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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories, by 
+Margaret Collier Graham
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere 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
+
+
+Title: The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories
+
+Author: Margaret Collier Graham
+
+Release Date: August 14, 2008 [EBook #26307]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WIZARD'S DAUGHTER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Geetu Melwani, Annie McGuire, Stephen Hope and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive/American
+Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+               +------------------------------------------+
+               |            Transcriber's Note            |
+               |Spelling, punctuation and inconsistencies |
+               |in the original book have been retained.  |
+               +------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Book Cover]
+
+
+
+
+  THE WIZARD'S DAUGHTER AND OTHER STORIES
+
+  Margaret Collier Graham
+
+
+
+
+By Margaret Collier Graham
+
+
+THE WIZARD'S DAUGHTER AND OTHER STORIES. 12mo, $1.25
+
+STORIES OF THE FOOT-HILLS. 16mo, $1.25
+
+
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+  The Wizard's Daughter
+  And Other Stories
+
+  By
+
+  Margaret Collier Graham
+
+
+  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
+  The Riverside Press, Cambridge
+  1905
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT 1905
+  BY MARGARET COLLIER GRAHAM
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+  _Published September 1905_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                PAGE
+
+  The Wizard's Daughter            1
+
+  Marg'et Ann                     67
+
+  At the Foot of the Trail       133
+
+  Lib                            169
+
+  For Value Received             181
+
+  The Face of the Poor           205
+
+
+
+
+The Wizard's Daughter
+
+
+There had been a norther during the day, and at sunset the valley, seen
+from Dysart's cabin on the mesa, was a soft blur of golden haze. The
+wind had hurled the yellow leaves from the vineyard, exposing the
+gnarled deformity of the vines, and the trailing branches of the
+pepper-trees had swept their fallen berries into coral reefs on the
+southerly side.
+
+A young man with a delicate, discontented face sat on the porch of the
+Dysart claim cabin, looking out over the valley. A last gust of lukewarm
+air strewed the floor with scythe-shaped eucalyptus-leaves, and Mrs.
+Dysart came out with her broom to sweep them away.
+
+She was a large woman, with a crease at her waist that buried her
+apron-strings, and the little piazza creaked ominously as she walked
+about. The invalid got up with a man's instinctive distrust of a broom,
+and began to move away.
+
+"Don't disturb yourself, Mr. Palmerston," she said, waving him back into
+his chair with one hand, and speaking in a large, level voice, as if she
+were quelling a mob,--"don't disturb yourself; I won't raise any dust.
+Does the north wind choke you up much?"
+
+"Oh, no," answered the young fellow, carelessly; "it was a rather more
+rapid change of air than I bargained for, but I guess it's over now."
+
+"Sick folks generally think the north wind makes them nervous. Some of
+them say it's the electricity; but I think it's because most of 'em's
+men-folks, and being away from their families, they naturally blame
+things on the weather."
+
+Mrs. Dysart turned her ample back toward her hearer, and swept a
+leaf-laden cobweb from the corner of the window.
+
+The young man's face relaxed.
+
+"I don't think it made me nervous," he said. "But then, I'm not very
+ill. I'm out here for my mother's health. She threatened to go into a
+decline if I didn't come."
+
+"Well, you've got a consumptive build," said Mrs. Dysart, striking her
+broom on the edge of the porch, "and you're light-complected; that's
+likely to mean scrofula. You'd ought to be careful. California's a good
+deal of a hospital, but it don't do to depend too much on the climate.
+It ain't right; it's got to be blessed to your use."
+
+Palmerston smiled, and leaned his head against the redwood wall of the
+cabin. Mrs. Dysart creaked virtuously to and fro behind her broom.
+
+"Isn't that Mr. Dysart's team?" asked the young man, presently, looking
+down the valley.
+
+His companion walked to the edge of the porch and pushed back her
+sunbonnet to look.
+
+"Yes," she announced, "that's Jawn; he's early."
+
+She piled her cushiony hands on the end of the broom-handle, and stood
+still, gazing absently at the approaching team.
+
+"I hope your mother's a Christian woman," she resumed, with a sort of
+corpulent severity.
+
+The young man's face clouded, and then cleared again whimsically.
+
+"I really never inquired," he said lightly; "but I am inclined to think
+she is. She is certainly not a pagan."
+
+"You spoke as if she was a good deal wrapped up in you," continued his
+hostess, addressing herself unctuously to the landscape. "I was thinkin'
+she'd need something to sustain her if you was to be taken away. There's
+nothing but religion that can prepare us for whatever comes. I wonder
+who that Jawn's a-bringin' now," she broke off suddenly, holding one of
+her fat hands above her eyes and leaning forward with a start. "He does
+pick up the queerest lot. I just held my breath the other day when I saw
+him fetchin' you. I'd been wantin' a boarder all summer, and kind of
+lookin' for one, but I wasn't no more ready for you than if you'd been
+measles. It does seem sometimes as if men-folks take a satisfaction in
+seein' how they can put a woman to."
+
+Mrs. Dysart wabbled heavily indoors, where she creaked about
+unresignedly, putting things to rights. Palmerston closed his eyes and
+struggled with a smile that kept breaking into a noiseless laugh. He had
+a fair, high-bred face, and his smile emphasized its boyishness.
+
+When the wagon rattled into the acacias west of the vineyard, he got up
+and sauntered toward the barn. John Dysart saw him coming, and took two
+or three steps toward him with his hand at the side of his mouth.
+
+"He's deaf," he whispered with a violent facial enunciation which must
+have assailed the stranger's remaining senses like a yell. "I think
+you'll like him; he's a wonderful talker."
+
+The newcomer was a large, seedy-looking man, with the resigned,
+unexpectant manner of the deaf. Dysart went around the wagon, and the
+visitor put up his trumpet.
+
+"Professor Brownell," John called into it. "I want to make you
+acquainted with Mr. Palmerston. Mr. Palmerston is a young man from the
+East, a student at Cambridge--no, Oxford"--
+
+"Ann Arbor," interrupted the young man, eagerly.
+
+Dysart ignored the interruption. "He's out here for his health."
+
+The stranger nodded toward the young man approvingly, and dropped the
+trumpet as if he had heard enough.
+
+"How do you do, Mr. Palmerston?" he said, reaching down to clasp the
+young fellow's slim white hand. "I'm glad to meet a scholar in these
+wilds."
+
+Palmerston blushed a helpless pink, and murmured politely. The stranger
+dismounted from the wagon with the awkwardness of age and avoirdupois.
+John Dysart stood just behind his guest, describing him as if he were a
+panorama:--
+
+"I never saw his beat. He talks just like a book. He's filled me
+chuck-full of science on the way up. He knows all about the inside of
+the earth from the top crust to China. Ask him something about his
+machine, and get him started."
+
+Palmerston glanced inquiringly toward the trumpet. The stranger raised
+it to his ear and leaned graciously toward him.
+
+"Mr. Dysart is mistaken," called Palmerston, in the high, lifeless voice
+with which we all strive to reconcile the deaf to their affliction; "I
+am a Western man, from Ann Arbor."
+
+"Better still, better still," interrupted the newcomer, grasping his
+hand again; "you'll be broader, more progressive--'the heir of all the
+ages,' and so forth. I was denied such privileges in my youth. But
+nature is an open book, 'sermons in stones.'" He turned toward the wagon
+and took out a small leather valise, handling it with evident care.
+
+Dysart winked at the young man, and pointed toward the satchel.
+
+"Jawn," called Mrs. Dysart seethingly, from the kitchen door, "what's
+the trouble?"
+
+John's facial contortions stopped abruptly, as if the mainspring had
+snapped. He took off his hat and scratched his head gingerly with the
+tip of his little finger. He had a round, bald head, with a fringe of
+smooth, red-brown hair below the baldness that made it look like a
+filbert.
+
+"I'm coming, Emeline," he called, glancing hurriedly from the two men to
+the vicinity of his wife's voice, as if anxious to bisect himself
+mentally and leave his hospitality with his guest.
+
+"I'll look after Professor Brownell," said Palmerston; "he can step into
+my tent and brush up."
+
+Dysart's countenance cleared.
+
+"Good," he said eagerly, starting on a quick run toward the kitchen
+door. When he was half-way there he turned and put up his hand again.
+"Draw him out!" he called in a stentorian whisper. "You'd ought to hear
+him talk; it's great. Get him started about his machine."
+
+Palmerston smiled at the unnecessary admonition. The stranger had been
+talking all the time in a placid, brook-like manner while he felt under
+the wagon-seat for a second and much smaller traveling-bag. The young
+man possessed himself of this after having been refused the first by a
+gentle motion of the owner's hand. The visitor accepted his signal of
+invitation, and followed him toward the tent.
+
+"Our universities and colleges are useful in their way; they no doubt
+teach many things that are valuable: but they are not practical; they
+all fail in the application of knowledge to useful ends. I am not an
+educated man myself, but I have known many who are, and they are all
+alike--shallow, superficial, visionary. They need to put away their
+books and sit down among the everlasting hills and think. You have done
+well to come out here, young man. This is good; you will grow."
+
+He stopped at the door of the tent and took off his rusty hat. The
+breeze blew his long linen duster about his legs.
+
+"Have you looked much into electrical phenomena?" he asked, putting up
+his trumpet.
+
+Palmerston moved a step back, and said: "No; not at all." Then he raised
+his hand to possess himself of the ear-piece, and colored as he
+remembered that it was not a telephone. His companion seemed equally
+oblivious of his confusion and of his reply.
+
+"I have made some discoveries," he went on; "I shall be pleased to talk
+them over with you. They will revolutionize this country." He waved his
+hand toward the mesa. "Every foot of this land will sometime blossom as
+the rose; greasewood and sage-brush will give place to the orange and
+the vine. Water is king in California, and there are rivers of water
+locked in these mountains. We must find it; yes, yes, my young friend,
+we must find it, and we _can_ find it. I have solved that. The solution
+is here." He stooped and patted his satchel affectionately. "This little
+instrument is California's best friend. There is a future for all these
+valleys, wilder than our wildest dreams."
+
+Palmerston nodded with a guilty feeling of having approved statements of
+which he intended merely to acknowledge the receipt, and motioned his
+guest into the white twilight of the tent.
+
+"Make yourself comfortable, professor," he called. "I want to find
+Dysart and get my mail."
+
+As he neared the kitchen door Mrs. Dysart's voice came to him enveloped
+in the sizzle of frying meat.
+
+"Well, I don't know, Jawn; he mayn't be just the old-fashioned
+water-witch, but it ain't right; it's tamperin' with the secrets of the
+Most High, that's what I think."
+
+"Well, now, Emeline, you hadn't ought to be hasty. He don't lay claim to
+anything more'n natural; he says it's all based on scientific
+principles. He says he can tell me just where to tunnel--Now, here's
+Mr. Palmerston; he's educated. I'm going to rely on him."
+
+"Well, I'm goin' to rely on my heavenly Fawther," said Mrs. Dysart
+solemnly, from the quaking pantry.
+
+Palmerston stood in the doorway, smiling. John jumped up and clapped his
+hand vigorously on his breast pockets.
+
+"Well, now, there! I left your mail in the wagon in my other coat," he
+said, hooking his arm through the young man's and drawing him toward
+the barn. "Did you get him turned on?" he asked eagerly, when they were
+out of his wife's hearing. "How does he strike you, anyway? Doesn't he
+talk like a book? He wants me to help him find a claim--show him the
+corners, you know. He's got a daughter down at Los Angeles; she'll come
+up and keep house for him. He says he'll locate water on shares if I'll
+help him find a claim and do the tunneling. Emeline she's afraid I'll
+get left, but I think she'll come round. Isn't it a caution the way he
+talks science?"
+
+Palmerston acknowledged that it was.
+
+"The chances are that he is a fraud, Dysart," he said kindly; "most of
+those people are. I'd be very cautious about committing myself."
+
+"Oh, I'm cautious," protested John; "that's one of my peculiarities.
+Emeline thinks because I look into things I'm not to be trusted. She's
+so quick herself she can't understand anybody that's slow and careful.
+Here's your letters--quite a batch of 'em. Would you mind our putting up
+a cot in your tent for the professor?"
+
+"Not at all," said the young fellow good-naturedly. "It's excellent
+discipline to have a deaf man about; you realize how little you have to
+say that's worth saying."
+
+"That's a fact, that's a fact," said Dysart, rather too cheerfully
+acquiescent. "A man that can talk like that makes you ashamed to open
+your head."
+
+Palmerston fell asleep that night to the placid monotone of the
+newcomer's voice, and awoke at daybreak to hear the same conversational
+flow just outside the tent. Perhaps it was Dysart's explosive
+"Good-morning, professor!" which seemed to have missed the trumpet and
+hurled itself against the canvas wall of the tent close to the sleeper's
+ear, that awoke him. He sat up in bed and tried to shake off the
+conviction that his guest had been talking all night. Dysart's greeting
+made no break in the cheerful optimism that filtered through the canvas.
+
+"Last night I was an old man and dreamed dreams; this morning I am a
+young man and see visions. I see this thirsty plain fed by
+irrigating-ditches and covered with bearing orchards. I am impatient to
+be off on our tramp. This is an ideal spot. With five acres of
+orange-trees here, producing a thousand dollars per acre, one might give
+his entire time to scientific investigation."
+
+"He'd want to look after the gophers some," yelled Dysart.
+
+"I am astonished that this country is so little appreciated," continued
+Brownell, blindly unheeding. "It is no doubt due to the reckless
+statements of enthusiasts. It is a wonderful country--wonderful,
+wonderful, wonderful!"
+
+There was a diminuendo in the repeated adjective that told Palmerston
+the speaker was moving toward the house; and it was from that direction
+that he heard Mrs. Dysart, a little later, assuring her visitor, in a
+high, depressed voice, that she hadn't found the country yet that would
+support anybody without elbow-grease, and she didn't expect to till it
+was Gawd's will to take her to her heavenly home.
+
+John Dysart and his visitor returned from their trip in the mountains,
+that evening, tired, dusty, and exultant. The professor's linen duster
+had acquired several of those triangular rents which have the merit of
+being beyond masculine repair, and may therefore be conscientiously
+endured. He sat on the camp-chair at Palmerston's tent door, his
+finger-tips together and his head thrown back in an ecstasy of content.
+
+"This is certainly the promised land," he said gravely, "a land flowing
+with milk and honey. Nature has done her share lavishly: soil, climate,
+scenery--everything but water; yes, and water, too, waiting for the
+brain, the hand of man, the magic touch of science--the one thing left
+to be conquered to give the sense of mastery, of possession. This
+country is ours by right of conquest." He waved his hands majestically
+toward the valley. "In three months we shall have a stream flowing from
+these mountains that will transform every foot of ground before you.
+These people seem worthy, though somewhat narrow. It will be a pleasure
+to share prosperity with them as freely as they share their poverty with
+me."
+
+Palmerston glanced conversationally toward the trumpet, and his
+companion raised it to his ear.
+
+"Dysart is a poor man," shouted Palmerston, "but he is the best fellow
+in the world. I should hate to see him risk anything on an uncertainty."
+
+Brownell had been nodding his head backward and forward with dreamy
+emphasis; he now shook it horizontally, closing his eyes. "There is no
+uncertainty," he said, lowering his trumpet; "that is the advantage of
+science: you can count upon it with absolute certainty. I am glad the
+man is poor--very glad; it heightens the pleasure of helping him."
+
+The young man turned away a trifle impatiently.
+
+"A reservoir will entail some expense," the professor rambled on; "but
+the money will come. 'To him that hath shall be given.'"
+
+Palmerston's face completed the quotation, but the speaker went on
+without opening his eyes: "When the water is once flowing out of the
+tunnel, capital will flow into it."
+
+"A good deal of capital will flow into the tunnel before any water flows
+out of it," growled Palmerston, taking advantage of his companion's
+physical defect to relieve his mind.
+
+Later in the evening Dysart drew the young man into the family
+conference, relying upon the sympathy of sex in the effort to allay his
+wife's misgivings.
+
+"The tunnel won't cost over two dollars a foot, with what I can do
+myself," maintained the little man, "and the professor says we'll strike
+water that'll drown us out before we've gone a hundred feet. Emeline
+here she's afraid of it because it sounds like a meracle, but I tell her
+it's pure science. It isn't any more wonderful than a needle traveling
+toward a magnet: the machine tells where the water is, and how far off
+it is, something like a compass--I don't understand it, but I can see
+that it ain't any more meraculous than a telegraph. It's science."
+
+"Oh, yes, I know," mourned Mrs. Dysart, who overflowed a small
+rocking-chair on the piazza; "there's folks that think the creation of
+the world in six days is nothin' but science, but they're not people for
+Christians to be goin' pardners with. If Gawd has put a hundred feet of
+dirt on top of that water, I tell Jawn he had his reasons, and I can't
+think it's right for anybody whose treasure ought to be laid up in
+heaven to go pryin' into the bowels of the earth huntin' for things that
+our heavenly Fawther's hid."
+
+"But there's gold, Emeline."
+
+"Oh, yes; I know there's gold, and I know 'the love of money is the root
+of all evil.' I don't say that the Lord don't reign over the inside of
+the earth, but I do say that people that get their minds fixed on things
+that's underground are liable to forget the things that are above."
+
+"Well, now, I'm sure they hadn't ought," protested Dysart. "I'm sure
+'the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof,' Emeline."
+
+Mrs. Dysart sank slowly back in her chair at this unexpected thrust from
+her own weapon, and then rallied with a long, corpulent sigh.
+
+"Well, I don't know. You recollect that old man was up here last winter,
+hammerin' around among the rocks as if the earth was a big nut that he
+was tryin' to crack? I talked with him long enough to find out what he
+was; he was an _atheist_."
+
+Mrs. Dysart leaned forward and whispered the last word in an awe-struck
+tone, with her fat eyes fixed reproachfully upon her husband.
+
+"Oh, I guess not, Emeline," pleaded John.
+
+Mrs. Dysart shut her lips and her eyes very tight, and nodded slowly and
+affirmatively. "Yes, he was. He set right in that identical spot where
+Mr. Palmerston is a-settin', and talked about the seven theological
+periods of creation, and the fables of Jonah and the whale and Noah's
+ark, till I was all of a tremble. Mebbe that's science, Jawn, but _I_
+call it blasphemin'."
+
+Dysart rested his elbows on his knees and looked over the edge of the
+porch as if he were gazing into the bottomless pit.
+
+"Oh, come, now, Mrs. Dysart," Palmerston broke in cheerfully; "I'm not
+at all afraid of Mr. Dysart losing his faith, but I'm very much afraid
+of his losing his money. I wish he had as good a grip on his purse as he
+has on his religion."
+
+Mrs. Dysart glanced at the young man with a look of relief to find him
+agreeing with her in spite of his irreverent commingling of the temporal
+and the spiritual.
+
+"Well, I'm sure we've lost enough already, when it comes to that," she
+continued, folding her hands resignedly in her convex lap. "There was
+that artesian well down at San Pasqual"--
+
+"Well, now, Emeline," her husband broke in eagerly, "that well would
+have been all right if the tools hadn't stuck. I think yet we'd have got
+water if we'd gone on."
+
+"We'd 'a' got water if it had 'a' been our heavenly Fawther's will,"
+announced Mrs. Dysart, with solemnity, rising slowly from her chair,
+which gave a little squeak of relief. "I've got to set the sponge," she
+went on in the same tone, as if it were some sacred religious rite. "I
+wish you'd talk it over with Mr. Palmerston, Jawn, and tell him the
+offer you've had from this perfessor--I'm sure I don't know what he's
+perfessor of. He ain't a perfessor of religion--I know that."
+
+She sent her last arrow over her wide shoulder as she passed the two men
+and creaked into the house. Her husband looked after her gravely.
+
+"Now that's the way with Emeline," he said; "she's all faith, and then,
+again, she has no faith. Now, I'm just the other way." He rubbed his
+bald head in a vain attempt to formulate the obverse of his wife's
+character. "Well, anyway," he resumed, accepting his failure cheerfully,
+"the professor he wants to find a claim, as I was telling you, but he
+wants one that's handy to the place he's selected for the tunnel. Of
+course he won't say just where that is till we get the papers made out,
+but he gave me a kind of a general idea of it, and the land around
+there's all mine. He'd have to go 'way over east to find a government
+section that hasn't been filed on, and of course there'd be a big
+expense for pipe; so he offers to locate the tunnel for half the water
+if we get ten inches or over, and I'm to make the tunnel, and deed him
+twenty acres of land."
+
+"Suppose you get less than ten inches--what then?"
+
+"Then it's all to be mine; but I'm to deed him the land all the same."
+
+"How many inches of water have you from your spring now?"
+
+"About ten, as near as I can guess."
+
+"Well, suppose he locates the tunnel so it will drain your spring; are
+you to have the expense of the work and the privilege of giving him half
+the water and twenty acres of land--is that it?"
+
+John rubbed the back of his neck and reflected.
+
+"The professor laughs at the idea of ten inches of water. He says we'll
+get at least a hundred, maybe more. You see, if we were to get that
+much, I'd have a lot of water to sell to the settlers below. It 'u'd be
+a big thing."
+
+"So it would; but there's a big 'if' in there, Dysart. Do you know
+anything about this man's record?"
+
+"I asked about him down in Los Angeles. Some folks believe in him, and
+some don't. They say he struck a big stream for them over at San Luis. I
+don't go much on what people say, anyway; I size a man up, and depend on
+that. I like the way the professor talks. I don't understand all of it,
+but he seems to have things pretty pat. Don't you think he has?"
+
+"Yes; he has things pat enough. Most swindlers have. It's their
+business. Not that I think him a deliberate swindler, Dysart. Possibly
+he believes in himself. But I hope you'll be cautious."
+
+"Oh, I'm cautious," asserted John. "I'd be a good deal richer man to-day
+if I hadn't been so cautious. I've spent a lot of time and money looking
+into things. I'll get there, if caution'll do it. Now, Emeline she's
+impulsive; she has to be held back; she never examines into anything:
+but I'm just the other way."
+
+In spite of Palmerston's warning and Mrs. Dysart's fears, temporal and
+spiritual, negotiations between Dysart and Brownell made rapid progress.
+The newcomer's tent was pitched upon the twenty acres selected, and
+gleamed white against the mountain-side, suggesting to Palmerston's idle
+vision a sail becalmed upon a sage-green sea. "Dysart's ship, which will
+probably never come in," he said to himself, looking at it with visible
+indignation, one morning, as he sat at his tent door in that state of
+fuming indolence which the male American calls taking a rest.
+
+"Practically there is little difference between a knave and a fool," he
+fretted; "it's the difference between the gun that is loaded and the one
+that is not: in the long run the unloaded gun does the more mischief. A
+self-absorbed fool is a knave. After all, dishonesty is only abnormal
+selfishness; it's a question of degree. Hello, Dysart!" he said aloud,
+as his host appeared around the tent. "How goes it?"
+
+"Slow," said John emphatically, "slow. I'm feeling my way like a cat,
+and the professor he's just about as cautious as I am. We're a good
+team. He's been over the caņon six times, and every time that machine of
+his'n gives him a new idea. He's getting it down to a fine point. He
+wanted to go up again to-day, but I guess he can't."
+
+"What's up?" inquired Palmerston indifferently.
+
+"Well, his daughter wrote him she was coming this afternoon, and
+somebody'll have to meet her down at Malaga when the train comes in.
+I've just been oiling up the top-buggy, and I thought maybe if you"--
+
+"Why, certainly," interrupted Palmerston, responding amiably to the
+suggestion of John's manner; "if you think the young lady will not
+object, I shall be delighted. What time is the train due?"
