← catalogue

In the Midst of Alarms

by Robert Barr · English · Gutenberg #9263 · 443,204 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of In the Midst of Alarms
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: In the Midst of Alarms

Author: Robert Barr


        
Release date: November 1, 2005 [eBook #9263]
                Most recently updated: October 31, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9263

Credits: Text file produced by Lee Dawei, William A. Pifer-Foote, and the PG
        Online Distributed Proofreaders
        
        HTML file produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE MIDST OF ALARMS ***




Produced by Lee Dawei, William A. Pifer-Foote, and the PG
Online Distributed Proofreaders









IN THE MIDST OF ALARMS

By Robert Barr

1894



TO E.B.




CHAPTER I.


In the marble-floored vestibule of the Metropolitan Grand Hotel in
Buffalo, Professor Stillson Renmark stood and looked about him with the
anxious manner of a person unused to the gaudy splendor of the modern
American house of entertainment. The professor had paused halfway
between the door and the marble counter, because he began to fear that
he had arrived at an inopportune time, that something unusual was going
on. The hurry and bustle bewildered him.

An omnibus, partly filled with passengers, was standing at the door, its
steps backed over the curbstone, and beside it was a broad, flat van,
on which stalwart porters were heaving great square, iron-bound trunks
belonging to commercial travelers, and the more fragile, but not less
bulky, saratogas, doubtless the property of the ladies who sat patiently
in the omnibus. Another vehicle which had just arrived was backing up to
the curb, and the irate driver used language suitable to the occasion;
for the two restive horses were not behaving exactly in the way he
liked.

A man with a stentorian, but monotonous and mournful, voice was filling
the air with the information that a train was about to depart for
Albany, Saratoga, Troy, Boston, New York, and the East. When he came to
the words “the East,” his voice dropped to a sad minor key, as if the
man despaired of the fate of those who took their departure in that
direction. Every now and then a brazen gong sounded sharply; and one of
the negroes who sat in a row on a bench along the marble-paneled wall
sprang forward to the counter, took somebody’s handbag, and disappeared
in the direction of the elevator with the newly arrived guest following
him. Groups of men stood here and there conversing, heedless of the rush
of arrival and departure around them.

Before the broad and lofty plate-glass windows sat a row of men, some
talking, some reading, and some gazing outside, but all with their feet
on the brass rail which had been apparently put there for that purpose.
Nearly everybody was smoking a cigar. A lady of dignified mien came down
the hall to the front of the counter, and spoke quietly to the clerk,
who bent his well-groomed head deferentially on one side as he listened
to what she had to say. The men instantly made way for her. She passed
along among them as composedly as if she were in her own drawing room,
inclining her head slightly to one or other of her acquaintances, which
salutation was gravely acknowledged by the raising of the hat and the
temporary removal of the cigar from the lips.

All this was very strange to the professor, and he felt himself in a new
world, with whose customs he was not familiar. Nobody paid the slightest
attention to him as he stood there among it all with his satchel in his
hand. As he timidly edged up to the counter, and tried to accumulate
courage enough to address the clerk, a young man came forward, flung his
handbag on the polished top of the counter, metaphorically brushed the
professor aside, pulled the bulky register toward him, and inscribed his
name on the page with a rapidity equaled only by the illegibility of the
result.

“Hello, Sam!” he said to the clerk. “How’s things? Get my telegram?”

“Yes,” answered the clerk; “but I can’t give you 27. It’s been taken for
a week. I reserved 85 for you, and had to hold on with my teeth to do
that.”

The reply of the young man was merely a brief mention of the place of
torment.

“It _is_ hot,” said the clerk blandly. “In from Cleveland?”

“Yes. Any letters for me?”

“Couple of telegrams. You’ll find them up in 85.”

“Oh, you were cocksure I’d take that room?”

“I was cocksure you’d have to. It is that or the fifth floor. We’re
full. Couldn’t give a better room to the President if he came.”

“Oh, well, what’s good enough for the President I can put up with for a
couple of days.”

The hand of the clerk descended on the bell. The negro sprang forward
and took the “grip.”

“Eighty-five,” said the clerk; and the drummer and the Negro
disappeared.

“Is there any place where I could leave my bag for a while?” the
professor at last said timidly to the clerk.

“Your bag?”

The professor held it up in view.

“Oh, your grip. Certainly. Have a room, sir?” And the clerk’s hand
hovered over the bell.

“No. At least, not just yet. You see, I’m----”

“All right. The baggage man there to the left will check it for you.”

“Any letters for Bond?” said a man, pushing himself in front of
the professor. The clerk pulled out a fat bunch of letters from the
compartment marked “B,” and handed the whole lot to the inquirer, who
went rapidly over them, selected two that appeared to be addressed to
him, and gave the letters a push toward the clerk, who placed them where
they were before.

The professor paused a moment, then, realizing that the clerk had
forgotten him, sought the baggage man, whom he found in a room filled
with trunks and valises. The room communicated with the great hall
by means of a square opening whose lower ledge was breast high. The
professor stood before it, and handed the valise to the man behind
this opening, who rapidly attached one brass check to the handle with a
leather thong, and flung the other piece of brass to the professor.
The latter was not sure but there was something to pay, still he quite
correctly assumed that if there had been the somewhat brusque man would
have had no hesitation in mentioning the fact; in which surmise his
natural common sense proved a sure guide among strange surroundings.
There was no false delicacy about the baggage man.

Although the professor was to a certain extent bewildered by the
condition of things, there was still in his nature a certain dogged
persistence that had before now stood him in good stead, and which had
enabled him to distance, in the long run, much more brilliant men. He
was not at all satisfied with his brief interview with the clerk. He
resolved to approach that busy individual again, if he could arrest his
attention. It was some time before he caught the speaker’s eye, as it
were, but when he did so, he said:

“I was about to say to you that I am waiting for a friend from New York
who may not yet have arrived. His name is Mr. Richard Yates of the----”

“Oh, Dick Yates! Certainly. He’s here.” Turning to the negro, he said:
“Go down to the billiard room and see if Mr. Yates is there. If he is
not, look for him at the bar.”

The clerk evidently knew Mr. Dick Yates. Apparently not noticing the
look of amazement that had stolen over the professor’s face, the clerk
said:

“If you wait in the reading room, I’ll send Yates to you when he comes.
The boy will find him if he’s in the house; but he may be uptown.”

The professor, disliking to trouble the obliging clerk further, did not
ask him where the reading room was. He inquired, instead, of a hurrying
porter, and received the curt but comprehensive answer:

“Dining room next floor. Reading, smoking, and writing rooms up the
hall. Billiard room, bar, and lavatory downstairs.”

The professor, after getting into the barber shop and the cigar store,
finally found his way into the reading room. Numerous daily papers were
scattered around on the table, each attached to a long, clumsy cleft
holder made of wood; while other journals, similarly encumbered, hung
from racks against the wall. The professor sat down in one of the easy
leather-covered chairs, but, instead of taking up a paper, drew a thin
book from his pocket, in which he was soon so absorbed that he became
entirely unconscious of his strange surroundings. A light touch on the
shoulder brought him up from his book into the world again, and he saw,
looking down on him, the stern face of a heavily mustached stranger.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but may I ask if you are a guest of this
house?”

A shade of apprehension crossed the professor’s face as he slipped the
book into his pocket. He had vaguely felt that he was trespassing when
he first entered the hotel, and now his doubts were confirmed.

“I--I am not exactly a guest,” he stammered.

“What do you mean by not exactly a guest?” continued the other,
regarding the professor with a cold and scrutinizing gaze. “A man is
either a guest or he is not, I take it. Which is it in your case?”

“I presume, technically speaking, I am not.”

“Technically speaking! More evasions. Let me ask you, sir, as an
ostensibly honest man, if you imagine that all this luxury--this--this
elegance--is maintained for nothing? Do you think, sir, that it is
provided for any man who has cheek enough to step out of the street
and enjoy it? Is it kept up, I ask, for people who are, technically
speaking, not guests?”

The expression of conscious guilt deepened on the face of the
unfortunate professor. He had nothing to say. He realized that his
conduct was too flagrant to admit of defense, so he attempted none.
Suddenly the countenance of his questioner lit up with a smile, and he
smote the professor on the shoulder.

“Well, old stick-in-the-mud, you haven’t changed a particle in fifteen
years! You don’t mean to pretend you don’t know me?”

“You can’t--you can’t be Richard Yates?”

“I not only can, but I can’t be anybody else. I know, because I have
often tried. Well, well, well, well! Stilly we used to call you; don’t
you remember? I’ll never forget that time we sang ‘Oft in the stilly
night’ in front of your window when you were studying for the exams. You
always _were_ a quiet fellow, Stilly. I’ve been waiting for you nearly
a whole day. I was up just now with a party of friends when the boy
brought me your card--a little philanthropic gathering--sort of mutual
benefit arrangement, you know: each of us contributed what we could
spare to a general fund, which was given to some deserving person in the
crowd.”

“Yes,” said the professor dryly. “I heard the clerk telling the boy
where he would be most likely to find you.”

“Oh, you did, eh?” cried Yates, with a laugh. “Yes, Sam generally knows
where to send for me; but he needn’t have been so darned public about
it. Being a newspaper man, I know what ought to go in print and what
should have the blue pencil run through it. Sam is very discreet, as a
general thing; but then he knew, of course, the moment he set eyes on
you, that you were an old pal of mine.”

Again Yates laughed, a very bright and cheery laugh for so evidently
wicked a man.

“Come along,” he said, taking the professor by the arm. “We must get you
located.”

They passed out into the hall, and drew up at the clerk’s counter.

“I say, Sam,” cried Yates, “can’t you do something better for us than
the fifth floor? I didn’t come to Buffalo to engage in ballooning. No
sky parlors for me, if I can help it.”

“I’m sorry, Dick,” said the clerk; “but I expect the fifth floor will be
gone when the Chicago express gets in.”

“Well, what can you do for us, anyhow?”

“I can let you have 518. That’s the next room to yours. Really, they’re
the most comfortable rooms in the house this weather. Fine lookout over
the lake. I wouldn’t mind having a sight of the lake myself, if I could
leave the desk.”

“All right. But I didn’t come to look at the lake, nor yet at the
railroad tracks this side, nor at Buffalo Creek either, beautiful and
romantic as it is, nor to listen to the clanging of the ten thousand
locomotives that pass within hearing distance for the delight of your
guests. The fact is that, always excepting Chicago, Buffalo is more
like--for the professor’s sake I’ll say Hades, than any other place in
America.”

“Oh, Buffalo’s all right,” said the clerk, with that feeling of local
loyalty which all Americans possess. “Say, are you here on this Fenian
snap?”

“What Fenian snap?” asked the newspaper man.

“Oh! don’t you know about it? I thought, the moment I saw you, that you
were here for this affair. Well, don’t say I told you, but I can put you
on to one of the big guns if you want the particulars. They say they’re
going to take Canada. I told ‘em that I wouldn’t take Canada as a gift,
let alone fight for it. I’ve _been_ there.”

Yates’ newspaper instinct thrilled him as he thought of the possible
sensation. Then the light slowly died out of his eyes when he looked at
the professor, who had flushed somewhat and compressed his lips as he
listened to the slighting remarks on his country.

“Well, Sam,” said the newspaper man at last, “it isn’t more than once
in a lifetime that you’ll find me give the go-by to a piece of news, but
the fact is I’m on my vacation just now. About the first I’ve had for
fifteen years; so, you see, I must take care of it. No, let the _Argus_
get scooped, if it wants to. They’ll value my services all the more when
I get back. No. 518, I think you said?”

The clerk handed over the key, and the professor gave the boy the check
for his valise at Yates’ suggestion.

“Now, get a move on you,” said Yates to the elevator boy. “We’re going
right through with you.”

And so the two friends were shot up together to the fifth floor.




CHAPTER II.


The sky parlor, as Yates had termed it, certainly commanded a very
extensive view. Immediately underneath was a wilderness of roofs.
Farther along were the railway tracks that Yates objected to; and a line
of masts and propeller funnels marked the windings of Buffalo Creek,
along whose banks arose numerous huge elevators, each marked by some
tremendous letter of the alphabet, done in white paint against the
somber brown of the big building. Still farther to the west was a more
grateful and comforting sight for a hot day. The blue lake, dotted with
white sails and an occasional trail of smoke, lay shimmering under the
broiling sun. Over the water, through the distant summer haze, there
could be seen the dim line of the Canadian shore.

“Sit you down,” cried Yates, putting both hands on the other’s
shoulders, and pushing him into a chair near the window. Then, placing
his finger on the electric button, he added: “What will you drink?”

“I’ll take a glass of water, if it can be had without trouble,” said
Renmark.

Yates’ hand dropped from the electric button hopelessly to his side, and
he looked reproachfully at the professor.

“Great Heavens!” he cried, “have something mild. Don’t go rashly in
for Buffalo water before you realize what it is made of. Work up to it
gradually. Try a sherry cobbler or a milk shake as a starter.”

“Thank you, no. A glass of water will do very well for me. Order what
you like for yourself.”

“Thanks, I can be depended on for doing that.” He pushed the button,
and, when the boy appeared, said: “Bring up an iced cobbler, and charge
it to Professor Renmark, No. 518. Bring also a pitcher of ice water for
Yates, No. 520. There,” he continued gleefully, “I’m going to have all
the drinks, except the ice water, charged to you. I’ll pay the bill, but
I’ll keep the account to hold over your head in the future. Professor
Stillson Renmark, debtor to Metropolitan Grand--one sherry cobbler, one
gin sling, one whisky cocktail, and so on. Now, then, Stilly, let’s talk
business. You’re not married, I take it, or you wouldn’t have responded
to my invitation so promptly.” The professor shook his head. “Neither am
I. You never had the courage to propose to a girl; and I never had the
time.”

“Lack of self-conceit was not your failing in the old days, Richard,”
 said Renmark quietly.

Yates laughed. “Well, it didn’t hold me back any, to my knowledge.
Now I’ll tell you how I’ve got along since we attended old Scragmore’s
academy together, fifteen years ago. How time does fly! When I left, I
tried teaching for one short month. I had some theories on the education
of our youth which did not seem to chime in with the prejudices the
school trustees had already formed on the subject.”

The professor was at once all attention. Touch a man on his business,
and he generally responds by being interested.

“And what were your theories?” he asked.

“Well, I thought a teacher should look after the physical as well as
the mental welfare of his pupils. It did not seem to me that his duty to
those under his charge ended with mere book learning.”

“I quite agree with you,” said the professor cordially.

“Thanks. Well, the trustees didn’t. I joined the boys at their games,
hoping my example would have an influence on their conduct on the
playground as well as in the schoolroom. We got up a rattling good
cricket club. You may not remember that I stood rather better in cricket
at the academy than I did in mathematics or grammar. By handicapping me
with several poor players, and having the best players among the boys in
opposition, we made a pretty evenly matched team at school section No.
12. One day, at noon, we began a game. The grounds were in excellent
condition, and the opposition boys were at their best. My side was
getting the worst of it. I was very much interested; and, when one
o’clock came, I thought it a pity to call school and spoil so good and
interesting a contest. The boys were unanimously of the same opinion.
The girls were happy, picnicking under the trees. So we played cricket
all the afternoon.”

“I think that was carrying your theory a little too far,” said the
professor dubiously.

“Just what the trustees thought when they came to hear of it. So they
dismissed me; and I think my leaving was the only case on record where
the pupils genuinely mourned a teacher’s departure. I shook the dust of
Canada from my feet, and have never regretted it. I tramped to Buffalo,
continuing to shake the dust off at every step. (Hello! here’s your
drinks at last, Stilly. I had forgotten about them--an unusual thing
with me. That’s all right, boy; charge it to room 518. Ah! that hits
the spot on a hot day.) Well, where was I? Oh, yes, at Buffalo. I got
a place on a paper here, at just enough to keep life in me; but I liked
the work. Then I drifted to Rochester at a bigger salary, afterward
to Albany at a still bigger salary, and of course Albany is only a few
hours from New York, and that is where all newspaper men ultimately
land, if they are worth their salt. I saw a small section of the war as
special correspondent, got hurt, and rounded up in the hospital. Since
then, although only a reporter, I am about the top of the tree in that
line, and make enough money to pay my poker debts and purchase iced
drinks to soothe the asperities of the game. When there is anything big
going on anywhere in the country, I am there, with other fellows to do
the drudgery; I writing the picturesque descriptions and interviewing
the big men. My stuff goes red-hot over the telegraph wire, and the
humble postage stamp knows my envelopes no more. I am acquainted
with every hotel clerk that amounts to anything from New York to San
Francisco. If I could save money, I should be rich, for I make plenty;
but the hole at the top of my trousers pocket has lost me a lot of cash,
and I don’t seem to be able to get it mended. Now, you’ve listened with
your customary patience in order to give my self-esteem, as you called
it, full sway. I am grateful. I will reciprocate. How about yourself?”

The professor spoke slowly. “I have had no such adventurous career,” he
began. “I have not shaken Canadian dust from my feet, and have not
made any great success. I have simply plodded; and am in no danger of
becoming rich, although I suppose I spend as little as any man. After
you were expel--after you left the aca----”

“Don’t mutilate the good old English language, Stilly. You were right
in the first place. I am not thin-skinned. You were saying after I was
expelled. Go on.”

“I thought perhaps it might be a sore subject. You remember, you were
very indignant at the time, and----”

“Of course I was--and am still, for that matter. It was an outrage!”

“I thought it was proved that you helped to put the pony in the
principal’s room.”

“Oh, certainly. _That_. Of course. But what I detested was the way
the principal worked the thing. He allowed that villain Spink to turn
evidence against us, and Spink stated I originated the affair, whereas
I could claim no such honor. It was Spink’s own project, which I fell
in with, as I did with every disreputable thing proposed. Of course the
principal believed at once that I was the chief criminal. Do you happen
to know if Spink has been hanged yet?”

“I believe he is a very reputable business man in Montreal, and much
respected.”

“I might have suspected that. Well, you keep your eye on the respected
Spink. If he doesn’t fail some day, and make a lot of money, I’m a
Dutchman. But go on. This is digression. By the way, just push that
electric button. You’re nearest, and it is too hot to move. Thanks.
After I was expelled----”

“After your departure I took a diploma, and for a year or two taught a
class in the academy. Then, as I studied during my spare time, I got a
chance as master of a grammar school near Toronto, chiefly, as I think,
though the recommendation of Principal Scragmore. I had my degree by
this time. Then----”

There was a gentle tap at the door.

“Come in!” shouted Yates. “Oh, it’s you. Just bring up another cooling
cobbler, will you? and charge it, as before, to Professor Renmark, room
518. Yes; and then----”

“And then there came the opening in University College, Toronto. I had
the good fortune to be appointed. There I am still, and there I suppose
I shall stay. I know very few people, and am better acquainted with
books than with men. Those whom I have the privilege of knowing are
mostly studious persons, who have made, or will make, their mark in the
world of learning. I have not had your advantage, of meeting statesmen
who guide the destinies of a great empire.

“No; you always were lucky, Stilly. My experience is that the chaps who
do the guiding are more anxious about their own pockets, or their own
political advancement, than they are of the destinies. Still, the empire
seems to take its course westward just the same. So old Scragmore’s been
your friend, has he?”

“He has, indeed.”

“Well, he insulted me only the other day.”

“You astonish me. I cannot imagine so gentlemanly and scholarly a man as
Principal Scragmore insulting anybody.”

“Oh, you don’t know him as I do. It was like this: I wanted to find out
where you were, for reasons that I shall state hereafter. I cudgeled
my brains, and then thought of old Scrag. I wrote him, and enclosed a
stamped and addressed envelope, as all unsought contributors should
do. He answered--But I have his reply somewhere. You shall read it for
yourself.”

Yates pulled from his inside pocket a bundle of letters, which he
hurriedly fingered over, commenting in a low voice as he did so: “I
thought I answered that. Still, no matter. Jingo! haven’t I paid that
bill yet? This pass is run out. Must get another.” Then he smiled and
sighed as he looked at a letter in dainty handwriting; but apparently he
could not find the document he sought.

“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. I have it somewhere. He returned me the
prepaid envelope, and reminded me that United States stamps were of no
use in Canada, which of course I should have remembered. But he didn’t
pay the postage on his own letter, so that I had to fork out double.
Still, I don’t mind that, only as an indication of his meanness. He went
on to say that, of all the members of our class, you--_you_!--were the
only one who had reflected credit on it. That was the insult. The idea
of his making such a statement, when I had told him I was on the New
York _Argus_! Credit to the class, indeed! I wonder if he ever heard of
Brown after he was expelled. You know, of course. No? Well, Brown,
by his own exertions, became president of the Alum Bank in New York,
wrecked it, and got off to Canada with a clear half million. _Yes_,
sir. I saw him in Quebec not six months ago. Keeps the finest span and
carriage in the city, and lives in a palace. Could buy out old Scragmore
a thousand times, and never feel it. Most liberal contributor to the
cause of education that there is in Canada. He says education made him,
and he’s not a man to go back on education. And yet Scragmore has the
cheek to say that _you_ were the only man in the class who reflects
credit on it!”

The professor smiled quietly as the excited journalist took a cooling
sip of the cobbler.

