedagogue, when he first came among
us, was, as nearly as I can judge, about forty,
and a bachelor, tall, raw-boned, lean-faced,
and muscular—a man of many words, and big
ones, but not over prone to seek audience of
the world. To me, a boy of twelve, he appeared
somewhat awful, especially when plying
the beech rod for the benefit of a future
man, and I do still think that something
harder than mere sternness slept or woke in
and around the lines of his strong, flat jaws—
that something sharper than acid shrewdness
lurked in his light gray eyes, and that surely
a more powerful expression than ordinary
brute obstinacy lingered about his firm mouth
and smoothly shaven chin.
Blodgett had a mighty body and a mighty
will, joined with a self-appreciation only
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bounded by his power to generate it. This, added
to the deep deference with which he was approached
by everybody, made him not a little
arrogant and despotic—though, doubtless, he
was less so than most men, under like circumstances,
would have been. His years sat
lightly on him. His step was youthful though
slouching, his raven hair was bright and wavy,
his skin had the tinge of vigorous health, and
in truth he was not far from handsome. His
voice was nasal, but pleasantly so.
I cannot hope to give you more than a faint
idea of the absolute power vested in Blodgett
by the men, women and children of the school
vicinage; suffice it to say that his view was a
sine qua non to every neighborhood opinion,
his words the basis of neighborhood action in
all matters of public interest. If he pronounced
the parson's last sermon a failure, at once the
entire church agreed in condemning it, not
only as a failure but a consummate blunder.
If he hinted that a certain new comer impressed
him unfavorably, the nincompoop was
summarily kicked out of society. In fact, in
the pithy phrascology of these latter days,
“it was dangerous to be safe” about where he
lived.
Thus, for a long time, Blodgett ruled with
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an iron hand his little world, with no one to
dream of disputing his right or of doubting his
capacity, till at length fate let fall a bit of
romance into the strong but placid stream of
his life, and tinged it all with rose color. He
wrote some poetry, but it is obsolete—that is,
it is not now in existence. While this streak
of romance lasted he looked, for all the world,
like a gilt-edged mathematical problem drawn
on rawhide.
It was a great event in our neighborhood
when Miss Grace Holland, a yellow-haired,
blue-eyed, very handsome and well educated
young lady from Louisville, Kentucky, came
to spend the summer with Parson Holland, our
preacher, and the young woman's uncle. Kentucky
girls are all sweet. My wife was a Kentucky
girl. All the young men fell in love
with Miss Holland right away, but it was of
no use to them. Blodgett, in the language of
your fast youngsters, “shied his castor into
the ring,” and what was there left for the
others but to stand by and see the glory of
the pedagogue during the season of his wooing?
It would have done your eyes good to
see the pedagogue “slick himself up” each
Saturday evening preparatory to visiting the
parson's. He went into the details of the
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toilette with an enthusiasm worthy a better
result. Ordinarily he was ostentatiously pious
and grave, but now his nature began to slip
its bark and disclose an inner rind of real
mirthfulness, which made him quite pleasant
company for Miss Holland, who, though a
mere girl, was sensible and old enough to enjoy
the many marked peculiarities of the pedagogue.
On Blodgett's side it was love—just the
blindest, craziest kind of love, at first sight.
As to Miss Holland, I cannot say. One never
can precisely say as to a woman; guessing at
a woman's feelings, in matters of love, is a
little like wondering which makes the music, a
boy's mouth or the jewsharp—a doubtful affair.
Great events never come singly. When it
rains it pours. If you have seen a bear, every
stump is a bear. A few days after the advent
of Miss Holland came a pop-eyed, nervous,
witty little fellow with a hand press, and started
a weekly paper in our village. A newspaper
in town! It was startling.
Blodgett from the first seemed not to relish
the innovation, but public sentiment had set
in too strongly in its favor for him to jeopardize
his reputation by any serious denunciations.
A real live paper in our midst was no small
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matter. Everybody subscribed, and so did
Blodgett.