+
+"Now, that's just what I told Emeline," said John triumphantly. "He'd
+liever go than not, says I; if he wouldn't then young folks has changed
+since I can remember. The train gets there about two o'clock. If you jog
+along kind of comfortable you'll be home before supper. If the girl's as
+smart as her father, you'll have a real nice visit."
+
+Mrs. Dysart viewed the matter with a pessimism which was scarcely to be
+distinguished from conventionality.
+
+"I think it's a kind of an imposition, Mr. Palmerston," she said, as her
+boarder was about to start, "sendin' you away down there for a total
+stranger. It's a good thing you're not bashful. Some young men would be
+terribly put out. I'm sure Jawn would 'a' been at your age. But my
+father wouldn't have sent a strange young man after one of his
+daughters--he knowed us too well. My, oh! just to think of it! I'd have
+fell all in a heap."
+
+Palmerston ventured a hope that the young lady would not be completely
+unnerved.
+
+"Oh, I'm not frettin' about _her_," said his hostess. "I don't doubt
+she can take care of _her_self. If she's like some of her folks, she'll
+talk you blind."
+
+Palmerston drove away to hide the smile that teased the corners of his
+mouth.
+
+"The good woman has the instincts of a chaperon, without the
+traditions," he reflected, letting his smile break into a laugh. "Her
+sympathy is with the weaker sex when it comes to a personal encounter.
+We may need her services yet, who knows?"
+
+Malaga was a flag-station, and the shed which was supposed to shelter
+its occasional passengers from the heat of summer and the rain of winter
+was flooded with afternoon sunshine. Palmerston drove into the square
+shadow of the shed roof, and set his feet comfortably upon the dashboard
+while he waited. He was not aware of any very lively curiosity
+concerning the young woman for whom he was waiting. That he had formed
+some nebulous hypothesis of vulgarity was evidenced by his whimsical
+hope that her prevailing atmosphere would not be musk; aggressive
+perfumery of some sort seemed inevitable. He found himself wondering
+what trait in her father had led him to this deduction, and drifted idly
+about in the haze of heredity until the whistle of the locomotive warned
+him to withdraw his feet from their elevation and betake himself to the
+platform. Half a minute later the engine panted onward and the young man
+found himself, with uplifted hat, confronting a slender figure clad very
+much as he was, save for the skirt that fell in straight, dark folds to
+the ground.
+
+"Miss Brownell?" inquired Palmerston smiling.
+
+The young woman looked at him with evident surprise.
+
+"Where is my father?" she asked abruptly.
+
+"He was unable to come. He regretted it very much. I was so fortunate as
+to take his place. Allow me"--He stooped toward her satchel.
+
+"Unable to come--is he ill?" pursued the girl, without moving.
+
+"Oh, no," explained Palmerston hastily; "he is quite well. It was
+something else--some matter of business."
+
+"Business!" repeated the young woman, with ineffable scorn.
+
+She turned and walked rapidly toward the buggy. Palmerston followed with
+her satchel. She gave him a preoccupied "Thank you" as he assisted her
+to a seat and shielded her dress with the shabby robe.
+
+"Do you know anything about this business of my father's?" she asked as
+they drove away.
+
+"Very little; it is between him and Mr. Dysart, with whom I am boarding.
+Mr. Dysart has mentioned it to me." The young man spoke with evident
+reluctance. His companion turned her clear, untrammeled gaze upon him.
+
+"You needn't be afraid to say what you think. Of course it is all
+nonsense," she said bitterly.
+
+Palmerston colored under her intent gaze, and smiled faintly.
+
+"I have said what I think to Mr. Dysart. Don't you really mean that I
+need not be afraid to say what _you_ think?"
+
+She was still looking at him, or rather at the place where he was. She
+turned a little more when he spoke, and regarded him as if he had
+suddenly materialized.
+
+"I think it is all nonsense," she said gravely, as if she were answering
+a question. Then she turned away again and knitted her brows. Palmerston
+glanced covertly now and then at her profile, unwillingly aware of its
+beauty. She was handsome, strikingly, distinguishedly handsome, he said
+to himself; but there was something lacking. It must be femininity,
+since he felt the lack and was masculine. He smiled to think how much
+alike they must appear--he and this very gentlemanly young woman beside
+him. He thought of her soft felt hat and the cut of her dark-blue coat,
+and there arose in him a rigidly subdued impulse to offer her a cigar,
+to ask her if she had a daily paper about her, to--She turned upon him
+suddenly, her eyes full of tears.
+
+"I am crying!" she exclaimed angrily. "How unspeakably silly!"
+
+Palmerston's heart stopped with that nameless terror which the actual
+man always experiences when confronted by this phase of the ideal woman.
+He had been so serene, so comfortable, under the unexpected that there
+flashed into his mind a vague sense of injury that she should surprise
+him in this way with the expected. It was inconsiderate, inexcusable;
+then, with an inconsistency worthy of a better sex, he groped after an
+excuse for the inexcusable.
+
+"You are very nervous--your journey has tired you--you are not strong,"
+he pleaded.
+
+"I am _not_ nervous," insisted the young woman indignantly. "I have no
+nerves--I detest them. And I am quite as strong as you are." The young
+fellow winced. "It is not that. It is only because I cannot have my own
+way. I cannot make people do as I wish." She spoke with a heat that
+seemed to dry her tears.
+
+Palmerston sank back and let the case go by default. "If you like that
+view of it better"--
+
+"I like the truth," the girl broke in vehemently. "I am so tired of
+talk! Why must we always cover up the facts with a lot of platitudes?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Palmerston lightly. "I suppose there ought to
+be a skeleton of truth under all we say, but one doesn't need to rattle
+his bones to prove that he has them."
+
+The girl laughed. Palmerston caught a glimpse of something reassuring in
+her laugh.
+
+"It might not be cheerful," she admitted, "but it would be honest, and
+we might learn to like it. Besides, the truth is not always
+disagreeable."
+
+"Wouldn't the monotony of candor appall us?" urged Palmerston. "Isn't it
+possible that our deceptions are all the individuality we have?"
+
+"Heaven forbid!" said his companion curtly.
+
+They drove on without speaking. The young man was obstinately averse to
+breaking the silence, which, nevertheless, annoyed him. He had a theory
+that feminine chatter was disagreeable. Just why he should feel
+aggrieved that this particular young woman did not talk to him he could
+not say. No doubt he would have resented with high disdain the
+suggestion that his vanity had been covertly feeding for years upon the
+anxiety of young women to make talk for his diversion.
+
+"Do you think my father has closed his agreement with this man of whom
+you were speaking--this Mr. Dysart?" asked Miss Brownell, returning to
+the subject as if they had never left it.
+
+"I am very certain he has not; at least, he had not this morning,"
+rejoined Palmerston.
+
+"I wish it might be prevented," she said earnestly, with a note of
+appeal.
+
+"I have talked with Dysart, but my arguments fail to impress him;
+perhaps you may be more successful."
+
+Palmerston was aware of responding to her tone rather than to her
+words. The girl shook her head.
+
+"I can do nothing. People who have only common sense are at a terrible
+disadvantage when it comes to argument. I know it is all nonsense; but a
+great many people seem to prefer nonsense. I believe my father would die
+if he were reduced to bare facts."
+
+"There is something in that," laughed Palmerston. "A theory makes a very
+comfortable mental garment, if it is roomy enough."
+
+The young woman turned and glanced at him curiously, as if she could not
+divine what he was laughing at.
+
+"They are like children--such people. My father is like a child. He does
+not live in the world; he cannot defend himself."
+
+Palmerston's skepticism rushed into his face. The girl looked at him,
+and the color mounted to her forehead.
+
+"You do not believe in him!" she broke out. "It cannot be--you cannot
+think--you do not know him!"
+
+"I know very little of your father's theories, Miss Brownell,"
+protested Palmerston. "You cannot blame me if I question them; you seem
+to question them yourself."
+
+"His theories--I loathe them!" She spoke with angry emphasis. "It is not
+that; it is himself. I cannot bear to think that you--that any one"--
+
+"Pardon me," interrupted Palmerston; "we were speaking of his theories.
+I have no desire to discuss your father."
+
+He knew his tone was resentful. He found himself wondering whether it
+was an excess of egotism or of humility that made her ignore his
+personality.
+
+"Why should we not discuss him?" she asked, turning her straightforward
+eyes upon him.
+
+"Because"--Palmerston broke into an impatient laugh--"because we are not
+disembodied spirits; at least, I am not."
+
+The girl gave him a look of puzzled incomprehension, and turned back to
+her own thoughts. That they were troubled thoughts her face gave
+abundant evidence. Palmerston waited curiously eager for some
+manifestation of social grace, some comment on the scenery which should
+lead by the winding path of young-ladyism to the Mecca of her personal
+tastes and preferences; should unveil that sacred estimate of herself
+which she so gladly shared with others, but which others too often
+failed to share with her.
+
+"I wish you would tell me all you know about it," she said presently,
+"this proposition my father has made. He writes me very indefinitely,
+and sometimes it is hard for me to learn, even when I am with him, just
+what he is doing. He forgets that he has not told me."
+
+The young man hesitated, weighing the difficulties that would beset him
+if he should attempt to explain his hesitation, seeing also the more
+tangible difficulties of evasion if she should turn her clear eyes upon
+him. It would be better for Dysart if she knew, he said to himself. They
+had made no secret of the transaction, and sooner or later she must hear
+of it from others, if not from her father. He yielded to the infection
+of her candor, and told her what she asked. She listened with knitted
+brows and an introspective glance.
+
+"Mr. Dysart might lose his work," she commented tentatively.
+
+Palmerston was silent.
+
+The girl turned abruptly. "Could he lose anything else?" The color swept
+across her face, and her voice had a half-pathetic menace in it.
+
+"Every business arrangement is uncertain, contains a possibility of
+loss."
+
+Palmerston was defiantly aware that he had not answered her question. He
+emphasized his defiance by jerking the reins.
+
+"Don't!" said the girl reproachfully. "I think his mouth is tender."
+
+"You like horses?" inquired the young man, with a sensation of relief.
+
+She shook her head. "No; I think not. I never notice them except when
+they seem uncomfortable."
+
+"But if you didn't like them you wouldn't care."
+
+"Oh, yes, I should. I don't like to see anything uncomfortable."
+
+Palmerston laughed. "You have made me very uncomfortable, and you do not
+seem to mind. I must conclude that you have not noticed it, and that
+conclusion hurts my vanity."
+
+The young woman did not turn her head.
+
+"I try to be candid," she said, "and I am always being misunderstood. I
+think I must be very stupid."
+
+Her companion began to breathe more freely. She was going to talk of
+herself, after all. He was perfectly at home when it came to that.
+
+"Not at all," he said graciously; "you only make the rest of us appear
+stupid. We are at a disadvantage when we get what we do not expect, and
+none of us expect candor."
+
+"But if we tell the truth ourselves, I don't see why we shouldn't expect
+it from others."
+
+"Oh, yes, if we ourselves tell the truth."
+
+"I think you have been telling me the truth," she said, turning her
+steadfast eyes upon him.
+
+"Thank you," said Palmerston lightly. "I hope my evident desire for
+approval doesn't suggest a sense of novelty in my position."
+
+Miss Brownell smiled indulgently, and then knitted her brows. "I am glad
+you have told me," she said; "I may not be able to help it, but it is
+better for me to know."
+
+They were nearing the Dysart house, and Palmerston remembered that he
+had no definite instruction concerning the newcomer's destination.
+
+"I think I will take her directly to her father's tent," he reflected,
+"and let Mrs. Dysart plan her own attack upon the social situation."
+
+When he had done this and returned to his boarding-place, there was a
+warmth in the greeting of his worthy hostess which suggested a sense of
+his recent escape from personal danger.
+
+"I'm real glad to see you safe home, Mr. Palmerston," she said amply. "I
+don't wonder you look fagged; the ride through the dust was hard enough
+without having all sorts of other things to hatchel you. I do hope you
+won't have that same kind of a phthisicky ketch in your breath that you
+had the other night after you overdone. I think it was mostly
+nervousness, and, dear knows, you've had enough to make you nervous
+to-day. I told Jawn after you was gone that I'd hate to be answerable
+for the consequences."
+
+Two days later John Dysart came into Palmerston's tent, and drew a
+camp-stool close to the young man's side.
+
+"I'm in a kind of a fix," he said, seating himself and fastening his
+eyes on the floor with an air of profound self-commiseration. "You see,
+this girl of Brownell's she came up where I was mending the flume
+yesterday, and we got right well acquainted. She seems friendly. She
+took off her coat and laid it on a boulder, and we set down there in our
+shirt-sleeves and had quite a talk. I think she means all right, but
+she's visionary. I can't understand it, living with a practical man like
+the professor. But you can't always tell. Now, there's Emeline. Emeline
+means well, but she lets her prejudices run away with her judgment. I
+guess women generally do. But, someway, this girl rather surprised me.
+When I first saw her I thought she looked kind of reasonable; maybe it
+was her cravat--I don't know."
+
+John shook his head in a baffled way. He had taken off his hat, and the
+handkerchief which he had spread over his bald crown to protect it from
+the flies drooped pathetically about his honest face.
+
+"What did Miss Brownell say?" asked Palmerston, flushing a little.
+
+John looked at him absently from under his highly colored awning. "The
+girl? Oh, she don't understand. She wanted me to be careful. I told her
+I'd been careful all my life, and I wasn't likely to rush into anything
+now. She thinks her father's 'most too sanguine about the water, but she
+doesn't understand the machine--I could see that. She said she was
+afraid I'd lose something, and she wants me to back out right now. I'm
+sure I don't know what to do. I want to treat everybody right."
+
+"Including yourself, I hope," suggested Palmerston.
+
+"Yes, of course. I don't feel quite able to give up all my prospects
+just for a notion; and yet I want to do the square thing by Emeline.
+It's queer about women--especially Emeline. I've often thought if there
+was only men it would be easier to make up your mind; but still, I
+suppose we'd oughtn't to feel that way. They don't mean any harm."
+
+John drew the protecting drapery from his head, and lashed his bald
+crown with it softly, as if in punishment for his seeming disloyalty.
+
+"You could withdraw from the contract now without any great loss to Mr.
+Brownell," suggested Palmerston.
+
+John looked at him blankly. "Why, of course he wouldn't lose anything;
+I'd be the loser. But I haven't any notion of doing that. I'm only
+wondering whether I ought to tell Emeline about the girl. You see,
+Emeline's kind of impulsive, and she's took a dead set against the girl
+because, you see, she thinks,"--John leaned forward confidentially and
+shut one eye, as if he were squinting along his recital to see that it
+was in line with the facts,--"you see, she thinks--well, I don't know as
+I'd ought to take it on myself to say just what Emeline thinks, but I
+think she thinks--well, I don't know as I'd ought to say what I think
+she thinks, either; but you'd understand if you'd been married."
+
+"Oh, I can understand," asserted the young man. "Mrs. Dysart's position
+is very natural. But I think you should tell her what Miss Brownell
+advises. There is no other woman near, and it will prove very
+uncomfortable for the young lady if your wife remains unfriendly toward
+her. You certainly don't want to be unjust, Dysart."
+
+John shook his head dolorously over this extension of his moral
+obligations.
+
+"No," he declared valiantly; "I want to be square with everybody; but I
+don't want to prejudice Emeline against the professor, and I'm afraid
+this would. You see, Emeline's this way--well, I don't know as I'd
+ought to say just how Emeline is, but you know she's an _awful good
+woman_!"
+
+John leaned forward and gave the last three words a slow funereal
+emphasis which threatened his companion's gravity.
+
+"Oh, I know," Palmerston broke out quickly; "Mrs. Dysart's a good woman,
+and she's a very smart woman, too; she has good ideas."
+
+"Yes, yes; Emeline's smart," John made haste to acquiesce; "she's smart
+as far as she knows, but when she don't quite understand, then she's
+prejudiced. I guess women are generally prejudiced about machinery; they
+can't be expected to see into it: but still, if you think I'd ought to
+tell her what this Brownell girl says, why, I'm a-going to do it."
+
+John got up with the air of a man harassed but determined, and went out
+of the tent.
+
+The next afternoon Mrs. Dysart put on her beaded dolman and her best
+bonnet and panted through the tar-weed to call upon her new neighbor.
+Palmerston watched the good woman's departure, and awaited her return,
+taunting himself remorselessly meanwhile for the curiosity which
+prompted him to place a decoy-chair near his tent door, and exulting
+shamefacedly at the success of his ruse when she sank into it with the
+interrogative glance with which fat people always commit themselves to
+furniture.
+
+"Well, I've been to see her, and I must say, for a girl that's never
+found grace, she's about the straightforwardest person I ever came
+across. I know I was prejudiced." Mrs. Dysart took off her bonnet, a
+sacred edifice constructed of cotton velvet, frowzy feathers, and red
+glass currants, and gazed at it penitentially. "That father of hers is
+enough to prejudice a saint. But the girl ain't to blame. I think she
+must have had a prayin' mother, though she says she doesn't remember
+anything about her exceptin' her clothes, which does sound worldly."
+
+Mrs. Dysart straightened out the varnished muslin leaves of her
+horticultural headgear, and held the structure at arm's length with a
+sigh of gratified sense and troubled spirit.
+
+"I invited her to come to the mothers' meetin' down at Mrs. Stearns's
+in the wash with me next Thursday afternoon, and I'm goin' to have her
+over to dinner some day when the old perfessor's off on a tramp. I try
+to have Christian grace, but I can't quite go him, though I would like
+to see the girl brought into the fold."
+
+Palmerston remembered the steadfast eyes of the wanderer, and wondered
+how they had met all this. His companion replaced the bonnet on her
+head, where it lurched a little, by reason of insufficient skewering, as
+she got up.
+
+"Then you were pleased with Miss Brownell?" the young man broke out,
+rather senselessly, he knew--aware, all at once, of a desire to hear
+more.
+
+Mrs. Dysart did not sit down.
+
+"Yes," she said judicially; "for a girl without any bringin' up, and
+with no religious inflooences, and no mother and no father to speak of,
+I think she's full as good as some that's had more chances. I've got to
+go and start a fire now," she went on, with an air of willingness but
+inability to continue the subject. "There's Jawn comin' after the
+milk-pail; I do wish he could be brought to listen to reason."
+
+Palmerston watched the good woman as she labored down the path, her
+dusty skirts drawn close about her substantial ankles, and the beaded
+dolman glittering unfeelingly in the sun.
+
+"I hope she has a sense of humor," he said to himself. Then he got up
+hastily, went into the tent, and brought out a letter, which he read
+carefully from the beginning to the signature scribbled in the upper
+corner of the first page--"Your own Bess." After that he sat quite
+still, letting his glance play with the mists of the valley, until Mrs.
+Dysart rang the supper-bell.
+
+"If she has a sense of humor, how much she must enjoy her!" he said to
+himself, with the confusion of pronouns we all allow ourselves and view
+with such scorn in others.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When a man first awakes to the fact that he is thinking of the wrong
+woman, it is always with a comfortable sense of certainty that he can
+change his attitude of mind by a slight effort of the will. If he does
+not make the effort, it is only because he is long past the necessity of
+demonstrating himself to himself, and not from any fickleness of fancy
+on his own part. It was in this comfortable state of certainty that
+Sidney Palmerston betook himself, a few days later, to the Brownell
+tent, armed with a photograph which might have been marked "Exhibit A"
+in the case which he was trying with himself before his own conscience.
+If there was in his determination to place himself right with Miss
+Brownell any trace of solicitude for the young woman, to the credit of
+his modesty be it said, he had not formulated it. Perhaps there was. A
+belief in the general overripeness of feminine affection, and a discreet
+avoidance of shaking the tree upon which it grows, have in some way
+become a part of masculine morals, and Sidney Palmerston was still young
+enough to take himself seriously.
+
+Miss Brownell had moved a table outside the tent, and was bending over a
+map fastened to it by thumb-tacks.
+
+"I am trying to find out what my father is doing," she said, looking
+straight into Palmerston's eyes without a word of greeting. "I suppose
+you know they are about to begin work on the tunnel."
+
+The young man was beginning to be a trifle tired of the tunnel. "Dysart
+mentioned it yesterday," he said. "May I sit down, Miss Brownell?"
+
+She gave a little start, and went into the tent for another chair. When
+she reappeared, Palmerston met her at the tent door and took the
+camp-chair from her hand.
+
+"I want to sit here," he said willfully, turning his back toward the
+table. "I don't want to talk about the tunnel; I want to turn the
+conversation upon agreeable things--myself, for instance."
+
+She frowned upon him smilingly, and put her hand to her cheek with a
+puzzled gesture.
+
+"Have I talked too much about the tunnel?" she asked. "I thought
+something might be done to stop it."
+
+Palmerston shook his head. "You have done everything in your power.
+Dysart has been fairly warned. Besides, who knows?" he added rather
+flippantly. "They may strike a hundred inches of water, as your father
+predicts."
+
+"I have not been objecting merely to rid myself of responsibility; I
+have never felt any. I only wanted--I hoped"--She stopped, aware of the
+unresponsive chill that always came at mention of her father. "I _know_
+he is honest."
+
+"Of course," protested Palmerston, with artificial warmth; "and, really,
+I think the place for the work is well selected. I am not much of an
+engineer, but I went up the other day and looked about, and there are
+certainly indications of water. I"--he stopped suddenly, aware of his
+mistake.
+
+The girl had not noticed it. "I wish I could make people over," she
+said, curling her fingers about her thumb, and striking the arm of her
+chair with the soft side of the resultant fist, after the manner of
+women.
+
+Her companion laughed.
+
+"Not every person, I hope; not this one, at least." He drew the
+photograph from his breast pocket and held it toward her. She took it
+from him, and looked at it absently an instant.
+
+"What a pretty girl!" she said, handing it back to him. "Your sister?"
+
+The young man flushed. "No; my fiancée."
+
+She held out her hand and took the card again, looking at it with fresh
+eyes.
+
+"A _very_ pretty girl," she said. "What is her name?"
+
+"Elizabeth Arnold."
+
+"Where does she live?"
+
+Palmerston mentioned a village in Michigan. His companion gave another
+glance at the picture, and laid it upon the arm of the chair. The young
+man rescued it from her indifference with a little irritable jerk. She
+was gazing unconsciously toward the horizon.
+
+"Don't you intend to congratulate me?" he inquired with a nettled laugh.
+
+She turned quickly, flushing to her forehead. "Pardon me. I said she was
+very pretty--I thought young men found that quite sufficient. I have
+never heard them talk much of girls in any other way. But perhaps I
+should have told you: I care very little about photographs, especially
+of women. They never look like them. They always make me think of paper
+dolls."
+
+She halted between her sentences with an ungirlish embarrassment which
+Palmerston was beginning to find dangerously attractive.
+
+"But the women themselves--you find them interesting?"
+
+"Oh, yes; some of them. Mrs. Dysart, for instance. As soon as she
+learned I had no mother, she invited me to a mothers' meeting. I thought
+that very interesting."
+
+"Very sensible, too. They are mostly childless mothers, and a sprinkling
+of motherless children will add zest to the assemblage."
+
+They both laughed, and the young man's laugh ended in a cough. The girl
+glanced uneasily toward the bank of fog that was sweeping across the
+valley.
+
+"Mr. Palmerston," she said, "the fog is driving in very fast, and it is
+growing quite damp and chilly. I think you ought to go home. Wait a
+minute," she added, hurrying into the tent and returning with a soft
+gray shawl. "I am afraid you will be cold; let me put this about your
+shoulders."
+
+She threw it around him and pinned it under his chin, standing in front
+of him with her forehead on a level with his lips.
+
+"Now hurry!"
