and rumble away over the track to the main line and on to the great
world where men put trust in them and sent them back to the Farm with
newspaper clippings and horseshoe wreaths made of immortelles with the
figure 2-and-a-fraction in the middle.
When she was grown and they had put her out in a side pasture, there
were some new stables there, with a lot of men thronging round them who
did not look like grooms. The knowledge that something of importance to
the world was about to happen the other side of the fence made her feel
more contented. If she could not travel in a box car to see such things,
it was good to have some of the excitement of it brought in to the
ranch.
At first she did not notice much, being deeply interested just then in
the early education of Fenelon, 2.10-1/4, who was a fretful infant and
took up most of her time. When he had passed out of her immediate care
and was cropping sweet alfalfa with the rest, she watched curiously the
foundations sinking into the grass, the crowd of people who came one May
morning to hear things said round a block of yellow sandstone, the
fitting of the red tiling above the stone walls. By this time she knew
the reason of it all; the dead heir, the monument, the boys and girls
who were coming to be taught in this great kindergarten. Finally, when
these had poured into the place, some of them straggled out into the
pasture and made friends with her. From them she learned more definitely
the great things that had been done and were about to happen; they told
her of the wonderful endowment, of the strangers from corners of the
world never reached even by the lucky horses who had rolled away in the
box cars, of the numberless buildings that were to surround and dwarf
the structures she had seen grow up in the sun.
"The Governor" had driven less often through the yard since the yellow
buildings were up, and the boys and girls playing among them. After
awhile he ceased to come altogether. Then Bonita, the brood-mare,
understood that something had happened. It was more quiet everywhere
after this. Most of the horses and mares, her colts among them, went off
in the cars, not to come back, they told her. She stood under the dark
oaks for hours at a time, fearing lest they would send her, too. Her
longing for the world was past now; she wished to be left in the quiet
pastures with the students to talk to.
It was during these days that Craig, who taught something to the younger
people, used to lean on the fence and smoke during the afternoons. He
was not much older than many of the students she knew, and she liked
him particularly. He had lumps of something white and sweet, and he
rubbed her head in exactly the right spot. When she had won his
confidence, he told her many things about himself and the College. Once
he had been at another place, a college older than this by a long time
but not so famous. The Overseer of this one had written him to come and
teach there, at a better salary. He explained to her what this
meant--money for the support of his mother, and in a few years the study
in Europe of which he dreamed, and for which he worked and saved, and
beside this the growing up with a new university, from an instructorship
in the present to a full professorship in the wonderful future. He told
her what was promised him, and showed her a picture once of the plan of
the completed university, with its arch and chapel tower and the great
mechanical shops spreading back across her shady pasture to the borders
of the lake.
Then she learned what the death of "the Governor" had brought upon them;
why the horses had been sold and why there were no more hammers nor
chisels ringing against the stone. The farm was losing a thousand
dollars a day, and the Government had seized upon the money they were
building the monument with and was trying to wrest it entirely from the
woman who had stopped once to pet the brood-mare when "the Governor"
was driving in the yard. These things were hard to understand. There
had never been any question of money here that Bonita could remember.
One day she had nosed vainly for the sugar he used to bring; Craig told
her that for two months he had had no money to give his mother; that if
it wasn't for a grocer in Mayfield who was kind to people in trouble,
they would have had nothing to eat. Bonita, remembering the students she
had seen gathering mushrooms, suggested grass; but he told her,
laughing, that only one man to his knowledge had ever lived that way and
he was a king, long ago, in the holy times. He, Craig, would have to
have money. In an old vest he had worn in the East, his mother found a
few pennies and had walked to Palo Alto and spent them for stamps for
the sake of paying for something. After this explanation, Bonita did not
hunt for sugar.
