to get her own consent. At length he got up and went to the mantel-piece
and took down Barbara's slate.
"Let's talk about algebra awhile," he said.
Barbara was fond enough of algebra, but it seemed droll that Mason, with
an unsettled proposition of marriage on hand, should revert to his
favorite study. She could not see what he was writing, but when he
passed the slate to her, she read:
_a_ = another lover.
_b_ = objections to H. Mason.
_c_ = interfering circumstances.
_x_ = _a_ + _b_ + _c_.
"Now," said Mason, when she looked up, "I'd like you to help me to get
the exact value of _x_ in this little equation. It's a kind of
fortune-telling by algebra. We must proceed by elimination; you may
strike out such of the letters on the right side of the last equation as
do not count for anything."
But instead of proceeding as the master suggested, Barbara, whose
reserve was partly dissipated by her amusement, took the pencil that he
offered her, and after a moment's reflection wrote below:
_a_ = 0
_b_ = 0
_x_ = _c_
"I never saw an equation more to my taste," said Hiram. "If it's only
circumstances, then circumstances and I are going to fight it out. You
think there are things that will keep us from making an equation between
Barbara and Hiram?"
"There wouldn't be any equation," she said, looking out of half-closed
eye-lids, as she always did when speaking with feeling. "Your family is
an educated one, and your father and mother wouldn't approve of us.
Mother never had any chance to learn, and her talk is very
old-fashioned, but she's just as good as good can be, all the same.
Tom's unsteady; I hope he'll get over that yet; but your father and
mother and your sisters wouldn't like it."
"Yes, they would, if they knew you," said Mason, with enthusiasm; "and,
besides, I don't see that I'm bound to get their consent."
"But that wouldn't change matters," persisted Barbara, despondingly. "If
they didn't like it, it wouldn't be nice."
"Don't you bother about my happiness, Barbara. If I have you, do you
think anything else will trouble me?" He got up and snuffed the candle
with his fingers like the brave man that he was.
"I'm not bothering about you at all," said Barbara. "I'm not so good as
you think I am. I let you take care of yourself in this matter; you're
strong, and such things won't worry you." She was picking at her dress
as she spoke. "Ever since you said what you did when you helped me over
the fence last,"--Barbara took a long breath as she thought of that
scene; she had often retraced all its details in her memory,--"I've
known that you felt so toward me that you would face any thing. But
_I_--I couldn't bear it if your folks should look down on me and I
be--your wife." It was hard to say the last words; they sounded
strangely, and when they were uttered, the sound of them put her into a
trepidation not altogether disagreeable.
"Look down on _you_?" said Hiram, with a vehemence Barbara had never
known him to manifest before. "Do you think my folks are such idiots?
They don't meet a person like you often enough to get the habit of
looking down on such."
"But you don't know women folks," said Barbara.
"I know my family better than you do, and you've got mighty curious
notions about them and about yourself. You've always lived here in the
woods, and you don't know what you're worth."
He lifted the empty apple-basket out of the way and sat down by her.
"Now, Barbara, you say you know how I feel toward you. You are the girl
of all girls in the world for me. And now you won't spurn me, will you?"
he said entreatingly.
Barbara's lips quivered and she seemed about to lose control of herself.
However, after a little period of silence and struggle, she suppressed
her feelings sufficiently to speak:
"I couldn't _spurn_ you," she said. Then, after another pause: "Maybe
you don't care any more for me than I do for you. But I'm in such
trouble--that I can't tell what to say. Won't you wait and give me a
little time? Things may be better after a while."
"How long shall I stay away? A week?" Mason's voice had a note of
protest in it.
"Don't be hurt," she said, lifting her eyes timidly to his. "But I'm in
such a hard place. Let me have two weeks or so to think about it, and
see how things are going to turn." It was not that Barbara saw any
chance for a change of circumstances, but that she could not resolve to
decide the question either way, and wished to escape from her present
perplexity by postponement.
"Just as you say," said Mason, regretfully; "but I tell you, Barbara,
it's two weeks of dead lost time."
Then he got up and held out his hand to her.
"Good-bye, Barbara."
"Good-bye, Mr. Mason."
