As he stood alone in the barnyard, excited at the thought of the
adventure on which Clara and Hugh had set out, Jim Priest remembered Tom
Butterworth. For more than thirty years Jim had worked for Tom and they
had one strong impulse that bound them together--their common love of
fine horses. More than once the two men had spent an afternoon together
in the grand stand at the fall trotting meeting at Cleveland. In the
late morning of such a day Tom found Jim wandering from stall to stall,
looking at the horses being rubbed down and prepared for the afternoon's
races. In a generous mood he bought his employee's lunch and took him to
a seat in the grand stand. All afternoon the two men watched the races,
smoked and quarreled. Tom contended that Bud Doble, the debonair, the
dramatic, the handsome, was the greatest of all race horse drivers, and
Jim Priest held Bud Doble in contempt. For him there was but one man of
all the drivers he whole-heartedly admired, Pop Geers, the shrewd and
silent. “That Geers of yours doesn't drive at all. He just sits up there
like a stick,” Tom grumbled. “If a horse can win all right, he'll ride
behind him all right. What I like to see is a driver. Now you look at
that Doble. You watch him bring a horse through the stretch.”
Jim looked at his employer with something like pity in his eyes. “Huh,”
he exclaimed. “If you haven't got eyes you can't see.”
The farm hand had two strong loves in his life, his employer's daughter
and the race horse driver, Geers. “Geers,” he declared, “was a man born
old and wise.” Often he had seen Geers at the tracks on a morning before
some important race. The driver sat on an upturned box in the sun before
one of the horse stalls. All about him there was the bantering talk of
horsemen and grooms. Bets were made and challenges given. On the
tracks nearby horses, not entered in the races for that day, were being
exercised. Their hoofbeats made a kind of music that made Jim's blood
tingle. Negroes laughed and horses put their heads out at stall doors.
The stallions neighed loudly and the heels of some impatient steed
rattled against the sides of a stall.
Every one about the stalls talked of the events of the afternoon and Jim
leaned against the front of one of the stalls and listened, filled with
happiness. He wished the fates had made him a racing man. Then he looked
at Pop Geers, the silent one, who sat for hours dumb and uncommunicative
on a feed box, tapping lightly on the ground with his racing whip and
chewing straw. Jim's imagination was aroused. He had once seen
that other silent American, General Grant, and had been filled with
admiration for him.
That was on a great day in Jim's life, the day on which he had seen
Grant going to receive Lee's surrender at Appomattox. There had been a
battle with the Union men pursuing the fleeing Rebs out of Richmond, and
Jim, having secured a bottle of whisky, and having a chronic dislike of
battles, had managed to creep away into a wood. In the distance he heard
shouts and presently saw several men riding furiously down a road. It
was Grant with his aides going to the place where Lee waited. They rode
to the place near where Jim sat with his back against a tree and the
bottle between his legs; then stopped. Then Grant decided not to take
part in the ceremony. His clothes were covered with mud and his beard
was ragged. He knew Lee and knew he would be dressed for the occasion.
He was that kind of a man; he was one fitted for historic pictures and
occasions. Grant wasn't. He told his aides to go on to the spot where
Lee waited, told them what arrangements were to be made, then jumped his
horse over a ditch and rode along a path under the trees toward the spot
where Jim lay.
That was an event Jim never forgot. He was fascinated at the thought
of what the day meant to Grant and by his apparent indifference. He sat
silently by the tree and when Grant got off his horse and came near,
walking now in the path where the sunlight sifted down through the
trees, he closed his eyes. Grant came to where he sat and stopped,
apparently thinking him dead. His hand reached down and took the bottle
of whisky. For a moment they had something between them, Grant and Jim.
They both understood that bottle of whisky. Jim thought Grant was about
to drink, and opened his eyes a little. Then he closed them. The cork
was out of the bottle and Grant clutched it in his hand tightly. From
the distance there came a vast shout that was picked up and carried by
voices far away. The wood seemed to rock with it. “It's done. The war's
over,” Jim thought. Then Grant reached over and smashed the bottle
against the trunk of the tree above Jim's head. A piece of the flying
glass cut his cheek and blood came. He opened his eyes and looked
directly into Grant's eyes. For a moment the two men stared at each
other and the great shout again rolled over the country. Grant went
hurriedly along the path to where he had left his horse, and mounting,
rode away.