Although things grew easier after a time, Craig was gloomy enough during
the afternoons when they talked across the fence. Once "the Governor's
Wife" had been given five hundred dollars to pay her servants, and she
had given it to the Overseer for his teachers. But the Overseer had
begun at the houses where there were the most children, and he had not
got around to Craig, who had only a mother. When temptation came to
him, he told Bonita about it and asked her advice. A letter had come to
him with an offer from his old college; it meant a full salary and the
hope of Europe. It was everything to him, he said, but he couldn't bear
to go away. The brood-mare had put her nose affectionately against his
arm. She understood little about the salary, but she knew how dreadful
it would be to leave the pasture. The man must have understood, for
after being quiet a long time and smoking harder than ever, he said that
he was going to stay. But many times after that, when other offers came,
he told her how hard it was to decide and how black everything looked
for the University. The Government was pulling at the fund, and the lady
who was building the monument was going to sell her precious things to
get money.
The last time Craig leaned on the fence and whistled to her, he had been
very unhappy. Since then Bonita had not seen him. She was afraid that
he, too, had gone, after all, as the horses and grooms had gone, without
even a good-bye. She felt that if he had finally decided to give it up,
the smoke must fade away above the top of the chimney and the voices
cease altogether.
But to-day, when the clouds were breaking and the clear blue of
summer-time looked down between them, the chimney-smoke was blacker than
ever and across by the lake fence some young people were pulling
mushrooms and laughing. Bonita looked over toward the buildings. Then
she cropped grass again, for only a gurgling meadow-lark broke the line
of the fence-rail.
Suddenly she heard Craig's low whistle. He had come out from the
Wood-shop and put his elbows on the fence, his pipe sending up clear,
white smoke. Stopping now and then for a blade of grass, to show that
she was not too eager, the brood-mare walked slowly up to him. He was
not happy, as she had expected to find him. His brow was puckered and
his lips shut tightly on the stem of his pipe. Bonita put her nose over
the fence. The instructor took his pipe from his mouth and rubbed her
cheek slowly with the back of his knuckles.
"Well, old girl," he said, "I'm afraid you and I won't have many more
talks over this fence."
The brood-mare looked at him with questioning eyes.
"I plead guilty," he went on, "I oughtn't to have kept the secret from
you, I know. The minute I got the letter I should have come out to tell
you about it, but it was raining; honestly, it was."
He gave her a lump of sugar by way of conciliation.
"You see, I couldn't resist this one," he continued, while the sugar
crunched under her teeth; "it's a big honor and three thousand a year,
and I've got to do something; now, haven't I?"
His tone was doubtful, as though he were hardly sure of her opinion. The
meadow-lark which he had disturbed was releasing the joy of its full
throat under a shaft of sunlight further down the fence. The air hung
over them, sweet with the fragrance of the freshened pasture, charged
with the mysterious power of a Santa Clara Spring. No man, or horse, who
has caught that smell, ever forgets the valley of the Saint. Bonita was
looking across the green to the mushroom gatherers.
Craig spoke, a little petulantly.
"You never agree with me about my going, anyway. You seem to think that
the beauty of this campus and the freedom of everything here is argument
enough. But it's all too uncertain. I've told you that my salary is cut
away down and I'm not any too sure of ever having it made up to me; as
it is, we assistants are here only because the heads decided to cut
their own pay and keep us for the sake of the departments. If the suit
is lost, it's good-bye, anyway. I can't believe you have much idea that
we're going to win it to-morrow. It went for us in the lower courts,
here in California, but do you think that the Supreme Court of these
selfish and United States is going to decide for us just because they
were gallant enough to Mrs. Stanford to hurry the case up in the
calendar and cut short her suspense? You don't understand things, if you
think so. Out here where you live, the rains may be late and the grass
seem never coming, but you know it'll rain sooner or later, and you're
getting hay right along and it doesn't take much water to bring up what
you want. But with me it's different. We're going to get a weather
prediction from Washington to-morrow that'll tell us definitely whether
it's to be winter for keeps around here or summer and a good crop."
The instructor leaned on the fence and puffed on at his pipe. Bonita
endured the smoke that clung around them in the still air, for she felt
that they were at a crisis. She drew up closer to the rails and put her
head against the instructor's shoulder. Suddenly, the man let his pipe
fall into the grass and he laid his face against her soft, gray nose.