It did, formerly, require a little brains to
run a newspaper, and in those days an editor
was looked upon as nearly or quite as learned
and intelligent as a pedagogue; but everybody,
however ignorant himself, could not fail to see
that one represented progress, the other conservatism,
and formerly most persons were
Ultra-Conservatives. This, of course, gave
the pedagogue a considerable advantage.
Of course Blodgett and the editor soon became
acquainted. The latter, a dapper Yankee,
full of “get-up-and-snap,” and alert to make
way for his paper, measured the pedagogue at
a glance, seeing at once that a big bulk of
strong sense and a will like iron were enwrapped
in the stalwart Hoosier's brain. One
of two things must be done. Blodgett must
be vanquished or his influence secured. He
must be prevailed on to endorse the Star (the
new paper), or the Star must attack and
destroy him at once.
Meantime the pedagogue grimly waited for
an opportunity to demolish the editor. The
big Hoosier had no thought of compromise or
currying favor. He would sacrifice the little
sleek, stuck-up, big-headed, pop-eyed,
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Romannosed Yankee between his thumb nails as he
would a flea. Blodgett was a predestinarian
of the old school, and was firmly imbedded in
the belief that from all eternity it had been
fore-ordained that he was to attend to just
such fellows as the editor.
Still, the little lady from Louisville took up
so much of his time, and so distracted his
mind, that no well laid plan of attack could be
matured by the pedagogue. But when nations
wish to fight it is easy to find a pretext for
war. So with individuals. So with the editor
and Blodgett. They soon came to open
hostilities and raised the black flag. What an
uproar it did make in the county!
This war seemed to come about quite naturally.
It had its beginning in a debating
society, where Blodgett and the editor were
leading antagonists. The question debated
was, “Which has done more for the cause of
human liberty, Napoleon or Wellington?”
Two village men and two countrymen were
the jury to decide which side offered the best
argument. The jury was out all night and
finally returned a split verdict, two of them
standing for Blodgett and two for the editor.
Of course it was town against country—the
villagers for the editor, the country folk for
the pedagogue.
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“Huzza for the little editor!” cried the
town people.
“'Rah for Blodgett!” bawled the lusty
country folk.
The matter quickly came to blows at certain
parts of the room. Jim Dowder caught Phil
Gates by the hair and snatched him over two
seats. Sarah Jane Beaver hit Martha Ann
Randall in the mouth with a reticule full of
hazel nuts. Farmer Heath choked store-keeper
Jones till his face was as blue as
moderate-like indigo. Old Mrs. Baber pulled
off Granny Logan's wig and threw it at 'Squire
Hank. But Pete Develin wound the thing up
with a most disgraceful feat. He seized a
bucket half full of water and deliberately
poured it right on top of the editor's head.
This was the beginning of trouble and fun.
Some lawsuits grew out of it and some hard
fisticuffs. All the country-folk sided with
Blodgett—the towns-folk with the editor.
The Star began to get dim, but the editor,
shrewd dog, when he saw how things were
turning, at once took up the question of Napoleon
vs. Wellington in his journal, kindly
and condescendingly offering his columns to
Blodgett for the discussion.
The pedagogue foolishly accepted the
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challenge, and thus laid the stones upon which he
was to fall. So the antagonists sharpened
their goose quills and went at it. In sporting
circles the proverb runs: never bet on a man's
own trick. Blodgett ought to have known
better than to go to the editor's own ground
to fight.
I have always suspected that Miss Holland
did much to shear our Samson of his strength.
She certainly did, wittingly or unwittingly,
occupy too much of his time and thought.
Poor fellow! he would have given his life for
her. He often looked at her, with his head
turned a little one side, sadly, thoughtfully,
as I have seen a terrier look at a rat hole, as
though he half expected disappointment.
The battle in the Star began in very earnest.
It was a harvest for the shrewd journalist.