+
+A man does not submit to the humiliation of having a shawl pinned about
+his shoulders without questioning his own sanity, and some consciousness
+of this fact forced itself upon Palmerston as he made his way along the
+narrow path through the greasewood. He had removed the obnoxious
+drapery, of course, and was vindicating his masculinity by becoming very
+cold and damp in the clammy folds of the fog which had overtaken him;
+but the shawl hung upon his arm and reminded him of many things--not
+altogether unpleasant things, he would have been obliged to confess if
+he had not been busy assuring himself that he had no confession to
+make. He had done his duty, he said to himself; but there was something
+else which he did not dare to say even to himself--something which made
+him dissatisfied with his duty now that it was done. Of course he did
+not expect her to care about his engagement, but she should have been
+sympathetic; well-bred women were always sympathetic, he argued,
+arriving at his conclusion by an unanswerable transposition of
+adjectives. He turned his light coat collar up about his throat, and the
+shawl on his arm brushed his cheek warmly. No man is altogether
+colorblind to the danger-signals of his own nature. Did he really want
+her to care, after all? he asked himself angrily. He might have spared
+himself the trouble of telling her. She was absorbed in herself, or,
+what was the same, in that unsavory fraud whom she called father. The
+young man unfastened the flap of his tent nervously, and took himself in
+out of the drenching mist, which seemed in some way to have got into his
+brain. He was angry with himself for his interest in these people, as
+he styled them in his lofty self-abasement. They were ungrateful,
+unworthy. His eye fell upon two letters propped up on his table in a
+manner so conspicuous as to suggest a knowledge of his preoccupation--as
+if some one were calling him out of his reverie in an offensively loud
+voice. He turned the address downward, and busied himself in putting to
+rights the articles which John had piled up to attract his tardy notice.
+He would read his letters, of course, but not in his present mood: that
+would be a species of sacrilege, he patronizingly informed his restive
+conscience.
+
+And he did read them later, after he had carefully folded the gray shawl
+and placed it out of his range of vision--half a score of closely
+written pages filled with gentle girlish analysis of the writer's love
+and its unique manifestations, and ending with a tepid interest in the
+"queer people" among whom her lover's lot was cast. "It is very hard, my
+dear," she wrote, "to think of you in that lonely place, cut off from
+everybody and everything interesting; but we must bear it bravely,
+since it is to make you strong and well."
+
+Palmerston held the letter in his hand, and looked steadily through the
+tent window across the sea of fog that had settled over the valley.
+
+"After all, she is not selfish," he reflected; "she has nothing to gain
+by saving Dysart, except"--he smiled grimly--"her rascally father's good
+name."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The rains were late, but they came at last, blowing in soft and warm
+from the southeast, washing the dust from the patient orange-trees and
+the draggled bananas, and luring countless green things out of the brown
+mould of the mesa into the winter sun. Birds fledged in the golden
+drought of summer went mad over the miracles of rain and grass, and
+riotously announced their discovery of a new heaven and a new earth to
+their elders. The leafless poinsettia flaunted its scarlet diadem at
+Palmerston's tent door, a monarch robbed of all but his crown, and the
+acacias west of the Dysart dooryard burst into sunlit yellow in a
+night.
+
+The rains had not been sufficient to stop work on the tunnel, and John
+watched its progress with the feverish eagerness of an inexperienced
+gambler. Now that it was fairly under way, Brownell seemed to lose
+interest in the result, and wandered, satchel in hand, over the
+mountain-side, leaving fragments of his linen duster on the thorny
+chaparral, and devising new schemes for the enrichment of the valley, to
+which his daughter listened at night in skeptical silence. Now and then
+his voice fell from some overhanging crag in a torrent of religious
+rapture, penetrating the cabin walls and trying Mrs. Dysart's pious soul
+beyond endurance.
+
+"Now listen to that, Emeline!" said John, exultantly, during one of
+these vocal inundations. "He's a-singin' the doxology. Now _I_ believe
+he's a Christian."
+
+Mrs. Dysart averted her face with a sigh of long-suffering patience.
+
+"Singin' is the easiest part of the Christian religion, Jawn. As for
+that,"--she jerked her head toward the source of vocal supply,--"it's
+soundin' brass; that's what I'd say if I was settin' in judgment, which
+I thank our heavenly Fawther I'm not."
+
+"Well, there goes Mr. Palmerston and the girl, anyway," said John, with
+eager irrelevance; "they seem to be gettin' pretty thick."
+
+Mrs. Dysart moved toward the open window with piously restrained
+curiosity.
+
+"I'm sorry for that girl," she said; "she's got one man more'n she can
+manage now, without tacklin' another."
+
+"Oh, well, now, Emeline, young folks, will be young folks, you know."
+There was in John's voice something dangerously near satisfaction with
+this well-known peculiarity of youth.
+
+"Yes; and they'll be old folks, too, which most of 'em seems to forget,"
+returned Mrs. Dysart, sending a pessimistic glance after the retreating
+couple.
+
+Mrs. Dysart was right. Sidney Palmerston and his companion were not
+thinking of old age that winter day. The mesa stretched a mass of purple
+lupine at their feet. There was the odor of spring, the warmth of
+summer, the languor of autumn, in the air. As they neared the caņon the
+path grew narrow, and the girl walked ahead, turning now and then, and
+blocking the way, in the earnestness of her speech. They had long since
+ceased to talk of the tunnel; Sidney had ceased even to think of it. For
+weeks he had hardly dared to think at all. There had been at first the
+keen sense of disappointment in himself which comes to every confident
+soul as it learns the limitations of its own will; then the
+determination, so easy to youth's foreshortening view, to keep the
+letter of his promise and bury the spirit out of his own sight and the
+sight of the world forever; then the self-pity and the pleading with
+fate for a little happiness as an advance deposit on the promise of
+lifelong self-sacrifice; then the perfumed days when thought was lulled
+and duty became a memory and a hope. Strangely enough, it was always
+duty, this unholy thing which he meant to do--this payment of a debt in
+base metal, when the pure gold of love had been promised. But ethics
+counted for little to-day as he followed a figure clad in blue serge
+down the path that led from the edge of the caņon to the bed of the
+stream. Budding willows made a green mist in the depths below them, and
+the sweet, tarry odors of the upland blew across the tops of the
+sycamores in the caņon and mingled with the smell of damp leaf-mould and
+the freshness of growing things.
+
+The girl paused and peered down into the caņon inquiringly.
+
+"Do you think of leaping?" asked Palmerston.
+
+She smiled seriously, still looking down. "No; I was wondering if the
+rainfall had been as light in the mountains as it has been in the
+valley, and how the water-supply will hold out through the summer if we
+have no more."
+
+Palmerston laughed. "Do you always think of practical things?" he asked.
+
+She turned and confronted him with a half-defiant, half-whimsical smile.
+
+"I do not think much about what I think," she said; "I am too busy
+thinking."
+
+As she spoke she took a step backward and tripped upon some obstacle in
+the path.
+
+Palmerston sprang forward and caught her upraised arm with both hands.
+
+"I--I--love you!" he said eagerly, tightening his grasp, and then
+loosening it, and falling back with the startled air of one who hears a
+voice when he thinks himself alone.
+
+The young woman let her arm fall at her side, and stood still an
+instant, looking at him with untranslatable eyes.
+
+"You love me?" she repeated with slow questioning. "How can you?"
+
+Palmerston smiled rather miserably. "Far more easily than I can explain
+why I have told you," he answered.
+
+"If it is true, why should you not tell me?" she asked, still looking at
+him steadily.
+
+Evasion seemed a drapery of lies before her gaze. Palmerston spoke the
+naked truth:
+
+"Because I cannot ask you to love me in return--because I have promised
+to marry another woman, and I must keep my promise."
+
+He made the last avowal with the bitter triumph of one who chooses death
+where he might easily have chosen dishonor.
+
+His listener turned away a little, and looked through the green haze of
+the caņon at the snow of San Antonio.
+
+"You say that you love me, and yet you intend to marry this other girl,
+who loves you, and live a lie?" she asked without looking at him.
+
+"My God! but you make it hard!" groaned Palmerston.
+
+She faced about haughtily.
+
+"I make it hard!" she exclaimed. "I have been afraid of you--not for
+myself, but for--for others, about something in which one might be
+mistaken. And you come to me and tell me this! You would cheat a woman
+out of her life, a girl who loves you--who promised to marry you because
+you told her you loved her; who no doubt learned to love you because of
+your love for her. And this is what men call honor! Do you know what I
+intend to do? I intend to write to this girl and tell her what you have
+told me. Then she may marry you if she wishes. But she shall know. You
+shall not feed her on husks all her life, if I can help it. And because
+I intend to do this, even if--even if I loved you, I could never see you
+again!"
+
+Palmerston knew that he stood aside to let her pass and walk rapidly out
+of the caņon.
+
+The call of insects and the twitter of linnets seemed to deepen into a
+roar. A faint "halloo" came from far up the mountain-side, and in the
+distance men's voices rang across the caņon.
+
+A workman came running down the path, almost stumbling over Palmerston
+in his haste.
+
+"Where's the old man--where's Dysart?" he panted, wiping his forehead
+with his sleeve. "We've struck a flow that's washing us into the middle
+of next week. The old professor made a blamed good guess this time,
+sure."
+
+
+
+
+Marg'et Ann
+
+
+It was sacrament Sabbath in the little Seceder congregation at Blue
+Mound. Vehicles denoting various degrees of prosperity were beginning to
+arrive before the white meeting-house that stood in a patch of
+dog-fennel by the roadside.
+
+The elders were gathered in a solemn, bareheaded group on the shady side
+of the building, arranging matters of deep spiritual portent connected
+with the serving of the tables. The women entered the church as they
+arrived, carrying or leading their fat, sunburned, awe-stricken
+children, and sat in subdued and reverent silence in the unpainted pews.
+There was a smell of pine and peppermint and last week's gingerbread in
+the room, and a faint rustle of bonnet strings and silk mantillas as
+each newcomer moved down the aisle; but there was no turning of heads or
+vain, indecorous curiosity concerning arrivals on the part of those
+already in the pews.
+
+Outside, the younger men moved about slowly in their creased black
+clothes, or stood in groups talking covertly of the corn planting which
+had begun; there was an evident desire to compensate by lowered voices
+and lack of animated speech for the manifest irreverence of the topic.
+
+Marg'et Ann and her mother came in the farm wagon, that the assisting
+minister, the Rev. Samuel McClanahan, who was to preach the "action
+sermon," might ride in the buggy with the pastor. There were four wooden
+chairs in the box of the wagon, and the floor was strewn with
+sweet-scented timothy and clover. Mrs. Morrison and Miss Nancy
+McClanahan, who had come with her brother from Cedar Township to
+communion, sat in two of the chairs, and Marg'et Ann and her younger
+sister occupied the others. One of the boys sat on the high spring seat
+with his brother Laban, who drove the team, and the other children were
+distributed on the hay between their elders.
+
+Marg'et Ann wore her mother's changeable silk made over and a cottage
+bonnet with pink silk strings and skirt and a white ruche with a wreath
+of pink flowers in the face trimming. Her brown hair was combed over her
+ears like a sheet of burnished bronze and held out by puff combs, and
+she had a wide embroidered collar, shaped like a halo, fastened by a
+cairngorm in a square setting of gold.
+
+Miss Nancy McClanahan and her mother talked in a subdued way of the Fast
+Day services, and of the death of Squire Davidson, who lived the other
+side of the creek, and the probable result of Esther Jane Skinner's
+trouble with her chest. There was a tacit avoidance of all subjects
+pertaining to the flesh except its ailments, but there was no long-faced
+hypocrisy in the tones or manner of the two women. Marg'et Ann listened
+to them and watched the receding perspective of the corn rows in the
+brown fields. She had her token tied securely in the corner of her
+handkerchief, and every time she felt it she thought regretfully of
+Lloyd Archer. She had hoped he would make a confession of faith this
+communion, but he had not come before the session at all. She knew he
+had doubts concerning close communion, and she had heard him say that
+certain complications of predestination and free will did not appear
+reasonable to him. Marg'et Ann thought it very daring of him to exact
+reasonableness of those in spiritual high places. She would as soon have
+thought of criticising the Creator for making the sky blue instead of
+green as for any of His immutable decrees as set forth in the Confession
+of Faith. It did not prevent her liking Lloyd Archer that her father and
+several of the elders whom he had ventured to engage in religious
+discussion pronounced him a dangerous young man, but it made it
+impossible for her to marry him. So she had been quite anxious that he
+should see his way clear to join the church.
+
+They had talked about it during intermission last Sabbath; but Marg'et
+Ann, having arrived at her own position by a process of complete
+self-abnegation, found it hard to know how to proceed with this stalwart
+sinner who insisted upon understanding things. It is true he spoke
+humbly enough of himself, as one who had not her light, but Marg'et Ann
+was quite aware that she did not believe the Catechism because she
+understood it. She had no doubt it could be understood, and she thought
+regretfully that Lloyd Archer would be just the man to understand it if
+he would study it in the right spirit. Just what the right spirit was
+she could not perhaps have formulated, except that it was the spirit
+that led to belief in the Catechism. She had hoped that he would come to
+a knowledge of the truth through the ministrations of the Rev. Samuel
+McClanahan, who was said to be very powerful in argument; but he had
+found fault with Mr. McClanahan's logic on Fast Day in a way that was
+quite disheartening, and he evidently did not intend to come forward
+this communion at all. Her father had spoken several times in a very
+hopeless manner of Lloyd's continued resistance of the Holy Spirit, and
+Marg'et Ann thought with a shiver of Squire Atwater, who was an
+infidel, and was supposed by some to have committed the unpardonable
+sin. She remembered once when she and one of the younger boys had gone
+into his meadow for wild strawberries he had come out and talked to them
+in a jovial way, and when they were leaving, had patted her little
+brother's head, and told him, with a great, corpulent laugh, to "ask his
+father how the devil could be chained to the bottomless pit." She did
+not believe Lloyd could become like that, but still it was dangerous to
+resist the Spirit.
+
+Miss Nancy McClanahan had a bit of mint between the leaves of her
+psalm-book, and she smelled it now and then in a niggardly way, as if
+the senses should be but moderately indulged on the Sabbath. She had on
+black netted mitts which left the enlarged knuckles of her hands
+exposed, and there was a little band of Guinea gold on one of her
+fingers, with two almost obliterated hearts in loving juxtaposition.
+Marg'et Ann knew that she had been a hardworking mother to the Rev.
+Samuel's family ever since the death of his wife, and she wondered
+vaguely how it would seem to take care of Laban's children in case
+Lloyd should fail to make his peace with God.
+
+When they drove to the door of the meeting-house, Archibald Skinner came
+down the walk to help them dismount. Mrs. Morrison shook hands with him
+kindly and asked after his sister's cough, and whether his Grandfather
+Elliott was still having trouble with his varicose veins. She handed the
+children to him one by one, and he lifted them to the ground with an
+easy swing, replacing their hats above their tubular curls after the
+descent, and grinning good-naturedly into their round, awe-filled,
+freckled countenances.
+
+Miss Nancy got out of the wagon backwards, making a maidenly effort to
+keep the connection between the hem of her black silk skirt and the top
+of her calf-skin shoes inviolate, and brushing the dust of the wagon
+wheel from her dress carefully after her safe arrival in the dog-fennel.
+Marg'et Ann ignored the chair which had been placed beside the wagon for
+the convenience of her elders, and sprang from the wheel, placing her
+hands lightly in those of the young man, who deposited her safely beside
+her mother and turned toward her sister Rebecca with a blush that
+extended to the unfreckled spaces of his hairy, outstretched hands, and
+explained his lively interest in the disembarkation of the family.
+
+Laban drove the team around the corner to a convenient hitching-place,
+and the women and children went up the walk to the church door. Mrs.
+Morrison stopped a moment on the step to remove the hats of the younger
+boys, whose awe of the sanctuary seemed to have deprived them of
+volition, and they all proceeded down the aisle to the minister's pew.
+
+The pastor and the Rev. Samuel McClanahan were already in the pulpit,
+their presence there being indicated by two tufts of hair, one black and
+the other sandy, which arose above the high reading-desk; and the elders
+having filed into the room and distributed themselves in the ends of the
+various well-filled pews, the young men and boys followed their example,
+the latter taking a sudden start at the door and projecting themselves
+into their places with a concentration of purpose that seemed almost
+apoplectic in its results.
+
+There was a deep, premonitory stillness, broken only by the precentor,
+who covertly struck his tuning-fork on the round of his chair, and held
+it to his ear with a faint, accordant hum; then the minister arose and
+spread his hands in solemn invocation above the little flock.
+
+"Let us pray."
+
+Every one in the house arose. Even old Mrs. Groesbeck, who had sciatica,
+allowed her husband and her son Ebenezer to assist her to her feet, and
+the children who were too small to see over the backs of the pews
+slipped from their seats and stood in downcast stillness within the high
+board inclosures.
+
+After the prayer, Mr. Morrison read the psalm. It was Rouse's version:--
+
+  "I joy'd when to the house of God,
+  Go up, they said to me.
+  Jerusalem, within thy gates
+  Our feet shall standing be.
+
+  Jerus'lem as a city is
+  Compactly built together.
+  Unto that place the tribes go up,
+  The tribes of God go thither."
+
+The minister read it all and "lined out" the first couplet. Then the
+precentor, a tall, thin man, whose thinness was enveloped but not
+alleviated by an alpaca coat, struck his tuning-fork more openly and
+launched into the highly rarefied atmosphere of "China," being quite
+alone in his vocal flight until the congregation joined him in the more
+accessible regions of the second line.
+
+Marg'et Ann shared her psalm-book with Laban, who sat beside her. He had
+hurt his thumb shelling seed corn, and his mother had made him a clean
+thumb-stall for Sabbath. It was with this shrouded member that he held
+the edge of the psalm-book awkwardly. Laban's voice was in that
+uncertain stage in which its vagaries astonished no one so much as its
+owner, but he joined in the singing. "Let all the people praise Thee"
+was a command not to be lightly set aside for worldly considerations of
+harmony and fitness, and so Laban sang, his callow and ill-adjusted
+soul divided between fears that the people would hear him and that the
+Lord would not.
+
+Marg'et Ann listened for Lloyd Archer's deep bass voice in the Amen
+corner.
+
+She wished his feet _were_ standing within the gates of Jerusalem, as he
+so resonantly announced that they would be. But whatever irreverence
+there might be in poor Laban refusing to sing what he did not dream of
+doubting, there was no impiety to these devout souls in Lloyd Archer's
+joining with them in the vocal proclamation of things concerning which
+he had very serious doubts.
+
+Not that Jerusalem, either new or old, was one of these things; the
+young man himself was not conscious of any heresy there; he believed in
+Jerusalem, in the church militant upon earth and triumphant in heaven,
+and in many deeper and more devious theological doctrines as well.
+Indeed, his heterodoxy was of so mild a type that, viewed by the
+incandescent light of to-day, which is not half a century later, it
+shines with the clear blue radiance of flawless Calvinism.
+
+If the tedious "lining out," traditionally sacred, was quite
+unreasonable and superfluous, commemorating nothing but the days of
+hunted Covenanters and few psalm-books and fewer still who were able to
+read them, perhaps the remembrance of these things was as conducive to
+thankfulness of heart as David's recital of the travails and triumphs of
+ancient Israel. Certain it is that profound gratitude to God and
+devotion to duty characterized the lives of most of these men and women
+who sang the praises of their Maker in this halting and unmusical
+fashion.
+
+Marg'et Ann sang in a high and somewhat nasal treble, compassing the
+extra feet of Mr. Rouse's doubtful version with skill, and gliding
+nimbly over the gaps in prosody by the aid of his dextrously elongated
+syllables.
+
+Some of the older men seemed to dwell upon these peculiarities of
+versification as being distinctively ecclesiastical and therefore
+spiritually edifying, and brought up the musical rear of such couplets
+with long-drawn and profoundly impressive "shy-un's" and "i-tee's;" but
+these irregularities found little favor in the eyes of the younger
+people, who had attended singing-school and learned to read buckwheat
+notes under the direction of Jonathan Loomis, the precentor.
+
+Marg'et Ann listened to the Rev. Mr. McClanahan's elaborately divided
+discourse, wondering what piece of the logical puzzle Lloyd would
+declare to be missing; and she glanced rather wistfully once or twice
+toward the Amen corner where the young man sat, with his head thrown
+back and his eager eyes fixed upon the minister's face.
+
+When the intermission came, she ate her sweet cake and her triangle of
+dried apple pie with the others, and then walked toward the graveyard
+behind the church. She knew that Lloyd would follow her, and she prayed
+for grace to speak a word in season.
+
+The young man stalked through the tall grass that choked the path of the
+little inclosure until he overtook her under a blossoming crab-apple
+tree.
+
+He had been "going with" Marg'et Ann more than a year, and there was
+generally supposed to be an understanding between them.
+
+She turned when he came up, and put out her hand without embarrassment,
+but she blushed as pink as the crab-apple bloom in his grasp.
+
+They talked a little of commonplace things, and Marg'et Ann looked down
+and swallowed once or twice before she said gravely,--
+
+"I hoped you'd come forward this sacrament, Lloyd."
+
+The young man's brow clouded.
+
+"I've told you I can't join the church without telling a lie, Marg'et
+Ann. You wouldn't want me to tell a lie," he said, flushing hotly.
+
+She shook her head, looking down, and twisting her handkerchief into a
+ball in her hands.
+
+"I know you have doubts about some things; but I thought they might be
+removed by prayer. Have you prayed earnestly to have them removed?" She
+looked up at him anxiously.
+
+"I've asked to be made to see things right," he replied, choking a
+little over this unveiling of his holy of holies; "but I don't seem to
+be able to see some things as you do."
+
+She pondered an instant, looking absently at the headstone of
+"Hephzibah," who was the later of Robert McCoy's two beloved wives, then
+she said, with an effort, for these staid descendants of Scottish
+ancestry were not given to glib talking of sacred things:
+
+"I suppose doubts are sent to try our faith; but we have the promise
+that they will be removed if we ask in the right spirit. Are you sure
+you have asked in the right spirit, Lloyd?"
+
+"I have prayed for light, but I haven't asked to have my doubts removed,
+Marg'et Ann; I don't know that I want to believe what doesn't appear
+reasonable to me."
+
+The girl lifted a troubled, tremulous face to his.
+
+"That isn't the right spirit, Lloyd,--you know it isn't. How can God
+remove your doubts if you don't want him to?"
+
+The young man reached up and broke off a twig of the round, pink
+crab-apple buds and rolled the stem between his work-hardened hands.
+
+"I've asked for light," he repeated, "and if when it comes I see things
+different, I'll say so; but I can't want to believe what I don't
+believe, and I can't pray for what I don't want."
+
+The triangle of Marg'et Ann's brow between her burnished satin puffs of
+hair took on two upright, troubled lines. She unfolded her handkerchief
+nervously, and her token fell with a ringing sound against tired
+Hephzibah's gravestone and rolled down above her patiently folded hands.
+
+Lloyd stooped and searched for it in the grass. When he found it he gave
+it to her silently, and their hands met. Poor Marg'et Ann! No hunted
+Covenanter amid Scottish heather was more a martyr to his faith than
+this rose-cheeked girl amid Iowa cornfields. She took the bit of
+flattened lead and pressed it between her burning palms.
+
+"I hope you won't get hardened in unbelief, Lloyd," she said soberly.
+
+The congregation was drifting toward the church again, and the young
+people turned. Lloyd touched the iridescent silk of her wide sleeve.
+
+"You ain't a-going to let this make any difference between you and me,
+are you, Marg'et Ann?" he pleaded.
+
+"I don't know," wavered the girl. "I hope you'll be brought to a sense
+of your true condition, Lloyd." She hesitated, smoothing the sheen of
+her skirt. "It would be an awful cross to father and mother."
