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Main-Travelled Roads

by Hamlin Garland · English · Gutenberg #2809 · 508,567 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Main-Travelled Roads

Author: Hamlin Garland


        
Release date: September 1, 2001 [eBook #2809]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2809

Credits: Prepared by David Reed


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAIN-TRAVELLED ROADS ***

Books by Hamlin Garland

Border Edition

    Main-Travelled Roads
    Other Main-Travelled Roads
    Boy Life
    Rose of Dutcher's Coolly
    The Eagle's Heart
    The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop
    Hesper
    Mart Haney's Mate
    Cavanaugh, Forest Rangers
    They of the High Trails
    The Long Trail
    The Forester's Daughter

Regular Edition

    The Light of the Star
    Prarie Folks
    The Shadow World
    Trail of the Gold-Seekers
    The Tyranny of the Dark
    Victor Ollnee's Discipline

Harper & Brothers
Publishers



Other Editions

    Under the Wheel
    Jason Edwards
    A Member of the Third House
    A Little Norsk
    A Spoil of Office
    Prairie Songs
    Crumbling Idols
    Wayside Courtships
    The Spirit of Sweetwater
    Ulysses S. Grant, his life and character
    Her Mountain Lover
    Witch's Gold
    Money Magic
    Moccassin Ranch
    A Son of the Middle Border
    A Daughter of the Middle Border
    A Prairie Mother

Main-Travelled Roads

By
Hamlin Garland

Author of
Other Main-Travelled Roads, etc.

Border Edition



Harper & Brothers
Publishers
New York and London




Main-Travelled Roads

Copyright, 1891, by The Arena Publishing Company
Copyright, 1893, by The Century Co.
Copyright, 1893, 1899, by Hamlin Garland




To

My Father and Mother

Whose Half-Century Pilgrimage on the Main-Travelled Road of Life Has 
Brought Them Only Toil and Deprivation, This Book of Stories Is 
Dedicated By a Son to Whom Every Day Brings a Deepening Sense of His 
Parents' Silent Heroism





The main-travelled road in the West (as everywhere) is hot and dusty in 
summer, and desolate and drear with mud in fall and spring, and in 
winter the winds sweep the snow across it; but it does sometimes cross a
rich meadow where the songs of the larks and bobolinks and blackbirds 
are tangled. Follow it far enough, it may lead past a bend in the river
where the water laughs eternally over its shallows.

Mainly it is long and wearyful, and has a dull little town at one end 
and a home of toil at the other. Like the main-travelled road of life it
is traversed by many classes of people, but the poor and the weary
predominate.




Table of Contents.
Main-Travelled Roads 
Foreword                         xi
Introduction                      1
A Branch Road                     7
Up the Coolly                    67
Among the Corn-Rows             131
The Return of a Private         167
Under the Lion's Paw            195
The Creamery Man                219
A Day's Pleasure                245
Mrs. Ripley's Trip              261
Uncle Ethan Ripley              281
God's Ravens                    301
A "Good-Fellow's" Wife          327




Foreword

In the summer of 1887, after having been three years in Boston, and six
years absent from my old home in northern Iowa, I found myself with
money enough to pay my railway fare to Ordway, South Dakota, where my
father and mother were living, and as it cost very little extra to go by
way of Dubuque and Charles City, I planned to visit Osage, Iowa, and the
farm we had opened on Dry Run prairie in 1871.

Up to this time I had written only a few poems, and some articles
descriptive of boy life on the prairie, although I was doing a good deal
of thinking and lecturing on land reform, and was regarded as a very
intense disciple of Herbert Spencer and Henry George--a singular
combination, as I see it now. On my way westward, that summer day in
1887, rural life presented itself from an entirely new angle. The
ugliness, the endless drudgery, and the loneliness of the farmer's lot
smote me with stern insistence. I was the militant reformer.

The farther I got from Chicago the more depressing the landscape became.
It was bad enough in our former home in Mitchell County, but my pity
grew more intense as I passed from northwest Iowa into southern Dakota.
The houses, bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless plains, the
barbed-wire fences running at right angles, and the towns mere
assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with painted-pine battlement,
produced on me the effect of an almost helpless and sterile poverty.

My dark mood was deepened into bitterness by my father's farm, where I
found my mother imprisoned in a small cabin on the enormous sunburned,
treeless plain, with no expectation of ever living anywhere else.
Deserted by her sons and failing in health, she endured the discomforts
of her life uncomplainingly--but my resentment of "things as they are"
deepened during my talks with her neighbors who were all housed in the
same unshaded cabins in equal poverty and loneliness. The fact that at
twenty-seven I was without power to aid my mother in any substantial way
added to my despairing mood.

My savings for the two years of my teaching in Boston were not
sufficient to enable me to purchase my return ticket, and when my father
offered me a stacker's wages in the harvest field I accepted and for two
weeks or more proved my worth with the fork, which was still
mightier--with me--than the pen.

However, I did not entirely neglect the pen. In spite of the dust and
heat of the wheat ricks I dreamed of poems and stories. My mind teemed
with subjects for fiction, and one Sunday morning I set to work on a
story which had been suggested to me by a talk with my mother, and a few
hours later I read to her (seated on the low sill of that treeless
cottage) the first two thousand words of Mrs. Ripley's Trip, the first
of the series of sketches which became Main Travelled Roads.

I did not succeed in finishing it, however, till after my return to
Boston in September. During the fall and winter of '87 and the winter
and spring of '88, I wrote the most of the stories in Main Travelled
Roads, a novelette for the Century Magazine, and a play called "Under
the Wheel." The actual work of the composition was carried on in the
south attic room of Doctor Cross's house at 21 Seaverns Avenue, Jamaica
Plain.

The mood of bitterness in which these books were written was renewed and
augmented by a second visit to my parents in 1889, for during my stay my
mother suffered a stroke of paralysis due to overwork and the dreadful
heat of the summer. She grew better before the time came for me to
return to my teaching in Boston, but I felt like a sneak as I took my
way to the train leaving my mother and sister on that bleak and
sun-baked plain.

"Old Paps Flaxen," "Jason Edwards," "A Spoil of Office," and most of the
stories gathered into the second volume of Main Travelled Roads were
written in the shadow of these defeats. If they seem unduly austere, let
the reader remember the times in which they were composed. That they
were true of the farms of that day no one can know better than I, for I
was there--a farmer.

Life on the farms of Iowa and Wisconsin--even on the farms of
Dakota--has gained in beauty and security, I will admit, but there are
still wide stretches of territory in Kansas and Nebraska where the
farmhouse is a lonely shelter. Groves and lawns, better roads, the rural
free delivery, the telephone, and the motor car have done much to bring
the farmer into a frame of mind where he is contented with his lot, but
much remains to be done before the stream of young life from the country
to the city can be checked.

The two volumes of Main Travelled Roads can now be taken to be what
William Dean Howells called them, "historical fiction," for they form a
record of the farmer's life as I lived it and studied it. In these two
books is a record of the privations and hardships of the men and women
who subdued the midland wilderness and prepared the way for the present
golden age of agriculture.

H. G.

March 1, 1922.




Introduction

I

An interesting phase of fiction, at present, is the material prosperity
of the short story, which seems to have followed its artistic excellence
among us with uncommon obedience to a law that ought always to prevail.
Until of late the publisher has been able to say to the author, dazzled
and perhaps deceived by his magazine success with short stories, and
fondly intending to make a book of them, "Yes. But collections of short
stories don't sell. The public won't have them. I don't know why; but it
won't."

This was never quite true of the short stories of Mr. Bret Harte, or of
Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, or of Mr. T. B. Aldrich; but it was too true of
the short stories of most other writers. For some reason, or for none,
the very people who liked an author's short stories in the magazine
could not bear them, or would not buy them, when he put several of them
together in a volume. They then became obnoxious, or at least
undesirable; somewhat as human beings, agreeable enough as long as they
are singly domiciled in one's block, become a positive detriment to the
neighborhood when gathered together in a boarding-house. A novel not
half so good by the same author would formerly outsell his collection of
short stories five times over. Perhaps it would still outsell the
stories; we rather think it would; but not in that proportion. The hour
of the short story in book form has struck, apparently, for with all our
love and veneration for publishers, we have never regarded them as
martyrs to literature, and we do not believe they would now be issuing
so many volumes of short stories if these did not pay. Publishers, with
all their virtues, are as distinctly made a little lower than the angels
as any class of mortals we know. They are, in fact, a tentative and
timid kind, never quite happy except in full view of the main chance;
and just at this moment, this chance seems to wear the diversified
physiognomy of the collected short stories. We do not know how it has
happened; we should not at all undertake to say; but it is probably
attributable to a number of causes. It may be the prodigious popularity
of Mr. Kipling, which has broken down all prejudices against the form of
his success. The vogue that Maupassant's tales in the original or in
versions have enjoyed may have had something to do with it. Possibly the
critical recognition of the American supremacy in this sort has helped.
But however it has come about, it is certain that the result has come,
and the publishers are fearlessly adventuring volumes of short stories
on every hand; and not only short stories by authors of established
repute, but by new writers, who would certainly not have found this way
to the public some time ago.

The change by no means indicates that the pleasure in large fiction is
dying out. This remains of as ample gorge as ever. But it does mean that
a quite reasonless reluctance has given way, and that a young writer can
now hope to come under the fire of criticism much sooner than before.
This may not be altogether a blessing; it has its penalties inherent in
the defective nature of criticism, or the critics; but undoubtedly it
gives the young author definition and fixity in the reader's knowledge.
It enables him to continue a short-story writer if he likes, or it
prepares the public not to be surprised at him if he turns out a
novelist.

II

These are advantages, and we must not be impatient of any writer who
continues a short-story writer when he might freely become a novelist.
Now that a writer can profitably do so, he may prefer to grow his
fiction on the dwarf stock. He may plausibly contend that this was the
original stock, and that the novella was a short story many ages before
its name was appropriated by the standard variety, the duodecimo
American, or the three-volume English; that Boccaccio was a world-wide
celebrity five centuries before George Eliot was known to be a woman. To
be sure, we might come back at him with the Greek romancers; we might
ask him what he had to say to the interminable tales of Heliodorus and
Longus, and the rest, and then not let him say.

But no such controversy is necessary to the enjoyment of the half dozen
volumes of short stories at hand, and we gladly postpone it till we have
nothing to talk about. At present we have only too much to talk about in
a book so robust and terribly serious as Mr. Hamlin Garland's volume
called Main-Travelled Roads. That is what they call the highways in the
part of the West that Mr. Garland comes from and writes about; and these
stories are full of the bitter and burning dust, the foul and trampled
slush, of the common avenues of life, the life of the men who hopelessly
and cheerlessly make the wealth that enriches the alien and the idler,
and impoverishes the producer.

If any one is still at a loss to account for that uprising of the
farmers in the West which is the translation of the Peasants' War into
modern and republican terms, let him read Main-Travelled Roads, and he
will begin to understand, unless, indeed, Mr. Garland is painting the
exceptional rather than the average. The stories are full of those
gaunt, grim, sordid, pathetic, ferocious figures, whom our satirists
find so easy to caricature as Hayseeds, and whose blind groping for
fairer conditions is so grotesque to the newspapers and so menacing to
the politicians. They feel that something is wrong, and they know that
the wrong is not theirs. The type caught in Mr. Garland's book is not
pretty; it is ugly and often ridiculous; but it is heart-breaking in its
rude despair.

The story of a farm mortgage, as it is told in the powerful sketch 
"Under the Lion's Paw," is a lesson in political economy, as well as a
tragedy of the darkest cast. "The Return of the Private" is a satire of
the keenest edge, as well as a tender and mournful idyl of the unknown
soldier who comes back after the war with no blare of welcoming trumpets
or flash of streaming flags, but foot-sore, heart-sore, with no stake in
the country he has helped to make safe and rich but the poor man's
chance to snatch an uncertain subsistence from the furrows he left for
the battle-field.

"Up the Coolly," however, is the story which most pitilessly of all
accuses our vaunted conditions, wherein every man has the chance to rise
above his brother and make himself richer than his fellows. It shows us
once for all what the risen man may be, and portrays in his good-natured
selfishness and indifference that favorite ideal of our system. The
successful brother comes back to the old farmstead, prosperous,
handsome, well-dressed, and full of patronizing sentiment for his
boyhood days there, and he cannot understand why his brother, whom hard
work and corroding mortgages have eaten all the joy out of, gives him a
grudging and surly welcome. It is a tremendous situation, and it is the
allegory of the whole world's civilization: the upper dog and the under
dog are everywhere, and the under dog nowhere likes it.

But the allegorical effects are not the primary intent of Mr. Garland's
work: it is a work of art, first of all, and we think of fine art;
though the material will strike many gentilities as coarse and common.
In one of the stories, "Among the Corn-Rows," there is a good deal of
burly, broad-shouldered humor of a fresh and native kind; in "Mrs.
Ripley's Trip" is a delicate touch, like that of Miss Wilkins; but Mr.
Garland's touches are his own, here and elsewhere. He has a certain
harshness and bluntness, an indifference to the more delicate charms of
style, and he has still to learn that though the thistle is full of an
unrecognized poetry, the rose has a poetry, too, that even over-praise
cannot spoil. But he has a fine courage to leave a fact with the reader,
ungarnished and unvarnished, which is almost the rarest trait in an
Anglo-Saxon writer, so infantile and feeble is the custom of our art;
and this attains tragical sublimity in the opening sketch, "A Branch
Road," where the lover who has quarrelled with his betrothed comes back
to find her mismated and miserable, such a farm wife as Mr. Garland has
alone dared to draw, and tempts the broken-hearted drudge away from her
loveless home. It is all morally wrong, but the author leaves you to say
that yourself. He knows that his business was with those two people,
their passions and their probabilities.

W. D. HOWELLS
(In the Editor's Study, "Harper's Magazine").




A Branch Road

"Keep the main-travelled road till you come to a branch leading
off--keep to the right."

I

In the windless September dawn a voice went ringing clear and sweet, a
man's voice, singing a cheap and common air. Yet something in the sound
of it told he was young, jubilant, and a happy lover.

Above the level belt of timber to the east a vast dome of pale
undazzling gold was rising, silently and swiftly. Jays called in the
thickets where the maples flamed amid the green oaks, with irregular
splashes of red and orange. The grass was crisp with frost under the
feet, the road smooth and gray-white in color, the air was indescribably
pure, resonant, and stimulating. No wonder the man sang!

He came into view around the curve in the lane. He had a fork on his
shoulder, a graceful and polished tool. His straw hat was tilted on the
back of his head; his rough, faded coat was buttoned close to the chin,
and he wore thin buckskin gloves on his hands. He looked muscular and
intelligent, and was evidently about twenty-two years of age.

As he walked on, and the sunrise came nearer to him, he stopped his
song. The broadening heavens had a majesty and sweetness that made him
forget the physical joy of happy youth. He grew almost sad with the
vague thoughts and great emotions which rolled in his brain as the
wonder of the morning grew.

He walked more slowly, mechanically following the road, his eyes on the
ever-shifting streaming banners of rose and pale green, which made the
east too glorious for any words to tell. The air was so still it seemed
to await expectantly the coming of the sun.

Then his mind flew back to Agnes. Would she see it? She was at work,
getting breakfast, but he hoped she had time to see it. He was in that
mood, so common to him now, wherein he could not fully enjoy any sight
or sound unless sharing it with her. Far down the road he heard the
sharp clatter of a wagon. The roosters were calling near and far, in
many keys and tunes. The dogs were barking, cattle-bells were jangling
in the wooded pastures, and as the youth passed farmhouses, lights in
the kitchen windows showed that the women were astir about breakfast,
and the sound of voices and the tapping of curry-combs at the barn told
that the men were at their morning chores.

And the east bloomed broader! The dome of gold grew brighter, the faint
clouds here and there flamed with a flush of red. The frost began to
glisten with a reflected color. The youth dreamed as he walked; his
broad face and deep earnest eyes caught and retained some part of the
beauty and majesty of the sky.

But his brow darkened as he passed a farm gate and a young man of about
his own age joined him. The other man was equipped for work like
himself.

"Hello, Will!"

"Hello, Ed!"

"Going down to help Dingman thrash!"

"Yes," replied Will, shortly. It was easy to see he did not welcome
company.

"So'm I. Who's goin' to do your thrashin'--Dave McTurg?"

"Yes, I guess so. Haven't spoken to anybody yet."

They walked on side by side. Will hardly felt like being rudely broken
in on in this way. The two men were rivals, but Will, being the victor,
would have been magnanimous, only he wanted to be alone with his lover's
dream.

"When do you go back to the Sem?" Ed asked after a little.

"Term begins next week. I'll make a break about second week."

"Le's see: you graduate next year, don't yeh?"

"I expect to, if I don't slip up on it."

They walked on side by side, both handsome fellows; Ed a little more
showy in his face, which had a certain clear-cut precision of line, and
a peculiar clear pallor that never browned under the sun. He chewed
vigorously on a quid of tobacco, one of his most noticeable bad habits.

Teams could be heard clattering along on several roads now, and jovial
voices singing. One team coming along rapidly behind the two men, the
driver sung out in good-natured warning, "Get out o' the way, there."
And with a laugh and a chirp spurred his horses to pass them.

Ed, with a swift understanding of the driver's trick, flung out his left
hand and caught the end-gate, threw his fork in and leaped after it.
Will walked on, disdaining attempt to catch the wagon. On all sides now
the wagons of the ploughmen or threshers were getting out into the
fields, with a pounding, rumbling sound.

The pale-red sun was shooting light through the leaves, and warming the
boles of the great oaks that stood in the yard, and melting the frost
off the great gaudy, red and gold striped threshing machine standing
between the stacks. The interest, picturesqueness, of it all got hold of
Will Hannan, accustomed to it as he was. The horses stood about in a
circle, hitched to the ends of the six sweeps, every rod shining with
frost.

The driver was oiling the great tarry cog-wheels underneath. Laughing
fellows were wrestling about the yard. Ed Kinney had scaled the highest
stack, and stood ready to throw the first sheaf. The sun, lighting him
where he stood, made his fork-handle gleam like dull gold. Cheery words,
jests, and snatches of song rose everywhere. Dingman bustled about
giving his orders and placing his men, and the voice of big David
McTurg was heard calling to the men as they raised the long stacker into
place:

"Heave ho, there! Up she rises!"

And, best of all, Will caught a glimpse of a smiling girl-face at the
kitchen window that made the blood beat in his throat.

"Hello, Will!" was the general greeting, given with some constraint by
most of the young fellows, for Will had been going to Rock River to
school for some years, and there was a little feeling of jealousy on the
part of those who pretended to sneer at the "seminary chaps like Will
Hannan and Milton Jennings."

Dingman came up. "Will, I guess you'd better go on the stack with Ed."

"All ready. Hurrah, there!" said David in his soft but resonant bass
voice that always had a laugh in it. "Come, come, every sucker of yeh
git hold o' something. All ready!" He waved his hand at the driver, who
climbed upon his platform. Everybody scrambled into place.

The driver began to talk:

"Chk, chk! All ready, boys! Stiddy there, Dan! Chk, chk! All ready,
boys! Stiddy there, boys! All ready now!" The horses began to strain at
the sweeps. The cylinder began to hum.

"Grab a root there! Where's my band-cutter? Here, you, climb on here!"
And David reached down and pulled Shep Watson up by the shoulder with
his gigantic hand.

Boo-oo-oo-oom, Boo-woo-woo-oom-oom-ow-owm, yarr, yarr! The whirling
cylinder boomed, roared, and snarled as it rose in speed. At last, when
its tone became a rattling yell, David nodded to the pitchers and rasped
his hands together. The sheaves began to fall from the stack; the
band-cutter, knife in hand, slashed the bands in twain, and the feeder
with easy majestic movement gathered them under his arm, rolled them out
into an even belt of entering wheat, on which the cylinder tore with its
smothered, ferocious snarl.

Will was very happy in a quiet way. He enjoyed the smooth roll of his
great muscles, the sense of power in his hands as he lifted, turned, and
swung the heavy sheaves two by two upon the table, where the band-cutter
madly slashed away. His frame, sturdy rather than tall, was nevertheless
lithe, and he made a fine figure to look at, so Agnes thought, as she
came out a moment and bowed and smiled.

This scene, one of the jolliest and most sociable of the Western farm,
had a charm quite aside from human companionship. The beautiful yellow
straw entering the cylinder; the clear yellow-brown wheat pulsing out at
the side; the broken straw, chaff, and dust puffing out on the great
stacker; the cheery whistling and calling of the driver; the keen, crisp
air, and the bright sun somehow weirdly suggestive of the passage of
time.

Will and Agnes had arrived at a tacit understanding of mutual love only
the night before, and Will was powerfully moved to glance often toward
the house, but feared as never before the jokes of his companions. He
worked on, therefore, methodically, eagerly; but his thoughts were on
the future--the rustle of the oak-tree near by, the noise of whose sere
leaves he could distinguish sifting beneath the booming snarl of the
machine, was like the sound of a woman's dress; on the sky were great
fleets of clouds sailing on the rising wind, like merchantmen bound to
some land of love and plenty.

When the Dingmans first came in, only a couple of years before, Agnes
had been at once surrounded by a swarm of suitors. Her pleasant face and
her abounding good-nature made her an instant favorite with all. Will,
however, had disdained to become one of the crowd, and held himself
aloof, as he could easily do, being away at school most of the time.

The second winter, however, Agnes also attended the seminary, and Will
saw her daily, and grew to love her. He had been just a bit jealous of
Ed Kinney all the time, for Ed had a certain rakish grace in dancing and
a dashing skill in handling a team, which made him a dangerous rival.

But, as Will worked beside him all the Monday, he felt so secure in his
knowledge of the caress Agnes had given him at parting the night before
that he was perfectly happy--so happy that he didn't care to talk, only
to work on and dream as he worked.

