MY LOAD RECEIVES AN EMBARRASSING ADDITION
I still had some corn for my cattle, of the original supply which I had
got from Rucker in Madison. Hay was fifteen dollars a ton, and all it
cost the producer was a year's foresight and the labor of putting it up;
for there were millions of acres of wild grass going to waste which made
the sweet-smelling hay that old horsemen still prefer to tame hay. It
hadn't quite the feeding value, pound for pound, that the best timothy
and clover has; but it was a wonderful hay that could be put up in the
clear weather of the fall when the ground is dry and warm, and cured so
as to be free from dust. My teams never got the heaves when I fed
prairie hay. It graveled me like sixty to pay such a price, but I had to
do it because the season was just between hay and grass. Sometimes I
thought of waiting over until the summer of 1856 to make hay for sale to
the movers; but having made my start for my farm I could not bring
myself to give up reaching it that spring. So I only waited occasionally
to break in or rest up the foot-sore and lame cattle for which I traded
from time to time.
The Fewkes family went on after I had given them some butter, some side
pork and a milking of milk. While I was baking pancakes that last
morning, Rowena came to my fire, and snatching the spider away from me
took the job off my hands, baking the cakes while I ate. She was a
pretty girl, slim and well developed, and she had a fetching way with
her eyes after friendly relations were established with her--which was
pretty hard because she seemed to feel that every one looked down on
her, and was quick to take offense.
"Got any saleratus?" she asked.
"No," said I. "Why?"
She stepped over to the Fewkes wagon and brought back a small packet of
saleratus, a part of which she stirred into the batter.
"It's gettin' warm enough so your milk'll sour on you," said she. "This
did. Don't you know enough to use saleratus to sweeten the sour milk?
You better keep this an' buy some at the next store."
"I wish I had somebody along that could cook," said I.
"Can't you cook?" she asked. "I can."
I told her, then, all about my experience on the canal; and how we used
to carry a cook on the boat sometimes, and sometimes cooked for
ourselves. I induced her to sit by me on the spring seat which I had set
down on the ground, and join me in my meal while I told her of my
adventures. She seemed to forget her ragged and unwashed dress, while
she listened to the story of my voyages from Buffalo to Albany, and my
side trips to such places as Oswego. This canal life seemed powerfully
thrilling to the poor girl. She could only tell of living a year or so
at a time on some run-down or never run-up farm in Indiana or Illinois,
always in a log cabin in a clearing; or of her brothers and sisters who
had been "bound out" because the family was so large; and now of this
last voyage in search of an estate in Negosha.
"I can make bread," said she, after a silence. "Kin you?"
When I told her I couldn't she told me how. It was the old-fashioned
salt-rising bread, the receipt for which she gave me; and when I asked
her to write it down I found that she was even a poorer scribe than I
was. We were two mighty ignorant young folks, but we got it down, and
that night I set emptins[6] for the first time, and I kept trying, and
advising with the women-folks, until I could make as good salt-rising
bread as any one. When we had finished this her father was calling her
to come, as they were starting on toward Negosha; and I gave Rowena
money enough to buy her a calico dress pattern at the next settlement.
She tried to resist, and her eyes filled with tears as she took the
money and chokingly tried to thank me for it. She climbed into the wagon
and rode on for a while, but got out and came back to me while old Tom
went on in those mad rushes of his, and circling within a few yards of
me she said, "You're right good," and darted off over the prairie at a
wide angle to the road.
[6] Our author resists firmly all arguments in favor of the generally
accepted dictionary spelling, "emptyings." He says that the term can not
possibly come from any such idea as things which are emptied, or emptied
out. The editor is reconciled to this view in the light of James Russell
Lowell's discussion of "emptins" in which he says: "Nor can I divine the
original." Mr. Lowell surely must have considered "emptyings"--and
rejected it.--G.v.d.M.
I watched her with a buying eye, as she circled like a pointer pup and
finally caught up with the wagon, a full mile on to the westward. I had
wondered once if she had not deserted the Fewkes party forever. I had
even, such is the imagination of boyhood, made plans and lived them
through in my mind, which put Rowena on the nigh end of the spring seat,
and made her a partner with me in opening up the new farm. But she waved
her hand as she joined her family--or I thought so at least, and waved
back--and was gone.
The Gowdy outfit did not return until after I had about cured the
lameness of my newly-acquired cows and set out on my way over the Old
Ridge Road for the West. The spring was by this time broadening into the
loveliest of all times on the prairies (when the weather is fine), the
days of the full blowth of the upland bird's-foot violets. Some southern
slopes were so blue with them that you could hardly tell the distant
hill from the sky, except for the greening of the peeping grass. The
possblummies were still blowing, but only the later ones. The others
were aging into tassels of down.
