bursting into a roar of laughter. As it was, he felt compelled to
retire up the cañon until he could recover his gravity. There he
confided the joke to the tall pine-trees, with many slaps of his
leg, contortions of his face, and the usual profanity. But when
he returned to the party, he found them seated by a fire—for the
air had grown strangely chill and the sky overcast—in apparently
amicable conversation. Piney was actually talking in an impulsive,
girlish fashion to the Duchess, who was listening with an interest and
animation she had not shown for many days. The Innocent was holding
forth, apparently with equal effect, to Mr. Oakhurst and Mother
Shipton, who was actually relaxing into amiability. “Is this yer a
d—-d picnic?” said Uncle Billy, with inward scorn, as he surveyed the
sylvan group, the glancing fire-light, and the tethered animals in the
foreground. Suddenly an idea mingled with the alcoholic fumes that
disturbed his brain. It was apparently of a jocular nature, for he felt
impelled to slap his leg again and cram his fist into his mouth.
As the shadows crept slowly up the mountain, a slight breeze rocked
the tops of the pine-trees, and moaned through their long and gloomy
aisles. The ruined cabin, patched and covered with pine boughs, was set
apart for the ladies. As the lovers parted, they unaffectedly exchanged
a kiss, so honest and sincere that it might have been heard above the
swaying pines. The frail Duchess and the malevolent Mother Shipton were
probably too stunned to remark upon this last evidence of simplicity,
and so turned without a word to the hut. The fire was replenished, the
men lay down before the door, and in a few minutes were asleep.
Mr. Oakhurst was a light sleeper. Toward morning he awoke benumbed and
cold. As he stirred the dying fire, the wind, which was now blowing
strongly, brought to his cheek that which caused the blood to leave
it,—snow!
He started to his feet with the intention of awakening the sleepers,
for there was no time to lose. But turning to where Uncle Billy had
been lying, he found him gone. A suspicion leaped to his brain and
a curse to his lips. He ran to the spot where the mules had been
tethered; they were no longer there. The tracks were already rapidly
disappearing in the snow.
The momentary excitement brought Mr. Oakhurst back to the fire with
his usual calm. He did not waken the sleepers. The Innocent slumbered
peacefully, with a smile on his good-humored, freckled face; the virgin
Piney slept beside her frailer sisters as sweetly as though attended
by celestial guardians, and Mr. Oakhurst, drawing his blanket over his
shoulders, stroked his mustachios and waited for the dawn. It came
slowly in a whirling mist of snowflakes, that dazzled and confused the
eye. What could be seen of the landscape appeared magically changed. He
looked over the valley, and summed up the present and future in two
words,—“Snowed in!”
A careful inventory of the provisions, which, fortunately for the
party, had been stored within the hut, and so escaped the felonious
fingers of Uncle Billy, disclosed the fact that with care and prudence
they might last ten days longer. “That is,” said Mr. Oakhurst,
_sotto voce_ to the Innocent, “if you’re willing to board us. If you
ain’t—and perhaps you’d better not—you can wait till Uncle Billy
gets back with provisions.” For some occult reason, Mr. Oakhurst could
not bring himself to disclose Uncle Billy’s rascality, and so offered
the hypothesis that he had wandered from the camp and had accidentally
stampeded the animals. He dropped a warning to the Duchess and Mother
Shipton, who of course knew the facts of their associate’s defection.
“They’ll find out the truth about us _all_, when they find out
anything,” he added, significantly, “and there’s no good frightening
them now.”
Tom Simson not only put all his worldly store at the disposal of Mr.
Oakhurst, but seemed to enjoy the prospect of their enforced seclusion.
“We’ll have a good camp for a week, and then the snow’ll melt, and
we’ll all go back together.” The cheerful gaiety of the young man and
Mr. Oakhurst’s calm infected the others. The Innocent, with the aid
of pine boughs, extemporized a thatch for the roofless cabin, and the
Duchess directed Piney in the rearrangement of the interior with a
taste and tact that opened the blue eyes of that provincial maiden
to their fullest extent. “I reckon now you’re used to fine things at
Poker Flat,” said Piney. The Duchess turned away sharply to conceal
something that reddened her cheek through its professional tint, and
Mother Shipton requested Piney not to “chatter.” But when Mr. Oakhurst
returned from a weary search for the trail, he heard the sound of
happy laughter echoed from the rocks. He stopped in some alarm, and
his thoughts first naturally reverted to the whiskey, which he had
prudently _cachéd_. “And yet it don’t somehow sound like whiskey,”
said the gambler. It was not until he caught sight of the blazing fire
through the still blinding storm, and the group around it, that he
settled to the conviction that it was “square fun.”