"Oh, call me Hiram! It's more friendly, and you call all the other young
men by their first names."
"But you're the master."
"I'm not the master of you, that's clear. Besides, you've left school."
He was holding her hand in gentle protest all this time.
"Well, good-bye--Hiram!" said Barbara, with a visible effort which ended
in a little laugh.
Mason let go of her hand and turned abruptly and walked out of the door,
and then swiftly down the meadow path. Barbara stood and looked after
him as long as she could see his form; then she slowly shut and latched
the kitchen door and came and covered with ashes the remaining embers of
the fire, and took the candle from the mantel-piece and went through the
now vacant sitting-room to her chamber above.
X
THE AFFAIR AT TIMBER CREEK CAMP MEETING
When Tom Grayson found himself suddenly stranded on the farmstead in
Hubbard Township he went to work to learn again the arts half forgotten
during his three-years' absence in Moscow. It was necessary to put his
soft hands to the plow, and to burn his fair face in the hot sun of the
hay-field. With characteristic heedlessness of results he set out, on
the very first day after his return, to mow alongside the stalwart hired
man, Bob McCord, the father of Mely. Bob lived in a little cabin not far
from the Grayson place, and since Tom left the farm he had done most of
the work for Mrs. Grayson. He was commonly known as "Big Bob," because
he had a half-brother of sinister birth who was older than himself, but
a small man, and who for distinction was "Little Bob." Big Bob fulfilled
his name in every dimension. His chest was deep, his arms were gigantic
in their muscularity, and no man had ever seen his legs show signs of
exhaustion. His immense muscles were softened in outline by a certain
moderate rotundity; his well-distributed adipose was only one of many
indications of his extraordinary physical thriftiness. In more than one
stand-up fight he had demonstrated his right to the title of champion of
the county. Yet he was a boyishly good-natured man, with no desire to
hurt anybody, and he never fought from choice. But every rising
fisticuffer within half a hundred miles round had heard of Bob's
strength, and the more ambitious of these had felt bound to "dare" him.
It was not consonant with the honor of such a man as Bob to "take a
dare"; so against first one and then another aspiring hero he had
fought, until at length there was none that ventured any more to "give a
dare" to the victor of so many battles. His physical perfections were
not limited to mere bull strength: no man had a keener eye or a steadier
hand; none could send a rifle-ball to its mark with a more unerring aim.
Had he lived in the days of the Saxon invasion of England, McCord would
have stood high on the list of those renowned for exploits of strength
and daring, the very darling hero of the minstrel. Our own Indian wars
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought renown to just such
men as he, semi-barbarian path-makers for the advance of civilization.
He had lagged a generation late. In the peaceful time, when strength of
muscle was secondary to mental power, and when a sure aim was no longer
important for the defense of one's life, nor the chief means for winning
one's meat, the powerful Bob McCord saw degenerate men, whom he could
have held at arms-length, prevail over him in the struggle for
subsistence. For though he was capable of hard work he could never
endure steady application; his nature was under mortgage to adventurous
ancestors, the ancient Indian-fighters and scouts of the Appalachian
country, and those more remote forefathers, the untamed emigrants who
had been almost expelled from the Scottish border in the time of the
Stuarts, to help resettle the devastated north of Ireland, to say
nothing of the yet wilder Irish women with whom they had mated. Nothing
less than the sound of the cup scraping on the bottom of the family
meal-box would impel Bob to work. Every wind that came from the great
sea of grass to the westward brought him the whir of the wings of
prairie-hens; dreams of bear-hunting filled his mind whenever he looked
into the recesses of the woods. At sight of the rising moon his hunter's
soul imagined the innumerable deer which at that hour come from their
coverts to graze on the prairies. Every stream tantalized him with the
thought of darting perch, and great prowling cat-fish hidden beneath its
surface, and challenging him to catch them if he could. If, as we are
taught to believe, the manliness of the English aristocracy and that of
the American apery is only kept alive by outdoor sports, how much their
superior in surplus manhood must such a man as Bob McCord be! In his
estimation no days were counted a part of human life except those passed
in circumventing and taking the wild creatures of the woods or the
prairie, and those others spent in the rude fun of musters, barbecues,
elections, corn-shuckings, wood-choppings, and like assemblages, where
draughts from a generous big-bellied bottle, with a twisted neck,
alternated with athletic feats, practical jokes, and tales as rude as
the most unblushing of those told by pious pilgrims to Canterbury in the
old religious time.