The Canada geese, except for the nesters, had swept on in that marvelous
ranked army which ends the migration, spreading from the east to the
west some warm morning when the wind is south, and extending from a
hundred feet in the air to ten thousand, all moved by a common impulse
like myself and my fellow-migrants, pressing northward though, instead
of westward, with the piping of a thousand organs, their wings whirring,
their eyes glistening as if with some mysterious hope, their black
webbed feet folded and stretched out behind, their necks strained out
eagerly to the north, and held a little high I thought as if to peer
over the horizon to catch a glimpse of their promised land of blue
lakes, tall reeds, and broad fields of water-celery and wild rice, with
dry nests downy with the harvests of their gray breasts; and fluffy
goslings swimming in orderly classes after their teachers. And up from
the South following these old honkers came the snow geese, the Wilson
geese, and all the other little geese (we ignorantly called all of them
"brants"), with their wild flutings like the high notes of
clarinets--and the ponds became speckled with teal and coot.
The prairie chickens now became the musicians of the morning and evening
on the uplands, with their wild and intense and almost insane chorus,
repeated over and over until it seemed as if the meaning of it must be
forced upon every mind like a figure in music played with greatening
power by a violinist so that the heart finally almost breaks with
it--"Ka-a-a-a-a-a, ka, ka, ka, ka! _Ka-a-a-a-a-a-a,_ ka, ka, ka, ka, ka,
ka, ka! KA-A-A-A-A-A-A, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka!"--Oh, there is
no way to tell it!--And then the cock filled in the harmony with his
lovely contribution: facing the courted hen, he swelled out the great
orange globes at the sides of his head, fluffed out his feathers,
strutted forward a few steps, and tolled his deep-toned bell, with all
the skill of a ventriloquist, making it seem far away when he was on a
near-by knoll, like a velvet gong sounded with no stroke of the hammer,
as if it spoke from some inward vibration set up by a mysterious
current--a liquid "Do, re, me," here full and distinct, there afar off,
the whole air tremulous with it, the harmony to the ceaseless fugue in
the soprano clef of the rest of the flock--nobody will ever hear it
again! Nobody ever drew from it, and from the howling of the wolves, the
honking of the geese, the calls of the ducks, the strange cries of the
cranes as they soared with motionless wings high overhead, or rowed
their way on with long slow strokes of their great wings, or danced
their strange reels and cotillions in the twilight; and from the myriad
voices of curlew, plover, gopher, bob-o-link, meadowlark, dick-cissel,
killdeer and the rest--day-sounds and night-sounds, dawn-sounds and
dusk-sounds--more inspiration than did the stolid Dutch boy plodding
west across Iowa that spring of 1855, with his fortune in his teams of
cows, in the covered wagon they drew, and the deed to his farm in a flat
packet of treasures in a little iron-bound trunk--among them a
rain-stained letter and a worn-out woman's shoe.
2
I got the saleratus at Dyersville, and just as I came out of the little
store which was, as I remember it, the only one there, I saw the Gowdy
carriage come down the short street, the horses making an effort to
prance under the skilful management of Pinck Johnson, who occupied the
front seat alone, while Virginia Royall sat in the back seat with
Buckner Gowdy, her arm about the upright of the cover, her left foot
over the side as it might be in case of a person who was ready to jump
out to escape the danger of a runaway, an overturn, or some other peril.
Gowdy did not recognize me, or if he did he did not speak to me. He got
out of the carriage and went first into the store, coming out presently
with some packages in his hand which he tossed to the darky, and then he
joined the crowd of men in front of the saloon across the way. Soon I
saw him go into the gin-mill, the crowd following him, and the noise of
voices grew louder. I had had enough experience with such things to know
pretty well what was going on; the stink of spilled drinks, and
profanity and indecency--there was nothing in them to toll me in from
the flowery prairie.
As I passed the carriage Virginia nodded to me; and looking at her I saw
that she was pale and tremulous, with a look in her eyes like that of a
crazy man I once knew who imagined that he was being followed by enemies
who meant to kill him. There is no word for it but a hunted look.
She came to my wagon, pretty soon, and surprised me by touching my arm
as I was about to start on so as to make a few more miles before
camping. I had got my team straightened out, and ready to start, when I
felt her hand on my arm, and on turning saw her standing close to me,
and speaking almost in a whisper.
"Do you know any one," she asked, "good people--along the road
ahead--people we'll overtake--that would be friends to a girl that
needs help?"
