added, looking at her with a wistful desire for contradiction,--"perhaps
I've been a little selfish about Marg'et Ann."
"I don't think you meant to be, Joseph," said the old maid soothingly;
"when anybody's so good as Marg'et Ann, she doesn't call for much grace
in the people about her. I think it's a duty we owe to other people to
have some faults."
Outside the door Marg'et Ann still lingered, with her anxiety about the
bread on her lips and the shadow of much serving in her soft eyes. Miss
Nancy stopped and drew her favorite into the shelter of her gaunt arms.
"I'm coming over next week to help you get ready for the wedding,
Margie," she said, "and I'm going to stay when you're gone and look
after things. They don't need me at Samuel's now, and I'll be more
comfortable here. I've got enough to pay a little for my board the rest
of my life, and I don't mean to work very hard, but I can show Nancy
Helen and keep the run of things. There, don't cry. We'll go and look at
the sponge now. I guess you'd better ride over to Yankee Neck this
afternoon, and tell them you don't want the winter school--There,
there!"
At the Foot of the Trail
I
The slope in front of old Mosey's cabin was a mass of purple lupine.
Behind the house the wild oats were dotted with brodiæa, waving on long,
glistening stems. The California lilac was in bloom on the trail, and
its clumps of pale blossoms were like breaks in the chaparral, showing
the blue sky beyond.
In the corral between the house and the mountain-side stood a dozen or
more burros, wearing that air of patient resignation common to very good
women and very obstinate beasts. Old Mosey himself was pottering about
the corral, feeding his stock. He stooped now and then with the
unwillingness of years, and erected himself by slow, rheumatic stages.
The donkeys crowded about the fence as he approached with a forkful of
alfalfa hay, and he pushed them about with the flat of the prongs,
calling them by queer, inappropriate names.
A young man in blue overalls came around the corner of the house,
swinging a newly trimmed manzanita stick.
"Hello, Mosey!" he called. "Here I am again, as hungry as a coyote.
What's the lay-out? Cottontail on toast and patty de foy grass?"
The old man grinned, showing his worn, yellow teeth.
"I'll be there in a minute," he said. "Just set down on the step."
The young fellow came toward the corral.
"I've got a job on the trail," he said. "I'm going down-town for my
traps. Who named 'em for you?" he questioned, as the old man swore
softly at the Democratic candidate for President.
"Oh, the women, mostly. They take a lot of interest in 'em when they
start out; they're afraid I ain't good to them. They don't say so much
about it when they get back."
"They're too tired, I suppose."
"Yes, I s'pose so."
"You let out five this morning, didn't you? I met them on my way down.
The girl in bloomers seemed to be scared; she gave a little screech
every few minutes. The others didn't appear to mind."
"Oh, she wasn't afraid. Women don't make a noise when they're scared;
it's only when they want to scare somebody else."
The young fellow leaned against the fence and laughed, with a final
whoop. A gray donkey investigated his hip pocket, and he reached back
and prodded the intruder with his stick.
"You seem to be up on the woman question, Mosey. It's queer you ain't
married."
The old man was lifting a boulder to hold down a broken bale of hay, and
made no reply. His visitor started toward the cabin. The old man
adjusted another boulder and trotted after his guest, brushing the hay
from his flannel shirt. A column of blue-white smoke arose from the
rusty stovepipe in the cabin roof, and the smell of overdone coffee
drifted out upon the spiced air.
"I was just about settin' down," said the host, placing another plate
and cup and saucer on the blackened redwood table. "I'll fry you some
more bacon and eggs."
The visitor watched him as he hurried about with the short, uncertain
steps of hospitable old age.
"By gum, Mosey, I'd marry a grass-widow with a second-hand family before
I'd do my own cooking."
The young fellow gave a self-conscious laugh that made the old man
glance at him from under his weather-beaten straw hat.
"Your mind seems to run on marryin'," he said; "guess you're hungry. Set
up and have some breakfast."
The visitor drew up a wooden chair, and the old man poured two cups of
black coffee from the smoke-begrimed coffee-pot and returned it to the
stove. Then he took off his hat and seated himself opposite his guest.
The latter stirred three heaping teaspoonfuls of sugar into his cup,
muddied the resulting syrup with condensed milk, and drank it with the
relish of abnormal health.