“You see, Yates, people’s opinions differ. A man like Brown may not be
Principal Scragmore’s ideal. The principal may be local in his ideals of
a successful man, or of one who reflects credit on his teaching.”

“Local? You bet he’s local. Too darned local for me. It would do that
man good to live in New York for a year. But I’m going to get even with
him. I’m going to write him up. I’ll give him a column and a half; see
if I don’t. I’ll get his photograph, and publish a newspaper portrait
of him. If that doesn’t make him quake, he’s a cast-iron man. Say, you
haven’t a photograph of old Scrag that you can lend me, have you?”

“I have; but I won’t lend it for such a purpose. However, never mind
the principal. Tell me your plans. I am at your disposal for a couple of
weeks, or longer if necessary.”

“Good boy! Well, I’ll tell you how it is. I want rest and quiet, and the
woods, for a week or two. This is how it happened: I have been steadily
at the grindstone, except for a while in the hospital; and that, you
will admit, is not much of a vacation. The work interests me, and I
am always in the thick of it. Now, it’s like this in the newspaper
business: Your chief is never the person to suggest that you take a
vacation. He is usually short of men and long on things to do, so if you
don’t worry him into letting you off, he won’t lose any sleep over it.
He’s content to let well enough alone every time. Then there is always
somebody who wants to get away on pressing business,--grandmother’s
funeral, and that sort of thing,--so if a fellow is content to work
right along, his chief is quite content to let him. That’s the way
affairs have gone for years with me. The other week I went over to
Washington to interview a senator on the political prospects. I tell
you what it is, Stilly, without bragging, there are some big men in the
States whom no one but me _can_ interview. And yet old Scrag says I’m
no credit to his class! Why, last year my political predictions were
telegraphed all over this country, and have since appeared in the
European press. No credit! By Jove, I would like to have old Scrag in a
twenty-four-foot ring, with thin gloves on, for about ten minutes!”

“I doubt if he would shine under those circumstances. But never mind
him. He spoke, for once, without due reflection, and with perhaps an
exaggerated remembrance of your school-day offenses. What happened when
you went to Washington?”

“A strange thing happened. When I was admitted to the senator’s library,
I saw another fellow, whom I thought I knew, sitting there. I said to
the senator: ‘I will come when you are alone.’ The senator looked up
in surprise, and said: ‘I am alone.’ I didn’t say anything, but went
on with my interview; and the other fellow took notes all the time.
I didn’t like this, but said nothing, for the senator is not a man to
offend, and it is by not offending these fellows that I can get the
information I do. Well, the other fellow came out with me, and as
I looked at him I saw that he was myself. This did not strike me as
strange at the time, but I argued with him all the way to New York,
and tried to show him that he wasn’t treating me fairly. I wrote up
the interview, with the other fellow interfering all the while, so I
compromised, and half the time put in what he suggested, and half the
time what I wanted in myself. When the political editor went over
the stuff, he looked alarmed. I told him frankly just how I had
been interfered with, and he looked none the less alarmed when I had
finished. He sent at once for a doctor. The doctor metaphorically took
me to pieces, and then said to my chief: ‘This man is simply worked to
death. He must have a vacation, and a real one, with absolutely nothing
to think of, or he is going to collapse, and that with a suddenness
which will surprise everybody.’ The chief, to my astonishment, consented
without a murmur, and even upbraided me for not going away sooner. Then
the doctor said to me: ‘You get some companion--some man with no brains,
if possible, who will not discuss politics, who has no opinion on
anything that any sane man would care to talk about, and who couldn’t
say a bright thing if he tried for a year. Get such a man to go off to
the woods somewhere. Up in Maine or in Canada. As far away from post
offices and telegraph offices as possible. And, by the way, don’t leave
your address at the _Argus_ office.’ Thus it happened, Stilly, when he
described this man so graphically, I at once thought of you.”

“I am deeply gratified, I am sure,” said the professor, with the ghost
of a smile, “to be so promptly remembered in such a connection, and if
I can be of service to you, I shall be very glad. I take it, then, that
you have no intention of stopping in Buffalo?”

“You bet I haven’t. I’m in for the forest primeval, the murmuring
pines and the hemlock, bearded with moss and green in the something or
other--I forget the rest. I want to quit lying on paper, and lie on
my back instead, on the sward or in a hammock. I’m going to avoid all
boarding houses or delightful summer resorts, and go in for the quiet of
the forest.”

“There ought to be some nice places along the lake shore.”

“No, sir. No lake shore for me. It would remind me of the Lake Shore
Railroad when it was calm, and of Long Branch when it was rough. _No_,
sir. The woods, the woods, and the woods. I have hired a tent and a lot
of cooking things. I’m going to take that tent over to Canada to-morrow;
and then I propose we engage a man with a team to cart it somewhere
into the woods, fifteen or twenty miles away. We shall have to be near
a farmhouse, so that we can get fresh butter, milk, and eggs. This, of
course, is a disadvantage; but I shall try to get near someone who has
never even heard of New York.”

“You may find that somewhat difficult.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I have great hopes of the lack of intelligence in the
Canadians.”

“Often the narrowest,” said the professor slowly, “are those who think
themselves the most cosmopolitan.”

“Right you are,” cried Yates, skimming lightly over the remark, and
seeing nothing applicable to his case in it. “Well, I’ve laid in about
half a ton, more or less, of tobacco, and have bought an empty jug.”

“An empty one?”

“Yes. Among the few things worth having that the Canadians possess,
is good whisky. Besides, the empty jar will save trouble at the
customhouse. I don’t suppose Canadian rye is as good as the Kentucky
article, but you and I will have to scrub along on it for a while. And,
talking of whisky, just press the button once again.”

The professor did so, saying:

“The doctor made no remark, I suppose, about drinking less or smoking
less, did he?”

“In my case? Well, come to think of it, there _was_ some conversation in
that direction. Don’t remember at the moment just what it amounted to;
but all physicians have their little fads, you know. It doesn’t do to
humor them too much. Ah, boy, there you are again. Well, the professor
wants another drink. Make it a gin fizz this time, and put plenty of ice
in it; but don’t neglect the gin on that account. Certainly; charge it
to room 518.”




CHAPTER III.


“What’s all this tackle?” asked the burly and somewhat red-faced customs
officer at Fort Erie.

“This,” said Yates, “is a tent, with the poles and pegs appertaining
thereto. These are a number of packages of tobacco, on which I shall
doubtless have to pay something into the exchequer of her Majesty. This
is a jug used for the holding of liquids. I beg to call your attention
to the fact that it is at present empty, which unfortunately prevents me
making a libation to the rites of good-fellowship. What my friend has
in that valise I don’t know, but I suspect a gambling outfit, and would
advise you to search him.”

“My valise contains books principally, with some articles of wearing
apparel,” said the professor, opening his grip.

The customs officer looked with suspicion on the whole outfit, and
evidently did not like the tone of the American. He seemed to be
treating the customs department in a light and airy manner, and the
officer was too much impressed by the dignity of his position not to
resent flippancy. Besides, there were rumors of Fenian invasion in the
air, and the officer resolved that no Fenian should get into the country
without paying duty.

“Where are you going with this tent?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. Perhaps you can tell us. I don’t know the
country about here. Say, Stilly, I’m off uptown to attend to the
emptiness in this stone utensil. I’ve been empty too often myself not
to sympathize with its condition. You wrestle this matter out about the
tent. You know the ways of the country, whereas I don’t.”

It was perhaps as well that Yates left negotiations in the hands of
his friend. He was quick enough to see that he made no headway with the
officer, but rather the opposite. He slung the jar ostentatiously over
his shoulder, to the evident discomfort of the professor, and marched up
the hill to the nearest tavern, whistling one of the lately popular war
tunes.

“Now,” he said to the barkeeper, placing the jar tenderly on the bar,
“fill that up to the nozzle with the best rye you have. Fill it with the
old familiar juice, as the late poet Omar saith.”

The bartender did as he was requested.

“Can you disguise a little of that fluid in any way, so that it may be
taken internally without a man suspecting what he is swallowing?”

The barkeeper smiled. “How would a cocktail fill the vacancy?”

“I can suggest nothing better,” replied Yates. “If you are sure you know
how to make it.”

The man did not resent this imputation of ignorance. He merely said,
with the air of one who gives an incontrovertible answer:

“I am a Kentucky man myself.”

“Shake!” cried Yates briefly, as he reached his hand across the bar.
“How is it you happened to be here?”

“Well, I got in to a little trouble in Louisville, and here I am, where
I can at least look at God’s country.”

“Hold on,” protested Yates. “You’re making only _one_ cocktail.”

“Didn’t you say one?” asked the man, pausing in the compounding.

“Bless you, I never saw one cocktail made in my life. You are with me on
this.”

“Just as you say,” replied the other, as he prepared enough for two.

“Now I’ll tell you my fix,” said Yates confidentially. “I’ve got a tent
and some camp things down below at the customhouse shanty, and I want
to get them taken into the woods, where I can camp out with a friend. I
want a place where we can have absolute rest and quiet. Do you know the
country round here? Perhaps you could recommend a spot.”

“Well, for all the time I’ve been here, I know precious little about the
back country. I’ve been down the road to Niagara Falls, but never back
in the woods. I suppose you want some place by the lake or the river?”

“No, I don’t. I want to get clear back into the forest--if there is a
forest.”

“Well, there’s a man in to-day from somewhere near Ridgeway, I think.
He’s got a hay rack with him, and that would be just the thing to take
your tent and poles. Wouldn’t be very comfortable traveling for you, but
it would be all right for the tent, if it’s a big one.”

“That will suit us exactly. We don’t care a cent about the comfort.
Roughing it is what we came for. Where will I find him?”

“Oh, he’ll be along here soon. That’s his team tied there on the side
street. If he happens to be in good humor, he’ll take your things, and
as like as not give you a place to camp in his woods. Hiram Bartlett’s
his name. And, talking of the old Nick himself, here he is. I say, Mr.
Bartlett, this gentleman was wondering if you couldn’t tote out some of
his belongings. He’s going out your way.”

Bartlett was a somewhat uncouth and wiry specimen of the Canadian farmer
who evidently paid little attention to the subject of dress. He said
nothing, but looked in a lowering way at Yates, with something of
contempt and suspicion in his glance.

Yates had one receipt for making the acquaintance of all mankind.
“Come in, Mr. Bartlett,” he said cheerily, “and try one of my friend’s
excellent cocktails.”

“I take mine straight,” growled Bartlett gruffly, although he stepped
inside the open door. “I don’t want no Yankee mixtures in mine. Plain
whisky’s good enough for any man, if he _is_ a man. I don’t take no
water, neither. I’ve got trouble enough.”

The bartender winked at Yates as he shoved the decanter over to the
newcomer.

“Right you are,” assented Yates cordially.

The farmer did not thaw out in the least because of this prompt
agreement with him, but sipped his whisky gloomily, as if it were a most
disagreeable medicine.

“What did you want me to take out?” he said at last.

“A friend and a tent, a jug of whisky and a lot of jolly good tobacco.”

“How much are you willing to pay?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m always willing to do what’s right. How would five
dollars strike you?”

The farmer scowled and shook his head.

“Too much,” he said, as Yates was about to offer more. “‘Taint worth it.
Two and a half would be about the right figure. Don’no but that’s too
much. I’ll think on it going home, and charge you what it’s worth. I’ll
be ready to leave in about an hour, if that suits you. That’s my team on
the other side of the road. If it’s gone when you come back, I’m gone,
an’ you’ll have to get somebody else.”

With this Bartlett drew his coat sleeve across his mouth and departed.

“That’s him exactly,” said the barkeeper. “He’s the most cantankerous
crank in the township. And say, let me give you a pointer. If the
subject of 1812 comes up,--the war, you know,--you’d better admit that
we got thrashed out of our boots; that is, if you want to get along with
Hiram. He hates Yankees like poison.”

“And did we get thrashed in 1812?” asked Yates, who was more familiar
with current topics than with the history of the past.

“Blessed if I know. Hiram says we did. I told him once that we got what
we wanted from old England, and he nearly hauled me over the bar. So I
give you the warning, if you want to get along with him.”

“Thank you. I’ll remember it. So long.”

This friendly hint from the man in the tavern offers a key to the
solution of the problem of Yates’ success on the New York press. He
could get news when no other man could. Flippant and shallow as he
undoubtedly was, he somehow got into the inner confidences of all sorts
of men in a way that made them give him an inkling of anything that
was going on for the mere love of him; and thus Yates often received
valuable assistance from his acquaintances which other reporters could
not get for money.

The New Yorker found the professor sitting on a bench by the
customhouse, chatting with the officer, and gazing at the rapidly
flowing broad blue river in front of them.

“I have got a man,” said Yates, “who will take us out into the
wilderness in about an hour’s time. Suppose we explore the town. I
expect nobody will run away with the tent till we come back.”

“I’ll look after that,” said the officer; and, thanking him, the two
friends strolled up the street. They were a trifle late in getting back,
and when they reached the tavern, they found Bartlett just on the point
of driving home. He gruffly consented to take them, if they did not keep
him more than five minutes loading up. The tent and its belongings
were speedily placed on the hay rack, and then Bartlett drove up to the
tavern and waited, saying nothing, although he had been in such a hurry
a few moments before. Yates did not like to ask the cause of the delay;
so the three sat there silently. After a while Yates said as mildly as
he could:

“Are you waiting for anyone, Mr. Bartlett?”

“Yes,” answered the driver in a surly tone. “I’m waiting for you to
go in fur that jug. I don’t suppose you filled it to leave it on the
counter.”

“By Jove!” cried Yates, springing off, “I had forgotten all about it,
which shows the extraordinary effect this country has on me already.”
 The professor frowned, but Yates came out merrily, with the jar in his
hand, and Bartlett started his team. They drove out of the village and
up a slight hill, going for a mile or two along a straight and somewhat
sandy road. Then they turned into the Ridge Road, as Bartlett called it,
in answer to a question by the professor, and there was no need to ask
why it was so termed. It was a good highway, but rather stony, the road
being, in places, on the bare rock. It paid not the slightest attention
to Euclid’s definition of a straight line, and in this respect was
rather a welcome change from the average American road. Sometimes they
passed along avenues of overbranching trees, which were evidently relics
of the forest that once covered all the district. The road followed the
ridge, and on each side were frequently to be seen wide vistas of lower
lying country. All along the road were comfortable farmhouses; and it
was evident that a prosperous community flourished along the ridge.

Bartlett spoke only once, and then to the professor, who sat next to
him.

“You a Canadian?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s _he_ from?”

“My friend is from New York,” answered the innocent professor.

“Humph!” grunted Bartlett, scowling deeper than ever, after which he
became silent again. The team was not going very fast, although neither
the load nor the road was heavy. Bartlett was muttering a good deal to
himself, and now and then brought down his whip savagely on one or the
other of the horses; but the moment the unfortunate animals quickened
their pace he hauled them in roughly. Nevertheless, they were going
quickly enough to be overtaking a young woman who was walking on alone.
Although she must have heard them coming over the rocky road she did not
turn her head, but walked along with the free and springy step of one
who is not only accustomed to walking, but who likes it. Bartlett paid
no attention to the girl; the professor was endeavoring to read his thin
book as well as a man might who is being jolted frequently; but Yates,
as soon as he recognized that the pedestrian was young, pulled up his
collar, adjusted his necktie with care, and placed his hat in a somewhat
more jaunty and fetching position.

“Are you going to offer that girl a ride?” he said to Bartlett.

“No, I’m not.”

“I think that is rather uncivil,” he added, forgetting the warning he
had had.

“You do, eh? Well, you offer her a ride. You hired the team.”

“By Jove! I will,” said Yates, placing his hand on the outside of the
rack, and springing lightly to the ground.

“Likely thing,” growled Bartlett to the professor, “that she’s going to
ride with the like of him.”

The professor looked for a moment at Yates, politely taking off his hat
to the apparently astonished young woman, but he said nothing.

“Fur two cents,” continued Bartlett, gathering up the reins, “I’d whip
up the horses, and let him walk the rest of the way.”

“From what I know of my friend,” answered the professor slowly, “I think
he would not object in the slightest.”

Bartlett muttered something to himself, and seemed to change his mind
about galloping his horses.

Meanwhile, Yates, as has been said, took off his hat with great
politeness to the fair pedestrian, and as he did so he noticed, with a
thrill of admiration, that she was very handsome. Yates always had an
eye for the beautiful.

“Our conveyance,” he began, “is not as comfortable as it might be, yet I
shall be very happy if you will accept its hospitalities.”

The young woman flashed a brief glance at him from her dark eyes, and
for a moment Yates feared that his language had been rather too choice
for her rural understanding, but before he could amend his phrase she
answered briefly:

“Thank you. I prefer to walk.”

“Well, I don’t know that I blame you. May I ask if you have come all the
way from the village?”

“Yes.”

“That is a long distance, and you must be very tired.” There was no
reply; so Yates continued. “At least, I thought it a long distance; but
perhaps that was because I was riding on Bartlett’s hay rack. There is
no ‘downy bed of ease’ about his vehicle.”

As he spoke of the wagon he looked at it, and, striding forward to its
side, said in a husky whisper to the professor:

“Say, Stilly, cover up that jug with a flap of the tent.”

“Cover it up yourself,” briefly replied the other; “it isn’t mine.”

Yates reached across and, in a sort of accidental way, threw the flap
of the tent over the too conspicuous jar. As an excuse for his action he
took up his walking cane and turned toward his new acquaintance. He was
flattered to see that she was loitering some distance behind the wagon,
and he speedily rejoined her. The girl, looking straight ahead, now
quickened her pace, and rapidly shortened the distance between herself
and the vehicle. Yates, with the quickness characteristic of him, made
up his mind that this was a case of country diffidence, which was best
to be met by the bringing down of his conversation to the level of his
hearer’s intelligence.

“Have you been marketing?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Butter and eggs, and that sort of thing?”

“We are farmers,” she answered, “and we sell butter and eggs”--a
pause--“and that sort of thing.”

Yates laughed in his light and cheery way. As he twirled his cane he
looked at his pretty companion. She was gazing anxiously ahead toward a
turn in the road. Her comely face was slightly flushed, doubtless with
the exercise of walking.

“Now, in my country,” continued the New Yorker, “we idolize our women.
Pretty girls don’t tramp miles to market with butter and eggs.”

“Aren’t the girls pretty--in your country?”

Yates made a mental note that there was not as much rurality about
this girl as he had thought at first. There was a piquancy about the
conversation which he liked. That she shared his enjoyment was doubtful,
for a slight line of resentment was noticeable on her smooth brow.

“You bet they’re pretty! I think all American girls are pretty. It seems
their birthright. When I say American, I mean the whole continent, of
course. I’m from the States myself--from New York.” He gave an extra
twirl to his cane as he said this, and bore himself with that air of
conscious superiority which naturally pertains to a citizen of the
metropolis. “But over in the States we think the men should do all the
work, and that the women should--well, spend the money. I must do our
ladies the justice to say that they attend strictly to their share of
the arrangement.”

“It should be a delightful country to live in--for the women.”

“They all say so. We used to have an adage to the effect that America
was paradise for women, purgatory for men, and--well, an entirely
different sort of place for oxen.”

There was no doubt that Yates had a way of getting along with people.
As he looked at his companion he was gratified to note just the faintest
suspicion of a smile hovering about her lips. Before she could answer,
if she had intended to do so, there was a quick clatter of hoofs on
the hard road ahead, and next instant an elegant buggy, whose slender
jet-black polished spokes flashed and twinkled in the sunlight, came
dashing past the wagon. On seeing the two walking together the driver
hauled up his team with a suddenness that was evidently not relished by
the spirited dappled span he drove.

“Hello, Margaret!” he cried; “am I late? Have you walked in all the
way?”

“You are just in good time,” answered the girl, without looking toward
Yates, who stood aimlessly twirling his cane. The young woman put her
foot on the buggy step, and sprang lightly in beside the driver. It
needed no second glance to see that he was her brother, not only on
account of the family resemblance between them, but also because
he allowed her to get into the buggy without offering the slightest
assistance, which, indeed, was not needed, and graciously permitted her
to place the duster that covered his knees over her own lap as well. The
restive team trotted rapidly down the road for a few rods, until they
came to a wide place in the highway, and then whirled around, seemingly
within an ace of upsetting the buggy; but the young man evidently knew
his business, and held them in with a firm hand. The wagon was jogging
along where the road was very narrow, and Bartlett kept his team
stolidly in the center of the way.

“Hello, there, Bartlett!” shouted the young man in the buggy; “half the
road, you know--half the road.”

“Take it,” cried Bartlett over his shoulder.

“Come, come, Bartlett, get out of the way, or I’ll run you down.”

“You just try it.”

Bartlett either had no sense of humor or his resentment against his
young neighbor smothered it, since otherwise he would have recognized
that a heavy wagon was in no danger of being run into by a light and
expensive buggy. The young man kept his temper admirably, but he knew
just where to touch the elder on the raw. His sister’s hand was placed
appealingly on his arm. He smiled, and took no notice of her.

“Come, now, you move out, or I’ll have the law on you.”

“The law!” roared Bartlett; “you just try it on.”

“Should think you’d had enough of it by this time.”