"Be friends," I blundered, "be friends? How be friends?"
"Give her work," she said; "take her in; take care of her. This girl
needs friends--other girls--women--some one to take the place of a
mother and sisters. Yes, and she needs friends to take the place of a
father and brothers. A girl needs friends--friends all the time--as you
were to me back there in the night."
I wondered if she meant herself; and after thinking over it for two or
three days I made up my mind that she did; and then I was provoked at
myself for not understanding: but what could I have done or said if I
had understood? I remembered, though, how she had skithered[7] back to
the carriage as she saw Pinck Johnson coming out of the saloon with Buck
Gowdy; and had then clambered out again and gone into the little hotel
where they seemed to have decided to stay all night; while I went on
over roads which were getting more and more miry as I went west. I had
only been able to tell her of the Fewkes family--Old Man Fewkes, with
his bird's claws and a beard where a chin should have been, Surajah
Dowlah Fewkes with no thought except for silly inventions, Celebrate
Fourth Fewkes with no ideas at all--
[7] A family word, to the study of which one would like to direct the
attention of the philologists, since traces of it are found in the
conversation of folk of unsophisticated vocabulary outside the Clan van
de Marck. Doubtless it is of Yankee origin, and hence old English. It
may, of course, be derived according to Alice-in-Wonderland principles
from "skip" and "hither" or "thither" or all three; but the claim is
here made that it comes, like monkeys and men, from a common linguistic
ancestor.--G.v.d.M.
"But isn't there a man among them?" she had asked.
"A man!" I repeated.
"A man that knows how to shoot a pistol, or use a knife," she explained;
"and who would shoot or stab for a weak girl with nobody to take care
of her."
I shook my head. Not one of these was a real man in the Kentucky, or
other proper sense: and Ma Fewkes with her boneless shoulders was not
one of those women of whom I had seen many in my life, who could be more
terrible to a wrong-doer than an army with bowie-knives.
"There's only two in the outfit," I went on, "that have got any sprawl
to them; and they are old Tom their bunged-up horse, and Rowena Fewkes."
"Who is she?" inquired Virginia Royall.
"A girl about your age," said I. "She's ragged and dirty, but she has a
little gumption."
And then she had skipped away, as I finally concluded, to keep Gowdy
from seeing her in conversation with me.
3
I pulled out for Manchester with Nathaniel Vincent Creede, whom
everybody calls just "N.V.," riding in the spring seat with me, and his
carpetbag and his law library in the back of the wagon.
His library consisted of _Blackstone's Commentaries_--I saw them in his
present library in Monterey Centre only yesterday--_Chitty on Pleading_,
the _Code of Iowa of_ 1850, the _Session Laws_ of the state so far as it
had any session laws--a few thin books bound in yellow and pink boards.
Even these few books made a pretty heavy bundle for a man to carry in
one hand while he lugged all his other worldly goods in the other.
"Books are damned heavy, Mr. Vandemark," said he; "law books are
particularly heavy. My library is small; but there is an adage in our
profession which warns us to beware of the man of one book. He's always
likely to know what's in the damned thing, you know, Mr. Vandemark; and
the truth being a seamless web, if a lawyer knows all about the law in
one book, he's prone to make a hell of a straight guess at what's in the
rest of 'em. Hence beware of the man of one book. I may safely lay claim
to being that man--in a figurative way; though there are half a dozen
volumes or so back there--the small pedestal on which I stand reaching
up toward a place on the Supreme Bench of the United States."
He had had a drink or two with Buckner Gowdy back there in the saloon,
and this had taken the brakes off his tongue--if there were any
provided in his temperament. So, aside from Buck Gowdy, I was the first
of his fellow-citizens of Monterey County to become acquainted with N.V.
Creede. He reminded me at first of Lawyer Jackway of Madison, the
guardian _ad litem_ who had sung the song that still recurred to me
occasionally--
"Sold again,
And got the tin,
And sucked another Dutchman in!"
But N.V. looked a little like Jackway from the fact only that he wore a
long frock coat, originally black, a white shirt, and a black cravat. He
was very tall, and very erect, even while carrying those books and that
bag. He was smooth-shaven, and was the first man I ever saw who shaved
every day, and could do the trick without a looking-glass. His eyes were
black and very piercing; and his voice rolled like thunder when he grew
earnest--which he was likely to do whenever he spoke. He would begin to
discuss my cows, the principles of farming, the sky, the birds of
passage, the flowers, the sucking in of the Dutchman--which I told him
all about before we had gone five miles--the mire-holes in the slews,
anything at all--and rising from a joke or a flighty notion which he
earnestly advocated, he would lower his voice and elevate his language
and utter a little gem of an oration. After which he would be still and
solemn for a while--to let it sink in I thought.