"I tell you what, Mosey," he said, reaching for a slice of bacon and
dripping the grease across the table, "there ain't any flies on the
women when it comes to housekeeping. Now, a woman would turn on the
soapsuds and float you clean out of this house; then she'd mop up, and
put scalloped noospapers on all the shelves, and little white aprons on
the windows, and pillow-shams on your bunk, and she'd work a doily for
you to lay your six-shooter on, with 'God bless our home' in the corner
of it; and she'd make you so comfortable you wouldn't know what to do
with yourself."
"I'm comfortable enough by myself," said the old man uneasily. "When you
work for yourself, you know who's boss."
"Naw, you don't, Mosey, not by a long shot; you don't know whether
you're boss or the cookin'. I tried bachin' once"--the speaker made a
grimace of reminiscent disgust; "the taste hasn't gone out of my mouth
yet. You're a pretty fair cook, Mosey, but you'd ought to see my girl's
biscuits; she makes 'em so light she has to put a napkin over 'em to
keep 'em from floating around like feathers. Fact!" He reached over and
speared a slice of bread with his fork. "If I keep this job on the
trail, maybe you'll have a chance to sample them biscuits. I'm goin' to
send East for that girl."
"Where you goin' to live?"
"Well, I didn't know but we could rent this ranch and board you, Mosey.
Seems to me you ought to retire. It ain't human to live this way. If you
was to die here all by yourself, you'd regret it. Well, I must toddle."
The visitor stood a moment on the step, sweeping the valley with his
fresh young glance; then he set his hat on the back of his head and went
whistling down the road, waving his stick at old Mosey as he disappeared
among the sycamores in the wash. The old man gathered the dishes into a
rusty pan, and scalded them with boiling water from the kettle.
"I believe I'll do it," he said, as he fished the hot saucers out by
their edges and turned them down on the table; "it can't do no harm to
write to her, no way."
II
Mrs. Moxom put on her slat sunbonnet, took a tin pan from the pantry
shelf, and hurried across the kitchen toward the door. Her
daughter-in-law looked up from the corner where she was kneading bread.
She was a short, plump woman, and all of her convexities seemed
emphasized by flour. She put up the back of her hand to adjust a
loosened lock of hair, and added another high light to her forehead.
"Where you going, mother?" she called anxiously.
The old woman did not turn her head.
"Oh, just out to see how the lettuce is coming on. I had a notion I'd
like some for dinner, wilted with ham gravy."
"Can't one of the children get it?"
There was no response. Mrs. Weaver turned back to her bread.
"Your grandmother seems kind of fidgety this morning," she fretted to
her eldest daughter, who was decorating the cupboard shelves with tissue
paper of an enervating magenta hue, and indulging at intervals in vocal
reminiscences of a ship that never returned.
"Oh, well, mother," said that young person comfortably, "let her alone.
I think we all tag her too much. I hate to be tagged myself."
"Well, I'm sure I don't want to tag her, Ethel; I just don't want her to
overdo."
Mrs. Weaver spoke in a tone of mingled injury and self-justification.
"Oh, well, mother, she isn't likely to put her shoulder out of joint
pulling a few heads of lettuce."
The girl broke out again into cheerful interrogations concerning the
disaster at sea:--
"Did she never_r_ re_tur_ren?
No, she never_r_ re_tur_rened."
Mrs. Weaver gave a little sigh, as if she feared her daughter's words
might prove prophetic, and buried her plump fists in the puffy dough.
Old Mrs. Moxom turned when she reached the garden gate and glanced back
at the house. Then she clasped the pan to her breast and skurried along
the fence toward the orchard. Once under the trees, she did not look
behind her, but went rapidly toward the field where she knew her son was
plowing. The reflection of the sun on the tin pan made him look up, and
when he saw her he stopped his team. She came across the soft brown
furrows to his side.
"I'd have come to the fence when I saw you, if I hadn't had the colt,"
he said kindly. "What's wanted?"
The old woman's face twitched. She pushed her sunbonnet back with one
trembling hand.
"Jason," she said, with a little jerk in her voice, "your paw's alive."
The man arranged the lines carefully along the colt's back; then he took
off his hat and wiped the top of his head on his sleeve, looking away
from his mother with heavy, dull embarrassment.
"I expect you'd 'most forgot all about him," pursued the old woman, with
a vague reproach in her tone.
"I hadn't much to forget," answered the man, resentment rising in his
voice. "He hasn't troubled himself about me."
"Well, he didn't know anything about you, Jason, he went away so soon
after we was married. It's a dreadful position to be placed in. It 'u'd
be awfully embarrassing to--to the Moxom girls."
