"I shall never forget it as I saw it first, when I arrived there in

the chill of a backward June. The long, rank grass, thick and soft

and falling in billows, was always wet until midday. The gravel

walks were bordered with great lilac-bushes, mock-orange, and

bridal-wreath. Back of the house was a neglected rose garden,

surrounded by a low stone wall over which the long suckers trailed

and matted. They had wound their pink, thorny tentacles, layer upon

layer, about the lock and the hinges of the rusty iron gate. Even

the porches of the house, and the very windows, were damp and heavy

with growth: wistaria, clematis, honeysuckle, and trumpet vine. The

garden was grown up with trees, especially that part of it which lay

above the river. The bark of the old locusts was blackened by the

smoke that crept continually up the valley, and their feathery

foliage, so merry in its movement and so yellow and joyous in its

color, seemed peculiarly precious under that somber sky. There were

sycamores and copper beeches; gnarled apple-trees, too old to bear;

and fall pear-trees, hung with a sharp, hard fruit in October; all

with a leafage singularly rich and luxuriant, and peculiarly vivid

in color. The oaks about the house had been old trees when my

great-grandfather built his cabin there, more than a century before,

and this garden was almost the only spot for miles along the river

where any of the original forest growth still survived. The smoke

from the mills was fatal to trees of the larger sort, and even these

had the look of doomed things--bent a little toward the town and

seemed to wait with head inclined before that on-coming, shrieking

force.

"About the river, too, there was a strange hush, a tragic

submission--it was so leaden and sullen in its color, and it flowed

so soundlessly forever past our door.

"I sat there every evening, on the high veranda overlooking it,

watching the dim outlines of the steep hills on the other shore, the

flicker of the lights on the island, where there was a boat-house,

and listening to the call of the boatmen through the mist. The mist

came as certainly as night, whitened by moonshine or starshine. The

tin water-pipes went splash, splash, with it all evening, and the

wind, when it rose at all, was little more than a sighing of the old

boughs and a troubled breath in the heavy grasses.

"At first it was to think of my distant friends and my old life that

I used to sit there; but after awhile it was simply to watch the

days and weeks go by, like the river which seemed to carry them

away.

"Within the house I was never at home. Month followed month, and yet

I could feel no sense of kinship with anything there. Under the roof

where my father and grandfather were born, I remained utterly

detached. The somber rooms never spoke to me, the old furniture

never seemed tinctured with race. This portrait of my boy uncle was

the only thing to which I could draw near, the only link with

anything I had ever known before.

"There is a good deal of my father in the face, but it is my father

transformed and glorified; his hesitating discontent drowned in a

kind of triumph. From my first day in that house, I continually

turned to this handsome kinsman of mine, wondering in what terms he

had lived and had his hope; what he had found there to look like

that, to bound at one, after all those years, so joyously out of the

canvas.

"From the timid, clouded old woman over whose life I had come to

watch, I learned that in the backyard, near the old rose garden,

there was a locust-tree which my uncle had planted. After his death,

while it was still a slender sapling, his mother had a seat built

round it, and she used to sit there on summer evenings. His grave

was under the apple-trees in the old orchard.

"My aunt could tell me little more than this. There were days when

she seemed not to remember him at all.

"It was from an old soldier in the village that I learned the boy's

story. Lyon was, the old man told me, but fourteen when the first

enlistment occurred, but was even then eager to go. He was in the

court-house square every evening to watch the recruits at their

drill, and when the home company was ordered off he rode into the

city on his pony to see the men board the train and to wave them

good-by. The next year he spent at home with a tutor, but when he

was fifteen he held his parents to their promise and went into the

army. He was color sergeant of his regiment and fell in a charge

upon the breastworks of a fort about a year after his enlistment.

"The veteran showed me an account of this charge which had been

written for the village paper by one of my uncle's comrades who had

seen his part in the engagement. It seems that as his company were

running at full speed across the bottom lands toward the fortified

hill, a shell burst over them. This comrade, running beside my

uncle, saw the colors waver and sink as if falling, and looked to

see that the boy's hand and forearm had been torn away by the

exploding shrapnel. The boy, he thought, did not realize the extent

of his injury, for he laughed, shouted something which his comrade

did not catch, caught the flag in his left hand, and ran on up the

hill. They went splendidly up over the breastworks, but just as my

uncle, his colors flying, reached the top of the embankment, a

second shell carried away his left arm at the arm-pit, and he fell

over the wall with the flag settling about him.

"It was because this story was ever present with me, because I was

unable to shake it off, that I began to read such books as my

grandfather had collected upon the Civil War. I found that this war

was fought largely by boys, that more men enlisted at eighteen than

at any other age. When I thought of those battlefields--and I

thought of them much in those days--there was always that glory of

youth above them, that impetuous, generous passion stirring the long

lines on the march, the blue battalions in the plain. The bugle,

whenever I have heard it since, has always seemed to me the very

golden throat of that boyhood which spent itself so gaily, so

incredibly.

"I used often to wonder how it was that this uncle of mine, who

seemed to have possessed all the charm and brilliancy allotted to

his family and to have lived up its vitality in one splendid hour,

had left so little trace in the house where he was born and where he

had awaited his destiny. Look as I would, I could find no letters

from him, no clothing or books that might have been his. He had been

dead but twenty years, and yet nothing seemed to have survived

except the tree he had planted. It seemed incredible and cruel that

no physical memory of him should linger to be cherished among his

kindred,--nothing but the dull image in the brain of that aged

sister. I used to pace the garden walks in the evening, wondering

that no breath of his, no echo of his laugh, of his call to his pony

or his whistle to his dogs, should linger about those shaded paths

where the pale roses exhaled their dewy, country smell. Sometimes,

in the dim starlight, I have thought that I heard on the grasses

beside me the stir of a footfall lighter than my own, and under the

black arch of the lilacs I have fancied that he bore me company.

"There was, I found, one day in the year for which my old aunt

waited, and which stood out from the months that were all of a

sameness to her. On the thirtieth of May she insisted that I should

bring down the big flag from the attic and run it up upon the tall

flagstaff beside Lyon's tree in the garden. Later in the morning she

went with me to carry some of the garden flowers to the grave in the

orchard,--a grave scarcely larger than a child's.

"I had noticed, when I was hunting for the flag in the attic, a

leather trunk with my own name stamped upon it, but was unable to

find the key. My aunt was all day less apathetic than usual; she

seemed to realize more clearly who I was, and to wish me to be with

her. I did not have an opportunity to return to the attic until

after dinner that evening, when I carried a lamp up-stairs and

easily forced the lock of the trunk. I found all the things that I

had looked for; put away, doubtless, by his mother, and still

smelling faintly of lavender and rose leaves; his clothes, his

exercise books, his letters from the army, his first boots, his

riding-whip, some of his toys, even. I took them out and replaced

them gently. As I was about to shut the lid, I picked up a copy of

the Æneid, on the fly-leaf of which was written in a slanting,

boyish hand,

Lyon Hartwell, January, 1862.

He had gone to the wars in Sixty-three, I remembered.

"My uncle, I gathered, was none too apt at his Latin, for the pages

were dog-eared and rubbed and interlined, the margins mottled with

pencil sketches--bugles, stacked bayonets, and artillery carriages.

In the act of putting the book down, I happened to run over the

pages to the end, and on the fly-leaf at the back I saw his name

again, and a drawing--with his initials and a date--of the Federal

flag; above it, written in a kind of arch and in the same unformed

hand:

'Oh, say, can you see by the dawn's early light

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?'

It was a stiff, wooden sketch, not unlike a detail from some

Egyptian inscription, but, the moment I saw it, wind and color

seemed to touch it. I caught up the book, blew out the lamp, and

rushed down into the garden.

"I seemed, somehow, at last to have known him; to have been with him

in that careless, unconscious moment and to have known him as he was

then.

"As I sat there in the rush of this realization, the wind began to

rise, stirring the light foliage of the locust over my head and

bringing, fresher than before, the woody odor of the pale roses that

overran the little neglected garden. Then, as it grew stronger, it

brought the sound of something sighing and stirring over my head in

the perfumed darkness.

"I thought of that sad one of the Destinies who, as the Greeks

believed, watched from birth over those marked for a violent or

untimely death. Oh, I could see him, there in the shine of the

morning, his book idly on his knee, his flashing eyes looking

straight before him, and at his side that grave figure, hidden in

her draperies, her eyes following his, but seeing so much

farther--seeing what he never saw, that great moment at the end,

when he swayed above his comrades on the earthen wall.

"All the while, the bunting I had run up in the morning flapped fold

against fold, heaving and tossing softly in the dark--against a sky

so black with rain clouds that I could see above me only the blur of

something in soft, troubled motion.

"The experience of that night, coming so overwhelmingly to a man so

dead, almost rent me in pieces. It was the same feeling that artists

know when we, rarely, achieve truth in our work; the feeling of

union with some great force, of purpose and security, of being glad

that we have lived. For the first time I felt the pull of race and

blood and kindred, and felt beating within me things that had not

begun with me. It was as if the earth under my feet had grasped and

rooted me, and were pouring its essence into me. I sat there until

the dawn of morning, and all night long my life seemed to be pouring

out of me and running into the ground."

* * * * *

Hartwell drew a long breath that lifted his heavy shoulders, and

then let them fall again. He shifted a little and faced more

squarely the scattered, silent company before him. The darkness had

made us almost invisible to each other, and, except for the

occasional red circuit of a cigarette end traveling upward from the

arm of a chair, he might have supposed us all asleep.

"And so," Hartwell added thoughtfully, "I naturally feel an interest

in fellows who are going home. It's always an experience."

No one said anything, and in a moment there was a loud rap at the

door,--the concierge, come to take down Bentley's luggage and to

announce that the cab was below. Bentley got his hat and coat,

enjoined Hartwell to take good care of his _perroquets_, gave each

of us a grip of the hand, and went briskly down the long flights of

stairs. We followed him into the street, calling our good wishes,

and saw him start on his drive across the lighted city to the Gare

St. Lazare.

_McClure's_, March 1907

_The Enchanted Bluff_

We had our swim before sundown, and while we were cooking our supper

the oblique rays of light made a dazzling glare on the white sand

about us. The translucent red ball itself sank behind the brown

stretches of corn field as we sat down to eat, and the warm layer of

air that had rested over the water and our clean sand-bar grew

fresher and smelled of the rank ironweed and sunflowers growing on

the flatter shore. The river was brown and sluggish, like any other

of the half-dozen streams that water the Nebraska corn lands. On one

shore was an irregular line of bald clay bluffs where a few

scrub-oaks with thick trunks and flat, twisted tops threw light

shadows on the long grass. The western shore was low and level, with

corn fields that stretched to the sky-line, and all along the

water's edge were little sandy coves and beaches where slim

cottonwoods and willow saplings flickered.

The turbulence of the river in spring-time discouraged milling, and,

beyond keeping the old red bridge in repair, the busy farmers did

not concern themselves with the stream; so the Sandtown boys were

left in undisputed possession. In the autumn we hunted quail through

the miles of stubble and fodder land along the flat shore, and,

after the winter skating season was over and the ice had gone out,

the spring freshets and flooded bottoms gave us our great excitement

of the year. The channel was never the same for two successive

seasons. Every spring the swollen stream undermined a bluff to the

east, or bit out a few acres of corn field to the west and whirled

the soil away to deposit it in spumy mud banks somewhere else. When

the water fell low in midsummer, new sand-bars were thus exposed to

dry and whiten in the August sun. Sometimes these were banked so

firmly that the fury of the next freshet failed to unseat them; the

little willow seedlings emerged triumphantly from the yellow froth,

broke into spring leaf, shot up into summer growth, and with their

mesh of roots bound together the moist sand beneath them against the

batterings of another April. Here and there a cottonwood soon

glittered among them, quivering in the low current of air that, even

on breathless days when the dust hung like smoke above the wagon

road, trembled along the face of the water.