Everybody took the Star while the discussion
was going on. Everybody took sides, everybody
got mad, and almost everybody fought
more or less. Even Parson Holland and the
village preacher had high words and ceased
to recognize each other. As for the young
lady from Louisville, she had little to say
about the discussion, though Blodgett always
read to her each one of his articles first in MS.
and then in the Star after it was printed.
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Well, finally, in the very height of the war
of words, the editor, in one of his articles, indulged
in Latin. As you are aware, when an
editor gets right down to pan-rock Latin, it's
a sure sign he's after somebody. This instance
was no exception to the general rule. He was
baiting for the pedagogue. The pedagogue
swallowed hook and all.
“Nil de mortuis nisi bonum,” said the editor,
“is my motto, which may be freely translated:
“If you can't say something good of the dead,
keep your tarnal mouth shut about them!”
Blodgett started as he read this, and for a
full minute thereafter gazed steadily and inquiringly
on vacancy. At length his great
bony right hand opened slowly, then quickly
shut like a vice.
“I have him! I have him!” he muttered in
a murderous tone, “I'll crush him to impalpable
dust!” He forthwith went for a small
Latin lexicon and began busily searching its
pages. It was Saturday evening, and so
busily did he labor at what was on his mind,
he came near forgetting his regular weekly
visit to Miss Holland.
He did not forget it, however. He went;
without pointing out to her the exact spot so
vulnerable to his logical arrows, he told her in
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a confidential and confident way that his next
letter would certainly make an end of the
editor. He told her that, at last, he had the
shallow puppy where he could expose him
thoroughly. Of course Miss Holland was
curious to know more, but, with a grim smile,
Blodgett shook his head, saying that to insure
utter victory he must keep his own counsel.
The next day, though the Sabbath, was
spent by the pedagogue writing his crusher
for the Star. He wrote it and re-wrote it,
over and over again. He almost ruined a
Latin grammar and the afore-mentioned lexicon.
He worked till far in the night, revising
and elaborating. His gray eyes burned like
live coals—his jaws were set for victory.
That week was one of intense excitement
all over the county, for somehow it had come
generally to be understood that the pedagogue's
forthcoming essay was to completely
defeat and disgrace the editor. Work, for
the time, was mostly suspended. The school
children did about as they pleased, so that
they were careful not to break rudely in upon
Blodgett's meditations.
On the day of its issue the Star was in great
demand. For several hours the office was
crowded with eager subscribers, hungry for a
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copy. The 'Squire and two constables had
some trouble to keep down a genuine riot.
The following is an exact copy of Blodgett's
great essay:
Mr. Editor—Sir: This, for two reasons, is
my last article for your journal. Firstly: My
time and the exigencies of my profession will
not permit me to further pursue a discussion
which, on your part, has degenerated into the
merest twaddle. Secondly: It only needs, at
my hands, an exposition of the false and fraudulent
claims you make to classical attainments,
to entirely annihilate your unsubstantial and
wholly underserved popularity in this community,
and to send you back to peddling your
bass wood hams and maple nutmegs. In order
to put on a false show of erudition, you lug
into your last article a familiar Latin sentence.
Now, sir, if you had sensibly foregone any attempt
at translation, you might, possibly, have
made some one think you knew a shade more
than a horse; but “whom the gods would destroy
they first make mad.”
You say, “De mortuis nil nisi bonum” may be
freely translated, “If you can't say something
good of the dead, keep your tarnal mouth shut
about them!” Shades of Horace and Praxiteles!
What would Pindar or Cæsar say? But
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I will not jest at the expense of sound scholarship.
In conclusion, I simply submit the following
literal translation of the Latin sentence
in question: “De—of, mortuis—the dead, nil—
nothing, nisi—but, bonum—goods,” so that the
whole quotation may be rendered as follows—
“Nothing (is left) of the dead but (their)
goods.” This is strictly according to the dictionary.
Here, so far as I am concerned, this
discussion ends.
Your ob't serv't,
T. Blodget.
The country flared into flames of triumph.
