IMAGINATIONS RUN AMUCK
I decided to utilize some of my spare time by doing a little freighting
from Oristown to Calias. Accordingly, one fair morning I started for the
former town. It began raining that evening, finally turning into a fine
snow, and by morning a genuine South Dakota blizzard was raging. How the
wind did screech across the prairie!
I was driving the big horse and Jenny Mule to a wagon loaded with two
tons of coal. They were not shod, and the hillsides had become slick and
treacherous with ice. At the foot of every hill Jenny Mule would lay her
ears back, draw herself up like a toad, when teased, and look up with a
groan, while the big horse trotted on up the next slope, pulling her
share of the load.
When the wind finally went down the mercury fell to 25 deg. below zero and
my wrists, face, feet, and ears were frost bitten when I arrived at
Calias. As is always the case during such severe weather, the hotel was
filled, and laughing, story telling, and good cheer prevailed. The
Nicholson boys asked "how I made it" and I answered disgustedly that I'd
have made it all right if that Jennie Mule hadn't got faint hearted. The
remark was received as a good joke and my suffering and annoyances of
the trip slipped away into the past. That remark also had the further
effect of giving Jennie Mule immortality. She became the topic of
conversation and jest in hotel and postoffice lobbies, and even to this
day the story of the "faint hearted mule" often affords splendid
entertainment at festive boards and banquet halls of the Little Crow,
when told by a Nicholson.
While working in the rain, the perspiration and the rain water had
caused my body to become so badly galled, that I found considerable
difficulty in getting around. To add to this discomfiture Jenny Mule was
affected with a touch of "Maudism" at times, especially while engaged in
eating grain. One night when I had wandered thoughtlessly into the barn,
she gave me such a wallop on the right shin as to impair that member
until I could hardly walk without something to hold to. As it had taken
a fourteen-hundred-mile walk to follow the plow in breaking the one
hundred and twenty acres, I was about "all in" physically when it was
done.
As a means of recuperation I took a trip to Chicago. While there, the
"call of the road" affected me; I got reinstated and ran a couple of
months to the coast. Four months of free life on the plains, however,
had changed me. After one trip I came in and found a letter from Jessie,
saying she was sick, and although she never said "come and see me" I
took it as an excuse and quit that P----n Company for good--and here it
passes out of the story--went down state to M--boro, and spent the
happiest week of my life.
After I had returned to Dakota, however, I contracted an imagination
that worked me into a state of jealously, concerning an individual who
made his home in M--boro, and with whom I suspicioned the object of my
heart to be unduly friendly. I say, this is what I suspicioned. There
was no particular proof, and I have been inclined to think, in after
years, that it was more a case of an over-energetic imagination run
amuck. I contended in my mind and in my letters to her as well, that I
should not have thought anything of it, if the "man in the case" had a
little more promising future, but since his proficiency only earned him
the munificent sum of three dollars per week, I continued to fret and
fume, until I at last resolved to suspend all communication with her.
Now what I should have done when I reached this stage of imaginary
insanity, was to have sent Miss Rooks a ticket, some money, and she
would have come to Dakota and married me, and together we would have
"lived happy ever after." As I see it now, I was affected with an
"idealism." Of course I was not aware of it at the time--no young soul
is--until they have learned by bitter experience the folly of "they
should not do thus and so", and, of course, there is the old excuse,
"good intentions." Somewhere I read that the road to--not St. Peter--is
paved with good intentions. The result of my prolific imagination was
that I carried out my resolutions, quit writing, and emotionally lived
rather unhappily thereafter, for some time at least.