N.V. was at that time twenty-seven years old. He came from Evansville,
Indiana, by the Ohio from Evansville to St. Louis, and thence up the
Mississippi. From Dubuque he had partly walked and partly ridden with
people who were willing to give him a lift.
"I am like unto the Apostle Peter," he said when he asked for the chance
to ride with me, "silver and gold have I none; but such as I have I give
unto thee."
"What do you mean?" I asked; for it is just as well always to be sure
beforehand when it comes to pay--though, of course, I should have been
glad to have him with me without money and without price.
"In the golden future of Iowa," he said, "you will occasionally want
legal advice. I will accept transportation in your very safe, but
undeniably slow equipage as a retainer."
"Captain Sproule used to say," I said, "that what you pay the lawyer is
the least of the matter when you go to law."
"Wise Captain Sproule," replied N.V.; "and my rule shall be to keep my
first client, Mr. Jacob T. Vandemark, out of the courts; and in addition
to my prospective legal services, I can wield the goad-stick and
manipulate the blacksnake. Moreover, when these feet of mine get their
blisters healed, I can help drive the cattle; and I can gather firewood,
kindle fires, and perhaps I may suggest that my conversation may not be
entirely unprofitable."
I told him I would take him in as a passenger; and there our life-long
friendship began. His conversation was not unprofitable. He had the
vision of the future of Iowa which I had until then lacked. He could see
on every quarter-section a prosperous farm, and he knew what the
building of the railways must mean. As we forded the Maquoketa he
laughed at the settlers working at the timber, grubbing out stumps,
burning off the logs, struggling with roots.
"Your ancestors, the Dutch," said he, "have been held up to ridicule
because they refused to establish a town until they found a place where
dykes had to be built to keep out the sea, though there were plenty of
dry places available. These settlers are acting just as foolishly. They
have been used to grubbing, and they go where grubbing has to be done.
Two miles either way is better land ready for the plow! Why can't every
one be wise like us?"
"They have to have wood for houses, stables, and fuel," I said. "I hope
my land has timber on it."
"The railroads are coming," said he, "and they will bring you coal and
wood and everything you want. They are racing for the crossings of the
Mississippi. Soon they will reach the Missouri--and some day they will
cross the continent to the Pacific. No more Erie Canals; no more Aaron
Burr conspiracies for the control of the mouth of the Mississippi.
Towns! Cities! Counties! States! We are pioneers; but civilization is
treading on our heels. I feel it galling my kibes[8]--and what are a few
blisters to me! I see in my own adopted city of Lithopolis, Iowa, a
future Sparta or Athens or Rome, or anyhow, a Louisville or Cincinnati
or Dubuque--a place in which to achieve greatness--or anyhow, a chance
to deal in town lots, defend criminals, or prosecute them, and where the
unsettled will have to be settled in the courts as well as on the farm.
On to Lithopolis! G'lang, Whiteface, g'lang!"
[8] The editor acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Honorable N.V.
Creede in the editing of the proofs of this and a few other
passages.--G.v.d.M.
"I thought you were going to Monterey Centre," I said.
"Not if the court knows itself," he said, "and it thinks it does.
Lithopolis is the permanent town in Monterey County, and Monterey Centre
is the mushroom."
4
Monterey County, like all the eastern counties of Iowa, all the counties
along the Missouri, and every other county which was crossed by a
considerable river, was dotted with paper towns. We passed many of these
staked-out sites on the Old Ridge Road; and we heard of them from buyers
of and dealers in their lots.
Lithopolis was laid out by Judge Horace Stone, the great outsider in the
affairs of the county until he died. He platted a town in Howard County
when the town-lot fever first broke out, at a place called Stone's
Ferry, and named it Lithopolis, because his name was Stone, and for the
additional reason that there was a stone quarry there. I've been told
that the word means Stone City. The people insisted upon calling it
Stone's Ferry and would not have the name Lithopolis. Judge Stone raved
and tore, but he was voted down, and pulled up stakes in disgust, sold
out his interests and went on to Monterey County, where he could
establish a new city and name it Lithopolis. He seemed to care more for
the name than anything else, and never seemed to see how funny it was
that he felt it possible to make a city wherever he decreed. This was a
part of the spirit of the time. The prairies were infested with
Romuluses and Remuses, flourishing, not on the milk of the wolves, but
seemingly on their howls, of which they often gave a pretty fair
imitation.