“Oh, don’t, don’t, Henry!” protested the girl in distress.

“There aint no law,” yelled Bartlett, “that kin make a man with a load
move out fur anything.”

“You haven’t any load, unless it’s in that jug.”

Yates saw with consternation that the jar had been jolted out from under
its covering, but the happy consolation came to him that the two in the
buggy would believe it belonged to Bartlett. He thought, however, that
this dog-in-the-manger policy had gone far enough. He stepped briskly
forward, and said to Bartlett:

“Better drive aside a little, and let them pass.”

“You ‘tend to your own business,” cried the thoroughly enraged farmer.

“I will,” said Yates shortly, striding to the horses’ heads. He took
them by the bits and, in spite of Bartlett’s maledictions and pulling at
the lines, he drew them to one side, so that the buggy got by.

“Thank you!” cried the young man. The light and glittering carriage
rapidly disappeared up the Ridge Road.

Bartlett sat there for one moment the picture of baffled rage. Then he
threw the reins down on the backs of his patient horses, and descended.

“You take my horses by the head, do you, you good-fur-nuthin’ Yank? You
do, eh? I like your cheek. Touch my horses an’ me a-holdin’ the lines!
Now you hear me? Your traps comes right off here on the road. You hear
me?”

“Oh, anybody within a mile can hear you.”

“Kin they? Well, off comes your pesky tent.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Don’t it, eh? Well, then, you’ll lick me fust; and that’s something no
Yank ever did nor kin do.”

“I’ll do it with pleasure.”

“Come, come,” cried the professor, getting down on the road, “this has
gone far enough. Keep quiet, Yates. Now, Mr. Bartlett, don’t mind it; he
means no disrespect.”

“Don’t you interfere. You’re all right, an’ I aint got nothin’ ag’in
you. But I’m goin’ to thrash this Yank within an inch of his life; see
if I don’t. We met ‘em in 1812, an’ we fit ‘em an’ we licked ‘em, an’ we
can do it ag’in. I’ll learn ye to take my horses by the head.”

“Teach,” suggested Yates tantalizingly.

Before he could properly defend himself, Bartlett sprang at him and
grasped him round the waist. Yates was something of a wrestler himself,
but his skill was of no avail on this occasion. Bartlett’s right leg
became twisted around his with a steel-like grip that speedily convinced
the younger man he would have to give way or a bone would break. He gave
way accordingly, and the next thing he knew he came down on his back
with a thud that seemed to shake the universe.

“There, darn ye!” cried the triumphant farmer; “that’s 1812 and
Queenstown Heights for ye. How do you like ‘em?”

Yates rose to his feet with some deliberation, and slowly took off his
coat.

“Now, now, Yates,” said the professor soothingly, “let it go at this.
You’re not hurt, are you?” he asked anxiously, as he noticed how white
the young man was around the lips.

“Look here, Renmark; you’re a sensible man. There is a time to interfere
and a time not to. This is the time not to. A certain international
element seems to have crept into this dispute. Now, you stand aside,
like a good fellow, for I don’t want to have to thrash both of you.”

The professor stood aside, for he realized that, when Yates called him
by his last name, matters were serious.

“Now, old chucklehead, perhaps you would like to try that again.”

“I kin do it a dozen times, if ye aint satisfied. There aint no Yank
ever raised on pumpkin pie that can stand ag’in that grapevine twist.”

“Try the grapevine once more.”

Bartlett proceeded more cautiously this time, for there was a look in
the young man’s face he did not quite like. He took a catch-as-catch-can
attitude, and moved stealthily in a semi-circle around Yates, who
shifted his position constantly so as to keep facing his foe. At last
Bartlett sprang forward, and the next instant found himself sitting on a
piece of the rock of the country, with a thousand humming birds buzzing
in his head, while stars and the landscape around joined in a dance
together. The blow was sudden, well placed, and from the shoulder.

“That,” said Yates, standing over him, “is 1776--the Revolution--when,
to use your own phrase, we met ye, fit ye, and licked ye. How do you
like it? Now, if my advice is of any use to you, take a broader view
of history than you have done. Don’t confine yourself too much to one
period. Study up the War of the Revolution a bit.”

Bartlett made no reply. After sitting there for a while, until the
surrounding landscape assumed its normal condition, he arose leisurely,
without saying a word. He picked the reins from the backs of the horses
and patted the nearest animal gently. Then he mounted to his place
and drove off. The professor had taken his seat beside the driver, but
Yates, putting on his coat and picking up his cane, strode along in
front, switching off the heads of Canada thistles with his walking stick
as he proceeded.




CHAPTER IV.


Bartlett was silent for a long time, but there was evidently something
on his mind, for he communed with himself, his mutterings growing louder
and louder, until they broke the stillness; then he struck the horses,
pulled them in, and began his soliloquy over again. At last he said
abruptly to the professor:

“What’s this Revolution he talked about?”

“It was the War of Independence, beginning in 1776.”

“Never heard of it. Did the Yanks fight us?”

“The colonies fought with England.”

“What colonies?”

“The country now called the United States.”

“They fit with England, eh? Which licked?”

“The colonies won their independence.”

“That means they licked us. I don’t believe a word of it. ‘Pears to me
I’d ‘a’ heard of it; fur I’ve lived in these parts a long time.”

“It was a little before your day.”

“So was 1812; but my father fit in it, an’ I never heard him tell of
this Revolution. He’d ‘a’ known, I sh’d think. There’s a nigger in the
fence somewheres.”

“Well, England was rather busy at the time with the French.”

“Ah, that was it, was it? I’ll bet England never knew the Revolution was
a-goin’ on till it was over. Old Napoleon couldn’t thrash ‘em, and it
don’t stand to reason that the Yanks could. I thought there was some
skullduggery. Why, it took the Yanks four years to lick themselves. I
got a book at home all about Napoleon. He was a tough cuss.”

The professor did not feel called upon to defend the character of
Napoleon, and so silence once more descended upon them. Bartlett seemed
a good deal disturbed by the news he had just heard of the Revolution,
and he growled to himself, while the horses suffered more than usual
from the whip and the hauling back that invariably followed the stroke.
Yates was some distance ahead, and swinging along at a great rate, when
the horses, apparently of their own accord, turned in at an open gateway
and proceeded, in their usual leisurely fashion, toward a large barn,
past a comfortable frame house with a wide veranda in front.

“This is my place,” said Bartlett shortly.

“I wish you had told me a few minutes ago,” replied the professor,
springing off, “so that I might have called to my friend.”

“I’m not frettin’ about him,” said Bartlett, throwing the reins to a
young man who came out of the house.

Renmark ran to the road and shouted loudly to the distant Yates.
Yates apparently did not hear him, but something about the next house
attracted the pedestrian’s attention, and after standing for a moment
and gazing toward the west he looked around and saw the professor
beckoning to him. When the two men met, Yates said:

“So we have arrived, have we? I say, Stilly, she lives in the next
house. I saw the buggy in the yard.”

“She? Who?”

“Why, that good-looking girl we passed on the road. I’m going to buy our
supplies at that house, Stilly, if you have no objections. By the way,
how is my old friend 1812?”

“He doesn’t seem to harbor any harsh feelings. In fact, he was more
troubled about the Revolution than about the blow you gave him.”

“News to him, eh? Well, I’m glad I knocked something into his head.”

“You certainly did it most unscientifically.”

“How do you mean--unscientifically?”

“In the delivery of the blow. I never saw a more awkwardly delivered
undercut.”

Yates looked at his friend in astonishment. How should this calm,
learned man know anything about undercuts or science in blows?

“Well, you must admit I got there just the same.”

“Yes, by brute force. A sledge hammer would have done as well. But you
had such an opportunity to do it neatly and deftly, without any display
of surplus energy, that I regretted to see such an opening thrown away.”

“Heavens and earth, Stilly, this is the professor in a new light!
What do you teach in Toronto University, anyhow? The noble art of
self-defense?”

“Not exactly; but if you intend to go through Canada in this belligerent
manner, I think it would be worth your while to take a few hints from
me.”

“With striking examples, I suppose. By Jove! I will, Stilly.”

As the two came to the house they found Bartlett sitting in a wooden
rocking chair on the veranda, looking grimly down the road.

“What an old tyrant that man must be in his home!” said Yates. There was
no time for the professor to reply before they came within earshot.

“The old woman’s setting out supper,” said the farmer gruffly, that
piece of information being apparently as near as he could get toward
inviting them to share his hospitality. Yates didn’t know whether it was
meant for an invitation or not, but he answered shortly:

“Thanks, we won’t stay.”

“Speak fur yourself, please,” snarled Bartlett.

“Of course I go with my friend,” said Renmark; “but we are obliged for
the invitation.”

“Please yourselves.”

“What’s that?” cried a cheery voice from the inside of the house, as a
stout, rosy, and very good-natured-looking woman appeared at the front
door. “Won’t stay? _Who_ won’t stay? I’d like to see anybody leave my
house hungry when there’s a meal on the table! And, young men, if you
can get a better meal anywhere on the Ridge than what I’ll give you,
why, you’re welcome to go there next time, but this meal you’ll have
here, inside of ten minutes. Hiram, that’s your fault. You always invite
a person to dinner as if you wanted to wrastle with him!”

Hiram gave a guilty start, and looked with something of mute appeal at
the two men, but said nothing.

“Never mind him,” continued Mrs. Bartlett. “You’re at my house; and,
whatever my neighbors may say ag’in me, I never heard anybody complain
of the lack of good victuals while I was able to do the cooking. Come
right in and wash yourselves, for the road between here and the fort
is dusty enough, even if Hiram never was taken up for fast driving.
Besides, a wash is refreshing after a hot day.”

There was no denying the cordiality of this invitation, and Yates, whose
natural gallantry was at once aroused, responded with the readiness of a
courtier. Mrs. Bartlett led the way into the house; but as Yates passed
the farmer the latter cleared his throat with an effort, and, throwing
his thumb over his shoulder in the direction his wife had taken, said in
a husky whisper:

“No call to--to mention the Revolution, you know.”

“Certainly not,” answered Yates, with a wink that took in the situation.
“Shall we sample the jug before or after supper?”

“After, if it’s all the same to you;” adding, “out in the barn.”

Yates nodded, and followed his friend into the house.

The young men were shown into a bedroom of more than ordinary size, on
the upper floor. Everything about the house was of the most dainty and
scrupulous cleanliness, and an air of cheerful comfort pervaded the
place. Mrs. Bartlett was evidently a housekeeper to be proud of. Two
large pitchers of cool, soft water awaited them, and the wash, as had
been predicted, was most refreshing.

“I say,” cried Yates, “it’s rather cheeky to accept a man’s hospitality
after knocking him down.”

“It would be for most people, but I think you underestimate your cheek,
as you call it.”

“Bravo, Stilly! You’re blossoming out. That’s repartee, that is. With
the accent on the rap, too. Never you mind; I think old 1812 and I will
get on all right after this. It doesn’t seem to bother him any, so I
don’t see why it should worry me. Nice motherly old lady, isn’t she?”

“Who? 1812?”

“No; Mrs. 1812. I’m sorry I complimented you on your repartee. You’ll
get conceited. Remember that what in the newspaper man is clever, in a
grave professor is rank flippancy. Let’s go down.”

The table was covered with a cloth as white and spotless as good linen
can well be. The bread was genuine homemade, a term so often misused
in the cities. It was brown as to crust, and flaky and light as to
interior. The butter, cool from the rock cellar, was of a refreshing
yellow hue. The sight of the well-loaded table was most welcome to
the eyes of hungry travelers. There was, as Yates afterward remarked,
“abundance, and plenty of it.”

“Come, father!” cried Mrs. Bartlett, as the young men appeared; they
heard the rocking chair creak on the veranda in prompt answer to the
summons.

“This is my son, gentlemen,” said Mrs. Bartlett, indicating the young
man who stood in a noncommittal attitude near a corner of the room.
The professor recognized him as the person who had taken charge of the
horses when his father came home. There was evidently something of
his father’s demeanor about the young man, who awkwardly and silently
responded to the recognition of the strangers.

“And this is my daughter,” continued the good woman. “Now, what might
your names be?”

“My name is Yates, and this is my friend Professor Renmark of T’ronto,”
 pronouncing the name of the fair city in two syllables, as is, alas! too
often done. The professor bowed, and Yates cordially extended his hand
to the young woman. “How do you do, Miss Bartlett?” he said, “I am happy
to meet you.”

The girl smiled very prettily, and said she hoped they had a pleasant
trip out from Fort Erie.

“Oh, we had,” said Yates, looking for a moment at his host, whose eyes
were fixed on the tablecloth, and who appeared to be quite content to
let his wife run the show. “The road’s a little rocky in places, but
it’s very pleasant.”

“Now, you sit down here, and you here,” said Mrs. Bartlett; “and I do
hope you have brought good appetites with you.”

The strangers took their places, and Yates had a chance to look at the
younger member of the family, which opportunity he did not let slip.
It was hard to believe that she was the daughter of so crusty a man
as Hiram Bartlett. Her cheeks were rosy, with dimples in them that
constantly came and went in her incessant efforts to keep from laughing.
Her hair, which hung about her plump shoulders, was a lovely golden
brown. Although her dress was of the cheapest material, it was neatly
cut and fitted; and her dainty white apron added that touch of wholesome
cleanliness which was so noticeable everywhere in the house. A bit of
blue ribbon at her white throat, and a pretty spring flower just
below it, completed a charming picture, which a more critical and less
susceptible man than Yates might have contemplated with pleasure.

Miss Bartlett sat smilingly at one end of the table, and her father
grimly at the other. The mother sat at the side, apparently looking
on that position as one of vantage for commanding the whole field, and
keeping her husband and her daughter both under her eye. The teapot and
cups were set before the young woman. She did not pour out the tea at
once, but seemed to be waiting instructions from her mother. That
good lady was gazing with some sternness at her husband, he vainly
endeavoring to look at the ceiling or anywhere but at her. He drew his
open hand nervously down his face, which was of unusual gravity even for
him. Finally he cast an appealing glance at his wife, who sat with her
hands folded on her lap, but her eyes were unrelenting. After a
moment’s hopeless irresolution Bartlett bent his head over his plate and
murmured:

“For what we are about to receive, oh, make us truly thankful. Amen.”

Mrs. Bartlett echoed the last word, having also bowed her head when she
saw surrender in the troubled eyes of her husband.

Now, it happened that Yates, who had seen nothing of this silent
struggle of the eyes, being exceedingly hungry, was making every
preparation for the energetic beginning of the meal. He had spent most
of his life in hotels and New York boarding houses, so that if he ever
knew the adage, “Grace before meat,” he had forgotten it. In the midst
of his preparations came the devout words, and they came upon him as a
stupefying surprise. Although naturally a resourceful man, he was not
quick enough this time to cover his confusion. Miss Bartlett’s golden
head was bowed, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Yates’ look of
amazed bewilderment and his sudden halt of surprise. When all heads were
raised, the young girl’s still remained where it was, while her plump
shoulders quivered. Then she covered her face with her apron, and the
silvery ripple of a laugh came like a smothered musical chime trickling
through her fingers.

“Why, _Kitty_!” cried her mother in astonishment, “whatever is the
matter with you?”

The girl could no longer restrain her mirth. “You’ll have to pour out
the tea, mother!” She exclaimed, as she fled from the room.

“For the land’s sake!” cried the astonished mother, rising to take her
frivolous daughter’s place, “what ails the child? I don’t see what there
is to laugh at.”

Hiram scowled down the table, and was evidently also of the opinion that
there was no occasion for mirth. The professor was equally in the dark.

“I am afraid, Mrs. Bartlett,” said Yates, “that I am the innocent cause
of Miss Kitty’s mirth. You see, madam--it’s a pathetic thing to say, but
really I have had no home life. Although I attend church regularly, of
course,” he added with jaunty mendacity, “I must confess that I haven’t
heard grace at meals for years and years, and--well, I wasn’t just
prepared for it. I have no doubt I made an exhibition of myself, which
your daughter was quick to see.”

“It wasn’t very polite,” said Mrs. Bartlett with some asperity.

“I know that,” pleaded Yates with contrition, “but I assure you it was
unintentional on my part.”

“Bless the man!” cried his hostess. “I don’t mean you. I mean Kitty. But
that girl never _could_ keep her face straight. She always favored me
more than her father.”

This statement was not difficult to believe, for Hiram at that moment
looked as if he had never smiled in his life. He sat silent throughout
the meal, but Mrs. Bartlett talked quite enough for two.

“Well, for my part,” she said, “I don’t know what farming’s coming to!
Henry Howard and Margaret drove past here this afternoon as proud as
Punch in their new covered buggy. Things is very different from what
they was when I was a girl. Then a farmer’s daughter had to work. Now
Margaret’s took her diploma at the ladies’ college, and Arthur he’s
begun at the university, and Henry’s sporting round in a new buggy. They
have a piano there, with the organ moved out into the back room.”

“The whole Howard lot’s a stuck-up set,” muttered the farmer.

But Mrs. Bartlett wouldn’t have that. Any detraction that was necessary
she felt competent to supply, without help from the nominal head of the
house.

“No, I don’t go so far as to say that. Neither would you, Hiram, if you
hadn’t lost your lawsuit about the line fence; and served you right,
too, for it wouldn’t have been begun if I had been at home at the time.
Not but what Margaret’s a good housekeeper, for she wouldn’t be her
mother’s daughter if she wasn’t that; but it does seem to me a queer way
to raise farmers’ children, and I only hope they can keep it up. There
were no pianos nor French and German in _my_ young days.”

“You ought to hear her play! My lands!” cried young Bartlett, who spoke
for the first time. His admiration for her accomplishment evidently went
beyond his powers of expression.

Bartlett himself did not relish the turn the conversation had taken,
and he looked somewhat uneasily at the two strangers. The professor’s
countenance was open and frank, and he was listening with respectful
interest to Mrs. Bartlett’s talk. Yates bent over his plate with flushed
face, and confined himself strictly to the business in hand.

“I am glad,” said the professor innocently to Yates, “that you made the
young lady’s acquaintance. I must ask you for an introduction.”

For once in his life Yates had nothing to say, but he looked at his
friend with an expression that was not kindly. The latter, in answer to
Mrs. Bartlett’s inquiries, told how they had passed Miss Howard on the
road, and how Yates, with his usual kindness of heart, had offered the
young woman the hospitalities of the hay rack. Two persons at the table
were much relieved when the talk turned to the tent. It was young Hiram
who brought about this boon. He was interested in the tent, and he
wanted to know. Two things seemed to bother the boy: First, he was
anxious to learn what diabolical cause had been at work to induce two
apparently sane men to give up the comforts of home and live in this
exposed manner, if they were not compelled to do so. Second, he desired
to find out why people who had the privilege of living in large cities
came of their own accord into the uninteresting country, anyhow. Even
when explanations were offered, the problem seemed still beyond him.

After the meal they all adjourned to the veranda, where the air was cool
and the view extensive. Mrs. Bartlett would not hear of the young men
pitching the tent that night. “Goodness knows, you will have enough of
it, with the rain and the mosquitoes. We have plenty of room here, and
you will have one comfortable night on the Ridge, at any rate. Then in
the morning you can find a place in the woods to suit you, and my boy
will take an ax and cut stakes for you, and help to put up your precious
tent. Only remember that when it rains you are to come to the house,
or you will catch your deaths with cold and rheumatism. It will be very
nice till the novelty wears off; then you are quite welcome to the front
rooms upstairs, and Hiram can take the tent back to Erie the first time
he goes to town.”

Mrs. Bartlett had a way of taking things for granted. It never seemed
to occur to her that any of her rulings might be questioned. Hiram sat
gazing silently at the road, as if all this was no affair of his.

Yates had refused a chair, and sat on the edge of the veranda, with
his back against one of the pillars, in such a position that he might,
without turning his head, look through the open doorway into the room.
where Miss Bartlett was busily but silently clearing away the tea
things. The young man caught fleeting glimpses of her as she moved
airily about her work. He drew a cigar from his case, cut off the end
with his knife, and lit a match on the sole of his boot, doing this with
an easy automatic familiarity that required no attention on his part;
all of which aroused the respectful envy of young Hiram, who sat on a
wooden chair, leaning forward, eagerly watching the man from New York.

“Have a cigar?” said Yates, offering the case to young Hiram.

“No, no; thank you,” gasped the boy, aghast at the reckless audacity of
the proposal.

“What’s that?” cried Mrs. Bartlett. Although she was talking volubly
to the professor, her maternal vigilance never even nodded, much less
slept. “A cigar? Not likely! I’ll say this for my husband and my boy:
that, whatever else they may have done, they have never smoked nor
touched a drop of liquor since I’ve known them, and, please God, they
never will.”

“Oh, I guess it wouldn’t hurt them,” said Yates, with a lack of tact
that was not habitual. He fell several degrees in the estimation of his
hostess.

“Hurt ‘em?” cried Mrs. Bartlett indignantly. “I guess it won’t get
a chance to.” She turned to the professor, who was a good
listener--respectful and deferential, with little to say for himself.
She rocked gently to and fro as she talked.

