On his way down the bluffs to town Scarborough felt as calm and
peaceful as that tranquil evening. He had a sense of the end of a long
strain of which he had until then been unconscious. "NOW I can go away
and rest," he said to himself. And at sundown he set out for his farm.
He arrived at ten o'clock, by moonlight, amid a baying of dogs so
energetic that it roused every living thing in the barnyard to protest
in a peevish chorus of clucking and grunting and quacking and squealing.
"What on airth!" exclaimed Mrs. Gabbard, his farmer's wife, standing at
the back door, in calico skirt and big shawl. When she saw who it was,
her irritated voice changed to welcome. "Why, howdy, Mr. Scarborough!
I thought it was old John Lovel among the chickens or at the granary.
I might 'a' knowed he wouldn't come in the full of the moon and no
clouds."
"Go straight back to bed, Mrs. Gabbard, and don't mind me," said
Scarborough. "I looked after my horse and don't want anything to eat.
Where's Eph?"
"Can't you hear?" asked Mrs. Gabbard, dryly. And in the pause a lusty
snore penetrated. "When anything out of the way happens, I get up and
nose around to see whether it's worth while to wake him."
Scarborough laughed. "I've come for a few days--to get some exercise,"
he said. "But don't wake me with the others to-morrow morning. I'm
away behind on sleep and dead tired."
He went to bed--the rooms up-stairs in front were reserved for him and
were always ready. His brain was apparently as busy and as determined
not to rest as on the worst of his many bad nights during the past four
months. But the thoughts were vastly different; and soon those
millions of monotonous murmurings from brook and field and forest were
soothing his senses. He slept soundly, with that complete relaxing of
every nerve and muscle which does not come until the mind wholly yields
up its despotic control and itself plunges into slumber unfathomable.
The change of the air with dawn slowly wakened him. It was only a
little after five, but he felt refreshed. He got himself into farm
working clothes and went down to the summer dining-room--a shed against
the back of the house with three of its walls latticed. In the
adjoining kitchen Mrs. Gabbard and her daughters, Sally and Bertha,
were washing the breakfast dishes--Gabbard and his two sons and the
three "hands" had just started for the meadows with the hay wagons.
"Good morning," said Scarborough, looking in on the three women.
They stopped work and smiled at him, and the girls dried their hands
and shook hands with him--all with an absolute absence of embarrassment
that, to one familiar with the awkward shyness of country people, would
have told almost the whole story of Scarborough's character. "I'll get
you some breakfast in the dining-room," said Mrs. Gabbard.
"No--just a little--on the corner of the table out here," replied
Scarborough.
Mrs. Gabbard and Sally bustled about while he stood in the doorway of
the shed, looking out into the yard and watching the hens make their
careful early morning tour of the inclosure to glean whatever might be
there before scattering for the day's excursions and depredations. He
had not long to wait and he did not linger over what was served.
"You've et in a manner nothing," complained Mrs. Gabbard.
"I haven't earned an appetite yet," he replied. "Just wait till this
evening."
As soon as he was out of view he gave a great shout and started to run.
"What folly to bother with, a foolish, trouble-breeding thinking
apparatus in a world like this!" he thought, as the tremendous currents
of vitality surged through him. And he vaulted a six-rail fence and
ran on. Down the hollow drenched with dew, across the brook which was
really wide enough to be called a creek, up the steep slope of the
opposite hill at a slower pace, and he was at the edge of the meadows.
The sun was clear of the horizon now, and the two wagons, piled high
with hay and "poled down" to keep the loads steady, were about to move
off to the barn.
"Bring back a fork for me, Bill!" he called to the driver of the nearer
wagon--Bill was standing on the lofty top of his load, which projected
forward and rear so far that, forward, the horses were half canopied.
Against Bill's return he borrowed Gabbard's fork and helped complete
the other wagon, the sweat streaming from his face as his broad
shoulders swung down with the empty fork and up with a great mat of hay.
They worked alternately in the fields and at the barns until half-past
eleven. Then they went into the shade at the edge of the meadow and
had their dinner.
"My old woman," said Gabbard, "says that two set-down meals a day in
harvest time's as many as she'll stand for. So we have dinner out here
in good weather, and to the barn when it rains."
The talk was of weather prospects, of probable tonnage to the acre, of
the outlook for the corn, of the health and family expectations of the
mares and the cows and the pigs. It died away gradually as one man
after another stretched out upon his back with a bunch of hay for an
odorous pillow and his broad-brimmed straw hat for a light-shade.
Scarborough was the fourth man to yield; as he dozed off his hat was
hiding that smile of boundless content which comes only to him who
stretches his well body upon grass or soft stubble and feels the vigor
of the earth steal up and through him. "Why don't I do this oftener?"
Scarborough was saying to himself. "I must--and I shall, now that my
mind's more at ease."