It was on such an island, in the third summer of its yellow green,

that we built our watch-fire; not in the thicket of dancing willow

wands, but on the level terrace of fine sand which had been added

that spring; a little new bit of world, beautifully ridged with

ripple marks, and strewn with the tiny skeletons of turtles and

fish, all as white and dry as if they had been expertly cured. We

had been careful not to mar the freshness of the place, although we

often swam out to it on summer evenings and lay on the sand to rest.

This was our last watch-fire of the year, and there were reasons why

I should remember it better than any of the others. Next week the

other boys were to file back to their old places in the Sandtown

High School, but I was to go up to the Divide to teach my first

country school in the Norwegian district. I was already homesick at

the thought of quitting the boys with whom I had always played; of

leaving the river, and going up into a windy plain that was all

windmills and corn fields and big pastures; where there was nothing

wilful or unmanageable in the landscape, no new islands, and no

chance of unfamiliar birds--such as often followed the watercourses.

Other boys came and went and used the river for fishing or skating,

but we six were sworn to the spirit of the stream, and we were

friends mainly because of the river. There were the two Hassler

boys, Fritz and Otto, sons of the little German tailor. They were

the youngest of us; ragged boys of ten and twelve, with sunburned

hair, weather-stained faces, and pale blue eyes. Otto, the elder,

was the best mathematician in school, and clever at his books, but

he always dropped out in the spring term as if the river could not

get on without him. He and Fritz caught the fat, horned catfish and

sold them about the town, and they lived so much in the water that

they were as brown and sandy as the river itself.

There was Percy Pound, a fat, freckled boy with chubby cheeks, who

took half a dozen boys' story-papers and was always being kept in

for reading detective stories behind his desk. There was Tip Smith,

destined by his freckles and red hair to be the buffoon in all our

games, though he walked like a timid little old man and had a funny,

cracked laugh. Tip worked hard in his father's grocery store every

afternoon, and swept it out before school in the morning. Even his

recreations were laborious. He collected cigarette cards and tin

tobacco-tags indefatigably, and would sit for hours humped up over a

snarling little scroll-saw which he kept in his attic. His dearest

possessions were some little pill-bottles that purported to contain

grains of wheat from the Holy Land, water from the Jordan and the

Dead Sea, and earth from the Mount of Olives. His father had bought

these dull things from a Baptist missionary who peddled them, and

Tip seemed to derive great satisfaction from their remote origin.

The tall boy was Arthur Adams. He had fine hazel eyes that were

almost too reflective and sympathetic for a boy, and such a pleasant

voice that we all loved to hear him read aloud. Even when he had to

read poetry aloud at school, no one ever thought of laughing. To be

sure, he was not at school very much of the time. He was seventeen

and should have finished the High School the year before, but he was

always off somewhere with his gun. Arthur's mother was dead, and his

father, who was feverishly absorbed in promoting schemes, wanted to

send the boy away to school and get him off his hands; but Arthur

always begged off for another year and promised to study. I remember

him as a tall, brown boy with an intelligent face, always lounging

among a lot of us little fellows, laughing at us oftener than with

us, but such a soft, satisfied laugh that we felt rather flattered

when we provoked it. In after-years people said that Arthur had been

given to evil ways even as a lad, and it is true that we often saw

him with the gambler's sons and with old Spanish Fanny's boy, but if

he learned anything ugly in their company he never betrayed it to

us. We would have followed Arthur anywhere, and I am bound to say

that he led us into no worse places than the cattail marshes and the

stubble fields. These, then, were the boys who camped with me that

summer night upon the sand-bar.

After we finished our supper we beat the willow thicket for

driftwood. By the time we had collected enough, night had fallen,

and the pungent, weedy smell from the shore increased with the

coolness. We threw ourselves down about the fire and made another

futile effort to show Percy Pound the Little Dipper. We had tried it

often before, but he could never be got past the big one.

"You see those three big stars just below the handle, with the

bright one in the middle?" said Otto Hassler; "that's Orion's belt,

and the bright one is the clasp." I crawled behind Otto's shoulder

and sighted up his arm to the star that seemed perched upon the tip

of his steady forefinger. The Hassler boys did seine-fishing at

night, and they knew a good many stars.

Percy gave up the Little Dipper and lay back on the sand, his hands

clasped under his head. "I can see the North Star," he announced,

contentedly, pointing toward it with his big toe. "Any one might get

lost and need to know that."

We all looked up at it.

"How do you suppose Columbus felt when his compass didn't point

north any more?" Tip asked.

Otto shook his head. "My father says that there was another North

Star once, and that maybe this one won't last always. I wonder what

would happen to us down here if anything went wrong with it?"

Arthur chuckled. "I wouldn't worry, Ott. Nothing's apt to happen to

it in your time. Look at the Milky Way! There must be lots of good

dead Indians."

We lay back and looked, meditating, at the dark cover of the world.

The gurgle of the water had become heavier. We had often noticed a

mutinous, complaining note in it at night, quite different from its

cheerful daytime chuckle, and seeming like the voice of a much

deeper and more powerful stream. Our water had always these two

moods: the one of sunny complaisance, the other of inconsolable,

passionate regret.

"Queer how the stars are all in sort of diagrams," remarked Otto.

"You could do most any proposition in geometry with 'em. They always

look as if they meant something. Some folks say everybody's fortune

is all written out in the stars, don't they?"

"They believe so in the old country," Fritz affirmed.

But Arthur only laughed at him. "You're thinking of Napoleon,

Fritzey. He had a star that went out when he began to lose battles.

I guess the stars don't keep any close tally on Sandtown folks."

We were speculating on how many times we could count a hundred

before the evening star went down behind the corn fields, when some

one cried, "There comes the moon, and it's as big as a cart wheel!"

We all jumped up to greet it as it swam over the bluffs behind us.

It came up like a galleon in full sail; an enormous, barbaric thing,

red as an angry heathen god.

"When the moon came up red like that, the Aztecs used to sacrifice

their prisoners on the temple top," Percy announced.

"Go on, Perce. You got that out of _Golden Days_. Do you believe

that, Arthur?" I appealed.

Arthur answered, quite seriously: "Like as not. The moon was one of

their gods. When my father was in Mexico City he saw the stone where

they used to sacrifice their prisoners."

As we dropped down by the fire again some one asked whether the

Mound-Builders were older than the Aztecs. When we once got upon the

Mound-Builders we never willingly got away from them, and we were

still conjecturing when we heard a loud splash in the water.

"Must have been a big cat jumping," said Fritz. "They do sometimes.

They must see bugs in the dark. Look what a track the moon makes!"

There was a long, silvery streak on the water, and where the current

fretted over a big log it boiled up like gold pieces.

"Suppose there ever _was_ any gold hid away in this old river?"

Fritz asked. He lay like a little brown Indian, close to the fire,

his chin on his hand and his bare feet in the air. His brother

laughed at him, but Arthur took his suggestion seriously.

"Some of the Spaniards thought there was gold up here somewhere.

Seven cities chuck full of gold, they had it, and Coronado and his

men came up to hunt it. The Spaniards were all over this country

once."

Percy looked interested. "Was that before the Mormons went through?"

We all laughed at this.

"Long enough before. Before the Pilgrim Fathers, Perce. Maybe they

came along this very river. They always followed the watercourses."

"I wonder where this river really does begin?" Tip mused. That was

an old and a favorite mystery which the map did not clearly explain.

On the map the little black line stopped somewhere in western

Kansas; but since rivers generally rose in mountains, it was only

reasonable to suppose that ours came from the Rockies. Its

destination, we knew, was the Missouri, and the Hassler boys always

maintained that we could embark at Sandtown in flood-time, follow

our noses, and eventually arrive at New Orleans. Now they took up

their old argument. "If us boys had grit enough to try it, it

wouldn't take no time to get to Kansas City and St. Joe."

We began to talk about the places we wanted to go to. The Hassler

boys wanted to see the stock-yards in Kansas City, and Percy wanted

to see a big store in Chicago. Arthur was interlocutor and did not

betray himself.

"Now it's your turn, Tip."

Tip rolled over on his elbow and poked the fire, and his eyes looked

shyly out of his queer, tight little face. "My place is awful far

away. My uncle Bill told me about it."

Tip's Uncle Bill was a wanderer, bitten with mining fever, who had

drifted into Sandtown with a broken arm, and when it was well had

drifted out again.

"Where is it?"

"Aw, it's down in New Mexico somewheres. There aren't no railroads

or anything. You have to go on mules, and you run out of water

before you get there and have to drink canned tomatoes."

"Well, go on, kid. What's it like when you do get there?"

Tip sat up and excitedly began his story.

"There's a big red rock there that goes right up out of the sand for

about nine hundred feet. The country's flat all around it, and this

here rock goes up all by itself, like a monument. They call it the

Enchanted Bluff down there, because no white man has ever been on

top of it. The sides are smooth rock, and straight up, like a wall.

The Indians say that hundreds of years ago, before the Spaniards

came, there was a village away up there in the air. The tribe that

lived there had some sort of steps, made out of wood and bark, hung

down over the face of the bluff, and the braves went down to hunt

and carried water up in big jars swung on their backs. They kept a

big supply of water and dried meat up there, and never went down

except to hunt. They were a peaceful tribe that made cloth and

pottery, and they went up there to get out of the wars. You see,

they could pick off any war party that tried to get up their little

steps. The Indians say they were a handsome people, and they had

some sort of a queer religion. Uncle Bill thinks they were

Cliff-Dwellers who had got into trouble and left home. They weren't

fighters, anyhow.

"One time the braves were down hunting and an awful storm came up--a

kind of waterspout--and when they got back to their rock they found

their little staircase had been all broken to pieces, and only a few

steps were left hanging away up in the air. While they were camped

at the foot of the rock, wondering what to do, a war party from the

north came along and massacred 'em to a man, with all the old folks

and women looking on from the rock. Then the war party went on south

and left the village to get down the best way they could. Of course

they never got down. They starved to death up there, and when the

war party came back on their way north, they could hear the children

crying from the edge of the bluff where they had crawled out, but

they didn't see a sign of a grown Indian, and nobody has ever been

up there since."

We exclaimed at this dolorous legend and sat up.

"There couldn't have been many people up there," Percy demurred.

"How big is the top, Tip?"

"Oh, pretty big. Big enough so that the rock doesn't look nearly as

tall as it is. The top's bigger than the base. The bluff is sort of

worn away for several hundred feet up. That's one reason it's so

hard to climb."

I asked how the Indians got up, in the first place.

"Nobody knows how they got up or when. A hunting party came along

once and saw that there was a town up there, and that was all."

Otto rubbed his chin and looked thoughtful. "Of course there must be

some way to get up there. Couldn't people get a rope over someway

and pull a ladder up?"

Tip's little eyes were shining with excitement. "I know a way. Me

and Uncle Bill talked it all over. There's a kind of rocket that

would take a rope over--life-savers use 'em--and then you could

hoist a rope-ladder and peg it down at the bottom and make it tight

with guy-ropes on the other side. I'm going to climb that there

bluff, and I've got it all planned out."

Fritz asked what he expected to find when he got up there.

"Bones, maybe, or the ruins of their town, or pottery, or some of

their idols. There might be 'most anything up there. Anyhow, I want

to see."

"Sure nobody else has been up there, Tip?" Arthur asked.

