putting queer little brown things in the earth, where it scares you to
think of their getting all cold and wet and rotted, and then coming to
see them sprout and curl and run out of the ground? No, nothing can
compare with it unless it is seeing whole rows of them bursting out into
blooms and tassels and little pods and burrs. I felt extravagant and
wanted to kiss the whole vegetable family in a way of encouragement and
greeting. And the two lilacs were both most beautifully plumed out in
their long, white blossoms to greet me. Now, weren't they the plucky
young things to bloom that way in a perfectly strange place? Still,
everybody always did have confidence in Sam.
But then in every joy patch some weeds are bound to shoot up overnight,
and I was horrified to look down the rows of purple beet fronds and see
what a lot of bold pepper-grass and chickweed were doing in their
trenches. Without waiting to get my gloves from my bag in the car, I
fell to and began a determined onslaught. Furiously I charged down two
rows and up a third, at whose end I sank with exhaustion.
"Say, Betty, could a cat give kitten dinner to a poor little duck that
all the hens peck?" asked the Byrd, anxiously, as he came and squatted
beside me with two of the new kittens and the duck orphan in question in
his arms.
"No, Byrd, I don't believe so," I answered, from instinct rather than
direct knowledge.
"Why is they so many little ones in the world without mothers, me and
the duck and the cow that died 'fore Dr. Chubb came, her calf, and now
that mean old dog have left her puppies to eat out of a plate?" he
asked. He let the kittens slide to the ground, where they sprawled in
their blind helplessness, while he began to tenderly pry open the small
yellow ball's wide bill and insert crumbs of bread rolled into very
realistic pills, but which the patient gobbled with evident
appreciation.
"See, Byrd, you are just as good as a mother any day," I said, a choke
in my throat as I cuddled his thin little shoulder in the hollow between
my arm and my breast, and bent over to watch the orphan's meal.
"Like Sam," answered Byrd, with a queer little flash of his keen eyes up
at me, and a grin that was so like Sam's that I tumbled him over onto
the grass, duck and all, and began a frolic with him which delighted his
heart and eased mine. I've loved that "little one" since the day they
let me hold him in my arms when he was only a few hours old and
motherless. Examining him from heels to head had comforted Sam in his
anguish and eased my own sympathetic sorrow. It is a tradition that
Mammy Kitty rescued him just in time; but I've always felt that nothing
would have happened to him at Sam's sixteen-year-old hands if he had
been left for hours.
In the midst of our frolic Peter and Sam came on the scene, and as far
as Peter was concerned it was indeed a transformation scene. Sam was
very much washed and slick from some time at the wash-bench, and Peter
was likewise, only Peter was not the Peter whom I had brought from town
that very morning. He was attired in a pair of Sam's overalls that could
have been wrapped around him twice, and he had a bit of color in his
cheeks under his eyes, though the eyes were slightly dazed as to
expression.
"Good work, Betty, for only two hours," said Sam, looking at the three
long ranks of slain weeds and then at his watch. "Pete and I are going
to pick peas for to-morrow's market right after dinner. Want to help?"
I assented from pure ignorance, and we all went in to devour one of
Mammy's chicken dinners, the like of which is not cooked by another
person in the Harpeth Valley. The way Peter ate would have made the
black beauty in mother's kitchen swell with jealousy until there were
danger to her own black skin. Immediately after the gorge Sam gave me a
basket, gave Peter another, and then looked around for the Byrd, with a
smaller box; but the Byrd had flown.
"I'll have to tan him for shirking like that," said Sam, looking off
into the bushes. "You Byrd!" But there was no response. That ought to
have roused my suspicions, but it didn't. I went on down to that
pea-patch as innocent as a newly born lamb, with Peter walking beside
me, enthusing over the landscape and swinging the light basket with
elegant nonchalance.
"I see, Betty dear--I see that there is a great satisfaction in the
pragmatic accomplishment, and--" he was saying when we came out of the
woods onto the southern slope, where lie the long rows of peas, which
are making Sam's fortune. He got them in by working two days and all one
night in a bright spell in mid-February, and nobody for twenty miles
around has any, while he has more than he can gather to market at a top
price; that is, more than he can gather himself with Byrd's assistance,
he explained to us, as he showed us just how to snap the pod against our
thumbs.
"I ought to put five barrels into Hayesboro every day now for a week
before anybody else gets any," he said, as he squatted at the head of a
row between Peter and me, and we all began to pull at the beautiful
gray-green vines and snap off the full, green pods. I looked across at
poor, innocent, enthusiastic Peter and saw his finish.
