HIS LOVE AFFAIRS
Naturally a lad of this temper had his loves. He made no secret of them,
and all the young people in the town knew his sweethearts and the
precise time when his passion changed its course. If a girl pleased him
he courted her with the utmost directness, but he was by no
interpretation a love-sick youth. His likings were more in the nature of
proprietary comradeship, and were expressed without caresses or ordinary
words of endearment.
His courtship amounted to service. He waited about to meet and help his
love, he hastened to defend her and to guide her; and if the favored one
knew her rôle she humored his fancies, permitting him to aid her in
finding her way across a weedy pasture lot or over a tiny little brook
which he was pleased to call a torrent. A smile of derision was fatal.
He would not submit to ridicule or joking. At the first jocular word his
hands clinched and his eyes flamed with anger. His was not a face of
laughter; for the most part it was serious in expression, and his eyes
were rapt with dreams of great deeds.
He had one mate to whom he talked freely, and him he chose often to be
his companion in the woods or on the prairies. This was John Burns, son
of a farmer who lived near the town. Harry spent nearly every Saturday
and Sunday during the summer months on the Burns farm. He helped Jack
during haying and harvest, and when their tasks were done the two boys
wandered away to the bank of the river and there, under some great
basswood tree on delicious sward, they lay and talked of wild animals
and Indians and the West. At this time the great chieftains of the
Sioux, Sitting Bull and Gall, were becoming famous to the world, and the
first reports of the findings of gold in the Black Hills were being
made. A commission appointed by President Grant had made a treaty with
the Sioux wherein Sitting Bull was told, "If you go to this new
reservation and leave Dakota to the settlers, you shall be unmolested so
long as grass grows and water runs."
But the very guard sent in to protect this commission reported "gold in
the grass roots," and the insatiate greed of the white man broke all
bounds--the treaty was ignored, and Sitting Bull, the last chieftain of
the Sioux, calling his people together, withdrew deeper into the
wilderness of Wyoming. The soldiers were sent on the trail, and the
press teemed for months with news of battles and speeches and campaigns.
All these exciting events Harry and his friend Jack read and discussed
hotly. Jack was eager to own a mine. "I'd like to pick up a nugget," he
said, but Harold was not interested. "I don't care to mine; I'd like to
be with General Custer. I'd like to be one of the scouts. I'd like to
have a coat like that." He pointed at one of the pictures wherein two or
three men in fringed buckskin shirts and wide hats were galloping across
a rocky plain.
Many times as the two boys met to talk over these alluring matters the
little town and the dusty lanes became exceedingly tame and commonplace.
Harold's eyes glowed with passion as he talked to his sweetheart of
these wild scenes, and she listened because he was so alluring as he lay
at her feet, pouring out a vivid recital of his plans.
"I'm not going to stay here much longer," he said; "it's too dull. I
can't stand much more school. If it wasn't for you I'd run away right
now."
Dot only smiled back at him and laid her hand on his hair. She was his
latest sweetheart. He loved her for her vivid color, her abundant and
beautiful hair, and also because she was a sympathetic listener. She, on
her part, enjoyed the sound of his eager voice and the glow of his deep
brown eyes. They were both pupils in the little seminary in the town,
and he saw her every day walking to and from the recitation halls. He
often carried her books for her, and in many other little ways insisted
on serving her.
Almost without definable reason the "Wild West" came to be a land of
wonder, lit as by some magical light. Its cañons, _arroyos_, and
mesquite, its bronchos, cowboys, Indians, and scouts filled the boy's
mind with thoughts of daring, not much unlike the fancies of a boy in
the days of knight errantry.
Of the Indians he held mixed opinions. At times he thought of them as a
noble race, at others--when he dreamed of fame--he wished to kill a
great many of them and be very famous. Most of the books he read were
based upon the slaughter of the "redskins," and yet at heart he wished
to be one of them and to taste the wild joy of their poetic life, filled
with hunting and warfare. Sitting Bull, Chief Gall, Rain-in-the-Face,
Spotted Tail, Star-in-the-Brow, and Black Buffalo became wonder-working
names in his mind. Every line in the newspapers which related to the
life of the cowboys or Indians he read and remembered, for his plan was
to become a part of it as soon as he had money enough to start.