Standing in the race track looking at Geers, Jim thought of Grant. Then
his mind came back to this other hero. “What a man!” he thought. “Here
he goes from town to town and from race track to race track all through
the spring, summer and fall, and he never loses his head, never gets
excited. To win horse races is the same as winning battles. When I'm at
home plowing corn on summer afternoons, this Geers is away somewhere
at some track with all the people gathered about and waiting. To me
it would be like being drunk all the time, but you see he isn't drunk.
Whisky could make him stupid. It couldn't make him drunk. There he
sits hunched up like a sleeping dog. He looks as though he cared about
nothing on earth, and he'll sit like that through three-quarters of the
hardest race, waiting, taking advantage of every little stretch of firm
hard ground on the track, saving his horse, watching, watching his horse
too, waiting. What a man! He works the horse into fourth place, into
third, into second. The crowd in the grand stand, such fellows as Tom
Butterworth, have not seen what he's doing. He sits still. By God, what
a man! He waits. He looks half asleep. If he doesn't have to do it, he
makes no effort. If the horse has it in him to win without help he sits
still. The people are shouting and jumping up out of their seats in the
grand stand, and if that Bud Doble has a horse in the race he's leaning
forward in the sulky, shouting at his horse and making a holy show of
himself.
“Ha, that Geers! He waits. He doesn't think of the people but of the
horse he's driving. When the time comes, just the right time, that
Geers, he lets the horse know. They are one at that moment, like Grant
and I were over that bottle of whisky. Something happens between them.
Something inside the man says, 'now,' and the message runs along the
reins to the horse's brain. It flies down into his legs. There is a
rush. The head of the horse has just worked its way out in front by
inches--not too soon, nothing wasted. Ha, that Geers! Bud Doble, huh!”
On the night of Clara's marriage after she and Hugh had disappeared
down the county seat road, Jim hurried into the barn and, bringing out
a horse, sprang on his back. He was sixty-three but could mount a horse
like a young man. As he rode furiously toward Bidwell he thought, not of
Clara and her adventure, but of her father. To both men the right kind
of marriage meant success in life for a woman. Nothing else really
mattered much if that were accomplished. He thought of Tom Butterworth,
who, he told himself, had fussed with Clara just as Bud Doble often
fussed with a horse in a race. He had himself been like Pop Geers. All
along he had known and understood the mare colt, Clara. Now she had come
through; she had won the race of life.
“Ha, that old fool!” Jim whispered to himself as he rode swiftly down
the dark road. When the horse ran clattering over a small wooden bridge
and came to the first of the houses of the town, he felt like one coming
to announce a victory, and half expected a vast shout to come out of the
darkness, as it had come in the moment of Grant's victory over Lee.
Jim could not find his employer at the hotel or in Main Street, but
remembered a tale he had heard whispered. Fanny Twist the milliner lived
in a little frame house in Garfield Street, far out at the eastern edge
of town, and he went there. He banged boldly on the door and the woman
appeared. “I've got to see Tom Butterworth,” he said. “It's important.
It's about his daughter. Something has happened to her.”
The door closed and presently Tom came around the corner of the house.
He was furious. Jim's horse stood in the road, and he went straight
to him and took hold of the bit. “What do you mean by coming here?” he
asked sharply. “Who told you I was here? What business you got coming
here and making a show of yourself? What's the matter of you? Are you
drunk or out of your head?”
Jim got off the horse and told Tom the news. For a moment the two stood
looking at each other. “Hugh McVey--Hugh McVey, by crackies, are you
right, Jim?” Tom exclaimed. “No missfire, eh? She's really gone and done
it? Hugh McVey, eh? By crackies!”
“They're on the way to the county seat now,” Jim said softly. “Missfire!
Not on your life.” His voice lost the cool, quiet tone he had so often
dreamed of maintaining in great emergencies. “I figure they'll be back
by twelve or one,” he said eagerly. “We got to blow 'em out, Tom. We got
to give that girl and her husband the biggest blowout ever seen in this
county, and we got just about three hours to get ready for it.”