About three o'clock I saw my own finish, and threw up the basket.
"You poor, dear child!" exclaimed Peter as he came stiffly across the
row Sam had long since finished. He, Sam, was four rows ahead of us, and
a quarter of a mile away, more or less. I had collapsed, with my tired
legs stuck out in front of me and my thumb, swollen from snapping the
pods, in my mouth. "This is too hard work for you."
"Yes, it is; but Sam won't think so," I answered, with a glance at the
strong, broad back swinging so easily down the slope. "Now, Peter, we
must go right along picking the peas. Sam must get those five barrels,"
I said, as I hastily scrambled up and began to pull at the vicious vines
again.
"Well, I certainly don't intend to stop until they are filled," answered
Peter, stiffly, in more ways than one, and without any more waste of
sympathy he turned his back and went doggedly at the vines. That was my
opportunity, and I took it. I rose, looked with fear at the two men at
work in front of me, and fled, basket and all. I stopped long enough to
empty my full basket in one of the barrels that were already in the
wagon; and as I climbed laboriously down over the wheels, with my
paralyzed legs working slowly, I caught a glimpse of a flash of blue out
in the bushes, topped by a glint of red that was too large to be that of
any bird inhabitant of The Briers.
"Byrd," I called, softly.
No answer.
"Byrd, do you want to go to town with me to see Mother Hayes?" I asked
in subdued tones. That brought its response.
There were difficulties; but we surmounted them. We were afraid to wake
Mammy at her afternoon nap for the clean clothes of civilization, so we
purloined a fairly clean blue jumper hanging on the porch, while I left
a note for Sam pinned on my old doll seed-basket hanging by his door. It
was large enough for him to see, and it read:
I'm a good young mule, but I've broken down. Poor Peter! All that
is left of
BETTY.
_P.S._--I've rescued the Byrd for overnight. I'll return him to
his fate to-morrow. Poor Peter! Poor Peter!
I wish I could have seen Sam's face when he found it! The next morning
mother's black beauty found my old grass basket full of delicious little
peas on the front steps with this note in it:
You'll be docked a quarter of a cent every hour you are off your
job. Bring that brat home and both of you get to work.
SAM.
_P.S._--Something is sprouting in your garden that I don't
understand.
I knew those hollyhocks would rise up some day and bear witness against
me. For the life of me I couldn't make up my mind what to say about
them, so I sent the Byrd home by Tolly, who was going to take Edith out
to see how her okra was progressing, and stayed in the safe shelter of
my home. On the Byrd's rompers I pinned this note:
Strike, if you will, my young back,
But spare, oh spare, this little brat!
BETTY.
There are all kinds of poetry in the world.
That night when I was beginning to get restless and wish I had gone out
to my fate, even if it included being throttled with a pea-vine, Tolly
and Edith came into town and stopped at my gate in such a condition that
I was positively alarmed about them.
"Five baskets of peas!" gasped Tolly, as he fell forward limp over his
wheel.
"My thumb! my thumb!" moaned Edith, with the afflicted member in her
mouth.
"But, say, Betty," Tolly revived enough to say, "we are not going to
tell Sue and Billy and Julia and Pink. They are going out to-morrow to
call. Let 'em go--it's coming to 'em."
"Oh no, I won't say a word," I agreed, with the intensest joy. "Come
over to-morrow, Edith, and let's finish _My Lady's Fan_. I'm dying to
know what happened to her at the court ball. Good night!"
"No, you come over to my house; I'll be in bed," Edith wailed from the
middle of the road as Tolly turned and made his machine buzz for home.
Then for five days--glorious, warm, growing, blooming days--I stayed in
town in a state of relapse from gardening of which the sorenesses in the
calves of my legs and my thumbs were the strongest symptoms, and
listened to my martyred friends' accounts of what Sam was doing to
Peter. I also had a bulletin from Peter every day by the rural-delivery
route. That is, they were in Peter's handwriting, but they read more
like government crop reports than a poet's letters to the girl to whom
he considered himself engaged. I sent them on to Judge Vandyne, and I
got a glorious written chuckle in return for them.