Whether Mr. Oakhurst had _cachéd_ his cards with the whiskey as
something debarred the free access of the community, I cannot say.
It was certain that, in Mother Shipton’s words, he “didn’t say cards
once” during that evening. Haply the time was beguiled by an accordion,
produced somewhat ostentatiously by Tom Simson, from his pack.
Notwithstanding some difficulties attending the manipulation of this
instrument, Piney Woods managed to pluck several reluctant melodies
from its keys, to an accompaniment by the Innocent on a pair of bone
castanets. But the crowning festivity of the evening was reached in
a rude camp-meeting hymn, which the lovers, joining hands, sang with
great earnestness and vociferation. I fear that a certain defiant
tone and Covenanter’s swing to its chorus, rather than any devotional
quality, caused it speedily to infect the others, who at last joined in
the refrain:
“‘I’m proud to live in the service of the Lord,
And I’m bound to die in His army.’”
The pines rocked, the storm eddied and whirled above the miserable
group, and the flames of their altar leaped heavenward, as if in token
of the vow.
At midnight the storm abated, the rolling clouds parted, and the
stars glittered keenly above the sleeping camp. Mr. Oakhurst, whose
professional habits had enabled him to live on the smallest possible
amount of sleep, in dividing the watch with Tom Simson, somehow
managed to take upon himself the greater part of that duty. He excused
himself to the Innocent, by saying that he had “often been a week
without sleep.” “Doing what?” asked Tom. “Poker!” replied Oakhurst,
sententiously; “when a man gets a streak of luck,—nigger-luck,—he
don’t get tired. The luck gives in first. Luck,” continued the gambler,
reflectively, “is a mighty queer thing. All you know about it for
certain is that it’s bound to change. And it’s finding out when it’s
going to change that makes you. We’ve had a streak of bad luck since
we left Poker Flat—you come along, and slap you get into it, too. If
you can hold your cards right along you’re all right. For,” added the
gambler, with cheerful irrelevance,
“‘I’m proud to live in the service of the Lord,
And I’m bound to die in His army.’”
The third day came, and the sun, looking through the white-curtained
valley, saw the outcasts divide their slowly decreasing store of
provisions for the morning meal. It was one of the peculiarities of
that mountain climate that its rays diffused a kindly warmth over the
wintry landscape, as if in regretful commiseration of the past. But it
revealed drift on drift of snow piled high around the hut; a hopeless,
uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky shores to which
the castaways still clung. Through the marvellously clear air, the
smoke of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles away. Mother
Shipton saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky fastness,
hurled in that direction a final malediction. It was her last
vituperative attempt, and perhaps for that reason was invested with a
certain degree of sublimity. It did her good, she privately informed
the Duchess. “Just you go out there and cuss, and see.” She then set
herself to the task of amusing “the child,” as she and the Duchess were
pleased to call Piney. Piney was no chicken, but it was a soothing and
ingenious theory of the pair thus to account for the fact that she
didn’t swear and wasn’t improper.
When night crept up again through the gorges, the reedy notes of the
accordion rose and fell in fitful spasms and long-drawn gasps by the
flickering camp-fire. But music failed to fill entirely the aching
void left by insufficient food, and a new diversion was proposed by
Piney—story-telling. Neither Mr. Oakhurst nor his female companions
caring to relate their personal experiences, this plan would have
failed, too, but for the Innocent. Some months before he had chanced
upon a stray copy of Mr. Pope’s ingenious translation of the Iliad. He
now proposed to narrate the principal incidents of that poem—having
thoroughly mastered the argument and fairly forgotten the words—in
the current vernacular of Sandy Bar. And so for the rest of that
night the Homeric demigods again walked the earth. Trojan bully and
wily Greek wrestled in the winds, and the great pines in the cañon
seemed to bow to the wrath of the son of Peleus. Mr. Oakhurst listened
with quiet satisfaction. Most especially was he interested in the
fate of “Ash-heels,” as the Innocent persisted in denominating the
“swift-footed Achilles.”
