THE QUEEN OF SHEBA
The barn was a roomy place, as well built as the Ball house itself,
and quite as old. The wagon floor had a wide door, front and rear.
The stables were on either side of this floor and the mows were
above. In one mow was a small quantity of hay and some corn fodder,
but the upper reaches were filled only with a brown dusk.
The pale face of a gray mare was visible at the opening over one of
the mangers. She was the sole recognized occupant of the stable. In
a dark corner Tunis Latham saw a huge grain box, for once the Ball
farm had supported several span of oxen and a considerable dairy
herd, its cover raised and its maw gaping wide. There was something
moving there in the murk, something fluttering.
"Come here, boy!" gasped Cap'n Ira, hurrying across the barn door.
"I'm so crippled I can't git her up, and she's dove clean to the
lower hold, tryin' to scrape out a capful o' oats for that dratted
Queen of Sheby."
"Aunt Prue!" shouted Tunis, reverting to the title he had addressed
her by in his boyhood. "It's never her?"
A muffled voice stammered:
"Get me out! Get me out!"
"Heave hard, Tunis! All together now!" gasped Cap'n Ira, as the
younger man reached over the old woman's struggling heels and seized
her around the waist.
"Up she comes!" continued the excited old man, as though he were
bossing a capstan crew starting one of the _Susan Gatskill's_
anchors.
Tunis Latham set Prudence Ball on her feet, but the old woman was
forced to lean against the stalwart young man for a minute. She
addressed her husband in some heat.
"Goodness gracious gallop! Why don't you sing a chantey over me, I
want to know? You'd think I was a bale of jute being snaked out of a
ship's hold. Good land!"
"There, there, Prudence!" exclaimed Cap'n Ira. "You're safe, after
all! It--it was something awful!"
"I cal'late it was," rejoined the old woman rather bitterly. "And I
didn't get them oats, after all."
"I'll 'tend to all that, Aunt Prue," said Tunis.
"If it hadn't been for that dratted Queen of Sheby"--Cap'n Ira
glared malevolently at the rather surprised-looking countenance of
the gray mare in her box--"you wouldn't have got into that jam."
"If it hadn't been for you taking that dose of snuff when I was
expecting nothing of the kind, I wouldn't have dove into that feed
box, Ira, and you know it very well."
"I swan!" admitted her husband in a feeble voice. "I forgot again,
didn't I?"
"I don't know as you forgot, but I know you mighty near sneezed your
head off. You'll be the death of me some day, Ira, blowin' up that
way. I wonder I didn't jump clean through the bottom of that feed
box when I was just reaching down to get a measure of oats."
"Aunt Prue," Tunis interposed, "why do you keep the little tad of
feed you have to buy for Queenie in this big old chest?"
"There!" Cap'n Ira hastened to rejoin, glad likewise to turn the
trend of conversation. "That's all that dratted boy's doings, little
John-Ed Williams. Who else would have ever thought of dumping a
two-bushel bag of oats into a twenty-bushel bin? We always put feed
in that covered can yonder, so as to keep shet of the rats. But that
boy, when he brought the oats, dumped 'em into the box before I
could stop him. He's got less sense than his father; and you know,
Tunis, John-Ed himself ain't got much more wit than the law allows."
"But if you hadn't sneezed--" began Prudence again.
"You take her into the house, Cap'n Ira," said Tunis. "I'll feed
Queenie. What do you give her--this measure full of oats? And a hank
of that hay?"
"And a bunch of fodder. Might as well give her a dinner while you're
about it," grumbled the old man, leading his tottering wife toward
the door. "As I say, that old critter is eatin' her head off."
"Well, she long ago earned her keep in her old age," Tunis said,
laughing.
He could remember when the Queen of Sheba had come to the Ball barn
as a colt. Many a clandestine bareback ride had he enjoyed. He fed
the mare and petted her as if she were his own. Then he scraped the
oats out of the bin and poured them into the galvanized-iron can, so
that Cap'n Ira could more easily get at the mare's feed.
He went to the house afterward to see if there was any other little
chore he could do for the old couple before going on to his own
home.
"You can't do much for us, Tunis, unless you can furnish me a new
pair of legs," said Cap'n Ira. "I might as well have timber ones as
these I've got. What Prue and me needs is what you've got but can't
give away--youth."
"You ought to have somebody living with you to help, Cap'n Ira,"
said the young man.
"I cal'late," said the other dryly, "that we've already made that
discovery, Tunis. Trouble is, we ain't fixed right to increase the
pay roll. I'd like to know who you'd think would want to sign up on
this craft that even the rats have deserted?"
"Never mind, Ira. Don't be downhearted," Prudence said, now
recovered from her excitement. "Perhaps the Lord has something good
in store for us."
Cap'n Ira pursed his lips.
"I ain't doubting the Lord's stores is plentiful," he returned
rather irreverently. "The trouble is for us poor mortals to get at
'em. Well, Tunis, I certainly am obliged to you."
