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A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays

by Willa Cather · English · Gutenberg #25586 · 549,173 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays

Author: Willa Cather


        
Release date: May 24, 2008 [eBook #25586]
                Most recently updated: January 31, 2009

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COLLECTION OF STORIES, REVIEWS AND ESSAYS ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell, Barbara Tozier and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net





A Collection of

Stories, Reviews and Essays

by

Willa Cather




CONTENTS


  PART I: STORIES

    Peter
    On the Divide
    Eric Hermannson's Soul
    The Sentimentality of William Tavener
    The Namesake
    The Enchanted Bluff
    The Joy of Nelly Deane
    The Bohemian Girl
    Consequences
    The Bookkeeper's Wife
    Ardessa
    Her Boss


  PART II: REVIEWS AND ESSAYS

    Mark Twain
    William Dean Howells
    Edgar Allan Poe
    Walt Whitman
    Henry James
    Harold Frederic
    Kate Chopin
    Stephen Crane
    Frank Norris
    When I Knew Stephen Crane
    On the Art of Fiction




PART I

STORIES




_Peter_


"No, Antone, I have told thee many times, no, thou shalt not sell it
until I am gone."

"But I need money; what good is that old fiddle to thee? The very
crows laugh at thee when thou art trying to play. Thy hand trembles
so thou canst scarce hold the bow. Thou shalt go with me to the Blue
to cut wood to-morrow. See to it thou art up early."

"What, on the Sabbath, Antone, when it is so cold? I get so very
cold, my son, let us not go to-morrow."

"Yes, to-morrow, thou lazy old man. Do not I cut wood upon the
Sabbath? Care I how cold it is? Wood thou shalt cut, and haul it
too, and as for the fiddle, I tell thee I will sell it yet." Antone
pulled his ragged cap down over his low heavy brow, and went out.
The old man drew his stool up nearer the fire, and sat stroking his
violin with trembling fingers and muttering, "Not while I live, not
while I live."

Five years ago they had come here, Peter Sadelack, and his wife, and
oldest son Antone, and countless smaller Sadelacks, here to the
dreariest part of south-western Nebraska, and had taken up a
homestead. Antone was the acknowledged master of the premises, and
people said he was a likely youth, and would do well. That he was
mean and untrustworthy every one knew, but that made little
difference. His corn was better tended than any in the county, and
his wheat always yielded more than other men's.

Of Peter no one knew much, nor had any one a good word to say for
him. He drank whenever he could get out of Antone's sight long
enough to pawn his hat or coat for whiskey. Indeed there were but
two things he would not pawn, his pipe and his violin. He was a
lazy, absent minded old fellow, who liked to fiddle better than to
plow, though Antone surely got work enough out of them all, for that
matter. In the house of which Antone was master there was no one,
from the little boy three years old, to the old man of sixty, who
did not earn his bread. Still people said that Peter was worthless,
and was a great drag on Antone, his son, who never drank, and was a
much better man than his father had ever been. Peter did not care
what people said. He did not like the country, nor the people, least
of all he liked the plowing. He was very homesick for Bohemia. Long
ago, only eight years ago by the calendar, but it seemed eight
centuries to Peter, he had been a second violinist in the great
theatre at Prague. He had gone into the theatre very young, and had
been there all his life, until he had a stroke of paralysis, which
made his arm so weak that his bowing was uncertain. Then they told
him he could go. Those were great days at the theatre. He had plenty
to drink then, and wore a dress coat every evening, and there were
always parties after the play. He could play in those days, ay, that
he could! He could never read the notes well, so he did not play
first; but his touch, he had a touch indeed, so Herr Mikilsdoff, who
led the orchestra, had said. Sometimes now Peter thought he could
plow better if he could only bow as he used to. He had seen all the
lovely women in the world there, all the great singers and the great
players. He was in the orchestra when Rachel played, and he heard
Liszt play when the Countess d'Agoult sat in the stage box and threw
the master white lilies. Once, a French woman came and played for
weeks, he did not remember her name now. He did not remember her
face very well either, for it changed so, it was never twice the
same. But the beauty of it, and the great hunger men felt at the
sight of it, that he remembered. Most of all he remembered her
voice. He did not know French, and could not understand a word she
said, but it seemed to him that she must be talking the music of
Chopin. And her voice, he thought he should know that in the other
world. The last night she played a play in which a man touched her
arm, and she stabbed him. As Peter sat among the smoking gas jets
down below the footlights with his fiddle on his knee, and looked up
at her, he thought he would like to die too, if he could touch her
arm once, and have her stab him so. Peter went home to his wife very
drunk that night. Even in those days he was a foolish fellow, who
cared for nothing but music and pretty faces.

It was all different now. He had nothing to drink and little to eat,
and here, there was nothing but sun, and grass, and sky. He had
forgotten almost everything, but some things he remembered well
enough. He loved his violin and the holy Mary, and above all else he
feared the Evil One, and his son Antone.

The fire was low, and it grew cold. Still Peter sat by the fire
remembering. He dared not throw more cobs on the fire; Antone would
be angry. He did not want to cut wood tomorrow, it would be Sunday,
and he wanted to go to mass. Antone might let him do that. He held
his violin under his wrinkled chin, his white hair fell over it, and
he began to play "Ave Maria." His hand shook more than ever before,
and at last refused to work the bow at all. He sat stupefied for a
while, then arose, and taking his violin with him, stole out into
the old sod stable. He took Antone's shot-gun down from its peg, and
loaded it by the moonlight which streamed in through the door. He
sat down on the dirt floor, and leaned back against the dirt wall.
He heard the wolves howling in the distance, and the night wind
screaming as it swept over the snow. Near him he heard the regular
breathing of the horses in the dark. He put his crucifix above his
heart, and folding his hands said brokenly all the Latin he had ever
known, "_Pater noster, qui in cælum est._" Then he raised his head
and sighed, "Not one kreutzer will Antone pay them to pray for my
soul, not one kreutzer, he is so careful of his money, is Antone, he
does not waste it in drink, he is a better man than I, but hard
sometimes. He works the girls too hard, women were not made to work
so. But he shall not sell thee, my fiddle, I can play thee no more,
but they shall not part us. We have seen it all together, and we
will forget it together, the French woman and all." He held his
fiddle under his chin a moment, where it had lain so often, then put
it across his knee and broke it through the middle. He pulled off
his old boot, held the gun between his knees with the muzzle against
his forehead, and pressed the trigger with his toe.

In the morning Antone found him stiff, frozen fast in a pool of
blood. They could not straighten him out enough to fit a coffin, so
they buried him in a pine box. Before the funeral Antone carried to
town the fiddle-bow which Peter had forgotten to break. Antone was
very thrifty, and a better man than his father had been.

                               _The Mahogany Tree_, May 21, 1892




_On the Divide_


Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw stood Canute's
shanty. North, east, south, stretched the level Nebraska plain of
long rust-red grass that undulated constantly in the wind. To the
west the ground was broken and rough, and a narrow strip of timber
wound along the turbid, muddy little stream that had scarcely
ambition enough to crawl over its black bottom. If it had not been
for the few stunted cottonwoods and elms that grew along its banks,
Canute would have shot himself years ago. The Norwegians are a
timber-loving people, and if there is even a turtle pond with a few
plum bushes around it they seem irresistibly drawn toward it.

As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of any
kind, for when he first squatted along the banks of Rattlesnake
Creek there was not a human being within twenty miles. It was built
of logs split in halves, the chinks stopped with mud and plaster.
The roof was covered with earth and was supported by one gigantic
beam curved in the shape of a round arch. It was almost impossible
that any tree had ever grown in that shape. The Norwegians used to
say that Canute had taken the log across his knee and bent it into
the shape he wished. There were two rooms, or rather there was one
room with a partition made of ash saplings interwoven and bound
together like big straw basket work. In one corner there was a cook
stove, rusted and broken. In the other a bed made of unplaned planks
and poles. It was fully eight feet long, and upon it was a heap of
dark bed clothing. There was a chair and a bench of colossal
proportions. There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with a few
cracked dirty dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin
wash-basin. Under the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken,
some whole, all empty. On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost
incredible dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and some
ragged clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark cloth,
apparently new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a red silk
handkerchief and pinned to the sleeve. Over the door hung a wolf and
a badger skin, and on the door itself a brace of thirty or forty
snake skins whose noisy tails rattled ominously every time it
opened. The strangest things in the shanty were the wide
window-sills. At first glance they looked as though they had been
ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but on closer
inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and
shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. They were, in a
rough way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as
though they had been cut very slowly and with very awkward
instruments. There were men plowing with little horned imps sitting
on their shoulders and on their horses' heads. There were men
praying with a skull hanging over their heads and little demons
behind them mocking their attitudes. There were men fighting with
big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All about these
pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew in this
world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was always
the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was a
serpent's head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had
felt its sting. In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of
them was cut up in the same manner. Sometimes the work was very rude
and careless, and looked as though the hand of the workman had
trembled. It would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men
from their evil geniuses but for one fact, the men were always grave
and were either toiling or praying, while the devils were always
smiling and dancing. Several of these boards had been split for
kindling and it was evident that the artist did not value his work
highly.

It was the first day of winter on the Divide. Canute stumbled into
his shanty carrying a basket of cobs, and after filling the stove,
sat down on a stool and crouched his seven foot frame over the fire,
staring drearily out of the window at the wide gray sky. He knew by
heart every individual clump of bunch grass in the miles of red
shaggy prairie that stretched before his cabin. He knew it in all
the deceitful loveliness of its early summer, in all the bitter
barrenness of its autumn. He had seen it smitten by all the plagues
of Egypt. He had seen it parched by drought, and sogged by rain,
beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in the grasshopper years he
had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones that the vultures have
left. After the great fires he had seen it stretch for miles and
miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.

He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet heavily
as though they were burdens to him. He looked out of the window into
the hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in the straw
before the shed. The leaden gray clouds were beginning to spill
themselves, and the snowflakes were settling down over the white
leprous patches of frozen earth where the hogs had gnawed even the
sod away. He shuddered and began to walk, tramping heavily with his
ungainly feet. He was the wreck of ten winters on the Divide and he
knew what they meant. Men fear the winters of the Divide as a child
fears night or as men in the North Seas fear the still dark cold of
the polar twilight.

His eyes fell upon his gun, and he took it down from the wall and
looked it over. He sat down on the edge of his bed and held the
barrel towards his face, letting his forehead rest upon it, and laid
his finger on the trigger. He was perfectly calm, there was neither
passion nor despair in his face, but the thoughtful look of a man
who is considering. Presently he laid down the gun, and reaching
into the cupboard, drew out a pint bottle of raw white alcohol.
Lifting it to his lips, he drank greedily. He washed his face in the
tin basin and combed his rough hair and shaggy blond beard. Then he
stood in uncertainty before the suit of dark clothes that hung on
the wall. For the fiftieth time he took them in his hands and tried
to summon courage to put them on. He took the paper collar that was
pinned to the sleeve of the coat and cautiously slipped it under his
rough beard, looking with timid expectancy into the cracked,
splashed glass that hung over the bench. With a short laugh he threw
it down on the bed, and pulling on his old black hat, he went out,
striking off across the level.

It was a physical necessity for him to get away from his cabin once
in a while. He had been there for ten years, digging and plowing and
sowing, and reaping what little the hail and the hot winds and the
frosts left him to reap. Insanity and suicide are very common things
on the Divide. They come on like an epidemic in the hot wind season.
Those scorching dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from Kansas
seem to dry up the blood in men's veins as they do the sap in the
corn leaves. Whenever the yellow scorch creeps down over the tender
inside leaves about the ear, then the coroners prepare for active
duty; for the oil of the country is burned out and it does not take
long for the flame to eat up the wick. It causes no great sensation
there when a Dane is found swinging to his own windmill tower, and
most of the Poles after they have become too careless and
discouraged to shave themselves keep their razors to cut their
throats with.

It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very happy,
but the present one came too late in life. It is useless for men
that have cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for forty years
to try to be happy in a country as flat and gray and as naked as the
sea. It is not easy for men that have spent their youths fishing in
the Northern seas to be content with following a plow, and men that
have served in the Austrian army hate hard work and coarse clothing
and the loneliness of the plains, and long for marches and
excitement and tavern company and pretty barmaids. After a man has
passed his fortieth birthday it is not easy for him to change the
habits and conditions of his life. Most men bring with them to the
Divide only the dregs of the lives that they have squandered in
other lands and among other peoples.

Canute Canuteson was as mad as any of them, but his madness did not
take the form of suicide or religion but of alcohol. He had always
taken liquor when he wanted it, as all Norwegians do, but after his
first year of solitary life he settled down to it steadily. He
exhausted whisky after a while, and went to alcohol, because its
effects were speedier and surer. He was a big man with a terrible
amount of resistant force, and it took a great deal of alcohol even
to move him. After nine years of drinking, the quantities he could
take would seem fabulous to an ordinary drinking man. He never let
it interfere with his work, he generally drank at night and on
Sundays. Every night, as soon as his chores were done, he began to
drink. While he was able to sit up he would play on his mouth harp
or hack away at his window sills with his jack knife. When the
liquor went to his head he would lie down on his bed and stare out
of the window until he went to sleep. He drank alone and in solitude
not for pleasure or good cheer, but to forget the awful loneliness
and level of the Divide. Milton made a sad blunder when he put
mountains in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All
mountain peoples are religious. It was the cities of the plains
that, because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad
caprice of their vice, were cursed of God.

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness
is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a
bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. Canute was none of these,
but he was morose and gloomy, and liquor took him through all the
hells of Dante. As he lay on his giant's bed all the horrors of this
world and every other were laid bare to his chilled senses. He was a
man who knew no joy, a man who toiled in silence and bitterness. The
skull and the serpent were always before him, the symbols of eternal
futileness and of eternal hate.

When the first Norwegians near enough to be called neighbors came,
Canute rejoiced, and planned to escape from his bosom vice. But he
was not a social man by nature and had not the power of drawing out
the social side of other people. His new neighbors rather feared him
because of his great strength and size, his silence and his lowering
brows. Perhaps, too, they knew that he was mad, mad from the eternal
treachery of the plains, which every spring stretch green and rustle
with the promises of Eden, showing long grassy lagoons full of clear
water and cattle whose hoofs are stained with wild roses. Before
autumn the lagoons are dried up, and the ground is burnt dry and
hard until it blisters and cracks open.

So instead of becoming a friend and neighbor to the men that settled
about him, Canute became a mystery and a terror. They told awful
stories of his size and strength and of the alcohol he drank. They
said that one night, when he went out to see to his horses just
before he went to bed, his steps were unsteady and the rotten planks
of the floor gave way and threw him behind the feet of a fiery young
stallion. His foot was caught fast in the floor, and the nervous
horse began kicking frantically. When Canute felt the blood
trickling down in his eyes from a scalp wound in his head, he roused
himself from his kingly indifference, and with the quiet stoical
courage of a drunken man leaned forward and wound his arms about the
horse's hind legs and held them against his breast with crushing
embrace. All through the darkness and cold of the night he lay
there, matching strength against strength. When little Jim Peterson
went over the next morning at four o'clock to go with him to the
Blue to cut wood, he found him so, and the horse was on its fore
knees, trembling and whinnying with fear. This is the story the
Norwegians tell of him, and if it is true it is no wonder that they
feared and hated this Holder of the Heels of Horses.

One spring there moved to the next "eighty" a family that made a
great change in Canute's life. Ole Yensen was too drunk most of the
time to be afraid of any one, and his wife Mary was too garrulous to
be afraid of any one who listened to her talk, and Lena, their
pretty daughter, was not afraid of man nor devil. So it came about
that Canute went over to take his alcohol with Ole oftener than he
took it alone. After a while the report spread that he was going to
marry Yensen's daughter, and the Norwegian girls began to tease Lena
about the great bear she was going to keep house for. No one could
quite see how the affair had come about, for Canute's tactics of
courtship were somewhat peculiar. He apparently never spoke to her
at all: he would sit for hours with Mary chattering on one side of
him and Ole drinking on the other and watch Lena at her work. She
teased him, and threw flour in his face and put vinegar in his
coffee, but he took her rough jokes with silent wonder, never even
smiling. He took her to church occasionally, but the most watchful
and curious people never saw him speak to her. He would sit staring
at her while she giggled and flirted with the other men.

Next spring Mary Lee went to town to work in a steam laundry. She
came home every Sunday, and always ran across to Yensens to startle
Lena with stories of ten cent theaters, firemen's dances, and all
the other esthetic delights of metropolitan life. In a few weeks
Lena's head was completely turned, and she gave her father no rest
until he let her go to town to seek her fortune at the ironing
board. From the time she came home on her first visit she began to
treat Canute with contempt. She had bought a plush cloak and kid
gloves, had her clothes made by the dress-maker, and assumed airs
and graces that made the other women of the neighborhood cordially
detest her. She generally brought with her a young man from town who
waxed his mustache and wore a red necktie, and she did not even
introduce him to Canute.

The neighbors teased Canute a good deal until he knocked one of them
down. He gave no sign of suffering from her neglect except that he
drank more and avoided the other Norwegians more carefully than
ever. He lay around in his den and no one knew what he felt or
thought, but little Jim Peterson, who had seen him glowering at Lena
in church one Sunday when she was there with the town man, said that
he would not give an acre of his wheat for Lena's life or the town
chap's either; and Jim's wheat was so wondrously worthless that the
statement was an exceedingly strong one.

Canute had bought a new suit of clothes that looked as nearly like
the town man's as possible. They had cost him half a millet crop;
for tailors are not accustomed to fitting giants and they charge for
it. He had hung those clothes in his shanty two months ago and had
never put them on, partly from fear of ridicule, partly from
discouragement, and partly because there was something in his own
soul that revolted at the littleness of the device.

Lena was at home just at this time. Work was slack in the laundry
and Mary had not been well, so Lena stayed at home, glad enough to
get an opportunity to torment Canute once more.

She was washing in the side kitchen, singing loudly as she worked.
Mary was on her knees, blacking the stove and scolding violently
about the young man who was coming out from town that night. The
young man had committed the fatal error of laughing at Mary's
ceaseless babble and had never been forgiven.

"He is no good, and you will come to a bad end by running with him!
I do not see why a daughter of mine should act so. I do not see why
the Lord should visit such a punishment upon me as to give me such a
daughter. There are plenty of good men you can marry."

Lena tossed her head and answered curtly, "I don't happen to want to
marry any man right away, and so long as Dick dresses nice and has
plenty of money to spend, there is no harm in my going with him."

"Money to spend? Yes, and that is all he does with it I'll be bound.
You think it very fine now, but you will change your tune when you
have been married five years and see your children running naked and
your cupboard empty. Did Anne Hermanson come to any good end by
marrying a town man?"

"I don't know anything about Anne Hermanson, but I know any of the
laundry girls would have Dick quick enough if they could get him."

"Yes, and a nice lot of store clothes huzzies you are too. Now there
is Canuteson who has an 'eighty' proved up and fifty head of cattle
and----"

"And hair that ain't been cut since he was a baby, and a big dirty
beard, and he wears overalls on Sundays, and drinks like a pig.
Besides he will keep. I can have all the fun I want, and when I am
old and ugly like you he can have me and take care of me. The Lord
knows there ain't nobody else going to marry him."

Canute drew his hand back from the latch as though it were red hot.
He was not the kind of a man to make a good eavesdropper, and he
wished he had knocked sooner. He pulled himself together and struck
the door like a battering ram. Mary jumped and opened it with a
screech.

"God! Canute, how you scared us! I thought it was crazy Lou,--he has
been tearing around the neighborhood trying to convert folks. I am
afraid as death of him. He ought to be sent off, I think. He is just
as liable as not to kill us all, or burn the barn, or poison the
dogs. He has been worrying even the poor minister to death, and he
laid up with the rheumatism, too! Did you notice that he was too
sick to preach last Sunday? But don't stand there in the cold,--come
in. Yensen isn't here, but he just went over to Sorenson's for the
mail; he won't be gone long. Walk right in the other room and sit
down."