So with small food and much of Homer and the accordion, a week passed
over the heads of the outcasts. The sun again forsook them, and again
from leaden skies the snowflakes were sifted over the land. Day by day
closer around them drew the snowy circle, until at last they looked
from their prison over drifted walls of dazzling white, that towered
twenty feet above their heads. It became more and more difficult to
replenish their fires, even from the fallen trees beside them, now half
hidden in the drifts. And yet no one complained. The lovers turned from
the dreary prospect and looked into each other’s eyes, and were happy.
Mr. Oakhurst settled himself coolly to the losing game before him. The
Duchess, more cheerful than she had been, assumed the care of Piney.
Only Mother Shipton—once the strongest of the party—seemed to sicken
and fade. At midnight on the tenth day she called Oakhurst to her side.
“I’m going,” she said, in a voice of querulous weakness, “but don’t say
anything about it. Don’t waken the kids. Take the bundle from under my
head and open it.” Mr. Oakhurst did so. It contained Mother Shipton’s
rations for the last week, untouched. “Give ’em to the child,” she
said, pointing to the sleeping Piney. “You’ve starved yourself,” said
the gambler. “That’s what they call it,” said the woman, querulously,
as she lay down again, and, turning her face to the wall, passed
quietly away.
The accordion and the bones were put aside that day, and Homer was
forgotten. When the body of Mother Shipton had been committed to the
snow, Mr. Oakhurst took the Innocent aside, and showed him a pair of
snowshoes, which he had fashioned from the old packsaddle. “There’s one
chance in a hundred to save her yet,” he said, pointing to Piney; “but
it’s there,” he added, pointing toward Poker Flat. “If you can reach
there in two days she’s safe.” “And you?” asked Tom Simson. “I’ll stay
here,” was the curt reply.
The lovers parted with a long embrace. “You are not going, too?” said
the Duchess, as she saw Mr. Oakhurst apparently waiting to accompany
him. “As far as the cañon,” he replied. He turned suddenly, and kissed
the Duchess, leaving her pallid face aflame, and her trembling limbs
rigid with amazement.
Night came, but not Mr. Oakhurst. It brought the storm again and the
whirling snow. Then the Duchess, feeding the fire, found that some one
had quietly piled beside the hut enough fuel to last a few days longer.
The tears rose to her eyes, but she hid them from Piney.
The women slept but little. In the morning, looking into each other’s
faces, they read their fate. Neither spoke; but Piney, accepting the
position of the stronger, drew near and placed her arm around the
Duchess’s waist. They kept this attitude for the rest of the day. That
night the storm reached its greatest fury, and, rending asunder the
protecting pines, invaded the very hut.
Toward morning they found themselves unable to feed the fire, which
gradually died away. As the embers slowly blackened, the Duchess
crept closer to Piney, and broke the silence of many hours: “Piney,
can you pray?” “No, dear,” said Piney, simply. The Duchess, without
knowing exactly why, felt relieved, and, putting her head upon Piney’s
shoulder, spoke no more. And so reclining, the younger and purer
pillowing the head of her soiled sister upon her virgin breast, they
fell asleep.
The wind lulled as if it feared to waken them. Feathery drifts of
snow, shaken from the long pine boughs, flew like white-winged birds,
and settled about them as they slept. The moon through the rifted
clouds looked down upon what had been the camp. But all human stain,
all trace of earthly travail, was hidden beneath the spotless mantle
mercifully flung from above.
They slept all that day and the next, nor did they waken when voices
and footsteps broke the silence of the camp. And when pitying fingers
brushed the snow from their wan faces, you could scarcely have told
from the equal peace that dwelt upon them, which was she that had
sinned. Even the Law of Poker Flat recognized this, and turned away,
leaving them still locked in each other’s arms.
But at the head of the gulch, on one of the largest pine-trees, they
found the deuce of clubs pinned to the bark with a bowie knife. It bore
the following, written in pencil, in a firm hand:
†
BENEATH THIS TREE
LIES THE BODY
OF
JOHN OAKHURST,
WHO STRUCK A STREAK OF BAD LUCK
ON THE 23D OF NOVEMBER, 1850,
AND
HANDED IN HIS CHECKS
ON THE 7TH DECEMBER, 1850.
†
And, pulseless and cold, with a Derringer by his side and a bullet in
his heart, though still calm as in life, beneath the snow lay he who
was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker
Flat.
THE REVOLT OF “MOTHER”
BY
MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN
This is a story of character against a New England background. Each
character is worked out with the delicacy and minuteness of a cameo.