"Dead sure. Hardly anybody ever goes down there. Some hunters tried

to cut steps in the rock once, but they didn't get higher than a man

can reach. The Bluff's all red granite, and Uncle Bill thinks it's a

boulder the glaciers left. It's a queer place, anyhow. Nothing but

cactus and desert for hundreds of miles, and yet right under the

bluff there's good water and plenty of grass. That's why the bison

used to go down there."

Suddenly we heard a scream above our fire, and jumped up to see a

dark, slim bird floating southward far above us--a whooping-crane,

we knew by her cry and her long neck. We ran to the edge of the

island, hoping we might see her alight, but she wavered southward

along the rivercourse until we lost her. The Hassler boys declared

that by the look of the heavens it must be after midnight, so we

threw more wood on our fire, put on our jackets, and curled down in

the warm sand. Several of us pretended to doze, but I fancy we were

really thinking about Tip's Bluff and the extinct people. Over in

the wood the ring-doves were calling mournfully to one another, and

once we heard a dog bark, far away. "Somebody getting into old

Tommy's melon patch," Fritz murmured, sleepily, but nobody answered

him. By and by Percy spoke out of the shadow.

"Say, Tip, when you go down there will you take me with you?"

"Maybe."

"Suppose one of us beats you down there, Tip?"

"Whoever gets to the Bluff first has got to promise to tell the rest

of us exactly what he finds," remarked one of the Hassler boys, and

to this we all readily assented.

Somewhat reassured, I dropped off to sleep. I must have dreamed

about a race for the Bluff, for I awoke in a kind of fear that other

people were getting ahead of me and that I was losing my chance. I

sat up in my damp clothes and looked at the other boys, who lay

tumbled in uneasy attitudes about the dead fire. It was still dark,

but the sky was blue with the last wonderful azure of night. The

stars glistened like crystal globes, and trembled as if they shone

through a depth of clear water. Even as I watched, they began to

pale and the sky brightened. Day came suddenly, almost

instantaneously. I turned for another look at the blue night, and it

was gone. Everywhere the birds began to call, and all manner of

little insects began to chirp and hop about in the willows. A breeze

sprang up from the west and brought the heavy smell of ripened corn.

The boys rolled over and shook themselves. We stripped and plunged

into the river just as the sun came up over the windy bluffs.

When I came home to Sandtown at Christmas time, we skated out to our

island and talked over the whole project of the Enchanted Bluff,

renewing our resolution to find it.

* * * * *

Although that was twenty years ago, none of us have ever climbed the

Enchanted Bluff. Percy Pound is a stockbroker in Kansas City and

will go nowhere that his red touring-car cannot carry him. Otto

Hassler went on the railroad and lost his foot braking; after which

he and Fritz succeeded their father as the town tailors.

Arthur sat about the sleepy little town all his life--he died before

he was twenty-five. The last time I saw him, when I was home on one

of my college vacations, he was sitting in a steamer-chair under a

cottonwood tree in the little yard behind one of the two Sandtown

saloons. He was very untidy and his hand was not steady, but when he

rose, unabashed, to greet me, his eyes were as clear and warm as

ever. When I had talked with him for an hour and heard him laugh

again, I wondered how it was that when Nature had taken such pains

with a man, from his hands to the arch of his long foot, she had

ever lost him in Sandtown. He joked about Tip Smith's Bluff, and

declared he was going down there just as soon as the weather got

cooler; he thought the Grand Cañon might be worth while, too.

I was perfectly sure when I left him that he would never get beyond

the high plank fence and the comfortable shade of the cottonwood.

And, indeed, it was under that very tree that he died one summer

morning.

Tip Smith still talks about going to New Mexico. He married a

slatternly, unthrifty country girl, has been much tied to a

perambulator, and has grown stooped and gray from irregular meals

and broken sleep. But the worst of his difficulties are now over,

and he has, as he says, come into easy water. When I was last in

Sandtown I walked home with him late one moonlight night, after he

had balanced his cash and shut up his store. We took the long way

around and sat down on the schoolhouse steps, and between us we

quite revived the romance of the lone red rock and the extinct

people. Tip insists that he still means to go down there, but he

thinks now he will wait until his boy, Bert, is old enough to go

with him. Bert has been let into the story, and thinks of nothing

but the Enchanted Bluff.

_Harper's_, April 1909

_The Joy of Nelly Deane_

Nell and I were almost ready to go on for the last act of "Queen

Esther," and we had for the moment got rid of our three patient

dressers, Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny. Nell was peering

over my shoulder into the little cracked looking-glass that Mrs. Dow

had taken from its nail on her kitchen wall and brought down to the

church under her shawl that morning. When she realized that we were

alone, Nell whispered to me in the quick, fierce way she had:

"Say, Peggy, won't you go up and stay with me to-night? Scott

Spinny's asked to take me home, and I don't want to walk up with him

alone."

"I guess so, if you'll ask my mother."

"Oh, I'll fix her!" Nell laughed, with a toss of her head which

meant that she usually got what she wanted, even from people much

less tractable than my mother.

In a moment our tiring-women were back again. The three old

ladies--at least they seemed old to us--fluttered about us, more

agitated than we were ourselves. It seemed as though they would

never leave off patting Nell and touching her up. They kept trying

things this way and that, never able in the end to decide which way

was best. They wouldn't hear to her using rouge, and as they

powdered her neck and arms, Mrs. Freeze murmured that she hoped we

wouldn't get into the habit of using such things. Mrs. Spinny

divided her time between pulling up and tucking down the "illusion"

that filled in the square neck of Nelly's dress. She didn't like

things much low, she said; but after she had pulled it up, she stood

back and looked at Nell thoughtfully through her glasses. While the

excited girl was reaching for this and that, buttoning a slipper,

pinning down a curl, Mrs. Spinny's smile softened more and more

until, just before _Esther_ made her entrance, the old lady tiptoed

up to her and softly tucked the illusion down as far as it would go.

"She's so pink; it seems a pity not," she whispered apologetically

to Mrs. Dow.

Every one admitted that Nelly was the prettiest girl in Riverbend,

and the gayest--oh, the gayest! When she was not singing, she was

laughing. When she was not laid up with a broken arm, the outcome of

a foolhardy coasting feat, or suspended from school because she ran

away at recess to go buggy-riding with Guy Franklin, she was sure to

be up to mischief of some sort. Twice she broke through the ice and

got soused in the river because she never looked where she skated or

cared what happened so long as she went fast enough. After the

second of these duckings our three dressers declared that she was

trying to be a Baptist despite herself.

Mrs. Spinny and Mrs. Freeze and Mrs. Dow, who were always hovering

about Nelly, often whispered to me their hope that she would

eventually come into our church and not "go with the Methodists";

her family were Wesleyans. But to me these artless plans of theirs

never wholly explained their watchful affection. They had good

daughters themselves,--except Mrs. Spinny, who had only the sullen

Scott,--and they loved their plain girls and thanked God for them.

But they loved Nelly differently. They were proud of her pretty

figure and yellow-brown eyes, which dilated so easily and sparkled

with a kind of golden effervescence. They were always making pretty

things for her, always coaxing her to come to the sewing-circle,

where she knotted her thread, and put in the wrong sleeve, and

laughed and chattered and said a great many things that she should

not have said, and somehow always warmed their hearts. I think they

loved her for her unquenchable joy.

All the Baptist ladies liked Nell, even those who criticized her

most severely, but the three who were first in fighting the battles

of our little church, who held it together by their prayers and the

labor of their hands, watched over her as they did over Mrs. Dow's

century-plant before it blossomed. They looked for her on Sunday

morning and smiled at her as she hurried, always a little late, up

to the choir. When she rose and stood behind the organ and sang

"There Is a Green Hill," one could see Mrs. Dow and Mrs. Freeze

settle back in their accustomed seats and look up at her as if she

had just come from that hill and had brought them glad tidings.

It was because I sang contralto, or, as we said, alto, in the

Baptist choir that Nell and I became friends. She was so gay and

grown up, so busy with parties and dances and picnics, that I would

scarcely have seen much of her had we not sung together. She liked

me better than she did any of the older girls, who tried clumsily to

be like her, and I felt almost as solicitous and admiring as did

Mrs. Dow and Mrs. Spinny. I think even then I must have loved to see

her bloom and glow, and I loved to hear her sing, in "The Ninety and

Nine,"

But one was out on the hills away

in her sweet, strong voice. Nell had never had a singing lesson, but

she had sung from the time she could talk, and Mrs. Dow used fondly

to say that it was singing so much that made her figure so pretty.

After I went into the choir it was found to be easier to get Nelly

to choir practice. If I stopped outside her gate on my way to church

and coaxed her, she usually laughed, ran in for her hat and jacket,

and went along with me. The three old ladies fostered our

friendship, and because I was "quiet," they esteemed me a good

influence for Nelly. This view was propounded in a sewing-circle

discussion and, leaking down to us through our mothers, greatly

amused us. Dear old ladies! It was so manifestly for what Nell was

that they loved her, and yet they were always looking for

"influences" to change her.

The "Queen Esther" performance had cost us three months of hard

practice, and it was not easy to keep Nell up to attending the

tedious rehearsals. Some of the boys we knew were in the chorus of

Assyrian youths, but the solo cast was made up of older people, and

Nell found them very poky. We gave the cantata in the Baptist church

on Christmas eve, "to a crowded house," as the Riverbend "Messenger"

truly chronicled. The country folk for miles about had come in

through a deep snow, and their teams and wagons stood in a long row

at the hitch-bars on each side of the church door. It was certainly

Nelly's night, for however much the tenor--he was her schoolmaster,

and naturally thought poorly of her--might try to eclipse her in his

dolorous solos about the rivers of Babylon, there could be no doubt

as to whom the people had come to hear--and to see.

After the performance was over, our fathers and mothers came back to

the dressing-rooms--the little rooms behind the baptistry where the

candidates for baptism were robed--to congratulate us, and Nell

persuaded my mother to let me go home with her. This arrangement may

not have been wholly agreeable to Scott Spinny, who stood glumly

waiting at the baptistry door; though I used to think he dogged

Nell's steps not so much for any pleasure he got from being with her

as for the pleasure of keeping other people away. Dear little Mrs.

Spinny was perpetually in a state of humiliation on account of his

bad manners, and she tried by a very special tenderness to make up

to Nelly for the remissness of her ungracious son.

Scott was a spare, muscular fellow, good-looking, but with a face so

set and dark that I used to think it very like the castings he sold.

He was taciturn and domineering, and Nell rather liked to provoke

him. Her father was so easy with her that she seemed to enjoy being

ordered about now and then. That night, when every one was praising

her and telling her how well she sang and how pretty she looked,

Scott only said, as we came out of the dressing-room:

"Have you got your high shoes on?"

"No; but I've got rubbers on over my low ones. Mother doesn't care."

"Well, you just go back and put 'em on as fast as you can."

Nell made a face at him and ran back, laughing. Her mother, fat,

comfortable Mrs. Deane, was immensely amused at this.

"That's right, Scott," she chuckled. "You can do enough more with

her than I can. She walks right over me an' Jud."

Scott grinned. If he was proud of Nelly, the last thing he wished to

do was to show it. When she came back he began to nag again. "What

are you going to do with all those flowers? They'll freeze stiff as

pokers."

"Well, there won't none of _your_ flowers freeze, Scott Spinny, so

there!" Nell snapped. She had the best of him that time, and the

Assyrian youths rejoiced. They were most of them high-school boys,

and the poorest of them had "chipped in" and sent all the way to

Denver for _Queen Esther's_ flowers. There were bouquets from half a

dozen townspeople, too, but none from Scott. Scott was a prosperous

hardware merchant and notoriously penurious, though he saved his

face, as the boys said, by giving liberally to the church.