"You're a good old girl," he said, "and you know more about it than
anyone. But you haven't any money question to worry you. You don't love
the place a bit more than I do; you don't love it as much, because you
only know the nature side of it, and I know the bigness of the rest of
it, too. But the hope's almost dead, old lady; I can't tie my ambitions
to a corpse, you wouldn't ask me to, and you know I'm not the only one
to be looked after. But, oh, it'll be hard to go, won't it! There's
something that grips you where you live--you understand it."
The brood-mare did not pull away, although he was holding her head
tightly in his hot hands.
"If it all goes smash to-morrow and I can ever raise the money, I'm
going to send back for you, my beauty. You're getting too old to bring
much now, and you'll have to go sure if the Government wins."
Bonita lifted her head suddenly. A drop of cold rain had fallen against
her face. The clouds had drawn together sulkily above them. Across the
intervening turf hastened the mushroom gatherers, their baskets full of
the brown and white trophies. Craig picked up his pipe.
"Good-bye," he said, with a caress. "I'll come over to-morrow and tell
you the final news."
Bonita had never shown him how much she really cared, true to her
feminine reserve; but to-day, leaning her slender neck far over the
fence, she whinnied after him until he stopped at the corner of the
Power-house and waved back to her. Then she cropped grass slowly while
it began to sprinkle.
Next morning, when the second hour was about half through, a feeling of
excitement filled the Quad and penetrated the classrooms. Craig's
students were not paying very creditable attention to his lecture. He
himself was keeping his mind on the syllabus with considerable
difficulty. When someone passed the window and the eyes of the entire
class, including even the enthusiastic dig on the front seat, were
turned that way, Craig let his own wander and hesitated the least bit in
his talk.
All at once, like a thunderclap, a half-dozen voices somewhere in the
Quad gave the yell. Craig stopped speaking and looked at the class, who
gazed back at him. A man with his back to the windows stood up and
looked out. The seats creaked ominously. Then, like grass after a
breeze, the whole class rose and craned necks at the window.
The instructor, coming to himself, began feebly:
"If you please--"
Again the yell, not the desperate cry that is wrung out to cheer a
losing team, but the voice of victory, of joy and of great relief.
Professor Craig went out of his classroom like a shot, the class after
him.
There was a triumphal parade to the station, with flags and the entire
population of Roble beating time with dust-pans and brooms, to meet the
President who had sent the happy telegram. There were songs and speeches
and demonstrations in front of Xasmin House, with fellows hugging each
other or swinging round in side-line fashion, girls crying, and the
President's parrot incidentally learning the yell. Then, at night, the
alumni poured in on the trains from north and south, stirring the tumult
anew. Gay lanterns jewelled the porches of the Row, the Gym blazed with
light for more speeches and football songs, with no thought of football
in the singing of them, and round and round the shadowy Quad, where the
yell flashed in electric letters, went a wild carnival procession of men
and women, with torches and noise-machines, and Instructor Craig at
their head.
The gleam of the unusual lights, the happy shouts, and the clamor of
firecrackers, came in mingled confusion across to the dark pasture where
Bonita stood by the fence with her head raised and her pointed ears
forward. Craig had not come that afternoon to tell her the final truth;
but, listening and watching from the shadow, she did not feel that he
had gone away.
When she did see him again, he wore a new suit and, what was more
important, its pockets bulged with sugar. She was very glad to see him,
of course, but her greeting was an indifferent one after all; for she
was preoccupied, just then, with the infant needs of Pronto 2:17-3/4,
and could not stop to interest herself in the fact that the youngest of
the universities had been saved for all time.
CROSSROADS.
Crossroads.
"Oh see ye not yon narrow road
So thick beset wi' thorns and briers?
That is the Path of Righteousness,
Though after it but few inquires.
"And see ye not yon braid, braid road,
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the Path of Wickedness,
Though some call that the road to Heaven."
THOMAS THE RHYMER.
I.
