"BEST LAID PLANS"
Joe came home the next day, and his indignation, when Jessie told him
of the fire, and of the manner--presumably--in which it originated,
was nearly as scorching as the fire itself. Nothing in the whole
affair seemed to rouse his wrath to such a pitch as did her recital of
the theories that she and Mrs. Horton had evolved to account for the
threatened disaster.
"W'at sort of fool talk dat?" he inquired, contemptuously, when Jessie
had concluded.
"Why, Joe, the fire must have started in some such way!" Jessie
insisted.
"Honey, yo's done got a forgibbin' sperrit; yo' not only forgibs yo'
inimy, like what de Bible say fur ter do, but yo' eben furgits dat yo'
has one!"
"Oh, Joe! Surely you cannot think that it was the work of an
incendiary?"
"Ob a 'cindery? No, hit ain' dat."
"What do you think, then, Joe?"
"W'at I t'ink? Some low-down sneak sot hit afire. Dat's w'at I t'ink.
An' I wouldn' hab ter hunt long afore I done laid my han's on him,
neider." Jessie looked so shocked, and so cast down, that, chancing to
catch the old man's eye, I shook my head at him warningly. Joe
understood. His beloved master Ralph's tactics had been those of
silence and Joe was willing to follow them to the end. But he muttered
scornfully: "'Cindery? Dat a likely idee; w'en I nebber lef' a heap o'
stuff like dat ag'in' nobody's house en all my life! Look like I'd go
fur ter doin' hit now, w'en dish yer house hole my own fambly!"
He seated himself in the corner with a bit of harness that he had
brought up to the house to mend, in his hand, but presently he began
searching anxiously for some mislaid tool.
"What have you lost, Joe?" I asked.
"W'y I ain' right shore as I done los' anyt'ing, chile, but de needle
an' t'read w'at I put in dis cheer, ag'in' I wanted 'em, 'pear to hab
crope away some'ers; likewise dat ar leetle case knife w'at I cuts
leather wiv'. Dey's gone, an' I doan see dat chile Ralph 'round'
nowhere's."
Just at this point the door was pushed a little farther open and a
cheerful voice proclaimed: "Here me is, Doe!"
The voice was followed by its owner, little Ralph, but such a curious
spectacle the boy presented that the occupants of the room stared at
him a moment in amazed silence. Jessie was the first to recover her
power of speech and remonstrance:
"Ralph! Oh, what have you been doing, you naughty, naughty boy!"
It was evident that the little trespasser had not realized that his
recent occupation had been in any way objectionable. His lips began to
quiver, but he stood his ground manfully.
"Me isn't a notty, notty b'y, Jeppie. Me is a yittle 'orse, an' 'ese
are 'e yittle 'orse's ley bells."
"Sleigh bells! Didn't you know any better than to pull up all of
Joe's cantaloupes and string them on to threads--how you could do it I
can't imagine--to hang around your shoulders?"
"Dey isn't 'antelopes, Jeppie; dey's ley bells."
"How did you do it? Oh, you naughty--"
"Me did it wiv Doe's little knife an' Doe's needle an' t'read; an' me
hurted me's han's, me did."
The recollection gave him the excuse that he was longing for. The
string to one of his odd sets of sleigh-bells broke as he started
across the room, with outstretched arms, for Joe, and he left a trail
of small, hard, green melons as he ran. "Doe!" he cried, as the old
man lifted him tenderly to his breast, "me hurted me han's!" The howl
of anguish with which he repeated the statement was partially
smothered by reason of the sufferer's face being buried in Joe's neck.
"Jeppie say me is notty, notty b'y!" he continued, sobbing.
"Miss Jessie," the old man said, with dignity, looking disapprovingly
at his young mistress over the boy's shaking shoulders, "yo' means
well, honey; I ain' a doubtin' ob dat, but yo' done got er heap ter
learn 'bout managin' chillen. Yo's done hurted pore little Ralph's
feelin's mighty bad!"
"His feelings ought to be hurt!" Jessie persisted, indignantly. "A boy
who is old enough to do such a piece of mischief as that is old enough
to know better. And, Joe, it isn't right for you to encourage him in
it."
"Honey, hit ain' likely, now, is hit, dat any one has dish yer pore
little feller's good more at heart dan I has, now is hit?"
"No, Joe, it isn't."
"Berry well, den; now yo' listen at me. Ef I had a t'ought ob hit w'en
I was a plantin' dem dere little yeller seeds I'd put out a patch on
purpose for dis chile ter 'a' had fur a marble quarry, or fur
sleigh-bells, or w'atebber he tuck a notion fur. But I didn't t'ink of
hit, an' de chile did. Dat's all!"