Her husband sat unbendingly silent, in a sphinxlike attitude that gave
no outward indication of his mental uneasiness. He was thinking gloomily
that it would be just his luck to meet Mrs. Bartlett unexpectedly in the
streets of Fort Erie on one of those rare occasions when he was
enjoying the pleasures of sin for a season. He had the most pessimistic
forebodings of what the future might have in store for him. Sometimes,
when neighbors or customers “treated” him in the village, and he felt he
had taken all the whisky that cloves would conceal, he took a five-cent
cigar instead of a drink. He did not particularly like the smoking of
it, but there was a certain devil-may-care recklessness in going down
the street with a lighted cigar in his teeth, which had all the more
fascination for him because of its manifest danger. He felt at these
times that he was going the pace, and that it is well our women do not
know of all the wickedness there is in this world. He did not fear that
any neighbor might tell his wife, for there were depths to which no
person could convince Mrs. Bartlett he would descend. But he thought
with horror of some combination of circumstances that might bring his
wife to town unknown to him on a day when he indulged. He pictured, with
a shudder, meeting her unexpectedly on the uncertain plank sidewalk of
Fort Erie, he smoking a cigar. When this nightmare presented itself to
him, he resolved never to touch a cigar again; but he well knew that the
best resolutions fade away if a man is excited with two or three glasses
of liquor.

When Mrs. Bartlett resumed conversation with the professor, Yates looked
up at young Hiram and winked. The boy flushed with pleasure under the
comprehensiveness of that wink. It included him in the attractive halo
of crime that enveloped the fascinating personality of the man from New
York. It seemed to say:

“That’s all right, but we are men of the world. _We_ know.”

Young Hiram’s devotion to the Goddess Nicotine had never reached the
altitude of a cigar. He had surreptitiously smoked a pipe in a secluded
corner behind the barn in days when his father was away. He feared
both his father and his mother, and so was in an even more embarrassing
situation than old Hiram himself. He had worked gradually up to tobacco
by smoking cigarettes of cane made from abandoned hoop-skirts. Crinoline
was fashionable, even in the country, in those days, and ribs of
cane were used before the metallic distenders of dresses came in. One
hoop-skirt, whose usefulness as an article of adornment was gone, would
furnish delight and smoking material for a company of boys for a month.
The cane smoke made the tongue rather raw, but the wickedness was
undeniable. Yates’ wink seemed to recognize young Hiram as a comrade
worthy to offer incense at the shrine, and the boy was a firm friend of
Yates from the moment the eyelid of the latter drooped.

The tea things having been cleared away, Yates got no more glimpses of
the girl through the open door. He rose from his lowly seat and strolled
toward the gate, with his hands in his pockets. He remembered that he
had forgotten something, and cudgeled his brains to make out what it
was. He gazed down the road at the house of the Howards, which naturally
brought to his recollection his meeting with the young girl on the road.
There was a pang of discomfiture in this thought when he remembered
the accomplishments attributed to her by Mrs. Bartlett. He recalled his
condescending tone to her, and recollected his anxiety about the jar.
The jar! That was what he had forgotten. He flashed a glance at old
Hiram, and noted that the farmer was looking at him with something like
reproach in his eyes. Yates moved his head almost imperceptibly toward
the barn, and the farmer’s eyes dropped to the floor of the veranda. The
young man nonchalantly strolled past the end of the house.

“I guess I’ll go to look after the horses,” said the farmer, rising.

“The horses are all right, father. I saw to them,” put in his son, but
the old man frowned him down, and slouched around the corner of the
house. Mrs. Bartlett was too busy talking to the professor to notice. So
good a listener did not fall to her lot every day.

“Here’s looking at you,” said Yates, strolling into the barn, taking
a telescopic metal cup from his pocket, and clinking it into receptive
shape by a jerk of the hand. He offered the now elongated cup to Hiram,
who declined any such modern improvement.

“Help yourself in that thing. The jug’s good enough for me.”

“Three fingers” of the liquid gurgled out into the patented vessel, and
the farmer took the jar, after a furtive look over his shoulder.

“Well, here’s luck.” The newspaper man tossed off the potion with the
facility of long experience, shutting up the dish with his thumb and
finger, as if it were a metallic opera hat.

The farmer drank silently from the jar itself. Then he smote in the cork
with his open palm.

“Better bury it in the wheat bin,” he said morosely. “The boy might find
it if you put it among the oats--feedin’ the horses, ye know.”

“Mighty good place,” assented Yates, as the golden grain flowed in a
wave over the submerged jar. “I say, old man, you know the spot; you’ve
been here before.”

Bartlett’s lowering countenance indicated resentment at the imputation,
but he neither affirmed nor denied. Yates strolled out of the barn,
while the farmer went through a small doorway that led to the stable. A
moment later he heard Hiram calling loudly to his son to bring the pails
and water the horses.

“Evidently preparing an _alibi_,” said Yates, smiling to himself, as he
sauntered toward the gate.




CHAPTER V.


“What’s up? what’s up?” cried Yates drowsily next morning, as a
prolonged hammering at his door awakened him.

“Well, _you’re_ not, anyhow.” He recognized the voice of young Hiram. “I
say, breakfast’s ready. The professor has been up an hour.”

“All right; I’ll be down shortly,” said Yates, yawning, adding to
himself: “Hang the professor!” The sun was streaming in through the
east window, but Yates never before remembered seeing it such a short
distance above the horizon in the morning. He pulled his watch from
the pocket of his vest, hanging on the bedpost. It was not yet seven
o’clock. He placed it to his ear, thinking it had stopped, but found
himself mistaken.

“What an unearthly hour,” he said, unable to check the yawns. Yates’
years on a morning newspaper had made seven o’clock something like
midnight to him. He had been unable to sleep until after two o’clock,
his usual time of turning in, and now this rude wakening seemed
thoughtless cruelty. However, he dressed, and yawned himself downstairs.

They were all seated at breakfast when Yates entered the apartment,
which was at once dining room and parlor.

“Waiting for you,” said young Hiram humorously, that being one of a set
of jokes which suited various occasions. Yates took his place near Miss
Kitty, who looked as fresh and radiant as a spirit of the morning.

“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting long.” he said.

“No fear,” cried Mrs. Bartlett. “If breakfast’s a minute later than
seven o’clock, we soon hear of it from the men-folks. They get precious
hungry by that time.”

“By that time?” echoed Yates. “Then do they get up before seven?”

“Laws! what a farmer you would make, Mr. Yates!” exclaimed Mrs.
Bartlett, laughing.

“Why, everything’s done about the house and barn; horses fed, cows
milked--everything. There never was a better motto made than the one you
learned when you were a boy, and like as not have forgotten all about:

  “‘Early to bed and early to rise
  Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.’

I’m sorry you don’t believe in it, Mr. Yates.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Yates with some loftiness; “but I’d like to
see a man get out a morning paper on such a basis. I’m healthy enough,
quite as wealthy as the professor here, and everyone will admit that
I’m wiser than he is; yet I never go to bed until after two o’clock, and
rarely wake before noon.”

Kitty laughed at this, and young Hiram looked admiringly at the New
Yorker, wishing he was as clever.

“For the land’s sake!” cried Mrs. Bartlett, with true feminine
profanity, “What do you do up so late as that?”

“Writing, writing,” said Yates airily; “articles that make dynasties
tremble next morning, and which call forth apologies or libel suits
afterward, as the case may be.”

Young Hiram had no patience with one’s profession as a topic of
conversation. The tent and its future position was the burning question
with him. He mumbled something about Yates having slept late in order to
avoid the hearing of the words of thankfulness at the beginning of the
meal. What his parents caught of this remark should have shown them how
evil communications corrupt good manners; for, big as he was, the boy
had never before ventured even to hint at ridicule on such a subject. He
was darkly frowned upon by his silent father, and sharply reprimanded by
his voluble mother. Kitty apparently thought it rather funny, and would
like to have laughed. As it was, she contented herself with a sly glance
at Yates, who, incredible as it may seem, actually blushed at young
Hiram’s allusion to the confusing incident of the day before.

The professor, who was a kind-hearted man, drew a herring across the
scent.

“Mr. Bartlett has been good enough,” said he, changing the subject, “to
say we may camp in the woods at the back of the farm. I have been out
there this morning, and it certainly is a lovely spot.”

“We’re awfully obliged, Mr. Bartlett,” said Yates. “Of course Renmark
went out there merely to show the difference between the ant and the
butterfly. You’ll find out what a humbug he is by and by, Mrs. Bartlett.
He looks honest; but you wait.”

“I know just the spot for the tent,” cried young Hiram--“down in the
hollow by the creek. Then you won’t need to haul water.”

“Yes, and catch their deaths of fever and ague,” said Mrs. Bartlett.
Malaria had not then been invented. “Take my advice, and put your
tent--if you _will_ put it up at all--on the highest ground you can
find. Hauling water won’t hurt you.”

“I agree with you, Mrs. Bartlett. It shall be so. My friend uses no
water--you ought to have seen his bill at the Buffalo hotel. I have it
somewhere, and am going to pin it up on the outside of the tent as a
warning to the youth of this neighborhood--and what water I need I can
easily carry up from the creek.”

The professor did not defend himself, and Mrs. Bartlett evidently took a
large discount from all that Yates said. She was a shrewd woman.

After breakfast the men went out to the barn. The horses were hitched
to the wagon, which still contained the tent and fittings. Young Hiram
threw an ax and a spade among the canvas folds, mounted to his place,
and drove up the lane leading to the forest, followed by Yates and
Renmark on foot, leaving the farmer in his barnyard with a cheery
good-by, which he did not see fit to return.

First, a field of wheat; next, an expanse of waving hay that soon would
be ready for the scythe; then, a pasture field, in which some young
horses galloped to the fence, gazing for a moment at the harnessed
horses, whinnying sympathetically, off the next with flying heels wildly
flung in the air, rejoicing in their own contrast of liberty, standing
at the farther corner and snorting defiance to all the world; last, the
cool shade of the woods into which the lane ran, losing its identity as
a wagon road in diverging cow paths. Young Hiram knew the locality well,
and drove direct to an ideal place for camping. Yates was enchanted. He
included all that section of the country in a sweeping wave of his hand,
and burst forth:

  “‘This is the spot, the center of the grove:
  There stands the oak, the monarch of the wood.
  In such a place as this, at such an hour,
  We’ll raise a tent to ward off sun and shower.’

Shakespeare improved.”

“I think you are mistaken,” said Renmark.

“Not a bit it. Couldn’t be a better camping ground.”

“Yes; I know that. I picked it out two hours ago. But you were wrong in
your quotation. It is not by Shakespeare and yourself, as you seem to
think.”

“Isn’t it? Some other fellow, eh? Well, if Shake is satisfied, I am. Do
you know, Renny, I calculate that, line for line, I’ve written about ten
times as much as Shakespeare. Do the literati recognize that fact? Not a
bit of it. This is an ungrateful world, Stilly.”

“It is, Dick. Now, what are you going to do toward putting up the tent?”

“Everything, my boy, everything. I know more about putting up tents than
you do about science, or whatever you teach. Now, Hiram, my boy, you cut
me some stakes about two feet long--stout ones. Here, professor, throw
off that coat and _négligé_ manner, and grasp this spade. I want some
trenches dug.”

Yates certainly made good his words. He understood the putting up of
tents, his experience in the army being not yet remote. Young Hiram
gazed with growing admiration at Yates’ deftness and evident knowledge
of what he was about, while his contempt for the professor’s futile
struggle with a spade entangled in tree roots was hardly repressed.

“Better give me that spade,” he said at length; but there was an element
of stubbornness in Renmark’s character. He struggled on.

At last the work was completed, stakes driven, ropes tightened, trenches
dug.

Yates danced, and gave the war whoop of the country.

  “Thus the canvas tent has risen,
  All the slanting stakes are driven,
  Stakes of oak and stakes of beechwood:
  Mops his brow, the tired professor;
  Grins with satisfaction, Hiram;
  Dances wildly, the reporter--
  Calls aloud for gin and water.

Longfellow, old man, Longfellow. Bet you a dollar on it!” And the
frivolous Yates poked the professor in the ribs.

“Richard,” said the latter, “I can stand only a certain amount of
this sort of thing. I don’t wish to call any man a fool, but you act
remarkably like one.”

“Don’t be mealy-mouthed, Renny; call a spade a spade. By George! young
Hiram has gone off and forgotten his--And the ax, too! Perhaps they’re
left for us. He’s a good fellow, is young Hiram. A fool? Of course I’m
a fool. That’s what I came for, and that’s what I’m going to be for the
next two weeks. ‘A fool--a fool, I met a fool i’ the forest’--just the
spot for him. Who could be wise here after years of brick and mortar?

“Where are your eyes, Renny,” he cried, “that you don’t grow wild when
you look around you? See the dappled sunlight filtering through the
leaves; listen to the murmur of the wind in the branches; hear the
trickle of the brook down there; notice the smooth bark of the beech
and the rugged covering of the oak; smell the wholesome woodland scents.
Renmark, you have no soul, or you could not be so unmoved. It is like
paradise. It is--Say, Renny, by Jove, I’ve forgotten that jug at the
barn!”

“It will be left there.”

“Will it? Oh, well, if you say so.”

“I do say so. I looked around for it this morning to smash it, but
couldn’t find it.”

“Why didn’t you ask old Bartlett?”

“I did; but he didn’t know where it was.”

Yates threw himself down on the moss and laughed, flinging his arms and
legs about with the joy of living.

“Say, Culture, have you got any old disreputable clothes with you? Well,
then, go into the tent and put them on; then come out and lie on your
back and look up at the leaves. You’re a good fellow, Renny, but decent
clothes spoil you. You won’t know yourself when you get ancient duds
on your back. Old clothes mean freedom, liberty, all that our ancestors
fought for. When you come out, we’ll settle who’s to cook and who to
wash dishes. I’ve settled it already in my own mind, but I am not so
selfish as to refuse to discuss the matter with you.”

When the professor came out of the tent, Yates roared. Renmark himself
smiled; he knew the effect would appeal to Yates.

“By Jove! old man, I ought to have included a mirror in the outfit.
The look of learned respectability, set off with the garments of a
disreputable tramp, makes a combination that is simply killing. Well,
you can’t spoil _that_ suit, anyhow. Now sprawl.”

“I’m very comfortable standing up, thank you.”

“Get down on your back. You hear me?”

“Put me there.”

“You mean it?” asked Yates, sitting up.

“Certainly.”

“Say, Renny, beware. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I’ll forgive you for once.”

“On your head be it.”

“On my back, you mean.”

“That’s not bad, Renny,” cried Yates, springing to his feet. “Now, it
will hurt. You have fair warning. I have spoken.”

The young men took sparring attitudes. Yates tried to do it gently at
first, but, finding he could not touch his opponent, struck out more
earnestly, again giving a friendly warning. This went on ineffectually
for some time, when the professor, with a quick movement, swung around
his foot with the airy grace of a dancing master, and caught Yates just
behind the knee, at the same time giving him a slight tap on the breast.
Yates was instantly on his back.

“Oh, I say, Renny, that wasn’t fair. That was a kick.”

“No, it wasn’t. It is merely a little French touch. I learned it in
Paris. They _do_ kick there, you know; and it is good to know how to use
your feet as well as your fists if you are set on by three, as I was one
night in the Latin Quarter.”

Yates sat up.

“Look here, Renmark; when were you in Paris?”

“Several times.”

Yates gazed at him for a few moments, then said:

“Renny, you improve on acquaintance. I never saw a Bool-var in my life.
You must teach me that little kick.”

“With pleasure,” said Renmark, sitting down, while the other sprawled at
full length. “Teaching is my business, and I shall be glad to exercise
any talents I may have in that line. In endeavoring to instruct a
New York man the first step is to convince him that he doesn’t know
everything. That is the difficult point. Afterward everything is easy.”

“Mr. Stillson Renmark, you are pleased to be severe. Know that you
are forgiven. This delicious sylvan retreat does not lend itself to
acrimonious dispute, or, in plain English, quarreling. Let dogs delight,
if they want to; I refuse to be goaded by your querulous nature into
giving anything but the soft answer. Now to business. Nothing is
so conducive to friendship, when two people are camping out, as a
definition of the duties of each at the beginning. Do you follow me?”

“Perfectly. What do you propose?”

“I propose that you do the cooking and I wash the dishes. We will forage
for food alternate days.”

“Very well. I agree to that.”

Richard Yates sat suddenly upright, looking at his friend with reproach
in his eyes. “See here, Renmark; are you resolved to force on an
international complication the very first day? That’s no fair show to
give a man.”

“What isn’t?”

“Why, agreeing with him. There are depths of meanness in your character,
Renny, that I never suspected. You know that people who camp out always
object to the part assigned them by their fellow-campers. I counted on
that. I’ll do anything but wash dishes.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?”

“Because any sane man would have said ‘no’ when I suggested cooking,
merely _because_ I suggested it. There is no diplomacy about you,
Renmark. A man doesn’t know where to find you when you act like that.
When you refused to do the cooking, I would have said: ‘Very well, then,
I’ll do it,’ and everything would have been lovely; but now----”

Yates lay down again in disgust. There are moments in life when language
fails a man.

“Then it’s settled that you do the cooking and I wash the dishes?” said
the professor.

“Settled? Oh yes, if you say so; but all the pleasure of getting one’s
own way by the use of one’s brains is gone. I hate to be agreed with in
that objectionably civil manner.”

“Well, that point being arranged, who begins the foraging--you or I?”

“Both, Herr Professor, both. I propose to go to the house of the
Howards, and I need an excuse for the first visit; therefore I shall
forage to a limited extent. I go ostensibly for bread. As I may not get
any, you perhaps should bring some from whatever farmhouse you choose as
the scene of your operations. Bread is always handy in the camp, fresh
or stale. When in doubt, buy more bread. You can never go wrong, and the
bread won’t.”

“What else should I get? Milk, I suppose?”

“Certainly; eggs, butter--anything. Mrs. Bartlett will give you hints on
what to get that will be more valuable than mine.”

“Have you all the cooking utensils you need?”

“I think so. The villain from whom I hired the outfit said it was
complete. Doubtless he lied; but we’ll manage, I think.”

“Very well. If you wait until I change my clothes, I’ll go with you as
far as the road.”

“My dear fellow, be advised, and don’t change. You’ll get everything
twenty per cent. cheaper in that rig-out. Besides, you are so much more
picturesque. Your costume may save us from starvation if we run short
of cash. You can get enough for both of us as a professional tramp. Oh,
well, if you insist, I’ll wait. Good advice is thrown away on a man like
you.”




CHAPTER VI.


Margaret Howard stood at the kitchen table kneading dough. The room was
called the kitchen, which it was not, except in winter. The stove was
moved out in spring to a lean-to, easily reached through the open door
leading to the kitchen veranda.

When the stove went out or came in, it marked the approach or the
departure of summer. It was the heavy pendulum whose swing this way or
that indicated the two great changes of the year. No job about the
farm was so much disliked by the farmer and his boys as the semiannual
removal of the stove. Soot came down, stovepipes gratingly grudged to go
together again; the stove was heavy and cumbersome, and many a pain in a
rural back dated from the journey of the stove from outhouse to kitchen.

The kitchen itself was a one-story building, which projected back from
the two-story farmhouse, giving the whole a T-shape. There was a veranda
on each side of the kitchen, as well as one along the front of the house
itself.

Margaret’s sleeves were turned back nearly to her elbows, showing a pair
of white and shapely arms. Now and then she deftly dusted the kneading
board with flour to prevent the dough sticking, and as she pressed
her open palms into the smooth, white, spongy mass, the table groaned
protestingly. She cut the roll with a knife into lumps that were patted
into shape, and placed side by side, like hillocks of snow, in the
sheet-iron pan.

At this moment there was a rap at the open kitchen door, and Margaret
turned round, startled, for visitors were rare at that hour of the day;
besides, neighbors seldom made such a concession to formality as to
knock. The young girl flushed as she recognized the man who had spoken
to her the day before. He stood smiling in the doorway, with his hat in
his hand. She uttered no word of greeting or welcome, but stood looking
at him, with her hand on the floury table.

“Good-morning, Miss Howard,” said Yates blithely; “may I come in? I have
been knocking for some time fruitlessly at the front door, so I took the
liberty of coming around.”

“I did not hear you knock,” answered Margaret. She neglected to invite
him in, but he took the permission for granted and entered, seating
himself as one who had come to stay. “You must excuse me for going on
with my work,” she added; “bread at this stage will not wait.”

“Certainly, certainly. Please do not let me interrupt you. I have made
my own bread for years, but not in that way. I am glad that you are
making bread, for I have come to see if I can buy some.”

“Really? Perhaps I can sell you some butter and eggs as well.”

Yates laughed in that joyous, free-hearted manner of his which had much
to do with his getting on in the world. It was difficult to remain long
angry with so buoyant a nature.

“Ah, Miss Howard, I see you haven’t forgiven me for that remark. You
surely could not have thought I meant it. I really intended it for a
joke, but I am willing to admit, now that I look back on it, that the
joke was rather poor; but, then, most of my jokes are rather shopworn.”

“I am afraid I lack a sense of humor.”

“All women do,” said Yates with easy confidence. “At least, all I’ve
ever met.”