It was alongside this son of Anak that Tom set himself to do a full
day's work at the start. The severity of labor accorded well with his
pungent feeling of penitence. Big Bob regarded him as he might any other
infant, not unkindly; he even had a notion that the Widow Grayson and
her children were in some sense under his care, and he did not wish any
harm to come to the boy, but a practical joke was too good a thing to be
missed. For two hours and a half, on that morning of Tom's appearance in
the field with a scythe, Bob did not once stop to take the usual rests.
Tom felt inevitable exhaustion coming on, though he cut a much narrower
swath than his companion. McCord's herculean right knee was bare, having
that morning forced itself through his much-bepatched trousers of
butternut-dyed cotton cloth. While swinging his wider-sweeping scythe at
a desperate rate, he kept telling Tom stories of adventure and the
well-worn joe-millers of the log-cabin firesides, never seeming to
notice the poor fellow's breathless endeavors to keep up or his
ever-narrowing swath. Only when at length he turned and looked at Tom's
face and perceived that the persistency of his will might carry him too
far, he said, as with his scythe he picked some bunches of good grass
from the edge of an elder patch and cast a wistful glance at the jug
standing in a cool fence corner:
"Looky h-yer, Tom, you're a-gittin' kind-uh white-like about the gills,
un 'f you try to keep up weth me, yer hide 'll be on the fence afore
night."
"I know that," said Tom, who found himself so thoroughly beaten that
there was no use in denying it.
"Well, hang yer scythe on that air red-haw over there un take a leetle
rest, un then try a pitch-fork awhile. I 'lowed I'd see what sort uv
stuff you've got, seein's you wuz so almighty gritty. A bigger man'n you
couldn't hold agin me"; and Bob let the amusement he felt at Tom's
discomfiture escape in a long hearty chuckle, rising at length into a
loud laugh, as he reversed his scythe and fell to whetting it, making
the neighboring woods ring with the tune he beat on the resonant
metal,--a kind of accompaniment to the briskness of his spirit.
And now Barbara appeared bringing the snack that was commonly served to
the mowers in the forenoon. Bob hung up his scythe, and, having taken
some whisky, joined the exhausted Tom under the shady boughs of a black
walnut. Barbara uncovered her basket, which contained an apple-pie to be
divided between the two and a bottle of sweet milk. Tom had stretched
himself in sheer exhaustion on a swath of hay.
"You foolish boy," said Barbara. "You've gone at your work too brash.
You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Here, take some of this pie; and
don't you work so hard the rest of the day."
"Tom," said Bob, speaking with his mouth full of pie, "'f I had the
eddication you've got, you wouldn't ketch me in this yere hot sun. I'd
take a school. What's eddication good fer, anyhow, ef 't ain't to git a
feller out uh the hot sun?"
But for the present Tom resolved to stick faithfully to his toil. As the
days wore on, and he became accustomed to the strain, he found the work
a sedative; he was usually too tired to think much of his
disappointment. Only the face of Rachel Albaugh haunted his visions in
lonely hours, and at times a rush of indignant feeling towards George
Lockwood disturbed his quiet.
In the early days of August there came a time of comparative leisure.
The summer harvests were over, and the fields of tall corn had been
"laid by" after the last plowing. Then Illinois had a breathing spell;
and shutting up its house, and hitching up its horse, and taking all the
children, it went to visit its "relations," staying a week at a place.