“Get off that horse and give me a boost,” Tom commanded. With a grunt
of satisfaction he sprang to the horse's back. The belated impulse to
philander that an hour before sent him creeping through back streets and
alleyways to the door of Fanny Twist's house was all gone, and in its
place had come the spirit of the man of affairs, the man who, as he
himself often boasted, made things move and kept them on the move. “Now
look here, Jim,” he said sharply, “there are three livery stables in
this town. You engage every horse they've got for the night. Have the
horses hitched to any kind of rigs you can find, buggies, surreys,
spring wagons, anything. Have them get drivers off the streets,
anywhere. Then have them all brought around in front of the Bidwell
House and held for me. When you've done that, you go to Henry Heller's
house. I guess you can find it. You found this house where I was fast
enough. He lives on Campus Street just beyond the new Baptist Church. If
he's gone to bed you get him up. Tell him to get his orchestra together
and have him bring all the lively music he's got. Tell him to bring his
men to the Bidwell House as fast as he can get them there.”
Tom rode off along the street followed by Jim Priest, running at the
horse's heels. When he had gone a little way he stopped. “Don't let any
one fuss with you about prices to-night, Jim,” he called. “Tell every
one it's for me. Tell 'em Tom Butterworth'll pay what they ask. The
sky's the limit to-night, Jim. That's the word, the sky's the limit.”
To the older citizens of Bidwell, those who lived there when every
citizen's affairs were the affair of the town, that evening will be long
remembered. The new men, the Italians, Greeks, Poles, Rumanians, and
many other strange-talking, dark-skinned men who had come with the
coming of the factories, went on with their lives on that evening as on
all others. They worked in the night shift at the Corn-Cutting Machine
Plant, at the foundry, the bicycle factory or at the big new Tool
Machine Factory that had just moved to Bidwell from Cleveland. Those who
were not at work lounged in the streets or wandered aimlessly in and out
of saloons. Their wives and children were housed in the hundreds of new
frame houses in the streets that now crept out in all directions. In
those days in Bidwell new houses seemed to spring out of the ground like
mushrooms. In the morning there was a field or an orchard on Turner Pike
or on any one of a dozen roads leading out of town. On the trees in the
orchard green apples hung down waiting, ready to ripen. Grasshoppers
sang in the long grass beneath the trees.
Then appeared Ben Peeler with a swarm of men. The trees were cut and
the song of the grasshopper choked beneath piles of boards. There was
a great shouting and rattling of hammers. A whole street of houses, all
alike, universally ugly, had been added to the vast number of new houses
already built by that energetic carpenter and his partner Gordon Hart.
To the people who lived in these houses, the excitement of Tom
Butterworth and Jim Priest meant nothing. Half sullenly they worked,
striving to make money enough to take them back to their native lands.
In the new place they had not, as they had hoped, been received as
brothers. A marriage or a death there meant nothing to them.
To the old townsmen however, those who remembered Tom when he was a
simple farmer and when Steve Hunter was looked upon with contempt as a
boasting young squirt, the night rocked with excitement. Men ran
through the streets. Drivers lashed their horses along roads. Tom
was everywhere. He was like a general in charge of the defenses of a
besieged town. The cooks at all three of the town's hotels were sent
back into their kitchens, waiters were found and hurried out to the
Butterworth house, and Henry Heller's orchestra was instructed to get
out there at once and to start playing the liveliest possible music.
Tom asked every man and woman he saw to the wedding party. The hotel
keeper was invited with his wife and daughter and two or three keepers
of stores who came to the hotel to bring supplies were asked, commanded
to come. Then there were the men of the factories, the office men and
superintendents, new men who had never seen Clara. They also, with the
town bankers and other solid fellows with money in the banks, who were
investors in Tom's enterprises, were invited. “Put on the best clothes
you've got in the world and have your women folks do the same,” he
said laughing. “Then you get out to my house as soon as you can. If you
haven't any way to get there, come to the Bidwell House. I'll get you
out.”