Then, one morning when I had about got over the bashfulness about the
hollyhocks, and had decided to deny them absolutely and stick to it, for
a time at least, I happened to pick up Grandmother Nelson's book. It was
full time--maybe past time--for thinning out my sugar-beets and
resetting my cosmos. I fled out to the wilderness in greater speed than
I had left it, and fairly threw myself prostrate at the feet of my
neglected garden. Peter helped me, a sun-blistered, brier-scratched,
ragged Peter, whose face had lost none of its beautiful, lofty, aloof
expression, but which was rendered almost ordinary by a long scratch
across the top of its nose. The scratch was inflicted, he told me, when
he held one of the thoroughbred Plymouth Rock biddies to be greased by
Sam for lice under her wings.
"Yes, but what about the play, Peter dear?" I asked, after we had weeded
and dug and watered and pulled up for an hour or two and had then seated
ourselves at the end of one of the long rows to rest.
"The play--oh, Betty, it is--" And his old look of rapture shot across
his face. Then Sam yelled to him, and me, too.
"Come on and help tie up onions," he called. "You Byrd!"
We went and we tied up--a whole white smelly mountain of them; but I
didn't care, for Sam showed me his day-book, and in just one week his
balance had shot up like the beautiful pink pie-plant in my garden. A
great big entry was from my beets that he had thinned and sold without
waiting for me.
"I'll give you a check when they are all sold, Betty," he said, in a
business-like way, and something in me made me glory in him and my
beets. "And isn't old Pete hitting the agricultural pace in fine style?"
he asked, as we walked out into my garden between the rows of my blush
peonies which had been grateful for the bone meal, and had bloomed,
though everybody who had given me the clumps had warned me that they
wouldn't flower until the second season.
"But isn't he going to write, too, Sam?" I asked, a trifle uneasily.
"Now, you know, Sam, if somebody had kept Keats alive as a perfectly
good lawyer or bank clerk--or farmer--he wouldn't have been half as much
to the world as he is as a sadly dead poet. Now, would he?"
"Well, Pete will know all about the vegetable kingdom before he makes
entry into the heavenly one, and we'll see what he reports when the time
comes. Just come over and look at the wheat in my north field." Sam
answered my anxiety so easily that I let it slip from my shoulders as I
went with him to sit on a rail fence on the edge of a gray-green ocean
of future food and be perfectly happy. "It'll fill dinner-pails and give
babies mother's milk," said Sam, as he sat beside me and smoldered out
over his crop. "The Commissioner of Agriculture was out here five times
last week, and a complete report on the whole place goes in to the Food
Commission in Washington. Pretty good for a less-than-two-year-old
farmer, eh, Bettykin?" And Sam tipped the rail enough to make me sure I
was falling before he caught me.
I didn't answer--I just clung, but Sam understood and roughed my hair
into my misty eyes and lifted me off the fence.
Daddy got me two copies of that Agricultural Commissioner's report, and
I sent one to Judge Vandyne and pasted the other in the front of
Grandmother Nelson's book. Little did I know that simple action of pride
in Sam would bring such results to Samuel Foster Crittenden and to
Tennessee, and even to perhaps the third and fourth generation, or
maybe--
Daddy says that when a man owns a bottom field, a hillside, and a creek
in the Harpeth Valley all he has to do is to go out and swing his hoe
around his head a few times and he'll have a living before he is ready
to harvest it. I don't know about that, and I do know that since I came
home in early April Sam has worked like two men, and maybe more. But his
harvests certainly amazed even the oldest inhabitants, who had sat
around at the cross-roads grocery and spat tobacco-juice at the idea of
his farming by government books, with no experience. They came to sit on
the rail fences around his fields and to spit out of the other side of
their mouths before the end of July, and I never went out to marvel,
myself, that I didn't step on that Commissioner of Agriculture, who
couldn't seem to keep away more than a few hours at a time.
As things grew and bloomed and burst and flowered and seeded, Sam went
calmly on his way of work with the crops from dawn to dark, and Peter
did likewise. I never saw anything like his friendly pride in every
successful test of Sam's work. And his own fat was getting packed on him
at a rate that beat the record-breaking red pig down in the long, clean
pens that Sam maintained in the condition of a sanitary detention
hospital. Also Peter never mentioned the play, I never mentioned it, and
Sam appeared to have completely forgotten it.