Farmers frequented the town to meet old friends and get the better of
them in swapping horses; and in this time of relaxation came the season
of Baptist Associations and Methodist Camp-meetings and two-days' Basket
Meetings--jolly religious picnics, where you could attend to your soul's
salvation and eat "roas'in' ears" with old friends in the thronged
recesses of the forests, among a people who were perhaps as gregarious
as any the world has ever produced. Children looked forward to this
gypsying with eagerness, and adults gave themselves over to it with the
abandon of children. What night-scenes there were! Within the oval of
tents at a camp-meeting two great platforms were raised on posts six or
eight feet high and covered with earth; on these were built blazing
bonfires, illuminating all the space inclosed by the tents and occupied
by the enthusiastic assembly, which, as one great chorus, made the wide
forest vocal with a tide of joyous or pathetic song. But there were two
poles to the magnetism of a camp-meeting. In the region of outer
blackness, quite beyond the reach of any illumination from platform
bonfires or pulpit eloquence, there were also assemblies of those who
were attracted by the excitement, but to whom the religious influences
were a centrifugal force. Here jollity and all conceivable deviltry
rejoiced also in a meet companionship.
The Great Union Camp-Meeting was held in the first half of August on the
Timber Creek camp-ground, only a mile and a half from the Grayson place.
The mother and Barbara went every evening and came back with accounts of
the attendance, of the old friends encountered, and of the sermons of
favorite preachers. They told how "powerfully" the elder had preached,
and how the eloquent young preacher, who was junior on the next circuit,
had carried all before him in a pathetic exhortation. But Tom showed no
desire to attend. He was slowly sinking into a depression quite unusual
with him. He had been accustomed to the excitement of the town, and the
prospect of a life of dull routine on a farm ate into his spirit like a
biting rust. Barbara amused him with stories of the camp-meeting; she
told him of the eccentric German exhorter whose broken English she
mimicked, and of the woman she had heard relate in a morning
"speaking-meeting" that, when convinced of the sin of wearing jewelry,
she had immediately taken off her ear-rings and given them to her
sister. These things lightened his spirit but for a moment; he would
relapse soon into the same state of mental lassitude, or more acute
melancholy. Barbara endeavored to cheer him with projects; he could take
a school the next winter, and with the money earned pay his board
somewhere in town and take up the study of law again. But all of
Barbara's projects were moderate and took full account of difficulties.
Tom had little heart for a process that demanded plodding and patient
waiting; nor did any of Barbara's suggestions hold out any prospect of
his recovering his ground with Rachel, which was the thing he most
desired.
One evening, as he finished a supper which he had eaten with little
relish and in silence, he pushed back his chair and sat moodily looking
into the black cave of the kitchen fire-place, where the embers were
smoldering under the ashes. Then when his mother had left the kitchen,
and Barbara was clearing away the plates, he said:
"The more I think of it, the worse I feel about George Lockwood. The
tricky villain got me into that scrape and then told all about it where
he knew it would do me the most harm. I'd just like to shoot him."
"You'd better shoot him and get yourself hanged!" said Barbara with
impatience. "_That_ would mend matters, wouldn't it?"
"'T wouldn't matter much to me," said Tom. "This country life doesn't
suit me; I'd just as well be out of it, and they do say hanging is an
easy way of dying." This last was spoken with a grim smile.
"I suppose you don't think of _us_," said Barbara.
"I'm more trouble than good to you and mother."
"And now if you would only commit a crime"--Barbara was looking at him
with a concentrated gaze--"that would put an end to all mother's
sorrows; she would soon die in torture, and I would be left alone in the
world to be pointed at by people who would say in a whisper: 'That's the
sister of the fellow that was hanged.'" And Barbara caught her breath
with a little gasp as she turned away.
"Oh, don't talk that way, Barb! Of course I don't mean to do anything of
the sort. It's a kind of relief to talk sometimes, and I do feel bitter
enough."
Barbara turned sharply on him again and said: "That's just the way to
get to be a murderer--keep stirring up your spite. After a while the
time'll come when you can't control yourself, may be, and then you'll do
something that you only meant to think about."
Tom shuddered a little and, feeling uncomfortable under Barbara's gaze,
got up and started away. But Barbara followed him and caught hold of his
arm, and pulled him around till she could look in his face, and said,
with more feeling than she liked to show:
"Look here, Tom! Give me your word and honor that you'll put all such
thoughts out of your mind."
"Of course I will, Sis, if you think there's any danger."
"And come and go over to the camp-meeting to-night with mother and me.
It'll do you good to see somebody besides the cows."
"All right," said Tom, shaking himself to get rid of his evil spirit,
and remembering, as he went out to harness old Blaze-face to the wagon,
that he would stand a chance of catching a glimpse of Rachel in the
light of the torches.