"There's no use freezing the fool things, anyhow. You get me some

newspapers, and I'll wrap 'em up." Scott took from his pocket a

folded copy of the Riverbend "Messenger" and began laboriously to

wrap up one of the bouquets. When we left the church door he bore

three large newspaper bundles, carrying them as carefully as if they

had been so many newly frosted wedding-cakes, and left Nell and me

to shift for ourselves as we floundered along the snow-burdened

sidewalk.

Although it was after midnight, lights were shining from many of the

little wooden houses, and the roofs and shrubbery were so deep in

snow that Riverbend looked as if it had been tucked down into a warm

bed. The companies of people, all coming from church, tramping this

way and that toward their homes and calling "Good night" and "Merry

Christmas" as they parted company, all seemed to us very unusual and

exciting.

When we got home, Mrs. Deane had a cold supper ready, and Jud Deane

had already taken off his shoes and fallen to on his fried chicken

and pie. He was so proud of his pretty daughter that he must give

her her Christmas presents then and there, and he went into the

sleeping-chamber behind the dining-room and from the depths of his

wife's closet brought out a short sealskin jacket and a round cap

and made Nelly put them on.

Mrs. Deane, who sat busy between a plate of spice cake and a tray

piled with her famous whipped-cream tarts, laughed inordinately at

his behavior.

"Ain't he worse than any kid you ever see? He's been running to that

closet like a cat shut away from her kittens. I wonder Nell ain't

caught on before this. I did think he'd make out now to keep 'em

till Christmas morning; but he's never made out to keep anything

yet."

That was true enough, and fortunately Jud's inability to keep

anything seemed always to present a highly humorous aspect to his

wife. Mrs. Deane put her heart into her cooking, and said that so

long as a man was a good provider she had no cause to complain.

Other people were not so charitable toward Jud's failing. I remember

how many strictures were passed upon that little sealskin and how he

was censured for his extravagance. But what a public-spirited thing,

after all, it was for him to do! How, the winter through, we all

enjoyed seeing Nell skating on the river or running about the town

with the brown collar turned up about her bright cheeks and her hair

blowing out from under the round cap! "No seal," Mrs. Dow said,

"would have begrudged it to her. Why should we?" This was at the

sewing-circle, when the new coat was under grave discussion.

At last Nelly and I got up-stairs and undressed, and the pad of

Jud's slippered feet about the kitchen premises--where he was

carrying up from the cellar things that might freeze--ceased. He

called "Good night, daughter," from the foot of the stairs, and the

house grew quiet. But one is not a prima donna the first time for

nothing, and it seemed as if we could not go to bed. Our light must

have burned long after every other in Riverbend was out. The muslin

curtains of Nell's bed were drawn back; Mrs. Deane had turned down

the white counterpane and taken off the shams and smoothed the

pillows for us. But their fair plumpness offered no temptation to

two such hot young heads. We could not let go of life even for a

little while. We sat and talked in Nell's cozy room, where there was

a tiny, white fur rug--the only one in Riverbend--before the bed;

and there were white sash curtains, and the prettiest little desk

and dressing-table I had ever seen. It was a warm, gay little room,

flooded all day long with sunlight from east and south windows that

had climbing-roses all about them in summer. About the dresser were

photographs of adoring high-school boys; and one of Guy Franklin,

much groomed and barbered, in a dress-coat and a boutonnière. I

never liked to see that photograph there. The home boys looked

properly modest and bashful on the dresser, but he seemed to be

staring impudently all the time.

I knew nothing definite against Guy, but in Riverbend all

"traveling-men" were considered worldly and wicked. He traveled for

a Chicago dry-goods firm, and our fathers didn't like him because he

put extravagant ideas into our mothers' heads. He had very smooth

and nattering ways, and he introduced into our simple community a

great variety of perfumes and scented soaps, and he always reminded

me of the merchants in Cæsar, who brought into Gaul "those things

which effeminate the mind," as we translated that delightfully easy

passage.

Nell was silting before the dressing-table in her nightgown, holding

the new fur coat and rubbing her cheek against it, when I saw a

sudden gleam of tears in her eyes. "You know, Peggy," she said in

her quick, impetuous way, "this makes me feel bad. I've got a secret

from my daddy."

I can see her now, so pink and eager, her brown hair in two springy

braids down her back, and her eyes shining with tears and with

something even softer and more tremulous.

"I'm engaged, Peggy," she whispered, "really and truly."

She leaned forward, unbuttoning her nightgown, and there on her

breast, hung by a little gold chain about her neck, was a diamond

ring--Guy Franklin's solitaire; every one in Riverbend knew it well.

"I'm going to live in Chicago, and take singing lessons, and go to

operas, and do all those nice things--oh, everything! I know you

don't like him, Peggy, but you know you _are_ a kid. You'll see how

it is yourself when you grow up. He's so _different_ from our boys,

and he's just terribly in love with me. And then, Peggy,"--flushing

all down over her soft shoulders,--"I'm awfully fond of him, too.

Awfully."

"Are you, Nell, truly?" I whispered. She seemed so changed to me by

the warm light in her eyes and that delicate suffusion of color. I

felt as I did when I got up early on picnic mornings in summer, and

saw the dawn come up in the breathless sky above the river meadows

and make all the cornfields golden.

"Sure I do, Peggy; don't look so solemn. It's nothing to look that

way about, kid. It's nice." She threw her arms about me suddenly and

hugged me.

"I hate to think about your going so far away from us all, Nell."

"Oh, you'll love to come and visit me. Just you wait."

She began breathlessly to go over things Guy Franklin had told her

about Chicago, until I seemed to see it all looming up out there

under the stars that kept watch over our little sleeping town. We

had neither of us ever been to a city, but we knew what it would be

like. We heard it throbbing like great engines, and calling to us,

that far-away world. Even after we had opened the windows and

scurried into bed, we seemed to feel a pulsation across all the

miles of snow. The winter silence trembled with it, and the air was

full of something new that seemed to break over us in soft waves. In

that snug, warm little bed I had a sense of imminent change and

danger. I was somehow afraid for Nelly when I heard her breathing so

quickly beside me, and I put my arm about her protectingly as we

drifted toward sleep.

* * * * *

In the following spring we were both graduated from the Riverbend

high school, and I went away to college. My family moved to Denver,

and during the next four years I heard very little of Nelly Deane.

My life was crowded with new people and new experiences, and I am

afraid I held her little in mind. I heard indirectly that Jud Deane

had lost what little property he owned in a luckless venture in

Cripple Creek, and that he had been able to keep his house in

Riverbend only through the clemency of his creditors. Guy Franklin

had his route changed and did not go to Riverbend any more. He

married the daughter of a rich cattle-man out near Long Pine, and

ran a dry-goods store of his own. Mrs. Dow wrote me a long letter

about once a year, and in one of these she told me that Nelly was

teaching in the sixth grade in the Riverbend school.

"Dear Nelly does not like teaching very well. The children try her,

and she is so pretty it seems a pity for her to be tied down to

uncongenial employment. Scott is still very attentive, and I have

noticed him look up at the window of Nelly's room in a very

determined way as he goes home to dinner. Scott continues

prosperous; he has made money during these hard times and now owns

both our hardware stores. He is close, but a very honorable fellow.

Nelly seems to hold off, but I think Mrs. Spinny has hopes. Nothing

would please her more. If Scott were more careful about his

appearance, it would help. He of course gets black about his

business, and Nelly, you know, is very dainty. People do say his

mother does his courting for him, she is so eager. If only Scott

does not turn out hard and penurious like his father! We must all

have our schooling in this life, but I don't want Nelly's to be too

severe. She is a dear girl, and keeps her color."

Mrs. Dow's own schooling had been none too easy. Her husband had

long been crippled with rheumatism, and was bitter and faultfinding.

Her daughters had married poorly, and one of her sons had fallen

into evil ways. But her letters were always cheerful, and in one of

them she gently remonstrated with me because I "seemed inclined to

take a sad view of life."

In the winter vacation of my senior year I stopped on my way home to

visit Mrs. Dow. The first thing she told me when I got into her old

buckboard at the station was that "Scott had at last prevailed," and

that Nelly was to marry him in the spring. As a preliminary step,

Nelly was about to join the Baptist church. "Just think, you will be

here for her baptizing! How that will please Nelly! She is to be

immersed to-morrow night."

I met Scott Spinny in the post-office that morning, and he gave me a

hard grip with one black hand. There was something grim and

saturnine about his powerful body and bearded face and his strong,

cold hands. I wondered what perverse fate had driven him for eight

years to dog the footsteps of a girl whose charm was due to

qualities naturally distasteful to him. It still seems strange to me

that in easy-going Riverbend, where there were so many boys who

could have lived contentedly enough with my little grasshopper, it

was the pushing ant who must have her and all her careless ways.

By a kind of unformulated etiquette one did not call upon candidates

for baptism on the day of the ceremony, so I had my first glimpse of

Nelly that evening. The baptistry was a cemented pit directly under

the pulpit rostrum, over which we had our stage when we sang "Queen

Esther." I sat through the sermon somewhat nervously. After the

minister, in his long, black gown, had gone down into the water and

the choir had finished singing, the door from the dressing-room

opened, and, led by one of the deacons, Nelly came down the steps

into the pool. Oh, she looked so little and meek and chastened! Her

white cashmere robe clung about her, and her brown hair was brushed

straight back and hung in two soft braids from a little head bent

humbly. As she stepped down into the water I shivered with the cold

of it, and I remembered sharply how much I had loved her. She went

down until the water was well above her waist, and stood white and

small, with her hands crossed on her breast, while the minister said

the words about being buried with Christ in baptism. Then, lying in

his arm, she disappeared under the dark water. "It will be like that

when she dies," I thought, and a quick pain caught my heart. The

choir began to sing "Washed in the Blood of the Lamb" as she rose

again, the door behind the baptistry opened, revealing those three

dear guardians, Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny, and she went

up into their arms.

I went to see Nell next day, up in the little room of many memories.

Such a sad, sad visit! She seemed changed--a little embarrassed and

quietly despairing. We talked of many of the old Riverbend girls and

boys, but she did not mention Guy Franklin or Scott Spinny, except

to say that her father had got work in Scott's hardware store. She

begged me, putting her hands on my shoulders with something of her

old impulsiveness, to come and stay a few days with her. But I was

afraid--afraid of what she might tell me and of what I might say.

When I sat in that room with all her trinkets, the foolish harvest

of her girlhood, lying about, and the white curtains and the little

white rug, I thought of Scott Spinny with positive terror and could

feel his hard grip on my hand again. I made the best excuse I could

about having to hurry on to Denver; but she gave me one quick look,

and her eyes ceased to plead. I saw that she understood me

perfectly. We had known each other so well. Just once, when I got up

to go and had trouble with my veil, she laughed her old merry laugh

and told me there were some things I would never learn, for all my

schooling.

The next day, when Mrs. Dow drove me down to the station to catch

the morning train for Denver, I saw Nelly hurrying to school with

several books under her arm. She had been working up her lessons at

home, I thought. She was never quick at her books, dear Nell.

* * * * *

It was ten years before I again visited Riverbend. I had been in

Rome for a long time, and had fallen into bitter homesickness. One

morning, sitting among the dahlias and asters that bloom so bravely

upon those gigantic heaps of earth-red ruins that were once the

palaces of the Cæsars, I broke the seal of one of Mrs. Dow's long

yearly letters. It brought so much sad news that I resolved then and

there to go home to Riverbend, the only place that had ever really

been home to me. Mrs. Dow wrote me that her husband, after years of

illness, had died in the cold spell last March. "So good and patient

toward the last," she wrote, "and so afraid of giving extra

trouble." There was another thing she saved until the last. She

wrote on and on, dear woman, about new babies and village

improvements, as if she could not bear to tell me; and then it came:

"You will be sad to hear that two months ago our dear Nelly left us.