Shrewd David McTurg had his joke when the machine stopped for a few
minutes. "Well, you fellers do better'n I expected yeh to, after bein'
out so late last night. The first feller I see gappin' has got to treat
to the apples."

"Keep your eye on me," said Shep Wilson.

"You?" laughed one of the others. "Anybody knows if a girl so much as
looked crossways at you, you'd fall in a fit."

"Another thing," said David. "I can't have you fellers carryin' grain
goin' to the house every minute for fried cakes or cookies."

"Now you git out," said Bill Young from the straw pile. "You ain't goin'
to have all the fun to yerself."

Will's blood began to grow hot in his face. If Bill had said much more,
or mentioned Agnes by name, he would have silenced him. To have this
rough joking come so close upon the holiest and most exquisite evening
of his life was horrible. It was not the words they said, but the tones
they used, that vulgarized it all. He breathed a sigh of relief when the
sound of the machine began again.

This jesting made him more wary, and when the call for dinner sounded
and he knew he was going to see her, he shrank from it. He took no part
in the race of the dust-blackened, half-famished men to get at the
washing-place first. He took no part in the scurry to get seats at the
first table.

Threshing-time was always a season of great trial to the housewife. To
have a dozen men with the appetites of dragons to cook for, in addition
to their other everyday duties, was no small task for a couple of women.
Preparations usually began the night before with a raid on a hen-roost,
for "biled chickun" formed the pièce de resistance of the dinner. The
table, enlarged by boards, filled the sitting room. Extra seats were
made out of planks placed on chairs, and dishes were borrowed from
neighbors, who came for such aid in their turn.

Sometimes the neighboring women came in to help; but Agnes and her
mother were determined to manage the job alone this year, and so the
girl, in a neat dark dress, her eyes shining, her cheeks flushed with
the work, received the men as they came in, dusty, coatless, with grime
behind their ears, but a jolly good smile on every face.

Most of them were farmers of the neighborhood, and her schoolmates. The
only one she shrank from was Bill Young, with his hard, glittering eyes
and red, sordid face. She received their jokes, their noise, with a
silent smile which showed her even teeth and dimpled her round cheek.
"She was good for sore eyes," as one of the fellows said to Shep. She
seemed deliciously sweet and dainty to these roughly dressed fellows.

They ranged along the table with a great deal of noise, boots thumping,
squeaking, knives and forks rattling, voices bellowing out.

"Now hold on, Steve! Can't hev yeh so near that chickun!"

"Move along, Shep! I want to be next to the kitchen door! I won't get
nothin' with you on that side o' me."

"Oh, that's too thin! I see what you're--"

"No, I won't need any sugar, if you just smile into it." This from
gallant David, greeted with roars of laughter.

"Now, Dave, s'pose your wife 'ud hear o' that?"

"She'd snatch 'im bald-headed, that's what she'd do."

"Say, somebody drive that ceow down this way," said Bill.

"Don't get off that drive! It's too old," criticised Shep, passing the
milk-jug.

Potatoes were seized, cut in halves, sopped in gravy, and taken one,
two! Corn cakes went into great jaws like coal into a steam-engine.
Knives in the right hand cut meat and scooped gravy up. Great, muscular,
grimy, but wholesome fellows they were, feeding like ancient Norse, and
capable of working like demons. They were deep in the process,
half-hidden by steam from the potatoes and stew, in less than sixty
seconds after their entrance.

With a shrinking from the comments of the others upon his regard for
Agnes, Will assumed a reserved and almost haughty air toward his
fellow-workmen, and a curious coldness toward her. As he went in, she
came forward smiling brightly.

"There's one more place, Will." A tender, involuntary droop in her voice
betrayed her, and Will felt a wave of hot blood surge over him as the
rest roared.

"Ha, ha! Oh, there'd be a place for him!"

"Don't worry, Will! Always room for you here!"

Will took his seat with a sudden, angry flame.

"Why can't she keep it from these fools?" was his thought. He didn't
even thank her for showing him the chair.

She flushed vividly, but smiled back. She was so proud and happy she
didn't care very much if they did know it. But as Will looked at her
with that quick, angry glance, she was hurt and puzzled. She redoubled
her exertions to please him, and by so doing added to the amusement of
the crowd that gnawed chicken-bones, rattled cups, knives, and forks,
and joked as they ate with small grace and no material loss of time.

Will remained silent through it all, eating his potato, in marked
contrast to the others, with his fork instead of his knife, and drinking
his tea from his cup rather than from his saucer--"finnickies" which did
not escape the notice of the girl nor the sharp eyes of the other
workmen.

"See that? That's the way we do down to the Sem! See? Fork for pie in
yer right hand! Hey? I can't do it? Watch me."

When Agnes leaned over to say, "Won't you have some more tea, Will?"
they nudged each other and grinned. "Aha! What did I tell you?"

Agnes saw at last that for some reason Will didn't want her to show her
regard for him--that he was ashamed of it in some way, and she was
wounded. To cover it up, she resorted to the natural device of smiling
and chatting with the others. She asked Ed if he wouldn't have another
piece of pie.

"I will--with a fork, please."

"This is 'bout the only place you can use a fork," said Bill Young,
anticipating a laugh by his own broad grin.

"Oh, that's too old," said Shep Watson. "Don't drag that out agin. A man
that'll eat seven taters--"

"Shows who does the work."

"Yes, with his jaws," put in Jim Wheelock, the driver.

"If you'd put in a little more work with soap 'n water before comin' in
to dinner, it 'ud be a religious idee," said David.

"It ain't healthy to wash."

"Well, you'll live forever, then."

"He ain't washed his face sence I knew 'im."

"Oh, that's a little too tough! He washes once a week," said Ed Kinney.

"Back of his ears?" inquired David, who was munching a doughnut, his
black eyes twinkling with fun.

"Yep."

"What's the cause of it?"

"Dade says she won't kiss 'im if he don't."

Everybody roared.

"Good fer Dade! I wouldn't if I was in her place."

Wheelock gripped a chicken-leg imperturbably, and left it bare as a
toothpick with one or two bites at it. His face shone in two clean
sections around his nose and mouth. Behind his ears the dirt lay
undisturbed. The grease on his hands could not be washed off.

Will began to suffer now because Agnes treated the other fellows too
well. With a lover's exacting jealousy, he wanted her in some way to
hide their tenderness from the rest, but to show her indifference to
men like Young and Kinney. He didn't stop to inquire of himself the
justice of such a demand, nor just how it was to be done. He only
insisted she ought to do it.

He rose and left the table at the end of his dinner without having
spoken to her, without even a tender, significant glance, and he knew,
too, that she was troubled and hurt. But he was suffering. It seemed as
if he had lost something sweet, lost it irrecoverably.

He noticed Ed Kinney and Bill Young were the last to come out, just
before the machine started up again after dinner, and he saw them pause
outside the threshold and laugh back at Agnes standing in the doorway.
Why couldn't she keep those fellows at a distance, not go out of her way
to bandy jokes with them?

In some way the elation of the morning was gone. He worked on doggedly
now, without looking up, without listening to the leaves, without seeing
the sunlighted clouds. Of course he didn't think that she meant anything
by it, but it irritated him and made him unhappy. She gave herself too
freely.

Toward the middle of the afternoon the machine stopped for some
repairing; and while Will lay on his stack in the bright yellow
sunshine, shelling wheat in his hands and listening to the wind in the
oaks, he heard his name and her name mentioned on the other side of the
machine, where the measuring-box stood. He listened.

"She's pretty sweet on him, ain't she? Did yeh notus how she stood
around over him?"

"Yes; an' did yeh see him when she passed the cup o' tea down over his
shoulder?"

Will got up, white with wrath, as they laughed.

"Someway he didn't seem to enjoy it as I would. I wish she'd reach her
arm over my neck that way."

Will walked around the machine, and came on the group lying on the chaff
near the straw-pile.

"Say, I want you fellers to understand that I won't have any more of
this talk. I won't have it."

There was a dead silence. Then Bill Young got up.

"What yeh goin' to do about ut?" he sneered.

"I'm going to stop it."

The wolf rose in Young. He moved forward, his ferocious soul flaming
from his eyes.

"W'y, you damned seminary dude, I can break you in two!"

An answering glare came into Will's eyes. He grasped and slightly shook
his fork, which he had brought with him unconsciously.

"If you make one motion at me, I'll smash your head like an egg-shell!"
His voice was low but terrific. There was a tone in it that made his own
blood stop in his veins. "If you think I'm going to roll around on this
ground with a hyena like you, you've mistaken your man. I'll kill you,
but I won't fight with such men as you are."

Bill quailed and slunk away, muttering some epithet like "coward."

"I don't care what you call me, but just remember what I say: you keep
your tongue off that girl's affairs."

"That's the talk!" said David. "Stand up for your girl always, but don't
use a fork. You can handle him without that."

"I don't propose to try," said Will, as he turned away. As he did so, he
caught a glimpse of Ed Kinney at the well, pumping a pail of water for
Agnes, who stood beside him, the sun on her beautiful yellow hair. She
was laughing at something Ed was saying as he slowly moved the handle up
and down.

Instantly, like a foaming, turbid flood, his rage swept out toward her.
"It's all her fault," he thought, grinding his teeth. "She's a fool.
If she'd hold herself in, like other girls! But no; she must smile and
smile at everybody." It was a beautiful picture, but it sent a shiver
through him.

He worked on with teeth set, white with rage. He had an impulse that
would have made him assault her with words as with a knife. He was
possessed of a terrible passion which was hitherto latent in him, and
which he now felt to be his worst self. But he was powerless to
exorcise it. His set teeth ached with the stress of his muscular
tension, and his eyes smarted with the strain.

He had always prided himself on being cool, calm, above these absurd
quarrels which his companions had indulged in. He didn't suppose he
could be so moved. As he worked on, his rage settled into a sort of
stubborn bitterness--stubborn bitterness of conflict between this evil
nature and his usual self. It was the instinct of possession, the
organic feeling of proprietorship of a woman, which rose to the surface
and mastered him. He was not a self-analyst, of course, being young,
though he was more introspective than the ordinary farmer.

He had a great deal of time to think it over as he worked on there,
pitching the heavy bundles, but still he did not get rid of the
miserable desire to punish Agnes; and when she came out, looking very
pretty in her straw hat, and came around near his stack, he knew she
came to see him, to have an explanation, a smile; and yet he worked away
with his hat pulled over his eyes, hardly noticing her.

Ed went over to the edge of the stack and chatted with her; and
she--poor girl!--feeling Will's neglect, could only put a good face on
the matter, and show that she didn't mind it, by laughing back at Ed.

All this Will saw, though he didn't appear to be looking. And when Jim
Wheelock--Dirty Jim--with his whip in his hand, came up and playfully
pretended to pour oil on her hair, and she laughingly struck at him with
a handful of straw, Will wouldn't have looked at her if she had called
him by name.

She looked so bright and charming in her snowy apron and her boy's straw
hat tipped jauntily over one pink ear, that David and Steve and Bill,
and even Shep, found a way to get a word with her, and the poor fellows
in the high straw-pile looked their disappointment and shook their forks
in mock rage at the lucky dogs on the ground. But Will worked on like a
fiend, while the dapples of light and shade fell on the bright face of
the merry girl.

To save his soul from hell-flames he couldn't have gone over there and
smiled at her. It was impossible. A wall of bronze seemed to have arisen
between them. Yesterday--last night--seemed a dream. The clasp of her
hands at his neck, the touch of her lips, were like the caresses of an
ideal in some revery long ago.

As night drew on the men worked with a steadier, more mechanical action.
No one spoke now. Each man was intent on his work. No one had any
strength or breath to waste. The driver on his power, changed his weight
on weary feet and whistled and sang at the tired horses. The feeder,
his face gray with dust, rolled the grain into the cylinder so evenly,
so steady, so swiftly that it ran on with a sullen, booming roar. Far up
on the straw-pile the stackers worked with the steady, rhythmic action
of men rowing a boat, their figures looming vague and dim in the flying
dust and chaff, outlined against the glorious yellow and orange-tinted
clouds.

"Phe-e-eew-ee," whistled the driver with the sweet, cheery, rising notes
of a bird. "Chk, chk, chk! Phe-e-eew-e! Go on there, boys! Chk, chk,
chk! Step up there, Dan, step up! (Snap!) Phe-e-eew-ee! G'-wan--g'-wan, 
g'-wan! Chk, chk, chk! Wheest, wheest, wheest! Chk, chk!"

In the house the women were setting the table for supper. The sun had
gone down behind the oaks, flinging glorious rose-color and orange
shadows along the edges of the slate-blue clouds. Agnes stopped her work
at the kitchen window to look up at the sky, and cry silently. "What was
the matter with Will?" She felt a sort of distrust of him now. She
thought she knew him so well; but now he was so strange.

"Come, Aggie," said Mrs. Dingman, "they're gettin' 'most down to the
bottom of the stack. They'll be pilin' in here soon."

"Phe-e-eew-ee! G'-wan, Doll! G'-wan, boys! Chk, chk, chk! Phe-e-eew-ee!"
called the driver out in the dusk, cheerily swinging the whip over the
horses' backs. Boom-oo-oo-oom! roared the machine, with a muffled,
monotonous, solemn tone. "G'-wan, boys! G'-wan, g'-wan!"

Will had worked unceasingly all day. His muscles ached with fatigue. His
hands trembled. He clenched his teeth, however, and worked on,
determined not to yield. He wanted them to understand that he could do
as much pitching as any of them, and read Cæsar's Commentaries beside.
It seemed as if each bundle were the last he could raise. The sinews of
his wrist pained him so; they seemed swollen to twice their natural
size. But still he worked on grimly, while the dusk fell and the air
grew chill.

At last the bottom bundle was pitched up, and he got down on his knees
to help scrape the loose wheat into baskets. What a sweet relief it was
to kneel down, to release the fork, and let the worn and cramping
muscles settle into rest! A new note came into the driver's voice, a
soothing tone, full of kindness and admiration for the work his teams
had done.

"Wo-o-o, lads! Stiddy-y-y, boys! Wo-o-o, there, Dan. Stiddy, stiddy, old
man! Ho, there!" The cylinder took on a lower key, with short, rising
yells, as it ran empty for a moment. The horses had been going so long
that they came to a stop reluctantly. At last David called, "Turn out!"
The men seized the ends of the sweep, David uncoupled the tumbling-rods,
and Shep slowly shoved a sheaf of grain into the cylinder, choking it
into silence.

The stillness and the dusk were very impressive. So long had the
bell-metal cog-wheel sung its deafening song into Will's ear that, as he
walked away into the dusk, Will had a weird feeling of being suddenly
deaf, and his legs were so numb that he could hardly feel the earth. He
stumbled away like a man paralyzed.

He took out his handkerchief, wiped the dust from his face as best he
could, shook his coat, dusted his shoulders with a grain-sack, and was
starting away, when Mr. Dingman, a rather feeble, elderly man, came up.

"Come, Will, supper's all ready. Go in and eat."

"I guess I'll go home to supper."

"Oh, no; that won't do. The women'll be expecting you to stay."

The men were laughing at the well, the warm yellow light shone from the
kitchen, the chill air making it seem very inviting, and she was
there--waiting! But the demon rose in him. He knew Agnes would expect
him, that she would cry that night with disappointment, but his face
hardened. "I guess I'll go home," he said, and his tone was relentless.
He turned and walked away, hungry, tired--so tired he stumbled, and so
unhappy he could have wept.

II

On Thursday the county fair was to be held. The fair is one of the
gala-days of the year in the country districts of the West, and one of
the times when the country lover rises above expense to the extravagance
of hiring a top-buggy, in which to take his sweetheart to the
neighboring town.

It was customary to prepare for this long beforehand, for the demand for
top-buggies was so great the livery-men grew dictatorial, and took no
chances. Slowly but surely the country beaux began to compete with the
clerks, and in many cases actually outbid them, as they furnished their
own horses and could bid higher, in consequence, on the carriages.

Will had secured his brother's "rig," and early on Thursday morning he
was at work, busily washing the mud from the carriage, dusting the
cushions, and polishing up the buckles and rosettes on his horses'
harnesses. It was a beautiful, crisp, clear dawn--the ideal day for a
ride; and Will was singing as he worked. He had regained his real self,
and, having passed through a bitter period of shame, was now joyous with
anticipation of forgiveness. He looked forward to the day, with its
chances of doing a thousand little things to show his regret and his
love.

He had not seen Agnes since Monday; Tuesday he did not go back to help
thresh, and Wednesday he had been obliged to go to town to see about
board for the coming term; but he felt sure of her. It had all been
arranged the Sunday before; she'd expect him, and he was to call at
eight o'clock.

He polished up the colts with merry tick-tack of the brush and comb, and
after the last stroke on their shining limbs, threw his tools in the box
and went to the house.

"Pretty sharp last night," said his brother John, who was scrubbing his
face at the cistern.

"Should say so by that rim of ice," Will replied, dipping his hands into
the icy water.

"I ought 'o stay home to-day and dig 'tates," continued the older man,
thoughtfully, as they went into the woodshed and wiped consecutively on
the long roller-towel. "Some o' them Early Rose lay right on top o' the
ground. They'll get nipped, sure."

"Oh, I guess not. You'd better go, Jack; you don't get away very often.
And then it would disappoint Nettie and the children so. Their little
hearts are overflowing," he ended, as the door opened and two sturdy
little boys rushed out.

"B'ekfuss, poppa; all yeady!"

The kitchen table was set near the stove; the window let in the sun, and
the smell of sizzling sausages and the aroma of coffee filled the room.

The kettle was doing its duty cheerily, and the wife, with flushed face
and smiling eyes, was hurrying to and fro, her heart full of
anticipation of the day's outing.

There was a hilarity almost like some strange intoxication on the part
of the two children. They danced and chattered and clapped their chubby
brown hands and ran to the windows ceaselessly.

"Is yuncle Will goin' yide nour buggy?"

"Yus; the buggy and the colts."

"Is he goin' to take his girl?"

Will blushed a little and John roared.

"Yes, I'm goin'--"

"Is Aggie your girl?"

"H'yer! h'yer! young man," called John, "you're gettin' personal."

"Well, set up!" said Nettie, and with a good deal of clatter they drew
around the cheerful table.

Will had already begun to see the pathos, the pitiful significance of
his great joy over a day's outing, and he took himself a little to task
at his own selfish freedom. He resolved to stay at home some time and
let Nettie go in his place. A few hours in the middle of the day on
Sunday, three or four holidays in summer; the rest of the year, for this
cheerful little wife and her patient husband, was made up of work--work
which accomplished little and brought them almost nothing that was
beautiful.

While they were eating breakfast, teams began to clatter by, huge
lumber-wagons with three seats across, and a boy or two jouncing up and
down with the dinner baskets near the end-gate. The children rushed to
the window each time to announce who it was and how many there were in.

But as Johnny said "firteen" each time, and Ned wavered between "seven"
and "sixteen," it was doubtful if they could be relied upon. They had
very little appetite, so keen was their anticipation of the ride and the
wonderful sights before them. Their little hearts shuddered with joy at
every fresh token of preparation--a joy that made Will say, "Poor little
men!"

They vibrated between the house and the barn while the chores were being
finished, and their happy cries started the young roosters into a
renewed season of crowing. And when at last the wagon was brought out
and the horses hitched to it, they danced like mad sprites.

After they had driven away, Will brought out the colts, hitched them in,
and drove them to the hitching-post. Then he leisurely dressed himself
in his best suit, blacked his boots with considerable exertion, and at
about 7:30 o'clock climbed into his carriage and gathered up the reins.

He was quite happy again. The crisp, bracing air, the strong pull of the
spirited young team, put all thought of sorrow behind him. He had
planned it all out. He would first put his arm round her and kiss
her--there would not need to be any words to tell her how sorry and
ashamed he was. She would know!

Now, when he was alone and going toward her on a beautiful morning, the
anger and bitterness of Monday fled away, became unreal, and the sweet
dream of the Sunday parting grew the reality. She was waiting for him
now. She had on her pretty blue dress, and the wide hat that always made
her look so arch. He had said about eight o'clock.

The swift team was carrying him along the cross-road, which was little
travelled, and he was alone with his thoughts. He fell again upon his
plans. Another year at school for them both, and then he'd go into a law
office. Judge Brown had told him he'd give him--

"Whoa! Ho!"

There was a swift lurch that sent him flying over the dasher. A confused
vision of a roadside ditch full of weeds and bushes, and then he felt
the reins in his hands and heard the snorting horses trample on the hard
road.

He rose dizzy, bruised, and covered with dust. The team he held securely
and soon quieted. The cause of the accident was plain; the right
fore-wheel had come off, letting the front of the buggy drop. He
unhitched the excited team from the carriage, drove them to the fence
and tied them securely, then went back to find the wheel, and the burr
whose failure to hold its place had done all the mischief. He soon had
the wheel on, but to find the burr was a harder task. Back and forth he
ranged, looking, scraping in the dust, searching the weeds.

He knew that sometimes a wheel will run without the burr for many rods
before coming off, and so each time he extended his search. He traversed
the entire half mile several times, each time his rage and
disappointment getting more bitter. He ground his teeth in a fever of
vexation and dismay.

He had a vision of Agnes waiting, wondering why he did not come. It was
this vision that kept him from seeing the burr in the wheel-track,
partly covered by a clod. Once he passed it looking wildly at his watch,
which was showing nine o'clock. Another time he passed it with eyes
dimmed with a mist that was almost tears of anger.

There is no contrivance that will replace an axle-burr, and farm-yards
have no unused axle-burrs, and so Will searched. Each moment he said: 
"I'll give it up, get onto one of the horses, and go down and tell her."
But searching for a lost axle-burr is like fishing; the searcher expects
each moment to find it. And so he groped, and ran breathlessly,
furiously, back and forth, and at last kicked away the clod that covered
it, and hurried, hot and dusty, cursing his stupidity, back to the team.