The flurry of excitement was over. But Ira Ball was a determined
man. It was in his mind that the trouble of taking care of the old
mare was too great for Prudence, and he could not do the barn chores
himself. They really had no use for the gray mare, for nowadays the
neighbors did all their errands in town for them, and the few
remaining acres of the old farm lay fallow.
Nor, had he desired to sell the mare, would anybody be willing to
pay much for the twenty-two-year-old Queenie. In truth, Ira Ball was
too tender-hearted to think of giving the Queen of Sheba over to a
new owner and so sentence her to painful toil.
"She'd be a sight better off in the horse heaven, wherever that
is," he decided. But he was careful to say nothing like this in his
wife's hearing. "Women are funny that way," he considered. "She'd
rather let the decrepit old critter hang around eatin' her head off,
like I say, than mercifully put her out of her misery."
Stern times call for stern methods. Cap'n Ira Ball had seen the
tragic moment when he was forced to separate a bridegroom from his
bride with a sinking deck all but awash under his feet. What had to
be done had to be done! Prudence could no longer be endangered by
the stable tasks connected with the old mare. He could not relieve
her. They could scarcely afford a hired hand merely to take care of
Queenie.
He remained rather silent that evening, and even forgot to praise
Prue's hot biscuit, of which he ate a good many with his creamed
pollack. The sweet-tempered old woman chatted as she knitted on his
blue-wool hose, but she scarcely expected more than his occasional
grunted acknowledgment that he was listening. She always said it was
"a joy to have somebody besides the cat around to talk to." The
loneliness of shipmasters who sail the seven seas is often mentioned
in song and in story; the loneliness of their wives at home is not
usually marked.
They went to bed. Old men do not usually sleep much after second
cock-crow, and it was not far from three in the morning when Cap'n
Ira awoke. Like most mariners, he was wide awake when he opened his
eyes. He lay quietly for several moments in the broad bed he
occupied alone. The half-sobbing breathing of the old woman sounded
from her room, through the open door.
"It's got to be done," Cap'n Ira almost audibly repeated.
He got out of the bed with care. It was both a difficult and a
painful task to dress. When he had on all but his boots and hat he
tiptoed to a green sea chest in the corner, unlocked it, and from
beneath certain tarpaulins and other sea rubbish drew out something
which he examined carefully in the semidarkness of the chamber. He
finally tucked this into an inner pocket of the double-breasted
pilot coat he wore. It sagged the coat a good deal on that side.
He crept out of the chamber, crossed the sitting room, and went into
the ell-kitchen with his shoes in his hand. When he opened the back
door he faced the west, but even the sky at that point of the
compass showed the glow of the false dawn. Down in the cove the
night mist wrapped the shipping about in an almost opaque veil. Only
the lofty tops of craft like the _Seamew_ were visible, black
streaks against the mother-of-pearl sky line.
The captain closed the kitchen door softly behind him. He sat down
on a bench and painfully pulled on his shoes and laced them. When he
tried to straighten up it was by a method which he termed, "easy,
by jerks." He sat and recovered his breath after the effort.
Then, taking his cane, he hobbled off to the barn. The big doors
were open, for it had been a warm night. The pungent odor from
Queenie's stall made his nostrils wrinkle. He stumbled in, and the
pale face of the old mare appeared at the opening above her manger.
She snorted her surprise.
"You'll snort more'n that afore I'm done with you," Cap'n Ira said,
trying to seem embittered.
But when he unknotted the halter and backed her out of the stable,
quite involuntarily he ran a tender hand down her sleek neck. He
sighed as he led her out of the rear door.
The old mare hung back, stretching first one hind leg and then the
other as old horses do when first they come from the stall in the
morning.
"Come on, you old nuisance!" exploded Cap'n Ira under his breath,
giving an impatient tug at the rope.
He did not look around at her, but set his face sternly toward the
distant lot which had once been known as the east meadow. It was no
longer in grass. Wild carrots sprang from its acidulous soil. The
herbage would scarcely have nourished sheep. There were patches of
that gray moss which blossoms with a tiny red flower, and there was
mullein and sour grass. Altogether the run-down condition of the
soil could not be mistaken by even the casual eye.
The hobbling old man and the hobbling old mare, making their way
across the bare lot, made as drab a picture in the early morning as
a Millet. At a distance their moving shapes would have seemed like
shadows only. There was no other sign of life upon Wreckers' Head.
A light but keen and salty breath blew in from the sea. Cap'n Ira
faced this breeze with twitching nostrils. The old mare's lower lip
hung down in depression. She groaned. She did not care to be led out
of her comfortable stall at this unconscionably early hour.
"Grunt, you old nuisance!" muttered Cap'n Ira bitterly. "You don't
even know what a dratted, useless thing you be, I swan!"