It was utterly useless to argue against such self-abnegation as this,
but Jessie could not forbear saying: "Think of the trouble you have
taken with that melon patch. You've scoured the whole valley, high
and low, for tin cans to cover the vines when a frost was threatened,
and you've spent days in hoeing and weeding them."
"And dere ain' a purtier patch ob melons, er a more promisin' one, in
de whole State, ef I does say hit!" Joe declared with pride.
"Don't be too sure of that, Joe. You haven't seen it since Ralph has
been over it."
Joe shifted the child's position, so that the tear-stained little
white face rested against his own, to which it formed a wonderful and
beautiful contrast. "W'at melons dese yer little han's been a-pullin'
up ain' no loss t' nobody," he said; "an' I wants de chile t' 'joy
hisself."
A subsequent examination of the melon patch established the truth of
Joe's words. At the moment, however, the idea that Ralph gathered was
that he had done a rather commendable thing than otherwise. "Shall me
pull up 'e rest of 'em?" he asked hopefully, snuggling closer to the
black face. Joe stole a sheepish look at Jessie, whose eyes were
dancing with amusement.
"Not jess yit, wouldn't go fur t' pull 'em, honey, chile. Wait twell
dey's growed 'bout as big as er coffee-cup, an' den jess bring yo'
little toofies tergedder on de inside o' one of 'em. Yo's et oranges,
an' yo's squalled hard w'en dey was gone, 'cause dere wan't no mo' of
'em. But yo' won't look at a orange when yo' kin git a cantaloupe."
"Den me lets 'em drow," Ralph declared magnanimously, and it is but
fair to the child to say that he kept his word.
"Come and gather up all your sleigh-bells, then, Ralph," Jessie
admonished him.
Climbing down from Joe's lap he set about the clearance, awkwardly
enough. The abbreviated skirt of his little dress was about half
filled--he had made a kind of bag of it by gathering the folds tightly
in one hand while he picked up melons with the other--when there came
a knock at the door. Dropping the spoil that he had already secured,
Ralph ran across the room to admit the caller, the melons rolling in
every direction. Joe glanced at them apprehensively, and then gave his
undivided attention to the harness mending.
The visitor who entered the room on Ralph's hospitable invitation was
our near neighbor, Caleb Wilson. Mr. Wilson glanced at the array of
hard little spheres on the floor and laughed.
"I'll bet a cent you've been up to mischief, youngster," he said,
nodding to me as I handed him a chair.
He looked smilingly at Ralph, who retreated to Joe's side, and made no
answer.
"Ralph, do you hear Mr. Wilson?" Jessie sternly inquired.
"'Ess; me hears him."
"Why don't you answer him, then?"
"'Tause he didn't ask me nuffin'."
Joe's sombre face lighted up; his white ivories gleamed out suddenly
like a flash of sunlight through a storm cloud. To Joe's mind few
people had a right to question the doings of a Gordon, of any age or
degree, and Mr. Wilson was not one of the favored few. Our genial
neighbor laughed.
"That's right, my little man; I didn't. I made a statement, and you
seem to be sharp enough already to see the difference."
He had been carrying a covered tin pail in his hand. He now set it on
the floor beside his chair, while Jessie, who had it much at heart
that her little brother must be properly trained, remarked:
"Ralph has been very naughty."
"He'll come out all right; don't you go to worrying about him, Miss
Jessie," Mr. Wilson admonished her, cheerfully. "He's nothing but a
baby, anyway," he continued, "but what even a baby can want of all
those little green knobs of cantaloupes is more'n I can tell, but
seeing 'em calls to my mind a fruit speculation of mine, last summer."
"I thought you were a cattleman?" I interrupted, involuntarily.
Mr. Wilson glanced down at the pail beside his chair. "Well, I am,
Leslie, but a cattleman doesn't have to be sensible all the time. I
had a kind of spell last summer when I wasn't sensible, and while it
was at its height I got hold of a pile of young tomato plants and set
'em out. You see, as everybody else, pretty nigh, is in the cattle
business, too, there ain't much fruit raised around here, and so I
'lowed I'd be able to dispose of my tomato crop to good advantage.
Along in August the crop was ready to market, and it was a hummer, no
mistake. The construction gang and the engineers were working on the
big storage reservoirs out beyond Turtle Shell Buttes then, just as
they are now. There's a lot of men employed there and I knew that
there was the place to go with my tomatoes."
"What, away out on the plains, beyond the valley? That must be twenty
miles away," Jessie remarked, as Mr. Wilson paused to chuckle over
some amusing reminiscence.
"It's all of that; maybe more. But you must remember that driving
over the plains is like driving over a level floor. Distance doesn't
count for much when the roads are always smooth and even. Well; one
afternoon Tom and I filled the bottom of the wagon-box with a soft bed
of fresh alfalfa hay and then we piled tomatoes in on top of it till
they came clean up to the edge of the top bed. Of course if the roads
had been rough it ain't likely that even a cattleman would 'a' thought
of taking such a load in that way; as it was, I reckon there wasn't a
tomato smashed in transit. I didn't get quite as early a start as I'd
'lowed to, so it was just noon when I reached the camp."