Tom did not forget that in order to have his wedding party go as he
wished, he would need to serve drinks. Jim Priest went from bar to
bar. “What wine you got--good wine? How much you got?” he asked at
each place. Steve Hunter had in the cellar of his house six cases of
champagne kept there against a time when some important guest, the
Governor of the State or a Congressman, might come to town. He felt that
on such occasions it was up to him to see that the town, as he said,
“did itself proud.” When he heard what was going on he hurried to the
Bidwell House and offered to send his entire stock of wine out to Tom's
house, and his offer was accepted.
* * * * *
Jim Priest had an idea. When the guests were all assembled and when the
farm kitchen was filled with cooks and waiters who stumbled over each
other, he took his idea to Tom. There was, he explained, a short-cut
through fields and along lanes to a point on the county seat road, three
miles from the house. “I'll go there and hide myself,” he said. “When
they come along, suspecting nothing, I'll cut out on horseback and get
here a half hour before them. You make every one in the house hide and
keep still when they drive into the yard. We'll put out all the lights.
We'll give that pair the surprise of their lives.”
Jim had concealed a quart bottle of wine in his pocket and, as he rode
away on his mission, stopped from time to time to take a hearty drink.
As his horse trotted along lanes and through fields, the horse that was
bringing Clara and Hugh home from their adventure cocked his ears and
remembered the comfortable stall filled with hay in the Butterworth
barn. The horse trotted swiftly along and Hugh in the buggy beside Clara
was lost in the same dense silence that all the evening had lain over
him like a cloak. In a dim way he was resentful and felt that time was
running too fast. The hours and the passing events were like the waters
of a river in flood time, and he was like a man in a boat without oars,
being carried helplessly forward. Occasionally he thought courage had
come to him and he half turned toward Clara and opened his mouth, hoping
words would come to his lips, but the silence that had taken hold of
him was like a disease whose grip on its victim could not be broken. He
closed his mouth and wet his lips with his tongue. Clara saw him do the
thing several times. He began to seem animal-like and ugly to her. “It's
not true that I thought of her and asked her to be my wife only because
I wanted a woman,” Hugh reassured himself. “I've been lonely, all my
life I've been lonely. I want to find my way into some one's heart, and
she is the one.”
Clara also remained silent. She was angry. “If he didn't want to marry
me, why did he ask me? Why did he come?” she asked herself. “Well, I'm
married. I've done the thing we women are always thinking about,” she
told herself, her mind taking another turn. The thought frightened
her and a shiver of dread ran over her body. Then her mind went to the
defense of Hugh. “It isn't his fault. I shouldn't have rushed things as
I have. Perhaps I'm not meant for marriage at all,” she thought.
The ride homeward dragged on indefinitely. The clouds were blown out
of the sky, the moon came out and the stars looked down on the two
perplexed people. To relieve the feeling of tenseness that had taken
hold of her Clara's mind resorted to a trick. Her eyes sought out a tree
or the lights of a farmhouse far ahead and she tried to count the
hoof beats of the horse until they had come to it. She wanted to hurry
homeward and at the same time looked forward with dread to the night
alone in the dark farmhouse with Hugh. Not once during the homeward
drive did she take the whip out of its socket or speak to the horse.
When at last the horse trotted eagerly across the crest of the hill,
from which there was such a magnificent view of the country below,
neither Clara nor Hugh turned to look. With bowed heads they rode, each
trying to find courage to face the possibilities of the night.
* * * * *
In the farmhouse Tom and his guests waited in winelit suspense, and
at last Jim Priest rode shouting out of a lane to the door. “They're
coming--they're coming,” he shouted, and ten minutes later and after Tom
had twice lost his temper and cursed the girl waitresses from the town
hotels who were inclined to giggle, all was silent and dark about the
house and the barnyard. When all was quiet Jim Priest crept into the
kitchen, and stumbling over the legs of the guests, made his way to a
front window where he placed a lighted candle. Then he went out of the
house to lie on his back beneath a bush in the yard. In the house he
had secured for himself a second bottle of wine, and as Clara with her
husband turned in at the gate and drove into the barnyard, the only
sound that broke the intense silence came from the soft gurgle of the
wine finding its way down his throat.