A long afternoon of the toil that tires and vexes not, and at sundown
he was glad to ride home on top of the last wagon instead of walking as
he had intended. The supper-table was ready--was spread in the
dining-shed. They washed their hands and sunburnt arms and soused
their heads in cold water from the well, and sat, Scarborough at one
end, Gabbard at the other, the strapping sons and the "hands" down
either side. The whole meal was before them--huge platters of fried
chicken, great dishes full of beans and corn and potatoes; plates piled
high with hot corn bread, other plates of "salt-rising"; Mrs. Gabbard's
miraculous apple pies, and honey for which the plundered flowers might
still be mourning. Yesterday it would have seemed to Scarborough
dinner enough for a regiment. To-day--he thought he could probably eat
it all, and wished that he might try. To drink, there were coffee and
cider and two kinds of milk. He tried the buttermilk and kept on with
it.
"You must 'a' had a busy summer," said Gabbard. "This is the first
time you've been with us."
"Yes," Scarborough replied. "I did hope to get here for the threshing,
but I couldn't."
The threshing set them all off--it had been a record year; thirty-eight
bushels to the acre on the average, twenty-seven on the hillsides which
Gabbard had hesitated whether to "put in" or not. An hour after supper
Scarborough could no longer hold his eyes open. "Wake me with the
others," he said to Mrs. Gabbard, who was making up the "salt-rising"
yeast for the morrow's baking. "I'll have breakfast when they do."
"I reckon you've earned it," said Mrs. Gabbard. "Eph says you laid it
over 'em all to-day."
"Well, I guess I at least earned my supper," replied Scarborough. "And
I guess I ate it."
"You didn't do so bad, considerin'," Mrs. Gabbard admitted. "Nothin'
like livin' in town to take appetite away."
"That isn't all it takes away," said Scarborough, going on to his own
part of the house without explaining his remark. When his head touched
the pillow his brain instantly stopped the machinery. He needed no
croonings or dronings from the fields to soothe him. "Not an idea in
my head all day," he said to himself with drowsy delight.
Four days of this, and on the fifth came the outside world in the form
of Burdick, chairman of the county committee of his party in the county
in which his farm lay. They sat on the fence under the big maple, out
of earshot of the others.
"Larkin's come out for John Frankfort for the nomination for governor,"
said Burdick.
Scarborough smiled. "Even Larkin couldn't get it for Frankfort--he's
too notorious."
"He don't want to get it for him," replied Burdick. "His real man's
Judge Graney."
Scarborough stopped fanning himself with his wide-brimmed straw. Judge
Graney was the most adroit and dangerous of John Dumont's tools. He
had given invaluable aid from the bench at several of the National
Woolens Company's most critical moments. Yet he had retained and
increased his popularity and his reputation by deciding against his
secret master with a brave show of virtue when he knew the higher
courts must reverse him. For several years Scarborough had been
looking forward to the inevitable open conflict between the forces of
honesty in his party and the forces of the machine as ruled by the
half-dozen big corporations who also ruled the machine of the
opposition party. He had known that the contest must come, and that he
must take part in it; and he had been getting ready. But he had not
wished to give battle until he was strong enough to give a battle
which, even if he lost it, would not strengthen the hold of the
corruptionists.
After he rejected Larkin's dazzling offers, conditioned upon his
aloofness rather than frank subservience, he had thought the whole
situation over, and, as he hinted to Pauline, had realized how
apparently hopeless a fight against the machine would be just then,
with the people prosperous and therefore quiescent. And he had decided
to stand aside for the time. He now saw that reluctance to attack
Dumont had been at least a factor in this decision; and he also saw
that he could not delay, as he had hoped. There was no escape--either
he must let his work of years be undermined and destroyed or he must
give battle with all his strength and skill. He remembered what
Pauline had said: "You can't lose!"
"No, one can't lose in this sort of fight," he thought. "Either WE win
or there'll be no victory." He sprang from the fence to the ground.
"Let's go to the house," he said to Burdick.
"What you going to do?" asked Burdick, as they walked toward the gate,
where his horse and buggy were hitched.
"Fight, of course," said Scarborough. "Fight Larkin and his gang in
the open. I'll get ex-Governor Bowen to let us use his name and
canvass the state for him."
Burdick shook his head sadly.
"It ain't politics," he said. "You'll split the party; then the
party'll turn and split you." And later, as they were separating,
Scarborough to drive to Saint X, Burdick to go back to Marshaltown, he
said: "I'll help all I can in a quiet way. But--I hope you've got your
cyclone cellar dug."
Scarborough laughed. "I haven't been digging a cyclone cellar. I've
been trying to manufacture a cyclone."
There were thirty-three clear days before the meeting of the
convention. He wasted not an hour of them on the manufacturing towns;
he went to the country--to the farmers and the villagers, the men who
lived each man in his own house, on his own soil from which he earned
his own living. Up and down and across the state he went, speaking,
organizing, planning, inspiring--he and the coterie of young men who
looked up to him as their leader and followed him in this desperate
assault as courageously as if victory were assured.
Not long before the convention he paused at ex-Judge Bowen's country
place and spent two hours with him in his great, quiet, cool library.
"Isn't it inspiring," Scarborough said, "to see so many young men in
arms for a principle?"
The old man slowly shook his magnificent white head and smiled at the
young man. "Principles without leaders go begging," he replied. "Men
rally to the standard only when the right voice calls. The right voice
at the right time." He laid his hand on Scarborough's shoulder with
affection and pride. "If the moment should come for you to think of
it, do not forget that the leader is the principle, and that in this
fight the leader is not I--but you."