+
+The young man fell behind her in the narrow path, and they walked to the
+church door in unhappy silence.
+
+Inside, the elders had accomplished the spreading of the tables with
+slow-moving, awkward reverence. The spotless drapery swayed a little in
+the afternoon breeze, and there was a faint fruity smell of communion
+wine in the room.
+
+The two ministers and some of the older communicants sat with bowed
+heads, in deep spiritual isolation.
+
+The solemn stillness of self-examination pervaded the room, and Marg'et
+Ann went to her seat with a vague stirring of resentment in her heart
+toward the Rev. Samuel McClanahan, who, with all his learning, could not
+convince this one lost sheep of the error of his theological way. She
+put aside such thoughts, however, before the serving of the tables, and
+walked humbly down the aisle behind her mother, singing the one hundred
+and sixteenth psalm to the quaint rising and falling cadences of
+"Dundee."
+
+Once, while the visiting pastor addressed the communicants, she thought
+how it would simplify matters if Lloyd were sitting opposite her, and
+then caught her breath as the minister adjured each one to examine
+himself, lest eating and drinking unworthily he should eat and drink
+damnation to himself.
+
+It was almost sunset when the service ended, and as the Morrisons drove
+into the lane the smell of jimson-weed was heavy on the evening air, and
+they could hear the clank of the cow bells in the distance.
+
+Marg'et Ann went to her room to lay aside her best dress and get ready
+for the milking, and Mrs. Morrison and Rebecca made haste to see about
+supper.
+
+Miss Nancy McClanahan walked about the garden in her much made-over
+black silk, and compared the progress of Mrs. Morrison's touch-me-nots
+and four-o'clocks with her own, nipping herself a sprig of tansy from
+the patch under the Bowerly apple-tree.
+
+She shared Marg'et Ann's room that night, and after she had taken off
+her lace headdress and put a frilled nightcap over her lonesome little
+knot of gray hair and said her prayers, she composed herself on her
+pillow with a patient sigh, and lay watching Marg'et Ann crowd her
+burnished braids into her close-fitting cap without speaking; but after
+the light was out, and her companion had lain down beside her, the old
+maid placed her knotted hand on the girl's more shapely one, and said:--
+
+"There's worse things than living single, Marg'et Ann, and then again I
+suppose there's better. Of course every girl has her chances, and the
+people we make sacrifices for don't always seem quite as grateful as we
+calculated they'd be. I'm not repinin', but I sometimes think if I had
+my life to live over again I'd do different."
+
+Marg'et Ann pressed the knotted fingers, that felt like a handful of
+hickory nuts, and touched the little circle with its two worn-out
+hearts, but she said nothing.
+
+She had heard that the Rev. Samuel McClanahan was going to marry the
+youngest Groesbeck girl, now that his children were "getting well up out
+of the way," and she knew that her mother had been telling Miss Nancy
+something about her own love affair with Lloyd Archer.
+
+Whatever Mrs. Morrison may have confided to Miss Nancy McClanahan
+concerning Marg'et Ann and her lover must have been entirely
+suppositional and therefore liable to error; for the confidence between
+parent and child did not extend into the mysteries of love and marriage,
+nor would the older woman have dreamed of intruding upon the sacred
+precinct of her daughter's feelings toward a young man. She had remarked
+once or twice to her husband that she was afraid sometimes that there
+was something between Lloyd Archer and Marg'et Ann; but whether this
+something was a barrier or a bond she left the worthy minister to
+divine.
+
+That he had decided upon the latter was evidenced, perhaps, by his reply
+that he hoped not, and his fear, which he had expressed before, that
+Lloyd was getting more and more settled in habits of unbelief; and Mrs.
+Morrison took occasion to remark the next day in her daughter's hearing
+that she would hate to have a child of hers marry an unbeliever.
+
+Marg'et Ann did not, however, need any of these helps to an
+understanding of her parents' position. She knew too well the danger
+that was supposed to threaten him who indulged in vain and unprofitable
+questionings, and she had too often heard the vanity of human reason
+proclaimed to feel any pride in the readiness with which Lloyd had
+answered Squire Wilson in the argument they had on foreordination at
+Hiram Graham's infare. Indeed, she had felt it a personal rebuke when
+her father had said on the way home that he hoped no child of his would
+ever set up his feeble intellect against the eternal purposes of God, as
+Lloyd Archer was doing. Marg'et Ann knew perfectly well that if she
+married Lloyd in his present unregenerate state she would, in the
+estimation of her father and mother, be endangering the safety of her
+own soul, which, though presumably of the elect, could never be
+conclusively so proved until the gates of Paradise should close behind
+it.
+
+She pondered on these things, and talked of them sometimes with Lloyd,
+rather unsatisfactorily, it is true; for that rising theologian bristled
+with questions which threw her troubled soul into a tumult of fear and
+uncertainty.
+
+It was this latter feeling, perhaps, which distressed her most in her
+calmer moments; for it was gradually forcing itself upon poor Marg'et
+Ann that she must either snatch her lover as a brand from the burning or
+be herself drawn into the flames.
+
+She had taken the summer school down on Cedar Creek, and Lloyd used to
+ride down for her on Friday evenings when the creek was high.
+
+Rebecca and Archie Skinner were to be married in the fall, and her
+mother, who had been ailing a little all summer, would need her at home
+when Rebecca was gone. Still, this would not have stood in the way of
+her marriage had everything else been satisfactory; and Lloyd suspected
+as much when she urged it as a reason for delay.
+
+"If anybody has to stay at home on your mother's account, why not let
+Archie Skinner and Becky put off their wedding a while? They're younger,
+and they haven't been going together near as long as we have," said
+Lloyd, in answer to her excuses.
+
+They were riding home on horseback one Friday night, and Lloyd had just
+told her that Martin Prather was going back to Ohio to take care of the
+old folks, and would rent his farm very reasonably.
+
+Marg'et Ann had on a slat sunbonnet which made her profile about as
+attractive as an "elbow" of stovepipe, but it had the advantage of
+hiding the concern that Lloyd's questioning brought into her face. It
+could not, however, keep it out of her voice.
+
+"I don't know, Lloyd," she began hesitatingly; then she turned toward
+him suddenly, and let him see all the pain and trouble and regret that
+her friendly headgear had been sheltering. "Oh, I _do_ wish you could
+come to see things different!" she broke out tremulously.
+
+The young man was quiet for an instant, and then said huskily, "I just
+thought you had something like that in your mind, Marg'et Ann. If you've
+concluded to wait till I join the church we might as well give it up. I
+don't believe in close communion, and I can't see any harm in occasional
+hearing, and I haven't heard any minister yet that can reconcile free
+will and election; the more I think about it the less I believe; I think
+there is about as much hope of your changing as there is of me. I don't
+see what all this fuss is about, anyway. Arch Skinner isn't a church
+member!"
+
+It was hard for Marg'et Ann to say why Archie Skinner's case was
+considered more hopeful than Lloyd's. She knew perfectly well, and so
+did her lover, for that matter, but it was not easy to formulate.
+
+"Ain't you afraid you'll get to believing less and less if you go on
+arguing, Lloyd?" she asked, ignoring Archie Skinner altogether.
+
+"I don't know," said Lloyd somewhat sullenly.
+
+They were riding up the lane in the scant shadow of the white locust
+trees. The corn was in tassel now, and rustled softly in the fields on
+either side. There was no other sound for a while. Then Marg'et Ann
+spoke.
+
+"I'll see what father thinks"--
+
+"No, you won't, Marg'et Ann," broke in Lloyd obstinately. "I think a
+good deal of your father, but I don't want to marry him; and I don't ask
+you to promise to marry the fellow I ought to be, or that you think I
+ought to be; I've asked you to marry _me_. I don't care what you believe
+and I don't care what your father thinks; I want to know what _you_
+think."
+
+Poor Lloyd made all this energetic avowal without the encouragement of a
+blush or a smile, or the discouragement of a frown or a tear. All this
+that a lover watches for anxiously was hidden by a wall of slats and
+green-checked gingham.
+
+She turned her tubular head covering toward him presently, however,
+showing him all the troubled pink prettiness it held, and said very
+genuinely through her tears,--
+
+"Oh, Lloyd, you know well enough what I think!"
+
+They had reached the gate, and it was a very much mollified face which
+the young man raised to hers as he helped her to dismount.
+
+"Your father and mother wouldn't stand in the way of our getting
+married, would they?" he asked, as she stood beside him.
+
+"Oh, no, they wouldn't stand in the way," faltered poor Marg'et Ann.
+
+How could she explain to this muscular fellow, whose pale-faced mother
+had no creed but what Lloyd thought or wanted or liked, that it was
+their unspoken grief that made it hard for her? How shall any woman
+explain her family ties to any man?
+
+Marg'et Ann did not need to consult her father. He looked up from his
+writing when she entered the door.
+
+"Was that Lloyd Archer, Marg'et Ann?" he asked kindly.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"I'd a little rather you wouldn't go with him. He seems to be falling
+into a state of mind that is likely to end in infidelity. It troubles
+your mother and me a good deal."
+
+Marg'et Ann went into the bedroom to take off her riding skirt, and she
+did not come out until she was sure no one could see that she had been
+crying.
+
+Mrs. Morrison continued to complain all through the fall; at least so
+her neighbors said, although the good woman had never been known to
+murmur; and Marg'et Ann said nothing whatever about her engagement to
+Lloyd Archer.
+
+Late in October Archie Skinner and Rebecca were married and moved to the
+Martin Prather farm, and Lloyd, restless and chafing under all this
+silence and delay, had no longer anything to suggest when Marg'et Ann
+urged her mother's failing health as a reason for postponing their
+marriage.
+
+Before the crab-apples bloomed again Mrs. Morrison's life went out as
+quietly as it had been lived. There was a short, sharp illness at the
+last, and in one of the pauses of the pain the sick woman lay watching
+her daughter, who was alone with her.
+
+"I'm real glad there was nothing between you and Lloyd Archer, Marg'et
+Ann," she said feebly; "that would have troubled me a good deal. You'll
+have your father and the children to look after. Nancy Helen will be
+coming up pretty soon, and be some help; she grows fast. You'll have to
+manage along as best you can."
+
+The girl's sorely troubled heart failed her. Her eyes burned and her
+throat ached with the effort of self-control. She buried her face in the
+patchwork quilt beside her mother's hand. The woman stroked her hair
+tenderly.
+
+"Don't cry, Marg'et Ann," she said, "don't cry. You'll get on. It's the
+Lord's will."
+
+The evening after the funeral Lloyd Archer came over, and Marg'et Ann
+walked up the lane with him. She was glad to get away from the Sabbath
+hush of the house, which the neighbors had made so pathetically
+neat,--taking up the dead woman's task where she had left it, and doing
+everything with scrupulous care, as if they feared some vision of
+neglected duty might disturb her rest.
+
+The frost was out of the ground and the spring plowing had begun. There
+was a smell of fresh earth from the furrows, and a red-bud tree in the
+thicket was faintly pink.
+
+Lloyd was silent and troubled, and Marg'et Ann could not trust her
+voice. They walked on without speaking, and the dusk was deepening
+before they turned to go back. Marg'et Ann had thrown a little homespun
+shawl over her head, for there was a memory of frost in the air, but it
+had fallen back and Lloyd could see her profile with its new lines of
+grief in the dim light.
+
+"It don't seem right, Marg'et Ann," he began in a voice strained almost
+to coldness by intensity of feeling.
+
+"But it _is_ right,--we know that, Lloyd," interrupted the girl; then
+she turned and threw both arms about his neck and buried her face on his
+shoulder. "Oh, Lloyd, I can't bear it--I can't bear it alone--you must
+help me to be--to be--reconciled!"
+
+The young man laid his cheek upon her soft hair. There was nothing but
+hot, unspoken rebellion in his heart. They stood still an instant, and
+then Marg'et Ann raised her head and drew the little shawl up and caught
+it under her quivering chin.
+
+"We must go in," she said staidly, choking back her sobs.
+
+Lloyd laid his hands on her shoulders and drew her toward him again.
+
+"Is there no help, Marg'et Ann?" he said piteously, looking into her
+tear-stained face. In his heart he knew there was none. He had gone over
+the ground a thousand times since he had seen her standing beside her
+mother's open grave with the group of frightened children clinging to
+her.
+
+  "God is our refuge and our strength,
+    In straits a present aid;
+  Therefore, although the earth remove
+    We will not be afraid,"
+
+repeated the girl, her sweet voice breaking into a whispered sob at the
+end. They walked to the step and stood there for a moment in silence.
+
+The minister opened the door.
+
+"Is that you, Marg'et Ann," he asked. "I think we'd better have worship
+now; the children are getting sleepy."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Almost a year before patient, tireless Esther Morrison's eternal holiday
+had come, a man, walking leisurely along an empty mill-race, had picked
+up a few shining yellow particles, holding in his hand for an instant
+the destiny of half the world. Every restless soul that could break its
+moorings was swept westward on the wave of excitement that followed.
+Blue Mound felt the magnetism of those bits of yellow metal along with
+the rest of the world, and wild stories were told at singing-school and
+in harvest fields of the fortunes that awaited those who crossed the
+plains.
+
+Lloyd Archer, eager, restless, and discontented, caught the fever among
+the first. Marg'et Ann listened to his plans, heartsore and helpless.
+She had ceased to advise him. There was a tacit acknowledgment on her
+part that she had forfeited her right to influence his life in any way.
+As for him, unconsciously jealous of the devotion to duty that made her
+precious to him and unable to solve the problem himself, he yet felt
+injured that she could not be true to him and to his ideal of her as
+well. If she had left the plain path and gone with him into the byways,
+his heart would have remained forever with the woman he had loved, and
+not with the woman who had so loved him; and yet he sometimes urged her
+to do this thing, so strange a riddle is the "way of a man with a maid."
+
+Lloyd had indulged a hope which he could not mention to any one, least
+of all to Marg'et Ann, that the minister would marry again in due
+season. But nothing pointed to a fulfillment of this wish. The good man
+seemed far more interested in the abolition of slavery in the South than
+in the release of his daughter from bondage to her own flesh and blood,
+Lloyd said to himself, with the bitterness of youth. Indeed, the
+household had moved on with so little change in the comfort of its
+worthy head that a knowledge of Lloyd's wishes would have been quite as
+startling to the object of them as the young man's reasons for their
+indulgence.
+
+The gold fever had seemed to the minister a moral disorder, calling for
+spiritual remedies, which he had not failed to administer in such
+quantity and of such strength as corresponded with the religious
+therapeutics of the day.
+
+Marg'et Ann hinted of this when her lover came to her with his plans.
+
+She was making soap, and although they stood on the windward side of the
+kettle, her eyes were red from the smoke of the hickory logs.
+
+"Do you think it is just right, Lloyd?" she asked, stirring the unsavory
+concoction slowly with a wooden paddle. "Isn't it just a greed for
+gold, like gambling?"
+
+Lloyd put both elbows on the top of the ash hopper and looked at her
+laughingly. He had on a straw hat lined with green calico, and his
+trousers were of blue jeans, held up by "galluses" of the same; but he
+was a handsome fellow, with sound white teeth and thick curling locks.
+
+"I don't know as a greed for gold is any worse than a greed for corn,"
+he said, trying to curb his voice into seriousness.
+
+"But corn is useful--it is food--and, besides, you work for it." Marg'et
+Ann pushed her sunbonnet back and looked at him anxiously.
+
+"Well, I've planted a good deal more corn than I expect to eat this
+year, and I was calculating to sell some of it for gold,--you wouldn't
+think that was wrong, would you, Marg'et Ann?"
+
+"No, of course not; but some one will eat it,--it's useful," maintained
+the girl earnestly.
+
+"I haven't found anything more useful than money yet," persisted the
+young man good-naturedly; "but if I come home from California with two
+or three bags full of gold, I'll buy up a township and raise corn by the
+wholesale,--that'll make it all right, won't it?"
+
+Marg'et Ann laughed in spite of herself.
+
+"You're such a case, Lloyd," she said, not without a note of admiration
+in her reproof.
+
+When it came to the parting there was little said. Marg'et Ann hushed
+her lover's assurances with her own, given amid blinding tears.
+
+"I'll be just the same, Lloyd, no matter what happens, but I can't let
+you make any promises; it wouldn't be right. I can't expect you to wait
+for me. You must do whatever seems right to you; but there won't be any
+harm in my loving you,--at least as long as you don't care for anybody
+else."
+
+The young man said what a young man usually says when he is looking into
+trustful brown eyes, filled with tears he has caused and cannot prevent,
+and at the moment, in the sharp pain of parting, the words of one were
+not more or less sincere than those of the other.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The years that followed moved slowly, weighted as they were with hard
+work and monotony for Marg'et Ann, and by the time the voice of the corn
+had changed three times from the soft whispering of spring to the hoarse
+rustling of autumn, she felt herself old and tired.
+
+There had been letters and messages and rumors, more or less reliable,
+repeated at huskings and quiltings, to keep her informed of the fortunes
+of those who had crossed the plains, but her own letters from Lloyd had
+been few and unsatisfactory. She could not complain of this strict
+compliance with her wishes, but she had not counted upon the absence of
+her lover's mother, who had gone to Ohio shortly after his departure and
+decided to remain there with a married daughter. There was no one left
+in the neighborhood who could expect to hear directly from Lloyd, and
+the reports that came from other members of the party he had joined
+told little that poor Marg'et Ann wished to know, beyond the fact that
+he was well and had suffered the varying fortunes of other gold-hunters.
+
+There were moments of bitterness in which she tried to picture to
+herself what her life might have been if she had braved her parents'
+disapproval and married Lloyd before her mother's death; but there was
+never a moment bitter enough to tempt her into any neglect of present
+duty. The milking, the butter-making, the washing, the spinning, all the
+relentless hard work of the women of her day, went on systematically
+from the beginning of the year to its end, and the younger children came
+to accept her patient ministrations as unquestioningly as they had
+accepted their mother's.
+
+She wondered sometimes at her own anxiety to know that Lloyd was true to
+her, reproaching herself meanwhile with puritanic severity for such
+unholy selfishness; but she discussed the various plaids for the
+children's flannel dresses with Mrs. Skinner, who did the weaving, and
+cut and sewed and dyed the rags for a new best room carpet with the same
+conscientious regard for art in the distribution of the stripes which
+was displayed by all the women of her acquaintance; indeed, there was no
+one among them all whose taste in striping a carpet, or in "piecing and
+laying out a quilt," was more sought after than Marg'et Ann's.
+
+"She always was the old-fashionedest little thing," said grandmother
+Elliott, who had been a member of Mr. Morrison's congregation back in
+Ohio. "I never did see her beat." The good old lady's remark, which was
+considered highly commendatory, and had nothing whatever to do with the
+frivolities of changing custom, was made at a quilting at Squire
+Wilson's, from which Marg'et Ann chanced to be absent.
+
+"It's a pity she don't seem to get married," said Mrs. Barnes, who was
+marking circles in the white patches of the quilt by means of an
+inverted teacup of flowing blue; "she's the kind of a girl _I'd_ 'a'
+thought young men would 'a' took up with."
+
+"Marg'et Ann never was much for the boys," said grandmother Elliott,
+disposed to defend her favorite, "and dear knows she has her hands full;
+it's quite a chore to look after all them children."
+
+The women maintained a charitable silence. The ethics of their day did
+not recognize any womanly duty inconsistent with matrimony. "A
+disappointment" was considered the only dignified reason for remaining
+single. Grandmother Elliott felt the weakness of her position.
+
+"I'm sure I don't see how her father would get on," she protested
+feebly; "he ain't much of a hand to manage."
+
+"If Marg'et Ann was to marry, her father would have to stir round and
+get himself a wife," said Mrs. Barnes, with cheerful lack of sentiment,
+confident that her audience was with her.
+
+"I've always had a notion Marg'et Ann thought a good deal more of Lloyd
+Archer than she let on,--at least more than her folks knew anything
+about," asserted Mrs. Skinner, stretching her plump arm under the quilt
+and feeling about carefully. "I shouldn't wonder if she'd had quite a
+disappointment."
+
+"I would have hated to see her marry Lloyd Archer," protested
+grandmother Elliott; "she's a sight too good for him; he's always had
+queer notions."
+
+"Well, I should 'a' thought myself she could 'a' done better," admitted
+Mrs. Barnes, "but somehow she hasn't. I tell 'Lisha it's more of a
+disgrace to the young man than it is to her."
+
+Evidently this discussion of poor Marg'et Ann's dismal outlook
+matrimonially was not without precedent.
+
+One person was totally oblivious to the facts and all surmises
+concerning them. Theoretically, no doubt, the good minister esteemed it
+a reproach that any woman should remain unmarried; but there are
+theories which refinement finds it easy to separate from daily life, and
+no thought of Marg'et Ann's future intruded upon her father's deep and
+daily increasing distress over the wrongs of human slavery. Marg'et Ann
+was conscious sometimes of a change in him; he went often and
+restlessly to see Squire Kirkendall, who kept an underground railroad
+station, and not infrequently a runaway negro was harbored at the
+Morrisons'. Strange to say, these frightened and stealthy visitors,
+dirty and repulsive though they were, excited no fear in the minds of
+the children, to whom the slave had become almost an object of
+reverence.
+
+Marg'et Ann read her first novel that year,--a story called "Uncle Tom's
+Cabin," which appeared in the "National Era,"--read it and wept over it,
+adding all the intensity of her antislavery training to the enjoyment of
+a hitherto forbidden pleasure. She did not fail to note her father's
+eagerness for the arrival of the paper; and recalled the fact that he
+had once objected to her reading "Pilgrim's Progress" on the Sabbath.
+
+"It's useful, perhaps," he had said, "useful in its way and in its
+place, but it is fiction nevertheless."
+
+There were many vexing questions of church discipline that winter, and
+the Rev. Samuel McClanahan rode over from Cedar Township often and held
+long theological discussions with her father in the privacy of the best
+room. Once Squire Wilson came with him, and as the two visitors left the
+house Marg'et Ann heard the Rev. Samuel urging upon the elder the
+necessity of "holding up Brother Morrison's hands."
+
+It was generally known among the congregation that Abner Kirkendall had
+been before the session for attending the Methodist Church and singing
+an uninspired hymn in the public worship of God, and it was whispered
+that the minister was not properly impressed with the heinousness of
+Abner's sin. Then, too, Jonathan Loomis, the precentor, who had at first
+insisted upon lining out two lines of the psalm instead of one, and had
+carried his point, now pushed his dangerous liberality to the extreme of
+not lining out at all. The first time he was guilty of this startling
+innovation, "Rushin' through the sawm," as Uncle John Turnbull
+afterwards said, "without deegnity, as if it were a mere human
+cawmposeetion," two or three of the older members arose and left the
+church; and the presbytery was shaken to its foundations of Scotch
+granite when Mr. Morrison humbly acknowledged that he had not noticed
+the precentor's bold sally until Brother Turnbull's departure attracted
+his attention.
+
+It is true that the minister had preached most acceptably that day from
+the ninth and twelfth verses of the thirty-fifth chapter of Job: "By
+reason of the multitude of oppressions they make the oppressed to cry:
+they cry out by reason of the arm of the mighty.... There they cry, but
+none giveth answer, because of the pride of evil men." And it is
+possible that the zeal for freedom that burned in his soul was rather
+gratified than otherwise by Jonathan's bold singing of the prophetic
+psalm:--
+
+  "He out of darkness did them bring
+    And from Death's shade them take,
+  Those bands wherewith they had been bound
+    Asunder quite he brake.
+
+  "O that men to the Lord would give
+    Praise for His goodness then,
+  And for His works of wonder done
+    Unto the sons of men."