It was ten o'clock as he climbed again into the buggy, and started his
team on a swift trot down the road. What would she think? He saw her now
with tearful eyes and pouting lips. She was sitting at the window, with
hat and gloves on; the rest had gone, and she was waiting for him.

But she'd know something had happened, because he had promised to be
there at eight. He had told her what team he'd have. (He had forgotten
at this moment the doubt and distrust he had given her on Monday.) She'd
know he'd surely come.

But there was no smiling or tearful face watching at the window as he
came down the lane at a tearing pace, and turned into the yard. The
house was silent, and the curtains down. The silence sent a chill to his
heart. Something rose up in his throat to choke him.

"Agnes!" he called. "Hello! I'm here at last!"

There was no reply. As he sat there the part he had played on Monday
came back to him. She may be sick! he thought, with a cold thrill of
fear.

An old man came around the corner of the house with a potato fork in his
hands, his teeth displayed in a grin.

"She ain't here. She's gone."

"Gone!"

"Yes--more'n an hour ago."

"Who'd she go with?"

"Ed Kinney," said the old fellow, with a malicious grin. "I guess your
goose is cooked."

Will lashed the horses into a run, and swung round the yard and out of
the gate. His face was white as a dead man's, and his teeth were set
like a vice. He glared straight ahead. The team ran wildly, steadily
homeward, while their driver guided them unconsciously without seeing
them. His mind was filled with a tempest of rages, despairs, and shames.

That ride he will never forget. In it he threw away all his plans. He
gave up his year's schooling. He gave up his law aspirations. He
deserted his brother and his friends. In the dizzying whirl of passions
he had only one clear idea--to get away, to go West, to escape from the
sneers and laughter of his neighbors, and to make her suffer by it all.

He drove into the yard, did not stop to unharness the team, but rushed
into the house, and began packing his trunk. His plan was formed. He
would drive to Cedarville, and hire some one to bring the team back. He
had no thought of anything but the shame, the insult, she had put upon
him. Her action on Monday took on the same levity it wore then, and
excited him in the same way. He saw her laughing with Ed over his
dismay. He sat down and wrote a letter to her at last--a letter that
came from the ferocity of the mediæval savage in him:

"It you want to go to hell with Ed Kinney, you can. I won't say a word.
That's where he'll take you. You won't see me again."

This he signed and sealed, and then he bowed his head and wept like a
girl. But his tears did not soften the effect of the letter. It went as
straight to its mark as he meant it should. It tore a seared and ragged
path to an innocent, happy heart, and he took a savage pleasure in the
thought of it as he rode away in the cars toward the South.

III

The seven years lying between 1880 and 1887 made a great change in Rock
River and in the adjacent farming land. Signs changed and firms went out
of business with characteristic Western ease of shift. The trees grew
rapidly, dwarfing the houses beneath them, and contrasts of newness and
decay thickened.

Will found the country changed, as he walked along the dusty road from
Rock River toward "The Corners." The landscape was at its fairest and
liberalest, with its seas of corn, deep-green and moving with a mournful
rustle, in sharp contrast to its flashing blades; its gleaming fields of
barley, and its wheat already mottled with soft gold in the midst of its
pea-green.

The changes were in the hedges, grown higher, in the greater
predominance of cornfields and cattle pastures, and especially in the
destruction of homes. As he passed on, Will saw the grass growing and
cattle feeding on a dozen places where homes had once stood. They had
given place to the large farm and the stock-raiser. Still the whole
scene was bountiful and beautiful to the eye.

It was especially grateful to Will, for he had spent nearly all his
years of absence among the rocks, treeless swells, and bleak cliffs of
the Southwest. The crickets rising before his dusty feet appeared to him
something sweet and suggestive, and the cattle feeding in the clover
moved him to deep thought--they were so peaceful and slow motioned.

As he reached a little popple tree by the roadside, he stopped, removed
his broad-brimmed hat, put his elbows on the fence, and looked hungrily
upon the scene. The sky was deeply blue, with only here and there a
huge, heavy, slow-moving, massive, sharply outlined cloud sailing like a
berg of ice in a shoreless sea of azure.

In the fields the men were harvesting the ripened oats and barley, and
the sound of their machines clattering, now low, now loud, came to his
ears. Flies buzzed near him, and a kingbird clattered overhead. He
noticed again, as he had many a time when a boy, that the softened sound
of the far-off reaper was at times exactly like the hum of a bluebottle
fly buzzing heedlessly about his ears.

A slender and very handsome young man was shocking grain near the fence,
working so desperately he did not see Will until greeted by him. He
looked up, replied to the greeting, but kept on until he had finished
his last stook; then he came to the shade of the tree and took off his
hat.

"Nice day to sit under a tree and fish."

Will smiled. "I ought to know you, I suppose; I used to live here years
ago."

"Guess not; we came in three years ago."

The young man was quick-spoken and pleasant to look at. Will felt freer
with him.

"Are the Kinneys still living over there?" He nodded at a group of large
buildings.

"Tom lives there. Old man lives with Ed. Tom ousted the old man some
way, nobody seems to know how, and so he lives with Ed."

Will wanted to ask after Agnes, but hardly felt able. "I s'pose John
Hannan is on his old farm?"

"Yes. Got a good crop this year."

Will looked again at the fields of rustling wheat over which the clouds
rippled, and said with an air of conviction: "This lays over Arizony,
dead sure."

"You're from Arizony, then?"

"Yes--a good ways from it," Will replied, in a way that stopped further
question. "Good luck!" he added, as he walked on down the road toward
the creek, musing.

"And the spring--I wonder if that's there yet. I'd like a drink." The
sun seemed hotter than at noon, and he walked slowly. At the bridge that
spanned the meadow brook, just where it widened over a sandy ford, he
paused again. He hung over the rail and looked at the minnows swimming
there.

"I wonder if they're the same identical chaps that used to boil and
glitter there when I was a boy--looks so. Men change from one generation
to another, but the fish remain the same. The same eternal procession of
types. I suppose Darwin 'ud say their environment remains the same."

He hung for a long time over the railing, thinking of a vast number of
things, mostly vague, flitting things, looking into the clear depths of
the brook, and listening to the delicious liquid note of a blackbird
swinging on the willow. Red lilies starred the grass with fire, and
golden-rod and chicory grew everywhere; purple and orange and
yellow-green the prevailing tints.

Suddenly a water-snake wriggled across the dark pool above the ford and
the minnows disappeared under the shadow of the bridge. Then Will
sighed, lifted his head and walked on. There seemed to be something
prophetic in it, and he drew a long breath. That's the way his plans
broke and faded away.

Human life does not move with the regularity of a clock. In living there
are gaps and silences when the soul stands still in its flight through
abysses--and there come times of trial and times of struggle when we
grow old without knowing it. Body and soul change appallingly.

Seven years of hard, busy life had made changes in Will.

His face had grown bold, resolute, and rugged; some of its delicacy and
all of its boyish quality was gone. His figure was stouter, erect as of
old, but less graceful. He bore himself like a man accustomed to look
out for himself in all kinds of places. It was only at times that there
came into his deep eyes a preoccupied, almost sad, look which showed
kinship with his old self.

This look was on his face as he walked toward the clump of trees on the
right of the road.

He reached the grove of popple trees and made his way at once to the
spring. When he saw it, he was again shocked. They had allowed it to
fill with leaves and dirt!

Overcome by the memories of the past, he flung himself down on the cool
and shadowy bank, and gave himself up to the bitter-sweet reveries of a
man returning to his boyhood's home. He was filled somehow with a
strange and powerful feeling of the passage of time; with a vague
feeling of the mystery and elusiveness of human life. The leaves
whispered it overhead, the birds sang it in chorus with the insects, and
far above, in the measureless spaces of sky, the hawk told it in the
silence and majesty of his flight from cloud to cloud.

It was a feeling hardly to be expressed in words--one of those emotions
whose springs lie far back in the brain. He lay so still the chipmunks
came curiously up to his very feet, only to scurry away when he stirred
like a sleeper in pain.

He had cut himself off entirely from the life at The Corners. He had
sent money home to John, but had concealed his own address carefully.
The enormity of his folly now came back to him, racking him till he
groaned.

He heard the patter of feet and the half-mumbled monologue of a running
child. He roused up and faced a small boy, who started back in terror
like a wild fawn. He was deeply surprised to find a man there, where
only boys and squirrels now came. He stuck his fist in his eye, and was
backing away when Will spoke.

"Hold on, sonny! Nobody's hit you. Come, I ain't goin' to eat yeh." He
took a bit of money from his pocket. "Come here and tell me your name. I
want to talk with you."

The boy crept upon the dime.

Will smiled. "You ought to be a Kinney. What is your name?"

"Tomath Dickinthon Kinney. I'm thix and a half. I've got a colt," lisped
the youngster, breathlessly, as he crept toward the money.

"Oh, you are, eh? Well, now, are you Tom's boy, or Ed's?"

"Tomth's boy. Uncle Ed heth got a little--"

"Ed got a boy?"

"Yeth, thir--a lil baby. Aunt Agg letth me hold 'im."

"Agg! Is that her name?"

"Tha'th what Uncle Ed callth her."

The man's head fell, and it was a long time before he asked his next
question.

"How is she anyhow?"

"Purty well," piped the boy, with a prolongation of the last words into
a kind of chirp. "She'th been thick, though," he added.

"Been sick? How long?"

"Oh, a long time. But she ain't thick abed; she'th awful poor, though.
Gran'pa thayth she'th poor ath a rake."

"Oh, he does, eh?"

"Yeth, thir. Uncle Ed he jawth her, then she crieth."

Will's anger and remorse broke out in a groaning curse. "O my God! I see
it all. That great lunkin houn' has made life a hell for her." Then that
letter came back to his mind--he had never been able to put it out of
his mind--he never would till he saw her and asked her pardon.

"Here, my boy, I want you to tell me some more. Where does your Aunt
Agnes live?"

"At gran'pa'th. You know where my gran'pa livth?"

"Well, you do. Now I want you to take this letter to her. Give it to
her." He wrote a little note and folded it. "Now dust out o' here."

The boy slipped away through the trees like a rabbit; his little brown
feet hardly rustled. He was like some little wood-animal. Left alone,
the man fell back into a revery which lasted till the shadows fell on
the thick little grove around the spring. He rose at last, and taking
his stick in hand, walked out to the wood again and stood there gazing
at the sky. He seemed loath to go farther. The sky was full of
flame-colored clouds floating in a yellow-green sea, where bars of faint
pink streamed broadly away.

As he stood there, feeling the wind lift his hair, listening to the
crickets' ever-present crying, and facing the majesty of space, a
strange sadness and despair came into his eyes.

Drawing a quick breath, he leaped the fence and was about going on up
the road, when he heard, at a little distance, the sound of a drove of
cattle approaching, and he stood aside to allow them to pass. They
snuffed and shied at the silent figure by the fence, and hurried by with
snapping heels--a peculiar sound that made Will smile with pleasure.

An old man was driving the cows, crying out:

"St--boy, there! Go on there! Whay, boss!"

Will knew that hard-featured, wiry old man, now entering his second
childhood and beginning to limp painfully. He had his hands full of hard
clods which he threw impatiently at the lumbering animals.

"Good-evening, uncle!"

"I ain't y'r uncle, young man."

His dim eyes did not recognize the boy he had chased out of his plum
patch years before.

"I don't know yeh, neither," he added.

"Oh, you will, later on. I'm from the East. I'm a sort of a relative to
John Hannan."

"I want 'o know if y' be!" the old man exclaimed, peering closer.

"Yes. I'm just up from Rock River. John's harvesting, I s'pose?"

"Yus."

"Where's the youngest one--Will?"

"William? Oh! he's a bad aig--he lit out f'r the West somewhere. He was
a hard boy. He stole a hatful o' my plums once. He left home kind o'
sudden. He! he! I s'pose he was purty well cut up jest about them days."

"How's that?"

The old man chuckled.

"Well, y' see, they was both courtin' Agnes then, an' my son cut William
out. Then William he lit out f'r the West, Arizony, 'r California, 'r
somewhere out West. Never been back sence."

"Ain't, heh?"

"No. But they say he's makin' a terrible lot o' money," the old man said
in a hushed voice. "But the way he makes it is awful scaly. I tell my
wife if I had a son like that an' he'd send me home a bushel-basket o'
money, earnt like that, I wouldn't touch finger to it--no sir!"

"You wouldn't? Why?"

"'Cause it ain't right. It ain't made right noway, you--"

"But how is it made? What's the feller's trade?"

"He's a gambler--that's his trade! He plays cards, and every cent is
bloody. I wouldn't touch such money nohow you could fix it."

"Wouldn't, heh?" The young man straightened up. "Well, look-a-here, old
man: did you ever hear of a man foreclosing a mortgage on a widow and
two boys, getting a farm f'r one quarter what it was really worth? You
damned old hypocrite! I know all about you and your whole tribe--you old
blood-sucker!"

The old man's jaw fell; he began to back away.

"Your neighbors tell some good stories about you. Now skip along after
those cows, or I'll tickle your old legs for you!"

The old man, appalled and dazed at this sudden change of manner, backed
away, and at last turned and racked off up the road, looking back with a
wild face, at which the young man laughed remorselessly.

"The doggoned old skeesucks!" Will soliloquized as he walked up the
road. "So that's the kind of a character he's been givin' me!"

"Hullo! A whippoorwill. Takes a man back into childhood--No, don't 'whip
poor Will'; he's got all he can bear now."

He came at last to the little farm Dingman had owned, and he stopped in
sorrowful surprise. The barn had been moved away, the garden ploughed
up, and the house, turned into a granary, stood with boards nailed
across its dusty, cobwebbed windows. The tears started into the man's
eyes; he stood staring at it silently.

In the face of this house the seven years that he had last lived
stretched away into a wild waste of time. It stood as a symbol of his
wasted, ruined life. It was personal, intimately personal, this decay of
her home.

All that last scene came back to him; the booming roar of the
threshing-machine, the cheery whistle of the driver, the loud, merry
shouts of the men. He remembered how warmly the lamp-light streamed out
of that door as he turned away tired, hungry, sullen with rage and
jealousy. Oh, if he had only had the courage of a man!

Then he thought of the boy's words. She was sick, Ed abused her. She had
met her punishment. A hundred times he had been over the whole scene. A
thousand times he had seen her at the pump smiling at Ed Kinney, the sun
lighting her hair; and he never thought of that without hardening.

At this very gate he had driven up that last forenoon; to find that she
had gone with Ed. He had lived that sickening, depressing moment over
many times, but not times enough to keep down the bitter passion he had
felt then, and felt now as he went over it in detail.

He was so happy and confident that morning, so perfectly certain that
all would be made right by a kiss and a cheery jest. And now! Here he
stood sick with despair and doubt of all the world. He turned away from
the desolate homestead and walked on.

"But I'll see her--just once more. And then--"

And again the mighty significance, responsibility of life, fell upon
him. He felt, as young people seldom do, the irrevocableness of living,
the determinate, unalterable character of living. He determined to begin
to live in some new way--just how he could not say.

IV

Old man Kinney and his wife were getting their Sunday-school lessons
with much bickering, when Will drove up the next day to the dilapidated
gate and hitched his team to a leaning-post under the oaks. Will saw the
old man's head at the open window, but no one else, though he looked
eagerly for Agnes as he walked up the familiar path. There stood the
great oak under whose shade he had grown to be a man. How close the
great tree seemed to stand to his heart, someway! As the wind stirred
in the leaves, it was like a rustle of greeting.

In that old house they had all lived, and his mother had toiled for
thirty years. A sort of prison after all. There they were all born, and
there his father and his little sister had died. And then it passed into
old Kinney's hands.

Walking along up the path he felt a serious weakness in his limbs, and
he made a pretence of stopping to look at a flower-bed containing
nothing but weeds. After seven years of separation he was about to face
once more the woman whose life came so near being a part of his--Agnes,
now a wife and a mother.

How would she look? Would her face have that old-time peachy bloom, her
mouth that peculiar beautiful curve? She was large and fair, he
recalled, hair yellow and shining, eyes blue--

He roused himself. This was nonsense! He was trembling. He composed
himself by looking around again.

"The old scoundrel has let the weeds choke out the flowers and surround
the bee-hives. Old man Kinney never believed in anything but a petty
utility."

Will set his teeth, and marched up to the door and struck it like a man
delivering a challenge. Kinney opened the door, and started back in fear
when he saw who it was.

"How de do? How de do?" said Will, walking in, his eyes fixed on a woman
seated beyond, a child in her lap.

Agnes rose, without a word; a fawn-like, startled widening of the eyes,
her breath coming quick, and her face flushing. They couldn't speak;
they only looked at each other an instant, then Will shivered, passed
his hand over his eyes and sat down.

There was no one there but the old people, who were looking at him in
bewilderment. They did not notice any confusion in Agnes's face. She
recovered first.

"I'm glad to see you back, Will," she said, rising and putting the
sleeping child down in a neighboring room. As she gave him her hand, he
said:

"I'm glad to get back, Agnes. I hadn't ought to have gone." Then he
turned to the old people:

"I'm Will Hannan. You needn't be scared, Daddy; I was jokin' last
night."

"Dew tell! I want o' know!" exclaimed Granny. "Wal, I never! An, you're
my little Willy boy who ust 'o he in my class? Well! Well! W'y, pa,
ain't he growed tall! Grew handsome tew. I ust 'o think he was a dretful
humly boy; but my sakes, that mustache--"

"Wal, he give me a turrible scare last night. My land! scared me out of
a year's growth," cackled the old man.

This gave them all a chance to laugh, and the air was cleared. It gave
Agnes time to recover herself, and to be able to meet Will's eyes. Will
himself was powerfully moved; his throat swelled and tears came to his
eyes every time he looked at her.

She was worn and wasted incredibly. The blue of her eyes seemed dimmed
and faded by weeping, and the old-time scarlet of her lips had been
washed away. The sinews of her neck showed painfully when she turned her
head, and her trembling hands were worn, discolored, and lumpy at the
joints.

Poor girl! She knew she was under scrutiny, and her eyes felt hot and
restless. She wished to run away and cry, but she dared not. She stayed,
while Will began to tell her of his life and to ask questions about old
friends.

The old people took it up and relieved her of any share in it; and Will,
seeing that she was suffering, told some funny stories which made the
old people cackle in spite of themselves.

But it was forced merriment on Will's part. Once or twice Agnes smiled,
with just a little flash of the old-time sunny temper. But there was no
dimple in the cheek now, and the smile had more suggestion of an
invalid--or even a skeleton. He was almost ready to take her in his arms
and weep, her face appealed so pitifully to him.

"It's most time f'r Ed to be gittin' back, ain't it, pa?"

"Sh'd say 't was! He jest went over to Hobkirk's to trade horses. It's
dretful tryin' to me to have him go off tradin' horses on Sunday. Seems
if he might wait till a rainy day, 'r do it evenin's. I never did
believe in horse-tradin' anyhow."

"Have y' come back to stay, Willie?" asked the old lady.

"Well--it's hard tellin'," answered Will, looking at Agnes.

"Well, Agnes, ain't you goin' to git no dinner? I'm 'bout ready f'r
dinner. We must git to church early to-day. Elder Wheat is goin' to
preach, an' they'll be a crowd. He's goin' to hold communion."

"You'll stay to dinner, Will?" asked Agnes.

"Yes--if you wish it."

"I do wish it."

"Thank you; I want to have a good visit with you. I don't know when I'll
see you again."

As she moved about, getting dinner on the table, Will sat with gloomy
face, listening to the "clack" of the old man. The room was a poor
little sitting room, with furniture worn and shapeless; hardly a touch
of pleasant color, save here and there a little bit of Agnes's
handiwork. The lounge, covered with calico, was rickety; the
rocking-chair matched it, and the carpet of rags was patched and darned
with twine in twenty places. Everywhere was the influence of the
Kinneys. The furniture looked like them, in fact.

Agnes was outwardly calm, but her real distraction did not escape Mrs.
Kinney's hawk-like eyes.

"Well, I declare if you hain't put the butter on in one o' my blue
chainy saucers? Now you know I don't allow that saucer to be took down
by nobody. I don't see what's got into yeh! Anybody'd s'pose you never
see any comp'ny b'fore--wouldn't they, pa?"

"Sh'd say th' would," said pa, stopping short in a long story about Ed.
"Seems if we couldn't keep anything in this house sep'rit from the rest.
Ed he uses my curry-comb--"

He launched out a long list of grievances, to which Will shut his ears
as completely as possible, and was thinking how to stop him, when there
came a sudden crash. Agnes had dropped a plate.

"Good land o' Goshen!" screamed Granny. "If you ain't the worst I ever
see. I'll bet that's my grapevine plate. If it is--Well, of all the
mercies, it ain't! But it might 'a' ben. I never see your beat--never!
That's the third plate since I came to live here."

"Oh, look-a-here, Granny," said Will, desperately, "don't make so much
fuss about the plate. What's it worth, anyway? Here's a dollar."

Agnes cried quickly:

"Oh, don't do that, Will! It ain't her plate. It's my plate, and I can
break every plate in the house if I want to," she cried defiantly.

"'Course you can," Will agreed.

"Wal, she can't! Not while I'm around," put in Daddy. "I've helped to
pay f'r them plates, if she does call 'em her'n--"

"What the devul is all this row about? Agg, can't you get along without
stirring up the old folks every time I'm out o' the house?"

The speaker was Ed, now a tall and slouchily dressed man of thirty-two
or three; his face still handsome in a certain dark, cleanly-cut style,
but he wore a surly look as he lounged in with insolent swagger, clothed
in greasy overalls and a hickory shirt.

"Hello, Will! I heard you'd got home. John told me as I came along."