"But Monterey Centre is the county-seat," I suggested.
"It just thinks it's going to be," said N.V. "The fact is that Monterey
County is not organized, but is attached to the county south of it for
judicial purposes. Let me whisper in your ear that it will soon be
organized, and that the county-seat will not be Monterey Centre, but
Lithopolis--that classic municipality whose sonorous name will be the
admiration of all true Americans and the despair of the spelling classes
in our schools. Lithopolis! It has the cadence of Alexander, and
Alcibiades, and Numa Pompilius, and Belisarius--it reeks of greatness!
Monterey Centre--ever been there? Ever seen that poverty-stricken,
semi-hamlet, squatting on the open prairie, and inhabited by a parcel of
dreaming Nimshies?"
"No," said I; "have you?"
"No," he replied. "What difference does it make? He that goeth up
against Lithopolis and them that dwell therein, the same is a
dreaming Nimshi."
The beginnings of faction were in our town-sites; for most of them were
in no sense towns, or even villages. There was a future county-seat
fight in the rivalry between Monterey Centre and Lithopolis--and not
only these, but in the rival rivalries of Cole's Grove, Imperial City,
Rocksylvania, New Baltimore, Cathedral Rock, Waynesville and I know not
how many more projects, all ambitiously laid out in the
still-unorganized county of Monterey, and all but one or two now quite
lost to all human memory or thought, except as some diligent abstractor
of titles or real-estate lawyer discovers something of them in the chain
of title of a farm; the spires and gables of the 'fifties realized only
in the towering silo, the spinning windmill, or the vine-clad porch of a
substantial farm-house. But in the heyday of their new-driven corner
stakes, what wars were waged for the power to draw people into them; and
especially, how the county-seat fights raged like prairie fires set out
by those Nimrods who sought to make up in the founding of cities for
what they lacked as hunters, in comparison with the establisher of Babel
and Erech and Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar.
Between the Maquoketa and Independence I lost N.V. Creede, merely
because I traded for some more lame cows and a young Alderney bull, and
had to stop to break them. He stayed with me two days, and then caught a
ride with one of Judge Horace Stone's teams which was making a quick
trip to Lithopolis.
"Good-by, Mr. Vandemark," said he at parting, "and good luck. I am sorry
not to be able to remunerate you for your hospitality, which I shall
always remember for its improving conversation, its pancakes, its pork
and beans, and its milk and butter, rather than for its breathless
speed. And take the advice of your man of the law in parting: in your
voyages over the inland waterways of life, look not upon the flush when
it is red--not even the straight one; for had I not done that on a
damned steamboat coming up from St. Louis I should not have been thus in
my old age forsaken. And let me tell you, one day my coachman will pull
up at the door of your farm-house and take you and your wife and
children in my coach and four for a drive--perhaps to see the laying of
the corner-stone of the United States court-house in Lithopolis. I go
from your ken, but I shall return--good-by."
I was sorry to see him go. It was lonesome without him; and I was
troubled by my live stock. I soon saw that I was getting so many cattle
that without help in driving them I should be obliged to leave and come
back for some of them. I found a farmer named Westervelt who lived by
the roadside, and had come to Iowa from Herkimer County, in York State.
He even knew some of the relatives of Captain Sproule; so in view of the
fact that he seemed honest, I left my cattle with him, all but four
cows, and promised to return for them not later than the middle of July.
I made him give me a receipt for them, setting forth just what the
bargain was, and I paid him then and there for looking out for them--and
N.V. Creede said afterward that the thing was a perfectly good legal
document, though badly spelled.
"It calls," said he, "for an application of the doctrine of _idem
sonans_--but it will serve, it will serve."
I marveled that the Gowdy carriage still was astern of me after all this
time; and speculated as to whether there was not some other road between
Dyersville and Independence, by which they had passed me; but a few
miles east of Independence they came up behind me as I lay bogged down
in a slew, and drove by on the green tough sod by the roadside. I had
just hitched the cows to the end of the tongue, by means of the chain,
when they trotted by, and sweeping down near me halted. Virginia still
sat as if she had never moved, her hand gripping the iron support of the
carriage top, her foot outside the box as if she was ready to spring
out. Buck Gowdy leaped out and came down to me.
"In trouble, Mr. Vandemark?" he inquired. "Can we be of any assistance?"
"I guess I can make it," I said, scraping the mud off my trousers and
boots. "Gee-up there, Liney!"
My cows settled slowly into the yoke, and standing, as they did now, on
firm ground, they deliberately snaked the wagon, hub-deep as it was, out
of the mire, and stopped at the word on the western side of
the mud-hole.