It was a terrible blow to us all. I cannot write about it yet, I

fear. I wake up every morning feeling that I ought to go to her. She

went three days after her little boy was born. The baby is a fine

child and will live, I think, in spite of everything. He and her

little girl, now eight years old, whom she named Margaret, after

you, have gone to Mrs. Spinny's. She loves them more than if they

were her own. It seems as if already they had made her quite young

again. I wish you could see Nelly's children."

Ah, that was what I wanted, to see Nelly's children! The wish came

aching from my heart along with the bitter homesick tears; along

with a quick, torturing recollection that flashed upon me, as I

looked about and tried to collect myself, of how we two had sat in

our sunny seat in the corner of the old bare school-room one

September afternoon and learned the names of the seven hills

together. In that place, at that moment, after so many years, how it

all came back to me--the warm sun on my back, the chattering girl

beside me, the curly hair, the laughing yellow eyes, the stubby

little finger on the page! I felt as if even then, when we sat in

the sun with our heads together, it was all arranged, written out

like a story, that at this moment I should be sitting among the

crumbling bricks and drying grass, and she should be lying in the

place I knew so well, on that green hill far away.

* * * * *

Mrs. Dow sat with her Christmas sewing in the familiar sitting-room,

where the carpet and the wall-paper and the table-cover had all

faded into soft, dull colors, and even the chromo of Hagar and

Ishmael had been toned to the sobriety of age. In the bay-window the

tall wire flower-stand still bore its little terraces of potted

plants, and the big fuchsia and the Martha Washington geranium had

blossomed for Christmas-tide. Mrs. Dow herself did not look greatly

changed to me. Her hair, thin ever since I could remember it, was

now quite white, but her spare, wiry little person had all its old

activity, and her eyes gleamed with the old friendliness behind her

silver-bowed glasses. Her gray house-dress seemed just like those

she used to wear when I ran in after school to take her angel-food

cake down to the church supper.

The house sat on a hill, and from behind the geraniums I could see

pretty much all of Riverbend, tucked down in the soft snow, and the

air above was full of big, loose flakes, falling from a gray sky

which betokened settled weather. Indoors the hard-coal burner made a

tropical temperature, and glowed a warm orange from its isinglass

sides. We sat and visited, the two of us, with a great sense of

comfort and completeness. I had reached Riverbend only that morning,

and Mrs. Dow, who had been haunted by thoughts of shipwreck and

suffering upon wintry seas, kept urging me to draw nearer to the

fire and suggesting incidental refreshment. We had chattered all

through the winter morning and most of the afternoon, taking up one

after another of the Riverbend girls and boys, and agreeing that we

had reason to be well satisfied with most of them. Finally, after a

long pause in which I had listened to the contented ticking of the

clock and the crackle of the coal, I put the question I had until

then held back:

"And now, Mrs. Dow, tell me about the one we loved best of all.

Since I got your letter I've thought of her every day. Tell me all

about Scott and Nelly."

The tears flashed behind her glasses, and she smoothed the little

pink bag on her knee.

"Well, dear, I'm afraid Scott proved to be a hard man, like his

father. But we must remember that Nelly always had Mrs. Spinny. I

never saw anything like the love there was between those two. After

Nelly lost her own father and mother, she looked to Mrs. Spinny for

everything. When Scott was too unreasonable, his mother could 'most

always prevail upon him. She never lifted a hand to fight her own

battles with Scott's father, but she was never afraid to speak up

for Nelly. And then Nelly took great comfort of her little girl.

Such a lovely child!"

"Had she been very ill before the little baby came?"

"No, Margaret; I'm afraid 't was all because they had the wrong

doctor. I feel confident that either Doctor Tom or Doctor Jones

could have brought her through. But, you see, Scott had offended

them both, and they'd stopped trading at his store, so he would have

young Doctor Fox, a boy just out of college and a stranger. He got

scared and didn't know what to do. Mrs. Spinny felt he wasn't doing

right, so she sent for Mrs. Freeze and me. It seemed like Nelly had

got discouraged. Scott would move into their big new house before

the plastering was dry, and though 't was summer, she had taken a

terrible cold that seemed to have drained her, and she took no

interest in fixing the place up. Mrs. Spinny had been down with her

back again and wasn't able to help, and things was just anyway. We

won't talk about that, Margaret; I think 't would hurt Mrs. Spinny

to have you know. She nearly died of mortification when she sent for

us, and blamed her poor back. We did get Nelly fixed up nicely

before she died. I prevailed upon Doctor Tom to come in at the last,

and it 'most broke his heart. 'Why, Mis' Dow,' he said, 'if you'd

only have come and told me how 't was, I'd have come and carried her

right off in my arms.'"

"Oh, Mrs. Dow," I cried, "then it needn't have been?"

Mrs. Dow dropped her needle and clasped her hands quickly. "We

mustn't look at it that way, dear," she said tremulously and a

little sternly; "we mustn't let ourselves. We must just feel that

our Lord wanted her _then_, and took her to Himself. When it was all

over, she did look so like a child of God, young and trusting, like

she did on her baptizing night, you remember?"

I felt that Mrs. Dow did not want to talk any more about Nelly then,

and, indeed, I had little heart to listen; so I told her I would go

for a walk, and suggested that I might stop at Mrs. Spinny's to see

the children.

Mrs. Dow looked up thoughtfully at the clock. "I doubt if you'll

find little Margaret there now. It's half-past four, and she'll have

been out of school an hour and more. She'll be most likely coasting

on Lupton's Hill. She usually makes for it with her sled the minute

she is out of the school-house door. You know, it's the old hill

where you all used to slide. If you stop in at the church about six

o'clock, you'll likely find Mrs. Spinny there with the baby. I

promised to go down and help Mrs. Freeze finish up the tree, and

Mrs. Spinny said she'd run in with the baby, if 't wasn't too

bitter. She won't leave him alone with the Swede girl. She's like a

young woman with her first."

Lupton's Hill was at the other end of town, and when I got there the

dusk was thickening, drawing blue shadows over the snowy fields.

There were perhaps twenty children creeping up the hill or whizzing

down the packed sled-track. When I had been watching them for some

minutes, I heard a lusty shout, and a little red sled shot past me

into the deep snow-drift beyond. The child was quite buried for a

moment, then she struggled out and stood dusting the snow from her

short coat and red woolen comforter. She wore a brown fur cap, which

was too big for her and of an old-fashioned shape, such as girls

wore long ago, but I would have known her without the cap. Mrs. Dow

had said a beautiful child, and there would not be two like this in

Riverbend. She was off before I had time to speak to her, going up

the hill at a trot, her sturdy little legs plowing through the

trampled snow. When she reached the top she never paused to take

breath, but threw herself upon her sled and came down with a whoop

that was quenched only by the deep drift at the end.

"Are you Margaret Spinny?" I asked as she struggled out in a cloud

of snow.

"Yes, 'm." She approached me with frank curiosity, pulling her

little sled behind her. "Are you the strange lady staying at Mrs.

Dow's?" I nodded, and she began to look my clothes over with

respectful interest.

"Your grandmother is to be at the church at six o'clock, isn't she?"

"Yes, 'm."

"Well, suppose we walk up there now. It's nearly six, and all the

other children are going home." She hesitated, and looked up at the

faintly gleaming track on the hill-slope. "Do you want another

slide? Is that it?" I asked.

"Do you mind?" she asked shyly.

"No. I'll wait for you. Take your time; don't run."

Two little boys were still hanging about the slide, and they cheered

her as she came down, her comforter streaming in the wind.

"Now," she announced, getting up out of the drift, "I'll show you

where the church is."

"Shall I tie your comforter again?"

"No, 'm, thanks. I'm plenty warm." She put her mittened hand

confidingly in mine and trudged along beside me.

Mrs. Dow must have heard us tramping up the snowy steps of the

church, for she met us at the door. Every one had gone except the

old ladies. A kerosene lamp flickered over the Sunday-school chart,

with the lesson-picture of the Wise Men, and the little barrel-stove

threw out a deep glow over the three white heads that bent above the

baby. There the three friends sat, patting him, and smoothing his

dress, and playing with his hands, which made theirs look so brown.

"You ain't seen nothing finer in all your travels," said Mrs.

Spinny, and they all laughed.

They showed me his full chest and how strong his back was; had me

feel the golden fuzz on his head, and made him look at me with his

round, bright eyes. He laughed and reared himself in my arms as I

took him up and held him close to me. He was so warm and tingling

with life, and he had the flush of new beginnings, of the new

morning and the new rose. He seemed to have come so lately from his

mother's heart! It was as if I held her youth and all her young joy.

As I put my cheek down against his, he spied a pink flower in my

hat, and making a gleeful sound, he lunged at it with both fists.

"Don't let him spoil it," murmured Mrs. Spinny. "He loves color

so--like Nelly."

_Century_, October 1911

_The Bohemian Girl_

The Trans-continental Express swung along the windings of the Sand

River Valley, and in the rear seat of the observation car a young

man sat greatly at his ease, not in the least discomfited by the

fierce sunlight which beat in upon his brown face and neck and

strong back. There was a look of relaxation and of great passivity

about his broad shoulders, which seemed almost too heavy until he

stood up and squared them. He wore a pale flannel shirt and a blue

silk necktie with loose ends. His trousers were wide and belted at

the waist, and his short sack-coat hung open. His heavy shoes had

seen good service. His reddish-brown hair, like his clothes, had a

foreign cut. He had deep-set, dark blue eyes under heavy reddish

eyebrows. His face was kept clean only by close shaving, and even

the sharpest razor left a glint of yellow in the smooth brown of his

skin. His teeth and the palms of his hands were very white. His

head, which looked hard and stubborn, lay indolently in the green

cushion of the wicker chair, and as he looked out at the ripe summer

country a teasing, not unkindly smile played over his lips. Once, as

he basked thus comfortably, a quick light flashed in his eyes,

curiously dilating the pupils, and his mouth became a hard, straight

line, gradually relaxing into its former smile of rather kindly

mockery. He told himself, apparently, that there was no point in

getting excited; and he seemed a master hand at taking his ease when

he could. Neither the sharp whistle of the locomotive nor the

brakeman's call disturbed him. It was not until after the train had

stopped that he rose, put on a Panama hat, took from the rack a

small valise and a flute-case, and stepped deliberately to the

station platform. The baggage was already unloaded, and the stranger

presented a check for a battered sole-leather steamer-trunk.

"Can you keep it here for a day or two?" he asked the agent. "I may

send for it, and I may not."

"Depends on whether you like the country, I suppose?" demanded the

agent in a challenging tone.

"Just so."

The agent shrugged his shoulders, looked scornfully at the small

trunk, which was marked "N.E.," and handed out a claim check without

further comment. The stranger watched him as he caught one end of

the trunk and dragged it into the express room. The agent's manner

seemed to remind him of something amusing. "Doesn't seem to be a

very big place," he remarked, looking about.

"It's big enough for us," snapped the agent, as he banged the trunk

into a corner.