Canute followed her, looking steadily in front of him and not
noticing Lena as he passed her. But Lena's vanity would not allow
him to pass unmolested. She took the wet sheet she was wringing out
and cracked him across the face with it, and ran giggling to the
other side of the room. The blow stung his cheeks and the soapy
water flew in his eyes, and he involuntarily began rubbing them with
his hands. Lena giggled with delight at his discomfiture, and the
wrath in Canute's face grew blacker than ever. A big man humiliated
is vastly more undignified than a little one. He forgot the sting of
his face in the bitter consciousness that he had made a fool of
himself. He stumbled blindly into the living room, knocking his head
against the door jamb because he forgot to stoop. He dropped into a
chair behind the stove, thrusting his big feet back helplessly on
either side of him.

Ole was a long time in coming, and Canute sat there, still and
silent, with his hands clenched on his knees, and the skin of his
face seemed to have shriveled up into little wrinkles that trembled
when he lowered his brows. His life had been one long lethargy of
solitude and alcohol, but now he was awakening, and it was as when
the dumb stagnant heat of summer breaks out into thunder.

When Ole came staggering in, heavy with liquor, Canute rose at once.

"Yensen," he said quietly, "I have come to see if you will let me
marry your daughter today."

"Today!" gasped Ole.

"Yes, I will not wait until tomorrow. I am tired of living alone."

Ole braced his staggering knees against the bedstead, and stammered
eloquently: "Do you think I will marry my daughter to a drunkard? a
man who drinks raw alcohol? a man who sleeps with rattle snakes? Get
out of my house or I will kick you out for your impudence." And Ole
began looking anxiously for his feet.

Canute answered not a word, but he put on his hat and went out into
the kitchen. He went up to Lena and said without looking at her,
"Get your things on and come with me!"

The tones of his voice startled her, and she said angrily, dropping
the soap, "Are you drunk?"

"If you do not come with me, I will take you,--you had better come,"
said Canute quietly.

She lifted a sheet to strike him, but he caught her arm roughly and
wrenched the sheet from her. He turned to the wall and took down a
hood and shawl that hung there, and began wrapping her up. Lena
scratched and fought like a wild thing. Ole stood in the door,
cursing, and Mary howled and screeched at the top of her voice. As
for Canute, he lifted the girl in his arms and went out of the
house. She kicked and struggled, but the helpless wailing of Mary
and Ole soon died away in the distance, and her face was held down
tightly on Canute's shoulder so that she could not see whither he
was taking her. She was conscious only of the north wind whistling
in her ears, and of rapid steady motion and of a great breast that
heaved beneath her in quick, irregular breaths. The harder she
struggled the tighter those iron arms that had held the heels of
horses crushed about her, until she felt as if they would crush the
breath from her, and lay still with fear. Canute was striding across
the level fields at a pace at which man never went before, drawing
the stinging north wind into his lungs in great gulps. He walked
with his eyes half closed and looking straight in front of him, only
lowering them when he bent his head to blow away the snow flakes
that settled on her hair. So it was that Canute took her to his
home, even as his bearded barbarian ancestors took the fair
frivolous women of the South in their hairy arms and bore them down
to their war ships. For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the
conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters
the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong
arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.

When Canute reached his shanty he placed the girl upon a chair,
where she sat sobbing. He stayed only a few minutes. He filled the
stove with wood and lit the lamp, drank a huge swallow of alcohol
and put the bottle in his pocket. He paused a moment, staring
heavily at the weeping girl, then he went off and locked the door
and disappeared in the gathering gloom of the night.

Wrapped in flannels and soaked with turpentine, the little Norwegian
preacher sat reading his Bible, when he heard a thundering knock at
his door, and Canute entered, covered with snow and with his beard
frozen fast to his coat.

"Come in, Canute, you must be frozen," said the little man, shoving
a chair towards his visitor.

Canute remained standing with his hat on and said quietly, "I want
you to come over to my house tonight to marry me to Lena Yensen."

"Have you got a license, Canute?"

"No, I don't want a license. I want to be married."

"But I can't marry you without a license, man. It would not be
legal."

A dangerous light came in the big Norwegian's eye. "I want you to
come over to my house to marry me to Lena Yensen."

"No, I can't, it would kill an ox to go out in a storm like this,
and my rheumatism is bad tonight."

"Then if you will not go I must take you," said Canute with a sigh.

He took down the preacher's bearskin coat and bade him put it on
while he hitched up his buggy. He went out and closed the door
softly after him. Presently he returned and found the frightened
minister crouching before the fire with his coat lying beside him.
Canute helped him put it on and gently wrapped his head in his big
muffler. Then he picked him up and carried him out and placed him in
his buggy. As he tucked the buffalo robes around him he said: "Your
horse is old, he might flounder or lose his way in this storm. I
will lead him."

The minister took the reins feebly in his hands and sat shivering
with the cold. Sometimes when there was a lull in the wind, he could
see the horse struggling through the snow with the man plodding
steadily beside him. Again the blowing snow would hide them from him
altogether. He had no idea where they were or what direction they
were going. He felt as though he were being whirled away in the
heart of the storm, and he said all the prayers he knew. But at last
the long four miles were over, and Canute set him down in the snow
while he unlocked the door. He saw the bride sitting by the fire
with her eyes red and swollen as though she had been weeping. Canute
placed a huge chair for him, and said roughly,--

"Warm yourself."

Lena began to cry and moan afresh, begging the minister to take her
home. He looked helplessly at Canute. Canute said simply,--

"If you are warm now, you can marry us."

"My daughter, do you take this step of your own free will?" asked
the minister in a trembling voice.

"No sir, I don't, and it is disgraceful he should force me into it!
I won't marry him."

"Then, Canute, I cannot marry you," said the minister, standing as
straight as his rheumatic limbs would let him.

"Are you ready to marry us now, sir?" said Canute, laying one iron
hand on his stooped shoulder. The little preacher was a good man,
but like most men of weak body he was a coward and had a horror of
physical suffering, although he had known so much of it. So with
many qualms of conscience he began to repeat the marriage service.
Lena sat sullenly in her chair, staring at the fire. Canute stood
beside her, listening with his head bent reverently and his hands
folded on his breast. When the little man had prayed and said amen,
Canute began bundling him up again.

"I will take you home, now," he said as he carried him out and
placed him in his buggy, and started off with him through the fury
of the storm, floundering among the snow drifts that brought even
the giant himself to his knees.

After she was left alone, Lena soon ceased weeping. She was not of a
particularly sensitive temperament, and had little pride beyond that
of vanity. After the first bitter anger wore itself out, she felt
nothing more than a healthy sense of humiliation and defeat. She had
no inclination to run away, for she was married now, and in her eyes
that was final and all rebellion was useless. She knew nothing about
a license, but she knew that a preacher married folks. She consoled
herself by thinking that she had always intended to marry Canute
some day, any way.

She grew tired of crying and looking into the fire, so she got up
and began to look about her. She had heard queer tales about the
inside of Canute's shanty, and her curiosity soon got the better of
her rage. One of the first things she noticed was the new black suit
of clothes hanging on the wall. She was dull, but it did not take a
vain woman long to interpret anything so decidedly flattering, and
she was pleased in spite of herself. As she looked through the
cupboard, the general air of neglect and discomfort made her pity
the man who lived there.

"Poor fellow, no wonder he wants to get married to get somebody to
wash up his dishes. Batchin's pretty hard on a man."

It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled. She
looked at the window sill and gave a little shudder and wondered if
the man were crazy. Then she sat down again and sat a long time
wondering what her Dick and Ole would do.

"It is queer Dick didn't come right over after me. He surely came,
for he would have left town before the storm began and he might just
as well come right on as go back. If he'd hurried he would have
gotten here before the preacher came. I suppose he was afraid to
come, for he knew Canuteson could pound him to jelly, the coward!"
Her eyes flashed angrily.

The weary hours wore on and Lena began to grow horribly lonesome. It
was an uncanny night and this was an uncanny place to be in. She
could hear the coyotes howling hungrily a little way from the cabin,
and more terrible still were all the unknown noises of the storm.
She remembered the tales they told of the big log overhead and she
was afraid of those snaky things on the window sills. She remembered
the man who had been killed in the draw, and she wondered what she
would do if she saw crazy Lou's white face glaring into the window.
The rattling of the door became unbearable, she thought the latch
must be loose and took the lamp to look at it. Then for the first
time she saw the ugly brown snake skins whose death rattle sounded
every time the wind jarred the door.

"Canute, Canute!" she screamed in terror.

Outside the door she heard a heavy sound as of a big dog getting up
and shaking himself. The door opened and Canute stood before her,
white as a snow drift.

"What is it?" he asked kindly.

"I am cold," she faltered.

He went out and got an armful of wood and a basket of cobs and
filled the stove. Then he went out and lay in the snow before the
door. Presently he heard her calling again.

"What is it?" he said, sitting up.

"I'm so lonesome, I'm afraid to stay in here all alone."

"I will go over and get your mother." And he got up.

"She won't come."

"I'll bring her," said Canute grimly.

"No, no. I don't want her, she will scold all the time."

"Well, I will bring your father."

She spoke again and it seemed as though her mouth was close up to
the key-hole. She spoke lower than he had ever heard her speak
before, so low that he had to put his ear up to the lock to hear
her.

"I don't want him either, Canute,--I'd rather have you."

For a moment she heard no noise at all, then something like a groan.
With a cry of fear she opened the door, and saw Canute stretched in
the snow at her feet, his face in his hands, sobbing on the door
step.

                                _Overland Monthly_, January 1896




_Eric Hermannson's Soul_


I.

It was a great night at the Lone Star schoolhouse--a night when the
Spirit was present with power and when God was very near to man. So
it seemed to Asa Skinner, servant of God and Free Gospeller. The
schoolhouse was crowded with the saved and sanctified, robust men
and women, trembling and quailing before the power of some
mysterious psychic force. Here and there among this cowering,
sweating multitude crouched some poor wretch who had felt the pangs
of an awakened conscience, but had not yet experienced that complete
divestment of reason, that frenzy born of a convulsion of the mind,
which, in the parlance of the Free Gospellers, is termed "the
Light." On the floor, before the mourners' bench, lay the
unconscious figure of a man in whom outraged nature had sought her
last resort. This "trance" state is the highest evidence of grace
among the Free Gospellers, and indicates a close walking with God.

Before the desk stood Asa Skinner, shouting of the mercy and
vengeance of God, and in his eyes shone a terrible earnestness, an
almost prophetic flame. Asa was a converted train gambler who used
to run between Omaha and Denver. He was a man made for the extremes
of life; from the most debauched of men he had become the most
ascetic. His was a bestial face, a face that bore the stamp of
Nature's eternal injustice. The forehead was low, projecting over
the eyes, and the sandy hair was plastered down over it and then
brushed back at an abrupt right angle. The chin was heavy, the
nostrils were low and wide, and the lower lip hung loosely except in
his moments of spasmodic earnestness, when it shut like a steel
trap. Yet about those coarse features there were deep, rugged
furrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle with the weakness
of the flesh, and about that drooping lip were sharp, strenuous
lines that had conquered it and taught it to pray. Over those seamed
cheeks there was a certain pallor, a grayness caught from many a
vigil. It was as though, after Nature had done her worst with that
face, some fine chisel had gone over it, chastening and almost
transfiguring it. To-night, as his muscles twitched with emotion,
and the perspiration dropped from his hair and chin, there was a
certain convincing power in the man. For Asa Skinner was a man
possessed of a belief, of that sentiment of the sublime before which
all inequalities are leveled, that transport of conviction which
seems superior to all laws of condition, under which debauchees have
become martyrs; which made a tinker an artist and a camel-driver the
founder of an empire. This was with Asa Skinner to-night, as he
stood proclaiming the vengeance of God.

It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa Skinner's
God was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve vengeance for
those of his creatures who were packed into the Lone Star
schoolhouse that night. Poor exiles of all nations; men from the
south and the north, peasants from almost every country of Europe,
most of them from the mountainous, night-bound coast of Norway.
Honest men for the most part, but men with whom the world had dealt
hardly; the failures of all countries, men sobered by toil and
saddened by exile, who had been driven to fight for the dominion of
an untoward soil, to sow where others should gather, the
advance-guard of a mighty civilization to be.

Never had Asa Skinner spoken more earnestly than now. He felt that
the Lord had this night a special work for him to do. To-night Eric
Hermannson, the wildest lad on all the Divide, sat in his audience
with a fiddle on his knee, just as he had dropped in on his way to
play for some dance. The violin is an object of particular
abhorrence to the Free Gospellers. Their antagonism to the church
organ is bitter enough, but the fiddle they regard as a very
incarnation of evil desires, singing forever of worldly pleasures
and inseparably associated with all forbidden things.

Eric Hermannson had long been the object of the prayers of the
revivalists. His mother had felt the power of the Spirit weeks ago,
and special prayer-meetings had been held at her house for her son.
But Eric had only gone his ways laughing, the ways of youth, which
are short enough at best, and none too flowery on the Divide. He
slipped away from the prayer-meetings to meet the Campbell boys in
Genereau's saloon, or hug the plump little French girls at
Chevalier's dances, and sometimes, of a summer night, he even went
across the dewy cornfields and through the wild-plum thicket to play
the fiddle for Lena Hanson, whose name was a reproach through all
the Divide country, where the women are usually too plain and too
busy and too tired to depart from the ways of virtue. On such
occasions Lena, attired in a pink wrapper and silk stockings and
tiny pink slippers, would sing to him, accompanying herself on a
battered guitar. It gave him a delicious sense of freedom and
experience to be with a woman who, no matter how, had lived in big
cities and knew the ways of town-folk, who had never worked in the
fields and had kept her hands white and soft, her throat fair and
tender, who had heard great singers in Denver and Salt Lake, and who
knew the strange language of flattery and idleness and mirth.

Yet, careless as he seemed, the frantic prayers of his mother were
not altogether without their effect upon Eric. For days he had been
fleeing before them as a criminal from his pursuers, and over his
pleasures had fallen the shadow of something dark and terrible that
dogged his steps. The harder he danced, the louder he sang, the more
was he conscious that this phantom was gaining upon him, that in
time it would track him down. One Sunday afternoon, late in the
fall, when he had been drinking beer with Lena Hanson and listening
to a song which made his cheeks burn, a rattlesnake had crawled out
of the side of the sod house and thrust its ugly head in under the
screen door. He was not afraid of snakes, but he knew enough of
Gospellism to feel the significance of the reptile lying coiled
there upon her doorstep. His lips were cold when he kissed Lena
good-by, and he went there no more.

The final barrier between Eric and his mother's faith was his
violin, and to that he clung as a man sometimes will cling to his
dearest sin, to the weakness more precious to him than all his
strength. In the great world beauty comes to men in many guises, and
art in a hundred forms, but for Eric there was only his violin. It
stood, to him, for all the manifestations of art; it was his only
bridge into the kingdom of the soul.

It was to Eric Hermannson that the evangelist directed his
impassioned pleading that night.

"_Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?_ Is there a Saul here
to-night who has stopped his ears to that gentle pleading, who has
thrust a spear into that bleeding side? Think of it, my brother; you
are offered this wonderful love and you prefer the worm that dieth
not and the fire which will not be quenched. What right have you to
lose one of God's precious souls? _Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou
me?_"

A great joy dawned in Asa Skinner's pale face, for he saw that Eric
Hermannson was swaying to and fro in his seat. The minister fell
upon his knees and threw his long arms up over his head.

"O my brothers! I feel it coming, the blessing we have prayed for. I
tell you the Spirit is coming! Just a little more prayer, brothers,
a little more zeal, and he will be here. I can feel his cooling wing
upon my brow. Glory be to God forever and ever, amen!"

The whole congregation groaned under the pressure of this spiritual
panic. Shouts and hallelujahs went up from every lip. Another figure
fell prostrate upon the floor. From the mourners' bench rose a chant
of terror and rapture:

  "Eating honey and drinking wine,
    _Glory to the bleeding Lamb!_
  I am my Lord's and he is mine,
    _Glory to the bleeding Lamb!_"

The hymn was sung in a dozen dialects and voiced all the vague
yearning of these hungry lives, of these people who had starved all
the passions so long, only to fall victims to the basest of them
all, fear.

A groan of ultimate anguish rose from Eric Hermannson's bowed head,
and the sound was like the groan of a great tree when it falls in
the forest.

The minister rose suddenly to his feet and threw back his head,
crying in a loud voice:

"_Lazarus, come forth!_ Eric Hermannson, you are lost, going down at
sea. In the name of God, and Jesus Christ his Son, I throw you the
life-line. Take hold! Almighty God, my soul for his!" The minister
threw his arms out and lifted his quivering face.

Eric Hermannson rose to his feet; his lips were set and the
lightning was in his eyes. He took his violin by the neck and
crushed it to splinters across his knee, and to Asa Skinner the
sound was like the shackles of sin broken audibly asunder.


II.

For more than two years Eric Hermannson kept the austere faith to
which he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from the East came
to spend a week on the Nebraska Divide. She was a girl of other
manners and conditions, and there were greater distances between her
life and Eric's than all the miles which separated Rattlesnake Creek
from New York city. Indeed, she had no business to be in the West at
all; but ah! across what leagues of land and sea, by what improbable
chances, do the unrelenting gods bring to us our fate!

It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot came to
Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he had
spent a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was
still customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons
to rough it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to
consign them to a living death in the sage-brush of the Black Hills.
These young men did not always return to the ways of civilized life.
But Wyllis Elliot had not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a
cow-punchers' brawl, nor wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by
a smirched adventuress. He had been saved from these things by a
girl, his sister, who had been very near to his life ever since the
days when they read fairy tales together and dreamed the dreams that
never come true. On this, his first visit to his father's ranch
since he left it six years before, he brought her with him. She had
been laid up half the winter from a sprain received while skating,
and had had too much time for reflection during those months. She
was restless and filled with a desire to see something of the wild
country of which her brother had told her so much. She was to be
married the next winter, and Wyllis understood her when she begged
him to take her with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the
continent, to taste the last of their freedom together. It comes to
all women of her type--that desire to taste the unknown which
allures and terrifies, to run one's whole soul's length out to the
wind--just once.

It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood that
strain of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her.
They had slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the
acquaintance of the personnel of a third-rate opera company on the
train to Deadwood, dined in a camp of railroad constructors at the
world's end beyond New Castle, gone through the Black Hills on
horseback, fished for trout in Dome Lake, watched a dance at Cripple
Creek, where the lost souls who hide in the hills gathered for their
besotted revelry. And now, last of all, before the return to
thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on the windy crest
of the Divide, a little black dot against the flaming sunsets, a
scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air and blinding
sunlight.

Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there are so many in
this day, when old order, passing, giveth place to new; beautiful,
talented, critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four.
For the moment the life and people of the Divide interested her. She
was there but a week; perhaps had she stayed longer, that inexorable
ennui which travels faster even than the Vestibule Limited would
have overtaken her. The week she tarried there was the week that
Eric Hermannson was helping Jerry Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or
a week later, and there would have been no story to write.

It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday. Wyllis and
his sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse,
staring out into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the
gusts of hot wind that blew up from the sandy river-bottom twenty
miles to the southward.

The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:

"This wind is the real thing; you don't strike it anywhere else. You
remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you it came from
Kansas. It's the key-note of this country."

Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued
gently:

"I hope it's paid you, Sis. Roughing it's dangerous business; it
takes the taste out of things."

She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so like her
own.

"Paid? Why, Wyllis, I haven't been so happy since we were children
and were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some day. Do
you know, I believe I could just stay on here forever and let the
world go on its own gait. It seems as though the tension and strain
we used to talk of last winter were gone for good, as though one
could never give one's strength out to such petty things any more."

Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk handkerchief
that was knotted about his neck and stared moodily off at the
sky-line.

"No, you're mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You can't
shake the fever of the other life. I've tried it. There was a time
when the gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and
burrow into the sandhills and get rid of it. But it's all too
complex now. You see we've made our dissipations so dainty and
respectable that they've gone further in than the flesh, and taken
hold of the ego proper. You couldn't rest, even here. The war-cry
would follow you."

"You don't waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I talk more
than you do, without saying half so much. You must have learned the
art of silence from these taciturn Norwegians. I think I like silent
men."