+
+But such absorbing enthusiasm, even in a good cause, argued a doctrinal
+laxity which could not pass unnoticed.
+
+"A deegnifyin' of the creature above the Creator, the sign above the
+thing seegnified," Uncle Johnnie Turnbull urged upon the session,
+smarting from the deep theological wound he had suffered at Jonathan's
+hands.
+
+A perceptible chill crept into the ecclesiastical atmosphere which
+Marg'et Ann felt without thoroughly comprehending.
+
+Nancy Helen was sixteen now, and Marg'et Ann had taught the summer
+school at Yankee Neck, riding home every evening to superintend the
+younger sister's housekeeping.
+
+Laban had emerged from the period of unshaven awkwardness, and was going
+to see Emeline Barnes with ominous regularity.
+
+There was nothing in the affairs of the household to trouble Marg'et Ann
+but her father's ever increasing restlessness and preoccupation. She
+wondered if it would have been different if her mother had lived. There
+was no great intimacy between the father and daughter, but the girl
+knew that the wrongs of the black man had risen like a dense cloud
+between her father and what had once been his highest duty and pleasure.
+
+She was not, therefore, greatly surprised when he said to her one day,
+more humbly than he was wont to speak to his children:--
+
+"I think I must try to do something for those poor people, child; it may
+not be much, but it will be something. The harvest truly is great, but
+the laborers are few."
+
+"What will you do, father?"
+
+Marg'et Ann asked the question hesitatingly, dreading the reply. The
+minister looked at her with anxious eagerness. He was glad of the humble
+acquiescence that obliged him to put his half-formed resolution into
+words.
+
+"If the presbytery will release me from my charge here, I may go South
+for a while. Nancy Helen is quite a girl now, and with Laban and your
+teaching you could get on. They are bruised for our iniquities, Marg'et
+Ann,--they are our iniquities, indirectly, child."
+
+He got up and walked across the rag-carpeted floor. Marg'et Ann sat
+still in her mother's chair, looking down at the stripes of the
+carpet,--dark blue and red and "hit or miss;" her mother had made them
+so patiently; it seemed as if patience were always under foot for
+heroism to tread upon. She fought with the ache in her throat a little.
+The stripes on the floor were beginning to blur when she spoke.
+
+"Isn't it dangerous to go down there, father, for people like us,--for
+Abolitionists, I mean; I have heard that it was."
+
+"Dangerous!" The preacher's face lighted with the faint, prophetic joy
+of martyrdom; poor Marg'et Ann had touched the wrong chord. "It cannot
+be worse for me than it is for them,--I must go," he broke out
+impatiently; "do not say anything against it, child!"
+
+And so Marg'et Ann said nothing.
+
+Really there was not much time for words. There were many stitches to be
+taken in the threadbare wardrobe, concerning which her father was as
+ignorant and indifferent as a child, before she packed it all in the
+old carpet sack and nerved herself to see him start.
+
+He went away willingly, almost cheerfully. Just at the last, when he
+came to bid the younger children good-by, the father seemed for an
+instant to rise above the reformer. No doubt their childish unconcern
+moved him.
+
+"We must think of the families that have been rudely torn apart. Surely
+it ought to sustain us,--it ought to sustain us," he said to Laban as
+they drove away.
+
+Two days later they carried him home, crippled for life by the
+overturning of the stage near Cedar Creek.
+
+He made no complaint of the drunken driver whose carelessness had caused
+the accident and frustrated his plans; but once, when his eldest
+daughter was alone with him, he looked into her face and said, absently,
+rather than to her,--
+
+"Patience, patience; I doubt not the Lord's hand is in it."
+
+And Marg'et Ann felt that his purpose was not quenched.
+
+In the spring Lloyd Archer came home. Marg'et Ann had heard of his
+coming, and tried to think of him with all the intervening years of care
+and trial added; but when she saw him walking up the path between the
+flowering almonds and snowball bushes, all the intervening years faded
+away, and left only the past that he had shared, and the present.
+
+She met him there at her father's bedside and shook hands with him and
+said, "How do you do, Lloyd? Have you kept your health?" as quietly as
+she would have greeted any neighbor. After he had spoken to her father
+and the children she sat before him with her knitting, a very gentle,
+self-contained Desdemona, and listened while he told the minister
+stories of California, mentioning the trees and fruits of the Bible with
+a freedom and familiarity that savored just enough of heresy to make him
+seem entirely unchanged.
+
+When Nancy Helen came into the room he glanced from her to Marg'et Ann;
+the two sisters had the same tints in hair and cheek, but the straight,
+placid lines of the elder broke into waves and dimples in the younger.
+Nancy Helen shook hands in a limp, half-grown way, blushingly conscious
+that her sleeves were rolled up, and that her elders were maturely
+indifferent to her sufferings; and Lloyd jokingly refused to tell her
+his name, insisting that she had kissed him good-by and promised to be
+his little sweetheart when he came back.
+
+Marg'et Ann was knitting a great blue and white sock for Laban, and
+after she had turned the mammoth heel she smoothed it out on her lap,
+painstakingly, conscious all the time of a tumultuous, unreasonable joy
+in Lloyd's presence, in the sound of his voice, in his glance, which
+assured her so unmistakably that she had a right to rejoice in his
+coming.
+
+She did not see her lover alone for several days. When she did, he
+caught her hands and said, "Well, Marg'et Ann?" taking up the unsettled
+question of their lives where they had left it. And Marg'et Ann stood
+still, with her hands in his, looking down at the snow of the fallen
+locust-bloom at her feet, and said,--
+
+"When father is well enough to begin preaching again, then I
+think--perhaps--Lloyd"--
+
+But Lloyd did not wait to hear what she thought, nor trouble himself
+greatly about the "perhaps."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The minister's injuries were slow to mend. They were all coming to
+understand that his lameness would be permanent, and there was on the
+part of the older children a tense, pained curiosity concerning their
+father's feeling on the subject, which no word of his had thus far
+served to relieve. There was a grave shyness among them concerning their
+deepest feelings, which was, perhaps, a sense of the inadequacy of
+expression rather than the austerity it seemed. Marg'et Ann would have
+liked to show her sympathy for her father, and no doubt it would have
+lightened the burdens of both; but any betrayal of filial tenderness
+beyond the dutiful care she gave him would have startled the minister,
+and embarrassed them both. Life was a serious thing to them only by
+reason of its relation to eternity; a constant underrating of this world
+had made them doubtful of its dignity. Marg'et Ann felt it rather
+light-minded that she should have a lump in her throat whenever she
+thought of her father on crutches for the rest of his life. She wondered
+how Laban felt about it, but it was not likely that she would ever know.
+Laban had made the crutches himself, a rude, temporary pair at first,
+but he was at work on others now that were more carefully made and more
+durable; and she knew from this and the remarks of her father when he
+tried them that they both understood. It was not worth while to talk
+about it of course, and yet the household had a dull ache in it that a
+little talking might have relieved.
+
+Marg'et Ann had begged Lloyd not to speak to her father until the latter
+was "up and about." It seemed to her unkind to talk of leaving him when
+he was helpless, and Lloyd was very patient now, and very tractable,
+working busily to get the old place in readiness for his bride.
+
+Mr. Morrison sat at his table, reading, or writing hurriedly, or gazing
+absently out into the June sunshine. He was sitting thus one afternoon,
+tapping the arms of his chair nervously with his thin fingers, when
+Marg'et Ann brought her work and sat in her mother's chair near him. It
+was not very dainty work, winding a mass of dyed carpet rags into a
+huge, madder-colored ball, but there were delicate points in its
+execution which a restless civilization has hurried into oblivion along
+with the other lost arts, and Marg'et Ann surveyed her ball critically
+now and then, to be sure that it was not developing any slovenly
+one-sidedness under her deft hands. The minister's crutches leaned
+against the arm of his painted wooden chair with an air of mute but
+patient helpfulness. Marg'et Ann had cushioned them with patchwork, but
+he had walked about so much that she already noted the worn places
+beginning to show under the arms of his faded dressing-gown. He leaned
+forward a little and glanced toward her, his hand on them now, and she
+put down her work and went to his side. He raised himself by the arms of
+his chair, sighing, and took the crutches from her patient hand.
+
+"I am not of much account, child,--not of much account," he said
+wearily.
+
+Marg'et Ann colored with pain. She felt as a branch might feel when the
+trunk of the tree snaps.
+
+"I'm sure you're getting on very well, father; the doctor says you'll be
+able to begin preaching again by fall."
+
+The minister made his way slowly across the room and stood a moment in
+the open door; then he retraced his halting steps with their thumping
+wooden accompaniment and seated himself slowly and painfully again. One
+of the crutches slid along the arm of the chair and fell to the floor.
+Marg'et Ann went to pick it up. His head was still bowed and his face
+had not relaxed from the pain of moving. Standing a moment at his side
+and looking down at him, she noticed how thin and gray his hair had
+become. She turned away her face, looking out of the window and
+battling with the cruelty of it all. The minister felt the tenderness of
+her silent presence there, and glanced up.
+
+"I shall not preach any more, Marg'et Ann, at least not here, not in
+this way. If I might do something for those down-trodden people,--but
+that is perhaps not best. The Lord knows. But I shall leave the ministry
+for a time,--until I see my way more clearly."
+
+His daughter crossed the room, stooping to straighten the braided rug at
+his feet as she went, and took up her work again. Certainly the crimson
+ball was a trifle one-sided, or was it the unevenness of her tear-filled
+vision? She unwound it a little to remedy the defect as her father went
+on.
+
+"Things do not present themselves to my mind as they once did. I have
+not decided just what course to pursue, but it would certainly not be
+honorable for me to occupy the pulpit in my present frame of mind.
+You've been a very faithful daughter, Marg'et Ann," he broke off, "a
+good daughter."
+
+He turned and looked at her sitting there winding the great ball with
+her trembling fingers; her failure to speak did not suggest any coldness
+to either of them; response would have startled him.
+
+"I have thought much about it," he went on. "I have had time to think
+under this affliction. Nancy Helen is old enough to be trusted now, and
+when Laban marries he will perhaps be willing to rent the land. No doubt
+you could get both the summer and winter schools in the district; that
+would be a great help. The congregation has not been able to pay much,
+but it would be a loss"--
+
+He faltered for the first time; there was a shame in mentioning money in
+connection with his office.
+
+"I have suffered a good deal of distress of mind, child, but doubtless
+it is salutary--it is salutary."
+
+He reached for his crutches again restlessly, and then drew back,
+remembering the pain of rising.
+
+Marg'et Ann had finished the ball of carpet rags and laid it carefully
+in the box with the others. She had taken great pains with the
+coloring, thinking of the best room in her new home, and Lloyd had a
+man's liking for red.
+
+And now the old question had come back; it was older than she knew.
+Doubtless it was right that men should always have opinions and
+aspirations and principles, and women only ties and duties and
+heartaches. It seemed cruel, though, just now. She choked back the
+throbbing pain in her throat that threatened to make itself seen and
+heard.
+
+"Of course I must do right, Marg'et Ann."
+
+Her father's voice seemed almost pleading.
+
+Of course he must do right. Marg'et Ann had not dreamed of anything
+else. Only it was a little hard just now.
+
+She glanced at him, leaning forward in his chair with the crutches
+beside him. He looked feeble about the temples, and his patched
+dressing-gown hung loose in wrinkles. She crossed the room and stood
+beside him. Of course she would stay with him. She did not ask herself
+why. She did not reason that it was because motherhood underlies
+wifehood and makes it sweet and sufficing; makes every good woman a
+mother to every dependent creature, be it strong or weak. I doubt if she
+reasoned at all. She only said,--
+
+"Of course you will do right, father, and I will see about the school; I
+think I can get it. You must not worry; we shall get on very well."
+
+Out in the June sunshine Lloyd was coming up the walk with Nancy Helen.
+She had been gathering wild strawberries in the meadow across the lane,
+and they had met at the gate. Her sunbonnet was pushed back from her
+crinkly hair, and her cheeks were stained redder than her finger-tips by
+Lloyd's teasing.
+
+Marg'et Ann looked at them and sighed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After her brother's return from presbytery Miss Nancy McClanahan
+borrowed her sister-in-law's horse and rode over to visit the Morrisons.
+It was not often that Miss Nancy made a trip of this kind alone, and
+Marg'et Ann ran down the walk to meet her, rolling down her sleeves and
+smoothing her hair.
+
+Miss Nancy took the girl's soft cheeks in her hands and drew them into
+the shadow of her cavernous sunbonnet for a withered kiss.
+
+"I want to see your father, Margie," she whispered, and the gentle
+constraint of spiritual things came into Marg'et Ann's voice as she
+answered,--
+
+"He's in the best room alone; I moved him in there this morning to be
+out of the sweeping. You can go right in."
+
+She lingered a little, hoping her old friend's concern of soul might not
+have obscured her interest in the salt-rising bread, which had been
+behaving untowardly of late; but Miss Nancy turned her steps in the
+direction of the best room, and Marg'et Ann opened the door for her,
+saying,--
+
+"It's Miss McClanahan, father."
+
+The minister looked up, wrinkling his forehead in the effort to
+disentangle himself from his thoughts. The old maid crossed the room
+toward him with her quick, hitching step.
+
+"Don't try to get up, Joseph," she said, as he laid his hand on his
+crutches; "I'll find myself a chair."
+
+She sat down before him, crossing her hands in her lap. The little worn
+band of gold was not on her finger, but there was a smooth white mark
+where it had been.
+
+"Samuel got home from presbytery yesterday; he told me what was before
+them. I thought I'd like to have a little talk with you."
+
+Her voice trembled as she stopped. A faint color showed itself through
+the silvery stubble on the minister's cheeks; he patted the arms of his
+chair nervously.
+
+"I'm hardly prepared to discuss my opinions. They are vague, very vague,
+at best. I should be sorry to unsettle the faith"--
+
+"I don't care at all about your opinions," Miss Nancy interrupted,
+pushing his words away with both hands; "I only wanted to speak to you
+about Marg'et Ann."
+
+"Marg'et Ann!" The minister's relief breathed itself out in gentle
+surprise.
+
+"Yes, Marg'et Ann. I think it's time somebody was thinking of her,
+Joseph." Miss Nancy leaned forward, her face the color of a withered
+rose. "She's doing over again what I did. Perhaps it was best for you. I
+believe it was, and I don't want you to say a word,--you mustn't,--but I
+can speak, and I'm not going to let Marg'et Ann live my life if I can
+help it."
+
+"I don't understand you, Nancy."
+
+The minister laid his hands on his crutches and refused to be motioned
+back into his chair. He stood before her, looking down anxiously into
+her thin, eager face.
+
+"I know you don't. Esther never understood, either. You didn't know that
+Marg'et Ann gave up Lloyd Archer because he had doubts, but I knew it. I
+wanted to speak then, but I couldn't--to her--Esther,--and now you don't
+know that she's going to give him up again because you have doubts,
+Joseph. That's the way with women. They have no principles, only to do
+the hardest thing. But I know what it means to work and worry and pinch
+and have nothing in the end, not even troubles of your own,--they would
+be some comfort. And I'm going to save Marg'et Ann from it. I'm going
+to come here and take her place. I've got a little something of my own,
+you know; I always meant it for her."
+
+She stopped, looking at him expectantly. The minister turned away,
+rubbing his hands up and down his polished crutches. There was a soft,
+troubled light in his eyes.
+
+"Why, Nancy!"
+
+His companion got up and moved a step backward. Her cheeks flushed a
+pale, faded red.
+
+"Oh, no," she said, with a quick, impatient movement of her head, "not
+that, Joseph; that died years ago,--you are the same to me as other men,
+excepting that you are Marg'et Ann's father. It's for _her_. It's the
+only way I can live my life over again, by letting her live hers. I
+don't know that it will be any better; but she will know, she will have
+a certainty in place of a doubt. I don't know that my life would have
+been any better; I know yours would not, and anyway it's all over now. I
+know I can get on with the children, and I don't think people will
+talk. I hope you're not going to object, Joseph. We've always been very
+good friends."
+
+He shook his head slowly.
+
+"I don't see how I can, Nancy. It's very good of you. Perhaps," he
+added, looking at her with a wistful desire for contradiction,--"perhaps
+I've been a little selfish about Marg'et Ann."
+
+"I don't think you meant to be, Joseph," said the old maid soothingly;
+"when anybody's so good as Marg'et Ann, she doesn't call for much grace
+in the people about her. I think it's a duty we owe to other people to
+have some faults."
+
+Outside the door Marg'et Ann still lingered, with her anxiety about the
+bread on her lips and the shadow of much serving in her soft eyes. Miss
+Nancy stopped and drew her favorite into the shelter of her gaunt arms.
+
+"I'm coming over next week to help you get ready for the wedding,
+Margie," she said, "and I'm going to stay when you're gone and look
+after things. They don't need me at Samuel's now, and I'll be more
+comfortable here. I've got enough to pay a little for my board the rest
+of my life, and I don't mean to work very hard, but I can show Nancy
+Helen and keep the run of things. There, don't cry. We'll go and look at
+the sponge now. I guess you'd better ride over to Yankee Neck this
+afternoon, and tell them you don't want the winter school--There,
+there!"
+
+
+
+
+At the Foot of the Trail
+
+
+I
+
+The slope in front of old Mosey's cabin was a mass of purple lupine.
+Behind the house the wild oats were dotted with brodiæa, waving on long,
+glistening stems. The California lilac was in bloom on the trail, and
+its clumps of pale blossoms were like breaks in the chaparral, showing
+the blue sky beyond.
+
+In the corral between the house and the mountain-side stood a dozen or
+more burros, wearing that air of patient resignation common to very good
+women and very obstinate beasts. Old Mosey himself was pottering about
+the corral, feeding his stock. He stooped now and then with the
+unwillingness of years, and erected himself by slow, rheumatic stages.
+The donkeys crowded about the fence as he approached with a forkful of
+alfalfa hay, and he pushed them about with the flat of the prongs,
+calling them by queer, inappropriate names.
+
+A young man in blue overalls came around the corner of the house,
+swinging a newly trimmed manzanita stick.
+
+"Hello, Mosey!" he called. "Here I am again, as hungry as a coyote.
+What's the lay-out? Cottontail on toast and patty de foy grass?"
+
+The old man grinned, showing his worn, yellow teeth.
+
+"I'll be there in a minute," he said. "Just set down on the step."
+
+The young fellow came toward the corral.
+
+"I've got a job on the trail," he said. "I'm going down-town for my
+traps. Who named 'em for you?" he questioned, as the old man swore
+softly at the Democratic candidate for President.
+
+"Oh, the women, mostly. They take a lot of interest in 'em when they
+start out; they're afraid I ain't good to them. They don't say so much
+about it when they get back."
+
+"They're too tired, I suppose."
+
+"Yes, I s'pose so."
+
+"You let out five this morning, didn't you? I met them on my way down.
+The girl in bloomers seemed to be scared; she gave a little screech
+every few minutes. The others didn't appear to mind."
+
+"Oh, she wasn't afraid. Women don't make a noise when they're scared;
+it's only when they want to scare somebody else."
+
+The young fellow leaned against the fence and laughed, with a final
+whoop. A gray donkey investigated his hip pocket, and he reached back
+and prodded the intruder with his stick.
+
+"You seem to be up on the woman question, Mosey. It's queer you ain't
+married."
+
+The old man was lifting a boulder to hold down a broken bale of hay, and
+made no reply. His visitor started toward the cabin. The old man
+adjusted another boulder and trotted after his guest, brushing the hay
+from his flannel shirt. A column of blue-white smoke arose from the
+rusty stovepipe in the cabin roof, and the smell of overdone coffee
+drifted out upon the spiced air.
+
+"I was just about settin' down," said the host, placing another plate
+and cup and saucer on the blackened redwood table. "I'll fry you some
+more bacon and eggs."
+
+The visitor watched him as he hurried about with the short, uncertain
+steps of hospitable old age.
+
+"By gum, Mosey, I'd marry a grass-widow with a second-hand family before
+I'd do my own cooking."
+
+The young fellow gave a self-conscious laugh that made the old man
+glance at him from under his weather-beaten straw hat.
+
+"Your mind seems to run on marryin'," he said; "guess you're hungry. Set
+up and have some breakfast."
+
+The visitor drew up a wooden chair, and the old man poured two cups of
+black coffee from the smoke-begrimed coffee-pot and returned it to the
+stove. Then he took off his hat and seated himself opposite his guest.
+The latter stirred three heaping teaspoonfuls of sugar into his cup,
+muddied the resulting syrup with condensed milk, and drank it with the
+relish of abnormal health.
+
+"I tell you what, Mosey," he said, reaching for a slice of bacon and
+dripping the grease across the table, "there ain't any flies on the
+women when it comes to housekeeping. Now, a woman would turn on the
+soapsuds and float you clean out of this house; then she'd mop up, and
+put scalloped noospapers on all the shelves, and little white aprons on
+the windows, and pillow-shams on your bunk, and she'd work a doily for
+you to lay your six-shooter on, with 'God bless our home' in the corner
+of it; and she'd make you so comfortable you wouldn't know what to do
+with yourself."
+
+"I'm comfortable enough by myself," said the old man uneasily. "When you
+work for yourself, you know who's boss."
+
+"Naw, you don't, Mosey, not by a long shot; you don't know whether
+you're boss or the cookin'. I tried bachin' once"--the speaker made a
+grimace of reminiscent disgust; "the taste hasn't gone out of my mouth
+yet. You're a pretty fair cook, Mosey, but you'd ought to see my girl's
+biscuits; she makes 'em so light she has to put a napkin over 'em to
+keep 'em from floating around like feathers. Fact!" He reached over and
+speared a slice of bread with his fork. "If I keep this job on the
+trail, maybe you'll have a chance to sample them biscuits. I'm goin' to
+send East for that girl."
+
+"Where you goin' to live?"
+
+"Well, I didn't know but we could rent this ranch and board you, Mosey.
+Seems to me you ought to retire. It ain't human to live this way. If you
+was to die here all by yourself, you'd regret it. Well, I must toddle."
+
+The visitor stood a moment on the step, sweeping the valley with his
+fresh young glance; then he set his hat on the back of his head and went
+whistling down the road, waving his stick at old Mosey as he disappeared
+among the sycamores in the wash. The old man gathered the dishes into a
+rusty pan, and scalded them with boiling water from the kettle.
+
+"I believe I'll do it," he said, as he fished the hot saucers out by
+their edges and turned them down on the table; "it can't do no harm to
+write to her, no way."
+
+
+II
+
+Mrs. Moxom put on her slat sunbonnet, took a tin pan from the pantry
+shelf, and hurried across the kitchen toward the door. Her
+daughter-in-law looked up from the corner where she was kneading bread.
+She was a short, plump woman, and all of her convexities seemed
+emphasized by flour. She put up the back of her hand to adjust a
+loosened lock of hair, and added another high light to her forehead.
+
+"Where you going, mother?" she called anxiously.
+
+The old woman did not turn her head.
+
+"Oh, just out to see how the lettuce is coming on. I had a notion I'd
+like some for dinner, wilted with ham gravy."
+
+"Can't one of the children get it?"
+
+There was no response. Mrs. Weaver turned back to her bread.
+
+"Your grandmother seems kind of fidgety this morning," she fretted to
+her eldest daughter, who was decorating the cupboard shelves with tissue
+paper of an enervating magenta hue, and indulging at intervals in vocal
+reminiscences of a ship that never returned.
+
+"Oh, well, mother," said that young person comfortably, "let her alone.
+I think we all tag her too much. I hate to be tagged myself."
+
+"Well, I'm sure I don't want to tag her, Ethel; I just don't want her to
+overdo."