That remark, apparently, was what Nils Ericson had wanted. He

chuckled quietly as he took a leather strap from his pocket and

swung his valise around his shoulder. Then he settled his Panama

securely on his head, turned up his trousers, tucked the flute-case

under his arm, and started off across the fields. He gave the town,

as he would have said, a wide berth, and cut through a great fenced

pasture, emerging, when he rolled under the barbed wire at the

farther corner, upon a white dusty road which ran straight up from

the river valley to the high prairies, where the ripe wheat stood

yellow and the tin roofs and weather-cocks were twinkling in the

fierce sunlight. By the time Nils had done three miles, the sun was

sinking and the farm-wagons on their way home from town came

rattling by, covering him with dust and making him sneeze. When one

of the farmers pulled up and offered to give him a lift, he

clambered in willingly. The driver was a thin, grizzled old man with

a long lean neck and a foolish sort of beard, like a goat's. "How

fur ye goin'?" he asked, as he clucked to his horses and started

off.

"Do you go by the Ericson place?"

"Which Ericson?" The old man drew in his reins as if he expected to

stop again.

"Preacher Ericson's."

"Oh, the Old Lady Ericson's!" He turned and looked at Nils. "La, me!

If you're goin' out there you might 'a' rid out in the automobile.

That's a pity, now. The Old Lady Ericson was in town with her auto.

You might 'a' heard it snortin' anywhere about the post-office er

the butcher-shop."

"Has she a motor?" asked the stranger absently.

"'Deed an' she has! She runs into town every night about this time

for her mail and meat for supper. Some folks say she's afraid her

auto won't get exercise enough, but I say that's jealousy."

"Aren't there any other motors about here?"

"Oh, yes! we have fourteen in all. But nobody else gets around like

the Old Lady Ericson. She's out, rain er shine, over the whole

county, chargin' into town and out amongst her farms, an' up to her

sons' places. Sure you ain't goin' to the wrong place?" He craned

his neck and looked at Nils' flute-case with eager curiosity. "The

old woman ain't got any piany that I knows on. Olaf, he has a grand.

His wife's musical; took lessons in Chicago."

"I'm going up there to-morrow," said Nils imperturbably. He saw that

the driver took him for a piano-tuner.

"Oh, I see!" The old man screwed up his eyes mysteriously. He was a

little dashed by the stranger's non-communicativeness, but he soon

broke out again.

"I'm one o' Mis' Ericson's tenants. Look after one of her places. I

did own the place myself oncet, but I lost it a while back, in the

bad years just after the World's Fair. Just as well, too, I say.

Lets you out o' payin' taxes. The Ericsons do own most of the county

now. I remember the old preacher's fav'rite text used to be, 'To

them that hath shall be given.' They've spread something

wonderful--run over this here country like bindweed. But I ain't one

that begretches it to 'em. Folks is entitled to what they kin git;

and they're hustlers. Olaf, he's in the Legislature now, and a

likely man fur Congress. Listen, if that ain't the old woman comin'

now. Want I should stop her?"

Nils shook his head. He heard the deep chug-chug of a motor

vibrating steadily in the clear twilight behind them. The pale

lights of the car swam over the hill, and the old man slapped his

reins and turned clear out of the road, ducking his head at the

first of three angry snorts from behind. The motor was running at a

hot, even speed, and passed without turning an inch from its course.

The driver was a stalwart woman who sat at ease in the front seat

and drove her car bareheaded. She left a cloud of dust and a trail

of gasoline behind her. Her tenant threw back his head and sneezed.

"Whew! I sometimes say I'd as lief be _before_ Mrs. Ericson as

behind her. She does beat all! Nearly seventy, and never lets

another soul touch that car. Puts it into commission herself every

morning, and keeps it tuned up by the hitch-bar all day. I never

stop work for a drink o' water that I don't hear her a-churnin' up

the road. I reckon her darter-in-laws never sets down easy nowadays.

Never know when she'll pop in. Mis' Otto, she says to me: 'We're so

afraid that thing'll blow up and do Ma some injury yet, she's so

turrible venturesome.' Says I: 'I wouldn't stew, Mis' Otto; the old

lady'll drive that car to the funeral of every darter-in-law she's

got.' That was after the old woman had jumped a turrible bad

culvert."

The stranger heard vaguely what the old man was saying. Just now he

was experiencing something very much like homesickness, and he was

wondering what had brought it about. The mention of a name or two,

perhaps; the rattle of a wagon along a dusty road; the rank,

resinous smell of sunflowers and ironweed, which the night damp

brought up from the draws and low places; perhaps, more than all,

the dancing lights of the motor that had plunged by. He squared his

shoulders with a comfortable sense of strength.

The wagon, as it jolted westward, climbed a pretty steady upgrade.

The country, receding from the rough river valley, swelled more and

more gently, as if it had been smoothed out by the wind. On one of

the last of the rugged ridges, at the end of a branch road, stood a

grim square house with a tin roof and double porches. Behind the

house stretched a row of broken, wind-racked poplars, and down the

hill-slope to the left straggled the sheds and stables. The old man

stopped his horses where the Ericsons' road branched across a dry

sand creek that wound about the foot of the hill.

"That's the old lady's place. Want I should drive in?"

"No, thank you. I'll roll out here. Much obliged to you. Good

night."

His passenger stepped down over the front wheel, and the old man

drove on reluctantly, looking back as if he would like to see how

the stranger would be received.

As Nils was crossing the dry creek he heard the restive tramp of a

horse coming toward him down the hill. Instantly he flashed out of

the road and stood behind a thicket of wild plum bushes that grew in

the sandy bed. Peering through the dusk, he saw a light horse, under

tight rein, descending the hill at a sharp walk. The rider was a

slender woman--barely visible against the dark hillside--wearing an

old-fashioned derby hat and a long riding-skirt. She sat lightly in

the saddle, with her chin high, and seemed to be looking into the

distance. As she passed the plum thicket her horse snuffed the air

and shied. She struck him, pulling him in sharply, with an angry

exclamation, "_Blázne!_" in Bohemian. Once in the main road, she let

him out into a lope, and they soon emerged upon the crest of high

land, where they moved along the skyline, silhouetted against the

band of faint color that lingered in the west. This horse and rider,

with their free, rhythmical gallop, were the only moving things to

be seen on the face of the flat country. They seemed, in the last

sad light of evening, not to be there accidentally, but as an

inevitable detail of the landscape.

Nils watched them until they had shrunk to a mere moving speck

against the sky, then he crossed the sand creek and climbed the

hill. When he reached the gate the front of the house was dark, but

a light was shining from the side windows. The pigs were squealing

in the hog corral, and Nils could see a tall boy, who carried two

big wooden buckets, moving about among them. Half way between the

barn and the house, the windmill wheezed lazily. Following the path

that ran around to the back porch, Nils stopped to look through the

screen door into the lamp-lit kitchen. The kitchen was the largest

room in the house; Nils remembered that his older brothers used to

give dances there when he was a boy. Beside the stove stood a little

girl with two light yellow braids and a broad, flushed face, peering

anxiously into a frying-pan. In the dining-room beyond, a large,

broad-shouldered woman was moving about the table. She walked with

an active, springy step. Her face was heavy and florid, almost

without wrinkles, and her hair was black at seventy. Nils felt proud

of her as he watched her deliberate activity; never a momentary

hesitation, or a movement that did not tell. He waited until she

came out into the kitchen and, brushing the child aside, took her

place at the stove. Then he tapped on the screen door and entered.

"It's nobody but Nils, Mother. I expect you weren't looking for me."

Mrs. Ericson turned away from the stove and stood staring at him.

"Bring the lamp, Hilda, and let me look."

Nils laughed and unslung his valise. "What's the matter, Mother?

Don't you know me?"

Mrs. Ericson put down the lamp. "You must be Nils. You don't look

very different, anyway."

"Nor you, Mother. You hold your own. Don't you wear glasses yet?"

"Only to read by. Where's your trunk, Nils?"

"Oh, I left that in town. I thought it might not be convenient for

you to have company so near threshing-time."

"Don't be foolish, Nils." Mrs. Ericson turned back to the stove. "I

don't thresh now. I hitched the wheat land onto the next farm and

have a tenant. Hilda, take some hot water up to the company room,

and go call little Eric."

The tow-haired child, who had been standing in mute amazement, took

up the tea-kettle and withdrew, giving Nils a long, admiring look

from the door of the kitchen stairs.

"Who's the youngster?" Nils asked, dropping down on the bench behind

the kitchen stove.

"One of your Cousin Henrik's."

"How long has Cousin Henrik been dead?"

"Six years. There are two boys. One stays with Peter and one with

Anders. Olaf is their guardeen."

There was a clatter of pails on the porch, and a tall, lanky boy

peered wonderingly in through the screen door. He had a fair, gentle

face and big gray eyes, and wisps of soft yellow hair hung down

under his cap. Nils sprang up and pulled him into the kitchen,

hugging him and slapping him on the shoulders. "Well, if it isn't my

kid! Look at the size of him! Don't you know me, Eric?"

The boy reddened under his sunburn and freckles, and hung his head.

"I guess it's Nils," he said shyly.

"You're a good guesser," laughed Nils, giving the lad's hand a

swing. To himself he was thinking: "That's why the little girl

looked so friendly. He's taught her to like me. He was only six when

I went away, and he's remembered for twelve years."

Eric stood fumbling with his cap and smiling. "You look just like I

thought you would," he ventured.

"Go wash your hands, Eric," called Mrs. Ericson. "I've got cob corn

for supper, Nils. You used to like it. I guess you don't get much of

that in the old country. Here's Hilda; she'll take you up to your

room. You'll want to get the dust off you before you eat."

Mrs. Ericson went into the dining-room to lay another plate, and the

little girl came up and nodded to Nils as if to let him know that

his room was ready. He put out his hand and she took it, with a

startled glance up at his face. Little Eric dropped his towel, threw

an arm about Nils and one about Hilda, gave them a clumsy squeeze,

and then stumbled out to the porch.

During supper Nils heard exactly how much land each of his eight

grown brothers farmed, how their crops were coming on, and how much

live stock they were feeding. His mother watched him narrowly as she

talked. "You've got better looking, Nils," she remarked abruptly,

whereupon he grinned and the children giggled. Eric, although he was

eighteen and as tall as Nils, was always accounted a child, being

the last of so many sons. His face seemed childlike, too, Nils

thought, and he had the open, wandering eyes of a little boy. All

the others had been men at his age.

After supper Nils went out to the front porch and sat down on the

step to smoke a pipe. Mrs. Ericson drew a rocking-chair up near him

and began to knit busily. It was one of the few old-world customs

she had kept up, for she could not bear to sit with idle hands.

"Where's little Eric, Mother?"

"He's helping Hilda with the dishes. He does it of his own will; I

don't like a boy to be too handy about the house."

"He seems like a nice kid."

"He's very obedient."

Nils smiled a little in the dark. It was just as well to shift the

line of conversation. "What are you knitting there, Mother?"

"Baby stockings. The boys keep me busy." Mrs. Ericson chuckled and

clicked her needles.

"How many grandchildren have you?"

"Only thirty-one now. Olaf lost his three. They were sickly, like

their mother."

"I supposed he had a second crop by this time!"

"His second wife has no children. She's too proud. She tears about

on horseback all the time. But she'll get caught up with, yet. She

sets herself very high, though nobody knows what for. They were low

enough Bohemians she came of. I never thought much of Bohemians;

always drinking."

Nils puffed away at his pipe in silence, and Mrs. Ericson knitted

on. In a few moments she added grimly: "She was down here to-night,

just before you came. She'd like to quarrel with me and come between

me and Olaf, but I don't give her the chance. I suppose you'll be

bringing a wife home some day."

"I don't know. I've never thought much about it."

"Well, perhaps it's best as it is," suggested Mrs. Ericson

hopefully. "You'd never be contented tied down to the land. There

was roving blood in your father's family, and it's come out in you.