Blodgett's friends stormed the village and
“bully-ragged” everybody who had stood out
for the editor. The little Yankee, however,
did not appear in the least disconcerted. His
clear, blue, pop-eyes really seemed twinkling
with half suppressed joy. Blodgett put a copy
of the Star into his pocket and stalked proudly,
victoriously, out of town.
After supper he dressed himself with scrupulous
care and went over to see Miss Holland.
Rumor said they were engaged to be married,
and I believe they were.
On this particular evening the young lady
was enchantingly pretty, dressed in white
muslin and blue ribbons, her bright yellow
hair flowing full and free down upon her
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plump shoulders, her face radiant with health
and high spirits. She met the pedagogue at
the door with more than usual warmth of
welcome. He kissed her hand. All that he
said to her that evening will never be known.
It is recorded, however, that, when he had finished
reading his essay to her, she got up and
took from her travelling trunk a “Book of
Foreign Phrases,” and examined it attentively
for a time, after which she was somewhat uneasy
and reticent. Blodgett observed this,
but he was too dignified to ask an explanation.
The “last day” of Blodgett's school was at
hand. The “exhibition” came off on Saturday.
Everybody went early. The pedagogue
was in his glory. He did not know the end
was so near. A little occurrence, toward evening,
however, seemed to foreshadow it.
Blodgett called upon the stage a bright
eyed, ruddy faced lad, his favorite pupil, to
translate Latin phrases. The boy, in his Sunday
best, and sleekly combed, came forth and
bowed to the audience, his eyes luminous with
vivacity. The little fellow was evidently precocious—
a rapid if not a very accurate thinker—
one of those children who always have an
answer ready, right or wrong.
After several preliminary questions, very
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promptly and satisfactorily disposed of, Blodgett
said:
“Now, sir, translate Monstrum horrendum
informe ingens.”
Quick as lightning the child replied:
“The horrid monster informed the Indians!”
Fury! The face of the pedagogue grew
livid. He stretched forth his hand and took
the boy by the back of the neck. The curtain
fell, but the audience could not help hearing
what a flogging the boy got. It was terrible.
Even while this was going on a rumor rippled
round the outskirts of the audience—for
you must know that the “exhibition” was held
under a bush arbor erected in front of the school
house door—a rumor, I say, rippled round
the outer fringe of the audience. Some one
had arrived from the village and copies of the
Star were being freely distributed. Looks of
blank amazement flashed into people's faces.
The name of the editor and that of Prof. W—,
of Wabash College, began to fly in sharp whispers
from mouth to mouth. The crowd reeled
and swayed. Men began to talk aloud. Finally
everybody got on his feet and confusion and
hubbub reigned supreme. The exhibition was
broken up. Blodgett came out of the school
house upon the stage when he heard the noise.
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He gazed around. Some one thrust a copy of
the Star into his hand.
Poor Blodgett! We may all fall. The
crowd resolved itself into an indignation meeting
then and there, at which the following extract
from the Star was read, followed by resolutions
dismissing and disgracing Blodgett:
“The following letter is rich reading for
those who have so long sworn by T. Blodgett.
We offer no comment:
“Editor of the Star—Dear Sir: In answer
to your letter requesting me to decide between
yourself and Mr. Blodgett as to the
correct English rendering of the Latin sentence
“De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” allow me to
say that your free translation is a good one, if
not very literal or elegant. As to Mr. Blodgett's,
if the man is sincere, he is certainly
crazy or wofully illiterate; no doubt the latter.
“Very respectfully,
“W—,
“Prof. Languages, Wabash College.”
Blodgett walked away from the school house
into the dusky June woods. He knew that it
was useless to contend against the dictum of a
college professor. His friends knew so too, so
they turned to rend him. He was dethroned
and discrowned forever. He was boarding at
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my father's then, and I can never forget the
haggard, wistful look his face wore when he
came in that evening. I have since learned
that he went straight from the scene of his
disgrace to Miss Holland, whom he found inclined
to laugh at him. The next week he collected
what was due him and left for parts unknown.