There was a depression in the field. When the heavy spring and fall
rains came the water ran down into this sink and stood, sometimes a
foot or two deep over several acres. In some past time of heavy
flood the water had washed out to the edge of the highland
overlooking the ocean beach. There it had crumbled the brink of the
Head away, the water gullying year after year a deeper and broader
channel, until now the slanting gutter began a hundred yards back
from the brink.
The recurrent downpours, aided by occasional landslips, had made a
slanting trough to the beach itself, which was all of two hundred
feet below the brink of Wreckers' Head. Many such water-worn gullies
are to be found along the face of the Cape headlands, up which the
fishermen and seaweed gatherers freight their cargoes from the
shore. There was no wheel track here; merely a trough of sliding
sand, treacherous under foot and almost continuously in motion. As
the gully progressed seaward, the banks on either hand became more
than forty feet high, the trough itself being scarcely half as wide.
Determinedly Cap'n Ira led the old mare into and down the slope of
this gully.
It was steep. He went ahead haltingly, trying to steady his
footsteps with the cane, which sank deeply into the sand, making
orifices which, in the pale light of the dawn, seemed to startle the
mare. She held back, scuffling and snorting.
"Come on, drat ye!" adjured the captain. "You needn't blow your
nose. You ain't been taking snuff."
The sand was so light and dry that it seemed to be on the move all
about them. There was a stealthy sound to the whispering particles,
too, as though they breathed. "Hush.' Hush-sh-sh!" The old man was
made nervous by it. He began to glance back over his shoulder at the
faintly objecting mare. When Queenie slipped a little and scrambled
in the unstable sand he uttered such an exclamation as might have
been wrung from him at time of stress upon his quarter-deck.
"I swan! I'd rather be keelhauled than do this," burst from his lips
finally.
But they were well into the gully now. The walls on either hand
towered far above their heads. He halted, and the mare stood still,
again blowing softly through her nostrils.
The old man, with shaking hands, took from under his coat the heavy
article that had sagged his pocket. It was a black, old-fashioned,
seven-chambered revolver, well oiled and as grim-looking as a rifled
cannon on a battleship. He produced three greased cartridges, broke
the weapon, inserted the cartridges, then closed it and spun the
cylinder. It was not an unfamiliar weapon, this. Its mere grim
appearance, stuck into Cap'n Ira's waistband, had once quelled
mutiny aboard the _Susan Gatskill_.
While he was thus engaged he had not even glanced around at the old
mare. Suddenly he felt a touch upon his shoulder, then upon the
sleeve of his coat. He felt a creepy chill the length of his spine.
It seemed as if the hand of Prudence had been laid softly upon him.
"I swan!" he gulped, shaking himself. "I'm as flighty as a gal. What
th'--" He looked back. Queenie was nuzzling his arm questioningly.
Her ears were cocked forward; her surprised face was almost
ridiculously human in its expression.
Cap'n Ira groaned again. He shuddered. But his gnarled hand gripped
the hard-rubber butt of the revolver with the desperation of the
deed he had screwed his courage to do. Better the old mare should be
put out of the way than that she should fall into hands that would
misuse her. And he feared what other accident might happen if
Prudence continued to take care of the animal.
"I swan! It's a wrench," admitted Cap'n Ira, swerving to point the
muzzle of the revolver at the gray mare.
He looked all about again. Yes, the position was right. If she fell
here, a man with a shovel could easily pry down tons of sand from
either bank upon her in a few minutes. The burial might be done by
himself without any other soul knowing what had become of Queenie.
He cocked the old revolver.
Suddenly the Queen of Sheba gave a snort of alarm. She looked back
over her withers. The light in the cut between the sand banks was
dim. Was somebody coming?
To tell the truth, Cap'n Ira had a vision of Prudence, having missed
him, getting out of her bed and traveling down through the lots
after him and the old mare. The idea shook him to his marrow, or was
it the weight of the heavy weapon that made his hand so unsteady?
"I swan!" His oft-repeated ejaculation was almost a prayer.
At the moment he felt the sand giving under his feet. The old mare
uttered again her terrified snort. He saw dimly the path behind them
moving--a swift, serpentlike slide. Heavy as the mare was, she felt
the landslip, too.
Cap'n Ira was not a man who easily lost his self-possession. He had
been through too much to show the white flag when danger menaced. He
realized that peril threatened now.
He turned squarely about and, cocked pistol in one hand and
huge-knobbed cane in the other, he started away from the spot at a
cripple's gallop. The whole trough of the gully of sand seemed to be
in motion. Behind him the old mare scrambled and whistled with fear,
quite as unable to keep her feet as was the captain.
For, before he had gone far, Cap'n Ira found himself seated on the
moving plane of sand. He glanced fearfully behind him. The Queen of
Sheba was seated on her tail, her forefeet braced against nothing
more stable than the avalanche itself, and she was sailing down the
slope behind him like a winged Pegasus!
"My soul and body!" ejaculated Cap'n Ira. "We're certainly on our
way."