I expect your own way of life suits you best." Mrs. Ericson had

dropped into a blandly agreeable tone which Nils well remembered. It

seemed to amuse him a good deal and his white teeth flashed behind

his pipe. His mother's strategies had always diverted him, even when

he was a boy--they were so flimsy and patent, so illy proportioned

to her vigor and force. "They've been waiting to see which way I'd

jump," he reflected. He felt that Mrs. Ericson was pondering his

case deeply as she sat clicking her needles.

"I don't suppose you've ever got used to steady work," she went on

presently. "Men ain't apt to if they roam around too long. It's a

pity you didn't come back the year after the World's Fair. Your

father picked up a good bit of land cheap then, in the hard times,

and I expect maybe he'd have give you a farm. It's too bad you put

off comin' back so long, for I always thought he meant to do

something by you."

Nils laughed and shook the ashes out of his pipe. "I'd have missed a

lot if I had come back then. But I'm sorry I didn't get back to see

father."

"Well, I suppose we have to miss things at one end or the other.

Perhaps you are as well satisfied with your own doings, now, as

you'd have been with a farm," said Mrs. Ericson reassuringly.

"Land's a good thing to have," Nils commented, as he lit another

match and sheltered it with his hand.

His mother looked sharply at his face until the match burned out.

"Only when you stay on it!" she hastened to say.

Eric came round the house by the path just then, and Nils rose, with

a yawn. "Mother, if you don't mind, Eric and I will take a little

tramp before bed-time. It will make me sleep."

"Very well; only don't stay long. I'll sit up and wait for you. I

like to lock up myself."

Nils put his hand on Eric's shoulder, and the two tramped down the

hill and across the sand creek into the dusty highroad beyond.

Neither spoke. They swung along at an even gait, Nils puffing at his

pipe. There was no moon, and the white road and the wide fields lay

faint in the starlight. Over everything was darkness and thick

silence, and the smell of dust and sunflowers. The brothers followed

the road for a mile or more without finding a place to sit down.

Finally Nils perched on a stile over the wire fence, and Eric sat on

the lower step.

"I began to think you never would come back, Nils," said the boy

softly.

"Didn't I promise you I would?"

"Yes; but people don't bother about promises they make to babies.

Did you really know you were going away for good when you went to

Chicago with the cattle that time?"

"I thought it very likely, if I could make my way."

"I don't see how you did it, Nils. Not many fellows could." Eric

rubbed his shoulder against his brother's knee.

"The hard thing was leaving home--you and father. It was easy

enough, once I got beyond Chicago. Of course I got awful homesick;

used to cry myself to sleep. But I'd burned my bridges."

"You had always wanted to go, hadn't you?"

"Always. Do you still sleep in our little room? Is that cottonwood

still by the window?"

Eric nodded eagerly and smiled up at his brother in the gray

darkness.

"You remember how we always said the leaves were whispering when

they rustled at night? Well, they always whispered to me about the

sea. Sometimes they said names out of the geography books. In a high

wind they had a desperate sound, like something trying to tear

loose."

"How funny, Nils," said Eric dreamily, resting his chin on his hand.

"That tree still talks like that, and 'most always it talks to me

about you."

They sat a while longer, watching the stars. At last Eric whispered

anxiously: "Hadn't we better go back now? Mother will get tired

waiting for us." They rose and took a short cut home, through the

pasture.

II

The next morning Nils woke with the first flood of light that came

with dawn. The white-plastered walls of his room reflected the glare

that shone through the thin window-shades, and he found it

impossible to sleep. He dressed hurriedly and slipped down the hall

and up the back stairs to the half-story room which he used to share

with his little brother. Eric, in a skimpy night-shirt, was sitting

on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes, his pale yellow hair

standing up in tufts all over his head. When he saw Nils, he

murmured something confusedly and hustled his long legs into his

trousers. "I didn't expect you'd be up so early, Nils," he said, as

his head emerged from his blue shirt.

"Oh, you thought I was a dude, did you?" Nils gave him a playful tap

which bent the tall boy up like a clasp-knife. "See here; I must

teach you to box." Nils thrust his hands into his pockets and walked

about. "You haven't changed things much up here. Got most of my old

traps, haven't you?"

He took down a bent, withered piece of sapling that hung over the

dresser. "If this isn't the stick Lou Sandberg killed himself with!"

The boy looked up from his shoe-lacing.

"Yes; you never used to let me play with that. Just how did he do

it, Nils? You were with father when he found Lou, weren't you?"

"Yes. Father was going off to preach somewhere, and, as we drove

along, Lou's place looked sort of forlorn, and we thought we'd stop

and cheer him up. When we found him father said he'd been dead a

couple days. He'd tied a piece of binding twine round his neck, made

a noose in each end, fixed the nooses over the ends of a bent stick,

and let the stick spring straight; strangled himself."

"What made him kill himself such a silly way?"

The simplicity of the boy's question set Nils laughing. He clapped

little Eric on the shoulder. "What made him such a silly as to kill

himself at all, I should say!"

"Oh, well! But his hogs had the cholera, and all up and died on him,

didn't they?"

"Sure they did; but he didn't have cholera; and there were plenty of

hogs left in the world, weren't there?"

"Well, but, if they weren't his, how could they do him any good?"

Eric asked, in astonishment.

"Oh, scat! He could have had lots of fun with other people's hogs.

He was a chump, Lou Sandberg. To kill yourself for a pig--think of

that, now!" Nils laughed all the way downstairs, and quite

embarrassed little Eric, who fell to scrubbing his face and hands at

the tin basin. While he was patting his wet hair at the kitchen

looking-glass, a heavy tread sounded on the stairs. The boy dropped

his comb. "Gracious, there's Mother. We must have talked too long."

He hurried out to the shed, slipped on his overalls, and disappeared

with the milking-pails.

Mrs. Ericson came in, wearing a clean white apron, her black hair

shining from the application of a wet brush.

"Good morning, Mother. Can't I make the fire for you?"

"No, thank you, Nils. It's no trouble to make a cob fire, and I like

to manage the kitchen stove myself." Mrs. Ericson paused with a

shovel full of ashes in her hand. "I expect you will be wanting to

see your brothers as soon as possible. I'll take you up to Anders'

place this morning. He's threshing, and most of our boys are over

there."

"Will Olaf be there?"

Mrs. Ericson went on taking out the ashes, and spoke between

shovels. "No; Olaf's wheat is all in, put away in his new barn. He

got six thousand bushel this year. He's going to town to-day to get

men to finish roofing his barn."

"So Olaf is building a new barn?" Nils asked absently.

"Biggest one in the county, and almost done. You'll likely be here

for the barn-raising. He's going to have a supper and a dance as

soon as everybody's done threshing. Says it keeps the voters in a

good humor. I tell him that's all nonsense; but Olaf has a long head

for politics."

"Does Olaf farm all Cousin Henrik's land?"

Mrs. Ericson frowned as she blew into the faint smoke curling up

about the cobs. "Yes; he holds it in trust for the children, Hilda

and her brothers. He keeps strict account of everything he raises on

it, and puts the proceeds out at compound interest for them."

Nils smiled as he watched the little flames shoot up. The door of

the back stairs opened, and Hilda emerged, her arms behind her,

buttoning up her long gingham apron as she came. He nodded to her

gaily, and she twinkled at him out of her little blue eyes, set far

apart over her wide cheek-bones.

"There, Hilda, you grind the coffee--and just put in an extra

handful; I expect your Cousin Nils likes his strong," said Mrs.

Ericson, as she went out to the shed.

Nils turned to look at the little girl, who gripped the

coffee-grinder between her knees and ground so hard that her two

braids bobbed and her face flushed under its broad spattering of

freckles. He noticed on her middle finger something that had not

been there last night, and that had evidently been put on for

company: a tiny gold ring with a clumsily set garnet stone. As her

hand went round and round he touched the ring with the tip of his

finger, smiling.

Hilda glanced toward the shed door through which Mrs. Ericson had

disappeared. "My Cousin Clara gave me that," she whispered

bashfully. "She's Cousin Olaf's wife."

III

Mrs. Olaf Ericson--Clara Vavrika, as many people still called

her--was moving restlessly about her big bare house that morning.

Her husband had left for the county town before his wife was out of

bed--her lateness in rising was one of the many things the Ericson

family had against her. Clara seldom came downstairs before eight

o'clock, and this morning she was even later, for she had dressed

with unusual care. She put on, however, only a tight-fitting black

dress, which people thereabouts thought very plain. She was a tall,

dark woman of thirty, with a rather sallow complexion and a touch of

dull salmon red in her cheeks, where the blood seemed to burn under

her brown skin. Her hair, parted evenly above her low forehead, was

so black that there were distinctly blue lights in it. Her black

eyebrows were delicate half-moons and her lashes were long and

heavy. Her eyes slanted a little, as if she had a strain of Tartar

or gypsy blood, and were sometimes full of fiery determination and

sometimes dull and opaque. Her expression was never altogether

amiable; was often, indeed, distinctly sullen, or, when she was

animated, sarcastic. She was most attractive in profile, for then

one saw to advantage her small, well-shaped head and delicate ears,

and felt at once that here was a very positive, if not an altogether

pleasing, personality.

The entire management of Mrs. Olaf's household devolved upon her

aunt, Johanna Vavrika, a superstitious, doting woman of fifty. When

Clara was a little girl her mother died, and Johanna's life had been

spent in ungrudging service to her niece. Clara, like many

self-willed and discontented persons, was really very apt, without

knowing it, to do as other people told her, and to let her destiny

be decided for her by intelligences much below her own. It was her

Aunt Johanna who had humored and spoiled her in her girlhood, who

had got her off to Chicago to study piano, and who had finally

persuaded her to marry Olaf Ericson as the best match she would be

likely to make in that part of the country. Johanna Vavrika had been

deeply scarred by smallpox in the old country. She was short and

fat, homely and jolly and sentimental. She was so broad, and took

such short steps when she walked, that her brother, Joe Vavrika,

always called her his duck. She adored her niece because of her

talent, because of her good looks and masterful ways, but most of

all because of her selfishness.

Clara's marriage with Olaf Ericson was Johanna's particular triumph.

She was inordinately proud of Olaf's position, and she found a

sufficiently exciting career in managing Clara's house, in keeping

it above the criticism of the Ericsons, in pampering Olaf to keep him

from finding fault with his wife, and in concealing from every one

Clara's domestic infelicities. While Clara slept of a morning,

Johanna Vavrika was bustling about, seeing that Olaf and the men had

their breakfast, and that the cleaning or the butter-making or the

washing was properly begun by the two girls in the kitchen. Then, at

about eight o'clock, she would take Clara's coffee up to her, and chat

with her while she drank it, telling her what was going on in the

house. Old Mrs. Ericson frequently said that her daughter-in-law would

not know what day of the week it was if Johanna did not tell her

every morning. Mrs. Ericson despised and pitied Johanna, but did not

wholly dislike her. The one thing she hated in her daughter-in-law

above everything else was the way in which Clara could come it over

people. It enraged her that the affairs of her son's big, barnlike

house went on as well as they did, and she used to feel that in this

world we have to wait over-long to see the guilty punished. "Suppose

Johanna Vavrika died or got sick?" the old lady used to say to Olaf.

"Your wife wouldn't know where to look for her own dish-cloth." Olaf

only shrugged his shoulders. The fact remained that Johanna did not

die, and, although Mrs. Ericson often told her she was looking

poorly, she was never ill. She seldom left the house, and she slept

in a little room off the kitchen. No Ericson, by night or day, could

come prying about there to find fault without her knowing it. Her

one weakness was that she was an incurable talker, and she sometimes

made trouble without meaning to.

This morning Clara was tying a wine-colored ribbon about her throat

when Johanna appeared with her coffee. After putting the tray on a

sewing-table, she began to make Clara's bed, chattering the while in

Bohemian.