Yates was sitting in a wooden chair, which he now placed at the end of
the table, tilting it back until his shoulders rested against the
wall. His feet were upon the rung, and he waved his hat back and forth,
fanning himself, for it was warm. In this position he could look up at
the face of the pretty girl before him, whose smooth brow was touched
with just the slightest indication of a faint frown. She did not
even glance at the self-confident young man, but kept her eyes fixed
resolutely on her work. In the silence the table creaked as Margaret
kneaded the dough. Yates felt an unaccustomed sensation of embarrassment
creeping over him, and realized that he would have to re-erect the
conversation on a new basis. It was manifestly absurd that a resourceful
New Yorker, who had conversed unabashed with presidents, senators,
generals, and other great people of a great nation, should be put out of
countenance by the unaccountable coldness of a country girl in the wilds
of Canada.

“I have not had an opportunity of properly introducing myself,” he
said at last, when the creaking of the table, slight as it was, became
insupportable. “My name is Richard Yates, and I come from New York. I
am camping out in this neighborhood to relieve, as it were, a mental
strain--the result of years of literary work.”

Yates knew from long experience that the quickest and surest road to a
woman’s confidence was through her sympathy. “Mental strain” struck
him as a good phrase, indicating midnight oil and the hollow eye of the
devoted student.

“Is your work mental, then?” asked Margaret incredulously, flashing, for
the first time, a dark-eyed look at him.

“Yes,” Yates laughed uneasily. He had manifestly missed fire. “I notice
by your tone that you evidently think my equipment meager. You should
not judge by appearances, Miss Howard. Most of us are better than we
seem, pessimists to the contrary notwithstanding. Well, as I was saying,
the camping company consists of two partners. We are so different
in every respect that we are the best of friends. My partner is Mr.
Stillson Renmark, professor of something or other in University College,
Toronto.”

For the first time Margaret exhibited some interest in the conversation.

“Professor Renmark? I have heard of him.”

“Dear me! I had no idea the fame of the professor had penetrated beyond
the precincts of the university--if a university has precincts. He told
me it had all the modern improvements, but I suspected at the time that
was merely Renny’s brag.”

The frown on the girl’s brow deepened, and Yates was quick to see that
he had lost ground again, if, indeed, he had ever gained any, which he
began to doubt. She evidently did not relish his glib talk about the
university. He was just about to say something deferentially about that
institution, for he was not a man who would speak disrespectfully of
the equator if he thought he might curry favor with his auditor by
doing otherwise, when it occurred to him that Miss Howard’s interest was
centered in the man, and not in the university.

“In this world, Miss Howard,” he continued, “true merit rarely finds
its reward; at least, the reward shows some reluctance in making itself
visible in time for man to enjoy it. Professor Renmark is a man so
worthy that I was rather astonished to learn that you knew of him. I
am glad for his sake that it is so, for no man more thoroughly deserves
fame than he.”

“I know nothing of him,” said Margaret, “except what my brother has
written. My brother is a student at the university.”

“Is he really? And what is he going in for?”

“A good education.”

Yates laughed.

“Well, that is an all-round handy thing for a person to have about him.
I often wish I had had a university training. Still, it is not valued
in an American newspaper office as much as might be. Yet,” he added in
a tone that showed he did not desire to be unfair to a man of education,
“I have known some university men who became passably good reporters in
time.”

The girl made no answer, but attended strictly to the work in hand.
She had the rare gift of silence, and these intervals of quiet abashed
Yates, whose most frequent boast was that he could outtalk any man
on earth. Opposition, or even abuse, merely served as a spur to his
volubility, but taciturnity disconcerted him.

“Well,” he cried at length, with something like desperation, “let us
abandon this animated discussion on the subject of education, and take
up the more practical topic of bread. Would you believe, Miss Howard,
that I am an expert in bread making?”

“I think you said already that you made your bread.”

“Ah, yes, but I meant then that I made it by the sweat of my good lead
pencil. Still, I have made bread in my time, and I believe that some of
those who subsisted upon it are alive to-day. The endurance of the human
frame is something marvelous, when you come to think of it. I did the
baking in a lumber camp one winter. Used to dump the contents of a
sack of flour into a trough made out of a log, pour in a pail or two
of melted snow, and mix with a hoe after the manner of a bricklayer’s
assistant making mortar. There was nothing small or mean about my bread
making. I was in the wholesale trade.”

“I pity the unfortunate lumbermen.”

“Your sympathy is entirely misplaced, Miss Howard. You ought to pity me
for having to pander to such appetites as those men brought in from
the woods with them. They never complained of the quality of the bread,
although there was occasionally some grumbling about the quantity. I
have fed sheaves to a threshing machine and logs to a sawmill, but their
voracity was nothing to that of a big lumberman just in from felling
trees. Enough, and plenty of it, is what he wants. No ‘tabbledote’ for
him. He wants it all at once, and he wants it right away. If there is
any washing necessary, he is content to do it after the meal. I
know nothing, except a morning paper, that has such an appetite for
miscellaneous stuff as the man of the woods.”

The girl made no remark, but Yates could see that she was interested in
his talk in spite of herself. The bread was now in the pans, and she
had drawn out the table to the middle of the floor; the baking board
had disappeared, and the surface of the table was cleaned. With a
light, deft motion of her two hands she had whisked over its surface the
spotlessly white cloth, which flowed in waves over the table and finally
settled calmly in its place like the placid face of a pond in the
moonlight. Yates realized that the way to success lay in keeping the
conversation in his own hands and not depending on any response. In this
way a man may best display the store of knowledge he possesses, to
the admiration and bewilderment of his audience, even though his store
consists merely of samples like the outfit of a commercial traveler; yet
a commercial traveler who knows his business can so arrange his samples
on the table of his room in a hotel that they give the onlooker an idea
of the vastness and wealth of the warehouses from which they are drawn.

“Bread,” said Yates with the serious air of a very learned man, “is a
most interesting subject. It is a historical subject--it is a biblical
subject. As an article of food it is mentioned oftener in the Bible than
any other. It is used in parable and to point a moral. ‘Ye must not live
on bread alone.’”

From the suspicion of a twinkle in the eye of his listener he feared he
had not quoted correctly. He knew he was not now among that portion of
his samples with which he was most familiar, so he hastened back to the
historical aspect of his subject. Few people could skate over thinner
ice than Richard Yates, but his natural shrewdness always caused him to
return to more solid footing.

“Now, in this country bread has gone through three distinct stages, and
although I am a strong believer in progress, yet, in the case of our
most important article of food, I hold that the bread of to-day is
inferior to the bread our mothers used to make, or perhaps, I should
say, our grandmothers. This is, unfortunately, rapidly becoming the age
of machinery--and machinery, while it may be quicker, is certainly not
so thorough as old-fashioned hand work. There is a new writer in England
named Ruskin who is very bitter against machinery. He would like to see
it abolished--at least, so he says. I will send for one of his books,
and show it to you, if you will let me.”

“You, in New York, surely do not call the author of ‘Modern Painters’
and ‘The Seven Lamps of Architecture’ a new man. My father has one of
his books which must be nearly twenty years old.”

This was the longest speech Margaret had made to him, and, as he said
afterward to the professor in describing its effects, it took him right
off his feet. He admitted to the professor, but not to the girl, that he
had never read a word of Ruskin in his life. The allusion he had made to
him he had heard someone else use, and he had worked it into an article
before now with telling effect. “As Mr. Ruskin says” looked well in a
newspaper column, giving an air of erudition and research to it. Mr.
Yates, however, was not at the present moment prepared to enter into a
discussion on either the age or the merits of the English writer.

“Ah, well,” he said, “technically speaking, of course, Ruskin is not a
new man. What I meant was that he is looked on--ah--in New York as--that
is--you know--as comparatively new--comparatively new. But, as I was
saying about bread, the old log-house era of bread, as I might call it,
produced the most delicious loaf ever made in this country. It was the
salt-rising kind, and was baked in a round, flat-bottomed iron kettle.
Did you ever see the baking kettle of other days?”

“I think Mrs. Bartlett has one, although she never uses it now. It was
placed on the hot embers, was it not?”

“Exactly,” said Yates, noting with pleasure that the girl was thawing,
as he expressed it to himself. “The hot coals were drawn out and the
kettle placed upon them. When the lid was in position, hot coals were
put on he top of it. The bread was firm and white and sweet inside, with
the most delicious golden brown crust all around. Ah, that was bread!
but perhaps I appreciated it because I was always hungry in those days.
Then came the alleged improvement of the tin Dutch oven. That was the
second stage in the evolution of bread in this country. It also belonged
to the log-house and open-fireplace era. Bread baked by direct heat from
the fire and reflected heat from the polished tin. I think our present
cast-iron stove arrangement is preferable to that, although not up to
the old-time kettle.”

If Margaret had been a reader of the New York _Argus_, she would have
noticed that the facts set forth by her visitor had already appeared in
that paper, much elaborated, in an article entitled “Our Daily Bread.”
 In the pause that ensued after Yates had finished his dissertation on
the staff of life the stillness was broken by a long wailing cry. It
began with one continued, sustained note, and ended with a wail half
a tone below the first. The girl paid no attention to it, but Yates
started to his feet.

“In the name of--What’s that?”

Margaret smiled, but before she could answer the stillness was again
broken by what appeared to be the more distant notes of a bugle.

“The first,” she said, “was Kitty Bartlett’s voice calling the men home
from the field for dinner. Mrs. Bartlett is a very good housekeeper
and is usually a few minutes ahead of the neighbors with the meals. The
second was the sound of a horn farther up the road. It is what you would
deplore as the age of tin applied to the dinner call, just as your tin
oven supplanted the better bread maker. I like Kitty’s call much better
than the tin horn. It seems to me more musical, although it appeared to
startle you.”

“Oh, you can talk!” cried Yates with audacious admiration, at which the
girl colored slightly and seemed to retire within herself again. “And
you can make fun of people’s historical lore, too. Which do you use--the
tin horn or the natural voice?”

“Neither. If you will look outside, you will see a flag at the top of a
pole. That is our signal.”

It flashed across the mind of Yates that this was intended as an
intimation that he might see many things outside to interest him. He
felt that his visit had not been at all the brilliant success he had
anticipated. Of course the quest for bread had been merely an excuse. He
had expected to be able to efface the unfavorable impression he knew he
had made by his jaunty conversation on the Ridge Road the day before,
and he realized that his position was still the same. A good deal of
Yates’ success in life came from the fact that he never knew when he was
beaten. He did not admit defeat now, but he saw he had, for some reason,
not gained any advantage in a preliminary skirmish. He concluded it
would be well to retire in good order, and renew the contest at some
future time. He was so unused to anything like a rebuff that all
his fighting qualities were up in arms, and he resolved to show this
unimpressionable girl that he was not a man to be lightly valued.

As he rose the door from the main portion of the house opened, and
there entered a woman hardly yet past middle age, who had once been
undoubtedly handsome, but on whose worn and faded face was the look
of patient weariness which so often is the result of a youth spent in
helping a husband to overcome the stumpy stubbornness of an American
bush farm. When the farm is conquered, the victor is usually vanquished.
It needed no second glance to see that she was the mother from whom
the daughter had inherited her good looks. Mrs. Howard did not appear
surprised to see a stranger standing there; in fact, the faculty of
being surprised at anything seemed to have left her. Margaret introduced
them quietly, and went about her preparation for the meal. Yates greeted
Mrs. Howard with effusion. He had come, he said, on a bread mission. He
thought he knew something about bread, but he now learned he came too
early in the day. He hoped he might have the privilege of repeating his
visit.

“But you are not going now?” said Mrs. Howard with hospitable anxiety.

“I fear I have already stayed too long,” answered Yates lingeringly.
“My partner, Professor Renmark, is also on a foraging expedition at your
neighbors’, the Bartletts. He is doubtless back in camp long ago, and
will be expecting me.”

“No fear of that. Mrs. Bartlett would never let anyone go when there is
a meal on the way.”

“I am afraid I shall be giving extra trouble by staying. I imagine there
is quite enough to do in every farmhouse without entertaining any chance
tramp who happens along. Don’t you agree with me for once, Miss Howard?”

Yates was reluctant to go, and yet he did not wish to stay unless
Margaret added her invitation to her mother’s. He felt vaguely that
his reluctance did him credit, and that he was improving. He could not
remember a time when he had not taken without question whatever the gods
sent, and this unaccustomed qualm of modesty caused him to suspect that
there were depths in his nature hitherto unexplored. It always flatters
a man to realize that he is deeper than he thought.

Mrs. Howard laughed in a subdued manner because Yates likened himself to
a tramp, and Margaret said coldly:

“Mother’s motto is that one more or less never makes any difference.”

“And what is your motto, Miss Howard?”

“I don’t think Margaret has any,” said Mrs. Howard, answering for her
daughter. “She is like her father. She reads a great deal and doesn’t
talk much. He would read all the time, if he did not have to work. I see
Margaret has already invited you, for she has put an extra plate on the
table.”

“Ah, then,” said Yates, “I shall have much pleasure in accepting both
the verbal and the crockery invitation. I am sorry for the professor at
his lonely meal by the tent; for he is a martyr to duty, and I feel sure
Mrs. Bartlett will not be able to keep him.”

Before Mrs. Howard could reply there floated in to them, from the
outside, where Margaret was, a cheery voice which Yates had no
difficulty in recognizing as belonging to Miss Kitty Bartlett.

“Hello, Margaret!” she said. “Is he here?”

The reply was inaudible.

“Oh, you know whom I mean. That conceited city fellow.”

There was evidently an admonition and a warning.

“Well, I don’t care if he does. I’ll tell him so to his face. It might
do him good.”

Next moment there appeared a pretty vision in the doorway. On the fair
curls, which were flying about her shoulders, had been carelessly
placed her brother’s straw hat, with a broad and torn brim. Her face was
flushed with running; and of the fact that she was a very lovely girl
there was not the slightest doubt.

“How de do?” she said to Mrs. Howard, and, nodding to Yates, cried: “I
knew you were here, but I came over to make sure. There’s going to be
war in our house. Mother’s made a prisoner of the professor already,
but he doesn’t know it. He thinks he’s going back to the tent, and she’s
packing up the things he wanted, and doing it awfully slow, till I get
back. He said you would be sure to be waiting for him out in the woods.
We both told him there was no fear of that. You wouldn’t leave a place
where there was good cooking for all the professors in the world.”

“You are a wonderful judge of character, Miss Bartlett,” said Yates,
somewhat piqued by her frankness.

“Of course I am. The professor knows ever so much more than you, but he
doesn’t know when he’s well off, just the same. You do. He’s a quiet,
stubborn man.”

“And which do you admire the most, Miss Bartlett--a quiet, stubborn man,
or one who is conceited?”

Miss Kitty laughed heartily, without the slightest trace of
embarrassment. “Detest, you mean. I’m sure I don’t know. Margaret, which
is the most objectionable?”

Margaret looked reproachfully at her neighbor on being thus suddenly
questioned, but said nothing.

Kitty, laughing again, sprang toward her friend, dabbed a little kiss,
like the peck of a bird, on each cheek, cried: “Well, I must be off,
or mother will have to tie up the professor to keep him,” and was off
accordingly with the speed and lightness of a young fawn.

“Extraordinary girl,” remarked Yates, as the flutter of curls and calico
dress disappeared.

“She is a good girl,” cried Margaret emphatically.

“Bless me, I said nothing to the contrary. But don’t you think she is
somewhat free with her opinions about other people?” asked Yates.

“She did not know that you were within hearing when she first spoke, and
after that she brazened it out. That’s her way. But she’s a kind girl
and good-hearted, otherwise she would not have taken the trouble to come
over here merely because your friend happened to be surly.”

“Oh, Renny is anything but surly,” said Yates, as quick to defend his
friend as she was to stand up for hers. “As I was saying a moment ago,
he is a martyr to duty, and if he thought I was at the camp, nothing
would keep him. Now he will have a good dinner in peace when he knows I
am not waiting for him, and a good dinner is more than he will get when
I take to the cooking.”

By this time the silent signal on the flagpole had done its work, and
Margaret’s father and brother arrived from the field. They put their
broad straw hats on the roof of the kitchen veranda, and, taking water
in a tin basin from the rain barrel, placed it on a bench outside and
proceeded to wash vigorously.

Mr. Howard was much more interested in his guest than his daughter had
apparently been. Yates talked glibly, as he could always do if he had a
sympathetic audience, and he showed an easy familiarity with the great
people of this earth that was fascinating to a man who had read much of
them, but who was, in a measure, locked out of the bustling world. Yates
knew many of the generals in the late war, and all of the politicians.
Of the latter there was not an honest man among them, according to the
reporter; of the former there were few who had not made the most ghastly
mistakes. He looked on the world as a vast hoard of commonplace people,
wherein the men of real genius were buried out of sight, if there were
any men of genius, which he seemed to doubt, and those on the top were
there either through their own intrigues or because they had been forced
up by circumstances. His opinions sometimes caused a look of pain to
cross the face of the older man, who was enthusiastic in his quiet way,
and had his heroes. He would have been a strong Republican if he had
lived in the States; and he had watched the four-years’ struggle,
through the papers, with keen and absorbed interest. The North had been
fighting, in his opinion, for the great and undying principle of human
liberty, and had deservedly won. Yates had no such delusion. It was a
politicians’ war, he said. Principle wasn’t in it. The North would have
been quite willing to let slavery stand if the situation had not been
forced by the firing on Fort Sumter. Then the conduct of the war did not
at all meet the approval of Mr. Yates.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “I suppose Grant will go down into history as a
great general. The truth is that he simply knew how to subtract. That
is all there is in it. He had the additional boon of an utter lack of
imagination. We had many generals who were greater than Grant, but they
were troubled with imaginations. Imagination will ruin the best general
in the world. Now, take yourself, for example. If you were to kill a man
unintentionally, your conscience would trouble you all the rest of your
life. Think how you would feel, then, if you were to cause the death of
ten thousand men all in a lump. It would break you down. The mistake an
ordinary man makes may result in the loss of a few dollars, which can be
replaced; but if a general makes a mistake, the loss can never be made
up, for his mistakes are estimated by the lives of men. He says ‘Go’
when he should have said ‘Come.’ He says ‘Attack’ when he should have
said ‘Retreat.’ What is the result? Five, ten, or fifteen thousand men,
many of them better men than he is, left dead on the field. Grant had
nothing of this feeling. He simply knew how to subtract, as I said
before. It is like this: You have fifty thousand men and I have
twenty-five thousand. When I kill twenty-five thousand of your men and
you kill twenty-five thousand of my men, you have twenty-five thousand
left and I have none. You are the victor, and the thoughtless crowd
howls about you, but that does not make you out the greatest general
by a long shot. If Lee had had Grant’s number, and Grant had Lee’s, the
result would have been reversed. Grant set himself to do this little sum
in subtraction, and he did it--did it probably as quickly as any other
man would have done it, and he knew that when it was done the war would
have to stop. That’s all there was to it.”

The older man shook his head. “I doubt,” he said, “if history will take
your view either of the motives of those in power or of the way the war
was carried on. It was a great and noble struggle, heroically fought by
those deluded people who were in the wrong, and stubbornly contested at
immense self-sacrifice by those who were in the right.”

“What a pity it was,” said young Howard to the newspaper man, with a
rudeness that drew a frown from his father, “that you didn’t get to show
‘em how to carry on the war.”

“Well,” said Yates, with a humorous twinkle in his eye, “I flatter
myself that I would have given them some valuable pointers. Still, it is
too late to bemoan their neglect now.”

“Oh, you may have a chance yet,” continued the unabashed young man.
“They say the Fenians are coming over here this time sure. You ought to
volunteer either on our side or on theirs, and show how a war ought to
be carried on.”

“Oh, there’s nothing in the Fenian scare! They won’t venture over. They
fight with their mouths. It’s the safest way.”

“I believe you,” said the youth significantly.

Perhaps it was because the boy had been so inconsiderate as to make
these remarks that Yates received a cordial invitation from both Mr.
and Mrs. Howard to visit the farm as often as he cared to do so. Of this
privilege Yates resolved to avail himself, but he would have prized it
more if Miss Margaret had added her word--which she did not, perhaps
because she was so busy looking after the bread. Yates knew, however,
that with a woman apparent progress is rarely synonymous with real
progress. This knowledge soothed his disappointment.

As he walked back to the camp he reviewed his own feelings with
something like astonishment. The march of events was rapid even for him,
who was not slow in anything he undertook.

“It is the result of leisure,” he said to himself. “It is the first
breathing time I have had for fifteen years. Not two days of my vacation
gone, and here I am hopelessly in love!”




CHAPTER VII.


Yates had intended to call at the Bartletts’ and escort Renmark back
to the woods; but when he got outside he forgot the existence of the
professor, and wandered somewhat aimlessly up the side road, switching
at the weeds that always grow in great profusion along the ditches of a
Canadian country thoroughfare. The day was sunny and warm, and as Yates
wandered on in the direction of the forest he thought of many things.
He had feared that he would find life deadly dull so far from New York,
without even the consolation of a morning-paper, the feverish reading of
which had become a sort of vice with him, like smoking. He had imagined
that he could not exist without his morning paper, but he now realized
that it was not nearly so important a factor in life as he had supposed;
yet he sighed when he thought of it, and wished he had one with him of
current date. He could now, for the first time in many years, read a
paper without that vague fear which always possessed him when he took up
an opposition sheet, still damp from the press. Before he could enjoy it
his habit was to scan it over rapidly to see if it contained any item of
news which he himself had missed the previous day. The impending “scoop”
 hangs over the head of the newspaper man like the sword so often quoted.
Great as the joy of beating the opposition press is, it never takes
the poignancy of the sting away from a beating received. If a terrible
disaster took place, and another paper gave fuller particulars than the
_Argus_ did, Yates found himself almost wishing the accident had
not occurred, although he recognized such a wish as decidedly
unprofessional.