They shook hands, and Ed slouched down on the lounge. Will could have
kicked him for laying the blame of the dispute upon Agnes; it showed him
in a flash just how he treated her. He disdained to quarrel; he simply
silenced and dominated her.

Will asked a few questions about crops, with such grace as he could
show, and Ed, with keen eyes fixed on Will's face, talked easily and
stridently.

"Dinner ready?" he asked of Agnes. "Where's Pete?"

"He's asleep."

"All right. Let 'im sleep. Well, let's go out an' set up. Come, Dad,
sling away that Bible and come to grub. Mother, what the devul are you
snifflin' at? Say, now, look here! If I hear any more about this row,
I'll simply let you walk down to meetin'. Come, Will, set up."

He led the way out into the little kitchen where the dinner was set.

"What was the row about? Hain't been breakin' some dish, Agg?"

"Yes, she has," broke in the old lady.

"One o' the blue ones?" winked Ed.

"No, thank goodness, it was a white one."

"Well, now, I'll git into that dod-gasted cubberd some day an' break the
whole eternal outfit. I ain't goin' to have this damned jawin' goin'
on," he ended, brutally unconscious of his own "jawin'."

After this the dinner proceeded in comparative silence, Agnes sobbing
under breath. The room was small and very hot; the table was warped so
badly that the dishes had a tendency to slide to the centre; the walls
were bare plaster, grayed with time; the food was poor and scant, and
the flies absolutely swarmed upon everything, like bees. Otherwise the
room was clean and orderly.

"They say you've made a pile o' money out West, Bill. I'm glad of it.
We fellers back here don't make anything. It's a dam tight squeeze.
Agg, it seems to me the flies are devilish thick to-day. Can't you drive
'em out?"

Agnes felt that she must vindicate herself a little.

"I do drive 'em out, but they come right in again. The screen-door is
broken and they come right in."

"I told Dad to fix that door."

"But he won't do it for me."

Ed rested his elbows on the table and fixed his bright black eyes on his
father.

"Say, what d' you mean by actin' like a mule? I swear I'll trade you off
f'r a yaller dog. What do I keep you round here for anyway--to look
purty?"

"I guess I've as good a right here as you have, Ed Kinney."

"Oh, go soak y'r head, old man. If you don't 'tend out here a little
better, down goes your meat-house! I won't drive you down to meetin'
till you promise to fix that door. Hear me!"

Daddy began to snivel. Agnes could not look up for shame. Will felt
sick. Ed laughed.

"I c'n bring the old man to terms that way; he can't walk very well late
years, an' he can't drive my colt. You know what a cuss I used to be
about fast nags? Well, I'm just the same. Hobkirk's got a colt I want.
Say, that reminds me: your team's out there by the fence. I forgot. I'll
go out and put 'em up."

"No, never mind; I can't stay but a few minutes."

"Goin' to be round the country long?"

"A week--maybe."

Agnes looked up a moment, and then let her eyes fall.

"Goin' back West, I s'pose?"

"No. May go East, to Europe, mebbe."

"The devul y' say! You must 'a' made a ten-strike out West."

"They say it didn't come lawful," piped Daddy, over his blackberries and
milk.

"Oh, you shet up, who wants your put-in? Don't work in any o' your Bible
on us."

Daddy rose to go into the other room.

"Hold on, old man. You goin' to fix that door?"

"Course I be," quavered he.

"Well see 't y' do, that's all. Now get on y'r duds, an' I'll go an'
hitch up." He rose from the table. "Don't keep me waiting."

He went out unceremoniously, and Agnes was alone with Will.

"Do you go to church?" he asked. She shook her head. "No, I don't go
anywhere now. I have too much to do; I haven't strength left. And I'm
not fit anyway."

"Agnes, I want to say something to you; not now--after they're gone."

He went into the other room, leaving her to wash the dinner-things. She
worked on in a curious, almost dazed way, a dream of something sweet and
irrevocable in her eyes. Will represented so much to her. His voice
brought up times and places that thrilled her like song. He was
associated with all that was sweetest and most care-free and most
girlish in her life.

Ever since the boy had handed her that note she had been re-living those
days. In the midst of her drudgery she stopped to dream--to let some
picture come back into her mind. She was a student again at the
Seminary, and stood in the recitation-room with suffocating beat of the
heart; Will was waiting outside--waiting in a tremor like her own, to
walk home with her under the maples.

Then she remembered the painfully sweet mixture of pride and fear with
which she walked up the aisle of the little church behind him. Her
pretty new gown rustled, the dim light of the church had something like
romance in it, and he was so strong and handsome. Her heart went out in
a great silent cry to God--

"Oh, let me be a girl again!"

She did not look forward to happiness. She hadn't power to look forward
at all.

As she worked, she heard the high, shrill voices of the old people as
they bustled about and nagged at each other.

"Ma, where's my specticles?"

"I ain't seen y'r specticles."

"You have, too."

"I ain't neither."

"You had 'em this forenoon."

"Didn't no such thing. Them was my own brass-bowed ones. You had your'n
jest 'fore goin' to dinner. If you'd put 'em into a proper place you'd
find 'em again."

"I want 'o know if I would," the old man snorted.

"Wal, you'd orter know."

"Oh, you're awful smart, ain't yeh? You never have no trouble, and use
mine--do yeh?--an' lose 'em so 't I can't--"

"And if this is the thing that goes on when I'm here it must be hell
when visitors are gone," thought Will.

"Willy, ain't you goin' to meetin'?"

"No, not to-day. I want to visit a little with Agnes, then I've got to
drive back to John's."

"Wal, we must be goin'. Don't you leave them dishes f'r me to wash,"
she screamed at Agnes as she went out the door. "An' if we don't git
home by five, them caaves orter be fed."

As Agnes stood at the door to watch them drive away, Will studied her,
a smothering ache in his heart as he saw how thin and bent and weary she
was. In his soul he felt that she was a dying woman unless she had rest
and tender care.

As she turned, she saw something in his face--a pity and an agony of
self-accusation--that made her weak and white. She sank into a chair,
putting her hand on her chest, as if she felt a failing of breath. Then
the blood came back to her face and her eyes filled with tears.

"Don't--don't look at me like that," she said in a whisper. His pity
hurt her.

At sight of her sitting there pathetic, abashed, bewildered, like some
gentle animal, Will's throat contracted so that he could not speak. His
voice came at last in one terrible cry--

"Oh, Agnes! for God's sake forgive me!" He knelt by her side and put his
arm about her shoulders and kissed her bowed head. A curious numbness
involved his whole body; his voice was husky, the tears burned in his
eyes. His whole soul and body ached with his pity and remorseful,
self-accusing wrath.

"It was all my fault. Lay it all to me.... I am the one to bear it....
Oh, I've dreamed a thousand times of sayin' this to you, Aggie! I
thought if I could only see you again and ask your forgiveness, I'd--"
He ground his teeth together in his assault upon himself. "I threw my
life away an' killed you--that's what I did!"

He rose, and raged up and down the room till he had mastered himself.

"What did you think I meant that day of the thrashing?" he said, turning
suddenly. He spoke of it as if it were but a month or two past.

She lifted her head and looked at him in a slow way. She seemed to be
remembering. The tears lay on her hollow cheeks.

"I thought you was ashamed of me. I didn't know--why--"

He uttered a snarl of self-disgust.

"You couldn't know. Nobody could tell what I meant. But why didn't you
write? I was ready to come back. I only wanted an excuse--only a line."

"How could I, Will--after your letter?"

He groaned, and turned away.

"And Will, I--I got mad too. I couldn't write."

"Oh, that letter--I can see every line of it! F'r God's sake, don't
think of it again! But I didn't think, even when I wrote that letter,
that I'd find you where you are. I didn't think. I hoped, anyhow, Ed
Kinney wouldn't--"

She stopped him with a startled look in her great eyes.

"Don't talk about him--it ain't right. I mean it don't do any good. What
could I do, after father died? Mother and I. Besides, I waited three
years to hear from you, Will."

He gave a strange, choking cry. It burst from his throat--that terrible
thing, a man's sob of agony. She went on, curiously calm now.

"Ed was good to me; and he offered a home, anyway, for mother--"

"And all the time I was waiting for some line to break down my cussed
pride, so I could write to you and explain. But you did go with Ed to
the fair," he ended suddenly, seeking a morsel of justification for
himself.

"Yes. But I waited an' waited; and I thought you was mad at me, so when
they came I--no, I didn't really go with Ed. There was a wagon-load of
them."

"But I started," he explained, "but the wheel came off. I didn't send
word because I thought you'd feel sure I'd come. If you'd only trusted
me a little more--No! It was all my fault. I acted like a crazy fool. I
didn't stop to reason about anything."

They sat in silence after these explanations. The sound of the snapping
wings of the grasshoppers came through the windows, and a locust high in
a poplar sent down his ringing whir.

"It can't be helped now, Will," Agnes said at last, her voice full of
the woman's resignation. "We've got to bear it."

Will straightened up. "Bear it?" He paused. "Yes, I s'pose so. If you
hadn't married Ed Kinney! Anybody but him. How did you do it?"

"Oh, I don't know," she answered, wearily brushing her hair back from
her eyes. "It seemed best when I did it--and it can't be helped now." 
There was infinite, dull despair and resignation in her voice.

Will went over to the window. He thought how bright and handsome Ed used
to be. "After all, it's no wonder you married him. Life pushes us into
such things." Suddenly he turned, something resolute and imperious in
his eyes and voice.

"It can be helped, Aggie," he said. "Now just listen to me. We've made
an awful mistake. We've lost seven years o' life, but that's no reason
why we should waste the rest of it. Now hold on; don't interrupt me
just yet. I come back thinking just as much of you as ever. I ain't
going to say a word more about Ed; let the past stay past. I'm going to
talk about the future."

She looked at him in a daze of wonder as he went on.

"Now I've got some money, I've got a third interest in a ranch, and I've
got a standing offer to go back on the Sante Fee road as conductor.
There is a team standing out there. I'd like to make another trip to
Cedarville--with you--"

"Oh, Will, don't!" she cried; "for pity's sake don't talk--"

"Wait!" he exclaimed, imperiously. "Now look at it. Here you are in
hell! Caged up with two old crows picking the life out of you. They'll
kill you--I can see it; you're being killed by inches. You can't go
anywhere, you can't have anything. Life is just torture for you--"

She gave a little moan of anguish and despair, and turned her face to
her chair-back. Her shoulders shook with weeping, but she listened. He
went to her and stood with his hand on the chair-back.

His voice trembled and broke. "There's just one way to get out of this,
Agnes. Come with me. He don't care for you; his whole idea of women is
that they are created for his pleasure and to keep house. Your whole
life is agony. Come! Don't cry. There's a chance for life yet."

She didn't speak, but her sobs were less violent; his voice growing
stronger reassured her.

"I'm going East, maybe to Europe; and the woman who goes with me will
have nothing to do but get strong and well again. I've made you suffer
so, I ought to spend the rest of my life making you happy. Come! My wife
will sit with me on the deck of the steamer and see the moon rise, and
walk with me by the sea, till she gets strong and happy again--till the
dimples get back into her cheeks. I never will rest till I see her eyes
laugh again."

She rose flushed, wide-eyed, breathing hard with the emotion his vibrant
voice called up, but she could not speak. He put his hand gently upon
her shoulder, and she sank down again. And he went on with his appeal.
There was something hypnotic, dominating, in his voice and eyes.

On his part there was no passion of an ignoble sort, only a passion of
pity and remorse, and a sweet, tender, reminiscent love. He did not love
the woman before him so much as the girl whose ghost she was--the woman
whose promise she was. He held himself responsible for it all, and he
throbbed with desire to repair the ravage he had indirectly caused.
There was nothing equivocal in his position--nothing to disown. How
others might look at it, he did not consider, and did not care. His
impetuous soul was carried to a point where nothing came in to mar or
divert.

"And then after you're well, after our trip, we'll come back--to
Houston, or somewhere in Texas, and I'll build my wife a house that will
make her eyes shine. My cattle will give us a good living, and she can
have a piano and books, and go to the theatre and concerts. Come, what
do you think of that?"

Then she heard his words beneath his voice somehow, and they produced
pictures that dazzled her. Luminous shadows moved before her eyes,
drifting across the gray background of her poor, starved, work-weary
life.

As his voice ceased the rosy clouds faded, and she realized again the
faded, musty little room, the calico-covered furniture, and looking down
at her own cheap and ill-fitting dress, she saw her ugly hands lying
there. Then she cried out with a gush of tears:

"Oh, Will, I'm so old and homely now, I ain't fit to go with you now!
Oh, why couldn't we have married then?"

She was seeing herself as she was then, and so was he; but it deepened
his resolution. How beautiful she used to be! He seemed to see her there
as if she stood in perpetual sunlight, with a warm sheen in her hair and
dimples in her cheeks.

She saw her thin red wrists, her gaunt and knotted hands. There was a
pitiful droop in the thin, pale lips, and the tears fell slowly from her
drooping lashes. He went on:

"Well, it's no use to cry over what was. We must think of what we're
going to do. Don't worry about your looks; you'll be the prettiest
woman in the country when we get back. Don't wait, Aggie; make up your
mind."

She hesitated, and was lost.

"What will people say?"

"I don't care what they say," he flamed out. "They'd say, stay here and
be killed by inches. I say you've had your share of suffering. They'd
say--the liberal ones--stay and get a divorce; but how do you know we
can get one after you've been dragged through the mud of a trial? We can
get one as well in some other state. Why should you be worn out at
thirty? What right or justice is there in making you bear all your life
the consequences of our--my schoolboy folly?"

As he went on his argument rose to the level of Browning's philosophy.

"We can make this experience count for us yet. But we mustn't let a
mistake ruin us--it should teach us. What right has any one to keep you
in a hole? God don't expect a toad to stay in a stump and starve if it
can get out. He don't ask the snakes to suffer as you do."

She had lost the threads of right and wrong out of her hands. She was
lost in a maze, but she was not moved by passion. Flesh had ceased to
stir her; but there was vast power in the new and thrilling words her
deliverer spoke. He seemed to open a door for her, and through it
turrets shone and great ships crossed on dim blue seas.

"You can't live here, Aggie. You'll die in less than five years. It
would kill me to see you die here. Come! It's suicide."

She did not move, save the convulsive motion of her breath and the
nervous action of her fingers. She stared down at a spot in the carpet.
She could not face him.

He grew insistent, a sterner note creeping into his voice.

"If I leave this time of course you know I'll never come back."

Her hoarse breathing, growing quicker each moment, was her only reply.

"I'm done," he said with a note of angry disappointment. He did not give
her up, however. "I've told you what I'd do for you. Now if you think--"

"Oh, give me time to think, Will!" she cried out, lifting her face.

He shook his head. "No. You might as well decide now. It won't be any
easier to-morrow. Come, one minute more and I go out o' that
door--unless--" He crossed the room slowly, doubtful himself of his
desperate last measure. "My hand is on the knob. Shall I open it?"

She stopped breathing; her fingers closed convulsively on the chair. As
he opened the door she sprang up.

"Don't go, Will! Don't go, please don't! I need you here--I--"

"That ain't the question. Are you going with me, Agnes?"

"Yes, yes! I tried to speak before. I trust you, Will; you're--"

He flung the door open wide. "See the sunlight out there shining on that
field o' wheat? That's where I'll take you--out into the sunshine. You
shall see it shining on the Bay of Naples. Come, get on your hat; don't
take anything more'n you actually need. Leave the past behind you--"

The woman turned wildly and darted into the little bedroom. The man
listened. He whistled in surprise almost comical. He had forgotten the
baby. He could hear the mother talking, cooing.

"Mommie's 'ittle pet! She wasn't goin' to leave her 'ittle man--no, she
wasn't! There, there, don't 'e cry. Mommie ain't goin' away and leave
him--wicked mommie ain't--'ittle treasure!"

She was confused again; and when she reappeared at the door, with the
child in her arms, there was a wandering look on her face pitiful to
see. She tried to speak, tried to say, "Please go, Will."

He designedly failed to understand her whisper. He stepped forward. "The
baby! Sure enough. Why, certainly! to the mother belongs the child. Blue
eyes, thank heaven!"

He put his arm about them both. She obeyed silently. There was something
irresistible in his frank, clear eyes, his sunny smile, his strong
brown hand. He slammed the door behind them.

"That closes the door on your sufferings," he said, smiling down at her.
"Good-by to it all."

The baby laughed and stretched out its hands toward the light.

"Boo, boo!" he cried.

"What's he talking about?"

She smiled in perfect trust and fearlessness, seeing her child's face
beside his own. "He says it's beautiful."

"Oh, he does? I can't follow his French accent."

She smiled again, in spite of herself. Will shuddered with a thrill of
fear, she was so weak and worn. But the sun shone on the dazzling,
rustling wheat, the fathomless sky, blue as a sea, bent above them--and
the world lay before them.



Up the Coolly

"Keep the main-travelled road up the Coolly--it's the second house after
crossin' the crick."

I

The ride from Milwaukee to the Mississippi is a fine ride at any time,
superb in summer. To lean back in a reclining-chair and whirl away in a
breezy July day, past lakes, groves of oak, past fields of barley being
reaped, past hay-fields, where the heavy grass is toppling before the
swift sickle, is a panorama of delight, a road full of delicious
surprises, where down a sudden vista lakes open, or a distant wooded
hill looms darkly blue, or swift streams, foaming deep down the solid
rock, send whiffs of cool breezes in at the window.

It has majesty, breadth. The farming has nothing apparently petty about
it. All seems vigorous, youthful, and prosperous. Mr. Howard McLane in
his chair let his newspaper fall on his lap, and gazed out upon it with
dreaming eyes. It had a certain mysterious glamour to him; the lakes
were cooler and brighter to his eye, the greens fresher, and the grain
more golden than to any one else, for he was coming back to it all after
an absence of ten years. It was, besides, his West. He still took pride
in being a Western man.

His mind all day flew ahead of the train to the little town, far on
toward the Mississippi, where he had spent his boyhood and youth. As the
train passed the Wisconsin River, with its curiously carved cliffs, its
cold, dark, swift-swirling water eating slowly under cedar-clothed
banks, Howard began to feel curious little movements of the heart, like
those of a lover nearing his sweetheart.

The hills changed in character, growing more intimately recognizable.
They rose higher as the train left the ridge and passed down into the
Black River valley, and specifically into the La Crosse valley. They
ceased to have any hint of upheavals of rock, and became simply parts of
the ancient level left standing after the water had practically given up
its post-glacial scooping action.

It was about six o'clock as he caught sight of the splendid broken line
of hills on which his baby eyes had looked thirty-five years ago. A few
minutes later, and the train drew up at the grimy little station set
into the hillside, and, giving him just time to leap off, plunged on
again toward the West. Howard felt a ridiculous weakness in his legs as
he stepped out upon the broiling-hot, splintery planks of the station
and faced the few idlers lounging about. He simply stood and gazed with
the same intensity and absorption one of the idlers might show standing
before the Brooklyn Bridge.

The town caught and held his eyes first. How poor and dull and sleepy
and squalid it seemed! The one main street ended at the hillside at his
left, and stretched away to the north, between two rows of the usual
village stores, unrelieved by a tree or a touch of beauty. An unpaved
street, with walled, drab-colored, miserable, rotting wooden buildings,
with the inevitable battlements; the same--only worse and more
squalid--was the town.

The same, only more beautiful still, was the majestic amphitheatre of
green wooded hills that circled the horizon, and toward which he lifted
his eyes. He thrilled at the sight.

"Glorious!" he cried involuntarily.

Accustomed to the White Mountains, to the Alleghanies, he had wondered
if these hills would retain their old-time charm. They did. He took off
his hat to them as he stood there. Richly wooded, with gently sloping
green sides, rising to massive square or rounded tops with dim vistas,
they glowed down upon the squat little town, gracious, lofty in their
greeting, immortal in their vivid and delicate beauty.

He was a goodly figure of a man as he stood there beside his valise.
Portly, erect, handsomely dressed, and with something unusually winning
in his brown mustache and blue eyes, something scholarly suggested by
the pinch-nose glasses, something strong in the repose of the head. He
smiled as he saw how unchanged was the grouping of the old loafers on
the salt-barrels and nail-kegs. He recognized most of them--a little
dirtier, a little more bent, and a little grayer.

They sat in the same attitudes, spat tobacco with the same calm delight,
and joked each other, breaking into short and sudden fits of laughter,
and pounded each other on the back, just as when he was a student at the
La Crosse Seminary and going to and fro daily on the train.

They ruminated on him as he passed, speculating in a perfectly audible
way upon his business.

"Looks like a drummer."

"No, he ain't no drummer. See them Boston glasses?"

"That's so. Guess he's a teacher."

"Looks like a moneyed cuss."

"Bos'n, I guess."

He knew the one who spoke last--Freeme Cole, a man who was the fighting
wonder of Howard's boyhood, now degenerated into a stoop-shouldered,
faded, garrulous, and quarrelsome old man. Yet there was something epic
in the old man's stories, something enthralling in the dramatic power 
of recital.

Over by the blacksmith shop the usual game of "quaits" was in progress,
and the drug-clerk on the corner was chasing a crony with the
squirt-pump with which he was about to wash the windows. A few teams
stood ankle-deep in the mud, tied to the fantastically gnawed pine
pillars of the wooden awnings. A man on a load of hay was "jawing" with
the attendant of the platform scales, who stood below, pad and pencil in
hand.

"Hit 'im! hit 'im! Jump off and knock 'im!" suggested a bystander,
jovially.

Howard knew the voice.

"Talk's cheap. Takes money to buy whiskey," he said, when the man on the
load repeated his threat of getting off and whipping the scales-man.

"You're William McTurg," Howard said, coming up to him.

"I am, sir," replied the soft-voiced giant, turning and looking down on
the stranger, with an amused twinkle in his deep brown eyes. He stood as
erect as an Indian, though his hair and beard were white.