+
+Mrs. Weaver spoke in a tone of mingled injury and self-justification.
+
+"Oh, well, mother, she isn't likely to put her shoulder out of joint
+pulling a few heads of lettuce."
+
+The girl broke out again into cheerful interrogations concerning the
+disaster at sea:--
+
+  "Did she never_r_ re_tur_ren?
+  No, she never_r_ re_tur_rened."
+
+Mrs. Weaver gave a little sigh, as if she feared her daughter's words
+might prove prophetic, and buried her plump fists in the puffy dough.
+
+Old Mrs. Moxom turned when she reached the garden gate and glanced back
+at the house. Then she clasped the pan to her breast and skurried along
+the fence toward the orchard. Once under the trees, she did not look
+behind her, but went rapidly toward the field where she knew her son was
+plowing. The reflection of the sun on the tin pan made him look up, and
+when he saw her he stopped his team. She came across the soft brown
+furrows to his side.
+
+"I'd have come to the fence when I saw you, if I hadn't had the colt,"
+he said kindly. "What's wanted?"
+
+The old woman's face twitched. She pushed her sunbonnet back with one
+trembling hand.
+
+"Jason," she said, with a little jerk in her voice, "your paw's alive."
+
+The man arranged the lines carefully along the colt's back; then he took
+off his hat and wiped the top of his head on his sleeve, looking away
+from his mother with heavy, dull embarrassment.
+
+"I expect you'd 'most forgot all about him," pursued the old woman, with
+a vague reproach in her tone.
+
+"I hadn't much to forget," answered the man, resentment rising in his
+voice. "He hasn't troubled himself about me."
+
+"Well, he didn't know anything about you, Jason, he went away so soon
+after we was married. It's a dreadful position to be placed in. It 'u'd
+be awfully embarrassing to--to the Moxom girls."
+
+The man gave her a quick, curious glance. He had never heard her speak
+of his half-sisters in that way before.
+
+"They're so kind of high-toned," she went on, "just as like as not
+they'd blame me. I'm sure I don't know what to do."
+
+Jason kicked the soft earth with his sunburnt boot.
+
+"Where is he?" he asked sullenly.
+
+"In Californay."
+
+"How'd you hear?"
+
+"I got a letter. He wrote to Burtonville and directed it to Mrs.
+Angeline Weaver, and the postmaster give it to some of your uncle
+Samuel's folks, and they put it in another envelope and backed it to me
+here. I thought at first I wouldn't say anything about it, but it
+seemed as if I'd ought to tell you; it doesn't hurt you any, but it's
+awful hard on the--the Moxom girls."
+
+The man shifted his weight, and kicked awhile with his other foot.
+
+"Well, I'd just give him the go-by," he announced resolutely. "You're a
+decent man's widow, and that's enough. He's never"--
+
+"Oh, I ain't saying anything against your step-paw, Jason," the old
+woman broke in anxiously. "He was an awful good man. It seems queer to
+think it was the way it was. Dear me, it's all so kind of confusing!"
+
+The poor woman looked down with much the same embarrassment over her
+matrimonial redundance that a man might feel when suddenly confronted by
+twins.
+
+"I'm sure I don't see how I could help thinking he was dead," she went
+on after a little silence, "when he wrote he was going off on that trip
+and might never come back, and the man that was with him wrote that they
+got lost from each other, and water was so scarce and all that. And
+then, you know, I didn't get married again till you was 'most ten years
+old, Jason. I'm sure I don't know what to do. I don't want to mortify
+anybody, but I'd like to know just what's my dooty."
+
+"Well, I can tell you easy enough." The man's voice was getting beyond
+control, but he drew it in with a quick, angry breath. "Just drop the
+whole thing. If he's got on for forty years, mother, I guess he can
+manage for the rest of the time."
+
+"But it ain't so easy managin' when you begin to get old, Jason. I know
+how that is."
+
+Her son jerked the lines impatiently, and the colt gave a nervous start.
+
+"I suppose you know this farm really came to you from your paw, don't
+you, Jason?" she asked humbly.
+
+"Don't know as I did," answered the man, without enthusiasm.
+
+"Well, you see, after we was married, your grandfather Weaver offered
+your paw this quarter-section if he'd stay here in Ioway; but he had his
+heart set on going to Californay, and didn't want it; so after it
+turned out the way it did, and you was born, your grandfather gave me
+this farm, and I done very well with it. That's the reason your step-paw
+insisted on you having it when we was dividing things up before he
+died."
+
+"Seems to me father worked pretty hard on this place himself."
+
+The man said the word "father" half defiantly.
+
+"Mr. Moxom? Oh, yes, he was a first-rate manager, and the kindest man
+that ever drew breath. I remember when your sister Angie was born--oh,
+dear me!"--the old woman felt her voice giving way, and stopped an
+instant,--"it seems so kind of strange. Well, I guess we'd better just
+drop it, Jason. I must go back to the house. Emma didn't like my coming
+for lettuce. She'll think I've planted some, and am waitin' for it to
+come up."
+
+She gave her son a quivering smile as she turned away. He stood still
+and watched her until she had crossed the plowed ground. It seemed to
+him she walked more feebly than when she came out.
+
+"That's awful queer," he said, shaking his head, "calling her own
+daughters 'the Moxom girls.'"
+
+
+III
+
+Ethel Weaver had been to Ashland for the mail, and was driving home in
+the summer dusk. A dash of rain had fallen while she was in the village,
+and the air was full of the odor of moist earth and the sweetness of
+growing corn. The colt she was driving held his head high, glancing from
+side to side with youthful eagerness for a sensation, and shying at
+nothing now and then in sheer excess of emotion over the demand of his
+monotonous life.
+
+The girl held a letter in her lap, turning the pages with one
+unincumbered hand, and lifting her flushed face with a contemptuous "Oh,
+Barney, you goose!" as the colt drew himself into attitudes of quivering
+fright, which dissolved suddenly at the sound of her voice and the
+knowledge that another young creature viewed his coquettish terrors with
+the disrespect born of comprehension. As they turned into the lane west
+of the house, Ethel folded her letter and thrust it hastily into her
+pocket, and the colt darted through the open gate and drew up at the
+side door with a transparent assumption of serious purpose suggested by
+the proximity of oats.
+
+"Ed!" called the girl, "the next time you hitch up Barney for me, I wish
+you'd put a kicking-strap on him. I had a picnic with him coming down
+the hill by Arbuckle's."
+
+Ed maintained the gruff silence of the half-grown rural male as he
+climbed into the buggy beside his sister and cramped the wheel for her
+to dismount.
+
+"They haven't any quart jars over at the store, mother," said Ethel,
+entering the house and walking across to the mirror to remove her hat.
+"They're expecting some every day. Well, I do look like the Witch of
+Endor!" she exclaimed, twisting her loosened rope of hair and skewering
+it in place with a white celluloid pin. "That colt acted as if he was
+possessed."
+
+"Oh, I'm sorry about the jars," said Mrs. Weaver regretfully. "I wanted
+to finish putting up the curr'n's to-morrow."
+
+"Did you get any mail?" quavered grandmother Moxom.
+
+"I got a letter from Rob."
+
+There was a little hush in the room. The girl stood still before the
+mirror, with a sense of support in the dim reflection of her own face.
+
+"Is he well?" ventured the old woman feebly, glancing toward her
+daughter-in-law.
+
+"Yes, he's well; he's got steady work on some road up the mountain. He
+writes as if people keep going up, but he never tells what they go up
+for. He said something about a lot of burros, and at first I thought he
+was in a furniture store, but I found out he meant mules. An old man
+keeps them, and hires them out to people. Rob calls him 'old Mosey.'
+They're keeping bach together. Rob tried to make biscuits, and he says
+they tasted like castor oil."
+
+As her granddaughter talked, Mrs. Moxom seemed to shrink deeper and
+deeper into the patchwork cushion of her chair.
+
+"Rob wants me to come out there and be married," pursued the girl,
+bending nearer to the mirror and returning her own gaze with sympathy.
+
+"Why, Ethel!" Mrs. Weaver's voice was full of astonished disapproval. "I
+should think you'd be ashamed to say such a thing."
+
+"I didn't say it; Rob said it," returned the girl, making a little
+grimace at herself in the glass.
+
+"Well, I have my opinion of a young man that will say such a thing to a
+girl. If a girl's worth having, she's worth coming after."
+
+Mrs. Weaver made this latter announcement with an air of triumph in its
+triteness. Her daughter gave a little sniff of contempt.
+
+"Well, if a fellow's worth having, isn't he worth going to?" she asked
+with would-be flippancy.
+
+"Why, Ethel Imogen Weaver!" Mrs. Weaver repeated her daughter's name
+slowly, as if she hoped its length might arouse in the owner some sense
+of her worth. "I never did hear the like."
+
+The girl left the mirror, and seated herself in a chair in front of her
+mother.
+
+"It'll cost Rob a hundred dollars to come here and go back to
+California, and a hundred dollars goes a long way toward fixing up.
+Besides, he'll lose his job. I'd just as soon go out there as have him
+come here. If people don't like it they--they needn't."
+
+The girl's fresh young voice began to thicken, and she glanced about in
+restless search of diversion from impending tears.
+
+"Well, girls do act awful strange these days."
+
+Mrs. Weaver took warning from her daughter's tone and divided her
+disapproval by multiplying its denominator.
+
+"Yes, they do. They act sometimes as if they had a little sense,"
+retorted Ethel huskily.
+
+"Well, I don't know as I call it sense to pick up and run after a man,
+even if you're engaged to him; do you, mother?"
+
+Old Mrs. Moxom started nervously at her daughter-in-law's appeal.
+
+"Well, it does seem a long way to go on--on an uncertainty, Ethel," she
+faltered.
+
+The girl turned a flushed, indignant face upon her grandmother.
+
+"Well, I hope you don't mean to call Rob an uncertainty?" she demanded
+angrily.
+
+"Oh, no; I don't mean that," pleaded the old woman. "I haven't got
+anything agen' Rob. I don't suppose he's any more uncertain than--than
+the rest of them. I"--
+
+"Why, grandmother Moxom," interrupted the girl, "how you talk! I'm sure
+father isn't an uncertainty, and there wasn't anything uncertain about
+grandfather Moxom. To tell the honest truth, I think they're just about
+as certain as we are."
+
+The old woman got up and began to move the chairs about with purposeless
+industry.
+
+"It's awful hard to know what to do sometimes," she said, indulging in a
+generality that might be mollifying, but was scarcely glittering.
+
+"Well, it isn't hard for me to know _this_ time," said Mrs. Weaver, her
+features drawn into a look of pudgy determination. "No girl of mine
+shall ever go traipsing off to California alone on any such wild-goose
+chase."
+
+Ethel got up and moved toward the stairway, her tawny head thrown back,
+and an eloquent accentuation of heel in her tread.
+
+"I just believe old folks like for young folks to be foolish and
+wasteful," she said over her shoulder, "so they can have something to
+nag them about. I'm sure I"--She slammed the door upon her voice, which
+seemed to be carried upward in a little whirlwind of indignation.
+
+Mrs. Weaver glanced at her mother-in-law for sympathy, but the old woman
+refused to meet her gaze.
+
+"I'm just real mad at Rob Kendall for suggesting such a thing and
+getting Ethel all worked up," clucked the younger woman anxiously.
+
+Mrs. Moxom came back to her chair as aimlessly as she had left it.
+
+"Men-folks are kind of helpless when it comes to planning," she said
+apologetically. "To think of them poor things trying to keep house--and
+the biscuits being soggy! It does kind of work on her feelings, Emma."
+
+Mrs. Weaver gave her mother-in-law a glance of rotund severity.
+
+"I don't mind their getting married," she said, "but I want it done
+decent. I don't intend to pack my daughter off to any man as if she
+wasn't worth coming after, biscuits or no biscuits!"
+
+She lifted her chin and looked at her companion over the barricade of
+conventionality that lay between them with the air of one whose position
+is unassailable. The old woman sighed with much the same air, but with
+none of her daughter-in-law's satisfaction in it.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know," she said drearily; "sometimes it ain't easy to
+know your dooty at a glance."
+
+Mrs. Weaver made no response, but her expression was not favorable to
+such lax uncertainty.
+
+"The way mother Moxom talked," she said to her husband that night,
+"you'd have thought she sided with Ethel."
+
+Jason Weaver was far too much of a man to hazard an opinion on the
+proprieties in the face of his wife's disapproval, so he grunted an
+amiable acquiescence in that spirit of justifiable hypocrisy known among
+his kind as "humoring the women-folks." Privately he was disposed to
+exult in his daughter's spirit and good sense, and so long as these
+admirable qualities did not take her away from him, and paternal pride
+and affection were both gratified, he saw no reason to complain. This
+satisfaction, however, did not prevent his "stirring her up" now and
+then, as he said, that he might sun himself in the glow of her youthful
+temper and chuckle inwardly over her smartness.
+
+"Well, Dot, how's Rob?" he asked jovially one evening at supper about a
+month later. "Does he still think he's worth running after?"
+
+"I don't know whether he thinks so or not, but I know he is," asserted
+the young woman, tilting her chin and looking away from her father with
+a cool filial contempt for his pleasantries bred by familiarity. "He's
+well enough, but the old man that lives with him had a fall and broke
+his leg, and Rob has to take care of him."
+
+Old Mrs. Moxom laid down her knife and fork, and dropped her hands in
+her lap hopelessly.
+
+"Well, now, what made him go and do that?" she asked, with a fretful
+quaver in her voice, as if this were the last straw.
+
+"I don't know, grandmother," answered Ethel cheerfully. "As soon as he's
+well enough to be moved, they're going to take him to the county
+hospital. I guess that's the poorhouse. But Rob says he's so old they're
+afraid the bone won't knit; he suffers like everything. Poor old man,
+I'm awful sorry for him. Rob has to do all the cooking."
+
+The old woman pushed back her chair and brushed the crumbs from her
+apron.
+
+"I guess I'll go upstairs and lay down awhile, Emma. I been kind of
+light-headed all afternoon. I guess I set too long over them carpet
+rags."
+
+She got up and crossed the room hurriedly. Her son looked after her with
+anxious eyes. Presently they heard her toiling up the stairs with the
+slow, inelastic tread of infancy and old age.
+
+"I don't know what's come over your mother, Jason," said his wife. "She
+hasn't been herself all summer. Sometimes I think I'd ought to write to
+the girls."
+
+"Oh, I guess she'll be all right," said Jason, with masculine
+hopefulness. "Dot, you'd better go up by and by and see if grandmother
+wants anything."
+
+Safe in her own room, Mrs. Moxom sank into a chair with a long breath of
+relief and dismay.
+
+"The poorhouse!" she gasped. "That seems about as mortifying as to own
+up to your girls that you wasn't never rightly married to their father."
+
+She got up and wandered across the room to the bureau. "I expect he's
+changed a good deal," she murmured. She took a daguerreotype from the
+upper drawer, and gazed at it curiously. "Yes, I expect he's changed
+quite a good deal," she repeated, with a sigh.
+
+
+IV
+
+"Why, mother Moxom!"
+
+Mrs. Weaver sank into her sewing-chair in an attitude of pulpy despair.
+
+"Well, I don't see but what it's the best thing for me to do," asserted
+the old woman. "The cold weather'll be coming on soon, and I always have
+more or less rheumatism, and they say Californay's good for rheumatism.
+Besides, I think I need to stir round a little; I've stayed right here
+'most too close; and as long as Ethel has her heart set on going, I
+don't see but what it's the best plan. If I go along with her, I can
+make sure that everything's all right. If you and Jason say she can't
+go, why, then, I don't see but what I'll just have to start off and make
+the trip alone."
+
+"Why, mother Moxom, I just don't know what to say!"
+
+Mrs. Weaver's tone conveyed a deep-seated sense of injury that she
+should thus be deprived of speech for such insufficient cause.
+
+"'Tisn't such a very hard trip," pursued the old woman doggedly. "They
+say you get on one of them through trains and take your provision and
+your knitting, and just live along the road. It isn't as if you had to
+change cars at every junction, and get so turned round you don't know
+which way your head's set on your shoulders."
+
+Mrs. Weaver's expression began to dissolve into reluctant interest in
+these details.
+
+"Well, of course, if you think it'll help your rheumatism, and you've
+got your mind made up to go, _some_body'll have to go with you. Have you
+asked Jason?"
+
+"No, I haven't." Mrs. Moxom's voice took on an edge. "I can't see just
+why I've got to ask people; sometimes I think I'm about old enough to do
+as I please."
+
+"Why, of course, mother," soothed the daughter-in-law. "Would you go and
+see the girls before you'd start?"
+
+"No, I don't believe I would," answered the old woman, her voice
+relaxing under this acquiescence. "They'd only make a fuss. They've
+both got good homes and good men, and they're married to them right and
+lawful, and there's nothing to worry about. Besides, I'd just get
+interested in the children, and that'd make it harder. I've done the
+best I knew how by the girls, and I don't know as they've got any reason
+to complain"--
+
+"Why, no, mother," interrupted the daughter-in-law, with rising
+feathers, "I never heard anybody say but what you'd done well by all
+your children. I only thought they'd want to see you. I think they'd
+come over if they knew it--well, of course, Angie couldn't, having a
+young baby so, but Laura she'd come in a minute."
+
+"Well, I don't believe I want to see them," persisted Mrs. Moxom. "It'll
+only make it harder. I guess you needn't let them know I'm goin'. Ethel
+and I'll start as soon as she can get ready. Seems like Rob's having a
+pretty hard time. He couldn't come after Ethel now if he wanted to. It
+wouldn't be right for him to leave that--that--old gentleman."
+
+"Well, I wouldn't want the girls to have any hard feelings towards me."
+
+"The Moxom girls ain't a-going to have any hard feelings towards _you_,
+Emma," asserted the old woman, with emphasis.
+
+"She has the queerest way of talking about your sisters, Jason," Mrs.
+Weaver confided to her husband later. "It makes me think, sometimes,
+she's failing pretty fast."
+
+
+V
+
+As the road to the foot of the trail grew steeper, Rob Kendall found an
+increasing difficulty in guiding his team with one hand. His bride drew
+herself from his encircling arm reluctantly.
+
+"You'd better look after the horses," she said, with a vivid blush.
+"What'll grandmother think of us?"
+
+The young fellow removed the offending arm and reached back to pat the
+old lady's knee.
+
+"I ain't afraid of grandmother," he said joyously. "Grandmother's a
+brick. If she stays out here long, she'll soon be the youngest woman on
+the mesa. I shouldn't wonder if she'd pick up some nice old gentleman
+herself--how's that, grandmother?" He bent down and kissed his wife's
+ear. "Catch me going back on grandmothers after this!"
+
+"You haven't changed a bit, Rob," said Ethel fondly; "has he,
+grandmother?" She turned her radiant smile upon the withered face behind
+her.
+
+The old woman did not answer. The newly wedded couple resumed their
+rapturous contemplation of each other.
+
+"How's that funny old man, Rob?" asked Ethel, smoothing out her dimples.
+
+"Old Mosey? He's pretty rocky. I'm afraid he won't pull through." Rob
+strove to adjust his voice to the subject. "I'd 'a' got a house down in
+town, but I didn't like to leave him. We'll have to go pretty soon,
+though. I'm afraid you'll be lonesome up here."
+
+The old woman on the back seat leaned forward a little. The young couple
+smiled exultantly into each other's eyes, with superb scorn of the
+world.
+
+"Lonesome!" sneered the girl.
+
+Her husband drew her close to him with an ecstatic hug.
+
+"Yes, lonesome," he laughed, his voice smothered in her bright hair.
+
+The old woman settled back in her seat. The team made their way slowly
+through the sandy wash between the boulders. When they emerged from the
+sycamores, Rob pointed toward the cabin. "That's the place!" he said
+triumphantly.
+
+The sunset was sifting through the live-oaks upon the shake roof. Two
+tents gleamed white beside it, frescoed with the shadow of moving
+leaves. Ethel lifted her head from her husband's shoulder, and looked at
+her home with the faith in her eyes that has kept the world young.
+
+"I've put up some tents for us," said the young fellow gleefully; "but
+you mustn't go in till I get the team put away. I won't have you
+laughing at my housekeeping behind my back. Old Mosey's asleep in the
+shanty; the doctor gives him something to keep him easy. You can go in
+there and sit down, grandmother; you won't disturb him."
+
+He helped them out of the wagon, lingering a little with his wife in his
+arms. The old woman left them and went into the house. She crossed the
+floor hesitatingly, and bent over the feeble old face on the pillow.
+
+"It's just as I expected; he's changed a good deal," she said to
+herself.
+
+The old man opened his eyes.
+
+"I was sayin' you'd changed a good deal, Moses," she repeated aloud.
+
+There was no intelligence in his gaze.
+
+"For that matter, I expect I've changed a good deal myself," she went
+on. "I heard you'd had a fall, and I thought I'd better come out. You
+was always kind of hard to take care of when you was sick. I remember
+that time you hurt your foot on the scythe, just after we was married;
+you wouldn't let anybody come near you but me"--
+
+"Why, it's Angeline!" said the old man dreamily, with a vacant smile.
+
+"Yes, it's me."
+
+He closed his eyes and drifted away again. The old wife sat still on the
+edge of the bed. Outside she could hear the sigh of the oaks and the
+trill of young voices. Two or three tears fell over the wrinkled face,
+written close with the past, like a yellow page from an old diary. She
+wiped them away, and looked about the room with its meagre belongings,
+which Rob had scoured into expectant neatness.
+
+"He doesn't seem to have done very well," she thought; "but how could
+he, all by himself?" She got up and walked to the door, and looked out
+at the strange landscape with its masses of purple mountains.
+
+"I've got to do one of two things," she said to herself. "I've just got
+to own up the whole thing, and let the girls be mortified, or else I've
+got to keep still and marry him over again, and pass for an old fool the
+rest of my life. I don't believe I can do it. They've got more time to
+live down disgrace than I have. I believe I'll just come out and tell
+everything. Ethel!" she called. "Come here, you and Rob; I've got
+something to tell you."
+
+The young couple stood with locked arms, looking out over the valley. At
+the sound of her voice they clasped each other close in an embrace of
+passionate protest against the intrusion of this other soul. Then they
+turned toward the sunset, and went slowly and reluctantly into the
+house.
+
+
+
+
+Lib
+
+
+A young woman sat on the veranda of a small redwood cabin, putting her
+baby to sleep. The infant displayed that aggressive wide-awakeness which
+seems to characterize babies on the verge of somnolence. Now and then it
+plunged its dimpled fists into the young mother's bare white breast,
+stiffened its tiny form rebelliously, raised its head, and sent gleams
+of defiance from beneath its drooping eyelids.
+
+It was late in March, and the ground about the cabin was yellow with
+low-growing compositæ. The air was honey-sweet and dripping with
+bird-song. Inside the house a woman and a girl were talking.
+
+"Oh, he's not worrying," said the latter. "What's he got to worry about?
+He lets us do all that. Lib's got the baby and we've got to bear all the
+disgrace. I"--
+
+"Myrtie," called a clear voice from the veranda, "shut up! You may say
+what you please about me, and you may say what you please about him, but
+nobody's going to call this baby a disgrace."
+
+She caught the child up and kissed the back of its neck with passionate
+vehemence. The baby struggled in her embrace and gave a little cry of
+outraged dignity.
+
+Indoors the girl looked at her mother and bit her lip in astonished
+dismay.
+
+"I didn't know she could hear," she whispered.
+
+A tall young woman came up the walk, trailing her tawdry ruffles over
+the fragrant alfileria.
+
+"Is Miss Sunderland"--She colored a dull pink and glanced at the baby.
+
+"I'm Lib Sunderland. Won't you come in?" said Lib.