"Naturally," said Wyllis, "since you have decided to marry the most
brilliant talker you know."

Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the hot
wind through the parched morning-glory vines. Margaret spoke first.

"Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know as
interesting as Eric Hermannson?"

"Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the Norwegian
youth in my day, and he's rather an exception, even now. He has
retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil have tightened on him, I
fancy."

"Siegfried? Come, that's rather good, Wyllis. He looks like a
dragon-slayer. What is it that makes him so different from the
others? I can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being."

"Well," said Wyllis, meditatively, "I don't read Bourget as much as
my cultured sister, and I'm not so well up in analysis, but I fancy
it's because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted suspicion
that under that big, hulking anatomy of his, he may conceal a soul
somewhere. Nicht wahr?"

"Something like that," said Margaret, thoughtfully, "except that
it's more than a suspicion, and it isn't groundless. He has one, and
he makes it known, somehow, without speaking."

"I always have my doubts about loquacious souls," Wyllis remarked,
with the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual with him.

Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption. "I knew it from the
first, when he told me about the suicide of his cousin, the
Bernstein boy. That kind of blunt pathos can't be summoned at will
in anybody. The earlier novelists rose to it, sometimes,
unconsciously. But last night when I sang for him I was doubly sure.
Oh, I haven't told you about that yet! Better light your pipe again.
You see, he stumbled in on me in the dark when I was pumping away at
that old parlor organ to please Mrs. Lockhart. It's her household
fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of butter she made and
sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in some inarticulate
manner made me understand that he wanted me to sing for him. I sang
just the old things, of course. It's queer to sing familiar things
here at the world's end. It makes one think how the hearts of men
have carried them around the world, into the wastes of Iceland and
the jungles of Africa and the islands of the Pacific. I think if one
lived here long enough one would quite forget how to be trivial, and
would read only the great books that we never get time to read in
the world, and would remember only the great music, and the things
that are really worth while would stand out clearly against that
horizon over there. And of course I played the intermezzo from
'Cavalleria Rusticana' for him; it goes rather better on an organ
than most things do. He shuffled his feet and twisted his big hands
up into knots and blurted out that he didn't know there was any
music like that in the world. Why, there were tears in his voice,
Wyllis! Yes, like Rossetti, I _heard_ his tears. Then it dawned upon
me that it was probably the first good music he had ever heard in
all his life. Think of it, to care for music as he does and never to
hear it, never to know that it exists on earth! To long for it as we
long for other perfect experiences that never come. I can't tell you
what music means to that man. I never saw any one so susceptible to
it. It gave him speech, he became alive. When I had finished the
intermezzo, he began telling me about a little crippled brother who
died and whom he loved and used to carry everywhere in his arms. He
did not wait for encouragement. He took up the story and told it
slowly, as if to himself, just sort of rose up and told his own woe
to answer Mascagni's. It overcame me."

"Poor devil," said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious eyes, "and
so you've given him a new woe. Now he'll go on wanting Grieg and
Schubert the rest of his days and never getting them. That's a
girl's philanthropy for you!"

Jerry Lockhart came out of the house screwing his chin over the
unusual luxury of a stiff white collar, which his wife insisted upon
as a necessary article of toilet while Miss Elliot was at the house.
Jerry sat down on the step and smiled his broad, red smile at
Margaret.

"Well, I've got the music for your dance, Miss Elliot. Olaf Oleson
will bring his accordion and Mollie will play the organ, when she
isn't lookin' after the grub, and a little chap from Frenchtown will
bring his fiddle--though the French don't mix with the Norwegians
much."

"Delightful! Mr. Lockhart, that dance will be the feature of our
trip, and it's so nice of you to get it up for us. We'll see the
Norwegians in character at last," cried Margaret, cordially.

"See here, Lockhart, I'll settle with you for backing her in this
scheme," said Wyllis, sitting up and knocking the ashes out of his pipe.
"She's done crazy things enough on this trip, but to talk of dancing
all night with a gang of half-mad Norwegians and taking the carriage
at four to catch the six o'clock train out of Riverton--well, it's
tommy-rot, that's what it is!"

"Wyllis, I leave it to your sovereign power of reason to decide
whether it isn't easier to stay up all night than to get up at three
in the morning. To get up at three, think what that means! No, sir,
I prefer to keep my vigil and then get into a sleeper."

"But what do you want with the Norwegians? I thought you were tired
of dancing."

"So I am, with some people. But I want to see a Norwegian dance, and
I intend to. Come, Wyllis, you know how seldom it is that one really
wants to do anything nowadays. I wonder when I have really wanted to
go to a party before. It will be something to remember next month at
Newport, when we have to and don't want to. Remember your own theory
that contrast is about the only thing that makes life endurable.
This is my party and Mr. Lockhart's; your whole duty to-morrow night
will consist in being nice to the Norwegian girls. I'll warrant you
were adept enough at it once. And you'd better be very nice indeed,
for if there are many such young valkyrs as Eric's sister among
them, they would simply tie you up in a knot if they suspected you
were guying them."

Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider his fate,
while his sister went on.

"And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?"

Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the sole of
his plowshoe.

"Well, I guess we'll have a couple dozen. You see it's pretty hard
to get a crowd together here any more. Most of 'em have gone over to
the Free Gospellers, and they'd rather put their feet in the fire
than shake 'em to a fiddle."

Margaret made a gesture of impatience.

"Those Free Gospellers have just cast an evil spell over this
country, haven't they?"

"Well," said Lockhart, cautiously, "I don't just like to pass
judgment on any Christian sect, but if you're to know the chosen by
their works, the Gospellers can't make a very proud showin', an'
that's a fact. They're responsible for a few suicides, and they've
sent a good-sized delegation to the state insane asylum, an' I don't
see as they've made the rest of us much better than we were before.
I had a little herdboy last spring, as square a little Dane as I
want to work for me, but after the Gospellers got hold of him and
sanctified him, the little beggar used to get down on his knees out
on the prairie and pray by the hour and let the cattle get into the
corn, an' I had to fire him. That's about the way it goes. Now
there's Eric; that chap used to be a hustler and the spryest dancer
in all this section--called all the dances. Now he's got no ambition
and he's glum as a preacher. I don't suppose we can even get him to
come in to-morrow night."

"Eric? Why, he must dance, we can't let him off," said Margaret,
quickly. "Why, I intend to dance with him myself!"

"I'm afraid he won't dance. I asked him this morning if he'd help us
out and he said, 'I don't dance now, any more,'" said Lockhart,
imitating the labored English of the Norwegian.

"'The Miller of Hoffbau, the Miller of Hoffbau, O my Princess!'"
chirped Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.

The red on his sister's cheek deepened a little, and she laughed
mischievously. "We'll see about that, sir. I'll not admit that I am
beaten until I have asked him myself."

Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village in the
heart of the French settlement, for the mail. As the road lay
through the most attractive part of the Divide country, on several
occasions Margaret Elliot and her brother had accompanied him.
To-night Wyllis had business with Lockhart, and Margaret rode with
Eric, mounted on a frisky little mustang that Mrs. Lockhart had
broken to the side-saddle. Margaret regarded her escort very much as
she did the servant who always accompanied her on long rides at
home, and the ride to the village was a silent one. She was occupied
with thoughts of another world, and Eric was wrestling with more
thoughts than had ever been crowded into his head before. He rode
with his eyes riveted on that slight figure before him, as though he
wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it in his
brain forever. He understood the situation perfectly. His brain
worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of things. This
girl represented an entirely new species of humanity to him, but he
knew where to place her. The prophets of old, when an angel first
appeared unto them, never doubted its high origin.

Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but he
was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost its
self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were not
afraid of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had prospects
before him when his father went down off the North Cape in the long
Arctic night, and his mother, seized by a violent horror of
seafaring life, had followed her brother to America. Eric was
eighteen then, handsome as young Siegfried, a giant in stature, with
a skin singularly pure and delicate, like a Swede's; hair as yellow
as the locks of Tennyson's amorous Prince, and eyes of a fierce,
burning blue, whose flash was most dangerous to women. He had in
those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain confidence of
approach, that usually accompanies physical perfection. It was even
said of him then that he was in love with life, and inclined to
levity, a vice most unusual on the Divide. But the sad history of
those Norwegian exiles, transplanted in an arid soil and under a
scorching sun, had repeated itself in his case. Toil and isolation
had sobered him, and he grew more and more like the clods among
which he labored. It was as though some red-hot instrument had
touched for a moment those delicate fibers of the brain which
respond to acute pain or pleasure, in which lies the power of
exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away. It is a painful
thing to watch the light die out of the eyes of those Norsemen,
leaving an expression of impenetrable sadness, quite passive, quite
hopeless, a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change comes
almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness, with others
it comes more slowly, according to the time it takes each man's
heart to die.

Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a year
before they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the windy
hill where exiles of all nations grow akin.

The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of his
people sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric until that
night at the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his violin
across his knee. After that, the gloom of his people settled down
upon him, and the gospel of maceration began its work. "_If thine
eye offend thee, pluck it out_," et cetera. The pagan smile that
once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was one with sorrow.
Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it embitters, but when
it destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and where the agony of
the cross has been, joy will not come again. This man understood
things literally: one must live without pleasure to die without
fear; to save the soul it was necessary to starve the soul.

The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and her cavalier
left St. Anne. South of the town there is a stretch of road that
runs for some three miles through the French settlement, where the
prairie is as level as the surface of a lake. There the fields of
flax and wheat and rye are bordered by precise rows of slender,
tapering Lombard poplars. It was a yellow world that Margaret Elliot
saw under the wide light of the setting sun.

The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, "It will be
safe to run the horses here, won't it?"

"Yes, I think so, now," he answered, touching his spur to his pony's
flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old saying in the West
that new-comers always ride a horse or two to death before they get
broken in to the country. They are tempted by the great open spaces
and try to outride the horizon, to get to the end of something.
Margaret galloped over the level road, and Eric, from behind, saw
her long veil fluttering in the wind. It had fluttered just so in
his dreams last night and the night before. With a sudden
inspiration of courage he overtook her and rode beside her, looking
intently at her half-averted face. Before, he had only stolen
occasional glances at it, seen it in blinding flashes, always with
more or less embarrassment, but now he determined to let every line
of it sink into his memory. Men of the world would have said that it
was an unusual face, nervous, finely cut, with clear, elegant lines
that betokened ancestry. Men of letters would have called it a
historic face, and would have conjectured at what old passions, long
asleep, what old sorrows forgotten time out of mind, doing battle
together in ages gone, had curved those delicate nostrils, left
their unconscious memory in those eyes. But Eric read no meaning in
these details. To him this beauty was something more than color and
line; it was as a flash of white light, in which one cannot
distinguish color because all colors are there. To him it was a
complete revelation, an embodiment of those dreams of impossible
loveliness that linger by a young man's pillow on midsummer nights;
yet, because it held something more than the attraction of health
and youth and shapeliness, it troubled him, and in its presence he
felt as the Goths before the white marbles in the Roman Capitol, not
knowing whether they were men or gods. At times he felt like
uncovering his head before it, again the fury seized him to break
and despoil, to find the clay in this spirit-thing and stamp upon
it. Away from her, he longed to strike out with his arms, and take
and hold; it maddened him that this woman whom he could break in his
hands should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never
questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he
admitted the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him.
To-night, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched
her, he knew that he might as well reach out his hand to take a
star.

Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly in
her saddle.

"This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride fast," she
said.

Eric turned his eyes away.

"I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe hear
music like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand to work,"
he asked, timidly.

Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she studied the
outline of his face, pityingly.

"Well, you might--but you'd lose a good deal else. I shouldn't like
you to go to New York--and be poor, you'd be out of atmosphere, some
way," she said, slowly. Inwardly she was thinking: "There he would
be altogether sordid, impossible--a machine who would carry one's
trunks upstairs, perhaps. Here he is every inch a man, rather
picturesque; why is it?" "No," she added aloud, "I shouldn't like
that."

"Then I not go," said Eric, decidedly.

Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle amused
and a trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.

"But I'll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want you to
dance with us to-morrow night and teach me some of the Norwegian
dances; they say you know them all. Won't you?"

Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed as they
had done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke his violin
across his knee.

"Yes, I will," he said, quietly, and he believed that he delivered
his soul to hell as he said it.

They had reached the rougher country now, where the road wound
through a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along the creek, when a
beat of hoofs ahead and the sharp neighing of horses made the ponies
start and Eric rose in his stirrups. Then down the gulch in front of
them and over the steep clay banks thundered a herd of wild ponies,
nimble as monkeys and wild as rabbits, such as horse-traders drive
east from the plains of Montana to sell in the farming country.
Margaret's pony made a shrill sound, a neigh that was almost a
scream, and started up the clay bank to meet them, all the wild
blood of the range breaking out in an instant. Margaret called to
Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and caught her
pony's bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and was kicking
and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the range were all
about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and striking her with
their fore feet and snapping at her flanks. It was the old liberty
of the range that the little beast fought for.

"Drop the reins and hold tight, tight!" Eric called, throwing all
his weight upon the bit, struggling under those frantic fore feet
that now beat at his breast, and now kicked at the wild mustangs
that surged and tossed about him. He succeeded in wrenching the
pony's head toward him and crowding her withers against the clay
bank, so that she could not roll.

"Hold tight, tight!" he shouted again, launching a kick at a
snorting animal that reared back against Margaret's saddle. If she
should lose her courage and fall now, under those hoofs----He struck
out again and again, kicking right and left with all his might.
Already the negligent drivers had galloped into the cut, and their
long quirts were whistling over the heads of the herd. As suddenly
as it had come, the struggling, frantic wave of wild life swept up
out of the gulch and on across the open prairie, and with a long
despairing whinny of farewell the pony dropped her head and stood
trembling in her sweat, shaking the foam and blood from her bit.

Eric stepped close to Margaret's side and laid his hand on her
saddle. "You are not hurt?" he asked, hoarsely. As he raised his
face in the soft starlight she saw that it was white and drawn and
that his lips were working nervously.

"No, no, not at all. But you, you are suffering; they struck you!"
she cried in sharp alarm.

He stepped back and drew his hand across his brow.

"No, it is not that," he spoke rapidly now, with his hands clenched
at his side. "But if they had hurt you, I would beat their brains
out with my hands, I would kill them all. I was never afraid before.
You are the only beautiful thing that has ever come close to me. You
came like an angel out of the sky. You are like the music you sing,
you are like the stars and the snow on the mountains where I played
when I was a little boy. You are like all that I wanted once and
never had, you are all that they have killed in me. I die for you
to-night, to-morrow, for all eternity. I am not a coward; I was
afraid because I love you more than Christ who died for me, more
than I am afraid of hell, or hope for heaven. I was never afraid
before. If you had fallen--oh, my God!" he threw his arms out
blindly and dropped his head upon the pony's mane, leaning limply
against the animal like a man struck by some sickness. His shoulders
rose and fell perceptibly with his labored breathing. The horse
stood cowed with exhaustion and fear. Presently Margaret laid her
hand on Eric's head and said gently:

"You are better now, shall we go on? Can you get your horse?"

"No, he has gone with the herd. I will lead yours, she is not safe.
I will not frighten you again." His voice was still husky, but it
was steady now. He took hold of the bit and tramped home in silence.

When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the pony's head
until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle.

"The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis. I think I was pretty
thoroughly scared myself," she said as she took her brother's arm
and went slowly up the hill toward the house. "No, I'm not hurt,
thanks to Eric. You must thank him for taking such good care of me.
He's a mighty fine fellow. I'll tell you all about it in the
morning, dear. I was pretty well shaken up and I'm going right to
bed now. Good-night."

When she reached the low room in which she slept, she sank upon the
bed in her riding-dress face downward.

"Oh, I pity him! I pity him!" she murmured, with a long sigh of
exhaustion. She must have slept a little. When she rose again, she
took from her dress a letter that had been waiting for her at the
village post-office. It was closely written in a long, angular hand,
covering a dozen pages of foreign note-paper, and began:--

"My Dearest Margaret: If I should attempt to say _how like a winter
hath thine absence been_, I should incur the risk of being tedious.
Really, it takes the sparkle out of everything. Having nothing
better to do, and not caring to go anywhere in particular without
you, I remained in the city until Jack Courtwell noted my general
despondency and brought me down here to his place on the sound to
manage some open-air theatricals he is getting up. 'As You Like It'
is of course the piece selected. Miss Harrison plays Rosalind. I
wish you had been here to take the part. Miss Harrison reads her
lines well, but she is either a maiden-all-forlorn or a tomboy;
insists on reading into the part all sorts of deeper meanings and
highly colored suggestions wholly out of harmony with the pastoral
setting. Like most of the professionals, she exaggerates the
emotional element and quite fails to do justice to Rosalind's facile
wit and really brilliant mental qualities. Gerard will do Orlando,
but rumor says he is épris of your sometime friend, Miss Meredith,
and his memory is treacherous and his interest fitful.

"My new pictures arrived last week on the 'Gascogne.' The Puvis de
Chavannes is even more beautiful than I thought it in Paris. A pale
dream-maiden sits by a pale dream-cow, and a stream of anemic water
flows at her feet. The Constant, you will remember, I got because
you admired it. It is here in all its florid splendor, the whole
dominated by a glowing sensuosity. The drapery of the female figure
is as wonderful as you said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold,
painted with an easy, effortless voluptuousness, and that white,
gleaming line of African coast in the background recalls memories of
you very precious to me. But it is useless to deny that Constant
irritates me. Though I cannot prove the charge against him, his
brilliancy always makes me suspect him of cheapness."

Here Margaret stopped and glanced at the remaining pages of this
strange love-letter. They seemed to be filled chiefly with
discussions of pictures and books, and with a slow smile she laid
them by.

She rose and began undressing. Before she lay down she went to open
the window. With her hand on the sill, she hesitated, feeling
suddenly as though some danger were lurking outside, some inordinate
desire waiting to spring upon her in the darkness. She stood there
for a long time, gazing at the infinite sweep of the sky.

"Oh, it is all so little, so little there," she murmured. "When
everything else is so dwarfed, why should one expect love to be
great? Why should one try to read highly colored suggestions into a
life like that? If only I could find one thing in it all that
mattered greatly, one thing that would warm me when I am alone! Will
life never give me that one great moment?"

As she raised the window, she heard a sound in the plum-bushes
outside. It was only the house-dog roused from his sleep, but
Margaret started violently and trembled so that she caught the foot
of the bed for support. Again she felt herself pursued by some
overwhelming longing, some desperate necessity for herself, like the
outstretching of helpless, unseen arms in the darkness, and the air
seemed heavy with sighs of yearning. She fled to her bed with the
words, "I love you more than Christ, who died for me!" ringing in
her ears.


III.

About midnight the dance at Lockhart's was at its height. Even the
old men who had come to "look on" caught the spirit of revelry and
stamped the floor with the vigor of old Silenus. Eric took the
violin from the Frenchman, and Minna Oleson sat at the organ, and
the music grew more and more characteristic--rude, half-mournful
music, made up of the folk-songs of the North, that the villagers
sing through the long night in hamlets by the sea, when they are
thinking of the sun, and the spring, and the fishermen so long away.
To Margaret some of it sounded like Grieg's Peer Gynt music. She
found something irresistibly infectious in the mirth of these people
who were so seldom merry, and she felt almost one of them. Something
seemed struggling for freedom in them to-night, something of the
joyous childhood of the nations which exile had not killed. The
girls were all boisterous with delight. Pleasure came to them but
rarely, and when it came, they caught at it wildly and crushed its
fluttering wings in their strong brown fingers. They had a hard life
enough, most of them. Torrid summers and freezing winters, labor and
drudgery and ignorance, were the portion of their girlhood; a short
wooing, a hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited maternity, thankless
sons, premature age and ugliness, were the dower of their womanhood.
But what matter? To-night there was hot liquor in the glass and hot
blood in the heart; to-night they danced.