There were those who would have contributed five dollars each to send
him, for he was considered a dangerous influence among the village boys.
If a window were broken by hoodlums at night it was counted against the
minister's son. If a melon patch were raided and the fruit scattered and
broken, Harold was considered the ringleader. Of the judgments of their
elders the rough lads were well aware, and they took pains that no word
of theirs should shift blame from Harold's shoulders to their own. By
hints and sly remarks they fixed unalterably in the minds of their
fathers and mothers the conception that Harold was a desperately bad and
reckless boy. In his strength, skill, and courage they really believed,
and being afraid of him, they told stories of his exploits, even among
themselves, which bordered on the marvelous.
In reality he was not a leader of these raids. His temperament was not
of that kind. He did not care to assume direction of an expedition
because it carried too much trouble and some responsibility. His mind
was wayward and liable to shift to some other thing at any moment;
besides, mischief for its own sake did not appeal to him. The real
leaders were the two sons of the village shoemaker. They were
under-sized, weazened, shrewd, sly little scamps, and appeared not to
have the resolution of chickadees, but had a singular genius for getting
others into trouble. They knew how to handle spirits like Harold. They
dared him to do evil deeds, taunted him (as openly as they felt it safe
to do) with cowardice, and so spurred him to attempt some trifling
depredation merely as a piece of adventure. Almost invariably when they
touched him on this nerve Harold responded with a rush, and when
discovery came was nearly always among the culprits taken and branded,
for his pride would not permit him to sneak and run. So it fell out that
time after time he was found among the grape stealers or the melon
raiders, and escaped prosecution only because the men of the town laid
it to "boyish deviltry" and not to any deliberate intent to commit a
crime.
After his daughter married Mr. Excell made another effort to win the
love of his son and failed. Harold cared nothing for his father's
scholarship or oratorical powers, and never went to church after he was
sixteen, but he sometimes boasted of his father among the boys.
"If father wasn't a minister, he'd be one of the strongest men in this
town," he said once to Jack. "Look at his shoulders. His arms are hard,
too. Of course he can't show his muscle, but I tell you he can box and
swing dumb-bells."
If the father had known it, in the direction of athletics lay the road
to the son's heart, but the members of the First Church were not
sufficiently advanced to approve of a muscular minister, and so Mr.
Excell kept silent on such subjects, and swung his dumb-bells in
private. As a matter of fact, he had been a good hunter in his youth in
Michigan, and might have won his son's love by tales of the wood, but he
did not.
For the most part, Harold ignored his father's occasional moments of
tenderness, and spent the larger part of his time with his sister or at
the Burns' farm.
Mr. and Mrs. Burns saw all that was manly and good in the boy, and they
stoutly defended him on all occasions.
"The boy is put upon," Mrs. Burns always argued. "A quieter, more
peaceabler boy I never knew, except my own Jack. They're good, helpful
boys, both of 'em, and I don't care what anybody says."
Jack, being slower of thought and limb, worshiped his chum, whose
alertness and resource humbled him, though he was much the better
scholar in all routine work. He read more than Harold, but Harold seized
upon the facts and transmitted them instantly into something vivid and
dramatic. He assumed all leadership in the hunting, and upon Jack fell
all the drudgery. He always did the reading, also, while Harold listened
and dreamed with eyes that seemed to look across miles of peaks. His was
the eagle's heart; wild reaches allured him. Minute beauties of garden
or flower were not for him. The groves along the river had long since
lost their charm because he knew their limits--they no longer appealed
to his imagination.
A hundred times he said: "Come, let's go West and kill buffalo.
To-morrow we will see the snow on Pike's Peak." The wild country was so
near, its pressure day by day molded his mind. He had no care or thought
of cities or the East. He dreamed of the plains and horses and herds of
buffalo and troops of Indians filing down the distant slopes. Every poem
of the range, every word which carried flavor of the wild country, every
picture of a hunter remained in his mind.