I was over at parson Holland's, playing with
his boys.
The game was mumble peg.
I had been rooting a peg out of the ground
and my face was very dirty. We were under
a cherry tree by a private hedge. Presently
Miss Holland came out and began, girl-like,
to pluck and eat the half ripe cherries. The
wind rustled her white dress and lifted the
gold floss of her wonderful hair. The birds
chattered and sang all round us; the white
clouds lingered overhead like puffs of steam
vanishing against the splendid blue of the sky.
The fragrance of leaf and fruit and bloom was
heavy on the air. The girl in white, the quiet
glory of the day, the murmur of the unsteady
wind stream flowing among the dark leaves of
the orchard and hedge, the charm of the temperature,
and over all, the delicious sound of
running water from the brook hard by, all
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harmonized, and in a tender childish mood I
quit the game and lolled at full length on the
ground, watching the fascinating face of the
young lady as she drifted about the pleasant
places of the orchard. Suddenly I saw her fix
her eyes in a surprised way in a certain direction.
I looked to see what had startled her,
and there, half leaning over the hedge, stood
Blodgett.
His face was ghastly in its pallor, and deep
furrows ran down his jaws. His gray eyes
had in them a look of longing blended with
a sort of stern despair. It was only for a
moment that his powerful frame toppled
above the hedge, but he is indelibly pictured
in my memory just as he then appeared.
“Good-bye, Miss Holland, good-bye.”
How dismally hollow his voice sounded!
Ah! it was pitiful. I neither saw nor heard
of him after that. Years have passed since
then. Blodgett is, likely, in his grave, but I
never think of him without a sigh.
Yesterday I was in the old neighborhood, and,
to my surprise, learned that the old log school
house was still standing. So I set out alone
to visit it. I found it rotten and shaky, serving
as a sort of barn in which a farmer stows
his oats, straw and corn fodder. The genius
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of learning has long since flown to finer quarters.
The great old chimney had been torn
down or had fallen, the broad boards of the
roof, held on by weight poles, were deeply covered
with moss and mould, and over the whole
edifice hung a gloom—a mist of decay.
I leaned upon a worm fence hard by and
gazed through the long vacant side window,
underneath which our writing shelf used to be,
sorrowfully dallying with memory; not altogether
sorrowfully either, for the glad faces of
children that used to romp with me on the old
play ground floated across my memory, clothed
in the charming haze of distance, and encircled
by the halo of tender affections. The wind
sang as of old, and the bird songs had not
changed a jot. Slowly my whole being crept
back to the past. The wonders of our progress
were all forgotten. And then from
within the old school room came a well remembered
voice, with a certain nasal twang,
repeating slowly and sternly the words:
“Arma virumque cano;” then there came a
chime of silver tones—“School is out!—School
is out!” And I started, to find that I was all
alone by the rotting but blessed old throne
and palace of the pedagogue.
-- -- p722-193
An Idyl of the Rod.
[figure description] Page 188.[end figure description]
It was as pretty a country cottage as is to
be found, even now, in all the Wabash Valley,
situated on a prominent bluff, overlooking the
broad stretches of bottom land, and giving a
fine view of the wide winding river. The windows
and doors of this cottage were draped in
vines, among which the morning glory and the
honeysuckle were the most luxuriant; while
on each side of the gravelled walk, that led
from the front portico to the dooryard gate,
grew clusters of pinks, sweet-williams and
larkspurs. The house was painted white, and
had green window shutters—old fashioned, to
be sure, but cosy, homelike and tasty withal.
Everything pertaining to and surrounding the
place had an air of methodical neatness, that
betokened great care and scrupulous order on
the part of the inmates.