To-night Eric Hermannson had renewed his youth. He was no longer the
big, silent Norwegian who had sat at Margaret's feet and looked
hopelessly into her eyes. To-night he was a man, with a man's rights
and a man's power. To-night he was Siegfried indeed. His hair was
yellow as the heavy wheat in the ripe of summer, and his eyes
flashed like the blue water between the ice-packs in the North Seas.
He was not afraid of Margaret to-night, and when he danced with her
he held her firmly. She was tired and dragged on his arm a little,
but the strength of the man was like an all-pervading fluid,
stealing through her veins, awakening under her heart some nameless,
unsuspected existence that had slumbered there all these years and
that went out through her throbbing fingertips to his that answered.
She wondered if the hoydenish blood of some lawless ancestor, long
asleep, were calling out in her to-night, some drop of a hotter
fluid that the centuries had failed to cool, and why, if this curse
were in her, it had not spoken before. But was it a curse, this
awakening, this wealth before undiscovered, this music set free? For
the first time in her life her heart held something stronger than
herself, was not this worth while? Then she ceased to wonder. She
lost sight of the lights and the faces, and the music was drowned by
the beating of her own arteries. She saw only the blue eyes that
flashed above her, felt only the warmth of that throbbing hand which
held hers and which the blood of his heart fed. Dimly, as in a
dream, she saw the drooping shoulders, high white forehead and
tight, cynical mouth of the man she was to marry in December. For an
hour she had been crowding back the memory of that face with all her
strength.

"Let us stop, this is enough," she whispered. His only answer was to
tighten the arm behind her. She sighed and let that masterful
strength bear her where it would. She forgot that this man was
little more than a savage, that they would part at dawn. The blood
has no memories, no reflections, no regrets for the past, no
consideration of the future.

"Let us go out where it is cooler," she said when the music stopped;
thinking, "I am growing faint here, I shall be all right in the open
air." They stepped out into the cool, blue air of the night.

Since the older folk had begun dancing, the young Norwegians had
been slipping out in couples to climb the windmill tower into the
cooler atmosphere, as is their custom.

"You like to go up?" asked Eric, close to her ear.

She turned and looked at him with suppressed amusement. "How high is
it?"

"Forty feet, about. I not let you fall." There was a note of
irresistible pleading in his voice, and she felt that he
tremendously wished her to go. Well, why not? This was a night of
the unusual, when she was not herself at all, but was living an
unreality. To-morrow, yes, in a few hours, there would be the
Vestibule Limited and the world.

"Well, if you'll take good care of me. I used to be able to climb,
when I was a little girl."

Once at the top and seated on the platform, they were silent.
Margaret wondered if she would not hunger for that scene all her
life, through all the routine of the days to come. Above them
stretched the great Western sky, serenely blue, even in the night,
with its big, burning stars, never so cold and dead and far away as
in denser atmospheres. The moon would not be up for twenty minutes
yet, and all about the horizon, that wide horizon, which seemed to
reach around the world, lingered a pale, white light, as of a
universal dawn. The weary wind brought up to them the heavy odors of
the cornfields. The music of the dance sounded faintly from below.
Eric leaned on his elbow beside her, his legs swinging down on the
ladder. His great shoulders looked more than ever like those of the
stone Doryphorus, who stands in his perfect, reposeful strength in
the Louvre, and had often made her wonder if such men died forever
with the youth of Greece.

"How sweet the corn smells at night," said Margaret nervously.

"Yes, like the flowers that grow in paradise, I think."

She was somewhat startled by this reply, and more startled when this
taciturn man spoke again.

"You go away to-morrow?"

"Yes, we have stayed longer than we thought to now."

"You not come back any more?"

"No, I expect not. You see, it is a long trip; half-way across the
continent."

"You soon forget about this country, I guess." It seemed to him now
a little thing to lose his soul for this woman, but that she should
utterly forget this night into which he threw all his life and all
his eternity, that was a bitter thought.

"No, Eric, I will not forget. You have all been too kind to me for
that. And you won't be sorry you danced this one night, will you?"

"I never be sorry. I have not been so happy before. I not be so
happy again, ever. You will be happy many nights yet, I only this
one. I will dream sometimes, maybe."

The mighty resignation of his tone alarmed and touched her. It was
as when some great animal composes itself for death, as when a great
ship goes down at sea.

She sighed, but did not answer him. He drew a little closer and
looked into her eyes.

"You are not always happy, too?" he asked.

"No, not always, Eric; not very often, I think."

"You have a trouble?"

"Yes, but I cannot put it into words. Perhaps if I could do that, I
could cure it."

He clasped his hands together over his heart, as children do when
they pray, and said falteringly, "If I own all the world, I give him
you."

Margaret felt a sudden moisture in her eyes, and laid her hand on
his.

"Thank you, Eric; I believe you would. But perhaps even then I
should not be happy. Perhaps I have too much of it already."

She did not take her hand away from him; she did not dare. She sat
still and waited for the traditions in which she had always believed
to speak and save her. But they were dumb. She belonged to an
ultra-refined civilization which tries to cheat nature with elegant
sophistries. Cheat nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps
two, but the third---- Can we ever rise above nature or sink below
her? Did she not turn on Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon St. Anthony
in his desert as upon Nero in his seraglio? Does she not always cry
in brutal triumph: "I am here still, at the bottom of things,
warming the roots of life; you cannot starve me nor tame me nor
thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I am its destiny."

This woman, on a windmill tower at the world's end with a giant
barbarian, heard that cry to-night, and she was afraid! Ah! the
terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves!
Until then we have not lived.

"Come, Eric, let us go down; the moon is up and the music has begun
again," she said.

He rose silently and stepped down upon the ladder, putting his arm
about her to help her. That arm could have thrown Thor's hammer out
in the cornfields yonder, yet it scarcely touched her, and his hand
trembled as it had done in the dance. His face was level with hers
now and the moonlight fell sharply upon it. All her life she had
searched the faces of men for the look that lay in his eyes. She
knew that that look had never shone for her before, would never
shine for her on earth again, that such love comes to one only in
dreams or in impossible places like this, unattainable always. This
was Love's self, in a moment it would die. Stung by the agonized
appeal that emanated from the man's whole being, she leaned forward
and laid her lips on his. Once, twice and again she heard the deep
respirations rattle in his throat while she held them there, and the
riotous force under her heart became an engulfing weakness. He drew
her up to him until he felt all the resistance go out of her body,
until every nerve relaxed and yielded. When she drew her face back
from his, it was white with fear.

"Let us go down, oh, my God! let us go down!" she muttered. And the
drunken stars up yonder seemed reeling to some appointed doom as she
clung to the rounds of the ladder. All that she was to know of love
she had left upon his lips.

"The devil is loose again," whispered Olaf Oleson, as he saw Eric
dancing a moment later, his eyes blazing.

But Eric was thinking with an almost savage exultation of the time
when he should pay for this. Ah, there would be no quailing then! If
ever a soul went fearlessly, proudly down to the gates infernal, his
should go. For a moment he fancied he was there already, treading
down the tempest of flame, hugging the fiery hurricane to his
breast. He wondered whether in ages gone, all the countless years of
sinning in which men had sold and lost and flung their souls away,
any man had ever so cheated Satan, had ever bartered his soul for so
great a price.

It seemed but a little while till dawn.

The carriage was brought to the door and Wyllis Elliot and his
sister said good-by. She could not meet Eric's eyes as she gave him
her hand, but as he stood by the horse's head, just as the carriage
moved off, she gave him one swift glance that said, "I will not
forget." In a moment the carriage was gone.

Eric changed his coat and plunged his head into the watertank and
went to the barn to hook up his team. As he led his horses to the
door, a shadow fell across his path, and he saw Skinner rising in
his stirrups. His rugged face was pale and worn with looking after
his wayward flock, with dragging men into the way of salvation.

"Good-morning, Eric. There was a dance here last night?" he asked,
sternly.

"A dance? Oh, yes, a dance," replied Eric, cheerfully.

"Certainly you did not dance, Eric?"

"Yes, I danced. I danced all the time."

The minister's shoulders drooped, and an expression of profound
discouragement settled over his haggard face. There was almost
anguish in the yearning he felt for this soul.

"Eric, I didn't look for this from you. I thought God had set his
mark on you if he ever had on any man. And it is for things like
this that you set your soul back a thousand years from God. O
foolish and perverse generation!"

Eric drew himself up to his full height and looked off to where the
new day was gilding the corn-tassels and flooding the uplands with
light. As his nostrils drew in the breath of the dew and the
morning, something from the only poetry he had ever read flashed
across his mind, and he murmured, half to himself, with dreamy
exultation:

"'And a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a
day.'"

                                      _Cosmopolitan_, April 1900




_The Sentimentality of William Tavener_


It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success of living in the
West, and Hester undoubtedly was that. When people spoke of William
Tavener as the most prosperous farmer in McPherson County, they
usually added that his wife was a "good manager." She was an
executive woman, quick of tongue and something of an imperatrix. The
only reason her husband did not consult her about his business was
that she did not wait to be consulted.

It would have been quite impossible for one man, within the limited
sphere of human action, to follow all Hester's advice, but in the
end William usually acted upon some of her suggestions. When she
incessantly denounced the "shiftlessness" of letting a new threshing
machine stand unprotected in the open, he eventually built a shed
for it. When she sniffed contemptuously at his notion of fencing a
hog corral with sod walls, he made a spiritless beginning on the
structure--merely to "show his temper," as she put it--but in the
end he went off quietly to town and bought enough barbed wire to
complete the fence. When the first heavy rains came on, and the pigs
rooted down the sod wall and made little paths all over it to
facilitate their ascent, he heard his wife relate with relish the
story of the little pig that built a mud house, to the minister at
the dinner table, and William's gravity never relaxed for an
instant. Silence, indeed, was William's refuge and his strength.

William set his boys a wholesome example to respect their mother.
People who knew him very well suspected that he even admired her. He
was a hard man towards his neighbors, and even towards his sons;
grasping, determined and ambitious.

There was an occasional blue day about the house when William went
over the store bills, but he never objected to items relating to his
wife's gowns or bonnets. So it came about that many of the foolish,
unnecessary little things that Hester bought for boys, she had
charged to her personal account.

One spring night Hester sat in a rocking chair by the sitting room
window, darning socks. She rocked violently and sent her long needle
vigorously back and forth over her gourd, and it took only a very
casual glance to see that she was wrought up over something. William
sat on the other side of the table reading his farm paper. If he had
noticed his wife's agitation, his calm, clean-shaven face betrayed
no sign of concern. He must have noticed the sarcastic turn of her
remarks at the supper table, and he must have noticed the moody
silence of the older boys as they ate. When supper was but half over
little Billy, the youngest, had suddenly pushed back his plate and
slipped away from the table, manfully trying to swallow a sob. But
William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic
horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.

After supper the boys had gone to the pond under the willows in the
big cattle corral, to get rid of the dust of plowing. Hester could
hear an occasional splash and a laugh ringing clear through the
stillness of the night, as she sat by the open window. She sat
silent for almost an hour reviewing in her mind many plans of
attack. But she was too vigorous a woman to be much of a strategist,
and she usually came to her point with directness. At last she cut
her thread and suddenly put her darning down, saying emphatically:

"William, I don't think it would hurt you to let the boys go to that
circus in town to-morrow."

William continued to read his farm paper, but it was not Hester's
custom to wait for an answer. She usually divined his arguments and
assailed them one by one before he uttered them.

"You've been short of hands all summer, and you've worked the boys
hard, and a man ought use his own flesh and blood as well as he does
his hired hands. We're plenty able to afford it, and it's little
enough our boys ever spend. I don't see how you can expect 'em to be
steady and hard workin', unless you encourage 'em a little. I never
could see much harm in circuses, and our boys have never been to
one. Oh, I know Jim Howley's boys get drunk an' carry on when they
go, but our boys ain't that sort, an' you know it, William. The
animals are real instructive, an' our boys don't get to see much out
here on the prairie. It was different where we were raised, but the
boys have got no advantages here, an' if you don't take care,
they'll grow up to be greenhorns."

Hester paused a moment, and William folded up his paper, but
vouchsafed no remark. His sisters in Virginia had often said that
only a quiet man like William could ever have lived with Hester
Perkins. Secretly, William was rather proud of his wife's "gift of
speech," and of the fact that she could talk in prayer meeting as
fluently as a man. He confined his own efforts in that line to a
brief prayer at Covenant meetings.

Hester shook out another sock and went on.

"Nobody was ever hurt by goin' to a circus. Why, law me! I remember
I went to one myself once, when I was little. I had most forgot
about it. It was over at Pewtown, an' I remember how I had set my
heart on going. I don't think I'd ever forgiven my father if he
hadn't taken me, though that red clay road was in a frightful way
after the rain. I mind they had an elephant and six poll parrots,
an' a Rocky Mountain lion, an' a cage of monkeys, an' two camels.
My! but they were a sight to me then!"

Hester dropped the black sock and shook her head and smiled at the
recollection. She was not expecting anything from William yet, and
she was fairly startled when he said gravely, in much the same tone
in which he announced the hymns in prayer meeting:

"No, there was only one camel. The other was a dromedary."

She peered around the lamp and looked at him keenly.

"Why, William, how come you to know?"

William folded his paper and answered with some hesitation, "I was
there, too."

Hester's interest flashed up.--"Well, I never, William! To think of
my finding it out after all these years! Why, you couldn't have been
much bigger'n our Billy then. It seems queer I never saw you when
you was little, to remember about you. But then you Back Creek folks
never have anything to do with us Gap people. But how come you to
go? Your father was stricter with you than you are with your boys."

"I reckon I shouldn't 'a gone," he said slowly, "but boys will do
foolish things. I had done a good deal of fox hunting the winter
before, and father let me keep the bounty money. I hired Tom Smith's
Tap to weed the corn for me, an' I slipped off unbeknownst to father
an' went to the show."

Hester spoke up warmly: "Nonsense, William! It didn't do you no
harm, I guess. You was always worked hard enough. It must have been
a big sight for a little fellow. That clown must have just tickled
you to death."

William crossed his knees and leaned back in his chair.

"I reckon I could tell all that fool's jokes now. Sometimes I can't
help thinkin' about 'em in meetin' when the sermon's long. I mind I
had on a pair of new boots that hurt me like the mischief, but I
forgot all about 'em when that fellow rode the donkey. I recall I
had to take them boots off as soon as I got out of sight o' town,
and walked home in the mud barefoot."

"O poor little fellow!" Hester ejaculated, drawing her chair nearer
and leaning her elbows on the table. "What cruel shoes they did use
to make for children. I remember I went up to Back Creek to see the
circus wagons go by. They came down from Romney, you know. The
circus men stopped at the creek to water the animals, an' the
elephant got stubborn an' broke a big limb off the yellow willow
tree that grew there by the toll house porch, an' the Scribners were
'fraid as death he'd pull the house down. But this much I saw him
do; he waded in the creek an' filled his trunk with water, and
squirted it in at the window and nearly ruined Ellen Scribner's pink
lawn dress that she had just ironed an' laid out on the bed ready to
wear to the circus."

"I reckon that must have been a trial to Ellen," chuckled William,
"for she was mighty prim in them days."

Hester drew her chair still nearer William's. Since the children had
begun growing up, her conversation with her husband had been almost
wholly confined to questions of economy and expense. Their
relationship had become purely a business one, like that between
landlord and tenant. In her desire to indulge her boys she had
unconsciously assumed a defensive and almost hostile attitude
towards her husband. No debtor ever haggled with his usurer more
doggedly than did Hester with her husband in behalf of her sons. The
strategic contest had gone on so long that it had almost crowded out
the memory of a closer relationship. This exchange of confidences
to-night, when common recollections took them unawares and opened
their hearts, had all the miracle of romance. They talked on and on;
of old neighbors, of old familiar faces in the valley where they had
grown up, of long forgotten incidents of their youth--weddings,
picnics, sleighing parties and baptizings. For years they had talked
of nothing else but butter and eggs and the prices of things, and
now they had as much to say to each other as people who meet after a
long separation.

When the clock struck ten, William rose and went over to his walnut
secretary and unlocked it. From his red leather wallet he took out a
ten dollar bill and laid it on the table beside Hester.

"Tell the boys not to stay late, an' not to drive the horses hard,"
he said quietly, and went off to bed.

Hester blew out the lamp and sat still in the dark a long time. She
left the bill lying on the table where William had placed it. She
had a painful sense of having missed something, or lost something;
she felt that somehow the years had cheated her.

The little locust trees that grew by the fence were white with
blossoms. Their heavy odor floated in to her on the night wind and
recalled a night long ago, when the first whip-poor-Will of the
Spring was heard, and the rough, buxom girls of Hawkins Gap had held
her laughing and struggling under the locust trees, and searched in
her bosom for a lock of her sweetheart's hair, which is supposed to
be on every girl's breast when the first whip-poor-Will sings. Two
of those same girls had been her bridesmaids. Hester had been a very
happy bride. She rose and went softly into the room where William
lay. He was sleeping heavily, but occasionally moved his hand before
his face to ward off the flies. Hester went into the parlor and took
the piece of mosquito net from the basket of wax apples and pears
that her sister had made before she died. One of the boys had
brought it all the way from Virginia, packed in a tin pail, since
Hester would not risk shipping so precious an ornament by freight.
She went back to the bed room and spread the net over William's
head.

Then she sat down by the bed and listened to his deep, regular
breathing until she heard the boys returning. She went out to meet
them and warn them not to waken their father.

"I'll be up early to get your breakfast, boys. Your father says you
can go to the show." As she handed the money to the eldest, she felt
a sudden throb of allegiance to her husband and said sharply, "And
you be careful of that, an' don't waste it. Your father works hard
for his money."

The boys looked at each other in astonishment and felt that they had
lost a powerful ally.

                                         _Library_, May 12, 1900




_The Namesake_


Seven of us, students, sat one evening in Hartwell's studio on the
Boulevard St. Michel. We were all fellow-countrymen; one from New
Hampshire, one from Colorado, another from Nevada, several from the
farm lands of the Middle West, and I myself from California. Lyon
Hartwell, though born abroad, was simply, as every one knew, "from
America." He seemed, almost more than any other one living man, to
mean all of it--from ocean to ocean. When he was in Paris, his
studio was always open to the seven of us who were there that
evening, and we intruded upon his leisure as often as we thought
permissible.

Although we were within the terms of the easiest of all intimacies,
and although the great sculptor, even when he was more than usually
silent, was at all times the most gravely cordial of hosts, yet, on
that long remembered evening, as the sunlight died on the burnished
brown of the horse-chestnuts below the windows, a perceptible
dullness yawned through our conversation.

We were, indeed, somewhat low in spirit, for one of our number,
Charley Bentley, was leaving us indefinitely, in response to an
imperative summons from home. To-morrow his studio, just across the
hall from Hartwell's, was to pass into other hands, and Bentley's
luggage was even now piled in discouraged resignation before his
door. The various bales and boxes seemed literally to weigh upon us
as we sat in his neighbor's hospitable rooms, drearily putting in
the time until he should leave us to catch the ten o'clock express
for Dieppe.

The day we had got through very comfortably, for Bentley made it the
occasion of a somewhat pretentious luncheon at Maxim's. There had
been twelve of us at table, and the two young Poles were thirsty,
the Gascon so fabulously entertaining, that it was near upon five
o'clock when we put down our liqueur glasses for the last time, and
the red, perspiring waiter, having pocketed the reward of his
arduous and protracted services, bowed us affably to the door,
flourishing his napkin and brushing back the streaks of wet, black
hair from his rosy forehead. Our guests having betaken themselves
belated to their respective engagements, the rest of us returned
with Bentley--only to be confronted by the depressing array before
his door. A glance about his denuded rooms had sufficed to chill the
glow of the afternoon, and we fled across the hall in a body and
begged Lyon Hartwell to take us in.

Bentley had said very little about it, but we all knew what it meant
to him to be called home. Each of us knew what it would mean to
himself, and each had felt something of that quickened sense of
opportunity which comes at seeing another man in any way counted out
of the race. Never had the game seemed so enchanting, the chance to
play it such a piece of unmerited, unbelievable good fortune.