Richard’s idea of the correct spirit in a reporter was exemplified by
an old broken-down, out-of-work morning newspaper man, who had not long
before committed suicide at an hour in the day too late for the evening
papers to get the sensational item. He had sent in to the paper for
which he formerly worked a full account of the fatality, accurately
headed and sub-headed; and, in his note to the city editor, he told why
he had chosen the hour of 7 P.M. as the time for his departure from an
unappreciative world.

“Ah, well,” said Yates under his breath, and suddenly pulling himself
together, “I mustn’t think of New York if I intend to stay here for a
couple of weeks. I’ll be city-sick the first thing I know, and then I’ll
make a break for the metropolis. This will never do. The air here is
enchanting, it fills a man with new life. This is the spot for me, and
I’ll stick to it till I’m right again. Hang New York! But I mustn’t
think of Broadway or I’m done for.”

He came to the spot in the road where he could see the white side of
the tent under the dark trees, and climbed up on the rail fence,
sitting there for a few moments. The occasional call of a quail from a
neighboring field was the only sound that broke the intense stillness.
The warm smell of spring was in the air. The buds had but recently
broken, and the woods, intensely green, had a look of newness and
freshness that was comforting to the eye and grateful to the other
senses. The world seemed to be but lately made. The young man breathed
deeply of the vivifying air, and said: “No, there’s nothing the matter
with this place, Dick. New York’s a fool to it.” Then, with a sigh,
he added: “If I can stand it for two weeks. I wonder how the boys are
getting on without me.”

In spite of himself his thoughts kept drifting back to the great city,
although he told himself that it wouldn’t do. He gazed at the peaceful,
spreading landscape, but his eyes were vacant and he saw nothing. The
roar of the streets was in his ears. Suddenly his reverie was broken by
a voice from the forest.

“I say, Yates, where’s the bread?”

Yates looked quickly around, somewhat startled, and saw the professor
coming toward him.

“The bread? I forgot all about it. No; I didn’t either. They were
baking--that was it. I am to go for it later in the day. What loot did
you rake in, professor?”

“Vegetables mostly.”

“That’s all right. Have a good dinner?”

“Excellent.”

“So did I. Renny, when you interrupted me, I was just counting the
farmhouses in sight. What do you say to boarding round among them? You
are a schoolmaster, and ought to know all about it. Isn’t education in
this country encouraged by paying the teacher as little as possible,
and letting him take it out in eating his way from one house to another?
Ever board around, Renny?”

“Never. If the custom once existed in Canada, it is out of date now.”

“That’s a pity. I hate to face my own cooking, Renmark. We become less
brave as we grow older. By the way, how is old man Bartlett? As well as
could be expected?”

“He seemed much as usual. Mrs. Bartlett has sent out two chairs to the
tent; she fears we will get rheumatism if we sit on the ground.”

“She is a kind woman, Renny, and a thoughtful. And that reminds me: I
have a hammock somewhere among my belongings. I will swing it up. Chairs
are comfortable, but a hammock is luxury.”

Yates slid down from the fence top, and together the two men walked to
the tent. The hammock was unfurled and slung between two trees. Yates
tested it cautiously, and finally trusted himself to its restful folds
of network. He was swaying indolently several feet from the ground when
he said to Renmark:

“I call this paradise--paradise regained; but it will be paradise lost
next month. Now, professor, I am ready to do the cooking, but I have a
fancy for doing it by proxy. The general directs, and the useful prosaic
man executes. Where are your vegetables, Renny? Potatoes and carrots,
eh? Very good. Now, you may wash them, Renny; but first you must bring
some water from the spring.”

The professor was a patient man, and he obeyed. Yates continued to swing
in the hammock alternating directions with rhapsodies on the beauties
of the day and the stillness of the woods. Renmark said but little, and
attended strictly to the business in hand. The vegetables finished, he
took a book from his valise, tilted a chair back against a tree, and
began to read.

“I’m depending upon you for the bread,” he said to the drowsy man in the
hammock.

“Right you are, Renny. Your confidence is not misplaced. I shall
presently journey down into the realms of civilization, and fill
the long-felt want. I shall go to the Howards by way of the Bartlett
homestead, but I warn you that if there is a meal on, at either place,
you will not have me here to test your first efforts at cooking. So you
may have to wait until breakfast for my opinion.”

Yates extricated himself slowly and reluctantly from the hammock, and
looked regretfully at it when he stood once more on the ground.

“This mad struggle for bread, professor, is the curse of life here
below. It is what we are all after. If it were not for the necessity
of bread and clothing, what a good time a fellow might have. Well, my
blessing, Renny. Good-by.”

Yates strolled slowly through the woods, until he came to the beginning
of a lane which led to the Bartlett homestead. He saw the farmer and his
son at work in the back fields. From between the distant house and barn
there arose, straight up into the still air, a blue column of smoke,
which, reaching a certain height, spread out like a thin, hazy cloud
above the dwelling. At first Yates thought that some of the outhouses
were on fire, and he quickened his pace to a run; but a moment’s
reflection showed him that the column was plainly visible to the workers
in the fields, and that if anything were wrong they would not continue
placidly at their labor. When he had walked the long length of the lane,
and had safely rounded the corner of the barn, he saw, in the open space
between that building and the house, a huge camp fire blazing. From a
pole, upheld by two crotched supports, hung a big iron kettle over
the flames. The caldron was full nearly to the brim, and the steam
was already beginning to rise from its surface, although the fire
had evidently been but recently kindled. The smoke was not now so
voluminous, but Kitty Bartlett stood there with a big-brimmed straw hat
in her hands, fanning it away from her face, while the hat at the same
time protected her rosy countenance from the fire. She plainly was
not prepared to receive visitors, and she started when the young man
addressed her, flushing still more deeply, apparently annoyed at his
unwelcome appearance.

“Good-afternoon,” he said cordially. “Preparing for washing? I thought
Monday was washing day.”

“It is.”

“Then I have not been misinformed. And you are not preparing for
washing?”

“We are.”

Yates laughed so heartily that Kitty, in spite of herself, had to permit
a smile to brighten her own features. She always found it difficult
remain solemn for any length of time.

“This is obviously a conundrum,” said Yates, ticking off the items on
his four fingers. “First, Monday is washing day. Second, this is not
Monday. Third, neither is to-morrow. Fourth, we are preparing for
washing. I give it up, Miss Bartlett. Please tell me the answer.”

“The answer is that I am making soap; soft soap, if you know what that
is.”

“Practically, I don’t know what it is; but I have heard the term used
in a political connection. In the States we say that if a man is very
diplomatic he uses soft soap, so I suppose it has lubricating qualities.
Sam Slick used the term ‘soft sawder’ in the same way; but what sawder
is, soft or hard, I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“I thought you knew everything, Mr. Yates.”

“Me? Bless you, no. I’m a humble gleaner in the field of knowledge.
That’s why I brought a Toronto professor with me. I want to learn
something. Won’t you teach me how to make soap?”

“I’m very busy just now. When I said that we were preparing for washing,
I should perhaps have told you there was something else we are not
prepared for to-day.”

“What is that?”

“A visitor.”

“Oh, I say, Miss Bartlett, you are a little hard on me. I’m not a
visitor. I’m a friend of the family. I want to help. You will find me a
most diligent student. Won’t you give me a chance?”

“All the hard work’s done. But perhaps you knew that before you came.”

Yates looked at her reproachfully, and sighed deeply.

“That’s what it is to be a misunderstood man. So you think, among other
bad qualities, I have the habit of shirking work? Let me tell you, Miss
Bartlett, that the reason I am here is because I have worked too hard.
Now, confess that you are sorry for what you said--trampling on an
already downtrodden man.”

Kitty laughed merrily at this, and Yates laughed also, for his sense of
comradeship was strong.

“You don’t look as if you had ever worked in your life; I don’t believe
you know what work is.”

“But there are different kinds of labor. Don’t you call writing work?”

“No.”

“That’s just where you’re mistaken. It is, and hard work, too. I’ll tell
you about the newspaper business if you’ll tell me about soap making.
Fair exchange. I wish you would take me as a pupil, Miss Bartlett; you
would find me quick at picking up things.”

“Well, then, pick up that pail and draw a pailful of water.”

“I’ll do it,” cried Yates sternly; “I’ll do it, though it blast me.”

Yates picked up the wooden pail, painted blue on the outside, with a
red stripe near the top for ornament, and cream-colored inside. It was
called a “patent pail” in those days, as it was a comparatively recent
innovation, being cheaper, lighter, and stronger than the tin pail which
it was rapidly replacing. At the well was a stout pole, pinned
through the center to the upright support on which it swung, like the
walking-beam of an engine. The thick end, which rested on the ground,
was loaded with heavy stones; while from the thin end, high in the air,
there dangled over the mouth of the well a slim pole with a hook. This
hook was ingeniously furnished with a spring of hickory, which snapped
when the handle of the pail was placed on the hook, and prevented the
“patent” utensil from slipping off when it was lowered to the surface of
the water. Yates speedily recognized the usefulness of this contrivance,
for he found that the filling of a wooden pail in a deep well was not
the simple affair it looked. The bucket bobbed about on the surface of
the water. Once he forgot the necessity of keeping a stout grip on
the pole, and the next instant the pail came up to the sunlight with a
suddenness that was terrifying. Only an equally sudden backward jump on
Yates’ part saved his head. Miss Bartlett was pleased to look upon this
incident as funny. Yates was so startled by the unexpected revolt of the
pail that his native courtesy did not get a chance to prevent Kitty from
drawing up the water herself. She lowered the vessel, pulling down the
pole in a hand-over-hand manner that the young man thought decidedly
fetching, and then she gave an almost imperceptible twist to the
arrangement that resulted in instant success. The next thing Yates knew
the full pail was resting on the well curb, and the hickory spring had
given the click that released the handle.

“There,” said Kitty, suppressing her merriment, “that’s how it’s done.”

“I see the result, Miss Bartlett; but I’m not sure I can do the trick.
These things are not so simple as they seem. What is the next step?”

“Pour the water into the leach.”

“Into the what?”

“Into the leach, I said. Where else?”

“Oh, I’m up a tree again. I see I don’t even know the A B C of this
business. In the old days the leech was a physician. You don’t mean I’m
to drown a doctor?”

“This is the leach,” said Kitty, pointing to a large, yellowish, upright
wooden cylinder, which rested on some slanting boards, down the surface
of which ran a brownish liquid that dripped into a trough.

As Yates stood on a bench with the pail in his hand he saw that the
cylinder was filled nearly to the top with sodden wood ashes. He poured
in the water, and it sank quickly out of sight.

“So this is part of the soap-making equipment?” he said, stepping down;
“I thought the iron kettle over the fire was the whole factory. Tell me
about the leach.”

“That is where the hard work of soap making comes in,” said Kitty,
stirring the contents of the iron kettle with a long stick. “Keeping
the leach supplied with water at first is no fun, for then the ashes are
dry. If you put in five more pails of water, I will tell you about it.”

“Right!” cried Yates, pleased to see that the girl’s evident objection
to his presence at first was fast disappearing. “Now you’ll understand
how energetic I am. I’m a handy man about a place.”

When he had completed his task, she was still stirring the thickening
liquid in the caldron, guarding her face from the fire with her
big straw hat. Her clustering, tangled fair hair was down about her
shoulders; and Yates, as he put the pail in its place, when it had
been emptied the fifth time, thought she formed a very pretty picture
standing there by the fire, even if she were making soft soap.

“The wicked genii has finished the task set him by the fairy princess.
Now for the reward. I want all the particulars about the leach. In the
first place, where do you get this huge wooden cylinder that I have,
without apparent effect, been pouring water into? Is it manufactured or
natural?”

“Both. It is a section of the buttonwood tree.”

“Buttonwood? I don’t think I ever heard of that. I know the beech and
the maple, and some kinds of oak, but there my wood lore ends. Why the
buttonwood?”

“The buttonwood happens to be exactly suited to the purpose. It is a
tree that is very fine to look at. It seems all right, but it generally
isn’t. It is hollow or rotten within, and, even when sound, the timber
made from it is of little value, as it doesn’t last. Yet you can’t tell
until you begin to chop whether it is of any use or not.” Kitty shot a
quick glance at the young man, who was sitting on a log watching her.

“Go on, Miss Bartlett; I see what you mean. There are men like the
buttonwood tree. The woods are full of them. I’ve met lots of that
kind, fair to look upon, but hollow. Of course you don’t mean anything
personal; for you must have seen my worth by the way I stuck to the
water hauling. But go on.”

“Dear me, I never thought of such a thing; but a guilty conscience, they
say----” said Kitty, with a giggle.

“Of course they say; but it’s wrong, like most other things they say.
It’s the man with the guilty conscience who looks you straight in the
eye. Now that the buttonwood is chopped down, what’s the next thing to
be done?”

“It is sawn off at the proper length, square at one end and slanting at
the other.”

“Why slanting?”

“Don’t you see, the foundation of plank on which it rests is inclined,
so the end of the leach that is down must be slantingly cut, otherwise
it would not stand perpendicularly. It would topple over in the first
windstorm.”

“I see, I see. Then they haul it in and set it up?”

“Oh, dear no; not yet. They build a fire in it when it gets dry enough.”

“Really? I think I understand the comprehensive scheme, but I slip up
on the details, as when I tried to submerge that wooden pail. What’s the
fire for?”

“To burn out what remains of the soft inside wood, so as to leave
only the hard outside shell. Then the charring of the inner surface is
supposed to make the leach better--more water-tight, perhaps.”

“Quite so. Then it is hauled in and set up?”

“Yes; and gradually filled with ashes. When it is full, we pour the
water in it, and catch the lye as it drips out. This is put in the
caldron with grease, pigskins, and that sort of thing, and when it boils
long enough, the result is soft soap.”

“And if you boil it too long, what is the result?”

“Hard soap, I suppose. I never boil it too long.”

The conversation was here interrupted by a hissing in the fire, caused
by the tumultuous boiling over of the soap. Kitty hurriedly threw in a
basin of cold lye, and stirred the mixture vigorously.

“You see,” she said reproachfully, “the result of keeping me talking
nonsense to you. Now you will have to make up for it by bringing in some
wood and putting more water into the leach.”

“With the utmost pleasure,” cried Yates, springing to his feet. “It is a
delight to atone for a fault by obeying your commands.”

The girl laughed. “Buttonwood,” she said. Before Yates could think of
anything to say in reply Mrs. Bartlett appeared at the back door.

“How is the soap getting on, Kitty?” she asked. “Why, Mr. Yates, are you
here?”

“Am I here? I should say I was. Very much here. I’m the hired man. I’m
the hewer of wood and the hauler of water, or, to speak more correctly,
I’m the hauler of both. And, besides, I’ve been learning how to make
soap, Mrs. Bartlett.”

“Well, it won’t hurt you to know how.”

“You bet it won’t. When I get back to New York, the first thing I shall
do will be to chop down a buttonwood tree in the park, if I can find
one, and set up a leach for myself. Lye comes useful in running a
paper.”

Mrs. Bartlett’s eyes twinkled, for, although she did not quite
understand his nonsense, she knew it was nonsense, and she had a liking
for frivolous persons, her own husband being so somber-minded.

“Tea is ready,” she said. “Of course you will stay, Mr. Yates.”

“Really, Mrs. Bartlett, I cannot conscientiously do so. I haven’t earned
a meal since the last one. No; my conscience won’t let me accept, but
thank you all the same.”

“Nonsense; my conscience won’t let you go away hungry. If nobody were
to eat but those who earn their victuals, there would be more starving
people in the world than there are. Of course you’ll stay.”

“Now, that’s what I like, Mrs. Bartlett. I like to have a chance of
refusing an invitation I yearn for, and then be forced to accept. That’s
true hospitality.” Then in a whisper he added to Kitty; “If you dare to
say ‘buttonwood,’ Miss Bartlett, you and I will quarrel.”

But Kitty said nothing, now that her mother had appeared on the scene,
but industriously stirred the contents of the iron kettle.

“Kitty,” said the mother, “you call the men to supper.”

“I can’t leave this,” said Kitty, flushing; “it will boil over. You
call, mother.”

So Mrs. Bartlett held her open palms on each side of her mouth, and gave
the long wailing cry, which was faintly answered from the fields, and
Yates, who knew a thing or two, noted with secret satisfaction that
Kitty had refused doubtless because he was there.




CHAPTER VIII.


“I tell you what it is, Renny,” said Yates, a few days after the soap
episode, as he swung in his hammock at the camp, “I’m learning something
new every day.”

“Not really?” asked the professor in surprise.

“Yes, really. I knew it would astonish you. My chief pleasure in life,
professor, is the surprising of you. I sometimes wonder why it delights
me; it is so easily done.”

“Never mind about that. What have you been learning?”

“Wisdom, my boy; wisdom in solid chunks. In the first place, I am
learning to admire the resourcefulness of these people around us.
Practically, they make everything they need. They are the most
self-helping people that I was ever thrown among. I look upon theirs as
the ideal life.”

“I think you said something like that when we first came here.”

“I said that, you ass, about camping out. I am talking now about farm
life. Farmers eliminate the middleman pretty effectually, and that in
itself is going a long way toward complete happiness. Take the making
of soap, that I told you about; there you have it, cheap and good. When
you’ve made it, you know what is in it, and I’ll be hanged if you do
when you pay a big price for it in New York. Here they make pretty
nearly everything they need, except the wagon and the crockery; and I’m
not sure but they made them a few years back. Now, when a man with a
good sharp ax and a jack-knife can do anything from building his house
to whittling out a chair, he’s the most independent man on earth. Nobody
lives better than these people do. Everything is fresh, sweet, and good.
Perhaps the country air helps; but it seems to me I never tasted such
meals as Mrs. Bartlett, for instance, gets up. They buy nothing at the
stores except the tea, and I confess I prefer milk myself. My tastes
were always simple.”

“And what is the deduction?”

“Why, that this is the proper way to live. Old Hiram has an anvil and an
amateur forge. He can tinker up almost anything, and that eliminates the
blacksmith. Howard has a bench, saws, hammers, and other tools, and
that eliminates the carpenter. The women eliminate the baker, the soap
boiler, and a lot of other parasites. Now, when you have eliminated
all the middlemen, then comes independence, and consequently complete
happiness. You can’t keep happiness away with a shotgun then.”

“But what is to become of the blacksmith, the carpenter, and all the
rest?”

“Let them take up land and be happy too; there’s plenty of land. The
land is waiting for them. Then look how the master is eliminated. That’s
the most beautiful riddance of all. Even the carpenter and blacksmith
usually have to work under a boss; and if not, they have to depend on
the men who employ them. The farmer has to please nobody but himself.
That adds to his independence. That’s why old Hiram is ready to fight
the first comer on the slightest provocation. He doesn’t care whom he
offends, so long as it isn’t his wife. These people know how to make
what they want, and what they can’t make they do without. That’s the
way to form a great nation. You raise, in this way, a self-sustaining,
resolute, unconquerable people. The reason the North conquered the South
was because we drew our armies mostly from the self-reliant farming
class, while we had to fight a people accustomed for generations to
having things done for them.”

“Why don’t you buy a farm, Yates?”

“Several reasons. I am spoiled for the life here. I am like the drunkard
who admires a temperate life, yet can’t pass a ginshop. The city virus
is in my blood. And then, perhaps, after all, I am not quite satisfied
with the tendency of farm life; it is unfortunately in a transition
state. It is at the frame-house stage, and will soon blossom into the
red-brick stage. The log-house era is what I yearn for. Then everything
a person needed was made on the farm. When the brick-house era sets in,
the middleman will be rampant. I saw the other day at the Howards’ a set
of ancient stones that interested me as much as an Assyrian marble would
interest you. They were old, home-made millstones, and they have not
been used since the frame house was built. The grist mill at the village
put them out of date. And just here, notice the subtlety of the crafty
middleman. The farmer takes his grist to the mill, and the miller does
not charge him cash for grinding it. He takes toll out of the bags,
and the farmer has a vague idea that he gets his grinding for almost
nothing. The old way was the best, Renny, my boy. The farmer’s son won’t
be as happy in the brick house which the mason will build for him as his
grandfather was in the log house he built for himself. And fools call
this change the advance of civilization.”

“There is something to be said for the old order of things,” admitted
Renmark. “If a person could unite the advantages of what we call
civilization with the advantages of a pastoral life, he would inaugurate
a condition of things that would be truly idyllic.”

“That’s so, Renmark, that’s so!” cried Yates enthusiastically. “A
brownstone mansion on Fifth Avenue, and a log hut on the shores of Lake
Superior! That would suit me down to the ground. Spend half the year in
each place.”

“Yes,” said the professor meditatively; “a log hut on the rocks and
under the trees, with the lake in front, would be very nice if the hut
had a good library attached.”

