PETER approached the shanty-boat cautiously but there was no sign of
danger. Indeed, finding Buddy gone, the five men who had come to the
boat were quite satisfied to get Booge. Four were but little interested
in helping Briggles pick up a small boy, and nobody wanted Peter, but
Booge, being a tramp and having assaulted a bearer of a court order,
was a desirable capture. Booge, when he felt reasonably sure Peter had
reached safety, ended his half-joking parley abruptly, and said he was
willing to accompany his captors in peace. He was satisfied he would not
be given much more than six months in the county jail for the assault,
and six months would carry him through the winter, into good, warm,
summer weather. There was nothing to be gained by a struggle against
five men except more trouble.
Once more in his cabin, Peter put Buddy to bed in the dark, and ate his
much delayed supper. Buddy seemed to take the flight as a matter of no
moment. Flights, he probably thought, were a part of every small boy's
life, and he dropped asleep the moment he was tucked in the bunk. Peter,
however, did not sleep. He had much to think over. When an hour had
elapsed he lighted his lamp, knowing it could not be seen from any
distance, and set to work preparing to leave the boat forever. He had
few portable belongings worth carrying away. What food was left he
made into a parcel. He cut, with his jack-knife, strips from one of his
blankets to wind about his legs, and sliced off other pieces in which to
tie his feet, for his shoes were thin and worn through in places. He cut
a hole in the center of what was left of the blanket, making a serape
of it for Buddy. Later he cut a similar hole in the other blanket
for himself. All Buddy's toys he stored away under the bunk, with
his shotgun. Then he baked a corn cake and stowed pieces of it in his
pockets. He was ready for his flight. His sister Jane should afford a
refuge for him and the boy.
Long before sunrise he awakened Buddy and fed him, ate his own
breakfast, tied his feet in the pieces of blanket and left the
shanty-boat. They were two strange looking objects as Peter worked his
way down the slough, taking care to avoid the snow patches and keeping
to that part of the ice blown clear by the wind. Peter had dressed Buddy
and himself for comfort and not for show. The blue serape enveloped
Buddy and hung below his feet as Peter carried him, and both Peter and
Buddy had strips of blanket tied over their heads to protect their ears.
Peter, in his own gray blanket, tied about the waist with seine twine,
looked like an untidy friar, his feet huge gray paws.
A quarter of a mile below the shanty-boat Peter turned and crossed the
island, and, issuing on the other side, the whole broad river lay before
him. It was still dark as he began his long tramp across the river,
and on the vast field of ice it was frigidly cold. There the wind had a
clearer sweep than in the protected slough, and one could understand why
Peter had risked the return to the boat for additional garments after
having once fled from it. The wind carried the snow in low white clouds,
lifting it from one drift to deposit it in another, piling it high
against every obstruction on the ice. Without their blanket serapes it
would have been impossible for Peter, hardened as he was, to withstand
the cold of the long journey he had planned.
For a quarter of a mile, after leaving the island, Peter had to struggle
over the rough hummocks that had been drift ice until the river closed,
but beyond that the going was smoother. In places the ice was so glassy
that he could not walk, but had to slide his feet along without lifting
them. The wind cut his face like a knife and the blowing snow gathered
on his eye lashes, and Buddy grew heavier and heavier in his arms. He
could have carried him all day pickaback, but he did not dare risk that
mode lest he slip and fall backward on the little fellow. His arms and
back ached with the strain, but still he kept on, making straight across
the river, and not until he had passed the middle did he set Buddy down.
Then, believing he was beyond the jurisdiction of an Iowa court order,
he rested, sitting flat on the ice with Buddy in his lap.
“I can walk, Uncle Peter,” said Buddy.
“Uncle Peter will carry you awhile yet, Buddy,” said Peter. “By and by,
when he gets tired again he'll let you walk. Uncle Peter is in a hurry
now.”
He lifted the boy again and plodded on, and when he reached the roughly
wooded Illinois shore he pushed in among the grapevine festooned trees
until he was well hidden from the river. There he made a fire and rested
until he and Buddy were warmed through. Then out upon the river again
and, keeping close to the bank, up stream. Here he was sheltered from
the cutting wind, and the walking was surer, for the sand had blown upon
the ice in many places, but his progress was slow for all that. About
noon he halted again and made a fire and ate, and then went on. Toward
four o'clock, coming abreast of a tall, lightning scarred sycamore,
Peter plunged into the brush until he came to a clearing on the edge of
a small slough. Here stood an old log cattle shed, and here, with a
fire burning on the dirt floor, they spent the night, Buddy huddled in
Peter's arms, with his back to the fire.
They had covered half the distance to Riverbank.
“Where are we going now, Uncle Peter?” asked Buddy the next morning.