"Good work, Mr. Vandemark!" he said. "Those knowledgy folk back along
the road who said you were trading yourself out of your patrimony ought
to see you put the thing through. If you ever need work, come to my
place out in the new Earthly Eden."
"I'll have plenty of work of my own," I said; "but maybe, sometime, I
may need to earn a little money. I'll remember."
I stopped at Independence that night; and so did the Gowdy party. I was
on the road before them in the morning, but they soon passed me,
Virginia looking wishfully at me as they went by, and Buck Gowdy waving
his hand in a way that made me think he must be a little tight--and then
they drove on out of sight, and I pursued my slow way wondering why
Virginia Royall had asked me so anxiously if I knew any good people who
would take in and shelter a friendless girl--and not only take her in,
but fight for her. I could not understand what she had said in any
other way.
I had a hard time that day. The road was already cut up and at the
crossings of the swales the sod on which we relied to bear up our wheels
was destroyed by the host of teams that had gone on before me. That
endless stream across the Dubuque ferry was flowing on ahead of me; and
the fast-going part of it was passing me every hour like swift schooners
outstripping a slow, round-bellied Dutch square-rigger.
The mire-holes were getting deeper and deeper; for the weather was
showery. I helped many teams out of their troubles, and was helped by
some; though my load was not overly heavy, and I had four true-pulling
heavy cows that, when mated with the Alderney bull I had left behind me
with Mr. Westervelt, gave me the best stock of cattle--they and my other
cows--in Monterey County, until Judge Horace Stone began bringing in his
pure-bred Shorthorns; and even then, by grading up with Shorthorn blood
I was thought by many to have as good cattle as he had. So I got out of
most of my troubles on the Old Ridge Road with my cows, as I did later
with them and their descendants when the wheat crop failed us in the
'seventies; but I had a hard time that day. It grew better in the
afternoon; and as night drew on I could see the road for miles ahead of
me a solitary stretch of highway, without a team; but far off, coming
over a hill toward me, I saw a figure that looked strange and mysterious
to me, somehow.
5
It seemed to be a woman or girl, for I could see even at that distance
her skirts blown out by the brisk prairie wind. She came over the hill
as if running, and at its summit she appeared to stop as if looking for
something afar off. At that distance I could not tell whether she gazed
backward, forward, to the left or the right, but it impressed me that
she stood gazing backward over the route to the west along which she had
come. Then, it was plain, she began running down the gentle declivity
toward me, and once she fell and either lay or sat on the ground for
some time. Presently, though, she got up, and began coming on more
slowly, sometimes as if running, most of the time going from side to
side of the road as if staggering--and finally she went out of my sight,
dropping into a wide valley, to the bottom of which I could not see. It
was strange, as it appeared to me; this lone woman, the prairie, night,
and the sense of trouble; but, I thought, like most queer things, it
would have some quite simple explanation if one could see it close-by.
I made camp a few hundred yards from the road by a creek, along the
banks of which grew many willows, and some little groves of box-elders
and popples, which latter in this favorable locality grew eight or ten
feet tall, and were already breaking out their soft greenish catkins and
tender, quivering, pointed leaves: in one of these clumps I hid my
wagon, and in the midst of it I kindled my camp-fire. It seemed already
a little odd to find myself where I could not look out afar over
the prairie.
The little creek ran bank-full, but clear, and not muddy as our streams
now always are after a rain. One of the losses of Iowa through
civilization has been the disappearance of our lovely little brooks.
Then every few miles there ran a rivulet as clear as crystal, its bottom
checkered at the riffles into a brilliant pattern like plaid delaine by
the shining of the clean red, white and yellow granite pebbles through
the crossed ripples from the banks. Now these watercourses are robbed of
their flow by the absorption of the rich plowed fields, are all silted
up, and in summer are dry; and in spring and fall they are muddy
bankless wrinkles in the fields, poached full by the hoofs of cattle and
the snouts of hogs; and through many a swale, you would now be surprised
to know, in 1855 there ran a brook two feet wide in a thousand little
loops, with beautiful dark quiet pools at the turns, some of them
mantled with white water-lilies, and some with yellow. Over-hanging
banks of rooty turf, had these creeks, under which the larger and
soberer fishes lurked in dignified caution like bank presidents, too
wise for any common bait, but eager for the big good things. The
narrower reaches were all overshadowed by the long grass until you had
to part the greenery to see the water. Now such a valley is a forest of
corn unbroken by any vestige of brook, creek, rivulet or rill.