"I'm Howard McLane."

"Ye begin t' look it," said McTurg, removing his right hand from his
pocket. "How are yeh?"

"I'm first-rate. How's mother and Grant?"

"Saw 'm ploughing corn as I came down. Guess he's all right. Want a
boost?"

"Well, yes. Are you down with a team?"

"Yep. 'Bout goin' home. Climb right in. That's my rig, right there,"
nodding at a sleek bay colt hitched in a covered buggy. "Heave y'r grip
under the seat."

They climbed into the seat after William had lowered the buggy-top and
unhitched the horse from the post. The loafers were mildly curious.
Guessed Bill had got hooked onto by a lightnin'-rod peddler, or
somethin' o' that kind.

"Want to go by river, or 'round by the hills?"

"Hills, I guess."

The whole matter began to seem trivial, as if he had been away only for
a month or two.

William McTurg was a man little given to talk. Even the coming back of a
nephew did not cause any flow of questions or reminiscences. They rode
in silence. He sat a little bent forward, the lines held carelessly in
his hands, his great lion-like head swaying to and fro with the movement
of the buggy.

As they passed familiar spots, the younger man broke the silence with a
question.

"That's old man McElvaine's place, ain't it?"

"Yep."

"Old man living?"

"I guess he is. Husk more corn'n any man he c'n hire."

In the edge of the village they passed an open lot on the left, marked
with circus-rings of different eras.

"There's the old ball-ground. Do they have circuses on it just the same
as ever?"

"Just the same."

"What fun that field calls up! The games of ball we used to have! Do you
play yet?"

"Sometimes. Can't stoop as well as I used to." He smiled a little. "Too
much fat."

It all swept back upon Howard in a flood of names and faces and sights
and sounds; something sweet and stirring somehow, though it had little
of æsthetic charms at the time. They were passing along lanes now,
between superb fields of corn, wherein ploughmen were at work. Kingbirds
flew from post to post ahead of them; the insects called from the grass.
The valley slowly outspread below them. The workmen in the fields were
"turning out" for the night. They all had a word of chaff with McTurg.

Over the western wall of the circling amphitheatre the sun was setting.
A few scattering clouds were drifting on the west wind, their shadows
sliding down the green and purpled slopes. The dazzling sunlight flamed
along the luscious velvety grass, and shot amid the rounded, distant
purple peaks, and streamed in bars of gold and crimson across the blue
mist of the narrower upper Coollies.

The heart of the young man swelled with pleasure almost like pain, and
the eyes of the silent older man took on a far-off, dreaming look, as he
gazed at the scene which had repeated itself a thousand times in his
life, but of whose beauty he never spoke.

Far down to the left was the break in the wall through which the river
ran on its way to join the Mississippi. They climbed slowly among the
hills, and the valley they had left grew still more beautiful as the
squalor of the little town was hid by the dusk of distance. Both men
were silent for a long time. Howard knew the peculiarities of his
companion too well to make any remarks or ask any questions, and besides
it was a genuine pleasure to ride with one who understood that silence
was the only speech amid such splendors.

Once they passed a little brook singing in a mournfully sweet way its
eternal song over its pebbles. It called back to Howard the days when he
and Grant, his younger brother, had fished in this little brook for
trout, with trousers rolled above the knee and wrecks of hats upon their
heads.

"Any trout left?" he asked.

"Not many. Little fellers." Finding the silence broken, William asked
the first question since he met Howard. "Le' 's see: you're a show
feller now? B'long to a troupe?"

"Yes, yes; I'm an actor."

"Pay much?"

"Pretty well."

That seemed to end William's curiosity about the matter.

"Ah, there's our old house, ain't it?" Howard broke out, pointing to one
of the houses farther up the Coolly. "It'll be a surprise to them, won't
it?"

"Yep; only they don't live there."

"What! They don't!"

"Who does?"

"Dutchman."

Howard was silent for some moments. "Who lives on the Dunlap place?"

"'Nother Dutchman."

"Where's Grant living, anyhow?"

"Farther up the Coolly."

"Well, then, I'd better get out here, hadn't I?"

"Oh, I'll drive ye up."

"No, I'd rather walk."

The sun had set, and the Coolly was getting dusk when Howard got out of
McTurg's carriage and set off up the winding lane toward his brother's
house. He walked slowly to absorb the coolness and fragrance and color
of the hour. The katydids sang a rhythmic song of welcome to him.
Fireflies were in the grass. A whippoorwill in the deep of the wood was
calling weirdly, and an occasional night-hawk, flying high, gave his
grating shriek, or hollow boom, suggestive and resounding.

He had been wonderfully successful, and yet had carried into his success
as a dramatic author as well as actor a certain puritanism that made him
a paradox to his fellows. He was one of those actors who are always in
luck, and the best of it was he kept and made use of his luck. Jovial as
he appeared, he was inflexible as granite against drink and tobacco. He
retained through it all a certain freshness of enjoyment that made him
one of the best companions in the profession; and now, as he walked on,
the hour and the place appealed to him with great power. It seemed to
sweep away the life that came between.

How close it all was to him, after all! In his restless life, surrounded
by the glare of electric lights, painted canvas, hot colors, creak of
machinery, mock trees, stones, and brooks, he had not lost, but gained,
appreciation for the coolness, quiet, and low tones, the shyness of the
wood and field.

In the farmhouse ahead of him a light was shining as he peered ahead,
and his heart gave another painful movement. His brother was awaiting
him there, and his mother, whom he had not seen for ten years and who
had lost the power to write. And when Grant wrote, which had been more
and more seldom of late, his letters had been cold and curt.

He began to feel that in the pleasure and excitement of his life he had
grown away from his mother and brother. Each summer he had said, "Well,
now, I'll go home this year, sure." But a new play to be produced, or a
new yachting trip, or a tour of Europe, had put the home-coming off; and
now it was with a distinct consciousness of neglect of duty that he
walked up to the fence and looked into the yard, where William had told
him his brother lived.

It was humble enough--a small white story-and-a-half structure, with a
wing set in the midst of a few locust-trees; a small drab-colored barn
with a sagging ridge-pole; a barnyard full of mud, in which a few cows
were standing, fighting the flies and waiting to be milked. An old man
was pumping water at the well; the pigs were squealing from a pen near
by; a child was crying.

Instantly the beautiful, peaceful valley was forgotten. A sickening
chill struck into Howard's soul as he looked at it all. In the dim light
he could see a figure milking a cow. Leaving his valise at the gate, he
entered and walked up to the old man, who had finished pumping and was
about to go to feed the hogs.

"Good-evening," Howard began. "Does Mr. Grant McLane live here?"

"Yes, sir, he does. He's right over there milkin'."

"I'll go over there an--"

"Don't b'lieve I would. It's darn muddy over there. It's been turrible
rainy. He'll be done in a minute, anyway."

"Very well; I'll wait."

As he waited, he could hear a woman's fretful voice and the impatient
jerk and jar of kitchen things, indicative of ill-temper or worry. The
longer he stood absorbing this farm-scene, with all its sordidness,
dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries, the lower his heart
sank. All the joy of the home-coming was gone, when the figure arose
from the cow and approached the gate, and put the pail of milk down on
the platform by the pump.

"Good-evening," said Howard, out of the dusk.

Grant stared a moment. "Good-evening."

Howard knew the voice, though it was older and deeper and more sullen.
"Don't you know me, Grant? I am Howard."

The man approached him, gazing intently at his face. "You are?" after a
pause. "Well, I'm glad to see you, but I can't shake hands. That damned
cow had laid down in the mud."

They stood and looked at each other. Howard's cuffs, collar, and shirt,
alien in their elegance, showed through the dusk, and a glint of light
shot out from the jewel of his necktie, as the light from the house
caught it at the right angle. As they gazed in silence at each other,
Howard divined something of the hard, bitter feeling that came into
Grant's heart, as he stood there, ragged, ankle-deep in muck, his
sleeves rolled up, a shapeless old straw hat on his head.

The gleam of Howard's white hands angered him. When he spoke, it was in
a hard, gruff tone, full of rebellion.

"Well, go in the house and set down. I'll be in soon's I strain the milk
and wash the dirt off my hands."

"But mother--"

"She's 'round somewhere. Just knock on the door under the porch round
there."

Howard went slowly around the corner of the house, past a vilely
smelling rain-barrel, toward the west. A gray-haired woman was sitting
in a rocking-chair on the porch, her hands in her lap, her eyes fixed on
the faintly yellow sky, against which the hills stood, dim purple
silhouettes, and on which the locust trees were etched as fine as lace.
There was sorrow, resignation, and a sort of dumb despair in her
attitude.

Howard stood, his throat swelling till it seemed as if he would
suffocate. This was his mother--the woman who bore him, the being who
had taken her life in her hand for him; and he, in his excited and
pleasurable life, had neglected her!

He stepped into the faint light before her. She turned and looked at him
without fear. "Mother!" he said. She uttered one little, breathing,
gasping cry, called his name, rose, and stood still. He bounded up the
steps, and took her in his arms.

"Mother! Dear old mother!"

In the silence, almost painful, which followed, an angry woman's voice
could be heard inside: "I don't care! I ain't goin' to wear myself out
fer him. He c'n eat out here with us, or else--"

Mrs. McLane began speaking. "Oh, I've longed to see yeh, Howard. I was
afraid you wouldn't come till--too late."

"What do you mean, mother? Ain't you well?"

"I don't seem to be able to do much now 'cept sit around and knit a
little. I tried to pick some berries the other day, and I got so dizzy I
had to give it up."

"You mustn't work. You needn't work. Why didn't you write to me how you
were?" Howard asked, in an agony of remorse.

"Well, we felt as if you probably had all you could do to take care of
yourself. Are you married, Howard?" she broke off to ask.

"No, mother; and there ain't any excuse for me--not a bit," he said,
dropping back into her colloquialisms. "I'm ashamed when I think of how
long it's been since I saw you. I could have come."

"It don't matter now," she interrupted gently. "It's the way things go.
Our boys grow up and leave us."

"Well, come in to supper," said Grant's ungracious voice from the
doorway. "Come, mother."

Mrs. McLane moved with difficulty. Howard sprang to her aid, and,
leaning on his arm, she went through the little sitting room, which was
unlighted, out into the kitchen, where the supper table stood near the
cook-stove.

"How.--this is my wife," said Grant, in a cold, peculiar tone.

Howard bowed toward a remarkably handsome young woman, on whose forehead
was a scowl, which did not change as she looked at him and the old lady.

"Set down anywhere," was the young woman's cordial invitation.

Howard sat down next his mother, and facing the wife, who had a small,
fretful child in her arms. At Howard's left was the old man, Lewis. The
supper was spread upon a gay-colored oil-cloth, and consisted of a pan
of milk, set in the midst, with bowls at each plate. Beside the pan was
a dipper and a large plate of bread, and at one end of the table was a
dish of fine honey.

A boy of about fourteen leaned upon the table, his bent shoulders making
him look like an old man. His hickory shirt, like Grant's, was still wet
with sweat, and discolored here and there with grease, or green from
grass. His hair, freshly wet and combed, was smoothed away from his
face, and shone in the light of the kerosene lamp. As he ate, he stared
at Howard, as though he would make an inventory of each thread of the
visitor's clothing.

"Did I look like that at his age?" thought Howard.

"You see we live just about the same as ever," said Grant, as they began
eating, speaking with a grim, almost challenging, inflection.

The two brothers studied each other curiously, as they talked of
neighborhood scenes. Howard seemed incredibly elegant and handsome to
them all, with his rich, soft clothing, his spotless linen, and his
exquisite enunciation and ease of speech. He had always been
"smooth-spoken," and he had become "elegantly persuasive," as his
friends said of him, and it was a large factor in his success.

Every detail of the kitchen, the heat, the flies buzzing aloft, the poor
furniture, the dress of the people--all smote him like the lash of a
wire whip. His brother was a man of great character. He could see that
now. His deep-set, gray eyes and rugged face showed at thirty a man of
great natural ability. He had more of the Scotch in his face than
Howard, and he looked much older.

He was dressed, like the old man and the boy, in a checked shirt,
without vest. His suspenders, once gay-colored, had given most of their
color to his shirt, and had marked irregular broad bands of pink and
brown and green over his shoulders. His hair was uncombed, merely pushed
away from his face. He wore a mustache only, though his face was covered
with a week's growth of beard. His face was rather gaunt, and was brown
as leather.

Howard could not eat much. He was disturbed by his mother's strange
silence and oppression, and sickened by the long-drawn gasps with which
the old man ate his bread and milk, and by the way the boy ate. He had
his knife gripped tightly in his fist, knuckles up, and was scooping
honey upon his bread.

The baby, having ceased to be afraid, was curious, gazing silently at
the stranger.

"Hello, little one! Come and see your uncle. Eh? Course 'e will," cooed
Howard, in the attempt to escape the depressing atmosphere. The little
one listened to his inflections as a kitten does, and at last lifted its
arms in sign of surrender.

The mother's face cleared up a little. "I declare, she wants to go to
you."

"Course she does. Dogs and kittens always come to me when I call 'em.
Why shouldn't my own niece come?"

He took the little one and began walking up and down the kitchen with
her, while she pulled at his beard and nose. "I ought to have you, my
lady, in my new comedy. You'd bring down the house."

"You don't mean to say you put babies on the stage, Howard," said his
mother in surprise.

"Oh, yes. Domestic comedy must have a baby these days."

"Well, that's another way of makin' a livin', sure," said Grant. The
baby had cleared the atmosphere a little. "I s'pose you fellers make a
pile of money."

"Sometimes we make a thousand a week; oftener we don't."

"A thousand dollars!" They all stared.

"A thousand dollars sometimes, and then lose it all the next week in
another town. The dramatic business is a good deal like gambling--you
take your chances."

"I wish you weren't in it, Howard. I don't like to have my son--"

"I wish I was in somethin' that paid better than farmin'. Anything under
God's heavens is better 'n farmin'," said Grant.

"No, I ain't laid up much," Howard went on, as if explaining why he
hadn't helped them. "Costs me a good deal to live, and I need about ten
thousand dollars leeway to work on. I've made a good living, but I--I
ain't made any money."

Grant looked at him, darkly meditative.

Howard went on: "How'd ye come to sell the old farm? I was in hopes--"

"How'd we come to sell it?" said Grant with terrible bitterness. "We had
something on it that didn't leave anything to sell. You probably don't
remember anything about it, but there was a mortgage on it that eat us
up in just four years by the almanac. 'Most killed mother to leave it.
We wrote to you for money, but I don't suppose you remember that."

"No, you didn't."

"Yes, I did."

"When was it? I don't--why, it's--I never received it. It must have been
that summer I went with Bob Manning to Europe." Howard put the baby down
and faced his brother. "Why, Grant, you didn't think I refused to help?"

"Well, it looked that way. We never heard a word from yeh, all summer,
and when y' did write, it was all about yerself 'n plays 'n things we
didn't know anything about. I swore to God I'd never write to you again,
and I won't."

"But, good heavens! I never got it."

"Suppose you didn't. You might have known we were poor as Job's off-ox.
Everybody is that earns a living. We fellers on the farm have to earn a
livin' for ourselves and you fellers that don't work. I don't blame you.
I'd do it if I could."

"Grant, don't talk so! Howard didn't realize--"

"I tell yeh I don't blame him! Only I don't want him to come the
brotherly business over me, after livin' as he has--that's all." There
was a bitter accusation in the man's voice.

Howard leaped to his feet, his face twitching.

"By God, I'll go back to-morrow morning!" he threatened.

"Go, an' be damned! I don't care what yeh do," Grant growled, rising and
going out.

"Boys," called the mother, piteously, "it's terrible to see you
quarrel."

"But I'm not to blame, mother," cried Howard, in a sickness that made
him white as chalk. "The man is a savage. I came home to help you all,
not to quarrel."

"Grant's got one o' his fits on," said the young wife, speaking for the
first time. "Don't pay any attention to him. He'll be all right in the
morning."

"If it wasn't for you, mother, I'd leave now, and never see that savage
again."

He lashed himself up and down in the room, in horrible disgust and hate
of his brother and of this home in his heart. He remembered his tender
anticipations of the home-coming with a kind of self-pity and disgust.
This was his greeting!

He went to bed, to toss about on the hard, straw-filled mattress in the
stuffy little best room. Tossing, writhing under the bludgeoning of his
brother's accusing inflections, a dozen times he said, with a
half-articulate snarl:

"He can go to hell! I'll not try to do anything more for him. I don't
care if he is my brother; he has no right to jump on me like that. On
the night of my return, too. My God! he is a brute, a fool!"

He thought of the presents in his trunk and valise, which he couldn't
show to him that night after what had been said. He had intended to have
such a happy evening of it, such a tender reunion! It was to be so
bright and cheery!

In the midst of his cursings--his hot indignation--would come visions of
himself in his own modest rooms. He seemed to be yawning and stretching
in his beautiful bed, the sun shining in, his books, foils, pictures,
around him to say good-morning and tempt him to rise, while the squat
little clock on the mantel struck eleven warningly.

He could see the olive walls, the unique copper-and-crimson arabesque
frieze (his own selection), and the delicate draperies; an open grate
full of glowing coals, to temper the sea-winds; and in the midst of it,
between a landscape by Enneking and an Indian in a canoe in a cañon, by
Brush, he saw a sombre landscape by a master greater than Millet, a
melancholy subject, treated with pitiless fidelity.

A farm in the valley! Over the mountains swept jagged, gray, angry,
sprawling clouds, sending a freezing, thin drizzle of rain, as they
passed, upon a man following a plough. The horses had a sullen and weary
look, and their manes and tails streamed sidewise in the blast. The
ploughman, clad in a ragged gray coat, with uncouth, muddy boots upon
his feet, walked with his head inclined toward the sleet, to shield his
face from the cold and sting of it. The soil rolled away black and
sticky and with a dull sheen upon it. Near by, a boy with tears on his
cheeks was watching cattle; a dog seated near, his back to the gale.

As he looked at this picture, his heart softened. He looked down at the
sleeve of his soft and fleecy nightshirt, at his white, rounded arm,
muscular, yet fine as a woman's, and when he looked for the picture it
was gone. Then came again the assertive odor of stagnant air, laden with
camphor; he felt the springless bed under him, and caught dimly a few
soap-advertising lithographs on the walls. He thought of his brother, in
his still more inhospitable bedroom, disturbed by the child, condemned
to rise at five o'clock and begin another day's pitiless labor. His
heart shrank and quivered, and the tears started to his eyes.

"I forgive him, poor fellow! He's not to blame."

II

He woke, however, with a dull, languid pulse, and an oppressive
melancholy on his heart. He looked around the little room, clean enough,
but oh, how poor! how barren! Cold plaster walls, a cheap wash-stand, a
wash-set of three pieces, with a blue band around each; the windows
rectangular, and fitted with fantastic green shades.

Outside he could hear the bees humming. Chickens were merrily moving
about. Cow-bells far up the road were sounding irregularly. A jay came
by and yelled an insolent reveille, and Howard sat up. He could hear
nothing in the house but the rattle of pans on the back side of the
kitchen. He looked at his watch, which indicated half-past seven. Grant
was already in the field, after milking, currying the horses, and eating
breakfast--had been at work two hours and a half.

He dressed himself hurriedly, in a negligé shirt, with a Windsor scarf,
light-colored, serviceable trousers with a belt, russet shoes, and a
tennis hat--a knockabout costume, he considered. His mother, good soul,
thought it a special suit put on for her benefit, and admired it through
her glasses.

He kissed her with a bright smile, nodded at Laura, the young wife, and
tossed the baby, all in a breath, and with the manner, as he himself
saw, of the returned captain in the war-dramas of the day.

"Been to breakfast?" He frowned reproachfully. "Why didn't you call me?
I wanted to get up, just as I used to, at sunrise."

"We thought you was tired, and so we didn't--"

"Tired! Just wait till you see me help Grant pitch hay or something.
Hasn't finished his haying yet, has he?"

"No, I guess not. He will to-day if it don't rain again."

"Well, breakfast is all ready--Howard," said Laura, hesitating a little
on his name.

"Good! I am ready for it. Bacon and eggs, as I'm a jay! Just what I was
wanting. I was saying to myself: 'Now if they'll only get bacon and eggs
and hot biscuits and honey--' Oh, say, mother, I heard the bees humming
this morning; same noise they used to make when I was a boy, exactly.
Must be the same bees,--Hey, you young rascal! come here and have some
breakfast with your uncle."

"I never saw her take to any one so quick," Laura said, emphasizing the
baby's sex. She had on a clean calico dress and a gingham apron, and she
looked strong and fresh and handsome. Her head was intellectual, her
eyes full of power. She seemed anxious to remove the impression of her
unpleasant looks and words the night before. Indeed, it would have been
hard to resist Howard's sunny good-nature.

The baby laughed and crowed. The old mother could not take her dim eyes
off the face of her son, but sat smiling at him as he ate and rattled
on. When he rose from the table at last, after eating heartily and
praising it all, he said, with a smile:

"Well, now I'll just telephone down to the express and have my trunk
brought up. I've got a few little things in there you'll enjoy seeing.
But this fellow," indicating the baby, "I didn't take him into account.
But never mind: Uncle How.'ll make that all right."

"You ain't going to lay it up agin Grant, be you, my son?" Mrs. McLane
faltered, as they went out into the best room.

"Of course not! He didn't mean it. Now, can't you send word down and
have my trunk brought up? Or shall I have to walk down?"

"I guess I'll see somebody goin' down," said Laura.

"All right. Now for the hay-field," he smiled, and went out into the
glorious morning.

The circling hills were the same, yet not the same as at night, a
cooler, tenderer, more subdued cloak of color lay upon them. Far down
the valley a cool, deep, impalpable, blue mist hung, beneath which one
divined the river ran, under its elms and basswoods and wild grapevines.
On the shaven slopes of the hill cattle and sheep were feeding, their
cries and bells coming to the ear with a sweet suggestiveness. There was
something immemorial in the sunny slopes dotted with red and brown and
gray cattle.