It must have been, I think, about the middle of October, for I
remember that the sycamores were almost bare in the Luxembourg
Gardens that morning, and the terrace about the queens of France
were strewn with crackling brown leaves. The fat red roses, out the
summer long on the stand of the old flower woman at the corner, had
given place to dahlias and purple asters. First glimpses of autumn
toilettes flashed from the carriages; wonderful little bonnets
nodded at one along the Champs-Elysées; and in the Quarter an
occasional feather boa, red or black or white, brushed one's coat
sleeve in the gay twilight of the early evening. The crisp, sunny
autumn air was all day full of the stir of people and carriages and
of the cheer of salutations; greetings of the students, returned
brown and bearded from their holiday, gossip of people come back
from Trouville, from St. Valery, from Dieppe, from all over Brittany
and the Norman coast. Everywhere was the joyousness of return, the
taking up again of life and work and play.

I had felt ever since early morning that this was the saddest of all
possible seasons for saying good-by to that old, old city of youth,
and to that little corner of it on the south shore which since the
Dark Ages themselves--yes, and before--has been so peculiarly the
land of the young.

I can recall our very postures as we lounged about Hartwell's rooms
that evening, with Bentley making occasional hurried trips to his
desolated workrooms across the hall--as if haunted by a feeling of
having forgotten something--or stopping to poke nervously at his
_perroquets_, which he had bequeathed to Hartwell, gilt cage and
all. Our host himself sat on the couch, his big, bronze-like
shoulders backed up against the window, his shaggy head, beaked
nose, and long chin cut clean against the gray light.

Our drowsing interest, in so far as it could be said to be fixed
upon anything, was centered upon Hartwell's new figure, which stood
on the block ready to be cast in bronze, intended as a monument for
some American battlefield. He called it "The Color Sergeant." It was
the figure of a young soldier running, clutching the folds of a
flag, the staff of which had been shot away. We had known it in all
the stages of its growth, and the splendid action and feeling of the
thing had come to have a kind of special significance for the half
dozen of us who often gathered at Hartwell's rooms--though, in
truth, there was as much to dishearten one as to inflame, in the
case of a man who had done so much in a field so amazingly
difficult; who had thrown up in bronze all the restless, teeming
force of that adventurous wave still climbing westward in our own
land across the waters. We recalled his "Scout," his "Pioneer," his
"Gold Seekers," and those monuments in which he had invested one and
another of the heroes of the Civil War with such convincing dignity
and power.

"Where in the world does he get the heat to make an idea like that
carry?" Bentley remarked morosely, scowling at the clay figure.
"Hang me, Hartwell, if I don't think it's just because you're not
really an American at all, that you can look at it like that."

The big man shifted uneasily against the window. "Yes," he replied
smiling, "perhaps there is something in that. My citizenship was
somewhat belated and emotional in its flowering. I've half a mind to
tell you about it, Bentley." He rose uncertainly, and, after
hesitating a moment, went back into his workroom, where he began
fumbling among the litter in the corners.

At the prospect of any sort of personal expression from Hartwell, we
glanced questioningly at one another; for although he made us feel
that he liked to have us about, we were always held at a distance by
a certain diffidence of his. There were rare occasions--when he was
in the heat of work or of ideas--when he forgot to be shy, but they
were so exceptional that no flattery was quite so seductive as being
taken for a moment into Hartwell's confidence. Even in the matter of
opinions--the commonest of currency in our circle--he was niggardly
and prone to qualify. No man ever guarded his mystery more
effectually. There was a singular, intense spell, therefore, about
those few evenings when he had broken through this excessive
modesty, or shyness, or melancholy, and had, as it were, committed
himself.

When Hartwell returned from the back room, he brought with him an
unframed canvas which he put on an easel near his clay figure. We
drew close about it, for the darkness was rapidly coming on. Despite
the dullness of the light, we instantly recognized the boy of
Hartwell's "Color Sergeant." It was the portrait of a very handsome
lad in uniform, standing beside a charger impossibly rearing. Not
only in his radiant countenance and flashing eyes, but in every line
of his young body there was an energy, a gallantry, a joy of life,
that arrested and challenged one.

"Yes, that's where I got the notion," Hartwell remarked, wandering
back to his seat in the window. "I've wanted to do it for years, but
I've never felt quite sure of myself. I was afraid of missing it. He
was an uncle of mine, my father's half-brother, and I was named for
him. He was killed in one of the big battles of Sixty-four, when I
was a child. I never saw him--never knew him until he had been dead
for twenty years. And then, one night, I came to know him as we
sometimes do living persons--intimately, in a single moment."

He paused to knock the ashes out of his short pipe, refilled it, and
puffed at it thoughtfully for a few moments with his hands on his
knees. Then, settling back heavily among the cushions and looking
absently out of the window, he began his story. As he proceeded
further and further into the experience which he was trying to
convey to us, his voice sank so low and was sometimes so charged
with feeling, that I almost thought he had forgotten our presence
and was remembering aloud. Even Bentley forgot his nervousness in
astonishment and sat breathless under the spell of the man's thus
breathing his memories out into the dusk.

"It was just fifteen years ago this last spring that I first went
home, and Bentley's having to cut away like this brings it all back
to me.

"I was born, you know, in Italy. My father was a sculptor, though I
dare say you've not heard of him. He was one of those first fellows
who went over after Story and Powers,--went to Italy for 'Art,'
quite simply; to lift from its native bough the willing, iridescent
bird. Their story is told, informingly enough, by some of those
ingenuous marble things at the Metropolitan. My father came over
some time before the outbreak of the Civil War, and was regarded as
a renegade by his family because he did not go home to enter the
army. His half-brother, the only child of my grandfather's second
marriage, enlisted at fifteen and was killed the next year. I was
ten years old when the news of his death reached us. My mother died
the following winter, and I was sent away to a Jesuit school, while
my father, already ill himself, stayed on at Rome, chipping away at
his Indian maidens and marble goddesses, still gloomily seeking the
thing for which he had made himself the most unhappy of exiles.

"He died when I was fourteen, but even before that I had been put to
work under an Italian sculptor. He had an almost morbid desire that
I should carry on his work, under, as he often pointed out to me,
conditions so much more auspicious. He left me in the charge of his
one intimate friend, an American gentleman in the consulate at Rome,
and his instructions were that I was to be educated there and to
live there until I was twenty-one. After I was of age, I came to
Paris and studied under one master after another until I was nearly
thirty. Then, almost for the first time, I was confronted by a duty
which was not my pleasure.

"My grandfather's death, at an advanced age, left an invalid maiden
sister of my father's quite alone in the world. She had suffered for
years from a cerebral disease, a slow decay of the faculties which
rendered her almost helpless. I decided to go to America and, if
possible, bring her back to Paris, where I seemed on my way toward
what my poor father had wished for me.

"On my arrival at my father's birthplace, however, I found that this
was not to be thought of. To tear this timid, feeble, shrinking
creature, doubly aged by years and illness, from the spot where she
had been rooted for a lifetime, would have been little short of
brutality. To leave her to the care of strangers seemed equally
heartless. There was clearly nothing for me to do but to remain and
wait for that slow and painless malady to run its course. I was
there something over two years.

"My grandfather's home, his father's homestead before him, lay on
the high banks of a river in Western Pennsylvania. The little town
twelve miles down the stream, whither my great-grandfather used to
drive his ox-wagon on market days, had become, in two generations,
one of the largest manufacturing cities in the world. For hundreds
of miles about us the gentle hill slopes were honeycombed with gas
wells and coal shafts; oil derricks creaked in every valley and
meadow; the brooks were sluggish and discolored with crude
petroleum, and the air was impregnated by its searching odor. The
great glass and iron manufactories had come up and up the river
almost to our very door; their smoky exhalations brooded over us,
and their crashing was always in our ears. I was plunged into the
very incandescence of human energy. But, though my nerves tingled
with the feverish, passionate endeavor which snapped in the very air
about me, none of these great arteries seemed to feed me; this
tumultuous life did not warm me. On every side were the great muddy
rivers, the ragged mountains from which the timber was being
ruthlessly torn away, the vast tracts of wild country, and the
gulches that were like wounds in the earth; everywhere the glare of
that relentless energy which followed me like a searchlight and
seemed to scorch and consume me. I could only hide myself in the
tangled garden, where the dropping of a leaf or the whistle of a
bird was the only incident.

"The Hartwell homestead had been sold away little by little, until
all that remained of it was garden and orchard. The house, a square
brick structure, stood in the midst of a great garden which sloped
toward the river, ending in a grassy bank which fell some forty feet
to the water's edge. The garden was now little more than a tangle of
neglected shrubbery; damp, rank, and of that intense blue-green
peculiar to vegetation in smoky places where the sun shines but
rarely, and the mists form early in the evening and hang late in the
morning.

"I shall never forget it as I saw it first, when I arrived there in
the chill of a backward June. The long, rank grass, thick and soft
and falling in billows, was always wet until midday. The gravel
walks were bordered with great lilac-bushes, mock-orange, and
bridal-wreath. Back of the house was a neglected rose garden,
surrounded by a low stone wall over which the long suckers trailed
and matted. They had wound their pink, thorny tentacles, layer upon
layer, about the lock and the hinges of the rusty iron gate. Even
the porches of the house, and the very windows, were damp and heavy
with growth: wistaria, clematis, honeysuckle, and trumpet vine. The
garden was grown up with trees, especially that part of it which lay
above the river. The bark of the old locusts was blackened by the
smoke that crept continually up the valley, and their feathery
foliage, so merry in its movement and so yellow and joyous in its
color, seemed peculiarly precious under that somber sky. There were
sycamores and copper beeches; gnarled apple-trees, too old to bear;
and fall pear-trees, hung with a sharp, hard fruit in October; all
with a leafage singularly rich and luxuriant, and peculiarly vivid
in color. The oaks about the house had been old trees when my
great-grandfather built his cabin there, more than a century before,
and this garden was almost the only spot for miles along the river
where any of the original forest growth still survived. The smoke
from the mills was fatal to trees of the larger sort, and even these
had the look of doomed things--bent a little toward the town and
seemed to wait with head inclined before that on-coming, shrieking
force.

"About the river, too, there was a strange hush, a tragic
submission--it was so leaden and sullen in its color, and it flowed
so soundlessly forever past our door.

"I sat there every evening, on the high veranda overlooking it,
watching the dim outlines of the steep hills on the other shore, the
flicker of the lights on the island, where there was a boat-house,
and listening to the call of the boatmen through the mist. The mist
came as certainly as night, whitened by moonshine or starshine. The
tin water-pipes went splash, splash, with it all evening, and the
wind, when it rose at all, was little more than a sighing of the old
boughs and a troubled breath in the heavy grasses.

"At first it was to think of my distant friends and my old life that
I used to sit there; but after awhile it was simply to watch the
days and weeks go by, like the river which seemed to carry them
away.

"Within the house I was never at home. Month followed month, and yet
I could feel no sense of kinship with anything there. Under the roof
where my father and grandfather were born, I remained utterly
detached. The somber rooms never spoke to me, the old furniture
never seemed tinctured with race. This portrait of my boy uncle was
the only thing to which I could draw near, the only link with
anything I had ever known before.

"There is a good deal of my father in the face, but it is my father
transformed and glorified; his hesitating discontent drowned in a
kind of triumph. From my first day in that house, I continually
turned to this handsome kinsman of mine, wondering in what terms he
had lived and had his hope; what he had found there to look like
that, to bound at one, after all those years, so joyously out of the
canvas.

"From the timid, clouded old woman over whose life I had come to
watch, I learned that in the backyard, near the old rose garden,
there was a locust-tree which my uncle had planted. After his death,
while it was still a slender sapling, his mother had a seat built
round it, and she used to sit there on summer evenings. His grave
was under the apple-trees in the old orchard.

"My aunt could tell me little more than this. There were days when
she seemed not to remember him at all.

"It was from an old soldier in the village that I learned the boy's
story. Lyon was, the old man told me, but fourteen when the first
enlistment occurred, but was even then eager to go. He was in the
court-house square every evening to watch the recruits at their
drill, and when the home company was ordered off he rode into the
city on his pony to see the men board the train and to wave them
good-by. The next year he spent at home with a tutor, but when he
was fifteen he held his parents to their promise and went into the
army. He was color sergeant of his regiment and fell in a charge
upon the breastworks of a fort about a year after his enlistment.

"The veteran showed me an account of this charge which had been
written for the village paper by one of my uncle's comrades who had
seen his part in the engagement. It seems that as his company were
running at full speed across the bottom lands toward the fortified
hill, a shell burst over them. This comrade, running beside my
uncle, saw the colors waver and sink as if falling, and looked to
see that the boy's hand and forearm had been torn away by the
exploding shrapnel. The boy, he thought, did not realize the extent
of his injury, for he laughed, shouted something which his comrade
did not catch, caught the flag in his left hand, and ran on up the
hill. They went splendidly up over the breastworks, but just as my
uncle, his colors flying, reached the top of the embankment, a
second shell carried away his left arm at the arm-pit, and he fell
over the wall with the flag settling about him.

"It was because this story was ever present with me, because I was
unable to shake it off, that I began to read such books as my
grandfather had collected upon the Civil War. I found that this war
was fought largely by boys, that more men enlisted at eighteen than
at any other age. When I thought of those battlefields--and I
thought of them much in those days--there was always that glory of
youth above them, that impetuous, generous passion stirring the long
lines on the march, the blue battalions in the plain. The bugle,
whenever I have heard it since, has always seemed to me the very
golden throat of that boyhood which spent itself so gaily, so
incredibly.

"I used often to wonder how it was that this uncle of mine, who
seemed to have possessed all the charm and brilliancy allotted to
his family and to have lived up its vitality in one splendid hour,
had left so little trace in the house where he was born and where he
had awaited his destiny. Look as I would, I could find no letters
from him, no clothing or books that might have been his. He had been
dead but twenty years, and yet nothing seemed to have survived
except the tree he had planted. It seemed incredible and cruel that
no physical memory of him should linger to be cherished among his
kindred,--nothing but the dull image in the brain of that aged
sister. I used to pace the garden walks in the evening, wondering
that no breath of his, no echo of his laugh, of his call to his pony
or his whistle to his dogs, should linger about those shaded paths
where the pale roses exhaled their dewy, country smell. Sometimes,
in the dim starlight, I have thought that I heard on the grasses
beside me the stir of a footfall lighter than my own, and under the
black arch of the lilacs I have fancied that he bore me company.

"There was, I found, one day in the year for which my old aunt
waited, and which stood out from the months that were all of a
sameness to her. On the thirtieth of May she insisted that I should
bring down the big flag from the attic and run it up upon the tall
flagstaff beside Lyon's tree in the garden. Later in the morning she
went with me to carry some of the garden flowers to the grave in the
orchard,--a grave scarcely larger than a child's.

"I had noticed, when I was hunting for the flag in the attic, a
leather trunk with my own name stamped upon it, but was unable to
find the key. My aunt was all day less apathetic than usual; she
seemed to realize more clearly who I was, and to wish me to be with
her. I did not have an opportunity to return to the attic until
after dinner that evening, when I carried a lamp up-stairs and
easily forced the lock of the trunk. I found all the things that I
had looked for; put away, doubtless, by his mother, and still
smelling faintly of lavender and rose leaves; his clothes, his
exercise books, his letters from the army, his first boots, his
riding-whip, some of his toys, even. I took them out and replaced
them gently. As I was about to shut the lid, I picked up a copy of
the Æneid, on the fly-leaf of which was written in a slanting,
boyish hand,

  Lyon Hartwell, January, 1862.

He had gone to the wars in Sixty-three, I remembered.

"My uncle, I gathered, was none too apt at his Latin, for the pages
were dog-eared and rubbed and interlined, the margins mottled with
pencil sketches--bugles, stacked bayonets, and artillery carriages.
In the act of putting the book down, I happened to run over the
pages to the end, and on the fly-leaf at the back I saw his name
again, and a drawing--with his initials and a date--of the Federal
flag; above it, written in a kind of arch and in the same unformed
hand:

  'Oh, say, can you see by the dawn's early light
  What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?'

It was a stiff, wooden sketch, not unlike a detail from some
Egyptian inscription, but, the moment I saw it, wind and color
seemed to touch it. I caught up the book, blew out the lamp, and
rushed down into the garden.

"I seemed, somehow, at last to have known him; to have been with him
in that careless, unconscious moment and to have known him as he was
then.

"As I sat there in the rush of this realization, the wind began to
rise, stirring the light foliage of the locust over my head and
bringing, fresher than before, the woody odor of the pale roses that
overran the little neglected garden. Then, as it grew stronger, it
brought the sound of something sighing and stirring over my head in
the perfumed darkness.

"I thought of that sad one of the Destinies who, as the Greeks
believed, watched from birth over those marked for a violent or
untimely death. Oh, I could see him, there in the shine of the
morning, his book idly on his knee, his flashing eyes looking
straight before him, and at his side that grave figure, hidden in
her draperies, her eyes following his, but seeing so much
farther--seeing what he never saw, that great moment at the end,
when he swayed above his comrades on the earthen wall.

"All the while, the bunting I had run up in the morning flapped fold
against fold, heaving and tossing softly in the dark--against a sky
so black with rain clouds that I could see above me only the blur of
something in soft, troubled motion.

"The experience of that night, coming so overwhelmingly to a man so
dead, almost rent me in pieces. It was the same feeling that artists
know when we, rarely, achieve truth in our work; the feeling of
union with some great force, of purpose and security, of being glad
that we have lived. For the first time I felt the pull of race and
blood and kindred, and felt beating within me things that had not
begun with me. It was as if the earth under my feet had grasped and
rooted me, and were pouring its essence into me. I sat there until
the dawn of morning, and all night long my life seemed to be pouring
out of me and running into the ground."

       *       *       *       *       *

Hartwell drew a long breath that lifted his heavy shoulders, and
then let them fall again. He shifted a little and faced more
squarely the scattered, silent company before him. The darkness had
made us almost invisible to each other, and, except for the
occasional red circuit of a cigarette end traveling upward from the
arm of a chair, he might have supposed us all asleep.

"And so," Hartwell added thoughtfully, "I naturally feel an interest
in fellows who are going home. It's always an experience."

No one said anything, and in a moment there was a loud rap at the
door,--the concierge, come to take down Bentley's luggage and to
announce that the cab was below. Bentley got his hat and coat,
enjoined Hartwell to take good care of his _perroquets_, gave each
of us a grip of the hand, and went briskly down the long flights of
stairs. We followed him into the street, calling our good wishes,
and saw him start on his drive across the lighted city to the Gare
St. Lazare.

                                         _McClure's_, March 1907




_The Enchanted Bluff_


We had our swim before sundown, and while we were cooking our supper
the oblique rays of light made a dazzling glare on the white sand
about us. The translucent red ball itself sank behind the brown
stretches of corn field as we sat down to eat, and the warm layer of
air that had rested over the water and our clean sand-bar grew
fresher and smelled of the rank ironweed and sunflowers growing on
the flatter shore. The river was brown and sluggish, like any other
of the half-dozen streams that water the Nebraska corn lands. On one
shore was an irregular line of bald clay bluffs where a few
scrub-oaks with thick trunks and flat, twisted tops threw light
shadows on the long grass. The western shore was low and level, with
corn fields that stretched to the sky-line, and all along the
water's edge were little sandy coves and beaches where slim
cottonwoods and willow saplings flickered.

The turbulence of the river in spring-time discouraged milling, and,
beyond keeping the old red bridge in repair, the busy farmers did
not concern themselves with the stream; so the Sandtown boys were
left in undisputed possession. In the autumn we hunted quail through
the miles of stubble and fodder land along the flat shore, and,
after the winter skating season was over and the ice had gone out,
the spring freshets and flooded bottoms gave us our great excitement
of the year. The channel was never the same for two successive
seasons. Every spring the swollen stream undermined a bluff to the
east, or bit out a few acres of corn field to the west and whirled
the soil away to deposit it in spumy mud banks somewhere else. When
the water fell low in midsummer, new sand-bars were thus exposed to
dry and whiten in the August sun. Sometimes these were banked so
firmly that the fury of the next freshet failed to unseat them; the
little willow seedlings emerged triumphantly from the yellow froth,
broke into spring leaf, shot up into summer growth, and with their
mesh of roots bound together the moist sand beneath them against the
batterings of another April. Here and there a cottonwood soon
glittered among them, quivering in the low current of air that, even
on breathless days when the dust hung like smoke above the wagon
road, trembled along the face of the water.