That night at a spot which is now plow-land, I have no doubt, I listened
to the frogs and prairie-chickens while I caught a mess of chubs,
shiners, punkin-seeds and bullheads in a little pond not ten feet broad,
within a hundred yards of my wagon, and then rolled them in flour and
fried them in butter over my fire, wondering all the time about the
woman I had seen coming eastward on the road ahead of me.
I was still in sight of the road, and the twilight was settling down
gradually; the air was so clear that even in the absence of a moon, it
was long after sunset before it was dark; so I could sit in my dwarf
forest, and keep watch of the road to the west to see whether that woman
was really a lonely wanderer against the stream of travel, or only a
stray from some mover's wagon camped ahead of me along the road.
A pack of wolves just off the road and to the west at that moment began
their devilish concert over some wayside carcass--just at the moment
when she came in sight. She appeared in the road where it came into my
view twenty rods or so beyond the creek, and on the other side of it.
I heard her scream when the first howls of the wolves broke the
silence; and then she came running, stumbling, falling, partly toward me
and partly toward a point up-stream, where I thought she must mean to
cross the brook--a thing which was very easy for one on foot, since it
called only for a little jump from one bank to the other. She seemed to
be carrying something which when she fell would fly out of her hand, and
which in spite of her panic she would pick up before she ran on again.
She came on uncertainly, but always running away from the howls of the
wolves, and just before she reached the little creek, she stopped and
looked back, as if for a sight of pursuers--and there were pursuers.
Perhaps a hundred yards back of her I saw four or five slinking dark
forms; for the cowardly prairie wolf becomes bold when fled from, and
partly out of curiosity, and perhaps looking forward to a feast on some
dead or dying animal, they were stalking the girl, silent, shadowy,
evil, and maybe dangerous. She saw them too--and with another scream she
plunged on through the knee-high grass, fell splashing into the icy
water of the creek, and I lost sight of her.
My first thought was that she was in danger of drowning, notwithstanding
the littleness of the brook; and I ran to the point from which I had
heard her plunge into the water, expecting to have to draw her out on
the bank; but I found only a place where the grass was wallowed down as
she had crawled out, and lying on the ground was the satchel she had
been carrying. Dark as it was I could see her trail through the grass as
she had made her way on; and I followed it with her sachel in my hand,
with some foolish notion of opening a conversation with her by giving it
back to her.
A short distance farther, on the upland, were my four cows, tied head
and foot so they could graze, lying down to rest; and staggering on
toward them went the woman's form, zigzagging in bewilderment. She came
all at once upon the dozing cows, which suddenly gathered themselves
together in fright, hampered by their hobbling ropes, and one of them
sent forth that dreadful bellow of a scared cow, worse than a lion's
roar. The woman uttered another piercing cry, louder and shriller than
any she had given yet; she turned and ran back to me, saw my dark form
before her, and fell in a heap in the grass, helpless, unnerved,
quivering, quite done for.
"Don't be afraid," said I; "I won't let them hurt you--I won't let
anything hurt you!"
I didn't go very near her at first, and I did not touch her. I stood
there repeating that the wolves would not hurt her, that it was only a
gentle cow which had made that awful noise, that I was only a boy on my
way to my farm, and not afraid of wolves at all, or of anything else. I
kept repeating these simple words of reassurance over and over, standing
maybe a rod from her; and from that distance stepping closer and closer
until I stood over her, and found that she was moaning and catching her
breath, her face in her arms, stretched out on the cold ground, wet and
miserable, all alone on the boundless prairie except for a foolish boy
who did not know what to do with her or with himself, but was repeating
the promise that he would not let anything hurt her. She has told me
since that if I had touched her she would have died. It was a long time
before she said anything.
"The wolves!" she cried. "The wolves!"
"They are gone," I said. "They are all gone--and I've got a gun."
"Oh! Oh!" she cried: "Keep them away! Keep them away!"
She kept saying this over and over, sitting on the ground and staring
out into the darkness, starting at every rustle of the wind, afraid of
everything. It was a long time before she uttered a word except
exclamations of terror, and every once in a while she broke down in
convulsive sobbings. I thought there was something familiar in her
voice; but I could not see well enough to recognize her features, though
it was plain that she was a young girl.
"The wolves are gone," I said; "I have scared them off."
"Don't let them come back," she sobbed. "Don't let them come back!"
"I've got a little camp-fire over yonder," I said; "and if we go to it,
I'll build it up bright, and that will scare them most to death. They're
cowards, the wolves--camp-fire will make 'em run. Let's go to the fire."