The regular after-dinner crowd was smoking in Frank Lyman's Encina
boudoir, lolling over his sofa, their feet on his table, their legs
tangled on his iron bedstead. The steam heat was coming "Clank! clank!"
into the radiators, for it was a cold, clear evening in the time between
rains. Outside the fog was thick upon the hills, sending gray
ghost-fingers over toward the valley. You could lean from the window and
smell its clean moisture, mingling with the scent of young plants in the
fresh-turned earth. Frank himself sat close to the window and looked out
toward the gymnasium, because he had discovered a new amusement. There
was a section of the board walk between Encina and the gym which was
flooded just to its top by a pool from the late rain, so that if you
stepped heavily thereon the plank gave a bit and dropped you into the
water. The diversion consisted in betting with "Pegasus" Langdon on the
style of crossing adopted by chance wayfarers. The stakes were five
cents a corner. Frank backed the class who took the thing at one bound;
"Peg" laid his coin on those who went over on their tiptoes, trying not
to spring the plank into the water. For every one who did neither, but
walked around the puddle, five cents a corner went into the tobacco
fund. It was just as good as matching nickels and involved less
exertion.
There is a theory in the Hall that you can tell a man's habits by the
rooms he occupies there. The nearer he gets to the corner fronting on
the baseball field, the more sociable is his nature. Those who hold the
rooms at that corner or on the second or third floors, so as to be in
easy hail of anyone coming in at the back entrance, are Public
Characters. Their apartments are reception rooms in very truth. It has
never been explained why Encina does not sag at that end, like an
excursion steamer on the side toward a boat race. If, on the other hand,
you believe you have a Mission, or if you are a Dig, rooming in the Hall
because it is convenient to the Quad, then you dwell in "Faculty Row,"
away off to the east, where the early sun pulls you out in time to put
the finishing touches to your Latin, and where there is no trafficking
to and from the Quad to disturb your evening study.
It was said that Frank Lyman was the only man at the Quadrangle end of
the Hall who ever made much pretense of studying. By the same token the
keepers of the college tradition alleged that he alone of all the gang
stood high in the opinion of the Faculty. It was a way he had. He stood
well with everybody.
If they had taken the trouble to investigate, those who wondered at his
ability both to loaf much and to study much, at his scholarship dwelling
alongside of his popularity, they might have found that he kept the two
things in harmony by a marvelous system. The gang dwelt in his room,
made it their hang-out, but only just so long; when the hour arrived for
Lyman's study-time, they vanished away mysteriously, took the hint
conveyed in some fashion, no one ever knew how, and were gone.
To the under-classmen, Lyman was an object of healthy awe. Older than
the average senior, he had been already in the larger world. His opinion
of things had especial value even in his Junior year. After the football
season, when he had been acknowledged the keenest manager the college
had ever found, the under-classmen had a blind faith in his
infallibility. The older students relied on him in much the same way,
though there were some who said that self lay at the bottom of Lyman's
system of morals, that the watchword of his philosophy was "Does it
pay?" These men were sentimentalists who had ideals. Langdon, the
Sequoia editor, would have told you that he thought more of Lyman than
of any two men in the class; it is a question, though, whether he would
have recommended Lyman's advice in everything. Frank was a good man to
keep a Freshman's money for him, to listen to his class-room troubles or
to stand between the luckless youngster and Faculty wrath; but when it
was a case into which something deeper entered, perhaps the Senior's
worldly philosophy was not of the best sort. This was the idea of
dreamers like "Pegasus" Langdon, who said things about "sentiment" and
to whom Freshmen seldom came for advice. But Lyman continued to hold his
after-dinner receptions, and his admirers piled themselves comfortably
on his bed and believed in him implicitly.
The psychological moment came for the regular withdrawal. Frank opened
his windows with care, donned the old bath-robe which was his armor for
the battle intellectual, put on his eye-shade over his straight brown
hair, and opened his Pollock. At this hint the others slipped out; only
Jimmie Mason lingered, his gaze on the shadowy hills with their faint
fringe of dark green, the dregs of his pipe purring in the stillness.
Lyman's room-mate was somewhere queening. Lyman himself, pretending to
study, looked up from time to time, waiting for the Sophomore to unbosom
himself. Frank knew the symptoms.
"Well, Jimmie?" he said at length--one couldn't study with that going on
and Frank had his stint to finish.