It was on such an island, in the third summer of its yellow green,
that we built our watch-fire; not in the thicket of dancing willow
wands, but on the level terrace of fine sand which had been added
that spring; a little new bit of world, beautifully ridged with
ripple marks, and strewn with the tiny skeletons of turtles and
fish, all as white and dry as if they had been expertly cured. We
had been careful not to mar the freshness of the place, although we
often swam out to it on summer evenings and lay on the sand to rest.

This was our last watch-fire of the year, and there were reasons why
I should remember it better than any of the others. Next week the
other boys were to file back to their old places in the Sandtown
High School, but I was to go up to the Divide to teach my first
country school in the Norwegian district. I was already homesick at
the thought of quitting the boys with whom I had always played; of
leaving the river, and going up into a windy plain that was all
windmills and corn fields and big pastures; where there was nothing
wilful or unmanageable in the landscape, no new islands, and no
chance of unfamiliar birds--such as often followed the watercourses.

Other boys came and went and used the river for fishing or skating,
but we six were sworn to the spirit of the stream, and we were
friends mainly because of the river. There were the two Hassler
boys, Fritz and Otto, sons of the little German tailor. They were
the youngest of us; ragged boys of ten and twelve, with sunburned
hair, weather-stained faces, and pale blue eyes. Otto, the elder,
was the best mathematician in school, and clever at his books, but
he always dropped out in the spring term as if the river could not
get on without him. He and Fritz caught the fat, horned catfish and
sold them about the town, and they lived so much in the water that
they were as brown and sandy as the river itself.

There was Percy Pound, a fat, freckled boy with chubby cheeks, who
took half a dozen boys' story-papers and was always being kept in
for reading detective stories behind his desk. There was Tip Smith,
destined by his freckles and red hair to be the buffoon in all our
games, though he walked like a timid little old man and had a funny,
cracked laugh. Tip worked hard in his father's grocery store every
afternoon, and swept it out before school in the morning. Even his
recreations were laborious. He collected cigarette cards and tin
tobacco-tags indefatigably, and would sit for hours humped up over a
snarling little scroll-saw which he kept in his attic. His dearest
possessions were some little pill-bottles that purported to contain
grains of wheat from the Holy Land, water from the Jordan and the
Dead Sea, and earth from the Mount of Olives. His father had bought
these dull things from a Baptist missionary who peddled them, and
Tip seemed to derive great satisfaction from their remote origin.

The tall boy was Arthur Adams. He had fine hazel eyes that were
almost too reflective and sympathetic for a boy, and such a pleasant
voice that we all loved to hear him read aloud. Even when he had to
read poetry aloud at school, no one ever thought of laughing. To be
sure, he was not at school very much of the time. He was seventeen
and should have finished the High School the year before, but he was
always off somewhere with his gun. Arthur's mother was dead, and his
father, who was feverishly absorbed in promoting schemes, wanted to
send the boy away to school and get him off his hands; but Arthur
always begged off for another year and promised to study. I remember
him as a tall, brown boy with an intelligent face, always lounging
among a lot of us little fellows, laughing at us oftener than with
us, but such a soft, satisfied laugh that we felt rather flattered
when we provoked it. In after-years people said that Arthur had been
given to evil ways even as a lad, and it is true that we often saw
him with the gambler's sons and with old Spanish Fanny's boy, but if
he learned anything ugly in their company he never betrayed it to
us. We would have followed Arthur anywhere, and I am bound to say
that he led us into no worse places than the cattail marshes and the
stubble fields. These, then, were the boys who camped with me that
summer night upon the sand-bar.

After we finished our supper we beat the willow thicket for
driftwood. By the time we had collected enough, night had fallen,
and the pungent, weedy smell from the shore increased with the
coolness. We threw ourselves down about the fire and made another
futile effort to show Percy Pound the Little Dipper. We had tried it
often before, but he could never be got past the big one.

"You see those three big stars just below the handle, with the
bright one in the middle?" said Otto Hassler; "that's Orion's belt,
and the bright one is the clasp." I crawled behind Otto's shoulder
and sighted up his arm to the star that seemed perched upon the tip
of his steady forefinger. The Hassler boys did seine-fishing at
night, and they knew a good many stars.

Percy gave up the Little Dipper and lay back on the sand, his hands
clasped under his head. "I can see the North Star," he announced,
contentedly, pointing toward it with his big toe. "Any one might get
lost and need to know that."

We all looked up at it.

"How do you suppose Columbus felt when his compass didn't point
north any more?" Tip asked.

Otto shook his head. "My father says that there was another North
Star once, and that maybe this one won't last always. I wonder what
would happen to us down here if anything went wrong with it?"

Arthur chuckled. "I wouldn't worry, Ott. Nothing's apt to happen to
it in your time. Look at the Milky Way! There must be lots of good
dead Indians."

We lay back and looked, meditating, at the dark cover of the world.
The gurgle of the water had become heavier. We had often noticed a
mutinous, complaining note in it at night, quite different from its
cheerful daytime chuckle, and seeming like the voice of a much
deeper and more powerful stream. Our water had always these two
moods: the one of sunny complaisance, the other of inconsolable,
passionate regret.

"Queer how the stars are all in sort of diagrams," remarked Otto.
"You could do most any proposition in geometry with 'em. They always
look as if they meant something. Some folks say everybody's fortune
is all written out in the stars, don't they?"

"They believe so in the old country," Fritz affirmed.

But Arthur only laughed at him. "You're thinking of Napoleon,
Fritzey. He had a star that went out when he began to lose battles.
I guess the stars don't keep any close tally on Sandtown folks."

We were speculating on how many times we could count a hundred
before the evening star went down behind the corn fields, when some
one cried, "There comes the moon, and it's as big as a cart wheel!"

We all jumped up to greet it as it swam over the bluffs behind us.
It came up like a galleon in full sail; an enormous, barbaric thing,
red as an angry heathen god.

"When the moon came up red like that, the Aztecs used to sacrifice
their prisoners on the temple top," Percy announced.

"Go on, Perce. You got that out of _Golden Days_. Do you believe
that, Arthur?" I appealed.

Arthur answered, quite seriously: "Like as not. The moon was one of
their gods. When my father was in Mexico City he saw the stone where
they used to sacrifice their prisoners."

As we dropped down by the fire again some one asked whether the
Mound-Builders were older than the Aztecs. When we once got upon the
Mound-Builders we never willingly got away from them, and we were
still conjecturing when we heard a loud splash in the water.

"Must have been a big cat jumping," said Fritz. "They do sometimes.
They must see bugs in the dark. Look what a track the moon makes!"

There was a long, silvery streak on the water, and where the current
fretted over a big log it boiled up like gold pieces.

"Suppose there ever _was_ any gold hid away in this old river?"
Fritz asked. He lay like a little brown Indian, close to the fire,
his chin on his hand and his bare feet in the air. His brother
laughed at him, but Arthur took his suggestion seriously.

"Some of the Spaniards thought there was gold up here somewhere.
Seven cities chuck full of gold, they had it, and Coronado and his
men came up to hunt it. The Spaniards were all over this country
once."

Percy looked interested. "Was that before the Mormons went through?"

We all laughed at this.

"Long enough before. Before the Pilgrim Fathers, Perce. Maybe they
came along this very river. They always followed the watercourses."

"I wonder where this river really does begin?" Tip mused. That was
an old and a favorite mystery which the map did not clearly explain.
On the map the little black line stopped somewhere in western
Kansas; but since rivers generally rose in mountains, it was only
reasonable to suppose that ours came from the Rockies. Its
destination, we knew, was the Missouri, and the Hassler boys always
maintained that we could embark at Sandtown in flood-time, follow
our noses, and eventually arrive at New Orleans. Now they took up
their old argument. "If us boys had grit enough to try it, it
wouldn't take no time to get to Kansas City and St. Joe."

We began to talk about the places we wanted to go to. The Hassler
boys wanted to see the stock-yards in Kansas City, and Percy wanted
to see a big store in Chicago. Arthur was interlocutor and did not
betray himself.

"Now it's your turn, Tip."

Tip rolled over on his elbow and poked the fire, and his eyes looked
shyly out of his queer, tight little face. "My place is awful far
away. My uncle Bill told me about it."

Tip's Uncle Bill was a wanderer, bitten with mining fever, who had
drifted into Sandtown with a broken arm, and when it was well had
drifted out again.

"Where is it?"

"Aw, it's down in New Mexico somewheres. There aren't no railroads
or anything. You have to go on mules, and you run out of water
before you get there and have to drink canned tomatoes."

"Well, go on, kid. What's it like when you do get there?"

Tip sat up and excitedly began his story.

"There's a big red rock there that goes right up out of the sand for
about nine hundred feet. The country's flat all around it, and this
here rock goes up all by itself, like a monument. They call it the
Enchanted Bluff down there, because no white man has ever been on
top of it. The sides are smooth rock, and straight up, like a wall.
The Indians say that hundreds of years ago, before the Spaniards
came, there was a village away up there in the air. The tribe that
lived there had some sort of steps, made out of wood and bark, hung
down over the face of the bluff, and the braves went down to hunt
and carried water up in big jars swung on their backs. They kept a
big supply of water and dried meat up there, and never went down
except to hunt. They were a peaceful tribe that made cloth and
pottery, and they went up there to get out of the wars. You see,
they could pick off any war party that tried to get up their little
steps. The Indians say they were a handsome people, and they had
some sort of a queer religion. Uncle Bill thinks they were
Cliff-Dwellers who had got into trouble and left home. They weren't
fighters, anyhow.

"One time the braves were down hunting and an awful storm came up--a
kind of waterspout--and when they got back to their rock they found
their little staircase had been all broken to pieces, and only a few
steps were left hanging away up in the air. While they were camped
at the foot of the rock, wondering what to do, a war party from the
north came along and massacred 'em to a man, with all the old folks
and women looking on from the rock. Then the war party went on south
and left the village to get down the best way they could. Of course
they never got down. They starved to death up there, and when the
war party came back on their way north, they could hear the children
crying from the edge of the bluff where they had crawled out, but
they didn't see a sign of a grown Indian, and nobody has ever been
up there since."

We exclaimed at this dolorous legend and sat up.

"There couldn't have been many people up there," Percy demurred.
"How big is the top, Tip?"

"Oh, pretty big. Big enough so that the rock doesn't look nearly as
tall as it is. The top's bigger than the base. The bluff is sort of
worn away for several hundred feet up. That's one reason it's so
hard to climb."

I asked how the Indians got up, in the first place.

"Nobody knows how they got up or when. A hunting party came along
once and saw that there was a town up there, and that was all."

Otto rubbed his chin and looked thoughtful. "Of course there must be
some way to get up there. Couldn't people get a rope over someway
and pull a ladder up?"

Tip's little eyes were shining with excitement. "I know a way. Me
and Uncle Bill talked it all over. There's a kind of rocket that
would take a rope over--life-savers use 'em--and then you could
hoist a rope-ladder and peg it down at the bottom and make it tight
with guy-ropes on the other side. I'm going to climb that there
bluff, and I've got it all planned out."

Fritz asked what he expected to find when he got up there.

"Bones, maybe, or the ruins of their town, or pottery, or some of
their idols. There might be 'most anything up there. Anyhow, I want
to see."

"Sure nobody else has been up there, Tip?" Arthur asked.

"Dead sure. Hardly anybody ever goes down there. Some hunters tried
to cut steps in the rock once, but they didn't get higher than a man
can reach. The Bluff's all red granite, and Uncle Bill thinks it's a
boulder the glaciers left. It's a queer place, anyhow. Nothing but
cactus and desert for hundreds of miles, and yet right under the
bluff there's good water and plenty of grass. That's why the bison
used to go down there."

Suddenly we heard a scream above our fire, and jumped up to see a
dark, slim bird floating southward far above us--a whooping-crane,
we knew by her cry and her long neck. We ran to the edge of the
island, hoping we might see her alight, but she wavered southward
along the rivercourse until we lost her. The Hassler boys declared
that by the look of the heavens it must be after midnight, so we
threw more wood on our fire, put on our jackets, and curled down in
the warm sand. Several of us pretended to doze, but I fancy we were
really thinking about Tip's Bluff and the extinct people. Over in
the wood the ring-doves were calling mournfully to one another, and
once we heard a dog bark, far away. "Somebody getting into old
Tommy's melon patch," Fritz murmured, sleepily, but nobody answered
him. By and by Percy spoke out of the shadow.

"Say, Tip, when you go down there will you take me with you?"

"Maybe."

"Suppose one of us beats you down there, Tip?"

"Whoever gets to the Bluff first has got to promise to tell the rest
of us exactly what he finds," remarked one of the Hassler boys, and
to this we all readily assented.

Somewhat reassured, I dropped off to sleep. I must have dreamed
about a race for the Bluff, for I awoke in a kind of fear that other
people were getting ahead of me and that I was losing my chance. I
sat up in my damp clothes and looked at the other boys, who lay
tumbled in uneasy attitudes about the dead fire. It was still dark,
but the sky was blue with the last wonderful azure of night. The
stars glistened like crystal globes, and trembled as if they shone
through a depth of clear water. Even as I watched, they began to
pale and the sky brightened. Day came suddenly, almost
instantaneously. I turned for another look at the blue night, and it
was gone. Everywhere the birds began to call, and all manner of
little insects began to chirp and hop about in the willows. A breeze
sprang up from the west and brought the heavy smell of ripened corn.
The boys rolled over and shook themselves. We stripped and plunged
into the river just as the sun came up over the windy bluffs.

When I came home to Sandtown at Christmas time, we skated out to our
island and talked over the whole project of the Enchanted Bluff,
renewing our resolution to find it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Although that was twenty years ago, none of us have ever climbed the
Enchanted Bluff. Percy Pound is a stockbroker in Kansas City and
will go nowhere that his red touring-car cannot carry him. Otto
Hassler went on the railroad and lost his foot braking; after which
he and Fritz succeeded their father as the town tailors.

Arthur sat about the sleepy little town all his life--he died before
he was twenty-five. The last time I saw him, when I was home on one
of my college vacations, he was sitting in a steamer-chair under a
cottonwood tree in the little yard behind one of the two Sandtown
saloons. He was very untidy and his hand was not steady, but when he
rose, unabashed, to greet me, his eyes were as clear and warm as
ever. When I had talked with him for an hour and heard him laugh
again, I wondered how it was that when Nature had taken such pains
with a man, from his hands to the arch of his long foot, she had
ever lost him in Sandtown. He joked about Tip Smith's Bluff, and
declared he was going down there just as soon as the weather got
cooler; he thought the Grand Cañon might be worth while, too.

I was perfectly sure when I left him that he would never get beyond
the high plank fence and the comfortable shade of the cottonwood.
And, indeed, it was under that very tree that he died one summer
morning.

Tip Smith still talks about going to New Mexico. He married a
slatternly, unthrifty country girl, has been much tied to a
perambulator, and has grown stooped and gray from irregular meals
and broken sleep. But the worst of his difficulties are now over,
and he has, as he says, come into easy water. When I was last in
Sandtown I walked home with him late one moonlight night, after he
had balanced his cash and shut up his store. We took the long way
around and sat down on the schoolhouse steps, and between us we
quite revived the romance of the lone red rock and the extinct
people. Tip insists that he still means to go down there, but he
thinks now he will wait until his boy, Bert, is old enough to go
with him. Bert has been let into the story, and thinks of nothing
but the Enchanted Bluff.

                                          _Harper's_, April 1909




_The Joy of Nelly Deane_


Nell and I were almost ready to go on for the last act of "Queen
Esther," and we had for the moment got rid of our three patient
dressers, Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny. Nell was peering
over my shoulder into the little cracked looking-glass that Mrs. Dow
had taken from its nail on her kitchen wall and brought down to the
church under her shawl that morning. When she realized that we were
alone, Nell whispered to me in the quick, fierce way she had:

"Say, Peggy, won't you go up and stay with me to-night? Scott
Spinny's asked to take me home, and I don't want to walk up with him
alone."

"I guess so, if you'll ask my mother."

"Oh, I'll fix her!" Nell laughed, with a toss of her head which
meant that she usually got what she wanted, even from people much
less tractable than my mother.

In a moment our tiring-women were back again. The three old
ladies--at least they seemed old to us--fluttered about us, more
agitated than we were ourselves. It seemed as though they would
never leave off patting Nell and touching her up. They kept trying
things this way and that, never able in the end to decide which way
was best. They wouldn't hear to her using rouge, and as they
powdered her neck and arms, Mrs. Freeze murmured that she hoped we
wouldn't get into the habit of using such things. Mrs. Spinny
divided her time between pulling up and tucking down the "illusion"
that filled in the square neck of Nelly's dress. She didn't like
things much low, she said; but after she had pulled it up, she stood
back and looked at Nell thoughtfully through her glasses. While the
excited girl was reaching for this and that, buttoning a slipper,
pinning down a curl, Mrs. Spinny's smile softened more and more
until, just before _Esther_ made her entrance, the old lady tiptoed
up to her and softly tucked the illusion down as far as it would go.

"She's so pink; it seems a pity not," she whispered apologetically
to Mrs. Dow.

Every one admitted that Nelly was the prettiest girl in Riverbend,
and the gayest--oh, the gayest! When she was not singing, she was
laughing. When she was not laid up with a broken arm, the outcome of
a foolhardy coasting feat, or suspended from school because she ran
away at recess to go buggy-riding with Guy Franklin, she was sure to
be up to mischief of some sort. Twice she broke through the ice and
got soused in the river because she never looked where she skated or
cared what happened so long as she went fast enough. After the
second of these duckings our three dressers declared that she was
trying to be a Baptist despite herself.

Mrs. Spinny and Mrs. Freeze and Mrs. Dow, who were always hovering
about Nelly, often whispered to me their hope that she would
eventually come into our church and not "go with the Methodists";
her family were Wesleyans. But to me these artless plans of theirs
never wholly explained their watchful affection. They had good
daughters themselves,--except Mrs. Spinny, who had only the sullen
Scott,--and they loved their plain girls and thanked God for them.
But they loved Nelly differently. They were proud of her pretty
figure and yellow-brown eyes, which dilated so easily and sparkled
with a kind of golden effervescence. They were always making pretty
things for her, always coaxing her to come to the sewing-circle,
where she knotted her thread, and put in the wrong sleeve, and
laughed and chattered and said a great many things that she should
not have said, and somehow always warmed their hearts. I think they
loved her for her unquenchable joy.

All the Baptist ladies liked Nell, even those who criticized her
most severely, but the three who were first in fighting the battles
of our little church, who held it together by their prayers and the
labor of their hands, watched over her as they did over Mrs. Dow's
century-plant before it blossomed. They looked for her on Sunday
morning and smiled at her as she hurried, always a little late, up
to the choir. When she rose and stood behind the organ and sang
"There Is a Green Hill," one could see Mrs. Dow and Mrs. Freeze
settle back in their accustomed seats and look up at her as if she
had just come from that hill and had brought them glad tidings.

It was because I sang contralto, or, as we said, alto, in the
Baptist choir that Nell and I became friends. She was so gay and
grown up, so busy with parties and dances and picnics, that I would
scarcely have seen much of her had we not sung together. She liked
me better than she did any of the older girls, who tried clumsily to
be like her, and I felt almost as solicitous and admiring as did
Mrs. Dow and Mrs. Spinny. I think even then I must have loved to see
her bloom and glow, and I loved to hear her sing, in "The Ninety and
Nine,"

  But one was out on the hills away

in her sweet, strong voice. Nell had never had a singing lesson, but
she had sung from the time she could talk, and Mrs. Dow used fondly
to say that it was singing so much that made her figure so pretty.

After I went into the choir it was found to be easier to get Nelly
to choir practice. If I stopped outside her gate on my way to church
and coaxed her, she usually laughed, ran in for her hat and jacket,
and went along with me. The three old ladies fostered our
friendship, and because I was "quiet," they esteemed me a good
influence for Nelly. This view was propounded in a sewing-circle
discussion and, leaking down to us through our mothers, greatly
amused us. Dear old ladies! It was so manifestly for what Nell was
that they loved her, and yet they were always looking for
"influences" to change her.