The man gave her a quick, curious glance. He had never heard her speak
of his half-sisters in that way before.
"They're so kind of high-toned," she went on, "just as like as not
they'd blame me. I'm sure I don't know what to do."
Jason kicked the soft earth with his sunburnt boot.
"Where is he?" he asked sullenly.
"In Californay."
"How'd you hear?"
"I got a letter. He wrote to Burtonville and directed it to Mrs.
Angeline Weaver, and the postmaster give it to some of your uncle
Samuel's folks, and they put it in another envelope and backed it to me
here. I thought at first I wouldn't say anything about it, but it
seemed as if I'd ought to tell you; it doesn't hurt you any, but it's
awful hard on the--the Moxom girls."
The man shifted his weight, and kicked awhile with his other foot.
"Well, I'd just give him the go-by," he announced resolutely. "You're a
decent man's widow, and that's enough. He's never"--
"Oh, I ain't saying anything against your step-paw, Jason," the old
woman broke in anxiously. "He was an awful good man. It seems queer to
think it was the way it was. Dear me, it's all so kind of confusing!"
The poor woman looked down with much the same embarrassment over her
matrimonial redundance that a man might feel when suddenly confronted by
twins.
"I'm sure I don't see how I could help thinking he was dead," she went
on after a little silence, "when he wrote he was going off on that trip
and might never come back, and the man that was with him wrote that they
got lost from each other, and water was so scarce and all that. And
then, you know, I didn't get married again till you was 'most ten years
old, Jason. I'm sure I don't know what to do. I don't want to mortify
anybody, but I'd like to know just what's my dooty."
"Well, I can tell you easy enough." The man's voice was getting beyond
control, but he drew it in with a quick, angry breath. "Just drop the
whole thing. If he's got on for forty years, mother, I guess he can
manage for the rest of the time."
"But it ain't so easy managin' when you begin to get old, Jason. I know
how that is."
Her son jerked the lines impatiently, and the colt gave a nervous start.
"I suppose you know this farm really came to you from your paw, don't
you, Jason?" she asked humbly.
"Don't know as I did," answered the man, without enthusiasm.
"Well, you see, after we was married, your grandfather Weaver offered
your paw this quarter-section if he'd stay here in Ioway; but he had his
heart set on going to Californay, and didn't want it; so after it
turned out the way it did, and you was born, your grandfather gave me
this farm, and I done very well with it. That's the reason your step-paw
insisted on you having it when we was dividing things up before he
died."
"Seems to me father worked pretty hard on this place himself."
The man said the word "father" half defiantly.
"Mr. Moxom? Oh, yes, he was a first-rate manager, and the kindest man
that ever drew breath. I remember when your sister Angie was born--oh,
dear me!"--the old woman felt her voice giving way, and stopped an
instant,--"it seems so kind of strange. Well, I guess we'd better just
drop it, Jason. I must go back to the house. Emma didn't like my coming
for lettuce. She'll think I've planted some, and am waitin' for it to
come up."
She gave her son a quivering smile as she turned away. He stood still
and watched her until she had crossed the plowed ground. It seemed to
him she walked more feebly than when she came out.
"That's awful queer," he said, shaking his head, "calling her own
daughters 'the Moxom girls.'"
III
Ethel Weaver had been to Ashland for the mail, and was driving home in
the summer dusk. A dash of rain had fallen while she was in the village,
and the air was full of the odor of moist earth and the sweetness of
growing corn. The colt she was driving held his head high, glancing from
side to side with youthful eagerness for a sensation, and shying at
nothing now and then in sheer excess of emotion over the demand of his
monotonous life.
The girl held a letter in her lap, turning the pages with one
unincumbered hand, and lifting her flushed face with a contemptuous "Oh,
Barney, you goose!" as the colt drew himself into attitudes of quivering
fright, which dissolved suddenly at the sound of her voice and the
knowledge that another young creature viewed his coquettish terrors with
the disrespect born of comprehension. As they turned into the lane west
of the house, Ethel folded her letter and thrust it hastily into her
pocket, and the colt darted through the open gate and drew up at the
side door with a transparent assumption of serious purpose suggested by
the proximity of oats.
"Ed!" called the girl, "the next time you hitch up Barney for me, I wish
you'd put a kicking-strap on him. I had a picnic with him coming down
the hill by Arbuckle's."
Ed maintained the gruff silence of the half-grown rural male as he
climbed into the buggy beside his sister and cramped the wheel for her
to dismount.