She made an effort to get up, but fell back to the ground in a heap. I
was just at that age when every boy is afraid of girls; and while I had
had my dreams of rescuing damsels from danger and serving them in other
heroic ways as all boys do, when the pinch came I did not know what to
do; she put up her hand, though, and I took it and helped her to her
feet; but she could not walk. Summoning up my courage I picked her up
and carried her toward the fire. She said nothing, except, of course,
that she was too heavy for me to carry; but she clung to me
convulsively. I could feel her heart beating furiously against me, and
she was twitching and quivering in every limb.
"You are the boy who took care of me back there when my sister died,"
said she as I carried her along.
"Are you Mrs. Gowdy's sister?" I asked.
"I am Virginia Royall," she said.
6
She was very wet and very cold. I set her down on the spring seat where
she could lean back, and wrapped her in a buffalo robe, building up the
fire until it warmed her.
"I'm glad it's you!" she said.
Presently I had hot coffee for her, and some warm milk, with the fish
and good bread and butter, and a few slices of crisp pork which I had
fried, and browned warmed-up potatoes. There was smear-case too, milk
gravy and sauce made of English currants. She began picking at the food,
saying that she could not eat; and I noticed that her lips were pale,
while her face was crimson as if with fever. She had had nothing to eat
for twenty-four hours except some crackers and cheese which she had
hidden in her satchel before running away; so in spite of the fact that
she was in a bad way from all she had gone through, she did eat a fair
meal of victuals.
I thought she ought to be talked to so as to take her mind from her
fright; but I could think of nothing but my way of cooking the victuals,
and how much I wished I could give her a better meal--just the same sort
of talk a woman is always laughed at for--but she did not say much to
me. I suppose her strange predicament began returning to her mind.
I had already made up my mind that she should sleep in the wagon, while
I rolled up in the buffalo robe by the fire; but it seemed a very bad
and unsafe thing to allow her to go to bed wet as she was. I was afraid
to mention it to her, however, until finally I saw her shiver as the
fire died down. I tried to persuade her to use the covered wagon as a
bedroom, and to let me dry her clothes by the fire; but she hung back,
saying little except that she was not very wet, and hesitating and
seeming embarrassed; but after I had heated the bed-clothes by the fire,
and made up the bed as nicely as I could, I got her into the wagon and
handed her the satchel which I had clung to while bringing her back; and
although she had never consented to my plan she finally poked her
clothes out from under the cover at the side of the wagon, in a sort of
damp wad, and I went to work getting them in condition to wear again.
I blushed as I unfolded the wet dress, the underwear, and the
petticoats, and spread them over a drying rack of willow wands which I
had put up by the fire. I had never seen such things before; and it
seemed as if it would be very hard for me to meet Virginia in the open
day afterward--and yet as I watched by the clothes I had a feeling of
exaltation like that which young knights may have had as they watched
through the darkness by their armor for the ceremony of knighthood;
except that no such knight could have had all my thoughts and feelings.
Perhaps the Greek boy who once intruded upon a goddess in her temple had
an experience more like mine; though in my case the goddess had taken
part in the ceremony and consented to it. There would be something
between us forever, I felt, different from anything that had ever taken
place between a boy and girl in all the world (it always begins in that
way), something of which I could never speak to her or to any one,
something which would make her different to me, in a strange, intimate,
unspeakable way, whether I ever saw her again or not. Oh, the lost
enchantment of youth, which makes an idol of a discarded pair of
corsets, and locates a dream land about the combings of a woman's hair;
and lives a century of bliss in a day of embarrassed silence!
It must have been three o'clock, for the rooster of the half-dozen fowls
which I had traded for had just crowed, when Virginia called to me from
the wagon.
"That man," said she in a scared voice, "is hunting for me."
"Yes," said I, only guessing whom she meant.
"If he takes me I shall kill myself!"
"He will never take you from me," I said.
"What can you do?"
"I have had a thousand fights," I said; "and I have never been whipped!"
I afterward thought of one or two cases in which bigger boys had bested
me, though I had never cried "Enough!" and it seemed to me that it was
not quite honest to leave her thinking such a thing of me when it was
not quite so. And it looked a little like bragging; but it appeared to
quiet her, and I let it go. From the mention she had made back there at
Dyersville of men who could fight, using pistol or knife, she apparently
was accustomed to men who carried and used weapons; but, thought I, I
had never owned, much less carried, any weapons except my two hard
fists. Queer enough to say I never thought of the strangeness of a boy's
making his way into a new land with a strange girl suddenly thrown on
his hands as a new and precious piece of baggage to be secreted,
smuggled, cared for and defended.