The feel of a gun in his hands gave him the keenest delight, and to
stalk geese in a pond or crows in the cornfield enabled him to imagine
the joy of hunting the bear and the buffalo. He had the hunter's
patience, and was capable of creeping on his knees in the mud for hours
in the attempt to kill a duck. He could imitate almost all the birds and
animals he knew. His whistle would call the mother grouse to him. He
could stop the whooping of cranes in their steady flight, and his
honking deceived the wary geese. When complimented for his skill in
hunting he scornfully said:
"Oh, that's nothing. Anyone can kill small game; but buffaloes and
grizzlies--they are the boys."
During the winter of his sixteenth year a brother of Mr. Burns returned
from Kansas, which was then a strange and far-off land, and from him
Harold drew vast streams of talk. The boy was insatiate when the plains
were under discussion. From this veritable cattleman he secured many new
words. With great joy he listened while Mr. Burns spoke of _cinches_,
ropes, corrals, _buttes_, _arroyos_ and other Spanish-Mexican words
which the boys had observed in their dime novels, but which they had
never before heard anyone use in common speech. Mr. Burns alluded to an
_aparejo_ or an _arroyo_ as casually as Jack would say "singletree" or
"furrow," and his stories brought the distant plains country very near.
Harold sought opportunity to say: "Mr. Burns, take me back with you; I
wish you would."
The cattleman looked at him. "Can you ride a horse?"
Jack spoke up: "You bet he can, Uncle. He rode in the races."
Burns smiled as a king might upon a young knight seeking an errant.
"Well, if your folks don't object, when you get done with school, and
Jack's mother says _he_ can come, you make a break for Abilene; we'll
see what I can do with you on the 'long trail.'"
Harold took this offer very seriously, much more so than Mr. Burns
intended he should do, although he was pleased with the boy.
Harold well knew that his father and mother would not consent, and very
naturally said nothing to them about his plan, but thereafter he laid by
every cent of money he could earn, until his thrift became a source of
comment. To Jack he talked for hours of the journey they were to make.
Jack, unimaginative and engrossed with his studies at the seminary, took
the whole matter very calmly. It seemed a long way off at best, and his
studies were pleasant and needed his whole mind. Harold was thrown back
upon the company of his sweetheart, who was the only one else to whom he
could talk freely.
Dot, indolent, smiling creature of cozy corners that she was, listened
without emotion, while Harold, with eyes ablaze, with visions of the
great, splendid plains, said: "I'm going West sure. I'm tired of school;
I'm going to Kansas, and I'm going to be a great cattle king in a few
years, Dot, and then I'll come back and get you, and we'll go live on
the banks of a big river, and we'll have plenty of horses, and go riding
and hunting antelope every day. How will you like that?"
Her unresponsiveness hurt him, and he said: "You don't seem to care
whether I go or not."
She turned and looked at him vacantly, still smiling, and he saw that
she had not heard a single word of his passionate speech. He sprang up,
hot with anger and pain.
"If you don't care to listen to me you needn't," he said, speaking
through his clinched teeth.
She smiled, showing her little white teeth prettily. "Now, don't get
mad, Harry; I was thinking of something else. Please tell me again."
"I won't. I'm done with you." A big lump arose in his throat and he
turned away to hide tears of mortified pride. He could not have put it
into words, but he perceived the painful truth. Dot had considered him a
boy all along, and had only half listened to his stories and plans in
the past, deceiving him for some purpose of her own. She was a smiling,
careless hypocrite.
"You've lied to me," he said, turning and speaking with the bluntness of
a boy without subtlety of speech. "I never'll speak to you again;
good-by."
Dot kept swinging her foot. "Good-by," she said in her sweet,
soft-breathing voice.
He walked away slowly, but his heart was hot with rage and wounded
pride, and every time he thought of the tone in which she said
"Good-by," his flesh quivered. He was seventeen, and considered himself
a man; she was eighteen, and thought him only a boy. She had never
listened to him, that he now understood. Maud had been right. Dot had
only pretended, and now for some reason she ceased to pretend.
There was just one comfort in all this: it made it easier for him to go
to the sunset country, and his wounded heart healed a little at the
thought of riding a horse behind a roaring herd of buffaloes.