"They haven't any quart jars over at the store, mother," said Ethel,
entering the house and walking across to the mirror to remove her hat.
"They're expecting some every day. Well, I do look like the Witch of
Endor!" she exclaimed, twisting her loosened rope of hair and skewering
it in place with a white celluloid pin. "That colt acted as if he was
possessed."
"Oh, I'm sorry about the jars," said Mrs. Weaver regretfully. "I wanted
to finish putting up the curr'n's to-morrow."
"Did you get any mail?" quavered grandmother Moxom.
"I got a letter from Rob."
There was a little hush in the room. The girl stood still before the
mirror, with a sense of support in the dim reflection of her own face.
"Is he well?" ventured the old woman feebly, glancing toward her
daughter-in-law.
"Yes, he's well; he's got steady work on some road up the mountain. He
writes as if people keep going up, but he never tells what they go up
for. He said something about a lot of burros, and at first I thought he
was in a furniture store, but I found out he meant mules. An old man
keeps them, and hires them out to people. Rob calls him 'old Mosey.'
They're keeping bach together. Rob tried to make biscuits, and he says
they tasted like castor oil."
As her granddaughter talked, Mrs. Moxom seemed to shrink deeper and
deeper into the patchwork cushion of her chair.
"Rob wants me to come out there and be married," pursued the girl,
bending nearer to the mirror and returning her own gaze with sympathy.
"Why, Ethel!" Mrs. Weaver's voice was full of astonished disapproval. "I
should think you'd be ashamed to say such a thing."
"I didn't say it; Rob said it," returned the girl, making a little
grimace at herself in the glass.
"Well, I have my opinion of a young man that will say such a thing to a
girl. If a girl's worth having, she's worth coming after."
Mrs. Weaver made this latter announcement with an air of triumph in its
triteness. Her daughter gave a little sniff of contempt.
"Well, if a fellow's worth having, isn't he worth going to?" she asked
with would-be flippancy.
"Why, Ethel Imogen Weaver!" Mrs. Weaver repeated her daughter's name
slowly, as if she hoped its length might arouse in the owner some sense
of her worth. "I never did hear the like."
The girl left the mirror, and seated herself in a chair in front of her
mother.
"It'll cost Rob a hundred dollars to come here and go back to
California, and a hundred dollars goes a long way toward fixing up.
Besides, he'll lose his job. I'd just as soon go out there as have him
come here. If people don't like it they--they needn't."
The girl's fresh young voice began to thicken, and she glanced about in
restless search of diversion from impending tears.
"Well, girls do act awful strange these days."
Mrs. Weaver took warning from her daughter's tone and divided her
disapproval by multiplying its denominator.
"Yes, they do. They act sometimes as if they had a little sense,"
retorted Ethel huskily.
"Well, I don't know as I call it sense to pick up and run after a man,
even if you're engaged to him; do you, mother?"
Old Mrs. Moxom started nervously at her daughter-in-law's appeal.
"Well, it does seem a long way to go on--on an uncertainty, Ethel," she
faltered.
The girl turned a flushed, indignant face upon her grandmother.
"Well, I hope you don't mean to call Rob an uncertainty?" she demanded
angrily.
"Oh, no; I don't mean that," pleaded the old woman. "I haven't got
anything agen' Rob. I don't suppose he's any more uncertain than--than
the rest of them. I"--
"Why, grandmother Moxom," interrupted the girl, "how you talk! I'm sure
father isn't an uncertainty, and there wasn't anything uncertain about
grandfather Moxom. To tell the honest truth, I think they're just about
as certain as we are."
The old woman got up and began to move the chairs about with purposeless
industry.
"It's awful hard to know what to do sometimes," she said, indulging in a
generality that might be mollifying, but was scarcely glittering.
"Well, it isn't hard for me to know _this_ time," said Mrs. Weaver, her
features drawn into a look of pudgy determination. "No girl of mine
shall ever go traipsing off to California alone on any such wild-goose
chase."
Ethel got up and moved toward the stairway, her tawny head thrown back,
and an eloquent accentuation of heel in her tread.
"I just believe old folks like for young folks to be foolish and
wasteful," she said over her shoulder, "so they can have something to
nag them about. I'm sure I"--She slammed the door upon her voice, which
seemed to be carried upward in a little whirlwind of indignation.
Mrs. Weaver glanced at her mother-in-law for sympathy, but the old woman
refused to meet her gaze.
"I'm just real mad at Rob Kendall for suggesting such a thing and
getting Ethel all worked up," clucked the younger woman anxiously.