About the hour of six on a Monday morning,
in the month of May, a fine, hearty, intelligent
looking lad of twelve years walked
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slowly up the path which led from the old
orchard to the house. He was dressed in
loose trowsers of bottle green jeans, a jacket
of the same, heavy boots and a well worn wool
hat. The boy's shoulders stooped a little, and
a slight hump discovered itself at the upper
portion of his back. His face was strikingly
handsome, being fair, bright, healthful, and
marked with signs of great precocity of intellect,
albeit it wore just now an indescribable,
faintly visible shade, as of innocent perplexity,
or, possibly, grief. His mind was evidently
not at ease, but the varying shadows that
chased each other across the mild depths of
his clear, vivacious eyes would have stumped
a physiognomist. Between a laugh and a cry,
but more like a cry; between defiance and
utter shame, but more like the latter; his
cheeks and lips took on every shade of pallor
and of flush. He shrugged his shoulders as
he moved along, and cast rapid glances in
every direction, as if afraid of being seen.
“Whippoo-tee, tippoo-tee-tee-e!” sang a great
cardinal red bird in the apple tree over his
head. He flung a stone at the bird with terrible
energy, but missed it.
The mistress of the cottage was at this time
in the kitchen preparing for the week's washing,
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for do not all good Hoosier housewives wash
on Monday? She was a middle aged, stoutly
built, healthy matron, sandy haired, slightly
freckled, blue eyed and quick in her movements.
Usually smiling and happy, it was
painful to see how she struggled now to master
the emotions of great grief and sadness
that constantly arose in her bosom, like spectres
that would not be driven away.
A bright eyed, golden haired lass of sixteen
was in the breakfast room washing the dishes
and singing occasional snatches from a mournful
ditty. It was sad, indeed, to see a cloud of
sorrow on a face so fresh and sweet.
Mr. Coulter, the head of the family, and
owner of the cottage and its lands, stood near
the centre of the sitting room with his hands
crossed behind him, gazing fixedly and sadly
on the picture of a sweet child holding a white
kitten in its lap, which picture hung on the
wall over against the broad fire-place. A look
of sorrow betrayed itself even in the dark,
stern visage of the man. He drew down his
shaggy eyebrows and occasionally pulled his
grizzled moustache into his mouth and chewed
it fiercely. Evidently he was chafing under
his grief.
The cottage windows were wide open, as is
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the western custom in fine weather, and the
fragrance of spice wood and sassafras floated
in on the flood tide of pleasant air, while from
the big old locust tree down by the fence fell
the twittering prelude to a finch's song. A
green line of willows and a thin, pendulous
stratum of fog marked the way of the river,
plainly visible from the west window, and
through the white haze flocks of teal and
wood ducks cut swiftly in their downward
flight to the water. A golden flicker sang and
hammered on the gate-post the while he eyed
a sparrow-hawk that wheeled and screamed
high over head. The dew was like little mirrors
in the grass.
The lad entered the kitchen and said to his
mother, in a voice full of tenderness, though
barely audible:
“Mammy, where's pap?”
“In the front room, Billy,” replied the matron
solemnly, quaveringly.
Passing into the breakfast room, Billy looked
at his sister and a flash of sympathetic sorrow
played back and forth from the eyes of one to
those of the other; then he went straight into
the sitting room and handed something to Mr.
Coulter. It was a moment of silence and suspense.
Out in the orchard the cherry and
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apple blooms were falling like pink and white
snow.
The man looked down at his boy sadly, sorrowfully,
regretfully. He drew his face into a
stern frown. The lad looked up into his father's
eyes timidly, ruefully, strangely. It was a living
tableau no artist could reproduce. It was
the moment before a crisis.
“Billy,” said the father gravely, “I took your
mother and sister to church yesterday.”
“Yes, sir,” said Billy.
“And left you to see to things,” continued
the man.
“Yes, sir,” replied the boy, gazing through
the window at the flicker as it hitched down
the gate-post and finally dropped into the
grass with a shrill chirp.
“And you didn't water them pigs!”
“O-o-o! Oh, sir! Geeroody! O me! ouch!
lawsy! lawsy! mercy me!”