Each is intensely realistic, yet, as in the cameo, palely flushed
with romance. “Mother,” along with her originality of action and
long-concealed ideals, has the saving quality of common-sense, which
makes its powerful appeal to the daily realities of life. Thus when
“Father,” dazed by the unexpected revelation of the character and
ideals of the woman he has misunderstood for forty years, stands
uncertain whether to assert or to surrender his long-established
supremacy, she decides him in her favor by a practical suggestion of
acquiescence: “You’d better take your coat off an’ get washed—there’s
the wash-basin—an’ then we’ll have supper.”
THE REVOLT OF “MOTHER”[18]
“Father!”
“What is it?”
“What are them men diggin’ over there in the field for?”
There was a sudden dropping and enlarging of the lower part of the old
man’s face, as if some heavy weight had settled therein; he shut his
mouth tight, and went on harnessing the great bay mare. He hustled the
collar on to her neck with a jerk.
“Father!”
The old man slapped the saddle upon the mare’s back.
“Look here, father, I want to know what them men are diggin’ over in
the field for, an’ I’m goin’ to know.”
“I wish you’d go into the house, mother, an’ ’tend to your own
affairs,” the old man said then. He ran his words together, and his
speech was almost as inarticulate as a growl.
But the woman understood; it was her most native tongue. “I ain’t goin’
into the house till you tell me what them men are doin’ over there in
the field,” said she.
Then she stood waiting. She was a small woman, short and
straight-waisted like a child in her brown cotton gown. Her forehead
was mild and benevolent between the smooth curves of gray hair; there
were meek downward lines about her nose and mouth; but her eyes, fixed
upon the old man, looked as if the meekness had been the result of her
own will, never of the will of another.
They were in the barn, standing before the wide-open doors. The spring
air, full of the smell of growing grass and unseen blossoms, came in
their faces. The deep yard in front was littered with farm wagons and
piles of wood; on the edges, close to the fence and the house, the
grass was a vivid green, and there were some dandelions.
The old man glanced doggedly at his wife as he tightened the last
buckles on the harness. She looked as immovable to him as one of the
rocks in his pastureland, bound to the earth with generations of
blackberry vines. He slapped the reins over the horse, and started
forth from the barn.
“_Father!_” said she.
The old man pulled up. “What is it?”
“I want to know what them men are diggin’ over there in that field for.”
“They’re diggin’ a cellar, I s’pose, if you’ve got to know.”
“A cellar for what?”
“A barn.”
“A barn? You ain’t goin’ to build a barn over there where we was goin’
to have a house, father?”
The old man said not another word. He hurried the horse into the farm
wagon, and clattered out of the yard, jouncing as sturdily on his seat
as a boy.
The woman stood a moment looking after him, then she went out of the
barn across a corner of the yard to the house. The house, standing
at right angles with the great barn and a long reach of sheds and
out-buildings, was infinitesimal compared with them. It was scarcely
as commodious for people as the little boxes under the barn eaves were
for doves.
A pretty girl’s face, pink and delicate as a flower, was looking out of
one of the house windows. She was watching three men who were digging
over in the field which bounded the yard near the road line. She turned
quietly when the woman entered.
“What are they digging for, mother?” said she. “Did he tell you?”
“They’re diggin’ for—a cellar for a new barn.”
“Oh, mother, he ain’t going to build another barn?”
“That’s what he says.”
A boy stood before the kitchen glass combing his hair. He combed slowly
and painstakingly, arranging his brown hair in a smooth hillock over
his forehead. He did not seem to pay any attention to the conversation.
“Sammy, did you know father was going to build a new barn?” asked the
girl.
The boy combed assiduously.
“Sammy!”
He turned, and showed a face like his father’s under his smooth crest
of hair. “Yes, I s’pose I did,” he said, reluctantly.
“How long have you known it?” asked his mother.
“‘Bout three months, I guess.”
“Why didn’t you tell of it?”
“Didn’t think ’twould do no good.”
“I don’t see what father wants another barn for,” said the girl, in
her sweet, slow voice. She turned again to the window, and stared out
at the digging men in the field. Her tender, sweet face was full of a
gentle distress. Her forehead was as bald and innocent as a baby’s,
with the light hair strained back from it in a row of curl-papers. She
was quite large, but her soft curves did not look as if they covered
muscles.