The "Queen Esther" performance had cost us three months of hard
practice, and it was not easy to keep Nell up to attending the
tedious rehearsals. Some of the boys we knew were in the chorus of
Assyrian youths, but the solo cast was made up of older people, and
Nell found them very poky. We gave the cantata in the Baptist church
on Christmas eve, "to a crowded house," as the Riverbend "Messenger"
truly chronicled. The country folk for miles about had come in
through a deep snow, and their teams and wagons stood in a long row
at the hitch-bars on each side of the church door. It was certainly
Nelly's night, for however much the tenor--he was her schoolmaster,
and naturally thought poorly of her--might try to eclipse her in his
dolorous solos about the rivers of Babylon, there could be no doubt
as to whom the people had come to hear--and to see.

After the performance was over, our fathers and mothers came back to
the dressing-rooms--the little rooms behind the baptistry where the
candidates for baptism were robed--to congratulate us, and Nell
persuaded my mother to let me go home with her. This arrangement may
not have been wholly agreeable to Scott Spinny, who stood glumly
waiting at the baptistry door; though I used to think he dogged
Nell's steps not so much for any pleasure he got from being with her
as for the pleasure of keeping other people away. Dear little Mrs.
Spinny was perpetually in a state of humiliation on account of his
bad manners, and she tried by a very special tenderness to make up
to Nelly for the remissness of her ungracious son.

Scott was a spare, muscular fellow, good-looking, but with a face so
set and dark that I used to think it very like the castings he sold.
He was taciturn and domineering, and Nell rather liked to provoke
him. Her father was so easy with her that she seemed to enjoy being
ordered about now and then. That night, when every one was praising
her and telling her how well she sang and how pretty she looked,
Scott only said, as we came out of the dressing-room:

"Have you got your high shoes on?"

"No; but I've got rubbers on over my low ones. Mother doesn't care."

"Well, you just go back and put 'em on as fast as you can."

Nell made a face at him and ran back, laughing. Her mother, fat,
comfortable Mrs. Deane, was immensely amused at this.

"That's right, Scott," she chuckled. "You can do enough more with
her than I can. She walks right over me an' Jud."

Scott grinned. If he was proud of Nelly, the last thing he wished to
do was to show it. When she came back he began to nag again. "What
are you going to do with all those flowers? They'll freeze stiff as
pokers."

"Well, there won't none of _your_ flowers freeze, Scott Spinny, so
there!" Nell snapped. She had the best of him that time, and the
Assyrian youths rejoiced. They were most of them high-school boys,
and the poorest of them had "chipped in" and sent all the way to
Denver for _Queen Esther's_ flowers. There were bouquets from half a
dozen townspeople, too, but none from Scott. Scott was a prosperous
hardware merchant and notoriously penurious, though he saved his
face, as the boys said, by giving liberally to the church.

"There's no use freezing the fool things, anyhow. You get me some
newspapers, and I'll wrap 'em up." Scott took from his pocket a
folded copy of the Riverbend "Messenger" and began laboriously to
wrap up one of the bouquets. When we left the church door he bore
three large newspaper bundles, carrying them as carefully as if they
had been so many newly frosted wedding-cakes, and left Nell and me
to shift for ourselves as we floundered along the snow-burdened
sidewalk.

Although it was after midnight, lights were shining from many of the
little wooden houses, and the roofs and shrubbery were so deep in
snow that Riverbend looked as if it had been tucked down into a warm
bed. The companies of people, all coming from church, tramping this
way and that toward their homes and calling "Good night" and "Merry
Christmas" as they parted company, all seemed to us very unusual and
exciting.

When we got home, Mrs. Deane had a cold supper ready, and Jud Deane
had already taken off his shoes and fallen to on his fried chicken
and pie. He was so proud of his pretty daughter that he must give
her her Christmas presents then and there, and he went into the
sleeping-chamber behind the dining-room and from the depths of his
wife's closet brought out a short sealskin jacket and a round cap
and made Nelly put them on.

Mrs. Deane, who sat busy between a plate of spice cake and a tray
piled with her famous whipped-cream tarts, laughed inordinately at
his behavior.

"Ain't he worse than any kid you ever see? He's been running to that
closet like a cat shut away from her kittens. I wonder Nell ain't
caught on before this. I did think he'd make out now to keep 'em
till Christmas morning; but he's never made out to keep anything
yet."

That was true enough, and fortunately Jud's inability to keep
anything seemed always to present a highly humorous aspect to his
wife. Mrs. Deane put her heart into her cooking, and said that so
long as a man was a good provider she had no cause to complain.
Other people were not so charitable toward Jud's failing. I remember
how many strictures were passed upon that little sealskin and how he
was censured for his extravagance. But what a public-spirited thing,
after all, it was for him to do! How, the winter through, we all
enjoyed seeing Nell skating on the river or running about the town
with the brown collar turned up about her bright cheeks and her hair
blowing out from under the round cap! "No seal," Mrs. Dow said,
"would have begrudged it to her. Why should we?" This was at the
sewing-circle, when the new coat was under grave discussion.

At last Nelly and I got up-stairs and undressed, and the pad of
Jud's slippered feet about the kitchen premises--where he was
carrying up from the cellar things that might freeze--ceased. He
called "Good night, daughter," from the foot of the stairs, and the
house grew quiet. But one is not a prima donna the first time for
nothing, and it seemed as if we could not go to bed. Our light must
have burned long after every other in Riverbend was out. The muslin
curtains of Nell's bed were drawn back; Mrs. Deane had turned down
the white counterpane and taken off the shams and smoothed the
pillows for us. But their fair plumpness offered no temptation to
two such hot young heads. We could not let go of life even for a
little while. We sat and talked in Nell's cozy room, where there was
a tiny, white fur rug--the only one in Riverbend--before the bed;
and there were white sash curtains, and the prettiest little desk
and dressing-table I had ever seen. It was a warm, gay little room,
flooded all day long with sunlight from east and south windows that
had climbing-roses all about them in summer. About the dresser were
photographs of adoring high-school boys; and one of Guy Franklin,
much groomed and barbered, in a dress-coat and a boutonnière. I
never liked to see that photograph there. The home boys looked
properly modest and bashful on the dresser, but he seemed to be
staring impudently all the time.

I knew nothing definite against Guy, but in Riverbend all
"traveling-men" were considered worldly and wicked. He traveled for
a Chicago dry-goods firm, and our fathers didn't like him because he
put extravagant ideas into our mothers' heads. He had very smooth
and nattering ways, and he introduced into our simple community a
great variety of perfumes and scented soaps, and he always reminded
me of the merchants in Cæsar, who brought into Gaul "those things
which effeminate the mind," as we translated that delightfully easy
passage.

Nell was silting before the dressing-table in her nightgown, holding
the new fur coat and rubbing her cheek against it, when I saw a
sudden gleam of tears in her eyes. "You know, Peggy," she said in
her quick, impetuous way, "this makes me feel bad. I've got a secret
from my daddy."

I can see her now, so pink and eager, her brown hair in two springy
braids down her back, and her eyes shining with tears and with
something even softer and more tremulous.

"I'm engaged, Peggy," she whispered, "really and truly."

She leaned forward, unbuttoning her nightgown, and there on her
breast, hung by a little gold chain about her neck, was a diamond
ring--Guy Franklin's solitaire; every one in Riverbend knew it well.

"I'm going to live in Chicago, and take singing lessons, and go to
operas, and do all those nice things--oh, everything! I know you
don't like him, Peggy, but you know you _are_ a kid. You'll see how
it is yourself when you grow up. He's so _different_ from our boys,
and he's just terribly in love with me. And then, Peggy,"--flushing
all down over her soft shoulders,--"I'm awfully fond of him, too.
Awfully."

"Are you, Nell, truly?" I whispered. She seemed so changed to me by
the warm light in her eyes and that delicate suffusion of color. I
felt as I did when I got up early on picnic mornings in summer, and
saw the dawn come up in the breathless sky above the river meadows
and make all the cornfields golden.

"Sure I do, Peggy; don't look so solemn. It's nothing to look that
way about, kid. It's nice." She threw her arms about me suddenly and
hugged me.

"I hate to think about your going so far away from us all, Nell."

"Oh, you'll love to come and visit me. Just you wait."

She began breathlessly to go over things Guy Franklin had told her
about Chicago, until I seemed to see it all looming up out there
under the stars that kept watch over our little sleeping town. We
had neither of us ever been to a city, but we knew what it would be
like. We heard it throbbing like great engines, and calling to us,
that far-away world. Even after we had opened the windows and
scurried into bed, we seemed to feel a pulsation across all the
miles of snow. The winter silence trembled with it, and the air was
full of something new that seemed to break over us in soft waves. In
that snug, warm little bed I had a sense of imminent change and
danger. I was somehow afraid for Nelly when I heard her breathing so
quickly beside me, and I put my arm about her protectingly as we
drifted toward sleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the following spring we were both graduated from the Riverbend
high school, and I went away to college. My family moved to Denver,
and during the next four years I heard very little of Nelly Deane.
My life was crowded with new people and new experiences, and I am
afraid I held her little in mind. I heard indirectly that Jud Deane
had lost what little property he owned in a luckless venture in
Cripple Creek, and that he had been able to keep his house in
Riverbend only through the clemency of his creditors. Guy Franklin
had his route changed and did not go to Riverbend any more. He
married the daughter of a rich cattle-man out near Long Pine, and
ran a dry-goods store of his own. Mrs. Dow wrote me a long letter
about once a year, and in one of these she told me that Nelly was
teaching in the sixth grade in the Riverbend school.

"Dear Nelly does not like teaching very well. The children try her,
and she is so pretty it seems a pity for her to be tied down to
uncongenial employment. Scott is still very attentive, and I have
noticed him look up at the window of Nelly's room in a very
determined way as he goes home to dinner. Scott continues
prosperous; he has made money during these hard times and now owns
both our hardware stores. He is close, but a very honorable fellow.
Nelly seems to hold off, but I think Mrs. Spinny has hopes. Nothing
would please her more. If Scott were more careful about his
appearance, it would help. He of course gets black about his
business, and Nelly, you know, is very dainty. People do say his
mother does his courting for him, she is so eager. If only Scott
does not turn out hard and penurious like his father! We must all
have our schooling in this life, but I don't want Nelly's to be too
severe. She is a dear girl, and keeps her color."

Mrs. Dow's own schooling had been none too easy. Her husband had
long been crippled with rheumatism, and was bitter and faultfinding.
Her daughters had married poorly, and one of her sons had fallen
into evil ways. But her letters were always cheerful, and in one of
them she gently remonstrated with me because I "seemed inclined to
take a sad view of life."

In the winter vacation of my senior year I stopped on my way home to
visit Mrs. Dow. The first thing she told me when I got into her old
buckboard at the station was that "Scott had at last prevailed," and
that Nelly was to marry him in the spring. As a preliminary step,
Nelly was about to join the Baptist church. "Just think, you will be
here for her baptizing! How that will please Nelly! She is to be
immersed to-morrow night."

I met Scott Spinny in the post-office that morning, and he gave me a
hard grip with one black hand. There was something grim and
saturnine about his powerful body and bearded face and his strong,
cold hands. I wondered what perverse fate had driven him for eight
years to dog the footsteps of a girl whose charm was due to
qualities naturally distasteful to him. It still seems strange to me
that in easy-going Riverbend, where there were so many boys who
could have lived contentedly enough with my little grasshopper, it
was the pushing ant who must have her and all her careless ways.

By a kind of unformulated etiquette one did not call upon candidates
for baptism on the day of the ceremony, so I had my first glimpse of
Nelly that evening. The baptistry was a cemented pit directly under
the pulpit rostrum, over which we had our stage when we sang "Queen
Esther." I sat through the sermon somewhat nervously. After the
minister, in his long, black gown, had gone down into the water and
the choir had finished singing, the door from the dressing-room
opened, and, led by one of the deacons, Nelly came down the steps
into the pool. Oh, she looked so little and meek and chastened! Her
white cashmere robe clung about her, and her brown hair was brushed
straight back and hung in two soft braids from a little head bent
humbly. As she stepped down into the water I shivered with the cold
of it, and I remembered sharply how much I had loved her. She went
down until the water was well above her waist, and stood white and
small, with her hands crossed on her breast, while the minister said
the words about being buried with Christ in baptism. Then, lying in
his arm, she disappeared under the dark water. "It will be like that
when she dies," I thought, and a quick pain caught my heart. The
choir began to sing "Washed in the Blood of the Lamb" as she rose
again, the door behind the baptistry opened, revealing those three
dear guardians, Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny, and she went
up into their arms.

I went to see Nell next day, up in the little room of many memories.
Such a sad, sad visit! She seemed changed--a little embarrassed and
quietly despairing. We talked of many of the old Riverbend girls and
boys, but she did not mention Guy Franklin or Scott Spinny, except
to say that her father had got work in Scott's hardware store. She
begged me, putting her hands on my shoulders with something of her
old impulsiveness, to come and stay a few days with her. But I was
afraid--afraid of what she might tell me and of what I might say.
When I sat in that room with all her trinkets, the foolish harvest
of her girlhood, lying about, and the white curtains and the little
white rug, I thought of Scott Spinny with positive terror and could
feel his hard grip on my hand again. I made the best excuse I could
about having to hurry on to Denver; but she gave me one quick look,
and her eyes ceased to plead. I saw that she understood me
perfectly. We had known each other so well. Just once, when I got up
to go and had trouble with my veil, she laughed her old merry laugh
and told me there were some things I would never learn, for all my
schooling.

The next day, when Mrs. Dow drove me down to the station to catch
the morning train for Denver, I saw Nelly hurrying to school with
several books under her arm. She had been working up her lessons at
home, I thought. She was never quick at her books, dear Nell.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was ten years before I again visited Riverbend. I had been in
Rome for a long time, and had fallen into bitter homesickness. One
morning, sitting among the dahlias and asters that bloom so bravely
upon those gigantic heaps of earth-red ruins that were once the
palaces of the Cæsars, I broke the seal of one of Mrs. Dow's long
yearly letters. It brought so much sad news that I resolved then and
there to go home to Riverbend, the only place that had ever really
been home to me. Mrs. Dow wrote me that her husband, after years of
illness, had died in the cold spell last March. "So good and patient
toward the last," she wrote, "and so afraid of giving extra
trouble." There was another thing she saved until the last. She
wrote on and on, dear woman, about new babies and village
improvements, as if she could not bear to tell me; and then it came:

"You will be sad to hear that two months ago our dear Nelly left us.
It was a terrible blow to us all. I cannot write about it yet, I
fear. I wake up every morning feeling that I ought to go to her. She
went three days after her little boy was born. The baby is a fine
child and will live, I think, in spite of everything. He and her
little girl, now eight years old, whom she named Margaret, after
you, have gone to Mrs. Spinny's. She loves them more than if they
were her own. It seems as if already they had made her quite young
again. I wish you could see Nelly's children."

Ah, that was what I wanted, to see Nelly's children! The wish came
aching from my heart along with the bitter homesick tears; along
with a quick, torturing recollection that flashed upon me, as I
looked about and tried to collect myself, of how we two had sat in
our sunny seat in the corner of the old bare school-room one
September afternoon and learned the names of the seven hills
together. In that place, at that moment, after so many years, how it
all came back to me--the warm sun on my back, the chattering girl
beside me, the curly hair, the laughing yellow eyes, the stubby
little finger on the page! I felt as if even then, when we sat in
the sun with our heads together, it was all arranged, written out
like a story, that at this moment I should be sitting among the
crumbling bricks and drying grass, and she should be lying in the
place I knew so well, on that green hill far away.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Dow sat with her Christmas sewing in the familiar sitting-room,
where the carpet and the wall-paper and the table-cover had all
faded into soft, dull colors, and even the chromo of Hagar and
Ishmael had been toned to the sobriety of age. In the bay-window the
tall wire flower-stand still bore its little terraces of potted
plants, and the big fuchsia and the Martha Washington geranium had
blossomed for Christmas-tide. Mrs. Dow herself did not look greatly
changed to me. Her hair, thin ever since I could remember it, was
now quite white, but her spare, wiry little person had all its old
activity, and her eyes gleamed with the old friendliness behind her
silver-bowed glasses. Her gray house-dress seemed just like those
she used to wear when I ran in after school to take her angel-food
cake down to the church supper.

The house sat on a hill, and from behind the geraniums I could see
pretty much all of Riverbend, tucked down in the soft snow, and the
air above was full of big, loose flakes, falling from a gray sky
which betokened settled weather. Indoors the hard-coal burner made a
tropical temperature, and glowed a warm orange from its isinglass
sides. We sat and visited, the two of us, with a great sense of
comfort and completeness. I had reached Riverbend only that morning,
and Mrs. Dow, who had been haunted by thoughts of shipwreck and
suffering upon wintry seas, kept urging me to draw nearer to the
fire and suggesting incidental refreshment. We had chattered all
through the winter morning and most of the afternoon, taking up one
after another of the Riverbend girls and boys, and agreeing that we
had reason to be well satisfied with most of them. Finally, after a
long pause in which I had listened to the contented ticking of the
clock and the crackle of the coal, I put the question I had until
then held back:

"And now, Mrs. Dow, tell me about the one we loved best of all.
Since I got your letter I've thought of her every day. Tell me all
about Scott and Nelly."

The tears flashed behind her glasses, and she smoothed the little
pink bag on her knee.

"Well, dear, I'm afraid Scott proved to be a hard man, like his
father. But we must remember that Nelly always had Mrs. Spinny. I
never saw anything like the love there was between those two. After
Nelly lost her own father and mother, she looked to Mrs. Spinny for
everything. When Scott was too unreasonable, his mother could 'most
always prevail upon him. She never lifted a hand to fight her own
battles with Scott's father, but she was never afraid to speak up
for Nelly. And then Nelly took great comfort of her little girl.
Such a lovely child!"

"Had she been very ill before the little baby came?"

"No, Margaret; I'm afraid 't was all because they had the wrong
doctor. I feel confident that either Doctor Tom or Doctor Jones
could have brought her through. But, you see, Scott had offended
them both, and they'd stopped trading at his store, so he would have
young Doctor Fox, a boy just out of college and a stranger. He got
scared and didn't know what to do. Mrs. Spinny felt he wasn't doing
right, so she sent for Mrs. Freeze and me. It seemed like Nelly had
got discouraged. Scott would move into their big new house before
the plastering was dry, and though 't was summer, she had taken a
terrible cold that seemed to have drained her, and she took no
interest in fixing the place up. Mrs. Spinny had been down with her
back again and wasn't able to help, and things was just anyway. We
won't talk about that, Margaret; I think 't would hurt Mrs. Spinny
to have you know. She nearly died of mortification when she sent for
us, and blamed her poor back. We did get Nelly fixed up nicely
before she died. I prevailed upon Doctor Tom to come in at the last,
and it 'most broke his heart. 'Why, Mis' Dow,' he said, 'if you'd
only have come and told me how 't was, I'd have come and carried her
right off in my arms.'"

"Oh, Mrs. Dow," I cried, "then it needn't have been?"

Mrs. Dow dropped her needle and clasped her hands quickly. "We
mustn't look at it that way, dear," she said tremulously and a
little sternly; "we mustn't let ourselves. We must just feel that
our Lord wanted her _then_, and took her to Himself. When it was all
over, she did look so like a child of God, young and trusting, like
she did on her baptizing night, you remember?"

I felt that Mrs. Dow did not want to talk any more about Nelly then,
and, indeed, I had little heart to listen; so I told her I would go
for a walk, and suggested that I might stop at Mrs. Spinny's to see
the children.

Mrs. Dow looked up thoughtfully at the clock. "I doubt if you'll
find little Margaret there now. It's half-past four, and she'll have
been out of school an hour and more. She'll be most likely coasting
on Lupton's Hill. She usually makes for it with her sled the minute
she is out of the school-house door. You know, it's the old hill
where you all used to slide. If you stop in at the church about six
o'clock, you'll likely find Mrs. Spinny there with the baby. I
promised to go down and help Mrs. Freeze finish up the tree, and
Mrs. Spinny said she'd run in with the baby, if 't wasn't too
bitter. She won't leave him alone with the Swede girl. She's like a
young woman with her first."