“I guess we won't go nowhere to-day,” said Peter. “We ain't likely to be
bothered here, this time of the year, so we'll just make a good fire and
stay right here and be comfortable, and to-night we 're going to start
over across to your Aunt Jane's house.”
“Is Aunt Jane's house like this house?” asked Buddy.
“Well, it's quite considerable better,” said Peter. “You'll see what
it's like when you get to it. If everything turns out the way I hope it
will, you and me will live at Aunt Jane's quite some time.”
Not until well toward nine o'clock did Peter awaken Buddy that night. He
was haunted by the fear that, once he touched Iowa soil, every eye would
be watching for him and every hand eager to tear Buddy from him. If,
however, he could get Buddy safely into Jane's care Peter believed he
could make a fight against Briggles or any other man, for Jane's house
was a home--there was a woman in it--Peter meant to time his trip to
reach Jane's in the early morning.
The moon was full and bright, glaring bright on the river, as Peter
started, and the cold was benumbing.
The long, diagonal course across the river brought Peter and Buddy to
the Iowa shore some three miles below Riverbank, just before sunrise. On
shore new difficulties met him. A road ran along the shore, but Peter's
destination lay straight back in the hills, and two miles of sandy farm
land, in frozen furrows, crossed by many barbed wire fences, lay between
Peter and the foot of the hills. The sun came up while he was still
struggling across the plowed land, and by the time he reached the road
that led up the hillside it was glaring day. Twice early farmers, bound
to town, passed him as he trudged along the winding road, staring at him
curiously, and Peter dropped to the creek bed that followed the road.
Here he could hide if he heard an approaching team. Just below his
sister's house the road crossed the creek and here Peter climbed the
bank. A wind had risen with the sun and Peter's blanket flapped against
his legs. At his sister's gate he paused behind a mass of leafless
elderberry bushes, and deposited Buddy on the low bank that edged the
road.
“Now, you stay right here, Buddy,” said Peter to the boy, “and just sort
of look at the landscape over there whilst I run up and tell your Aunt
Jane you're coming. She don't like to be surprised.”
“But I don't want to look at the landscape, Uncle Peter,” Buddy
complained. “I want to go with you.”
“It ain't much of a landscape, and that's a fact,” said Peter, glancing
at the bare clay bank across the creek, “and if it wasn't very important
that I should speak to your Aunt Jane first I wouldn't ask you to wait
here. I know just how a boy feels about waiting. My goodness! Did I see
a squirrel over there? A little gray squirrel with a big bushy tail?”
“No,” said Buddy.
“Well, you just keep a sharp eye on that clay bank, and maybe you will.
Maybe you'll see a little jumpy rabbit.”
“I don't want to see a rabbit. I want to go with you,” said Buddy.
Peter looked at the house. It was hardly more than a weather-beaten
shanty. Its fence, once an army of white pickets, was now but a
tumble-down affair of rotting posts and stringers with a loose picket
here and there, and the door yard was cluttered with tin cans and wood
ashes. The woodshed, as free from paint as the house, was well filled
with stove wood, for Peter had filled it in the early fall. Beyond the
woodshed the garden--Peter worked it for his sister each spring--was
indicated by the rows of cabbage stalks with their few frozen leaves
still clinging to them. The whole place was run down and slip-shod, but
it was a house, and it held a woman.
“Goodness me!” said Peter. “Of course you don't want to look for
rabbits! I've got that jack-knife I bought for you right here in my
pocket, and _now_ I guess you'll want to wait here for Uncle Peter!
You will if Uncle Peter opens the big blade and gets you a stick to
whittle.”
“I want to whittle,” said Buddy promptly. “I want to whittle a funny
cat.”
Peter looked about for a stick.
“There!” he said. “There's a stick, but if I was you I'd make a funny
snake out of it. That stick don't look like it would make a cat. You
make a snake, and if it don't turn out to be a snake, maybe it'll be a
sword. Now, you stay right here, and Uncle Peter won't be gone very
long. I'm going to put you right back in among these bushes, and don't
you move.”
[Illus: 232]
“I won't,” said Buddy.
When Peter left the shanty-boat he had felt that he could walk up to
Jane with the front of a lion and demand shelter for himself and for
Buddy all the advantages of a home. From that distance it had seemed
quite reasonable, for he owned the house and the small plot of ground on
which it stood. Ownership ought to give some rights, and he had planned
just what he would say. He would tell Jane he had come. Then he would
tell her he had reformed, and how he had reformed, and that he was a
changed man and was going to work hard and make things comfortable for
her, and give up shanty-boating and the river and all the things he had
loved. He would say he now saw all these were bad for his character.