"It's about my father."
"Drinking again?"
Jimmie only nodded. The smoke went out in his pipe; he knocked the ashes
from it and put it away mechanically in the common pipe-rack over the
radiator.
"Tell me about it." Frank had closed his book, and was leaning back in
his tilted chair, his feet braced in the shelf beneath, his hands
clasped over his knees.
"Not much to tell, I guess, no more than you know already. I got a
letter from the old lady."
"Your grandmother, eh?"
"Yes. She says something must be done. 'In low saloons,' she says, and
I've been sizing it up--and Frank, don't you think I ought to go home?"
A silence again, with Lyman's alarm clock ticking placidly on the table
between them.
It had come, the moment to bring the boy around; Frank had waited for it
in the weeks since he had known the story. In this silence he mapped out
his argument, as he would have prepared a brief.
"How much has your father ever helped you, Jimmie?"
"Not much. We've always been poor, you know."
"Because he drank?"
"Yes, he never could keep a job but so long."
"Not even when you were small?"
"I wasn't with him then. When my mother got--when she left him, she took
me with her. Then she died, and I was with my grandmother awhile, then I
lived with him until I came here."
"Are you very fond of him?"
"No, Frank, I'm not; not a bit. He never did anything for my mother or
for me, to make me."
"I don't see why you lived with him then."
"He'd behave himself better. I had a sort of influence over him. He was
afraid of me, or ashamed, or something, and I stuck to him to keep him
straight. But, oh! I hated it, and when he got going all right, I cut
loose and came here."
"What sort is the old lady? W. C. T. U. and all that kind of thing, I
suppose?"
"Something on that order."
The Oracle leaned forward until his chest came almost between his bent
knees, as was his wont when he clinched his arguments.
"I suppose you've never figured it out that people of her way of
thinking would call what little drinking you do at Mayfield 'drinking in
low saloons?'"
By his silence Jimmie admitted that there was something in the position.
Frank followed up his lead.
"So it may be nothing very bad after all. But let's suppose it is;
suppose he has slid back into the worst of his old ways, is it going to
pay to go on and break things all up for yourself, for the purpose of
trying to bolster him up? It seems to me you would let your enthusiasm
get away with your common sense. But it's your business, Jimmie. Only
the thing that gets me is the blooming uselessness of it all. What can
you do?"
"I can work."
"You could do that before you came here. You see, it was all right
before, when your plans weren't formed. Now it means not only his
sliding back, but yours too. You know as well as I do that a half-baked
man isn't worth a whoop, not a solitary whoop. You've got to drop down
into mediocrity just when you are on the way up to something. And after
sacrificing yourself, perhaps, it will have been for nothing. You can't
cure that thing in a month, nor a year, nor two years. If he is
drinking, regular and hard, you've got to catch him and stay with him
just about as long as he lives. You can't leave him after you get him on
his feet, or he'll go right back. You know that from experience, don't
you?"
"Yes," said Jimmie. The Senior's words came to him as a relief. He had
begun the conversation with the feeling that the thing for him to do was
to go home, and dreading lest Lyman should think so, too. Now Frank
showed him the folly of such a step, and Frank knew about things.
"It means a knockout to your ambition," went on Lyman, "the spoiling of
yourself, and you propose to do this for a man you don't care for? I
don't understand."
"He is my father," said the Sophomore. This reason had seemed ample,
when he was thinking it over alone; it did not sound so convincing now.
"And suppose he is, do you have to pay for that? No, Jimmie, that's a
fine sentimental view of it that won't help either of you. Let him wait.
You have the right to do it. He can wait two years, till you've had your
chance. If it has been going on all this time, two years won't be long,
and then when you're through and ready to do something, there'll be
sense in it; there isn't now.--"
Just then Freshman Halleck, who had a genius for poking in where he was
not wanted, knocked and entered with Encina abruptness, for Frank had
not locked the door. He made his stay so long that Lyman, with his
thoughts on his unfinished work, said:
"Well, good-night, you fellows," as a gentle hint, and Jimmie withdrew.