“And a daily paper. Don’t forget the press.”

“No. I draw the line there. The daily paper would mean the daily steamer
or the daily train. The one would frighten away the fish, and the other
would disturb the stillness with its whistle.”

Yates sighed. “I forgot about the drawbacks,” he said. “That’s the
trouble with civilization. You can’t have the things you want without
bringing in their trail so many things you don’t want. I shall have to
give up the daily paper.”

“Then there is another objection, worse than either steamer or train.”

“What’s that?”

“The daily paper itself.”

Yates sat up indignantly.

“Renmark!” he cried, “that’s blasphemy. For Heaven’s sake, man, hold
something sacred. If you don’t respect the press, what do you respect?
Not my most cherished feelings, at any rate, or you wouldn’t talk
in that flippant manner. If you speak kindly of my daily paper, I’ll
tolerate your library.”

“And that reminds me: Have you brought any books with you, Yates? I have
gone through most of mine already, although many of them will bear going
over again; still, I have so much time on my hands that I think I may
indulge in a little general reading. When you wrote asking me to meet
you in Buffalo, I thought you perhaps intended to tramp through the
country, so I did not bring as many books with me as I should have done
if I had known you were going to camp out.”

Yates sprang from the hammock.

“Books? Well, I should say so! Perhaps you think I don’t read anything
but the daily papers. I’d have you know that I am something of a reader
myself. You mustn’t imagine you monopolize all the culture in the
township, professor.”

The young man went into the tent, and shortly returned with an armful of
yellow-covered, paper-bound small volumes, which he flung in profusion
at the feet of the man from Toronto. They were mostly Beadle’s Dime
Novels, which had a great sale at the time.

“There,” he said, “you have quantity, quality, and variety, as I have
before remarked. ‘The Murderous Sioux of Kalamazoo;’ that’s a good one.
A hair-raising Indian story in every sense of the word. The one you are
looking at is a pirate story, judging by the burning ship on the cover.
But for first-class highwaymen yarns, this other edition is the best.
That’s the ‘Sixteen String Jack set.’ They’re immense, if they do cost
a quarter each. You must begin at the right volume, or you’ll be sorry.
You see, they never really end, although every volume is supposed to be
complete in itself. They leave off at the most exciting point, and are
continued in the next volume. I call that a pretty good idea, but it’s
rather exasperating if you begin at the last book. You’ll enjoy this
lot. I’m glad I brought them along.”

“It is a blessing,” said Renmark, with the ghost of a smile about his
lips. “I can truthfully say that they are entirely new to me.”

“That’s all right, my boy,” cried Yates loftily, with a wave of his
hand. “Use them as if they were your own.”

Renmark arose leisurely and picked up a quantity of the books.

“These will do excellently for lighting our morning camp fire,” he said.
“And if you will allow me to treat them as if they were my own, that is
the use to which I will put them. You surely do not mean to say that you
read such trash as this, Yates?”

“Trash?” exclaimed Yates indignantly. “It serves me right. That’s what
a man gets for being decent to you, Renny. Well, you’re not compelled to
read them; but if you put one of them in the fire, your stupid treatises
will follow, if they are not too solid to burn. You don’t know good
literature when you see it.”

The professor, buoyed up, perhaps, by the conceit which comes to a
man through the possession of a real sheepskin diploma, granted by a
university of good standing, did not think it necessary to defend his
literary taste. He busied himself in pruning a stick he had cut in the
forest, and finally he got it into the semblance of a walking cane. He
was an athletic man, and the indolence of camp life did not suit him as
it did Yates. He tested the stick in various ways when he had trimmed it
to his satisfaction.

“Are you ready for a ten-mile walk?” he asked of the man in the hammock.

“Good gracious, no. Man wants but little walking here below, and he
doesn’t want it ten miles in length either. I’m easily satisfied. You’re
off, are you? Well, so long. And I say, Renny, bring back some bread
when you return to camp. It’s the one safe thing to do.”




CHAPTER IX.


Renmark walked through the woods and then across the fields, until he
came to the road. He avoided the habitations of man as much as he could,
for he was neither so sociably inclined nor so frequently hungry as was
his companion. He strode along the road, not caring much where it led
him. Everyone he met gave him “Good-day,” after the friendly custom
of the country. Those with wagons or lighter vehicles going in his
direction usually offered him a ride, and went on, wondering that a man
should choose to walk when it was not compulsory. The professor, like
most silent men, found himself good company, and did not feel the
need of companionship in his walks. He had felt relieved rather than
disappointed when Yates refused to accompany him. And Yates, swinging
drowsily in his hammock, was no less gratified. Even where men are firm
and intimate friends, the first few days of camping out together is a
severe strain on their regard for each other. If Damon and Pythias had
occupied a tent together for a week, the worst enemy of either, or both,
might at the end of that time have ventured into the camp in safety, and
would have been welcome.

Renmark thought of these things as he walked along. His few days’
intimacy with Yates had shown him how far apart they had managed to get
by following paths that diverged more and more widely the farther they
were trodden. The friendship of their youth had turned out to be merely
ephemeral. Neither would now choose the other as an intimate associate.
Another illusion had gone.

“I have surely enough self-control,” said Renmark to himself, as he
walked on, “to stand his shallow flippancy for another week, and not let
him see what I think of him.”

Yates at the same time was thoroughly enjoying the peaceful silence of
the camp. “That man is an exaggerated schoolmaster, with all the faults
of the species abnormally developed. If I once open out on him, he will
learn more truth about himself in ten minutes than he ever heard in
his life before. What an unbearable prig he has grown to be.” Thus ran
Yates’ thoughts as he swung in his hammock, looking up at the ceiling of
green leaves.

Nevertheless, the case was not so bad as either of them thought. If
it had been, then were marriage not only a failure, but a practical
impossibility. If two men can get over the first few days in camp
without a quarrel, life becomes easier, and the tension relaxes.

Renmark, as he polished off his ten miles, paid little heed to those he
met; but one driver drew up his horse and accosted him.

“Good-day,” he said. “How are you getting on in the tent?”

The professor was surprised at the question. Had their tenting-out
eccentricity gone all over the country? He was not a quick man
at recognizing people, belonging, as he did, to the
“I-remember-your-face-but-can’t-recall-your-name” fraternity. It had
been said of him that he never, at any one time, knew the names of more
than half a dozen students in his class; but this was an undergraduate
libel on him. The young man who had accosted him was driving a single
horse, attached to what he termed a “democrat”--a four-wheeled light
wagon, not so slim and elegant as a buggy, nor so heavy and clumsy as
a wagon. Renmark looked up at the driver with confused unrecognition,
troubled because he vaguely felt that he had met him somewhere before.
But his surprise at being addressed speedily changed into amazement as
he looked from the driver to the load. The “democrat” was heaped
with books. The larger volumes were stuck along the sides with some
regularity, and in this way kept the miscellaneous pile from being
shaken out on the road. His eye glittered with a new interest as it
rested on the many-colored bindings; and he recognized in the pile the
peculiar brown covers of the “Bohn” edition of classic translations,
that were scattered like so many turnips over the top of this ridge of
literature. He rubbed his eyes to make sure he was not dreaming. How
came a farmer’s boy to be driving a wagon load of books in the wilds of
the country as nonchalantly as if they were so many bushels of potatoes?

The young driver, who had stopped his horse, for the load was heavy and
the sand was deep, saw that the stranger not only did not recognize him,
but that from the moment he saw the books he had forgotten everything
else. It was evidently necessary to speak again.

“If you are coming back, will you have a ride?” he asked.

“I--I think I will,” said the professor, descending to earth again and
climbing up beside the boy.

“I see you don’t remember me,” said the latter, starting his horse
again. “My name is Howard. I passed you in my buggy when you were
coming in with your tent that day on the Ridge. Your partner--what’s his
name--Yates, isn’t it?--had dinner at our house the other day.”

“Ah, yes. I recollect you now. I thought I had seen you before; but it
was only for a moment, you know. I have a very poor memory so far as
people are concerned. It has always been a failing of mine. Are these
your books? And how do you happen to have such a quantity?”

“Oh, this is the library,” said young Howard.

“The library?”

“Yes, the township library, you know.”

“Oh! The township has a library, then? I didn’t know.”

“Well, it’s part of it. This is a fifth part. You know about township
libraries, don’t you? Your partner said you were a college man.”

Renmark blushed at his own ignorance, but he was never reluctant to
admit it.

“I ought to be ashamed to confess it, but I know nothing of township
libraries. Please, tell me about them.”

Young Howard was eager to give information to a college man, especially
on the subject of books, which he regarded as belonging to the province
of college-bred men. He was pleased also to discover that city people
did not know everything. He had long had the idea that they did, and
this belief had been annoyingly corroborated by the cocksureness of
Yates. The professor evidently was a decent fellow, who did not pretend
to universal knowledge. This was encouraging. He liked Renmark better
than Yates, and was glad he had offered him a ride, although, of course,
that was the custom; still, a person with one horse and a heavy load is
exempt on a sandy road.

“Well, you see,” he said in explanation, “it’s like this: The township
votes a sum of money, say a hundred dollars, or two hundred, as the case
may be. They give notice to the Government of the amount voted, and the
Government adds the same amount to the township money. It’s like the old
game: you think of a number, and they double it. The Government has a
depository of books, in Toronto, I think, and they sell them cheaper
than the bookstores do. At any rate, the four hundred dollars’ worth are
bought, or whatever the amount is, and the books are the property of the
township. Five persons are picked out in the township as librarians, and
they have to give security. My father is librarian for this section.
The library is divided into five parts, and each librarian gets a share.
Once a year I go to the next section and get all their books. They go
to the next section, again, and get all the books at that place. A man
comes to our house to-day and takes all we have. So we get a complete
change every year, and in five years we get back the first batch, which
by that time we have forgotten all about. To-day is changing day all
around.”

“And the books are lent to any person in each section who wishes to read
them?” asked the professor.

“Yes. Margaret keeps a record, and a person can have a book out for
two weeks; after that time there is a fine, but Margaret never fines
anyone.”

“And do people have to pay to take out the books?”

“Not likely!” said Howard with fine contempt. “You wouldn’t expect
people to pay for reading books; would you, now?”

“No, I suppose not. And who selected the volumes?”

“Well, the township can select the books if it likes, or it can send a
committee to select them; but they didn’t think it worth the trouble
and expense. People grumbled enough at wasting money on books as it was,
even if they did buy them at half price. Still, others said it was
a pity not to get the money out of the Government when they had the
chance. I don’t believe any of them cared very much about the books,
except father and a few others. So the Government chose the books.
They’ll do that if you leave it to them. And a queer lot of trash they
sent, if you take my word for it. I believe they shoved off on us all
the things no on else would buy. Even when they did pick out novels,
they were just as tough as the history books. ‘Adam Bede’ is one. They
say that’s a novel. I tried it, but I would rather read the history of
Josephus any day. There’s some fighting in that, if it is a history.
Then there’s any amount of biography books. They’re no good. There’s a
‘History of Napoleon.’ Old Bartlett’s got that, and he won’t give it up.
He says he was taxed for the library against his will. He dares them
to go to law about it, and it aint worth while for one book. The other
sections are all asking for that book; not that they want it, but the
whole country knows that old Bartlett’s a-holding on to it, so they’d
like to see some fun. Bartlett’s read that book fourteen times, and it’s
all he knows. I tell Margaret she ought to fine him, and keep on fining,
but she won’t do it. I guess Bartlett thinks the book belongs to him
by this time. Margaret likes Kitty and Mrs. Bartlett,--so does
everybody,--but old Bartlett’s a seed. There he sits now on his veranda,
and it’s a wonder he’s not reading the ‘History of Napoleon.’”

They were passing the Bartlett house, and young Howard raised his voice
and called out:

“I say, Mr. Bartlett, we want that Napoleon book. This is changing day,
you know. Shall I come up for it, or will you bring it down? If you
fetch it to the gate, I’ll cart it home now.”

The old man paid no heed to what was said to him; but Mrs. Bartlett,
attracted by the outcry, came to the door.

“You go along with your books, you young rascal!” she cried, coming
down to the gate when she saw the professor. “That’s a nice way to carry
bound books, as if they were a lot of bricks. I’ll warrant you have lost
a dozen between Mallory’s and here. But easy come, easy go. It’s plain
to be seen they didn’t cost you anything. I don’t know what the world’s
a-coming to when the township spends its money in books, as if taxes
weren’t heavy enough already. Won’t you come in, Mr. Renmark? Tea’s on
the table.”

“Mr. Renmark’s coming with me this trip, Mrs. Bartlett,” young Howard
said before the professor had time to reply; “but I’ll come over and
take tea, if you’ll invite me, as soon as I have put the horse up.”

“You go along with your nonsense,” she said; “I know you.” Then in a
lower voice she asked: “How is your mother, Henry--and Margaret?”

“They’re pretty well, thanks.”

“Tell them I’m going to run over to see them some day soon, but that
need not keep them from coming to see me. The old man’s going to town
to-morrow,” and with this hint, after again inviting the professor to a
meal, she departed up the path to the house.

“I think I’ll get down here,” said Renmark, halfway between the two
houses. “I am very much obliged to you for the ride, and also for what
you told me about the books. It was very interesting.”

“Nonsense!” cried young Howard; “I’m not going to let you do anything of
the sort. You’re coming home with me. You want to see the books, don’t
you? Very well, then, come along, Margaret is always impatient on
changing day, she’s so anxious to see the books, and father generally
comes in early from the fields for the same reason.”

As they approached the Howard homestead they noticed Margaret waiting
for them at the gate; but when the girl saw that a stranger was in
the wagon, she turned and walked into the house. Renmark, seeing this
retreat, regretted he had not accepted Mrs. Bartlett’s invitation. He
was a sensitive man, and did not realize that others were sometimes
as shy as himself. He felt he was intruding, and that at a sacred
moment--the moment of the arrival of the library. He was such a lover of
books, and valued so highly the privilege of being alone with them, that
he fancied he saw in the abrupt departure of Margaret the same feeling
of resentment he would himself have experienced if a visitor had
encroached upon him in his favorite nook in the fine room that held the
library of the university.

When the wagon stopped in the lane, Renmark said hesitatingly:

“I think I’ll not stay, if you don’t mind. My friend is waiting for me
at the camp, and will be wondering what has become of me.”

“Who? Yates? Let him wonder. I guess he never bothers about anybody else
as long as he is comfortable himself. That’s how I sized him up, at any
rate. Besides, you’re never going back on carrying in the books, are
you? I counted on your help. I don’t want to do it, and it don’t seem
the square thing to let Margaret do it all alone; does it, now?”

“Oh, if I can be of any assistance, I shall----”

“Of course you can. Besides, I know my father wants to see you, anyhow.
Don’t you, father?”

The old man was coming round from the back of the house to meet them.

“Don’t I what?” he asked.

“You said you wanted to see Professor Renmark when Margaret told you
what Yates had said to her about him.”

Renmark reddened slightly at finding so many people had made him the
subject of conversation, rather suspecting at the same time that the boy
was making fun of him. Mr. Howard cordially held out his hand.

“So this is Professor Renmark, is it? I am very pleased to see you.
Yes, as Henry was saying, I have been wanting to see you ever since my
daughter spoke of you. I suppose Henry told you that his brother is a
pupil of yours?”

“Oh! is Arthur Howard your son?” cried Renmark, warming up at once. “I
did not know it. There are many young men at the college, and I have but
the vaguest idea from what parts of the country they all come. A teacher
should have no favorites, but I must confess to a strong liking for your
son. He is a good boy, which cannot be said about every member of my
class.”

“Arthur was always studious, so we thought we would give him a chance.
I am glad to hear he behaves himself in the city. Farming is hard work,
and I hope my boys will have an easier time than I had. But come in,
come in. The missus and Margaret will be glad to see you, and hear how
the boy is coming on with his studies.”

So they went in together.




CHAPTER X.


“Hello! Hello, there! Wake up! Breakfa-a-a-st! I thought that would
fetch you. Gosh! I wish I had your job at a dollar a day!”

Yates rubbed his eyes, and sat up in the hammock. At first he thought
the forest was tumbling down about his ears, but as he collected his
wits he saw that it was only young Bartlett who had come crashing
through the woods on the back of one horse, while he led another by a
strap attached to a halter. The echo of his hearty yell still resounded
in the depths of the woods, and rang in Yates’ ears as he pulled himself
together.

“Did you--ah--make any remarks?” asked Yates quietly.

The boy admired his gift of never showing surprise.

“I say, don’t you know that it’s not healthy to go to sleep in the
middle of the day?”

“Is it the middle of the day? I thought it was later. I guess I can
stand it, if the middle of the day can. I’ve a strong constitution. Now,
what do you mean by dashing up on two horses into a man’s bedroom in
that reckless fashion?”

The boy laughed.

“I thought perhaps you would like a ride. I knew you were alone, for I
saw the professor go mooning up the road a little while ago.”

“Oh! Where was he going?”

“Hanged if I know, and he didn’t look as if he knew himself. He’s a
queer fish, aint he?”

“He is. Everybody can’t be as sensible and handsome as we are, you know.
Where are you going with those horses, young man?”

“To get them shod. Won’t you come along? You can ride the horse I’m on.
It’s got a bridle. I’ll ride the one with the halter.”

“How far away is the blacksmith’s shop?”

“Oh, a couple of miles or so; down at the Cross Roads.”

“Well,” said Yates, “there’s merit in the idea. I take it your generous
offer is made in good faith, and not necessarily for publication.”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

“There is no concealed joke, is there? No getting me on the back of one
of those brutes to make a public exhibition of me? Do they bite or kick
or buck, or playfully roll over a person?”

“No,” cried, young Bartlett indignantly. “This is no circus. Why, a baby
could ride this horse.”

“Well, that’s about the style of horse I prefer. You see, I’m a trifle
out of practice. I never rode anything more spirited than a street car,
and I haven’t been on one of them for a week.”

“Oh, you can ride all right. I guess you could do most things you set
your mind to.”

Yates was flattered by this evidently sincere tribute to his capacity,
so he got out of the hammock. The boy, who had been sitting on the horse
with both feet on one side, now straightened his back and slipped to the
ground.

“Wait till I throw down the fence,” he said.

Yates mounted with some difficulty, and the two went trotting down the
road. He managed to hold his place with some little uncertainty, but the
joggling up and down worried him. He never seemed to alight in quite the
same place on the horse’s back, and this gave an element of chance to
his position which embarrassed him. He expected to come down some time
and find the horse wasn’t there. The boy laughed at his riding, but
Yates was too much engaged in keeping his position to mind that very
much.

“D-d-dirt is s-s-said to b-b-be matter out of place, and that’s what’s
the m-m-mat-matter w-w-with me.” His conversation seemed to be shaken
out of him by the trotting of the horse. “I say, Bartlett, I can’t stand
this any longer. I’d rather walk.”

“You’re all right,” said the boy; “we’ll make him canter.”

He struck the horse over the flank with the loose end of the halter
rein.

“Here!” shouted Yates, letting go the bridle and grasping the mane.
“Don’t make him go faster, you young fiend. I’ll murder you when I get
off--and that will be soon.”

“You’re all right,” repeated young Bartlett, and, much to his
astonishment, Yates found it to be so. When the horse broke into a
canter, Yates thought the motion as easy as swinging in a hammock, and
as soothing as a rocking chair.

“This is an improvement. But we’ve got to keep it up, for if this brute
suddenly changes to a trot, I’m done for.”

“We’ll keep it up until we come in sight of the Corners, then we’ll slow
down to a walk. There’s sure to be a lot of fellows at the blacksmith’s
shop, so we’ll come in on them easy like.”

“You’re a good fellow, Bartlett,” said Yates. “I suspected you of
tricks at first. I’m afraid, if I had got another chap in such a fix, I
wouldn’t have let him off as easily as you have me. The temptation would
have been too great.”

When they reached the blacksmith’s shop at the Corners, they found four
horses in the building ahead of them. Bartlett tied his team outside,
and then, with his comrade, entered the wide doorway of the smithy. The
shop was built of rough boards, and the inside was blackened with soot.
It was not well lighted, the two windows being obscured with much
smoke, so that they were useless as far as their original purpose was
concerned; but the doorway, as wide as that of a barn, allowed all the
light to come in that the smith needed for his work. At the far end
and darkest corner of the place stood the forge, with the large bellows
behind it, concealed, for the most part, by the chimney. The forge was
perhaps six feet square and three or four feet high, built of plank and
filled in with earth. The top was covered with cinders and coal, while
in the center glowed the red core of the fire, with blue flames hovering
over it. The man who worked the bellows chewed tobacco, and now and then
projected the juice with deadly accuracy right into the center of the
fire, where it made a momentary hiss and dark spot. All the frequenters
of the smithy admired Sandy’s skill in expectoration, and many tried
in vain to emulate it. The envious said it was due to the peculiar
formation of his front teeth, the upper row being prominent, and the
two middle teeth set far apart, as if one were missing. But this was
jealousy; Sandy’s perfection in the art was due to no favoritism of
nature, but to constant and long-continued practice. Occasionally with
his callous right hand, never removing his left from the lever, Sandy
pulled an iron bar out of the fire and examined it critically. The
incandescent end of the bar radiated a blinding white light when it was
gently withdrawn, and illuminated the man’s head, making his beardless
face look, against its dark background, like the smudged countenance of
some cynical demon glowing with a fire from within. The end of the bar
which he held must have been very hot to an ordinary mortal, as everyone
in the shop knew, all of them, at their initiation to the country club,
having been handed a black piece of iron from Sandy’s hand, which he
held unflinchingly, but which the innocent receiver usually dropped with
a yell. This was Sandy’s favorite joke, and made life worth living for
him. It was perhaps not so good as the blacksmith’s own bit of humor,
but public opinion was divided on that point. Every great man has his
own particular set of admirers; and there were some who said,--under
their breaths, of course,--that Sandy could turn a horseshoe as well
as Macdonald himself. Experts, however, while admitting Sandy’s general
genius, did not go so far as this.