Walking toward the haymakers, Howard felt a twinge of pain and distrust. 
Would Grant ignore it all and smile--

He stopped short. He had not seen Grant smile in so long--he couldn't
quite see him smiling. He had been cold and bitter for years. When he
came up to them, Grant was pitching on; the old man was loading, and the
boy was raking after.

"Good-morning," Howard cried cheerily; the old man nodded, the boy
stared. Grant growled something, without looking up. These "finical"
things of saying good-morning and good-night are not much practised in
such homes as Grant McLane's.

"Need some help? I'm ready to take a hand. Got on my regimentals this
morning."

Grant looked at him a moment. "You look it."

Howard smiled. "Gimme a hold on that fork, and I'll show you. I'm not so
soft as I look, now you bet."

He laid hold upon the fork in Grant's hands, who released it sullenly
and stood back sneering. Howard struck the fork into the pile in the old
way, threw his left hand to the end of the polished handle, brought it
down into the hollow of his thigh, and laid out his strength till the
handle bent like a bow. "Oop she rises!" he called laughingly, as the
whole pile began slowly to rise, and finally rolled upon the high load.

"Oh, I ain't forgot how to do it," he laughed, as he looked around at
the boy, who was eyeing the tennis suit with a devouring gaze.

Grant was studying him, too, but not in admiration.

"I shouldn't say you had," said the old man, tugging at the forkful.

"Mighty funny to come out here and do a little of this. But if you had
to come here and do it all the while, you wouldn't look so white and
soft in the hands," Grant said, as they moved on to another pile. "Give
me that fork. You'll be spoiling your fine clothes."

"Oh, these don't matter. They're made for this kind of thing."

"Oh, are they? I guess I'll dress in that kind of a rig. What did that
shirt cost? I need one."

"Six dollars a pair; but then it's old."

"And them pants," he pursued; "they cost six dollars, too, didn't they?"

Howard's face darkened. He saw his brother's purpose. He resented it.
"They cost fifteen dollars, if you want to know, and the shoes cost
six-fifty. This ring on my cravat cost sixty dollars, and the suit I had
on last night cost eighty-five. My suits are made by Breckstein, on
Fifth Avenue, if you want to patronize him," he ended brutally, spurred
on by the sneer in his brother's eyes. "I'll introduce you."

"Good idea," said Grant, with a forced, mocking smile. "I need just such
a get-up for haying and corn-ploughing. Singular I never thought of it.
Now my pants cost eighty-five cents, s'spenders fifteen, hat twenty,
shoes one-fifty; stockin's I don't bother about."

He had his brother at a disadvantage, and he grew fluent and caustic as
he went on, almost changing places with Howard, who took the rake out of
the boy's hand, and followed, raking up the scatterings.

"Singular we fellers here are discontented and mulish, ain't it?
Singular we don't believe your letters when you write, sayin', 'I just
about make a live of it'? Singular we think the country's goin' to hell,
we fellers, in a two-dollar suit, wadin' around in the mud or sweatin'
around in the hay-field, while you fellers lay around New York and smoke
and wear good clothes and toady to millionaires?"

Howard threw down the rake and folded his arms. "My God! you're enough
to make a man forget the same mother bore us!"

"I guess it wouldn't take much to make you forget that. You ain't put
much thought on me nor her for ten years."

The old man cackled, the boy grinned, and Howard, sick and weak with
anger and sorrow, turned away and walked down toward the brook. He had
tried once more to get near his brother, and had failed. Oh, God! how
miserably, pitiably! The hot blood gushed all over him as he thought of
the shame and disgrace of it.

He, a man associating with poets, artists, sought after by brilliant
women, accustomed to deference even from such people, to be sneered at,
outfaced, shamed, shoved aside, by a man in a stained hickory shirt and
patched overalls, and that man his brother! He lay down on the bright
grass, with the sheep all around him, and writhed and groaned with the
agony and despair of it.

And worst of all, underneath it was a consciousness that Grant was right
in distrusting him. He had neglected him; he had said, "I guess they're
getting along all right." He had put them behind him when the invitation
to spend summer on the Mediterranean or in the Adirondacks, came.

"What can I do? What can I do?" he groaned.

The sheep nibbled the grass near him, the jays called pertly, "Shame,
shame," a quail piped somewhere on the hillside, and the brook sung a
soft, soothing melody that took away at last the sharp edge of his pain,
and he sat up and gazed down the valley, bright with the sun and
apparently filled with happy and prosperous people.

Suddenly a thought seized him. He stood up so suddenly that the sheep
fled in affright. He leaped the brook, crossed the flat, and began
searching in the bushes on the hillside. "Hurrah!" he said, with a
smile.

He had found an old road which he used to travel when a boy--a road that
skirted the edge of the valley, now grown up to brush, but still
passable for footmen. As he ran lightly along down the beautiful path,
under oaks and hickories, past masses of poison-ivy, under hanging
grapevines, through clumps of splendid hazel-nut bushes loaded with
great sticky, rough, green burs, his heart threw off part of its load.

How it all came back to him! How many days, when the autumn sun burned
the frost of the bushes, had he gathered hazel-nuts here with his boy
and girl friends--Hugh and Shelley McTurg, Rome Sawyer, Orrin McIlvaine,
and the rest! What had become of them all? How he had forgotten them!

This thought stopped him again, and he fell into a deep muse, leaning
against an oak tree, and gazing into the vast fleckless space above. The
thrilling, inscrutable mystery of life fell upon him like a blinding
light. Why was he living in the crush and thunder and mental unrest of a
great city, while his companions, seemingly his equals in powers, were
milking cows, making butter, and growing corn and wheat in the silence
and drear monotony of the farm?

His boyish sweethearts! their names came back to his ear now, with a
dull, sweet sound as of faint bells. He saw their faces, their pink
sunbonnets tipped back upon their necks, their brown ankles flying with
the swift action of the scurrying partridge. His eyes softened, he took
off his hat. The sound of the wind and the leaves moved him almost to
tears.

A woodpecker gave a shrill, high-keyed, sustained cry, "Ki, ki, ki!" and
he started from his revery, the dapples of the sun and shade falling
upon his lithe figure as he hurried on down the path.

He came at last to a field of corn that ran to the very wall of a large
weather-beaten house, the sight of which made his breathing quicker. It
was the place where he was born. The mystery of his life began there. In
the branches of those poplar and hickory trees he had swung and sung in
the rushing breeze, fearless as a squirrel. Here was the brook where,
like a larger kildee, he with Grant had waded after crawfish, or had
stolen upon some wary trout, rough-cut pole in hand.

Seeing someone in the garden, he went down along the corn-row through
the rustling ranks of green leaves. An old woman was picking berries, a
squat and shapeless figure.

"Good-morning," he called cheerily.

"Morgen," she said, looking up at him with a startled and very red face.
She was German in every line of her body.

"Ich bin Herr McLane," he said, after a pause.

"So?" she replied, with a questioning inflection.

"Yah; ich bin Herr Grant's Bruder."

"Ach, so!" she said, with a downward inflection. "Ich no spick Inglish.
No spick Inglis."

"Ich bin durstig," he said. Leaving her pans, she went with him to the
house, which was what he really wanted to see.

"Ich bin hier geboren."

"Ach, so!" She recognized the little bit of sentiment, and said some
sentences in German whose general meaning was sympathy. She took him to
the cool cellar where the spring had been trained to run into a tank
containing pans of cream and milk; she gave him a cool draught from a
large tin cup, and at his request went with him upstairs. The house was
the same, but somehow seemed cold and empty. It was clean and sweet, but
it showed so little evidence of being lived in. The old part, which was
built of logs, was used as best room, and modelled after the best rooms
of the neighboring "Yankee" homes, only it was emptier, without the
cabinet organ and the rag-carpet and the chromos.

The old fireplace was bricked up and plastered--the fireplace beside
which, in the far-off days, he had lain on winter nights, to hear his
uncles tell tales of hunting, or to hear them play the violin, great
dreaming giants that they were.

The old woman went out and left him sitting there, the centre of a swarm
of memories, coming and going like so many ghostly birds and
butterflies.

A curious heartache and listlessness, a nerveless mood came on him. What
was it worth, anyhow--success? Struggle, strife, trampling on some one
else. His play crowding out some other poor fellow's hope. The hawk eats
the partridge, the partridge eats the flies and bugs, the bugs eat each
other, and the hawk, when he in his turn is shot by man. So in the world
of business, the life of one man seemed to him to be drawn from the life
of another man, each success to spring from other failures.

He was like a man from whom all motives had been withdrawn. He was sick,
sick to the heart. Oh, to be a boy again! An ignorant baby, pleased with
a block and string, with no knowledge and no care of the great unknown!
To lay his head again on his mother's bosom and rest! To watch the
flames on the hearth!--

Why not? Was not that the very thing to do? To buy back the old farm?
It would cripple him a little for the next season, but he could do it.
Think of it! To see his mother back in the old home, with the fireplace
restored, the old furniture in the sitting room around her, and fine new
things in the parlor!

His spirits rose again. Grant couldn't stand out when he brought to
him a deed of the farm. Surely his debt would be cancelled when he had
seen them all back in the wide old kitchen. He began to plan and to
dream. He went to the windows, and looked out on the yard to see how
much it had changed.

He'd build a new barn and buy them a new carriage. His heart glowed
again, and his lips softened into their usual feminine grace--lips a
little full and falling easily into curves.

The old German woman came in at length, bringing some cakes and a bowl
of milk, smiling broadly and hospitably as she waddled forward.

"Ach! Goot!" he said, smacking his lips over the pleasant draught.

"Wo ist ihre goot mann?" he inquired, ready for business.

III

When Grant came in at noon Mrs. McLane met him at the door with a tender
smile on her face.

"Where's Howard, Grant?"

"I don't know," he replied, in a tone that implied "I don't care."

The dim eyes clouded with quick tears.

"Ain't you seen him?"

"Not since nine o'clock."

"Where do you think he is?"

"I tell yeh I don't know. He'll take care of himself; don't worry."

He flung off his hat and plunged into the wash-basin. His shirt was wet
with sweat and covered with dust of the hay and fragments of leaves. He
splashed his burning face with the water, paying no further attention to
his mother. She spoke again, very gently, in reproof:

"Grant, why do you stand out against Howard so?"

"I don't stand out against him," he replied harshly, pausing with the
towel in his hands. His eyes were hard and piercing. "But if he expects
me to gush over his coming back, he's fooled, that's all. He's left us
to paddle our own canoe all this while, and, so far as I'm concerned, he
can leave us alone hereafter. He looked out for his precious hide mighty
well, and now he comes back here to play big gun and pat us on the head.
I don't propose to let him come that over me."

Mrs. McLane knew too well the temper of her son to say any more, but she
inquired about Howard of the old hired man.

"He went off down the valley. He 'n' Grant had s'm words, and he pulled
out down toward the old farm. That's the last I see of 'im."

Laura took Howard's part at the table. "Pity you can't be decent," she
said, brutally direct as usual. "You treat Howard as if he was a--a--I
do' know what."

"Will you let me alone?"

"No, I won't. If you think I'm going to set by an' agree to your
bullyraggin' him, you're mistaken. It's a shame! You're mad 'cause he's
succeeded and you hain't. He ain't to blame for his brains. If you and
I'd had any, we'd 'a' succeeded too. It ain't our fault, and it ain't
his; so what's the use?"

A look came into Grant's face which the wife knew meant bitter and
terrible silence. He ate his dinner without another word.

It was beginning to cloud up. A thin, whitish, all-pervasive vapor which
meant rain was dimming the sky, and Grant forced his hands to their
utmost during the afternoon, in order to get most of the down hay in
before the rain came. He was pitching from the load into the barn when
Howard came by, just before one o'clock.

It was windless there. The sun fell through the white mist with
undiminished fury, and the fragrant hay sent up a breath that was hot as
an oven-draught. Grant was a powerful man, and there was something
majestic in his action as he rolled the huge flakes of hay through the
door. The sweat poured from his face like rain, and he was forced to
draw his drenched sleeve across his face to clear away the blinding
sweat that poured into his eyes.

Howard stood and looked at him in silence, remembering how often he had
worked there in that furnace-heat, his muscles quivering, cold chills
running over his flesh, red shadows dancing before his eyes.

His mother met him at the door, anxiously, but smiled as she saw his
pleasant face and cheerful eyes.

"You're a little late, m' son."

Howard spent most of the afternoon sitting with his mother on the
porch, or under the trees, lying sprawled out like a boy, resting at
times with sweet forgetfulness of the whole world, but feeling a dull
pain whenever he remembered the stern, silent man pitching hay in the
hot sun on the torrid side of the barn.

His mother did not say anything about the quarrel; she feared to
reopen it. She talked mainly of old times in a gentle monotone of
reminiscence, while he listened, looking up into her patient face.

The heat slowly lessened as the sun sank down toward the dun clouds
rising like a more distant and majestic line of mountains beyond the
western hills. The sound of cow-bells came irregularly to the ear, and
the voices and sounds of the haying-fields had a jocund, pleasant sound
to the ear of the city-dweller.

He was very tender. Everything conspired to make him simple, direct, and
honest.

"Mother, if you'll only forgive me for staying away so long, I'll surely
come to see you every summer."

She had nothing to forgive. She was so glad to have him there at her
feet--her great, handsome, successful boy! She could only love him and
enjoy him every moment of the precious days. If Grant would only
reconcile himself to Howard! That was the great thorn in her flesh.

Howard told her how he had succeeded.

"It was luck, mother. First I met Cook, and he introduced me to Jake
Saulsman of Chicago. Jake asked me to go to New York with him, and--I
don't know why--took a fancy to me some way. He introduced me to a lot
of the fellows in New York, and they all helped me along. I did nothing
to merit it. Everybody helps me. Anybody can succeed in that way."

The doting mother thought it not at all strange that they all helped
him.

At the supper table Grant was gloomily silent, ignoring Howard
completely. Mrs. McLane sat and grieved silently, not daring to say a
word in protest. Laura and the baby tried to amuse Howard, and under
cover of their talk the meal was eaten.

The boy fascinated Howard. He "sawed wood" with a rapidity and
uninterruptedness which gave alarm. He had the air of coaling up for a
long voyage.

"At that age," Howard thought, "I must have gripped my knife in my right
hand so, and poured my tea into my saucer so. I must have buttered and
bit into a huge slice of bread just so, and chewed at it with a smacking
sound in just that way. I must have gone to the length of scooping up
honey with my knife-blade."

The sky was magically beautiful over all this squalor and toil and
bitterness, from five till seven--a moving hour. Again the falling sun
streamed in broad banners across the valleys; again the blue mist lay
far down the Coolly over the river; the cattle called from the hills in
the moistening, sonorous air; the bells came in a pleasant tangle of
sound; the air pulsed with the deepening chorus of katydids and other
nocturnal singers.

Sweet and deep as the very springs of his life was all this to the soul
of the elder brother; but in the midst of it, the younger man, in
ill-smelling clothes and great boots that chafed his feet, went out to
milk the cows,--on whose legs the flies and mosquitoes swarmed, bloated
with blood,--to sit by the hot side of the cow and be lashed with her
tail as she tried frantically to keep the savage insects from eating her
raw.

"The poet who writes of milking the cows does it from the hammock,
looking on," Howard soliloquized, as he watched the old man Lewis racing
around the filthy yard after one of the young heifers that had kicked
over the pail in her agony with the flies, and was unwilling to stand
still and be eaten alive.

"So, so! you beast!" roared the old man, as he finally cornered the
shrinking, nearly frantic creature.

"Don't you want to look at the garden?" asked Mrs. McLane of Howard; and
they went out among the vegetables and berries.

The bees were coming home heavily laden and crawling slowly into the
hives. The level, red light streamed through the trees, blazed along the
grass, and lighted a few old-fashioned flowers into red and gold flame.
It was beautiful, and Howard looked at it through his half-shut eyes as
the painters do, and turned away with a sigh at the sound of blows where
the wet and grimy men were assailing the frantic cows.

"There's Wesley with your trunk," Mrs. McLane said, recalling him to
himself.

Wesley helped him carry the trunk in, and waved off thanks.

"Oh, that's all right," he said; and Howard knew the Western man too
well to press the matter of pay.

As he went in an hour later and stood by the trunk, the dull ache came
back into his heart. How he had failed! It seemed like a bitter mockery
now to show his gifts.

Grant had come in from his work, and with his feet released from his
chafing boots, in his wet shirt and milk-splashed overalls, sat at the
kitchen table reading a newspaper which he held close to a small
kerosene lamp. He paid no attention to any one. His attitude, curiously
like his father's, was perfectly definite to Howard. It meant that from
that time forward there were to be no words of any sort between them. It
meant that they were no longer brothers, not even acquaintances. "How
inexorable that face!" thought Howard.

He turned sick with disgust and despair, and would have closed his trunk
without showing any of the presents, only for the childish expectancy of
his mother and Laura.

"Here's something for you, mother," he said, assuming a cheerful voice,
as he took a fold of fine silk from the trunk and held it up. "All the
way from Paris." He laid it on his mother's lap and stooped and kissed
her, and then turned hastily away to hide the tears that came to his own
eyes as he saw her keen pleasure.

"And here's a parasol for Laura. I don't know how I came to have that in
here. And here's General Grant's autobiography for his namesake," he
said, with an effort at carelessness, and waited to hear Grant rise.

"Grant, won't you come in?" asked his mother, quiveringly.

Grant did not reply nor move. Laura took the handsome volumes out and
laid them beside him on the table. He simply pushed them to one side and
went on with his reading.

Again that horrible anger swept hot as flame over Howard. He could have
cursed him. His hands shook as he handed out other presents to his
mother and Laura and the baby. He tried to joke.

"I didn't know how old the baby was, so she'll have to grow to some of
these things."

But the pleasure was all gone for him and for the rest. His heart
swelled almost to a feeling of pain as he looked at his mother. There
she sat with the presents in her lap. The shining silk came too late for
her. It threw into appalling relief her age, her poverty, her work-weary
frame. "My God!" he almost cried aloud, "how little it would have taken
to lighten her life!"

Upon this moment, when it seemed as if he could endure no more, came the
smooth voice of William McTurg:

"Hello, folkses!"

"Hello, Uncle Bill! Come in."

"That's what we came for," laughed a woman's voice.

"Is that you, Rose?" asked Laura.

"It's me--Rose," replied the laughing girl, as she bounced into the room
and greeted everybody in a breathless sort of way.

"You don't mean little Rosy?"

"Big Rosy now," said William.

Howard looked at the handsome girl and smiled, saying in a nasal sort of
tone, "Wal, wal! Rosy, how you've growed since I saw yeh!"

"Oh, look at all this purple and fine linen! Am I left out?"

Rose was a large girl of twenty-five or thereabouts, and was called an
old maid. She radiated good-nature from every line of her buxom self.
Her black eyes were full of drollery, and she was on the best of terms
with Howard at once. She had been a teacher, but that did not prevent
her from assuming a homely directness of speech. Of course they talked
about old friends.

"Where's Rachel?" Howard inquired. Her smile faded away.

"Shellie married Orrin McIlvaine. They're 'way out in Dakota. Shellie's
havin' a hard row of stumps."

There was a little silence.

"And Tommy?"

"Gone West. Most all the boys have gone West. That's the reason there's
so many old maids."

"You don't mean to say--"

"I don't need to say--I'm an old maid. Lots of the girls are. It don't
pay to marry these days." "Are you married?"

"Not yet." His eyes lighted up again in a humorous way.

"Not yet! That's good! That's the way old maids all talk."

"You don't mean to tell me that no young fellow comes prowling around--"

"Oh, a young Dutchman or Norwegian once in a while. Nobody that counts.
Fact is, we're getting like Boston--four women to one man; and when you
consider that we're getting more particular each year, the outlook
is--well, it's dreadful!"

"It certainly is."

"Marriage is a failure these days for most of us. We can't live on a
farm, and can't get a living in the city, and there we are." She laid
her hand on his arm. "I declare, Howard, you're the same boy you used to
be. I ain't a bit afraid of you, for all your success."

"And you're the same girl? No, I can't say that. It seems to me you've
grown more than I have--I don't mean physically, I mean mentally," he
explained, as he saw her smile in the defensive way a fleshy girl has,
alert to ward off a joke.

They were in the midst of talk, Howard telling one of his funny stories,
when a wagon clattered up to the door, and merry voices called loudly:

"Whoa, there, Sampson!"

"Hullo, the house!"

Rose looked at her father with a smile in her black eyes exactly like
his. They went to the door.

"Hullo! What's wanted?"

"Grant McLane live here?"

"Yup. Right here."

A moment later there came a laughing, chattering squad of women to the
door. Mrs. McLane and Laura stared at each other in amazement. Grant
went outdoors.

Rose stood at the door as if she were hostess.

"Come in, Nettie. Glad to see yeh--glad to see yeh! Mrs. McIlvaine,
come right in! Take a seat. Make yerself to home, do! And Mrs. Peavey!
Wal, I never! This must be a surprise party. Well, I swan! How many more
o' ye air they?"

All was confusion, merriment, hand-shakings as Rose introduced them in
her roguish way.

"Folks, this is Mr. Howard McLane of New York. He's an actor, but it
hain't spoiled him a bit as I can see. How., this is Nettie
McIlvaine--Wilson that was."

Howard shook hands with Nettie, a tall, plain girl with prominent teeth.

"This is Ma McIlvaine."

"She looks just the same," said Howard, shaking her hand and feeling how
hard and work-worn it was.

And so amid bustle, chatter, and invitations "to lay off y'r things an'
stay awhile," the women got disposed about the room at last. Those that
had rocking-chairs rocked vigorously to and fro to hide their
embarrassment. They all talked in loud voices.