+
+The newcomer sank down on the upper step and leaned against the post of
+the veranda.
+
+"No. I don't want to see any one but you. I guess we can talk here."
+
+The baby sat up at the sound of the stranger's voice and stared at her
+with round, blinking eyes. She drew off her cotton gloves and whipped
+her knee with them in awkward embarrassment. She had small, regular
+features of the kind that remain the same from childhood to old age, and
+her liver-colored hair rolled in a billow almost to her eyes.
+
+"Maybe you'll think it strange for me to come," she began, "but I didn't
+know what else to do. I'm Ruby Adair."
+
+She waited a little, but her statement awoke no response in Lib's
+noncommittal face.
+
+"I don't know whether you know what they're saying over at the store or
+not," the visitor went on haltingly.
+
+"No," said Lib, with dry indifference; "there ain't any men in our
+family to do the loafin' and gossipin' for us."
+
+"Since you moved over here from Bunch Grass Valley, they're saying that
+Thad Farnham is the--is--you know he was in the tile works over there a
+year or more ago."
+
+"Yes, I know." Lib's voice was like the crackling of dead leaves under
+foot.
+
+"I think it's pretty hard," continued Miss Adair, gathering courage, and
+glancing from under the surf of her hair at her listener's impassive
+face; "him and me's engaged!"
+
+Lib's eyes narrowed, and the velvety down on her lip showed black
+against the whiteness around her mouth.
+
+"What does _he_ say?" she asked.
+
+"What can he say?" Thad's fiancée broke out nervously, "except that it
+ain't so. But that doesn't shut people's mouths. Nobody can do that but
+you. I think"--she raised her chin virtuously and twisted her gloves
+tight in her trembling hands--"that you ought to come out plain and tell
+who the man is--I mean the--you know what I mean!"
+
+"Yes," said Lib dully, "I know what you mean."
+
+There was a little silence, broken only by the mad twitter of nesting
+linnets in the passion-vine overhead.
+
+"Of course," resumed the stranger, "I wouldn't want you to think but
+what I'm sorry for you. You've been treated awful mean by somebody."
+
+A surprised look grew in the eyes Lib fixed upon her visitor. The baby
+stirred in its sleep, and she bent down and rubbed her cheek against its
+hair.
+
+"You needn't waste any time being sorry for me," she said.
+
+"It's too bad," continued Miss Adair, intent upon her own exalted
+charity, "but that doesn't make it right for you to get other folks into
+trouble. You'd ought to remember that."
+
+"If you think he's all right, why don't you go ahead and marry him?"
+asked Lib.
+
+"My folks would make such a fuss, and besides I don't know as it would
+be just right for me to act like I didn't care, after all that's been
+said--and me a church-member!"
+
+Miss Ruby bent her head a little forward, as if under the weight of her
+moral obligations.
+
+"Has he joined the church?" inquired Lib in a curious voice.
+
+"He's been going to the union meetings regular with me, and he's stood
+up twice for prayers, but I dunno 's they'd take him into the church with
+all these stories going about. You'd ought to think of that, too--you
+may be standing in the way of saving his soul."
+
+"If his soul was lost, it would be awful hard to find," said Lib
+quietly.
+
+Her listener's weak mouth slackened. "Wh-at?" she asked, with a little
+stuttering gasp.
+
+"Oh, I dunno. Some things _are_ hard to find when they're lost, you
+know."
+
+"And you'll speak up and tell the truth?" The visitor arose, gathering
+her flounces about her with one hand.
+
+"If I speak up, I'll tell the truth, you can bet on that," said Lib.
+
+Miss Adair waited an instant, as if for some assurance which Lib did not
+vouchsafe. Then she writhed down the walk in her twisted drapery and
+disappeared.
+
+Thad Farnham and his father had been cutting down a eucalyptus-tree. The
+two men looked small and mean clambering over the felled giant, as if
+belonging to some species of destructive insect. The tree in its fall
+had bruised the wild growth, and the air was full of oily medicinal
+odors. Long strips of curled cinnamon-colored bark strewed the ground.
+The father and son confronted each other across the pallid trunk. The
+older man's face was leathery-red with anger.
+
+"The story's got around that the kid's yours, anyway," he announced. "I
+don't care who started it, but if it's true, you'll make a bee-line for
+the widow's and marry the girl. D'you hear?"
+
+Thad dropped his eyes sullenly and made a feint of examining the
+crosscut saw.
+
+"I don't go much on family," continued old Farnham, "and I never 'lowed
+you'd set anything on fire excepting maybe yourself, but I'm not raising
+sneaks and liars, and what little I've got hain't been scraped together
+to fatten that kind of stock!"
+
+"Who said I lied?"
+
+"Nobody. But I'm going to take you over to face that girl and see what
+she says. If you don't foller peaceable, I'll coax you along with a
+hatful of cartridges. I hear you've been whining around the revival
+meetings. I never suspected you till I heard that!"
+
+"I don't see why you suspect a feller for lookin' after the salvation"--
+
+"Oh, damn your salvation!" broke in the old man.
+
+"Well, I dunno"--
+
+"Well, I _do_!" roared the father; "I know you can't make an angel
+without a man to start with, and I'll do what I can to furnish the man,
+seein' I'm responsible for you bein' born in the shape of one, and the
+preachers may put in the wing and the tail feathers if they can! Now
+start that saw!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Old Farnham and his son sat in the small front room of the widow
+Sunderland's cabin. The old man's jaw was set, and he grasped his knees
+with his big hairy hands as if to steady himself.
+
+Neither of the men arose when Lib came into the room with the baby. The
+old man's eyes followed her as she seated herself without so much as a
+glance at his companion.
+
+"My name's Farnham," he began hoarsely. "This is my son Thad. You've met
+him, maybe?" He stopped and cleared his throat.
+
+Lib did not turn her head.
+
+"Yes, I've met him," she said quietly.
+
+The old man's face turned the color of dull terra-cotta.
+
+"They say he took advantage of you. I don't know. I wasn't much as a
+young feller, but I wasn't a scrub, and I don't savvy scrubs. I fetched
+him over here to-day to ask you if it's true, and to say to you if it
+is, he'll marry you or there'll be trouble. That don't square it, but
+it's the best I can do."
+
+There was a tense stillness in the little room. The baby gave a squeal
+of delight and kicked a small red stocking from its dimpled foot. The
+old man picked it up and laid it on Lib's lap. She looked straight into
+his face for a while before she spoke.
+
+"I guess you're a good man, Mr. Farnham," she said slowly. "I wouldn't
+mind being your daughter-in-law, if you had a son that took after you. I
+think the baby would like you very well for a grandpap, too. The older
+he grows, the more particular I'm getting about his relations. I didn't
+think much about anything before he came, but I've done a lot of
+thinkin' since. I guess that's generally the way with girls."
+
+She turned toward Thad, and her voice cut the air like a lash.
+
+"Suppose you _was_ the father of this baby, and had to be drug here by
+the scruff of the neck to own it, wouldn't you think I'd done the poor
+little thing harm enough just by--by _that_, without tackin' you onto
+him for the rest of his life? No, sir!" She stood up and took a step
+backward. "You go and tell everybody--tell Ruby Adair, that I say this
+child hasn't any father; he never had any, but he's got a _mother_, and
+a mother that thinks too much of him to disgrace him by marrying a
+coward, which is more than she'll be able to say for _her_ children if
+she ever has any! Now go!"
+
+
+
+
+For Value Received
+
+
+A soft yellow haze lay over the San Jacinto plain, deepening into
+purple, where the mountains lifted themselves against the horizon. Nancy
+Watson stood in her cabin door, and held her bony, moistened finger out
+into the tepid air.
+
+"I believe there's a little breath of wind from the southeast, Robert,"
+she said, with a desperate hopefulness; "but the air doesn't feel
+rainy."
+
+"Oh, I guess the rains'll come along all right; they gener'lly do." The
+man's voice was husky and weak. "Anyway, the barley'll hold its own
+quite a while yet."
+
+"Oh, yes; quite a long while," acquiesced his wife, with an eager,
+artificial stress on the adjective. "I don't care much if the harvest
+isn't earlier'n usual; I want you to pick up your strength."
+
+She turned into the room, a strained smile twitching her
+weather-stained face. She was glad Robert's bed was in the farthest
+corner away from the window. The barley-field that stretched about the
+little redwood cabin was a pale yellowish green, deeper in the
+depressions, and fading almost into brown on the hillocks. There had
+been heavy showers late in October, and the early sown grain had
+sprouted. It was past the middle of November now, and the sky was of
+that serene, cloudless Californian blue which is like a perpetual
+smiling denial of any possibility of rain.
+
+"Is the barley turning yellow any?" queried the sick man feebly.
+
+Nancy hesitated.
+
+"Oh, not to speak of," she faltered, swallowing hard.
+
+Her husband was used to that gulping sob in her voice when she stood in
+the door. There was a little grave on the edge of the barley-field. He
+had put a bit of woven-wire fence about it to keep out the rabbits, and
+Nancy had planted some geraniums inside the small inclosure. There were
+some of the fiery blossoms in an old oyster can at the head of the
+little mound, lifting their brilliant smile toward the unfeeling blue of
+the sky.
+
+"There's pretty certain to be late rains, anyway," the man went on
+hoarsely. "Leech would let us have more seed if it wasn't for the
+mortgage." His voice broke into a strained whisper on the last word.
+
+Nancy crossed the room, and laid her knotted hand on his forehead.
+
+"You hain't got any fever to-day," she said irrelevantly.
+
+"Oh, no; I'm gettin' on fine; I'll be up in a day or two. The
+mortgage'll be due next month, Nancy," he went on, looking down at his
+thin gray hands on the worn coverlet; "I calc'lated they'd hold off till
+harvest, if the crop was comin' on all right." He glanced up at her
+anxiously.
+
+The woman's careworn face worked in a cruel convulsive effort at
+self-control.
+
+"It ain't right, Robert!" she broke out fiercely. "You've paid more'n
+the place is worth now; if they take it for what's back, it ain't
+right!"
+
+Her husband looked at her with pleading in his sunken eyes. He felt
+himself too weak for principles, hardly strong enough to cope with
+facts.
+
+"But they ain't to blame," he urged; "they lent me the money to pay
+Thomson. It was straight cash; I guess it's all right."
+
+"There's wrong somewhere," persisted the woman, hurling her abstract
+justice recklessly in the face of the evidence. "If the place is worth
+more, you've made it so workin' when you wasn't able. If they take it
+now, I'll feel like burnin' down the house and choppin' out every tree
+you've planted!"
+
+The man turned wearily on his pillow. His wife could see the gaunt lines
+of his unshaven neck. She put her hand to her aching throat and looked
+at him helplessly; then she turned and went back to the door. The barley
+_was_ turning yellow. She looked toward the little grave on the edge of
+the field. More than the place was worth, she had said. What was it
+worth? Suppose they should take it. She drew her high shoulders forward
+and shivered in the warm air. The anger in her hard-featured face
+wrought itself into fixed lines. She recrossed the room, and sat down on
+the edge of the bed.
+
+"How much is the mortgage, Robert?" she asked calmly. The sick man gave
+a sighing breath of relief, and drew a worn account-book from under his
+pillow.
+
+"It'll be $287.65, interest an' all, when it's due," he said, consulting
+his cramped figures. Each knew the amount perfectly well, but the feint
+of asking and telling eased them both.
+
+"I'm going down to San Diego to see them about it," said Nancy; "I can't
+explain things in writing. There's the money for the children's shoes;
+if the rains hold off, they can go barefoot till Christmas. Mother can
+keep Lizzie out of school, and I guess Bobbie and Frank can 'tend to
+things outside."
+
+A four-year-old boy came around the house wailing out a grief that
+seemed to abate suddenly at sight of his mother. Nancy picked him up and
+held him in her lap while she took a splinter from the tip of his little
+grimy outstretched finger; then she hugged him almost fiercely, and set
+him on the doorstep.
+
+"What's the matter with gramma's baby?" called an anxious voice from the
+kitchen.
+
+"Oh, nothing, mother; he got a sliver in his finger; I just took it
+out."
+
+"He's father's little soldier," said Robert huskily; "he ain't a-goin'
+to cry about a little thing like that."
+
+The little soldier sat on the doorstep, striving to get his sobs under
+military discipline and contemplating his tiny finger ruefully.
+
+An old woman came through the room with a white cloth in her hand.
+
+"Gramma'll tie it up for him," she said soothingly, sitting down on the
+step, and tearing off a bandage wide enough for a broken limb.
+
+The patient heaved a deep sigh of content as the unwieldiness of the
+wounded member increased, and held his fat little fingers wide apart to
+accommodate the superfluity of rag.
+
+"There, now," said the old woman, rubbing his soft little gingham back
+fondly; "gramma'll go and show him the turkeys."
+
+The two disappeared around the corner of the house, and the man and
+woman came drearily back to their conference.
+
+"If you go, Nancy," said Robert, essaying a wan smile, "I hope you'll be
+careful what you say to 'em; you must remember they don't _think_
+they're to blame."
+
+"I won't promise anything at all," asserted Nancy, hitching her angular
+shoulders; "more'n likely, I'll tell 'em just what I think. I ain't
+afraid of hurtin' their feelin's, for they hain't got any. I think
+money's a good deal like your skin; it keeps you from feelin' things
+that make you smart dreadfully when you get it knocked off."
+
+Robert smiled feebly, and rubbed his moist, yielding hand across his
+wife's misshapen knuckles.
+
+"Well, then, you hadn't ought to be hard on 'em, Nancy; it's no more'n
+natural to want to save your skin," he said, closing his eyes wearily.
+
+"Robert Watson?"
+
+The teller of the Merchants' and Fruitgrowers' Bank looked through the
+bars of his gilded cage, and repeated the name reflectively. He did not
+notice the eager look of the woman who confronted him, but he did wonder
+a little that she had failed to brush the thick dust of travel from the
+shoulders of her rusty cape.
+
+The teller was a slender, immaculate young man, whose hair arose in an
+alert brush from his forehead, which was high and seemed to have been
+polished by the same process that had given such a faultless and
+aggressive gloss to his linen. He turned on his spry little heel and
+stepped to the back of the inclosure, where he took a handful of long,
+narrow papers from a leather case, and ran over them hastily. Nancy did
+not think it possible that he could be reading them; the setting in his
+ring made a little streak of light as his fingers flew. She watched him
+with tense earnestness; it seemed to her that the beating of her heart
+shook the polished counter she leaned against. She hid her
+cotton-gloved hands under her cape for fear he would see how they
+trembled.
+
+The teller returned the papers to their case, and consulted a stout,
+short-visaged man, whose lips and brows drew themselves together in an
+effort of recollection.
+
+The two men stood near enough to hear Nancy's voice. She pressed her
+weather-beaten face close to the gilded bars.
+
+"I am Mrs. Watson. I came down to see you about it; my husband's been
+poorly and couldn't come. We'd like to get a little more time; we've had
+bad luck with the barley so far, but we think we can make it another
+season."
+
+The men gave her a bland, impersonal attention.
+
+"Yes?" inquired the teller, with tentative sympathy, running his pencil
+through his upright hair, and tapping his forefinger with it nervously.
+"I believe that's one of Bartlett's personal matters," he said in an
+undertone.
+
+The older man nodded, slowly at first, and then with increasing
+affirmation.
+
+"You're right," he said, untying the knot in his face, and turning away.
+
+The teller came back to his place.
+
+"Mr. Bartlett, the cashier, has charge of that matter, Mrs. Watson. He
+has not been down for two or three days: one of his children is very
+sick. I'll make a note of it, however, and draw his attention to it when
+he comes in." He wrote a few lines hurriedly on a bit of paper, and
+impaled it on an already overcrowded spindle.
+
+"Can you tell me where he lives?" asked Nancy.
+
+The young man hesitated.
+
+"I don't believe I would go to the house; they say it's something
+contagious"--
+
+"I'm not afraid," interrupted Nancy grimly.
+
+The teller wrote an address, and slipped it toward her with a nimble
+motion, keeping his hand outstretched for the next comer, and smiling at
+him over Nancy's dusty shoulder.
+
+The woman turned away, suddenly aware that she had been blocking the
+wheels of commerce, and made her way through the knot of men that had
+gathered behind her. Outside she could feel the sea in the air, and at
+the end of the street she caught a glimpse of a level blue plain with no
+purple mountains on its horizon.
+
+Someway, the mortgage had grown smaller; no one seemed to care about it
+but herself. She had felt vaguely that they would be expecting her and
+have themselves steeled against her request. On the way from the station
+she had thought that people were looking at her curiously as the woman
+from "up toward Pinacate" who was about to lose her home on a mortgage.
+She had even felt that some of them knew of the little wire-fenced grave
+on the edge of the barley-field.
+
+She showed the card to a boy at the corner, who pointed out the street
+and told her to watch for the number over the door.
+
+"It isn't very far; 'bout four blocks up on the right-hand side. Yuh kin
+take the street car fer a nickel, er yuh kin walk fi' cents cheaper," he
+volunteered, whereupon an older boy kicked him affectionately, and
+advised him in a nauseated tone to "come off."
+
+Nancy walked along the smooth cement pavement, looking anxiously at the
+houses behind their sentinel palms. The vagaries of Western architecture
+conveyed no impression but that of splendor to her uncritical eye. The
+house whose number corresponded to the one on her card was less
+pretentious than some of the others, but the difference was lost upon
+her in the general sense of grandeur.
+
+She went up the steps and rang the bell, with the same stifling clutch
+on her throat that she had felt in the bank. There was a little pause,
+and then the door opened, and Nancy saw a fragile, girl-like woman with
+a tear-stained face standing before her.
+
+"Does Mr. Bartlett live here?" faltered the visitor, her chin trembling.
+
+The young creature leaned forward like a flower wilting on its stem, and
+buried her face on Nancy's dusty shoulder.
+
+"Oh, I'm so glad to see you," she sobbed; "I thought no one ever
+_would_ come. I didn't know before that people were so afraid of scarlet
+fever. They have taken my baby away for fear he would take it. Do you
+know anything about it? Please come right in where she is, and tell me
+what you think."
+
+Nancy had put her gaunt arm around the girl's waist, and was patting her
+quivering shoulder with one cotton-gloved hand. Two red spots had come
+on her high cheek-bones, and her lips were working. She let herself be
+led across the hall into an adjoining room, where a yellow-haired child
+lay restless and fever stricken. A young man with a haggard face came
+forward and greeted her eagerly. "Now, Flora," he said, smoothing his
+wife's disordered hair, "you don't need to worry any more; we shall get
+on now. I'm sure she's a little better to-day; don't you think so?" He
+appealed to Nancy, wistfully.
+
+"Yes; I think she is," said Nancy stoutly, moving her head in awkward
+defiance of her own words.
+
+"There, Flora, that's just what the doctor said," pleaded the husband.
+
+The young wife clung to the older woman desperately.
+
+"Oh, do you think so?" she faltered. "You know, I never _could_ stand
+it. She's all--well, of course, there's the baby--but--oh--you see--you
+know--I never could bear it!" She broke down again, sobbing, with her
+arms about Nancy's neck.
+
+"Yes, you can bear it," said Nancy. "You can bear it if you have to, but
+you ain't a-goin' to have to--she's a-goin' to get well. An' you've got
+your man--you ought to recollect that"--she stifled a sob--"he seems
+well an' hearty."
+
+The young wife raised her head and looked at her husband with tearful
+scorn. He met her gaze meekly, with that ready self-effacement which
+husbands seem to feel in the presence of maternity.
+
+"Have you two poor things been here all alone?" asked Nancy.
+
+"Yes," sobbed the girl-wife, this time on her husband's shoulder;
+"everybody was afraid,--we couldn't get any one,--and I don't know
+anything. You're the first woman I've seen since--oh, it's been _so_
+long!"
+
+"Well, you're all nervous and worn out and half starved," announced
+Nancy, untying her bonnet-strings. "I've had sickness, but I've never
+been this bad off. Now, you just take care of the little girl, and I'll
+take care of you."
+
+It was a caretaking like the sudden stilling of the tempest that came to
+the little household. The father and mother would not have said that the
+rest and order that pervaded the house, and finally crept into the room
+where the sick child lay, came from a homely woman with an ill-fitting
+dress and hard, knotted hands. To them she seemed the impersonation of
+beauty and peace on earth.
+
+That night Nancy wrote to her husband. The letter was not very explicit,
+but limited expression seems to have its compensations. There are
+comparatively few misunderstandings among the animals that do not write
+at all. To Robert the letter seemed entirely satisfactory. This is what
+she wrote:--
+
+     I have not had much time to see about the Morgage. One of their
+     children is very sick and I will have to stay a few days. If the
+     cough medisine gives out tell mother the directions is up by the
+     Clock. I hope you are able to set up. Write and tell me how the
+     Barley holds on. Tell the children to be good. Your loving wife,
+
+         NANCY WATSON.
+
+
+"Nancy was always a great hand around where there's sickness," Robert
+commented to his mother-in-law. "I hope she won't hurry home if she's
+needed."
+
+He wrote her to that effect the next day, very proud of his ability to
+sit up, and urging her not to shorten her stay on his account. "Ime
+beter and the Barly is holding its own," he said, and Nancy found it
+ample.
+
+"This Mrs. Watson you have is a treasure," said the doctor to young
+Bartlett; "where did you find her?"
+
+"Find her? I thought you sent her," answered Bartlett, in a daze.
+
+"No; I couldn't find any one; I was at my wits' end."
+
+The two men stared at each other blankly.
+
+"Well, it doesn't matter where she came from," said the doctor, "so she
+stays. She's a whole relief corps and benevolent society in one."
+
+Young Bartlett spoke to Nancy about it the first time they were alone.
+
+"Who sent you to us, Mrs. Watson?" he asked.
+
+Nancy turned and looked out of the window.
+
+"Nobody sent me--I just came."
+
+Then she faced about.
+
+"I don't want to deceive nobody. I come down from Pinacate to see you
+about some--some business. They told me at the bank that you was up at
+the house, so I come up. When I found how it was, I thought I'd better
+stay--that's all."
+
+"From Pinacate--about some business?" queried the puzzled listener.
+
+"Yes; I didn't mean to say anything to you; I don't want to bother you
+about it when you're in trouble an' all wore out. I told them down at
+the bank; they'll tell you when you go down." And with this the young
+man was obliged to be content.
+
+It was nearly two weeks before the child was out of danger. Then Nancy
+said she must go home. The young mother kissed her tenderly when they
+parted.
+
+"I'm so sorry you can't stay and see the baby," she said, with sweet
+young selfishness; "they're going to bring him home very soon now. He's
+_so_ cute! Archie dear, go to the door with Mrs. Watson, and
+remember"--She raised her eyebrows significantly, and waited to see that
+her husband understood before she turned away.
+
+The young man followed Nancy to the hall.
+
+"How much do I owe"--He stopped, with a queer choking sensation in his
+throat.
+
+Nancy's face flushed.
+
+"I always want to be neighborly when there's sickness," she said; "'most
+anybody does. I hope you'll get on all right now. Good-by."
+
+She held out her work-hardened hand, and the young man caught it in his
+warm, prosperous grasp. They looked into each other's eyes an instant,
+not the mortgagor and the mortgagee, but the woman and the man.
+
+"Good-by, Mrs. Watson. I can never"--The words died huskily in his
+throat.
+
+"Papa," called a weak, fretful little voice.
+
+Nancy hitched her old cape about her high shoulders.
+
+"Good-by," she repeated, and turned away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Robert leaned across the kitchen table, and held a legal document near
+the lamp.