"I should have thought that you would lose the way," I said. My mind
had conjured up a vivid picture of the far stretches of unfenced
plains that lay between our mountain-walled valley and the great water
storage system where a single lake already sparkled like a white jewel
on the gray waste of plains. "There are wolves, too," I added,
suddenly.
"Yes; there are wolves, but they don't eat tomatoes. And, as for
losing the road, all that I had to do was to follow it; it stretches
out, plain as a white ribbon on a black dress. As I said, it was noon
when I reached camp. All hands had struck work and gone to dinner, so
I thought I'd wait till they got through before I sprung the subject
of tomatoes on them.
"There ain't a tree nor a shrub bigger than a soap weed within a mile
of the reservoirs, and as I didn't want to set and hold the horses all
the time, I unhitched 'em and tied 'em to the wagon-box; one on each
side. I knew that they wouldn't eat the tomatoes, and, as there was
plenty of horse feed in camp, I 'lowed to buy their dinner when I run
on to some one to buy it of. It turned out, though, that the horses
didn't understand about that; they had a scheme of their own, and they
worked it to good advantage.
"I strolled off, and pretty soon I got mighty interested in lookin' at
the works; it's a big enterprise, I tell you! I was gone from the
wagon a good deal longer than I'd laid out to be, and I don't know as
I'd 'a' woke up for an hour or two, but I heard a fellow laughin' over
that way and so I went over to see what was goin' on. Well, I found
out." Mr. Wilson paused impressively and glanced around at us. Joe was
listening with such absorbed attention that his work had slipped
unheeded from his hands and Ralph had again secured the harness needle
and was awkwardly re-stringing his imitation sleigh bells. "What was
it?" I asked.
"Why, you see, I'd plumb forgot about the alfalfa hay, but the horses
had remembered, and they nosed through the fruit until they come to
it, and they hadn't lost a minute's time, either. When the hay'd given
out in one place they'd worked through at another until they struck
bed rock again. The whole load was just a mass of tomato jam; the
juice was running out of the box in a stream, and the horses were red
with it from hoof to forelock. There wasn't a bushel of whole fruit
left. I jerked out the tailboard and dumped the mess on the ground,
while about forty men stood around just yellin' and hootin' with
delight. They got more pleasure out of it than they could possibly 'a'
got from eatin' the tomatoes. The cook came out of his little tent
alongside the big dining tent, to see what the racket was about, and
when he got his eyes on the fruit he was powerful mad. He said he'd
'a' given a dollar and a half a bushel for the load. He wanted me to
promise to come with another load the next day, but I'd had enough of
fruit raisin'--'specially when the horses did the heft of the
raisin'--I wouldn't 'a' faced that yellin' crowd again for a hundred
dollars. No, sir! I come right straight home, and I sent word 'round
among the neighbors to come and help themselves to all the tomatoes
they could lug home; what they didn't take the frost did, and that was
the end of my experiment in fruit raising."
"It was just too bad!" I exclaimed, feeling that I ought to say
something sympathetic.
"Oh, I don't know," returned our neighbor, in his comfortable way. "It
was all my fault. A man's got to keep his wits about him, no matter
what he undertakes to do, and I left mine at home that day. My wife'll
think I'm lost, wits and all, if I stay much longer, that's a fact."
He rose to his feet, and, after bidding us a cordial farewell, started
for the door. Then the pail on the floor caught his eye to remind him
that his intractable wits had again strayed. "Well, I declare for it!
I come nigh forgetting what I stopped for. Seems like a good way to
come for milk, doesn't it? We had company come unexpected, and nothing
would do Sarah but I must ride over here and ask you for some milk.
Condensed milk is good enough for us, but Sarah says it ain't good
enough for company."
Jessie had already taken the pail and started for the pantry; when she
re-appeared with it filled, she said, demurely:
"I thought that you said you were a cattleman, Mr. Wilson."
"Oh, bless you! Don't you know the old saying about a shoemaker's
wife? Lots of folks that can count their cattle by the thousand head
would be glad if they could be sure of as much nice milk and butter
as you girls get off your two cows, Miss Jessie. It's management, you
see."
"You mean want of management, don't you?" returned Jessie, smiling.
Mr. Wilson's jolly laugh floated back to us as he went down the walk
toward the horse that was waiting for him at the gate, and then I
roused myself to observe that Joe was again hunting for his tools. He
presently rescued them from Ralph's destructive little hands, and set
to work, only pausing the while to remark:
"I reckons dat ar watah sto'age camp gwine be a 'mighty good place fur
to sell we all's melon crap at."