Howard felt nervous under this furtive scrutiny. He wished that his
clothes didn't look so confoundedly dressy. Why didn't he have sense
enough to go and buy a fifteen-dollar suit of diagonals for everyday
wear.

Rose was the life of the party. Her tongue rattled on in the most
delightful way.

"It's all Rose and Bill's doin's," Mrs. McIlvaine explained. "They told
us to come over and pick up anybody we see on the road. So we did."

Howard winced a little at her familiarity of tone. He couldn't help it
for the life of him.

"Well, I wanted to come to-night because I'm going away next week, and I
wanted to see how he'd act at a surprise-party again," Rose explained.

"Married, I s'pose," said Mrs. McIlvaine, abruptly.

"No, not yet."

"Good land! Why, y' mus' be thirty-five, How. Must 'a' dis'p'inted y'r
mam not to have a young 'un to call 'er granny."

The men came clumping in, talking about haying and horses. Some of the
older ones Howard knew and greeted, but the younger ones were mainly too
much changed. They were all very ill at ease. Some of them were in
compromise dress--something lying between working "rig" and Sunday
dress. Most of them had on clean shirts and paper collars, and wore
their Sunday coats (thick woollen garments) over rough trousers. Most of
them crossed their legs at once, and all of them sought the wall and
leaned back perilously upon the hind legs of their chairs, eyeing Howard
slowly.

For the first few minutes the presents were the subjects of
conversation. The women especially spent a good deal of talk upon them.

Howard found himself forced to taking the initiative, so he inquired
about the crops and about the farms.

"I see you don't plough the hills as we used to. And reap! What a job it
used to be. It makes the hills more beautiful to have them covered with
smooth grass and cattle."

There was only dead silence to this touching upon the idea of beauty.

"I s'pose it pays reasonably?"

"Not enough to kill," said one of the younger men. "You c'n see that by
the houses we live in--that is, most of us. A few that came in early
an' got land cheap, like McIlvaine, here--he got a lift that the rest of
us can't get."

"I'm a free-trader, myself," said one young fellow, blushing and looking
away as Howard turned and said cheerily:

"So'm I."

The rest semed to feel that this was a tabooed subject--a subject to be
talked out of doors, where a man could prance about and yell and do
justice to it.

Grant sat silently in the kitchen doorway, not saying a word, not
looking at his brother.

"Well, I don't never use hot vinegar for mine," Mrs. McIlvaine was heard
to say. "I jest use hot water, and I rinse 'em out good, and set 'em
bottom-side up in the sun. I do' know but what hot vinegar would be more
cleansin'."

Rose had the younger folks in a giggle with a droll telling of a joke on
herself.

"How d' y' stop 'em from laffin'?"

"I let 'em laugh. Oh, my school is a disgrace--so one director says. But
I like to see children laugh. It broadens their cheeks."

"Yes, that's all hand-work." Laura was showing the baby's Sunday
clothes.

"Goodness Peter! How do you find time to do so much?"

"I take time."

Howard, being the lion of the evening, tried his best to be agreeable.
He kept near his mother, because it afforded her so much pride and
satisfaction, and because he was obliged to keep away from Grant, who
had begun to talk to the men. Howard talked mainly about their affairs,
but still was forced more and more into talking of life in the city. As
he told of the theatre and the concerts, a sudden change fell upon them;
they grew sober, and he felt deep down in the hearts of these people a
melancholy which was expressed only illusively with little tones or
sighs. Their gayety was fitful.

They were hungry for the world, for life--these young people.
Discontented, and yet hardly daring to acknowledge it; indeed, few of
them could have made definite statement of their dissatisfaction. The
older people felt it less. They practically said, with a sigh of
pathetic resignation:

"Well, I don't expect ever to see these things now."

A casual observer would have said, "What a pleasant bucolic--this little
surprise-party of welcome!" But Howard, with his native ear and eye, had
no such pleasing illusion. He knew too well these suggestions of
despair and bitterness. He knew that, like the smile of the slave, this
cheerfulness was self-defence; deep down was another unsatisfied ego.

Seeing Grant talking with a group of men over by the kitchen door, he
crossed over slowly and stood listening. Wesley Cosgrove--a tall,
raw-boned young fellow with a grave, almost tragic face--was saying:

"Of course I ain't. Who is? A man that's satisfied to live as we do is a
fool."

"The worst of it is," said Grant, without seeing Howard, "a man can't
get out of it during his lifetime, and I don't know that he'll have any
chance in the next--the speculator 'll be there ahead of us."

The rest laughed, but Grant went on grimly:

"Ten years ago Wess, here, could have got land in Dakota pretty easy,
but now it's about all a feller's life's worth to try it. I tell you
things seem shuttin' down on us fellers."

"Plenty o' land to rent," suggested some one.

"Yes, in terms that skin a man alive. More than that, farmin' ain't so
free a life as it used to be. This cattle-raisin' and butter-makin'
makes a nigger of a man. Binds him right down to the grindstone and he
gets nothin' out of it--that's what rubs it in. He simply wallers around
in the manure for somebody else. I'd like to know what a man's life is
worth who lives as we do? How much higher is it than the lives the
niggers used to live?"

These brutally bald words made Howard thrill with emotion like the
reading of some great tragic poem. A silence fell on the group.

"That's the God's truth, Grant," said young Cosgrove, after a pause.

"A man like me is helpless," Grant was saying. "Just like a fly in a pan
of molasses. There's no escape for him. The more he tears around the
more liable he is to rip his legs off."

"What can he do?"

"Nothin'."

The men listened in silence.

"Oh, come, don't talk politics all night!" cried Rose, breaking in.
"Come, let's have a dance. Where's that fiddle?"

"Fiddle!" cried Howard, glad of a chance to laugh. "Well, now! Bring out
that fiddle. Is it William's?"

"Yes, pap's old fiddle."

"O Gosh! he don't want to hear me play," protested William. "He's heard
s' many fiddlers."

"Fiddlers! I've heard a thousand violinists, but not fiddlers. Come,
give us 'Honest John.'"

William took the fiddle in his work-calloused and crooked hands and
began tuning it. The group at the kitchen door turned to listen, their
faces lighting up a little. Rose tried to get a "set" on the floor.

"Oh, good land!" said some. "We're all tuckered out. What makes you so
anxious?"

"She wants a chance to dance with the New Yorker."

"That's it, exactly," Rose admitted.

"Wal, if you'd churned and mopped and cooked for hayin' hands as I have
to-day, you wouldn't be so full o' nonsense."

"Oh, bother! Life's short. Come quick, get Bettie out. Come, Wess, never
mind your hobby-horse."

By incredible exertion she got a set on the floor, and William got the
fiddle in tune. Howard looked across at Wesley, and thought the change
in him splendidly dramatic. His face had lighted with a timid,
deprecating, boyish smile. Rose could do anything with him.

William played some of the old tunes that had a thousand associated
memories in Howard's brain, memories of harvest-moons, of melon-feasts,
and of clear, cold winter nights. As he danced, his eyes filled with a
tender light. He came closer to them all than he had been able to do
before. Grant had gone out into the kitchen.

After two or three sets had been danced, the company took seats and
could not be stirred again. So Laura and Rose disappeared for a few
moments, and returning, served strawberries and cream, which Laura said
she "just happened to have in the house."

And then William played again. His fingers, now grown more supple,
brought out clearer, firmer tones. As he played, silence fell on these
people. The magic of music sobered every face; the women looked older
and more careworn, the men slouched sullenly in their chairs, or leaned
back against the wall.

It seemed to Howard as if the spirit of tragedy had entered this house.
Music had always been William's unconscious expression of his
unsatisfied desires. He was never melancholy except when he played. Then
his eyes grew sombre, his drooping face full of shadows.

He played on slowly, softly, wailing Scotch tunes and mournful Irish
love songs. He seemed to find in these melodies, and especially in a
wild, sweet, low-keyed negro song, some expression for his indefinable
inner melancholy.

He played on, forgetful of everybody, his long beard sweeping the
violin, his toil-worn hands marvellously obedient to his will.

At last he stopped, looked up with a faint, apologetic smile, and said
with a sigh:

"Well, folkses, time to go home."

The going was quiet. Not much laughing. Howard stood at the door and
said good-night to them all, his heart very tender.

"Come and see us," they said.

"I will," he replied cordially. "I'll try and get around to see
everybody, and talk over old times, before I go back."

After the wagons had driven out of the yard, Howard turned and put his
arm about his mother's neck.

"Tired?"

"A little."

"Well, now good night. I'm going for a little stroll."

His brain was too active to sleep. He kissed his mother good-night, and
went out into the road, his hat in his hand, the cool moist wind on his
hair.

It was very dark, the stars being partly hidden by a thin vapor. On each
side the hills rose, every line familiar as the face of an old friend. A
whippoorwill called occasionally from the hillside, and the spasmodic
jangle of a bell now and then told of some cow's battle with the
mosquitoes.

As he walked, he pondered upon the tragedy he had rediscovered in these
people's lives. Out here under the inexorable spaces of the sky, a deep
distaste of his own life took possession of him. He felt like giving it
all up. He thought of the infinite tragedy of these lives which the
world loves to call peaceful and pastoral. His mind went out in the aim
to help them. What could he do to make life better worth living? 
Nothing.

They must live and die practically as he saw them to-night.

And yet he knew this was a mood, and that in a few hours the love and
the habit of life would come back upon him and upon them; that he would
go back to the city in a few days; that these people would live on and
make the best of it.

"I'll make the best of it," he said at last, and his thought came back
to his mother and Grant.

IV

The next day was a rainy day; not a shower, but a steady rain--an
unusual thing in midsummer in the West. A cold, dismal day in the
fireless, colorless farmhouses. It came to Howard in that peculiar
reaction which surely comes during a visit of this character, when
thought is a weariness, when the visitor longs for his own familiar
walls and pictures and books, and longs to meet his friends, feeling at
the same time the tragedy of life which makes friends nearer and more
congenial than blood-relations.

Howard ate his breakfast alone, save Baby and Laura its mother going
about the room. Baby and mother alike insisted on feeding him to death.
Already dyspeptic pangs were setting in.

"Now ain't there something more I can--"

"Good heavens! No!" he cried in dismay. "I'm likely to die of dyspepsia
now. This honey and milk, and these delicious hot biscuits--"

"I'm afraid it ain't much like the breakfasts you have in the city."

"Well, no, it ain't," he confessed. "But this is the kind a man needs
when he lives in the open air."

She sat down opposite him, with her elbows on the table, her chin in her
palm, her eyes full of shadows.

"I'd like to go to a city once. I never saw a town bigger'n La Crosse.
I've never seen a play, but I've read of 'em in the magazines. It must
be wonderful; they say they have wharves and real ships coming up to the
wharf, and people getting off and on. How do they do it?"

"Oh, that's too long a story to tell. It's a lot of machinery and paint
and canvas. If I told you how it was done, you wouldn't enjoy it so well
when you come on and see it."

"Do you ever expect to see me in New York?"

"Why, yes. Why not? I expect Grant to come on and bring you all some
day, especially Tonikins here. Tonikins, you hear, sir? I expect you to
come on you' forf birfday, sure." He tried thus to stop the woman's
gloomy confidence.

"I hate farm-life," she went on with a bitter inflection. "It's nothing
but fret, fret, and work the whole time, never going any place, never
seeing anybody but a lot of neighbors just as big fools as you are. I
spend my time fighting flies and washing dishes and churning. I'm sick
of it all."

Howard was silent. What could he say to such an indictment? The ceiling
swarmed with flies which the cold rain had driven to seek the warmth of
the kitchen. The gray rain was falling with a dreary sound outside, and
down the kitchen stove-pipe an occasional drop fell on the stove with a
hissing, angry sound.

The young wife went on with a deeper note:

"I lived in La Crosse two years, going to school, and I know a little
something of what city life is. If I was a man, I bet I wouldn't wear my
life out on a farm, as Grant does. I'd get away and I'd do something. I
wouldn't care what, but I'd get away."

There was a certain volcanic energy back of all the woman said, that
made Howard feel she would make the attempt. She did not know that the
struggle for a place to stand on this planet was eating the heart and
soul out of men and women in the city, just as in the country. But he
could say nothing. If he had said in conventional phrase, sitting there
in his soft clothing, "We must make the best of it all," the woman could
justly have thrown the dish-cloth in his face. He could say nothing.

"I was a fool for ever marrying," she went on, while the baby pushed a
chair across the room. "I made a decent living teaching, I was free to
come and go, my money was my own. Now I'm tied right down to a churn or
a dish-pan, I never have a cent of my own. He's growlin' 'round half the
time, and there's no chance of his ever being different."

She stopped with a bitter sob in her throat. She forgot she was talking
to her husband's brother. She was conscious only of his sympathy.

As if a great black cloud had settled down upon him, Howard felt it
all--the horror, hopelessness, imminent tragedy of it all. The glory of
nature, the bounty and splendor of the sky, only made it the more
benumbing. He thought of a sentence Millet once wrote:

"I see very well the aureole of the dandelions, and the sun also, far
down there behind the hills, flinging his glory upon the clouds. But not
alone that--I see in the plains the smoke of the tired horses at the
plough, or, on a stony-hearted spot of ground, a back-broken man trying
to raise himself upright for a moment to breathe. The tragedy is
surrounded by glories--that is no invention of mine."

Howard arose abruptly and went back to his little bedroom, where he
walked up and down the floor till he was calm enough to write, and then
he sat down and poured it all out to "Dearest Margaret," and his first
sentence was this:

"If it were not for you (just to let you know the mood I'm in)--if it
were not for you, and I had the world in my hands, I'd crush it like a
puff-ball; evil so predominates, suffering is so universal and
persistent, happiness so fleeting and so infrequent."

He wrote on for two hours, and by the time he had sealed and directed
several letters he felt calmer, but still terribly depressed. The rain
was still falling, sweeping down from the half-seen hills, wreathing the
wooded peaks with a gray garment of mist, and filling the valley with a
whitish cloud.

It fell around the house drearily. It ran down into the tubs placed to
catch it, dripped from the mossy pump, and drummed on the upturned
milk-pails, and upon the brown and yellow beehives under the maple
trees. The chickens seemed depressed, but the irrepressible bluejay
screamed amid it all, with the same insolent spirit, his plumage
untarnished by the wet. The barnyard showed a horrible mixture of mud
and mire, through which Howard caught glimpses of the men, slumping to
and fro without more additional protection than a ragged coat and a
shapeless felt hat.

In the sitting room where his mother sat sewing there was not an
ornament, save the etching he had brought. The clock stood on a small
shell, its dial so much defaced that one could not tell the time of day;
and when it struck, it was with noticeably disproportionate
deliberation, as if it wished to correct any mistake into which the
family might have fallen by reason of its illegible dial.

The paper on the walls showed the first concession of the Puritans to
the Spirit of Beauty, and was made up of a heterogeneous mixture of
flowers of unheard-of shapes and colors, arranged in four different ways
along the wall. There were no books, no music, and only a few newspapers
in sight--a bare, blank, cold, drab-colored shelter from the rain, not a
home. Nothing cozy, nothing heart-warming; a grim and horrible shed.

"What are they doing? It can't be they're at work such a day as this,"
Howard said, standing at the window.

"They find plenty to do, even on rainy days," answered his mother.
"Grant always has some job to set the men at. It's the only way to
live."

"I'll go out and see them." He turned suddenly. "Mother, why should
Grant treat me so? Have I deserved it?"

Mrs. McLane sighed in pathetic hopelessness. "I don't know, Howard. I'm
worried about Grant. He gets more an' more down-hearted an' gloomy every
day. Seems if he'd go crazy. He don't care how he looks any more, won't
dress up on Sunday. Days an' days he'll go aroun' not sayin' a word. I
was in hopes you could help him, Howard."

"My coming seems to have had an opposite effect. He hasn't spoken a word
to me, except when he had to, since I came. Mother, what do you say to
going home with me to New York?"

"Oh, I couldn't do that!" she cried in terror. "I couldn't live in a
big city--never!"

"There speaks the truly rural mind," smiled Howard at his mother, who
was looking up at him through her glasses with a pathetic forlornness
which sobered him again. "Why, mother, you could live in Orange, New
Jersey, or out in Connecticut, and be just as lonesome as you are here.
You wouldn't need to live in the city. I could see you then every day or
two."

"Well, I couldn't leave Grant an' the baby, anyway," she replied, not
realizing how one could live in New Jersey and do business daily in New
York.

"Well, then, how would you like to go back into the old house?"

The patient hands fell to the lap, the dim eyes fixed in searching
glance on his face. There was a wistful cry in the voice.

"Oh, Howard! Do you mean--"

He came and sat down by her, and put his arm about her and hugged her
hard. "I mean, you dear, good, patient, work-weary old mother, I'm going
to buy back the old farm and put you in it."

There was no refuge for her now except in tears, and she put up her
thin, trembling old hands about his neck, and cried in that easy,
placid, restful way age has.

Howard could not speak. His throat ached with remorse and pity. He saw
his forgetfulness of them all once more without relief,--the black thing
it was!

"There, there, mother, don't cry!" he said, torn with anguish by her
tears. Measured by man's tearlessness, her weeping seemed terrible to
him. "I didn't realize how things were going here. It was all my
fault--or, at least, most of it. Grant's letter didn't reach me. I
thought you were still on the old farm. But no matter; it's all over
now. Come, don't cry any more, mother dear. I'm going to take care of
you now."

It had been years since the poor, lonely woman had felt such warmth of
love. Her sons had been like her husband, chary of expressing their
affection; and like most Puritan families, there was little of caressing
among them. Sitting there with the rain on the roof and driving through
the trees, they planned getting back into the old house. Howard's plan
seemed to her full of splendor and audacity. She began to understand his
power and wealth now, as he put it into concrete form before her.

"I wish I could eat Thanksgiving dinner there with you," he said at
last, "but it can't be thought of. However, I'll have you all in there
before I go home. I'm going out now and tell Grant. Now don't worry any
more; I'm going to fix it all up with him, sure." He gave her a parting
hug.

Laura advised him not to attempt to get to the barn; but as he persisted
in going, she hunted up an old rubber coat for him. "You'll mire down
and spoil your shoes," she said, glancing at his neat calf gaiters.

"Darn the difference!" he laughed in his old way. "Besides, I've got
rubbers."

"Better go round by the fence," she advised, as he stepped out into the
pouring rain.

How wretchedly familiar it all was! The miry cow-yard, with the hollow
trampled out around the horse-trough, the disconsolate hens standing
under the wagons and sheds, a pig wallowing across its sty, and for
atmosphere the desolate, falling rain. It was so familiar he felt a pang
of the old rebellious despair which seized him on such days in his
boyhood.

Catching up courage, he stepped out on the grass, opened the gate and
entered the barn-yard. A narrow ribbon of turf ran around the fence, on
which he could walk by clinging with one hand to the rough boards. In
this way he slowly made his way around the periphery, and came at last
to the open barn-door without much harm.

It was a desolate interior. In the open floor-way Grant, seated upon a
half-bushel, was mending a harness. The old man was holding the trace in
his hard brown hands; the boy was lying on a wisp of hay. It was a small
barn, and poor at that. There was a bad smell, as of dead rats, about
it, and the rain fell through the shingles here and there. To the right,
and below, the horses stood, looking up with their calm and beautiful
eyes, in which the whole scene was idealized.

Grant looked up an instant, and then went on with his work.

"Did yeh wade through?" grinned Lewis, exposing his broken teeth.

"No, I kinder circumambiated the pond." He sat down on the little
tool-box near Grant. "Your barn is good deal like that in 'The Arkansaw
Traveller.' Needs a new roof, Grant." His voice had a pleasant sound,
full of the tenderness of the scene through which he had just been.
"In fact, you need a new barn."

"I need a good many things more'n I'll ever get," Grant replied shortly.

"How long did you say you'd been on this farm?"

"Three years this fall."

"I don't s'pose you've been able to think of buying--Now hold on,
Grant," he cried, as Grant threw his head back. "For God's sake, don't
get mad again! Wait till you see what I'm driving at."

"I don't see what you're drivin' at, and I don't care. All I want you to
do is to let us alone. That ought to be easy enough for you."

"I tell you, I didn't get your letter. I didn't know you'd lost the old
farm." Howard was determined not to quarrel. "I didn't suppose--"

"You might 'a' come to see."

"Well, I'll admit that. All I can say in excuse is that since I got to
managing plays I've kept looking ahead to making a big hit and getting a
barrel of money--just as the old miners used to hope and watch. Besides,
you don't understand how much pressure there is on me. A hundred
different people pulling and hauling to have me go here or go there, or
do this or do that. When it isn't yachting, it's canoeing, or--"

He stopped. His heart gave a painful throb, and a shiver ran through
him. Again he saw his life, so rich, so bright, so free, set over
against the routine life in the little low kitchen, the barren sitting
room, and this still more horrible barn. Why should his brother sit
there in wet and grimy clothing, mending a broken trace, while he
enjoyed all the light and civilization of the age?

He looked at Grant's fine figure, his great, strong face; recalled his
deep, stern, masterful voice. "Am I so much superior to him? Have not
circumstances made me and destroyed him?"

"Grant, for God's sake, don't sit there like that! I'll admit I've been
negligent and careless. I can't understand it all myself. But let me do
something for you now. I've sent to New York for five thousand dollars.
I've got terms on the old farm. Let me see you all back there once more
before I return."

"I don't want any of your charity."

"It ain't charity. It's only justice to you." He rose. "Come now, let's
get at an understanding, Grant. I can't go on this way. I can't go back
to New York and leave you here like this."

Grant rose, too. "I tell you, I don't ask your help. You can't fix this
thing up with money. If you've got more brains'n I have, why, it's all
right. I ain't got any right to take anything that I don't earn."