Then, when she got used to that, he would incidentally mention Buddy,
and tell her what a nice little fellow he was, and what a steadying
effect the boy would have on his shiftless life. Then he would get
Buddy, and his sister would see what a fine boy Buddy was, and wrap
her arms around him, and weep. Peter was sure she would weep. And there
would be a home for Buddy with a woman in it!
But if Jane objected--as she might--Peter meant to set his foot down
hard. It was his house and he could do what he wished with it. That he
had allowed Jane to possess it in single peace was well enough, but it
was his house. That would bring her to time--it----
The nearer he had approached the house, however, the more doubtful
he had become that Jane would welcome him and that she would, after a
little talk, order him to bring Buddy in. The closer he came to Jane the
better he recalled the many times he had fled precipitately after doing
her chores, and his many moist and mournful receptions.
Now he walked to the kitchen door and knocked, and Jane's voice bade him
enter. He took off his hat as he entered. His sister was sitting at the
kitchen table where, despite the lateness of the hour, she had evidently
just finished her breakfast. As she turned her head all Peter's optimism
fled, for Jane's eyes were red with weeping. When her sorrows pressed
heavily upon Jane she was a very fountain of tears. She threw up her
hands as she saw Peter.
“Oh, mercy me, Peter Lane!” she cried in a heart-broken voice. “Look
what you've come to at your time of life. Nothing to wear but old rags
and horse blankets on back and foot! It does seem as if nothing ever
went right for you since the day you were born. Just poverty and
bad-health and trouble, and one thing after another.” She wiped her
eyes to make room in them for fresh tears. “Every time I think of you,
freezing to death in that shanty-boat, and going hungry and cold, I--it
makes me so miserable--it makes me feel so bad--”
“Now, Jane,” said Peter uncomfortably, “don't cry! Don't do it! It ain't
so bad as all that. Every time I come to see you, you just cry and carry
on, and I tell you I don't need it done for me. I'm all right. I get
along somehow.”
“Never, never once, have I said an unkind word to you, Peter,” said
Jane damply. “You shouldn't upbraid me with it, for I know it ain't your
fault you turned out this way. I know you ain't got the health to go to
work and earn a living, if you wanted to. I do what I can to keep your
house from falling down on my head. When I think what would become of
this house if you didn't have me to do what I can to mend it up--the
roof's leakin' worse than ever.”
“As soon as spring comes, I'm going to get some shingles and shingle up
the leaky places,” said Peter. “Maybe I'll put a whole new roof on. Now,
just listen to what I want to say, please, Jane.”
“It's that makes me feel so awful bad, Peter,” said Jane, shaking her
head. “You mean so well, and you promise so much, and you see things so
big, and yet you ain't got money to buy shoes nor clothes nor anything,
and for all I know you might be lying sick without a bite to eat, and me
having all I can do to hold body and soul together in a house like this.
Time and again I've made up my mind to go and leave it, and I would
if it wasn't for you. I feel my duty by you, and I stay, but work in a
house like this wears me to the bone. It does. To the bone!”
It may have worn some one to the bone but not Jane. She was one of those
huge, flabby women who are naturally lazy; who sit thinking of the work
they have to do but do not do it; and who linger long over their meals
and weep into them. To Peter her tears were worse than Mrs. Potter's
sharp tongue, for Mrs. Potter's reproaches were single of motive, while
Jane's tears were too apt to be a mask for reproaches more cutting than
Mrs. Potter's out and out hard words. Jane did not weep continually; she
had the knack of weeping when tears would serve her purpose.
From time to time, as the spirit moved her, Jane went to town and did
plain sewing. She had had a husband (but had one no more) and he had
left her a little money which she had kept in the bank, drawing four
per cent, regularly. It did not amount to much, only a couple of hundred
dollars a year, but this she used most sparingly, leaving the greater
part of the interest to accumulate. Perhaps she was sincere in her
mourning for Peter, but she certainly did not want him in the house. As
a provider Peter had never been a success--he was too liberal--and in
his periods of financial stringency he had been known to ask Jane
for money. Not that he ever got it, but it was a thing to be guarded
against. Jane guarded against it with tears. In fifteen minutes of
tearful reproaches she could make Peter feel that he was the most
worthless and cruel of men. She had so often reduced him to that state
that he had come to fall into it naturally whenever he saw Jane, and he
was usually only too glad to escape from her presence again and go
back to the river life. Tears proclaim injustice, and a man like Peter,
seeing them, falls easily into the belief that he must be in the wrong,
and very badly in the wrong. In flying from Jane he fled from the
self-incrimination she planted in him. Now he sighed and took a seat on
one of the kitchen chairs.
“Jane,” he said, “this house is my house, aint it?”