About half a dozen members of the club were present, and most of them
stood leaning against something with hands deep in their trousers
pockets; one was sitting on the blacksmith’s bench, with his legs
dangling down. On the bench tools were scattered around so thickly that
he had had to clear a place before he could sit down; the taking of this
liberty proved the man to be an old and privileged member. He sat there
whittling a stick, aimlessly bringing it to a fine point, examining it
frequently with a critical air, as if he were engaged in some delicate
operation which required great discrimination.

The blacksmith himself stooped with his back to one of the horses, the
hind hoof of the animal, between his knees, resting on his leathern
apron. The horse was restive, looking over its shoulder at him, not
liking what was going on. Macdonald swore at it fluently, and requested
it to stand still, holding the foot as firmly as if it were in his own
iron vise, which was fixed to the table near the whittler. With his
right hand he held a hot horseshoe, attached to an iron punch that had
been driven into one of the nail holes, and this he pressed against the
upraised hoof, as though sealing a document with a gigantic seal. Smoke
and flame rose from the contact of the hot iron with the hoof, and the
air was filled with the not unpleasant odor of burning horn. The smith’s
tool box, with hammer, pinchers, and nails, lay on the earthern floor
within easy reach. The sweat poured from his grimy brow; for it was a
hot job, and Macdonald was in the habit of making the most of his work.
He was called the hardest working man in that part of the country,
and he was proud of the designation. He was a standing reproach to the
loafers who frequented his shop, and that fact gave him pleasure in
their company. Besides, a man must have an audience when he is an expert
in swearing. Macdonald’s profanity was largely automatic,--a natural
gift, as it were,--and he meant nothing wrong by it. In fact, when
you got him fighting angry, he always forgot to swear; but in his calm
moments oaths rolled easily and picturesquely from his lips, and gave
fluency to his conversation. Macdonald enjoyed the reputation round
about of being a wicked man, which he was not; his language was against
him, that was all. This reputation had a misty halo thrown around it by
Macdonald’s unknown doings “down East,” from which mystical region he
had come. No one knew just what Macdonald had done, but it was admitted
on all sides that he must have had some terrible experiences, although
he was still a young man and unmarried. He used to say: “When you have
come through what I have, you won’t be so ready to pick a quarrel with a
man.”

This must have meant something significant, but the blacksmith never
took anyone into his confidence; and “down East” is a vague place, a
sort of indefinite, unlocalized no-man’s-land, situated anywhere between
Toronto and Quebec. Almost anything might have happened in such a space
of country. Macdonald’s favorite way of crushing an opponent was to say:
“When you’ve had some of my experiences, young man, you’ll know better’n
to talk like that.” All this gave a certain fascination to friendship
with the blacksmith; and the farmers’ boys felt that they were playing
with fire when in his company, getting, as it were, a glimpse of the
dangerous side of life. As for work, the blacksmith reveled in it, and
made it practically his only vice. He did everything with full steam on,
and was, as has been said, a constant reproach to loafers all over the
country. When there was no work to do, he made work. When there was work
to do, he did it with a rush, sweeping the sweat from his grimy brow
with his hooked fore finger, and flecking it to the floor with a flirt
of the right hand, loose on the wrist, in a way that made his thumb
and fore finger snap together like the crack of a whip. This action was
always accompanied with a long-drawn breath, almost a sigh, that seemed
to say: “I wish I had the easy times you fellows have.” In fact, since
he came to the neighborhood the current phrase, “He works like a steer”
 had given way to, “He works like Macdonald,” except with the older
people, who find it hard to change phrases. Yet everyone liked the
blacksmith, and took no special offense at his untiring industry,
looking at it rather as an example to others.

He did not look up as the two newcomers entered, but industriously pared
down the hoof with a curiously formed knife turned like a hook at the
point, burned in the shoe to its place, nailed it on, and rasped the
hoof into shape with a long, broad file. Not till he let the foot drop
on the earthen floor, and slapped the impatient horse on the flank, did
he deign to answer young Bartlett’s inquiry.

“No,” he said, wringing the perspiration from his forehead, “all these
horses aint ahead of you, and you won’t need to come next week. That’s
the last hoof of the last horse. No man needs to come to my shop and go
away again, while the breath of life is left in me. And I don’t do it,
either, by sitting on a bench and whittling a stick.”

“That’s so. That’s so,” said Sandy, chuckling, in the admiring tone of
one who intimated that, when the boss spoke, wisdom was uttered. “That’s
one on you, Sam.”

“I guess I can stand it, if he can,” said the whittler from the bench;
which was considered fair repartee.

“Sit it, you mean,” said young Bartlett, laughing with the others at his
own joke.

“But,” said the blacksmith severely, “we’re out of shoes, and you’ll
have to wait till we turn some, that is, if you don’t want the old ones
reset. Are they good enough?”

“I guess so, if you can find ‘em; but they’re out in the fields. Didn’t
think I’d bring the horses in while they held on, did you?”
 Then, suddenly remembering his duties, he said by, way of general
introduction: “Gentlemen, this is my friend Mr. Yates from New York.”

The name seemed to fall like a wet blanket on the high spirits of the
crowd. They had imagined from the cut of his clothes that he was a
storekeeper from some village around, or an auctioneer from a distance,
these two occupations being the highest social position to which a man
might attain. They were prepared to hear that he was from Welland, or
perhaps St. Catherines; but New York! that was a crusher. Macdonald,
however, was not a man to be put down in his own shop and before his
own admirers. He was not going to let his prestige slip from him merely
because a man from New York had happened along. He could not claim to
know the city, for the stranger would quickly detect the imposture and
probably expose him; but the slightly superior air which Yates wore
irritated him, while it abashed the others. Even Sandy was silent.

“I’ve met some people from New York down East,” he said in an offhand
manner, as if, after all, a man might meet a New Yorker and still not
sink into the ground.

“Really?” said Yates. “I hope you liked them.”

“Oh, so-so,” replied the blacksmith airily. “There’s good and bad among
them, like the rest of us.”

“Ah, you noticed that,” said Yates. “Well, I’ve often thought the same
myself. It’s a safe remark to make; there is generally no disputing it.”

The condescending air of the New Yorker was maddening, and Macdonald
realized that he was losing ground. The quiet insolence of Yates’ tone
was so exasperating to the blacksmith that he felt any language at his
disposal inadequate to cope with it. The time for the practical joke
had arrived. The conceit of this man must be taken down. He would try
Sandy’s method, and, if that failed, it would at least draw attention
from himself to his helper.

“Being as you’re from New York, maybe you can decide a little bet Sandy
here wants to have with somebody.”

Sandy, quick to take the hint, picked up the bar that always lay near
enough the fire to be uncomfortably warm.

“How much do you reckon that weighs?” he said, with critical nicety
estimating its ounces in his swaying hand. Sandy had never done
it better. There was a look of perfect innocence on his bland,
unsophisticated countenance, and the crowd looked on in breathless
suspense.

Bartlett was about to step forward and save his friend, but a wicked
glare from Macdonald restrained him; besides, he felt, somehow, that
his sympathies were with his neighbors, and not with the stranger he had
brought among them. He thought resentfully that Yates might have been
less high and mighty. In fact, when he asked him to come he had imagined
his brilliancy would be instantly popular, and would reflect glory on
himself. Now he fancied he was included in the general scorn Yates took
such little pains to conceal.

Yates glanced at the piece of iron and, without taking his hands from
his pockets, said carelessly:

“Oh, I should imagine it weighed a couple of pounds.”

“Heft it,” said Sandy beseechingly, holding it out to him.

“No, thank you,” replied Yates, with a smile. “Do you think I have never
picked up a hot horseshoe before? If you are anxious to know its weight,
why don’t you take it over to the grocery store and have it weighed?”

“‘Taint hot,” said Sandy, as he feebly smiled and flung the iron back on
the forge. “If it was, I couldn’t have held it s’long.”

“Oh, no,” returned Yates, with a grin, “of course not. I don’t know what
a blacksmith’s hands are, do I? Try something fresh.”

Macdonald saw there was no triumph over him among his crowd, for they
all evidently felt as much involved in the failure of Sandy’s trick as
he did himself; but he was sure that in future some man, hard pushed in
argument, would fling the New Yorker at him. In the crisis he showed the
instinct of a Napoleon.

“Well, boys,” he cried, “fun’s fun, but I’ve got to work. I have to earn
my living, anyhow.”

Yates enjoyed his victory; they wouldn’t try “getting at” him again, he
said to himself.

Macdonald strode to the forge and took out the bar of white-hot iron. He
gave a scarcely perceptible nod to Sandy, who, ever ready with tobacco
juice, spat with great directness on the top of the anvil. Macdonald
placed the hot iron on the spot, and quickly smote it a stalwart blow
with the heavy hammer. The result was appalling. An instantaneous
spreading fan of apparently molten iron lit up the place as if it were a
flash of lightning. There was a crash like the bursting of a cannon.
The shop was filled for a moment with a shower of brilliant sparks, that
flew like meteors to every corner of the place. Everyone was prepared
for the explosion except Yates. He sprang back with a cry, tripped,
and, without having time to get the use of his hands to ease his fall,
tumbled and rolled to the horses’ heels. The animals, frightened by the
report, stamped around; and Yates had to hustle on his hands and knees
to safer quarters, exhibiting more celerity than dignity. The blacksmith
never smiled, but everyone else roared. The reputation of the country
was safe. Sandy doubled himself up in his boisterous mirth.

“There’s no one like the old man!” he shouted. “Oh, lordy! lordy! He’s
all wool, and a yard wide.”

Yates picked himself up and dusted himself off, laughing with the rest
of them.

“If I ever knew that trick before, I had forgotten it. That’s one on me,
as this youth in spasms said a moment ago. Blacksmith, shake! I’ll treat
the crowd, if there’s a place handy.”




CHAPTER XI.


People who have but a superficial knowledge of the life and times
here set down may possibly claim that the grocery store, and not the
blacksmith’s shop, used to be the real country club--the place where the
politics of the country were discussed; where the doings of great men
were commended or condemned, and the government criticised. It is true
that the grocery store was the club of the village, when a place like
the Corners grew to be a village; but the blacksmith’s shop was usually
the first building erected on the spot where a village was ultimately
to stand. It was the nucleus. As a place grew, and enervating luxury set
in, the grocery store slowly supplanted the blacksmith’s shop, because
people found a nail keg, or a box of crackers, more comfortable to sit
on than the limited seats at their disposal in a smithy; moreover, in
winter the store, with its red-hot box stove, was a place of warmth and
joy, but the reveling in such an atmosphere of comfort meant that the
members of the club had to live close at hand, for no man would brave
the storms of a Canadian winter night, and journey a mile or two through
the snow, to enjoy even the pleasures of the store. So the grocery was
essentially a village club, and not a rural club.

Of course, as civilization advanced, the blacksmith found it impossible
to compete with the grocer. He could not offer the same inducements. The
grocery approached more nearly than the smithy the grateful epicurism of
the Athenaeum, the Reform, or the Carlton. It catered to the appetite of
man, besides supplying him with the intellectual stimulus of debate.
A box of soda crackers was generally open, and, although such biscuits
were always dry, they were good to munch, if consumed slowly. The barrel
of hazel nuts never had a lid on. The raisins, in their square box, with
blue-tinted paper, setting forth the word “Malaga” under the colored
picture of joyous Spanish grape pickers, stood on the shelves behind
the counter, at an angle suited to display the contents to all comers,
requiring an exceptionally long reach, and more than an ordinary amount
of cheek, before they were got at; but the barrel of Muscavado brown
sugar was where everyone could dip his hand in; while the man on the
keg of tenpenny nails might extend his arm over into the display window,
where the highly colored candies exhibited themselves, although
the person who meddled often with them was frowned upon, for it was
etiquette in the club not to purloin things which were expensive.
The grocer himself drew the line at the candies, and a second helping
usually brought forth the mild reproof:

“Shall I charge that, Sam; or would you rather pay for it now?”

All these delicacies were taken in a somewhat surreptitious way, and the
takers generally wore an absent-minded look, as if the purloining was
not quite intentional on their part. But they were all good customers
of the grocer, and the abstractions were doubtless looked on by him as
being in the way of trade; just as the giving of a present with a pound
of tea, or a watch with a suit of clothes, became in later days. Be
that as it may, he never said anything unless his generosity was taken
advantage of, which was rarely the case.

Very often on winter nights there was a hilarious feast, that helped to
lighten the shelves and burden the till. This ordinarily took the form
of a splurge in cove oysters. Cove oysters came from Baltimore, of
course, in round tins; they were introduced into Canada long before the
square tin boxes that now come in winter from the same bivalvular city.
Cove oysters were partly cooked before being tinned, so that they would,
as the advertisements say, keep in any climate. They did not require ice
around them, as do the square tins which now contain the raw oysters.
Someone present would say:

“What’s the matter with having a feed of cove oysters?”

He then collected a subscription of ten cents or so from each member,
and the whole was expended in several cans of oysters and a few pounds
of crackers. The cooking was done in a tin basin on the top of the hot
stove. The contents of the cans were emptied into this handy dish, milk
was added, and broken crackers, to give thickness and consistency to the
result. There were always plenty of plates, for the store supplied the
crockery of the neighborhood. There were also plenty of spoons, for
everything was to be had at the grocery. What more could the most
exacting man need? On a particularly reckless night the feast ended with
several tins of peaches, which needed no cooking, but only a sprinkling
of sugar. The grocer was always an expert at cooking cove oysters and at
opening tins of peaches.

There was a general feeling among the members that, by indulging in
these banquets, they were going the pace rather; and some of the older
heads feebly protested against the indulgence of the times, but it was
noticed that they never refrained from doing their share when it came to
spoon work.

“A man has but one life to live,” the younger and more reckless would
say, as if that excused the extravagance; for a member rarely got away
without being fifteen cents out of pocket, especially when they had
peaches as well as oysters.

The grocery at the Corners had been but recently established and as yet
the blacksmith’s shop had not looked upon it as a rival. Macdonald was
monarch of all he surveyed, and his shop was the favorite gathering
place for miles around. The smithy was also the patriotic center of the
district, as a blacksmith’s shop must be as long as anvils can take the
place of cannon for saluting purposes. On the 24th of May, the queen’s
birthday, celebrated locally as the only day in the year, except
Sundays, when Macdonald’s face was clean and when he did no work, the
firing of the anvils aroused the echoes of the locality. On that great
day the grocer supplied the powder, which was worth three York shillings
a pound--a York shilling being sixpence halfpenny. It took two men to
carry an anvil, with a good deal of grunting; but Macdonald, if the
crowd were big enough, made nothing of picking it up, hoisting it on his
shoulder, and flinging it down on the green in front of his shop. In the
iron mass there is a square hole, and when the anvil was placed upside
down, the hole was uppermost. It was filled with powder, and a wooden
plug, with a notch cut in it, was pounded in with a sledge hammer.
Powder was sprinkled from the notch over the surface of the anvil, and
then the crowd stood back and held its breath. It was a most exciting
moment. Macdonald would come running out of the shop bareheaded, holding
a long iron bar, the wavering, red-hot end of which descended on the
anvil, while the blacksmith shouted in a terrifying voice: “Look out,
there!” The loose powder hissed and spat for a moment, then bang went
the cannon, and a great cloud of smoke rolled upward, while the rousing
cheers came echoing back from the surrounding forests. The helper, with
the powder-horn, would spring to the anvil and pour the black explosive
into the hole, while another stood ready with plug and hammer. The
delicious scent of burned gunpowder filled the air, and was inhaled by
all the youngsters with satisfaction, for now they realized what real
war was. Thus the salutes were fired, and thus the royal birthday was
fittingly celebrated.

Where two anvils were to be had, the cannonade was much brisker, as
then a plug was not needed. The hole in the lower anvil was filled with
powder, and the other anvil was placed over it. This was much quicker
than pounding in a plug, and had quite as striking and detonating an
effect. The upper anvil gave a heave, like Mark Twain’s shot-laden frog,
and fell over on its side. The smoke rolled up as usual, and the report
was equally gratifying.

Yates learned all these things as he sat in the blacksmith’s shop, for
they were still in the month of May, and the smoke of the echoing anvils
had hardly yet cleared away. All present were eager to tell him of the
glory of the day. One or two were good enough to express regret that he
had not been there to see. After the disaster which had overturned Yates
things had gone on very smoothly, and he had become one of the crowd, as
it were. The fact that he was originally a Canadian told in his favor,
although he had been contaminated by long residence in the States.

Macdonald worked hard at the turning of horseshoes from long rods of
iron. Usually an extended line of unfinished shoes bestrode a blackened
scantling, like bodiless horsemen, the scantling crossing the shop
overhead, just under the roof. These were the work of Macdonald’s
comparatively leisure days, and they were ready to be fitted to the
hoofs of any horse that came to be shod, but on this occasion there
had been such a run on his stock that it was exhausted, a depletion
the smith seemed to regard as a reproach on himself, for he told Yates
several times that he often had as many as three dozen shoes up aloft
for a rainy day.

When the sledge hammer work was to be done, one of those present stepped
forward and swung the heavy sledge, keeping stroke for stroke with
Macdonald’s one-handed hammer, all of which required a nice ear for
time. This assistance was supposed to be rendered by Sandy; but, as he
remarked, he was no hog, and anyone who wished to show his skill was at
liberty to do so. Sandy seemed to spend most of his time at the bellows,
and when he was not echoing the sentiments of the boss, as he called
him, he was commending the expertness of the _pro tem._ amateur, the
wielder of the sledge. It was fun to the amateur, and it was an old
thing with Sandy, so he never protested against this interference with
his duty, believing in giving everyone a chance, especially when it came
to swinging a heavy hammer. The whole scene brought back to Yates the
days of his youth, especially when Macdonald, putting the finishing
strokes to his shoe, let his hammer periodically tinkle with musical
clangor on the anvil, ringing forth a tintinnabulation that chimed
melodiously on the ear--a sort of anvil-chorus accompaniment to his
mechanical skill. He was a real sleight-of-hand man, and the anvil was
his orchestra.

Yates soon began to enjoy his visit to the rural club. As the members
thawed out he found them all first-rate fellows, and, what was more,
they were appreciative listeners. His stories were all evidently new to
them, and nothing puts a man into a genial frame of mind so quickly as
an attentive, sympathetic audience. Few men could tell a story better
than Yates, but he needed the responsive touch of interested hearers. He
hated to have to explain the points of his anecdotes, as, indeed, what
story-teller does not? A cold and critical man like the professor
froze the spring of narration at its source. Besides, Renmark had an
objectionable habit of tracing the recital to its origin; it annoyed
Yates to tell a modern yarn, and then discover that Aristophanes, or
some other prehistoric poacher on the good things men were to say, had
forestalled him by a thousand years or so. When a man is quick to see
the point of your stories, and laughs heartily at them, you are apt to
form a high opinion of his good sense, and to value his companionship.

When the horses were shod, and young Bartlett, who was delighted at
the impression Yates had made, was preparing to go, the whole company
protested against the New Yorker’s departure. This was real flattery.

“What’s your hurry, Bartlett?” asked the whittler. “You can’t do
anything this afternoon, if you do go home. It’s a poor time this to
mend a bad day’s work. If you stay, he’ll stay; won’t you, Mr. Yates?
Macdonald is going to set tires, and he needs us all to look on and see
that he does it right; don’t you, Mac?”

“Yes; I get a lot of help from you while there’s a stick to whittle,”
 replied the smith.

“Then there’s the protracted meeting to-night at the schoolhouse,” put
in another, anxious that all the attractions of the place should be
brought forward.

“That’s so,” said the whittler; “I had forgotten about that. It’s the
first night, so we must all be there to encourage old Benderson. You’ll
be on hand to-night, won’t you, Macdonald?”

The blacksmith made no answer, but turned to Sandy and asked him
savagely what in ---- and ---nation he was standing gawking there for.
Why didn’t he go outside and get things ready for the tire setting? What
in thunder was he paying him for, anyhow? Wasn’t there enough loafers
round, without him joining the ranks?

Sandy took this rating with equanimity, and, when the smith’s back was
turned, he shrugged his shoulders, took a fresh bite of tobacco from the
plug which he drew from his hip pocket, winking at the others as he did
so. He leisurely followed Macdonald out of the shop, saying in a whisper
as he passed the whittler:

“I wouldn’t rile the old man, if I were you.”

The club then adjourned to the outside, all except t

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/9263