"Well, Olaf got off early, and the girls are baking. I'm going down

presently to make some poppy-seed bread for Olaf. He asked for prune

preserves at breakfast, and I told him I was out of them, and to

bring some prunes and honey and cloves from town."

Clara poured her coffee. "Ugh! I don't see how men can eat so much

sweet stuff. In the morning, too!"

Her aunt chuckled knowingly. "Bait a bear with honey, as we say in

the old country."

"Was he cross?" her niece asked indifferently.

"Olaf? Oh, no! He was in fine spirits. He's never cross if you know

how to take him. I never knew a man to make so little fuss about

bills. I gave him a list of things to get a yard long, and he didn't

say a word; just folded it up and put it in his pocket."

"I can well believe he didn't say a word," Clara remarked with a

shrug. "Some day he'll forget how to talk."

"Oh, but they say he's a grand speaker in the Legislature. He knows

when to keep quiet. That's why he's got such influence in politics.

The people have confidence in him." Johanna beat up a pillow and

held it under her fat chin while she slipped on the case. Her niece

laughed.

"Maybe we could make people believe we were wise, Aunty, if we held

our tongues. Why did you tell Mrs. Ericson that Norman threw me

again last Saturday and turned my foot? She's been talking to Olaf."

Johanna fell into great confusion. "Oh, but, my precious, the old

lady asked for you, and she's always so angry if I can't give an

excuse. Anyhow, she needn't talk; she's always tearing up something

with that motor of hers."

When her aunt clattered down to the kitchen, Clara went to dust the

parlor. Since there was not much there to dust, this did not take

very long. Olaf had built the house new for her before their

marriage, but her interest in furnishing it had been short-lived. It

went, indeed, little beyond a bath-tub and her piano. They had

disagreed about almost every other article of furniture, and Clara

had said she would rather have her house empty than full of things

she didn't want. The house was set in a hillside, and the west

windows of the parlor looked out above the kitchen yard thirty feet

below. The east windows opened directly into the front yard. At one

of the latter, Clara, while she was dusting, heard a low whistle.

She did not turn at once, but listened intently as she drew her

cloth slowly along the round of a chair. Yes, there it was:

"_I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls,_"

She turned and saw Nils Ericson laughing in the sunlight, his hat in

his hand, just outside the window. As she crossed the room he leaned

against the wire screen. "Aren't you at all surprised to see me,

Clara Vavrika?"

"No; I was expecting to see you. Mother Ericson telephoned Olaf last

night that you were here."

Nils squinted and gave a long whistle. "Telephoned? That must have

been while Eric and I were out walking. Isn't she enterprising? Lift

this screen, won't you?"

Clara lifted the screen, and Nils swung his leg across the

window-sill. As he stepped into the room she said: "You didn't think

you were going to get ahead of your mother, did you?"

He threw his hat on the piano. "Oh, I do sometimes. You see, I'm

ahead of her now. I'm supposed to be in Anders' wheat-field. But, as

we were leaving, Mother ran her car into a soft place beside the

road and sank up to the hubs. While they were going for horses to

pull her out, I cut away behind the stacks and escaped." Nils

chuckled. Clara's dull eyes lit up as she looked at him admiringly.

"You've got them guessing already. I don't know what your mother

said to Olaf over the telephone, but he came back looking as if he'd

seen a ghost, and he didn't go to bed until a dreadful hour--ten

o'clock, I should think. He sat out on the porch in the dark like a

graven image. It had been one of his talkative days, too." They both

laughed, easily and lightly, like people who have laughed a great

deal together; but they remained standing.

"Anders and Otto and Peter looked as if they had seen ghosts, too,

over in the threshing-field. What's the matter with them all?"

Clara gave him a quick, searching look. "Well, for one thing,

they've always been afraid you have the other will."

Nils looked interested. "The other will?"

"Yes. A later one. They knew your father made another, but they

never knew what he did with it. They almost tore the old house to

pieces looking for it. They always suspected that he carried on a

clandestine correspondence with you, for the one thing he would do

was to get his own mail himself. So they thought he might have sent

the new will to you for safekeeping. The old one, leaving everything

to your mother, was made long before you went away, and it's

understood among them that it cuts you out--that she will leave all

the property to the others. Your father made the second will to

prevent that. I've been hoping you had it. It would be such fun to

spring it on them." Clara laughed mirthfully, a thing she did not

often do now.

Nils shook his head reprovingly. "Come, now, you're malicious."

"No, I'm not. But I'd like something to happen to stir them all up,

just for once. There never was such a family for having nothing ever

happen to them but dinner and threshing. I'd almost be willing to

die, just to have a funeral. _You_ wouldn't stand it for three

weeks."

Nils bent over the piano and began pecking at the keys with the

finger of one hand. "I wouldn't? My dear young lady, how do you know

what I can stand? _You_ wouldn't wait to find out."

Clara flushed darkly and frowned. "I didn't believe you would ever

come back--" she said defiantly.

"Eric believed I would, and he was only a baby when I went away.

However, all's well that ends well, and I haven't come back to be a

skeleton at the feast. We mustn't quarrel. Mother will be here with

a search-warrant pretty soon." He swung round and faced her,

thrusting his hands into his coat pockets. "Come, you ought to be

glad to see me, if you want something to happen. I'm something, even

without a will. We can have a little fun, can't we? I think we can!"

She echoed him, "I think we can!" They both laughed and their eyes

sparkled. Clara Vavrika looked ten years younger than when she had

put the velvet ribbon about her throat that morning.

"You know, I'm so tickled to see mother," Nils went on. "I didn't

know I was so proud of her. A regular pile-driver. How about little

pigtails, down at the house? Is Olaf doing the square thing by those

children?"

Clara frowned pensively. "Olaf has to do something that looks like

the square thing, now that he's a public man!" She glanced drolly at

Nils. "But he makes a good commission out of it. On Sundays they all

get together here and figure. He lets Peter and Anders put in big

bills for the keep of the two boys, and he pays them out of the

estate. They are always having what they call accountings. Olaf gets

something out of it, too. I don't know just how they do it, but it's

entirely a family matter, as they say. And when the Ericsons say

that--" Clara lifted her eyebrows.

Just then the angry _honk-honk_ of an approaching motor sounded from

down the road. Their eyes met and they began to laugh. They laughed

as children do when they can not contain themselves, and can not

explain the cause of their mirth to grown people, but share it

perfectly together. When Clara Vavrika sat down at the piano after

he was gone, she felt that she had laughed away a dozen years. She

practised as if the house were burning over her head.

When Nils greeted his mother and climbed into the front seat of the

motor beside her, Mrs. Ericson looked grim, but she made no comment

upon his truancy until she had turned her car and was retracing her

revolutions along the road that ran by Olaf's big pasture. Then she

remarked dryly:

"If I were you I wouldn't see too much of Olaf's wife while you are

here. She's the kind of woman who can't see much of men without

getting herself talked about. She was a good deal talked about

before he married her."

"Hasn't Olaf tamed her?" Nils asked indifferently.

Mrs. Ericson shrugged her massive shoulders. "Olaf don't seem to

have much luck, when it comes to wives. The first one was meek

enough, but she was always ailing. And this one has her own way. He

says if he quarreled with her she'd go back to her father, and then

he'd lose the Bohemian vote. There are a great many Bohunks in this

district. But when you find a man under his wife's thumb you can

always be sure there's a soft spot in him somewhere."

Nils thought of his own father, and smiled. "She brought him a good

deal of money, didn't she, besides the Bohemian vote?"

Mrs. Ericson sniffed. "Well, she has a fair half section in her own

name, but I can't see as that does Olaf much good. She will have a

good deal of property some day, if old Vavrika don't marry again.

But I don't consider a saloonkeeper's money as good as other

people's money."

Nils laughed outright. "Come, Mother, don't let your prejudices

carry you that far. Money's money. Old Vavrika's a mighty decent

sort of saloonkeeper. Nothing rowdy about him."

Mrs. Ericson spoke up angrily: "Oh, I know you always stood up for

them! But hanging around there when you were a boy never did you any

good, Nils, nor any of the other boys who went there. There weren't

so many after her when she married Olaf, let me tell you. She knew

enough to grab her chance."

Nils settled back in his seat. "Of course I liked to go there,

Mother, and you were always cross about it. You never took the

trouble to find out that it was the one jolly house in this country

for a boy to go to. All the rest of you were working yourselves to

death, and the houses were mostly a mess, full of babies and washing

and flies. Oh, it was all right--I understand that; but you are

young only once, and I happened to be young then. Now, Vavrika's was

always jolly. He played the violin, and I used to take my flute, and

Clara played the piano, and Johanna used to sing Bohemian songs. She

always had a big supper for us--herrings and pickles and poppyseed

bread, and lots of cake and preserves. Old Joe had been in the army

in the old country, and he could tell lots of good stories. I can

see him cutting bread, at the head of the table, now. I don't know

what I'd have done when I was a kid if it hadn't been for the

Vavrikas, really."

"And all the time he was taking money that other people had worked

hard in the fields for," Mrs. Ericson observed.

"So do the circuses, Mother, and they're a good thing. People ought

to get fun for some of their money. Even father liked old Joe."

"Your father," Mrs. Ericson said grimly, "liked everybody."

As they crossed the sand creek and turned into her own place, Mrs.

Ericson observed, "There's Olaf's buggy. He's stopped on his way

from town." Nils shook himself and prepared to greet his brother,

who was waiting on the porch.

Olaf was a big, heavy Norwegian, slow of speech and movement. His

head was large and square, like a block of wood. When Nils, at a

distance, tried to remember what his brother looked like, he could

recall only his heavy head, high forehead, large nostrils, and

pale-blue eyes, set far apart. Olaf's features were rudimentary: the

thing one noticed was the face itself, wide and flat and pale,

devoid of any expression, betraying his fifty years as little as it

betrayed anything else, and powerful by reason of its very

stolidness. When Olaf shook hands with Nils he looked at him from

under his light eyebrows, but Nils felt that no one could ever say

what that pale look might mean. The one thing he had always felt in

Olaf was a heavy stubbornness, like the unyielding stickiness of wet

loam against the plow. He had always found Olaf the most difficult

of his brothers.

"How do you do, Nils? Expect to stay with us long?"

"Oh, I may stay forever," Nils answered gaily. "I like this country

better than I used to."

"There's been some work put into it since you left," Olaf remarked.

"Exactly. I think it's about ready to live in now--and I'm about

ready to settle down." Nils saw his brother lower his big head.

("Exactly like a bull," he thought.) "Mother's been persuading me to

slow down now, and go in for farming," he went on lightly.

Olaf made a deep sound in his throat. "Farming ain't learned in a

day," he brought out, still looking at the ground.

"Oh, I know! But I pick things up quickly." Nils had not meant to

antagonize his brother, and he did not know now why he was doing it.

"Of course," he went on, "I shouldn't expect to make a big success,

as you fellows have done. But then, I'm not ambitious. I won't want

much. A little land, and some cattle, maybe."

Olaf still stared at the ground, his head down. He wanted to ask

Nils what he had been doing all these years, that he didn't have a

business somewhere he couldn't afford to leave; why he hadn't more

pride than to come back with only a little sole-leather trunk to

show for himself, and to present himself as the only failure in the

family. He did not ask one of these questions, but he made them all

felt distinctly.

"Humph!" Nils thought. "No wonder the man never talks, when he can

butt his ideas into you like that without ever saying a word. I

suppose he uses that kind of smokeless powder on his wife all the

time. But I guess she has her innings." He chuckled, and Olaf looked

up. "Never mind me, Olaf. I laugh without knowing why, like little

Eric. He's another cheerful dog."