I didn't quite like for Sam to forget Peter's play like that, and I
liked it less when I heard Julia say that she thought it was so
fortunate that Sam had cured Peter of being a poet, so he could go into
his father's office to learn to take care of his great fortune. Peter
likes Julia so much that I think she ought to have appreciated the great
thing in him more than she did. When the copy of the _Review_, with
Peter's poem on the Ultimate, came, he read the whole poem to her while
she embroidered an initial in the corner of a handkerchief for him. The
next day she told me that she couldn't understand a word about it, and
that it made Pink mad because she wouldn't tell him what to say to Peter
about it. Pink has grown fond of Peter, but he wouldn't try to read the
poem after the third stanza. But Peter went on back to help with the rye
crop, knowing nothing of all that.
Of course, I had all the confidence that there is in the world in Sam,
but I, about the first week in July, again began to feel responsible to
the world for Peter's play; and I might have made the awful blunder of
remonstrating with Peter or Sam or both of them if I hadn't got into so
much trouble with Edith and Tolly.
Now, Clyde Tolbot is a very business-like young man, and he ought to be
respected and considered for it, but that is just what Edith doesn't
seem to understand how to do. She wants to go on with her head level
with the moon, and Tolly wants to get married in November, and I think
he is perfectly right. He hasn't any family, and he says Edith's
"highstrikes," as he calls her moods and tenses, and the food at the
Hayesboro Inn, are making him thin and pale, and hurting the prospects
of The Electric Light Co.
"She acts as if she thought I was a cinnamon bear if I put my paw on her
fair hand. And she seems to think it is scandal because I wanted to buy
that old mahogany sideboard that the Vertreeses had to sell when they
inherited old Mrs. Anderson and her furniture from his mother," he
groaned, as he sat on my side porch with his head in his hands.
"Tolly," I said, with firm conviction in my voice and manner, "you must
do something heroic to shock Edith down to earth again, or into opening
her eyes as those kittens daddy gave Byrd did on their ninth day. The
evening of Edith's eighth day has about struck."
"It most certainly has, and about eleven-thirty at that," answered
Tolly, sitting up as if about to rush forth and do what I suggested,
though neither he nor I knew what it was. "But what is your idea of a
heroic deed that will pluck the child Edith?" he asked, just as if I
were one of the clerks out at the power-house and he was conducting a
business detail.
"Well, let me see, Tolly," I said, slowly, while I ran over in my mind
all the lover heroics I had ever heard of from runaway horses to the use
of a hated blond rival. "You couldn't get hurt slightly out at the
power-house, could you?"
"And ruin my boast that I have the most perfectly organized force and
machinery in the state? Not if I know myself," answered Tolly, with
business indignation and an utter lack of lover's enthusiasm at the
prospect of getting his lady-love by a ruse.
"Well, I don't know what you are going to do," I said, limply, as I saw
that none of the things that had ever been acted before were within
Tolly's reach.
"I don't know, either," answered Tolly; and again his head dropped into
his hands.
"What did she say the last time you asked her?" I questioned. I
considered it my duty to get to the bottom of the matter, as I had been
called in consultation.
"Ask her? Thunderation! I never have asked her! I've never got that near
to her!" he exclaimed, in a perfect outburst of indignation.
Then I laughed. I laughed so that Tolly had to pat me on the back to
make me get my breath, and a sleeping mocking-bird scolded outright from
a tree by the porch.
"Why don't you do it by telephone?" I gasped.
"By George! that _is_ the idea, all right, Betty!" Tolly exclaimed, with
his face positively radiant. I had flung his love troubles into a class
of affairs that he could handle. "I tell you what I am going to do. I am
going to have my wire chief cut Edith's line and make me a direct
connection with mine at about nine o'clock to-morrow morning, as that is
the time he is in less of a rush with all the other things to attend to.
Then I'll put it to her good and straight if she holds on to the
receiver and hears me out."
"But Edith might go over to Boliver to visit May Jessamine Ray for a
week at nine o'clock to-morrow. Oh, go do it to-night, Tolly!" I
pleaded.
"And let that doll-faced girl at Central hear me? Not much!" answered
Tolly, indignantly.
"I didn't mean that," I answered. "Go to her armed with your love,
Tolly, and make--make her listen to you."
"Armed with a sand-bag to slug her would be more like it, if I expected
to get anywhere with her. No, you've hit it, Betty, and I'm going on
down the street and see just where that Morris line goes into the trunk.
Hope Judson won't have to run more than a mile of wire to make that
connection." And with no more gratitude or good night than that Tolly
went down the street with his head up among his telephone wires, just as
Edith keeps hers in the clouds. I hope some day they will run into each
other so hard that they will crash out ignition sparks and take fire.