Lupton's Hill was at the other end of town, and when I got there the
dusk was thickening, drawing blue shadows over the snowy fields.
There were perhaps twenty children creeping up the hill or whizzing
down the packed sled-track. When I had been watching them for some
minutes, I heard a lusty shout, and a little red sled shot past me
into the deep snow-drift beyond. The child was quite buried for a
moment, then she struggled out and stood dusting the snow from her
short coat and red woolen comforter. She wore a brown fur cap, which
was too big for her and of an old-fashioned shape, such as girls
wore long ago, but I would have known her without the cap. Mrs. Dow
had said a beautiful child, and there would not be two like this in
Riverbend. She was off before I had time to speak to her, going up
the hill at a trot, her sturdy little legs plowing through the
trampled snow. When she reached the top she never paused to take
breath, but threw herself upon her sled and came down with a whoop
that was quenched only by the deep drift at the end.

"Are you Margaret Spinny?" I asked as she struggled out in a cloud
of snow.

"Yes, 'm." She approached me with frank curiosity, pulling her
little sled behind her. "Are you the strange lady staying at Mrs.
Dow's?" I nodded, and she began to look my clothes over with
respectful interest.

"Your grandmother is to be at the church at six o'clock, isn't she?"

"Yes, 'm."

"Well, suppose we walk up there now. It's nearly six, and all the
other children are going home." She hesitated, and looked up at the
faintly gleaming track on the hill-slope. "Do you want another
slide? Is that it?" I asked.

"Do you mind?" she asked shyly.

"No. I'll wait for you. Take your time; don't run."

Two little boys were still hanging about the slide, and they cheered
her as she came down, her comforter streaming in the wind.

"Now," she announced, getting up out of the drift, "I'll show you
where the church is."

"Shall I tie your comforter again?"

"No, 'm, thanks. I'm plenty warm." She put her mittened hand
confidingly in mine and trudged along beside me.

Mrs. Dow must have heard us tramping up the snowy steps of the
church, for she met us at the door. Every one had gone except the
old ladies. A kerosene lamp flickered over the Sunday-school chart,
with the lesson-picture of the Wise Men, and the little barrel-stove
threw out a deep glow over the three white heads that bent above the
baby. There the three friends sat, patting him, and smoothing his
dress, and playing with his hands, which made theirs look so brown.

"You ain't seen nothing finer in all your travels," said Mrs.
Spinny, and they all laughed.

They showed me his full chest and how strong his back was; had me
feel the golden fuzz on his head, and made him look at me with his
round, bright eyes. He laughed and reared himself in my arms as I
took him up and held him close to me. He was so warm and tingling
with life, and he had the flush of new beginnings, of the new
morning and the new rose. He seemed to have come so lately from his
mother's heart! It was as if I held her youth and all her young joy.
As I put my cheek down against his, he spied a pink flower in my
hat, and making a gleeful sound, he lunged at it with both fists.

"Don't let him spoil it," murmured Mrs. Spinny. "He loves color
so--like Nelly."

                                         _Century_, October 1911




_The Bohemian Girl_


The Trans-continental Express swung along the windings of the Sand
River Valley, and in the rear seat of the observation car a young
man sat greatly at his ease, not in the least discomfited by the
fierce sunlight which beat in upon his brown face and neck and
strong back. There was a look of relaxation and of great passivity
about his broad shoulders, which seemed almost too heavy until he
stood up and squared them. He wore a pale flannel shirt and a blue
silk necktie with loose ends. His trousers were wide and belted at
the waist, and his short sack-coat hung open. His heavy shoes had
seen good service. His reddish-brown hair, like his clothes, had a
foreign cut. He had deep-set, dark blue eyes under heavy reddish
eyebrows. His face was kept clean only by close shaving, and even
the sharpest razor left a glint of yellow in the smooth brown of his
skin. His teeth and the palms of his hands were very white. His
head, which looked hard and stubborn, lay indolently in the green
cushion of the wicker chair, and as he looked out at the ripe summer
country a teasing, not unkindly smile played over his lips. Once, as
he basked thus comfortably, a quick light flashed in his eyes,
curiously dilating the pupils, and his mouth became a hard, straight
line, gradually relaxing into its former smile of rather kindly
mockery. He told himself, apparently, that there was no point in
getting excited; and he seemed a master hand at taking his ease when
he could. Neither the sharp whistle of the locomotive nor the
brakeman's call disturbed him. It was not until after the train had
stopped that he rose, put on a Panama hat, took from the rack a
small valise and a flute-case, and stepped deliberately to the
station platform. The baggage was already unloaded, and the stranger
presented a check for a battered sole-leather steamer-trunk.

"Can you keep it here for a day or two?" he asked the agent. "I may
send for it, and I may not."

"Depends on whether you like the country, I suppose?" demanded the
agent in a challenging tone.

"Just so."

The agent shrugged his shoulders, looked scornfully at the small
trunk, which was marked "N.E.," and handed out a claim check without
further comment. The stranger watched him as he caught one end of
the trunk and dragged it into the express room. The agent's manner
seemed to remind him of something amusing. "Doesn't seem to be a
very big place," he remarked, looking about.

"It's big enough for us," snapped the agent, as he banged the trunk
into a corner.

That remark, apparently, was what Nils Ericson had wanted. He
chuckled quietly as he took a leather strap from his pocket and
swung his valise around his shoulder. Then he settled his Panama
securely on his head, turned up his trousers, tucked the flute-case
under his arm, and started off across the fields. He gave the town,
as he would have said, a wide berth, and cut through a great fenced
pasture, emerging, when he rolled under the barbed wire at the
farther corner, upon a white dusty road which ran straight up from
the river valley to the high prairies, where the ripe wheat stood
yellow and the tin roofs and weather-cocks were twinkling in the
fierce sunlight. By the time Nils had done three miles, the sun was
sinking and the farm-wagons on their way home from town came
rattling by, covering him with dust and making him sneeze. When one
of the farmers pulled up and offered to give him a lift, he
clambered in willingly. The driver was a thin, grizzled old man with
a long lean neck and a foolish sort of beard, like a goat's. "How
fur ye goin'?" he asked, as he clucked to his horses and started
off.

"Do you go by the Ericson place?"

"Which Ericson?" The old man drew in his reins as if he expected to
stop again.

"Preacher Ericson's."

"Oh, the Old Lady Ericson's!" He turned and looked at Nils. "La, me!
If you're goin' out there you might 'a' rid out in the automobile.
That's a pity, now. The Old Lady Ericson was in town with her auto.
You might 'a' heard it snortin' anywhere about the post-office er
the butcher-shop."

"Has she a motor?" asked the stranger absently.

"'Deed an' she has! She runs into town every night about this time
for her mail and meat for supper. Some folks say she's afraid her
auto won't get exercise enough, but I say that's jealousy."

"Aren't there any other motors about here?"

"Oh, yes! we have fourteen in all. But nobody else gets around like
the Old Lady Ericson. She's out, rain er shine, over the whole
county, chargin' into town and out amongst her farms, an' up to her
sons' places. Sure you ain't goin' to the wrong place?" He craned
his neck and looked at Nils' flute-case with eager curiosity. "The
old woman ain't got any piany that I knows on. Olaf, he has a grand.
His wife's musical; took lessons in Chicago."

"I'm going up there to-morrow," said Nils imperturbably. He saw that
the driver took him for a piano-tuner.

"Oh, I see!" The old man screwed up his eyes mysteriously. He was a
little dashed by the stranger's non-communicativeness, but he soon
broke out again.

"I'm one o' Mis' Ericson's tenants. Look after one of her places. I
did own the place myself oncet, but I lost it a while back, in the
bad years just after the World's Fair. Just as well, too, I say.
Lets you out o' payin' taxes. The Ericsons do own most of the county
now. I remember the old preacher's fav'rite text used to be, 'To
them that hath shall be given.' They've spread something
wonderful--run over this here country like bindweed. But I ain't one
that begretches it to 'em. Folks is entitled to what they kin git;
and they're hustlers. Olaf, he's in the Legislature now, and a
likely man fur Congress. Listen, if that ain't the old woman comin'
now. Want I should stop her?"

Nils shook his head. He heard the deep chug-chug of a motor
vibrating steadily in the clear twilight behind them. The pale
lights of the car swam over the hill, and the old man slapped his
reins and turned clear out of the road, ducking his head at the
first of three angry snorts from behind. The motor was running at a
hot, even speed, and passed without turning an inch from its course.
The driver was a stalwart woman who sat at ease in the front seat
and drove her car bareheaded. She left a cloud of dust and a trail
of gasoline behind her. Her tenant threw back his head and sneezed.

"Whew! I sometimes say I'd as lief be _before_ Mrs. Ericson as
behind her. She does beat all! Nearly seventy, and never lets
another soul touch that car. Puts it into commission herself every
morning, and keeps it tuned up by the hitch-bar all day. I never
stop work for a drink o' water that I don't hear her a-churnin' up
the road. I reckon her darter-in-laws never sets down easy nowadays.
Never know when she'll pop in. Mis' Otto, she says to me: 'We're so
afraid that thing'll blow up and do Ma some injury yet, she's so
turrible venturesome.' Says I: 'I wouldn't stew, Mis' Otto; the old
lady'll drive that car to the funeral of every darter-in-law she's
got.' That was after the old woman had jumped a turrible bad
culvert."

The stranger heard vaguely what the old man was saying. Just now he
was experiencing something very much like homesickness, and he was
wondering what had brought it about. The mention of a name or two,
perhaps; the rattle of a wagon along a dusty road; the rank,
resinous smell of sunflowers and ironweed, which the night damp
brought up from the draws and low places; perhaps, more than all,
the dancing lights of the motor that had plunged by. He squared his
shoulders with a comfortable sense of strength.

The wagon, as it jolted westward, climbed a pretty steady upgrade.
The country, receding from the rough river valley, swelled more and
more gently, as if it had been smoothed out by the wind. On one of
the last of the rugged ridges, at the end of a branch road, stood a
grim square house with a tin roof and double porches. Behind the
house stretched a row of broken, wind-racked poplars, and down the
hill-slope to the left straggled the sheds and stables. The old man
stopped his horses where the Ericsons' road branched across a dry
sand creek that wound about the foot of the hill.

"That's the old lady's place. Want I should drive in?"

"No, thank you. I'll roll out here. Much obliged to you. Good
night."

His passenger stepped down over the front wheel, and the old man
drove on reluctantly, looking back as if he would like to see how
the stranger would be received.

As Nils was crossing the dry creek he heard the restive tramp of a
horse coming toward him down the hill. Instantly he flashed out of
the road and stood behind a thicket of wild plum bushes that grew in
the sandy bed. Peering through the dusk, he saw a light horse, under
tight rein, descending the hill at a sharp walk. The rider was a
slender woman--barely visible against the dark hillside--wearing an
old-fashioned derby hat and a long riding-skirt. She sat lightly in
the saddle, with her chin high, and seemed to be looking into the
distance. As she passed the plum thicket her horse snuffed the air
and shied. She struck him, pulling him in sharply, with an angry
exclamation, "_Blázne!_" in Bohemian. Once in the main road, she let
him out into a lope, and they soon emerged upon the crest of high
land, where they moved along the skyline, silhouetted against the
band of faint color that lingered in the west. This horse and rider,
with their free, rhythmical gallop, were the only moving things to
be seen on the face of the flat country. They seemed, in the last
sad light of evening, not to be there accidentally, but as an
inevitable detail of the landscape.

Nils watched them until they had shrunk to a mere moving speck
against the sky, then he crossed the sand creek and climbed the
hill. When he reached the gate the front of the house was dark, but
a light was shining from the side windows. The pigs were squealing
in the hog corral, and Nils could see a tall boy, who carried two
big wooden buckets, moving about among them. Half way between the
barn and the house, the windmill wheezed lazily. Following the path
that ran around to the back porch, Nils stopped to look through the
screen door into the lamp-lit kitchen. The kitchen was the largest
room in the house; Nils remembered that his older brothers used to
give dances there when he was a boy. Beside the stove stood a little
girl with two light yellow braids and a broad, flushed face, peering
anxiously into a frying-pan. In the dining-room beyond, a large,
broad-shouldered woman was moving about the table. She walked with
an active, springy step. Her face was heavy and florid, almost
without wrinkles, and her hair was black at seventy. Nils felt proud
of her as he watched her deliberate activity; never a momentary
hesitation, or a movement that did not tell. He waited until she
came out into the kitchen and, brushing the child aside, took her
place at the stove. Then he tapped on the screen door and entered.

"It's nobody but Nils, Mother. I expect you weren't looking for me."

Mrs. Ericson turned away from the stove and stood staring at him.
"Bring the lamp, Hilda, and let me look."

Nils laughed and unslung his valise. "What's the matter, Mother?
Don't you know me?"

Mrs. Ericson put down the lamp. "You must be Nils. You don't look
very different, anyway."

"Nor you, Mother. You hold your own. Don't you wear glasses yet?"

"Only to read by. Where's your trunk, Nils?"

"Oh, I left that in town. I thought it might not be convenient for
you to have company so near threshing-time."

"Don't be foolish, Nils." Mrs. Ericson turned back to the stove. "I
don't thresh now. I hitched the wheat land onto the next farm and
have a tenant. Hilda, take some hot water up to the company room,
and go call little Eric."

The tow-haired child, who had been standing in mute amazement, took
up the tea-kettle and withdrew, giving Nils a long, admiring look
from the door of the kitchen stairs.

"Who's the youngster?" Nils asked, dropping down on the bench behind
the kitchen stove.

"One of your Cousin Henrik's."

"How long has Cousin Henrik been dead?"

"Six years. There are two boys. One stays with Peter and one with
Anders. Olaf is their guardeen."

There was a clatter of pails on the porch, and a tall, lanky boy
peered wonderingly in through the screen door. He had a fair, gentle
face and big gray eyes, and wisps of soft yellow hair hung down
under his cap. Nils sprang up and pulled him into the kitchen,
hugging him and slapping him on the shoulders. "Well, if it isn't my
kid! Look at the size of him! Don't you know me, Eric?"

The boy reddened under his sunburn and freckles, and hung his head.
"I guess it's Nils," he said shyly.

"You're a good guesser," laughed Nils, giving the lad's hand a
swing. To himself he was thinking: "That's why the little girl
looked so friendly. He's taught her to like me. He was only six when
I went away, and he's remembered for twelve years."

Eric stood fumbling with his cap and smiling. "You look just like I
thought you would," he ventured.

"Go wash your hands, Eric," called Mrs. Ericson. "I've got cob corn
for supper, Nils. You used to like it. I guess you don't get much of
that in the old country. Here's Hilda; she'll take you up to your
room. You'll want to get the dust off you before you eat."

Mrs. Ericson went into the dining-room to lay another plate, and the
little girl came up and nodded to Nils as if to let him know that
his room was ready. He put out his hand and she took it, with a
startled glance up at his face. Little Eric dropped his towel, threw
an arm about Nils and one about Hilda, gave them a clumsy squeeze,
and then stumbled out to the porch.

During supper Nils heard exactly how much land each of his eight
grown brothers farmed, how their crops were coming on, and how much
live stock they were feeding. His mother watched him narrowly as she
talked. "You've got better looking, Nils," she remarked abruptly,
whereupon he grinned and the children giggled. Eric, although he was
eighteen and as tall as Nils, was always accounted a child, being
the last of so many sons. His face seemed childlike, too, Nils
thought, and he had the open, wandering eyes of a little boy. All
the others had been men at his age.

After supper Nils went out to the front porch and sat down on the
step to smoke a pipe. Mrs. Ericson drew a rocking-chair up near him
and began to knit busily. It was one of the few old-world customs
she had kept up, for she could not bear to sit with idle hands.

"Where's little Eric, Mother?"

"He's helping Hilda with the dishes. He does it of his own will; I
don't like a boy to be too handy about the house."

"He seems like a nice kid."

"He's very obedient."

Nils smiled a little in the dark. It was just as well to shift the
line of conversation. "What are you knitting there, Mother?"

"Baby stockings. The boys keep me busy." Mrs. Ericson chuckled and
clicked her needles.

"How many grandchildren have you?"

"Only thirty-one now. Olaf lost his three. They were sickly, like
their mother."

"I supposed he had a second crop by this time!"

"His second wife has no children. She's too proud. She tears about
on horseback all the time. But she'll get caught up with, yet. She
sets herself very high, though nobody knows what for. They were low
enough Bohemians she came of. I never thought much of Bohemians;
always drinking."

Nils puffed away at his pipe in silence, and Mrs. Ericson knitted
on. In a few moments she added grimly: "She was down here to-night,
just before you came. She'd like to quarrel with me and come between
me and Olaf, but I don't give her the chance. I suppose you'll be
bringing a wife home some day."

"I don't know. I've never thought much about it."

"Well, perhaps it's best as it is," suggested Mrs. Ericson
hopefully. "You'd never be contented tied down to the land. There
was roving blood in your father's family, and it's come out in you.
I expect your own way of life suits you best." Mrs. Ericson had
dropped into a blandly agreeable tone which Nils well remembered. It
seemed to amuse him a good deal and his white teeth flashed behind
his pipe. His mother's strategies had always diverted him, even when
he was a boy--they were so flimsy and patent, so illy proportioned
to her vigor and force. "They've been waiting to see which way I'd
jump," he reflected. He felt that Mrs. Ericson was pondering his
case deeply as she sat clicking her needles.

"I don't suppose you've ever got used to steady work," she went on
presently. "Men ain't apt to if they roam around too long. It's a
pity you didn't come back the year after the World's Fair. Your
father picked up a good bit of land cheap then, in the hard times,
and I expect maybe he'd have give you a farm. It's too bad you put
off comin' back so long, for I always thought he meant to do
something by you."

Nils laughed and shook the ashes out of his pipe. "I'd have missed a
lot if I had come back then. But I'm sorry I didn't get back to see
father."

"Well, I suppose we have to miss things at one end or the other.
Perhaps you are as well satisfied with your own doings, now, as
you'd have been with a farm," said Mrs. Ericson reassuringly.

"Land's a good thing to have," Nils commented, as he lit another
match and sheltered it with his hand.

His mother looked sharply at his face until the match burned out.
"Only when you stay on it!" she hastened to say.

Eric came round the house by the path just then, and Nils rose, with
a yawn. "Mother, if you don't mind, Eric and I will take a little
tramp before bed-time. It will make me sleep."

"Very well; only don't stay long. I'll sit up and wait for you. I
like to lock up myself."

Nils put his hand on Eric's shoulder, and the two tramped down the
hill and across the sand creek into the dusty highroad beyond.
Neither spoke. They swung along at an even gait, Nils puffing at his
pipe. There was no moon, and the white road and the wide fields lay
faint in the starlight. Over everything was darkness and thick
silence, and the smell of dust and sunflowers. The brothers followed
the road for a mile or more without finding a place to sit down.
Finally Nils perched on a stile over the wire fence, and Eric sat on
the lower step.

"I began to think you never would come back, Nils," said the boy
softly.

"Didn't I promise you I would?"

"Yes; but people don't bother about promises they make to babies.
Did you really know you were going away for good when you went to
Chicago with the cattle that time?"

"I thought it very likely, if I could make my way."

"I don't see how you did it, Nils. Not many fellows could." Eric
rubbed his shoulder against his brother's knee.

"The hard thing was leaving home--you and father. It was easy
enough, once I got beyond Chicago. Of course I got awful homesick;
used to cry myself to sleep. But I'd burned my bridges."

"You had always wanted to go, hadn't you?"

"Always. Do you still sleep in our little room? Is that cottonwood
still by the window?"

Eric nodded eagerly and smiled up at his brother in the gray
darkness.

"You remember how we always said the leaves were whispering when
they rustled at night? Well, they always whispered to me about the
sea. Sometimes they said names out of the geography books. In a high
wind they had a desperate sound, like something trying to tear
loose."

"How funny, Nils," said Eric dreamily, resting his chin on his hand.
"That tree still talks like that, and 'most always it talks to me
about you."

They sat a while longer, watching the stars. At last Eric whisper

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