+
+"It's marked 'Satisfaction of mortgage' on the outside," he said in a
+puzzled voice; "and it must be our mortgage, for it tells all about it
+inside; but it says"--he unfolded the paper, and read from it in his
+slow, husky whisper,--"'The debt--secured thereby--having been fully
+paid--satisfied--and discharged.' I don't see what it means."
+
+Nancy rested her elbows on the table, and looked across at him
+anxiously.
+
+"It must be a mistake, Robert. I never said anything to them except that
+we'd like to have more time."
+
+He went over the paper again carefully.
+
+"It reads very plain," he said. Then he fixed his sunken eyes on her
+thoughtfully. "Do you suppose, Nancy, it could be on account of what you
+done?"
+
+"Me!" The woman stared at him in astonishment.
+
+Suddenly Robert turned his eyes toward the ceiling, with a new light in
+his thin face.
+
+"Listen!" he exclaimed breathlessly, "it's raining!"
+
+There was a swift patter of heralding drops, and then a steady,
+rhythmical drumming on the shake roof. The man smiled, with that
+ineffable delight in the music which no one really knows but the tiller
+of the soil.
+
+Nancy opened the kitchen door and looked out into the night.
+
+"Yes," she said, keeping something out of her voice; "the wind's strong
+from the southeast, and it's raining steady."
+
+Nancy Watson always felt a little lonesome when it rained. She had never
+mentioned it, but she could not help wishing there was a shelter over
+the little grave on the edge of the barley-field.
+
+
+
+
+The Face of the Poor
+
+
+Mr. Anthony attached a memorandum to the letter he was reading, and put
+his hand on the bell.
+
+"Confound them!" he said under his breath, "what do they think I'm made
+of!"
+
+A negro opened the door, and came into the room with exaggerated
+decorum.
+
+"Rufus, take this to Mr. Whitwell, and tell him to get the answer off at
+once. Is any one waiting?"
+
+"Yes, suh, several. One man's been there some time. Says his name's
+Busson, suh."
+
+"Send him in."
+
+The man gave his head a tilt forward which seemed to close his eyes,
+turned pivotally about, and walked out of the room in his most luxurious
+manner. Rufus never imitated his employer, but he often regretted that
+his employer did not imitate him.
+
+Mr. Anthony's face resumed its look of prosperous annoyance. The door
+opened, and a small, roughly dressed man came toward the desk.
+
+"Well, here I am at last," he said in a tone of gentle apology; "I
+suppose you think it's about time."
+
+The annoyance faded out of Mr. Anthony's face, and left it blank. The
+visitor put out a work-callous hand.
+
+"I guess you don't remember me; my name's Burson. I was up once before,
+but you were busy. I hope you're well; you look hearty."
+
+Mr. Anthony shook the proffered hand, and then shrank back, with the
+distrust of geniality which is one of the cruel hardships of wealth.
+
+"I am well, thank you. What can I do for you, Mr. Burson?"
+
+The little man sat down and wiped the back of his neck with his
+handkerchief. He was bearded almost to the eyes, and his bushy brows
+stood out in a thatch. As he bent his gaze upon Mr. Anthony it was like
+some gentle creature peering out of a brushy covert.
+
+"I guess the question's what I can do for you, Mr. Anthony," he said,
+smiling wistfully on the millionaire; "I hain't done much this far,
+sure."
+
+"Well?" Mr. Anthony's voice was dryly interrogative.
+
+"When Edmonson told me he'd sold the mortgage to you, I thought certain
+I'd be able to keep up the interest, but I haven't made out to do even
+that; you've been kept out of your money a long time, and to tell the
+truth I don't see much chance for you to get it. I thought I'd come in
+and talk with you about it, and see what we could agree on."
+
+Mr. Anthony leaned back rather wearily.
+
+"I might foreclose," he said.
+
+The visitor looked troubled. "Yes, you could foreclose, but that
+wouldn't fix it up. To tell the truth, Mr. Anthony, I don't feel right
+about it. I haven't kep' up the place as I'd ought; it's been running
+down for more'n a year. I don't believe it's worth the mortgage to-day."
+
+Some of the weariness disappeared from Mr. Anthony's face. He laid his
+arms on the desk and leaned forward.
+
+"You don't think it's worth the mortgage?" he asked.
+
+"Not the mortgage and interest. You see there's over three hundred
+dollars interest due. I don't believe you could get more'n a thousand
+dollars cash for the place."
+
+"There would be a deficiency judgment, then," said the millionaire.
+
+"Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about. I supposed the law was
+arranged some way so you'd get your money. It's no more'n right. But it
+seems a kind of a pity for you and me to go to law. There ain't nothing
+between us. I had the money, and you the same as loaned it to me. It was
+money you'd saved up again old age, and you'd ought to have it. If I'd
+worked the place and kep' it up right, it would be worth more, though of
+course property's gone down a good deal. But mother and the girls got
+kind of discouraged and wanted me to go to peddlin' fruit, and of course
+you can't do more'n one thing at a time, and do it justice. Now if you
+had the place, I expect you could afford to keep it up, and I wouldn't
+wonder if you could sell it; but you'd have to put some ready money into
+it first, I'm afraid."
+
+Mr. Anthony pushed a pencil up and down between his thumb and
+forefinger, and watched the process with an inscrutable face. His
+visitor went on:--
+
+"I was thinking if we could agree on a price, I might deed it to you and
+give you a note for the balance of what I owe you. I'm getting on kind
+of slow, but I don't believe but what I could pay the note after a
+while."
+
+Mr. Anthony kept his eyes on his lead pencil with a strange, whimsical
+smile.
+
+"Edmonson owed me two thousand dollars," he said, "the mortgage really
+cost me that; at least it was all I got on the debt."
+
+The visitor made a regretful sound with his tongue against the roof of
+his mouth.
+
+"You don't say so! Well, that is too bad."
+
+The thatch above the speaker's eyes stood out straight as he reflected.
+
+"You're worse off than I thought," he went on slowly, "but it don't
+quite seem as if I ought to be held responsible for that. I had the
+thousand dollars, and used it, and I'd ought to pay it; but the
+other--it was a kind of a trade you made--I can't see--you don't
+think"--
+
+Mr. Anthony broke into his hesitation with a short laugh.
+
+"No, I don't think you're responsible for my blunders," he said soberly.
+"You say property has gone down a good deal," he went on, fixing his
+shrewd eyes on his listener. "A good many other things have gone down.
+If my money will buy more than it would when it was loaned, some people
+would say I shouldn't have so much of it. Perhaps I'm not entitled to
+more than the place will bring. What do you think about that?" There was
+a quizzical note in the rich man's voice.
+
+Burson wiped the back of his neck with his handkerchief, dropped it into
+his hat, and shook the hat slowly and reflectively, keeping time with
+his head.
+
+"If you'd kep' your money by you, allowin' that you loaned it to
+me,--because you the same as did,--if you'd kep' it by you or put it in
+the bank and let it lay idle, you'd 'a' had it. It wouldn't 'a' gone
+down any. You hadn't ought to lose anything, that I can see,--except of
+course for your mistake about Edmonson. That kind of hurts me about
+Edmonson. I wouldn't 'a' thought it of him. He always seemed a clever
+sort of fellow."
+
+"Oh, Edmonson's all right," said Mr. Anthony; "he went into some things
+too heavily, and broke up. I guess he'll make it yet."
+
+Burson looked relieved. "Then he'll straighten this up with you, after
+all," he said.
+
+Mr. Anthony whistled noiselessly. "Well, hardly. He considers it
+straightened."
+
+Burson turned his old hat slowly around between his knees.
+
+"He's a fair-spoken man, Edmonson; I kind of think he'll square it up,
+after all," he said hopefully. "Anyway, it doesn't become me to throw
+stones till I've paid my own debts."
+
+The hair that covered the speaker's mouth twitched a little in its
+effort to smile. He glanced at his companion expectantly.
+
+"Could you come out and take a look at the place?" he asked.
+
+Mr. Anthony slid down in his chair, and clasped his hands across his
+portliness.
+
+"I believe I'll take your valuation, Burson," he answered slowly; "if I
+find there's nothing against the property but my mortgage, and you'll
+give me a deed and your note for the interest, or, say, two hundred and
+fifty dollars, we'll call it square. It will take a few days to look the
+matter up, a week, perhaps. Suppose you come in at the end of the week.
+Your wife will sign the deed?" he added interrogatively.
+
+Burson had leaned forward to get up. At the question he raised his eyes
+with the look that Mr. Anthony remembered to have seen years ago in
+small creatures he had driven into corners.
+
+"Mother didn't have to sign the mortgage," he said, halting a little
+before each word, "the lawyer said it wasn't necessary. I don't know if
+she'll"--
+
+Mr. Anthony broke into his embarrassment. "Let me see." He put his hand
+on the bell.
+
+"Ask Mr. Evert to send me the mortgage from Burson to Edmonson, assigned
+to me," he said when Rufus appeared.
+
+The negro walked out of the room as if he were carrying the message on
+his head.
+
+"Mother doesn't always see things just as I do," said Burson; "she was
+willing to sign the mortgage, though," he added, "only she didn't need
+to; she wanted me to get the money of Edmonson."
+
+He put his hand into his pocket, and a light of discovery came into his
+face.
+
+"Have a peach," he said convivially, laying an enormous Late Crawford on
+the corner of the desk. Mr. Anthony gave an uncomprehending glance at
+the gift. "Hain't you got a knife?" asked Burson, straightening himself
+and drawing a bone-handled implement from his pocket; "I keep the big
+blade for fruit," he said kindly, as he laid it on the desk.
+
+Mr. Anthony inspected the proffered refreshment with a queer, uncertain
+smile; then he took the peach from the desk, drew the wastebasket
+between his knees, opened the big blade of the knife, and began to
+remove the red velvet skin. The juice ran down his wrists and threatened
+his immaculate cuffs. He fished a spotless handkerchief from his pocket
+with his pencil and mopped up the encroaching rivulets. His companion
+smiled upon him with amiable relish as the dripping sections
+disappeared.
+
+"I errigated 'em more than usual this year, and it makes 'em kind of
+sloppy to eat," he apologized; "it doesn't help the flavor any, but most
+people buy for size. When you're out peddling and haven't time to
+cultivate, it's easy to turn on the water. It's about as bad as a
+milkman putting water in the milk, and I always feel mean about it. I
+tell mother errigating's a lazy man's way of farming, but she says water
+costs so much here she doesn't think it's cheating to sell it for
+peach-juice."
+
+Rufus came into the room, and bore down upon the pair with deferential
+disdain. Mr. Anthony gave his fingers a parting wipe, and took the
+papers from the envelope.
+
+"It's all right, Burson," he said after a little, "you needn't mind
+about your wife's signature. I'll risk it. Come back in about a week,
+say Thursday, Thursday at ten, if that suits you. I'll have my attorney
+look into it."
+
+Burson got up and started out. Then he turned and stood still an
+instant.
+
+"Of course, I mean to tell mother about the deed," he said; "I wouldn't
+want you to think"--
+
+"Oh, certainly, certainly," acquiesced Mr. Anthony with an almost
+violent waiving of domestic confidence. "Good-afternoon, Mr. Burson." He
+whirled his revolving chair toward the desk with a distinct air of
+dismissal, and picked up the package of papers.
+
+After the door closed he sat still for some time, looking thoughtfully
+at the mortgage; then he made a memorandum in ink, with his signature in
+full, and attached it to the document. Rufus opened the door.
+
+"Mr. Darnell and two other gentlemen, suh."
+
+The millionaire set his jaws. "Show them in, Rufus. Damn it," he said
+softly,--"damn it, why can't they be honest!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Do you mean to tell me, Erastus Burson, that you deeded him this place,
+and gave him your note for two hundred and fifty dollars you didn't owe
+him?"
+
+"Why, no, mother; didn't I explain to you there'd be a deficiency
+judgment?"
+
+"Well, I should say there was. But if anybody's lackin' judgment I'd say
+it was you, not him. The idea! Why he's as rich as cream, and you're as
+poor"--
+
+"Well, his being rich and me being poor hasn't got anything to do with
+it, mother; we're just two men trying to be fair with each other, don't
+you see? You and the girls wouldn't want me to be close-fisted and
+overreachin', even if I am poor. I think we fixed it up just as near
+right as a wrong thing can be fixed. Of course I don't like to feel the
+way I do about Edmonson, but Mr. Anthony don't seem to lay up anything
+again him, and he's the one that has the right to. Edmonson treated him
+worse than anybody ever treated me. I don't know just how I'd feel
+toward a man if he'd treated me the way Edmonson treated Mr. Anthony."
+
+Mrs. Burson laid the overalls she was mending across her knee in a
+suggestive attitude.
+
+"I don't call it close-fisted or overreachin' to keep a roof over your
+family's head," she argued; "if the place isn't ours, I suppose we'll
+have to leave it."
+
+"No; Mr. Anthony wants us to stay here, and take care of the place for
+the rent. I feel as if I'd ought to keep it up better, but if I'm to
+peddle fruit and try to pay off the note, I'll have to hustle. I want to
+do the square thing by him. He's certainly treated me white."
+
+Mrs. Burson fitted a patch on the seat of the overalls, and flattened it
+down with rather unnecessarily vigorous slaps of her large hand.
+
+"I wouldn't lose any sleep over Mr. Anthony; I guess he's able to take
+care of himself," she said, closing her lips suddenly as if to prevent
+the escape of less amicable sentiments.
+
+"Well, he doesn't seem to be," urged her husband, "the way Edmonson's
+overreached him. My! but I'd hate to be in that fellow's shoes: doin'
+dirt to a man that a way!"
+
+Mrs. Burson sighed audibly, and gave her husband a hopelessly
+uncomprehending look. "You do beat all, Erastus," she said wearily.
+"Here's your overalls. I guess you can be trusted with 'em. They're too
+much patched to give to Mr. Anthony."
+
+Burson returned her look of uncomprehension. Fortunately the marital fog
+through which two pairs of eyes so often view each other is more likely
+to dull the outline of faults than of virtues. Mrs. Burson watched her
+husband not unfondly as he straddled into his overalls and left the
+room.
+
+"A man doesn't have to be very sharp to get the better of Erastus," she
+said to herself, "but he has to be awful low down; and I s'pose there's
+plenty that is."
+
+The winter came smilingly on, tantalizing the farmer with sunny
+indifference concerning drouth, and when he was quite despondent sending
+great purple clouds from the southeast to wash away his fears. By
+Christmas the early oranges were yellowing. There had been no frost, and
+Burson's old spring-wagon and unshapely but well-fed sorrel team made
+their daily round of the valley, and now and then he dropped into Mr.
+Anthony's office to make small payments on his note. Pitifully small
+they seemed to the mortgagee, who appeared nevertheless always glad to
+receive them, and gave orders to Rufus, much to that dignitary's
+disgust, that the fruit-vender should always be admitted. The handful of
+coin which he so cheerfully piled on the corner of the rich man's desk
+always remained there until his departure, when Mr. Anthony took an
+envelope from the safe, swept the payment into it without counting, and
+returned it to its compartment, making no indorsement on the note.
+
+"I'd feel better satisfied if you'd drive out some time and take a look
+at things," said Burson to his creditor during one of these visits;
+"you'd ought to get out of the office now and then for your health."
+
+"Maybe I will, Burson," replied the capitalist. "You're not away from
+home all the time?"
+
+"Oh, no, but I s'pose Sunday's your day off; it's mine. Mother and the
+girls generally go to church, but I don't. I tell 'm I'll watch, and
+they can pray. I can't very well go," he added, making haste to
+counteract the possible shock from his irreverence; "there ain't but one
+seat in the fruit-wagon, and when the women folks get their togs on,
+three's about all that can ride. Come out any Sunday, and stay for
+dinner. We mostly have chicken."
+
+The following Sunday Mr. Anthony drew up his daintily-stepping chestnut
+at the fruit-peddler's gate. Before he had descended from his shining
+road-wagon, his host ran down the walk, pulling on his shabby coat.
+
+"Well, now, this is something like!" he exclaimed. "Got a
+hitching-strap? Just wait till I open the gate; I believe I'd better
+take your horse inside. There's a post by the kitchen door. My, ain't he
+a beauty!"
+
+Burson led the roadster through the gate, and Mr. Anthony walked by his
+side. When the horse was tied, the two men went about the place, and
+Erastus showed his guest the poultry and fruit trees, commenting on the
+merits of Plymouth Rocks and White Leghorns as layers, and displaying
+modest pride in the condition of the orchard.
+
+"I've kep' it up better this year. The rains come along more favorable
+and the weeds didn't get ahead of me the way they did last winter. Look
+out, there!" he cried, as Mr. Anthony laid his hand on the head of a
+Jersey calf that backed awkwardly from under his grasp. "Don't let her
+get a hold of your coat-tail; she chawed mine to a frazzle the other
+day; the girls pet her so much she has no manners."
+
+When the tour of the little farm was finished the two men came back to
+the veranda, and Erastus drew a rocking-chair from the front room for
+his guest. It was hung with patchwork cushions of "crazy" design, but
+Mr. Anthony leaned his tired head against them in the sanest content.
+
+"Now you just sit still a minute," Erastus said, "and I'm a-going to
+bring you something you hain't tasted for a long time."
+
+He darted into the house, and returned with a pitcher and two glasses.
+
+"Sweet cider!" he announced, with a triumphant smile. "I had a lot of
+apples in the fall, not big enough to peddle,--you know our apples ain't
+anything to brag of,--and I just rigged up a kind of hand-press in the
+back yard, and now and then I press out a pitcher of cider for Sunday. I
+never let it get the least bit hard; not that I don't like a little tang
+to it myself, but mother belongs to the W.C.T.U., and it'd worry her."
+
+He darted into the house again, and emerged with a plate of brown
+twisted cakes.
+
+"Mother usually makes cookies on Saturday, but I can't find anything but
+these doughnuts. Maybe they won't go bad with the cider."
+
+He poured his guest a glass, and Mr. Anthony drank it, holding a
+doughnut in one hand, and partaking of it with evident relish.
+
+"It's good, Burson," he said. "May I have another glass and another
+doughnut?"
+
+His host's countenance fairly shone with delighted hospitality as he
+replenished the empty glass. There were crumbs on the floor when the
+visitor left, and flies buzzed about the empty plate and pitcher as Mrs.
+Burson and her daughters came up the steps.
+
+"Mr. Anthony's been here," said Erastus cheerfully; "I'm awful sorry you
+missed him. We had some cider and doughnuts."
+
+The three women stopped suddenly, and stared at the speaker.
+
+"Why, Paw Burson!" ejaculated the elder daughter, "did you give Mr.
+Anthony doughnuts and cider out here on this porch?"
+
+"Why, yes, Millie," apologized the father; "I looked for cookies, but I
+couldn't find any. He said he liked doughnuts, and he did seem to relish
+'em; he eat several."
+
+"That awful rich man! Why, Paw Burson!"
+
+The young woman gave an awe-stricken glance about her, as if expecting
+to discover some lingering traces of wealth.
+
+"Doughnuts!" she repeated helplessly.
+
+"Why, Millie," faltered the father, mildly aggressive, "I don't see why
+being rich should take away a man's appetite; I'm sure I hope I'll never
+be too rich to like doughnuts and cider."
+
+"Didn't you give him a napkin, paw?" queried the younger girl.
+
+"No," said the father meekly, "he had his handkerchief. I coaxed him to
+stay to dinner, but he couldn't; and I asked him to drive out some day
+with his wife and daughter--he hasn't but one--they lost a little girl
+when she was seven"--
+
+The man's voice quivered on the last word, and died away. Mrs. Burson
+went hurriedly into the house. She reappeared at the door in a few
+minutes without her bonnet.
+
+"Erastus," she said gently, "will you split me a few sticks of kindling
+before you put away the team?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Burson was fitting a salad-green bodice on her elder daughter.
+That young woman's efforts to see her own spine, where her mother was
+distributing pins with solemn intentness, had dyed her face a somewhat
+unnatural red, but the hands that lay upon her downy arms were much
+whiter than those that hovered about her back. A dining-table, bearing
+the more permanent part of its outfit, was pushed into a corner of the
+room, and covered with a yellow mosquito-net, and from the kitchen came
+a sound of crockery accompanied by an occasional splash and a scraping
+of tin. Now and then the younger girl appeared in the doorway and gazed
+in a sort of worshipful ecstasy at her sister's splendor.
+
+"Do you think you'll get it finished for the Fiesta, maw?" she asked,
+between deep breaths of admiration. Mrs. Burson nodded absently,
+exploring her bosom for another pin with her outspread palm.
+
+Her husband came into the room, and seated himself on the edge of the
+rep lounge. His face had a strange pallor above the mask of his beard.
+
+"You're home early, Erastus," she said; then she looked up. "Are you
+sick?" she asked with anxiety.
+
+"Mr. Anthony is dead," Burson said huskily.
+
+"Dead! Why, Erastus!"
+
+Mrs. Burson held a pin suspended in the air and stared at her husband.
+
+"Yes. He dropped dead in his chair. Or rather, he had some kind of a
+stroke, and never came to. It happened more than a week ago. I went in
+to-day, and Rufus told me."
+
+Mrs. Burson returned the pin to her bosom, and motioned her daughter
+toward the bedroom door.
+
+"Go and take it off, Millie," she said soberly. She was shamefacedly
+conscious of something different from the grief that stirred her
+husband, something more sordid and personal.
+
+"It hurt me all over," Burson went on, "the way some of them talked in
+town. They looked queer at me when I said what I did about him. I don't
+understand it."
+
+"I guess there's a good many things you don't understand, Erastus,"
+ventured the wife quietly.
+
+A carriage stopped at the gate, and a young woman alighted from it, and
+came up the walk. Erastus saw her first, and met her in the open
+doorway. She looked at him with eager intentness.
+
+"Is this Mr. Burson?" she asked gently. "I am Mr. Anthony's daughter."
+
+Mrs. Burson got up, holding the scraps of green silk in her apron, and
+offered the visitor a seat. Erastus held out his hand, and tried to
+speak. The two faced each other in tearful silence.
+
+"I wanted to bring you this myself," the girl faltered,
+"because--because of what is written on the outside." She held a package
+of papers toward him. "I have heard him speak of you, I think. Any
+friend of my father must be a good man. We want to thank you, my mother
+and I"--
+
+"To thank me?" Erastus questioned, "to thank me! You certainly don't
+know"--
+
+"I know you were my father's friend," the girl interrupted; "I don't
+care about the rest. Possibly I couldn't understand it. I know very
+little about business, but I knew my father."
+
+She got up, holding her head high in grief-stricken pride, and gave her
+hand to her host and hostess.
+
+The younger Burson girl emerged from the kitchen, a dish-towel and a
+half-wiped plate clasped to her breast, and watched the visitor as she
+went down the path.
+
+"Her silk waist doesn't begin to touch Millie's for style," she said
+pensively, "and her skirt doesn't even drag; but there's something about
+her."
+
+"Yes," acquiesced Mrs. Burson, "there is something about her."
+
+Erastus sat on the edge of the old rep lounge, looking absently at the
+papers.
+
+"In the event of my death, to be delivered to my friend Erastus Burson,"
+was written on the package.
+
+His wife came and stood over him.
+
+"I don't know just what it means, mother," he said, "there's a deed, and
+my note marked 'Paid,' and a lot of two-bit and four-bit pieces. I'll
+have to get somebody to explain it."
+
+He sat quite still until the woman laid her large hand on his bowed
+head. Then he looked up, with moist, winking eyes.
+
+"I don't feel right about it, mother," he said. "I wish now I'd 'a'
+dropped in oftener, and been more sociable. It's a strange thing to say,
+but I think sometimes he was lonesome; and I'm sure I don't know why,
+for a kinder, genialer man I never met."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories, by 
+Margaret Collier Graham
+
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