As I said, being so interested in Edith and Tolly, and trying to get her
to postpone her visit until he could get the wires up between them both
in a material and a sentimental sense, and also wanting to let Sam and
Peter miss me sadly, I let quite a few days elapse without being in any
of the events out at The Briers. When I did go back I found that things
had happened.
"Where's Peter?" I asked, as Sam came to unload me and a huge bag of
smoke iris that old Mrs. Johnson had given me for my garden. There was
also Byrd's basket from mother, and a pair of small alligators that
daddy had got from Florida for him, having run out of natural animal
inhabitants of the Harpeth Valley.
"Pete's off with the bit in his mouth--haven't seen him for three days,"
answered Sam as he lifted me and swung me way out into the middle of my
own clover-pink bed. It was starred with sweet, white blossoms, having
been treated according to Eph's directions and those of Grandmother
Nelson's book.
"Peter off? Where? What's happened, Sam?" I exclaimed, with astonished
anxiety.
"The play," answered Sam, calmly, as he lit his cob pipe and blew a
ring of smoke. "It hit him in the middle of the night before last, and
he wrote me a note. Mammy grubs him, and I haven't seen him since. I've
paid the Byrd a half interest in the next young that happens to us not
to go down the hill to the shack, and we're all just going on as usual."
"Maybe I'd better not go, either," I said, with awe and sympathy for
Peter fairly dropping from the words as I uttered them.
"Betty," said Sam as he looked at me through a ring of smoke that the
warm wind blew away over our heads, "you run just a little more sense to
the cubic foot of dirt than the average, it seems to me. Come on down
and watch them begin to cut wheat. It is one week ahead of time, so I
can get all the harvesters and not a grain will be lost. They say it'll
run sixty bushels to the acre. Think of that, with only a thirty-six
record to beat in the Valley. It is that Canadian cross. The
Commissioner is down there, and so is your admirer, Chubb. He wastes
many hours riding over here to see you when you are in town on frivolous
pursuits."
"Frivolous!" I echoed as we went up the path back of the house; and on
our way over the hill I told him about Tolly and Edith. Sam laughed; he
always does when I want him to; but his eyes were grave after a second.
"The mating season is a troublesome time, isn't it, Betty?" he asked, as
he swung me to the top rail of the fence, vaulted over it, and held up
his arms to lift me down on the other side; but I sat poised in midair
to argue his proposition.
"It ought not to be, Sam," I said, with an experienced feeling rising in
my mind and voice at thus discussing fundamentals with a man that could
break a wheat record and be attended by the agricultural envoys of the
United States government. "People ought to sensibly pick each other from
their needs, and not act unintelligent about it."
At which perfectly sage remark a strange thing happened to Samuel Foster
Crittenden. He laid his head down on the rail beside my knee and laughed
until he almost shook me from my perch. It made me so furious that I
slipped past him and ran on ahead. I vaulted the next fence in fine
style and landed among the Commissioner and Dr. Chubb and the
tobacco-juice neighbors, who had come to see the output of the first
book-grown acre. I did not speak again to Sam that day until he tucked
in Dr. Chubb beside me for a spin over to Spring Hill, leaving the
doctor's old roan for a week's complimentary grazing on Sam's east
meadow of thick blue-grass, grown through a rock-lime dressing that all
the neighbors had assured him would kill the land outright.
"Wheez-chekk! nice young buck for a husband," wheezed the Butterball as
I shot down the hill from under Sam's big hand reached out for my hair.
"Sam?" I gasped.
"Women critters always back and shy, but they git the wedding-bit from a
steady hand--and like it," he chuckled, still further. I felt as if I
ought not to let Sam rest under such a suspicion, and that I ought to
tell him about Peter. But just then he launched forth on a case of a
spavined horse he had beyond the cross-roads, which he wanted me to take
him to see, and I didn't do it.
I don't much like to think about the long, hot July weeks that followed.
The whole of Harpeth Valley sweltered, and everybody did likewise. That
is, I suppose Peter did, for not one glimpse did I or anybody else get
of him. Sam says Mammy set his meals down in the doorway of the shack
with one of her soft, soothing, "Dah, dah, chile," which was answered
with a growl from Peter. That ended the events of his life at The
Briers.
Sam worked early and late, and got tanned to the most awful deep
mahogany. All of him held out pretty well but his heels, which he came
in three times to have me fix for him; and once mother and I had to
dress a blister on his back that he got from wearing a torn shirt in the
potato-field.