"But you don't get what you do earn. It ain't your fault. I begin to see
it now. Being the oldest, I had the best chance. I was going to town to
school while you were ploughing and husking corn. Of course I thought
you'd be going soon yourself. I had three years the start of you. If
you'd been in my place, you might have met a man like Cook, you might
have gone to New York and have been where I am".

"Well, it can't be helped now. So drop it."

"But it must be helped!" Howard said, pacing about, his hands in his
coat-pockets. Grant had stopped work, and was gloomily looking out of
the door at a pig nosing in the mud for stray grains of wheat at the
granary door. The old man and the boy quietly withdrew.

"Good God! I see it all now," Howard burst out in an impassioned tone.
"I went ahead with my education, got my start in life, then father died,
and you took up his burdens. Circumstances made me and crushed you.
That's all there is about that. Luck made me and cheated you. It ain't
right."

His voice faltered. Both men were now oblivious of their companions and
of the scene. Both were thinking of the days when they both planned
great things in the way of an education, two ambitious, dreamful boys.

"I used to think of you, Grant, when I pulled out Monday morning in my
best suit--cost fifteen dollars in those days." He smiled a little at
the recollection. "While you in overalls and an old 'wammus' was going
out into the field to plough, or husk corn in the mud. It made me feel
uneasy, but, as I said, I kept saying to myself, 'His turn'll come in a
year or two.' But it didn't."

His voice choked. He walked to the door, stood a moment, came back. His
eyes were full of tears.

"I tell you, old man, many a time in my boarding-house down to the city,
when I thought of the jolly times I was having, my heart hurt me. But I
said, 'It's no use to cry. Better go on and do the best you can, and
then help them afterward. There'll only be one more miserable member of
the family if you stay at home.' Besides, it seemed right to me to have
first chance. But I never thought you'd be shut off, Grant. If I had, I
never would have gone on. Come, old man, I want you to believe that."
His voice was very tender now and almost humble.

"I don't know as I blame you for that, How.," said Grant, slowly. It was
the first time he had called Howard by his boyish nickname. His voice
was softer, too, and higher in key. But he looked steadily away.

"I went to New York. People liked my work. I was very successful, Grant;
more successful than you realize. I could have helped you at any time.
There's no use lying about it. And I ought to have done it; but some
way--it's no excuse, I don't mean it for an excuse, only an
explanation--some way I got in with the boys. I don't mean I was a
drinker and all that. But I bought pictures and kept a horse and a
yacht, and of course I had to pay my share of all expeditions, and--oh,
what's the use!"

He broke off, turned, and threw his open palms out toward his brother,
as if throwing aside the last attempt at an excuse.

"I did neglect you, and it's a damned shame! and I ask your forgiveness.
Come, old man!"

He held out his hand, and Grant slowly approached and took it. There was
a little silence. Then Howard went on, his voice trembling, the tears on
his face.

"I want you to let me help you, old man. That's the way to forgive me.
Will you?"

"Yes, if you can help me."

Howard squeezed his hand. "That's all right, old man. Now you make me a
boy again. Course I can help you. I've got ten--"

"I don't mean that, How." Grant's voice was very grave. "Money can't
give me a chance now."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean life ain't worth very much to me. I'm too old to take a new
start. I'm a dead failure. I've come to the conclusion that life's a
failure for ninety-nine per cent of us. You can't help me now. It's too
late."

The two men stood there, face to face, hands clasped, the one
fair-skinned, full-lipped, handsome in his neat suit; the other tragic,
sombre in his softened mood, his large, long, rugged Scotch face bronzed
with sun and scarred with wrinkles that had histories, like sabre-cuts
on a veteran, the record of his battles.



Among the Corn-Rows

"But the road sometimes passes a rich meadow, where the songs of larks
and bobolinks and blackbirds are tangled."

I

Rob held up his hands, from which the dough depended in ragged strings.

"Biscuits," he said, with an elaborate working of his jaws, intended to
convey the idea that they were going to be specially delicious.

Seagraves laughed, but did not enter the shanty door. "How do you like
baching it?"

"Oh, don't mention it!" entreated Rob, mauling the dough again. "Come in
an' sit down. What in thunder y' standin' out there for?"

"Oh, I'd rather be where I can see the prairie. Great weather!"

"Im-mense!"

"How goes breaking?"

"Tip-top! A leette dry now; but the bulls pull the plough through two
acres a day. How's things in Boomtown?"

"Oh, same old grind."

"Judge still lyin'?"

"Still at it."

"Major Mullens still swearin' to it?"

"You hit it like a mallet. Railroad schemes are thicker 'n
prairie-chickens. You've got grit, Rob. I don't have anything but
crackers and sardines over to my shanty, and here you are making
soda-biscuit."

"I have t' do it. Couldn't break if I didn't. You editors c'n take
things easy, lay around on the prairie, and watch the plovers and
medderlarks; but we settlers have got to work."

Leaving Rob to sputter over his cooking, Seagraves took his slow way
off down toward the oxen grazing in a little hollow. The scene was
characteristically, wonderfully beautiful. It was about five o'clock
in a day in late June, and the level plain was green and yellow, and
infinite in reach as a sea; the lowering sun was casting over its
distant swells a faint impalpable mist, through which the breaking teams
on the neighboring claims ploughed noiselessly, as figures in a dream.
The whistle of gophers, the faint, wailing, fluttering cry of the
falling plover, the whir of the swift-winged prairie-pigeon, or the
quack of a lonely duck, came through the shimmering air. The lark's
infrequent whistle, piercingly sweet, broke from the longer grass in the
swales nearby. No other climate, sky, plain, could produce the same
unnamable weird charm. No tree to wave, no grass to rustle, scarcely a
sound of domestic life; only the faint melancholy soughing of the wind
in the short grass, and the voices of the wild things of the prairie.

Seagraves, an impressionable young man (junior editor of the Boomtown
Spike), threw himself down on the sod, pulled his hat-rim down over his
eyes, and looked away over the plain. It was the second year of
Boomtown's existence, and Seagraves had not yet grown restless under its
monotony. Around him the gophers played saucily. Teams were moving here
and there across the sod, with a peculiar noiseless, effortless motion,
that made them seem as calm, lazy, and insubstantial as the mist through
which they made their way; even the sound of passing wagons seemed a
sort of low, well-fed, self-satisfied chuckle.

Seagraves, "holding down a claim" near Rob, had come to see his
neighboring "bach" because feeling the need of company; but now that he
was near enough to hear him prancing about getting supper, he was
content to lie alone on a slope of the green sod.

The silence of the prairie at night was well-nigh terrible. Many a
night, as Seagraves lay in his bunk against the side of his cabin, he
would strain his ear to hear the slightest sound, and be listening thus
sometimes for minutes before the squeak of a mouse or the step of a
passing fox came as a relief to the aching sense. In the daytime,
however, and especially on a morning, the prairie was another thing. The
pigeons, the larks, the cranes, the multitudinous voices of the
ground-birds and snipes and insects, made the air pulsate with sound--a
chorus that died away into an infinite murmur of music.

"Hello, Seagraves!" yelled Rob from the door. "The biscuit are 'most
done."

Seagraves did not speak, only nodded his head, and slowly rose. The
faint clouds in the west were getting a superb flame-color above and a
misty purple below, and the sun had pierced them with lances of yellow
light. As the air grew denser with moisture, the sounds of neighboring
life began to reach the ear. Children screamed and laughed, and afar off
a woman was singing a lullaby. The rattle of wagons and the voices of
men speaking to their teams multiplied. Ducks in a neighboring lowland
were quacking sociably. The whole scene took hold upon Seagraves with
irresistible power.

"It is American," he exclaimed. "No other land or time can match this
mellow air, this wealth of color, much less the strange social
conditions of life on this sunlit Dakota prairie."

Rob, though visibly affected by the scene also, couldn't let his
biscuit spoil or go without proper attention.

"Say, ain't y' comin' t' grub?" he asked impatiently.

"In a minute," replied his friend, taking a last wistful look at the
scene. "I want one more look at the landscape."

"Landscape be blessed! If you'd been breakin' all day--Come, take that
stool an' draw up."

"No; I'll take the candle-box."

"Not much. I know what manners are, if I am a bull-driver."

Seagraves took the three-legged and rather precarious-looking stool and
drew up to the table, which was a flat broad box nailed up against the
side of the wall, with two strips of board spiked at the outer corners
for legs.

"How's that f'r a lay-out?" Rob inquired proudly.

"Well, you have spread yourself! Biscuit and canned peaches and sardines
and cheese. Why, this is--is--prodigal."

"It ain't nothin' else."

Rob was from one of the finest counties of Wisconsin, over toward
Milwaukee. He was of German parentage, a middle-sized, cheery,
wide-awake, good-looking young fellow--a typical claim-holder. He was
always confident, jovial, and full of plans for the future. He had dug
his own well, built his own shanty, washed and mended his own clothing.
He could do anything, and do it well. He had a fine field of wheat, and
was finishing the ploughing of his entire quarter-section.

"This is what I call settin' under a feller's own vine an' fig
tree"--after Seagraves' compliments--"an' I like it. I'm my own boss. No
man can say 'come here' 'r 'go there' to me. I get up when I'm a min'
to, an' go t' bed when I'm a min' to."

"Some drawbacks, I s'pose?"

"Yes. Mice, f'r instance, give me a devilish lot o' trouble. They get
into my flour-barrel, eat up my cheese, an' fall into my well. But it
ain't no use t' swear."

Seagraves quoted an old rhyme:

   "'The rats and the mice they made such a strife
    He had to go to London to buy him a wife.'"

"Don't blush. I've probed your secret thought."

"Well, to tell the honest truth," said Rob, a little sheepishly, leaning
across the table, "I ain't satisfied with my style o' cookin'. It's
good, but a little too plain, y' know. I'd like a change. It ain't much
fun to break all day, and then go to work an' cook y'r own supper."

"No, I should say not."

"This fall I'm going back to Wisconsin. Girls are thick as huckleberries
back there, and I'm goin' t' bring one back, now you hear me."

"Good! That's the plan," laughed Seagraves, amused at a certain timid
and apprehensive look in his companion's eye. "Just think what a woman
would do to put this shanty in shape; and think how nice it would be to
take her arm and saunter out after supper, and look at the farm, and
plan, and lay out gardens and paths, and tend the chickens!"

Rob's manly and self-reliant nature had the settler's typical buoyancy
and hopefulness, as well as a certain power of analysis, which enabled
him now to say: "The fact is, we fellers holdin' down claims out here
ain't fools clear to the rine. We know a couple o' things. Now I didn't
leave Waupac County f'r fun. Did y' ever see Waupac? Well, it's one o'
the handsomest counties the sun ever shone on, full o' lakes and rivers
and groves of timber. I miss 'em all out here, and I miss the boys an'
girls; but they wa'n't no chance there f'r a feller. Land that was good
was so blamed high you couldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole from a
balloon. Rent was high, if you wanted t' rent, an' so a feller like me
had t' get out, an' now I'm out here, I'm goin' t' make the most of it.
Another thing," he went on, after a pause--"we fellers workin' out back
there got more 'n' more like hands, an' less like human beings. Y' know,
Waupac is a kind of a summer resort, and the people that use' t' come in
summers looked down on us cusses in the fields an' shops. I couldn't
stand it. By God!" he said, with a sudden impulse of rage quite unusual,
"I'd rather live on an iceberg and claw crabs f'r a livin' than have
some feller passin' me on the road an' callin' me 'fellah!'"

Seagraves knew what he meant, but listened in astonishment at his
outburst.

"I consider myself a sight better 'n any man who lives on somebody
else's hard work. I've never had a cent I didn't earn with them hands."
He held them up and broke into a grin. "Beauties, ain't they? But they
never wore gloves that some other poor cuss earned."

Seagraves thought them grand hands, worthy to grasp the hand of any man
or woman living.

"Well, so I come West, just like a thousand other fellers, to get a
start where the cussed European aristocracy hadn't got a holt on the
people. I like it here--course I'd like the lakes an' meadows of Waupac
better--but I'm my own boss, as I say, and I'm goin' to stay my own boss
if I have to live on crackers an' wheat coffee to do it; that's the kind
of a hair-pin I am."

In the pause which followed, Seagraves, plunged deep into thought by
Rob's words, leaned his head on his hand. This working farmer had voiced
the modern idea. It was an absolute overturn of all the ideas of
nobility and special privilege born of the feudal past.

"I'd like to use your idea for an editorial, Rob," he said.

"My ideas!" exclaimed the astounded host, pausing in the act of filling
his pipe. "My ideas! Why, I didn't know I had any."

"Well, you've given me some, anyhow."

Seagraves felt that it was a wild, grand upstirring of the modern
democrat against the aristocrat, against the idea of caste and the
privilege of living on the labor of others. This atom of humanity (how
infinitesimal this drop in the ocean of humanity!) was feeling the
nameless longing of expanding personality. He had declared rebellion
against laws that were survivals of hate and prejudice. He had exposed
also the native spring of the emigrant by uttering the feeling that it
is better to be an equal among peasants than a servant before nobles.

"So I have good reasons f'r liking the country," Rob resumed, in a quiet
way. "The soil is rich, the climate good so far, an' if I have a couple
o' decent crops you'll see a neat upright goin' up here, with a porch
and a bay-winder."

"And you'll still be living here alone, frying leathery slapjacks an'
chopping 'taters and bacon."

"I think I see myself," drawled Rob, "goin' around all summer wearin'
the same shirt without washin', an' wipin' on the same towel four
straight weeks, an' wearin' holes in my socks, an' eatin' musty
ginger-snaps, mouldy bacon, an' canned Boston beans f'r the rest o' my
endurin' days! Oh, yes; I guess not!" He rose. "Well, see y' later. Must
go water my bulls."

As he went off down the slope, Seagraves smiled to hear him sing:

   "I wish that some kind-hearted girl
    Would pity on me take,
    And extricate me from the mess I'm in.
    The angel--how I'd bless her,
    If this her home she'd make,
    In my little old sod shanty on the plain."

The boys nearly fell off their chairs in the Western House dining room,
a few days later, when Rob came in to supper with a collar and necktie
as the finishing touch of a remarkable outfit.

"Hit him, somebody!"

"It's a clean collar!"

"He's started f'r Congress!"

"He's going to get married," put in Seagraves, in a tone that brought
conviction.

"What!" screamed Jack Adams, O'Neill, and Wilson, in one breath. "That
man?"

"That man," replied Seagraves, amazed at Rob, who coolly took his seat,
squared his elbows, pressed his collar down at the back, and called for
the bacon and eggs.

The crowd stared at him in a dead silence.

"Where's he going to do it?" asked Jack Adams. "Where's he going to find
a girl?"

"Ask him," said Seagraves.

"I ain't tellin'," put in Rob, with his mouth full of potato.

"You're afraid of our competition."

"That's right; our competition, Jack; not your competition. Come, now,
Rob, tell us where you found her."

"I ain't found her."

"What! And yet you're goin' away t' get married!"

"I'm goin' t' bring a wife back with me ten days fr'm date."

"I see his scheme," put in Jim Rivers. "He's goin' back East somewhere,
an' he's goin' to propose to every girl he meets."

"Hold on!" interrupted Rob, holding up his fork. "Ain't quite right.
Every good lookin' girl I meet."

"Well, I'll be blanked!" exclaimed Jack, impressively; "that simply lets
me out. Any man with such a cheek ought to--"

"Succeed," interrupted Seagraves.

"That's what I say," bawled Hank Whiting, the proprietor of the house.
"You fellers ain't got any enterprise to yeh. Why don't you go to work
an' help settle the country like men? 'Cause y' ain't got no sand. Girls
are thicker 'n huckleberries back East. I say it's a dum shame!"

"Easy, Henry," said the elegant bank-clerk, Wilson, looking gravely
about through his spectacles. "I commend the courage and the resolution
of Mr. Rodemaker. I pray the lady may not

   'Mislike him for his complexion,
    The shadowed livery of the burning sun.'"

"Shakespeare," said Adams, at a venture.

Wilson turned to Rob. "Brother in adversity, when do you embark another
Jason on an untried sea?"

"Hay!" said Rob, winking at Seagraves. "Oh, I go to-night--night train."

"And return?"

"Ten days from date."

"I'll wager a wedding supper he brings a blonde," said Wilson, in his
clean-cut, languid speech compelling attention.

"Oh, come, now, Wilson; that's too thin! We all know that rule about
dark marryin' light."

"I'll wager she'll be tall," continued Wilson. "I'll wager you, friend
Rodemaker, she'll be blonde and tall."

The rest roared at Rob's astonishment and confusion.

The absurdity of it grew, and they went into spasms of laughter. But
Wilson remained impassive, not the twitching of a muscle betraying that
he saw anything to laugh at in the proposition.

Mrs. Whiting and the kitchen-girls came in, wondering at the merriment.
Rob began to get uneasy.

"What is it? What is it?" said Mrs. Whiting, a jolly little matron.

Rivers put the case. "Rob's on his way back to Wisconsin t' get married,
and Wilson has offered to bet him that his wife will be a blonde and
tall, and Rob dassent bet!" And they roared again.

"Why, the idea! The man's crazy!" said Mrs. Whiting.

The crowd looked at each other. This was hint enough; they sobered,
nodding at each other commiseratingly.

"Aha! I see; I understand."

"It's the heat."

"And the Boston beans."

"Let up on him, Wilson. Don't badger a poor irresponsible fellow. I
thought something was wrong when I saw the collar."

"Oh, keep it up!" said Rob, a little nettled by their evident intention
to have fun with him.

"Soothe him--soo-o-o-o-the him!" said Wilson. "Don't be harsh."

Rob rose from the table. "Go to thunder! You fellows make me tired."

"The fit is on him again!"

He rose disgustedly and went out. They followed him in single file. The
rest of the town "caught on." Frank Graham heaved an apple at him, and
joined the procession. Rob went into the store to buy some tobacco. They
all followed, and perched like crows on the counters till he went out;
then they followed him, as before. They watched him check his trunk;
they witnessed the purchase of the ticket. The town had turned out by
this time.

"Waupac!" announced the one nearest the victim.

"Waupac!" said the next man, and the word was passed along the street up
town.

"Make a note of it," said Wilson; "Waupac--a county where a man's
proposal for marriage is honored upon presentation. Sight drafts."

Rivers struck up a song, while Rob stood around, patiently bearing the
jokes of the crowd:

   "We're lookin' rather seedy now,
    While holdin' down our claims,
    And our vittles are not always of the best,
    And the mice play slyly round us
    As we lay down to sleep
    In our little old tarred shanties on the claim.

   "Yet we rather like the novelty
    Of livin' in this way,
    Though the bill of fare is often rather tame;
    An' we're happy as a clam
    On the land of Uncle Sam
    In our little old tarred shanty on the claim."

The train drew up at length, to the immense relief of Rob, whose stoical
resignation was beginning to weaken.

"Don't y' wish y' had sand?" he yelled to the crowd, as he plunged into
the car, thinking he was rid of them at last.

He was mistaken. Their last stroke was to follow him into the car,
nodding, pointing to their heads, and whispering, managing in the
half-minute the train stood at the platform to set every person in the
car staring at the "crazy man." Rob groaned, and pulled his hat down
over his eyes--an action which confirmed his tormentors' words and made
several ladies click their tongues in sympathy--"Tlck! tlck! poor
fellow!"

"All abo-o-o-a-rd!' said the conductor, grinning his appreciation at the
crowd, and the train was off.

"Oh, won't we make him groan when he gets back!" said Barney, the young
lawyer, who sang the shouting tenor.

"We'll meet him with the timbrel and the harp. Anybody want to wager?
I've got two to one on a short brunette," said Wilson.

II

"Follow it far enough and it may pass the bend in the river where the
water laughs eternally over its shallows."

A corn-field in July is a sultry place. The soil is hot and dry; the
wind comes across the lazily murmuring leaves laden with a warm,
sickening smell drawn from the rapidly growing, broad-flung banners of
the corn. The sun, nearly vertical, drops a flood of dazzling light upon
the field over which the cool shadows run, only to make the heat seem
the more intense.

Julia Peterson, faint with hunger, was tolling back and forth between
the corn-rows, holding the handles of the double-shovel corn-plough,
while her little brother Otto rode the steaming horse. Her heart was
full of bitterness, her face flushed with heat, and her muscles aching
with fatigue. The heat grew terrible. The corn came to her shoulders,
and not a breath seemed to reach her, while the sun, nearing the noon
mark, lay pitilessly upon her shoulders, protected only by a calico
dress. The dust rose under her feet, and as she was wet with
perspiration it soiled her till with a woman's instinctive cleanliness,
she shuddered. Her head throbbed dangerously. What matter to her that
the kingbird pitched jovially from the maples to catch a wandering
bluebottle fly, that the robin was feeding its young, that the bobolink
was singing? All these things, if she saw them, only threw her bondage
to labor into greater relief.

Across the field, in another patch of corn, she could see her father--a
big, gruff-voiced, wide-bearded Norwegian--at work also with a plough.
The corn must be ploughed, and so she toiled on, the tears dropping from
the shadow of the ugly sun-bonnet she wore. Her shoes, coarse and
square-toed, chafed her feet; her hands, large and strong, were browned,
or, more properly, burnt, on the backs by the sun. The horse's harness
"creak-cracked" as he swung steadily and patiently forward, the moisture
pouring from his sides, his nostrils distended.

The field bordered on a road, and on the other side of the road ran a
river--a broad, clear, shallow expanse at that point, and the eyes of
the boy gazed longingly at the pond and the cool shadow each time that
he turned at the fence.

"Say, Jule, I'm goin' in! Come, can't I? Come--say!" he pleaded, as they
stopped at the fence to let the horse breathe.

"I've let you go wade twice."

"But that don't do any good. My legs is all smarty, 'cause ol' Jack
sweats so.

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