“You know it is, Peter,” she said reproachfully. “No need to remind me
of that, nor that I ain't any better than a pauper. If I was, it would
be far from me to stay here trying to hold the old boards together for
you. Many and many a time I wish you had health to live in this house,
so I could go somewhere and live like a human being, and let you take
care of this cow-pen--for it ain't no better than that--yourself. It
would be a blessed thing for me, Peter, if you ever got your health. I
could go then.”
Peter moved uneasily, and frowned at the fresh tears.
“I wisht you wouldn't cry, Jane,” he said. “I want to talk sort of
business to you this morning.” He paused, appalled by the effect his
revelation would be apt to have on Jane. It must be made, however, and
he plunged into it. “I've got a boy. I've got a little feller about
three years old that come to me one night when his ma died, and he ain't
got anybody in the world but me, Jane, to take care of him. I've had him
some months, down at my boat, and he's the cutest, nicest little tyke
you ever set eyes on. Why, he's--he's no more trouble 'round a place
than a little kitten or a pup or something like that. You'd be just
tickled to death with him. My first notion,” he said more slowly, “my
first idee was to have him and me come here, so you could be a sort of
ma to him, and I could be a sort of pa, so we'd make a sort of family,
like. What he's got to have is a good home, first of all, and a
shanty-boat ain't that. I see that. But I can see how easy-going I am,
and how I might be an expense to you, for awhile anyway, so I thought,
maybe, if you would take the boy in--now wait a minute, Jane! Wait a
minute! You're bound to hear me out.”
His sister had forgotten her sorrows in open-mouthed amazement as Peter
talked, but as the startling proposal became clear she dabbled at her
eyes, and sniffled. Peter knew what was coming--a new torrent of tears,
an avalanche of sorrow.
“For Heaven's sake shut up for a minute 'til I get through!” he cried in
exasperation. “You ain't done nothing but weep over me since I was knee
high. Give me a rest for one time. I don't need weeping over. I'm all
right. Ain't I just said I'll go away again?”
“You never understand me,” wept Jane.
“Yes, I do, too!” said Peter angrily. “I understand you good. All you
want is to weep me out of house and home, and I know it. I'm a sort of
old bum, and I know that, too, but I've been fair to you right along,
and all I get for it is to be wept over, and I'm sick of it. You ain't a
sister, you 're a--a fountain. You 're an everlasting fountain. You let
me come up and saw your wood, and you weep; and you let me make your
garden, and you weep, and if you do give me a meal while I'm working for
you it's so wept into that my mouth tastes of salt for a week. I've put
up with it just as long as I'm going to.”
“I'll go,” said Jane, sniveling. “I'll go. I never thought to get such
unkind words from my brother!”
“Brother nothing!” said Peter, thoroughly exasperated. “What did you
ever give me but shoves, wrapped up in sorrow and grief? What did you
ever do but jump on me, and tear me to pieces, and pull me apart to show
me how worthless I was, whilst you let on you was mourning over me? I
guess I've had it done to me long enough to see through it, Jane, so you
may as well shut off the bawling. You ain't no sister--you 're a miser!”
“Peter Lane!”
“That's what you are, a miser!” said Peter, rising from his chair. “You
're a weeping miser, and you might as well know it. That's why you don't
want me 'round, you 're afraid I might cost you a nickel sometime. For
two cents I'd _put_ you out of the house. You'd bawl some if you had to
pay rent.”
Peter should have felt a sense of shame, but he did not. In some
inexplicable way a huge weight seemed lifted from his chest. He
felt big, and strong, and efficient. It was a wonderful thing he had
discovered. He, who had for so many years, cringed before his sister's
cruelty was making her wince. He, Peter Lane, was not feeling worthless
and mean. He was talking out as other men do. He was having a rage, and
yet he was so self-controlled that he knew he could stop at any moment.
He was not the tool of his anger, the anger was his instrument. His pale
eyes blazed, but he ended with a scornful laugh.
Jane did not flare up. She dropped her head on her table and cried
again, but with real self-pity this time.
“Now, it ain't worth while to cry,” said Peter coldly. “I've said
all I've got to say on that subject. All I've got now is a business
proposition, and you can take it or not. If you want to take Buddy in
and feed him and sleep him and treat him white, the way he deserves,
I'll pay you for it just as soon as I earn some money, and I'm going
to get work right away. If you won't do that you can take the house and
have it, and I'm through with you.”
He stood with his hat in his hand, waiting. It seemed to him that Jane
was waiting too long, that she was calculating the chances of getting
her pay if she took the boy, and Peter knew his past record did not
suggest any very strong probability of that.
“You'll get your money,” he said. “I'm going to look for a job as
soon as I go out from here. Don't you be afraid of that. You won't lose
anything.”