The slender scion of an apple tree, in the
hand of Mr. Coulter, rose and fell, cutting the
air like a rapier, and up from the jacket of the
lad, like incense from an altar, rose a cloud of
dust mingled with the nap of jeans. Down in
the young clover of the meadow the larks and
sparrows sang cheerily; the gnats and flies
danced up and down in the sunshine, the fresh
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soft young leaves of the vines rustled like
satin, and all was merry indeed!
Billy's eyes were turned upward to the face
of his father in appealing agony; but still the
switch, with a sharp hiss, cut the air, falling
steadily and mercilessly on his shoulders.
All along the green banks of the river the
willows shook their shining fingers at the lifting
fog, and the voices of children going by to
the distant school smote the sweet May wind.
“Whippee! Whippee-tippee-tee!” sang the
cardinal bird.
“O pap! ouch! O-o-o! I'll not forget to
water the pigs no more!”
“S'pect you won't, neither!” said the man.
The wind, by a sudden puff, lifted into the
room a shower of white bloom petals from a
sweet apple tree, letting them fall gracefully
upon the patchwork carpet, the while a ploughman
whistled plaintively in a distant field.
“Crackee! O pap! ouch! O-o-o! You're
a killin' me!”
“Shet your mouth 'r I'll split ye to the backbone
in a second! Show ye how to run off
fishin' with Ed Jones and neglect them pigs!
Take every striffin of hide off 'n ye!”
How many delightful places in the woods,
how many cool spots beside the murmuring
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river, would have been more pleasant to Billy
than the place he just then occupied! He
would have swapped hides with the very pigs
he had forgot to water.
“O, land! O, me! Geeroody me!” yelled
the lad.
“Them poor pigs!” rejoined the father.
Still the dust rose and danced in the level
jet of sunlight that fell athwart the room from
the east window, and the hens out at the barn
cackled and sang for joy over new laid eggs
stowed away in cosy places.
At one time during the falling of the rod
the girl quit washing the dishes, and thrusting
her head into the kitchen said, in a subdued
tone:
“My land! Mammy, ain't Bill a gittin' an
awful one this load o' poles?”
“You're moughty right!” responded the matron,
solemnly.
Along toward the last Mr. Coulter tip-toed
at every stroke. The switch actually screamed
through the air. Billy danced and bawled and
made all manner of serio-comic faces and contortions.
“Now go, sir,” cried the man, finally tossing
the frizzled stump of the switch out through
the window. “Go now, and next time I'll be
bound you water them pigs!”
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And, while the finch poured a cataract of
melody from the locust tree, Billy went.
Poor boy! that was a terrible thrashing, and
to make it worse, it had been promised to him
on the evening before, so that he had been
dreading it and shivering over it all night!
Now, as he walked through the breakfast
room, his sister looked at him in a commiserating
way, but on passing through the kitchen
he could not catch the eye of his mother.
Finally he stood in the free open air in front
of the saddle closet. It was just then that a
speckled rooster on the barn yard fence flapped
his wings and crowed lustily. A turkey cock
was strutting on the grass by the old cherry
tree.
Billy opened the door of the closet. “A
boy's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts
of youth are long, long thoughts.” Billy peeped
into the saddle closet and then cast a glance
around him, as if to see if any one was near.
At length, during a pleasant lull in the
morning wind, and while the low, tenderly
mellow flowing of the river was distinctly audible,
and the song of the finch increased in
volume, and the bleating of new born lambs in
the meadow died in fluttering echoes under
the barn, and while the fragrance of apple
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blooms grew fainter, and while the sun, now
flaming just a little above the eastern horizon,
launched a shower of yellow splendors over
him from head to foot, he took from under his
jacket behind a doubled sheep skin with the
wool on, which, with an ineffable smile, he
tossed into the closet. Then, as the yellow
flicker rose rapidly from the grass, Billy
walked off, whistling the air of that once popular
ballad—
“O give me back my fifteen cents,
And give me back my money,” &c.