Her mother looked sternly at the boy. “Is he goin’ to buy more cows?”
said she.
The boy did not reply; he was tying his shoes.
“Sammy, I want you to tell me if he’s goin’ to buy more cows.”
“I s’pose he is.”
“How many?”
“Four, I guess.”
His mother said nothing more. She went into the pantry, and there was
a clatter of dishes. The boy got his cap from a nail behind the door,
took an old arithmetic from the shelf, and started for school. He was
lightly built, but clumsy. He went out of the yard with a curious
spring in the hips, that made his loose home-made jacket tilt up in the
rear.
The girl went to the sink, and began to wash the dishes that were piled
up there. Her mother came promptly out of the pantry, and shoved her
aside. “You wipe ’em,” said she; “I’ll wash. There’s a good many this
mornin’.”
The mother plunged her hands vigorously into the water, the girl wiped
the plates slowly and dreamily. “Mother,” said she, “don’t you think
it’s too bad father’s going to build that new barn, much as we need a
decent house to live in?”
Her mother scrubbed a dish fiercely. “You ain’t found out yet we’re
women-folks, Nanny Penn,” said she. “You ain’t seen enough of men-folks
yet to. One of these days you’ll find it out, an’ then you’ll know that
we know only what men-folks think we do, so far as any use of it goes,
an’ how we’d ought to reckon men-folks in with Providence, an’ not
complain of what they do any more than we do of the weather.”
“I don’t care; I don’t believe George is anything like that, anyhow,”
said Nanny. Her delicate face flushed pink, her lips pouted softly, as
if she were going to cry.
“You wait an’ see. I guess George Eastman ain’t no better than other
men. You hadn’t ought to judge father, though. He can’t help it, ’cause
he don’t look at things jest the way we do. An’ we’ve been pretty
comfortable here, after all. The roof don’t leak—ain’t never but
once—that’s one thing. Father’s kept it shingled right up.”
“I do wish we had a parlor.”
“I guess it won’t hurt George Eastman any to come to see you in a nice
clean kitchen. I guess a good many girls don’t have as good a place as
this. Nobody’s ever heard me complain.”
“I ain’t complained either, mother.”
“Well, I don’t think you’d better, a good father an’ a good home as
you’ve got. S’pose your father made you go out an’ work for your
livin’? Lots of girls have to that ain’t no stronger an’ better able to
than you be.”
Sarah Penn washed the frying-pan with a conclusive air. She scrubbed
the outside of it as faithfully as the inside. She was a masterly
keeper of her box of a house. Her one living-room never seemed to have
in it any of the dust which the friction of life with inanimate matter
produces. She swept, and there seemed to be no dirt to go before the
broom; she cleaned, and one could see no difference. She was like an
artist so perfect that he has apparently no art. To-day she got out a
mixing bowl and a board, and rolled some pies, and there was no more
flour upon her than upon her daughter who was doing finer work. Nanny
was to be married in the fall, and she was sewing on some white cambric
and embroidery. She sewed industriously while her mother cooked, her
soft milk-white hands and wrists showed whiter than her delicate work.
“We must have the stove moved out in the shed before long,” said Mrs.
Penn. “Talk about not havin’ things, it’s been a real blessin’ to be
able to put a stove up in that shed in hot weather. Father did one good
thing when he fixed that stove-pipe out there.”
Sarah Penn’s face as she rolled her pies had that expression of meek
vigor which might have characterized one of the New Testament saints.
She was making mince-pies. Her husband, Adoniram Penn, liked them
better than any other kind. She baked twice a week. Adoniram often
liked a piece of pie between meals. She hurried this morning. It had
been later than usual when she began, and she wanted to have a pie
baked for dinner. However deep a resentment she might be forced to hold
against her husband, she would never fail in sedulous attention to his
wants.
Nobility of character manifests itself at loop-holes when it is not
provided with large doors. Sarah Penn’s showed itself to-day in flaky
dishes of pastry. So she made the pies faithfully, while across the
table she could see, when she glanced up from her work, the sight that
rankled in her patient and steadfast soul—the digging of the cellar of
the new barn in the place where Adoniram forty years ago had promised
her their new house should stand.
The pies were done for dinner. Adoniram and Sammy were home a few
minutes after twelve o’clock. The dinner was eaten with serious haste.
There was never much conversation at the table in the Penn family.
Adoniram asked a blessing, and they ate promptly, then rose up and went
about their work.