Mrs. Moxom came back to her chair as aimlessly as she had left it.
"Men-folks are kind of helpless when it comes to planning," she said
apologetically. "To think of them poor things trying to keep house--and
the biscuits being soggy! It does kind of work on her feelings, Emma."
Mrs. Weaver gave her mother-in-law a glance of rotund severity.
"I don't mind their getting married," she said, "but I want it done
decent. I don't intend to pack my daughter off to any man as if she
wasn't worth coming after, biscuits or no biscuits!"
She lifted her chin and looked at her companion over the barricade of
conventionality that lay between them with the air of one whose position
is unassailable. The old woman sighed with much the same air, but with
none of her daughter-in-law's satisfaction in it.
"I'm sure I don't know," she said drearily; "sometimes it ain't easy to
know your dooty at a glance."
Mrs. Weaver made no response, but her expression was not favorable to
such lax uncertainty.
"The way mother Moxom talked," she said to her husband that night,
"you'd have thought she sided with Ethel."
Jason Weaver was far too much of a man to hazard an opinion on the
proprieties in the face of his wife's disapproval, so he grunted an
amiable acquiescence in that spirit of justifiable hypocrisy known among
his kind as "humoring the women-folks." Privately he was disposed to
exult in his daughter's spirit and good sense, and so long as these
admirable qualities did not take her away from him, and paternal pride
and affection were both gratified, he saw no reason to complain. This
satisfaction, however, did not prevent his "stirring her up" now and
then, as he said, that he might sun himself in the glow of her youthful
temper and chuckle inwardly over her smartness.
"Well, Dot, how's Rob?" he asked jovially one evening at supper about a
month later. "Does he still think he's worth running after?"
"I don't know whether he thinks so or not, but I know he is," asserted
the young woman, tilting her chin and looking away from her father with
a cool filial contempt for his pleasantries bred by familiarity. "He's
well enough, but the old man that lives with him had a fall and broke
his leg, and Rob has to take care of him."
Old Mrs. Moxom laid down her knife and fork, and dropped her hands in
her lap hopelessly.
"Well, now, what made him go and do that?" she asked, with a fretful
quaver in her voice, as if this were the last straw.
"I don't know, grandmother," answered Ethel cheerfully. "As soon as he's
well enough to be moved, they're going to take him to the county
hospital. I guess that's the poorhouse. But Rob says he's so old they're
afraid the bone won't knit; he suffers like everything. Poor old man,
I'm awful sorry for him. Rob has to do all the cooking."
The old woman pushed back her chair and brushed the crumbs from her
apron.
"I guess I'll go upstairs and lay down awhile, Emma. I been kind of
light-headed all afternoon. I guess I set too long over them carpet
rags."
She got up and crossed the room hurriedly. Her son looked after her with
anxious eyes. Presently they heard her toiling up the stairs with the
slow, inelastic tread of infancy and old age.
"I don't know what's come over your mother, Jason," said his wife. "She
hasn't been herself all summer. Sometimes I think I'd ought to write to
the girls."
"Oh, I guess she'll be all right," said Jason, with masculine
hopefulness. "Dot, you'd better go up by and by and see if grandmother
wants anything."
Safe in her own room, Mrs. Moxom sank into a chair with a long breath of
relief and dismay.
"The poorhouse!" she gasped. "That seems about as mortifying as to own
up to your girls that you wasn't never rightly married to their father."
She got up and wandered across the room to the bureau. "I expect he's
changed a good deal," she murmured. She took a daguerreotype from the
upper drawer, and gazed at it curiously. "Yes, I expect he's changed
quite a good deal," she repeated, with a sigh.
IV
"Why, mother Moxom!"
Mrs. Weaver sank into her sewing-chair in an attitude of pulpy despair.
"Well, I don't see but what it's the best thing for me to do," asserted
the old woman. "The cold weather'll be coming on soon, and I always have
more or less rheumatism, and they say Californay's good for rheumatism.
Besides, I think I need to stir round a little; I've stayed right here
'most too close; and as long as Ethel has her heart set on going, I
don't see but what it's the best plan. If I go along with her, I can
make sure that everything's all right. If you and Jason say she can't
go, why, then, I don't see but what I'll just have to start off and make
the trip alone."
"Why, mother Moxom, I just don't know what to say!"
Mrs. Weaver's tone conveyed a deep-seated sense of injury that she
should thus be deprived of speech for such insufficient cause.