The preaching was vigorous and stirring, and the exhorter, who came
after the preacher, told many pathetic stories, which deeply moved a
people always eager to be excited. The weird scene no doubt contributed
by its spectacular effect to increase the emotion. The bonfires on the
platforms illuminated the circle of white tents, which stood out against
the wall of deep blackness in the forest behind; the light mounted a
hundred feet and more through the thick branches of lofty beech and
maple trees, and was reflected from the under side of leaves quivering
in the breeze. The boughs and foliage, illuminated from below, had an
unreal and unworldly aspect. No imagery of the preacher could make the
threatened outer darkness of the lost so weird to the imagination as
this scene, in which the company of simple-minded people found
themselves in the presence of a savage Nature, and in a sphere of light
bounded on every hand by a blackness as of darkness primeval.
Tom paid little attention to the eloquence of the preacher or to the
tearful words of him who came after. At first he was interested and even
excited by the scene; he watched the flickering of the great shadows of
the tree trunks as the platform fires rose and fell; but presently he
set himself to searching under the large straw bonnets for a face. He
knew well that the sight of that face could not make him happy, but he
seemed driven by some evil impulse to seek for it. If Rachel was there
he did not find her. When the exhorter had closed his artless string of
disconnected anecdotes with an equally artless appeal, and a hymn was
announced, Tom whispered to Barbara that he would go and see if the
horse was all right, and would meet her at the door of the Mount Zion
tent when meeting should "let out." Then as the congregation rose, he
went out by a passage between two of the tents into the woods. The
"exercises" lasted a full hour longer, and it was half-past ten before
the presiding elder gave the benediction. Barbara and her mother went to
the door of the Mount Zion tent, where they stood watching the moving
people and waiting for Tom. Mely McCord, who was to ride home with them,
was talking in her fluent way to Barbara when an excited man rushed into
the space within the tents, and, finding himself obstructed by the
groups of people in the aisles, ran hurriedly across the boards that
served for backless benches until he reached the great rude pulpit. He
addressed a word to the white-haired presiding elder, who was at that
moment standing on the steps of the stand, engaged in shaking hands with
old friends from all parts of his district. Then the new-comer seized
the tin horn that hung against a tree, and which was used to call the
people to meeting. With this in his hand he mounted the rude board
rostrum and blew a long, harsh blast. Part of the people out of
curiosity had stopped talking when he made his appearance, and when the
strident tin horn ceased, there was a momentary murmur and then the
stillness of death, except for confused cries of excitement in the
remote outer regions, which now became audible. Then the man on the
platform said, in a breathless voice:
"A man has been killed in the woods outside of the camp-ground. The
murderer has fled. The sheriff is wanted!"
"Here he is!" cried some voices, and the sheriff stood up on a bench and
waved his hand to the messenger, who came down and communicated in a few
words what he knew of the murder. The sheriff then hurriedly departed.
"Sit down there, mother," gasped Barbara. "Mely, you stay by mother."
Then Barbara's slight form pushed through the crowd, until her progress
was arrested by a dense knot of eager inquirers that encompassed the man
who had brought the news. It was quite impossible to get within twenty
feet of him, or to hear anything he was saying; but bits of intelligence
percolated through the layers of humanity that enveloped him. Barbara
could only wait and listen. At last a man a little nearer the radiating
center said in reply to the query of one who stood next to her:
"It's George Lockwood, that clerks for Wooden & Snyder down 't Moscow,
that is killed, but I can't find out who 't wuz done it."
Barbara's heart stood still within her for a moment. Then dreading to
hear more, she pushed out of the ever-increasing crowd and reached her
mother.
"Come, mother; we must get home quick."
"What's the matter, Barb'ry? Who's killed?" asked Mely McCord.
"I don't know anything, only we _must_ get home. Quick, mother!" she was
impelled by instinct to save her mother as long as possible from the
shock she felt impending. But it was of no use.
"What's the matter, Sam; can you make out?" cried a man near her to one
just emerging from the crowd about the messenger.
"W'y, they say as Tom Grayson's shot an' killed a feller from Moscow,
an' Tom's made off, an' can't be found. They's talk of lynchin' him."