A NEW SETTLER.
"Why don't His Nobs go home out of the slush, and come back here when
it's dry, if he wants to?" demanded, one night, Lovina Nixon of her
husband, as he performed the ultimate evening ceremonial of whittling
kindlings for the morning fire. "There's no sense of him and Daise
wading around here through the mud, making four more feet to track my
floor up, when they've got a comfortable home, with a dry sidewalk to
it, laying idle in town. Now, is there?"
John Nixon, his sock-feet propped on the stove-pan, pushed hard with his
jack-knife against a tough shaving, and allowed the usual interval to
elapse before he made response.
"You claim to see everything," he remarked, finally, as the shaving
split off and fell to the floor, "an' I guess you do. Like most of the
weemen, there ain't much you miss. Ain't you noticed nothing about
Bill's actions lately that might tell you why he stays around?"
Lovina came to attention, her hands at her hips.
"Why, no," she said, "I ain't. How could I? He spends most of his time
out o' doors with you."
"Well," said her husband, "you can gener'ly take in things without
lookin'--through the pores of your skin, like. Hasn't your sense of
feelin' told you before now, that Bill's been bit by the farmin'
bug?--bit hard, too!"
"What!" Lovina smiled incredulously; "why, he don't know a plow from a
set of harrows. Have some sense, man."
"Don't he?" Nixon applied his knife again to the edge of the piece of
pine board; "maybe he didn't when he first come out here, but there
ain't much now he don't know. He's watched me blue-stonin' the seed
wheat; he's had me take the fannin' mill apart to see what makes it go;
and I guess I've plowed pretty near thirty acres for him, in pantomime,
with the old breakin' plow, out there in the snow. No hired farmin' for
Bill--he's a-goin' to do all the work himself."
"I pity his hands," Lovina Nixon observed, her knuckles at her chin
reflectively. "Where's he gettin' his farm? Not going to buy us out, I
suppose."
"Oh, we're fixin' that part of it," John Nixon, having finished the
kindlings, folded his knife and returned it to his hip-pocket. "To keep
you from gettin' any wrong notions into your head, I might say that he
ain't goin' to buy _us_ out, however. It's Jimmy Tomlinson's place he's
gettin'. We're going over to see Jimmy to-morrow."
Jimmy Tomlinson, standing in the doorway of his bachelor cabin across
the road-allowance from the Nixon farm, next morning welcomed glowingly
the tall man in gray and the short broad man in overalls who drove up to
his door in a muddy-spoke blackboard.
"Spring-like weather, Jim," said John Nixon, quizzically, as he pulled
up the bay horse in the lee of the house bluff, "why ain't you down't
the granary, picklin' up your seed?"
Jimmy Tomlinson merely grinned. He was uncommunicative and small and
somewhere between fifty and sixty years old. To his gray flannel shirt
he had this morning buttoned the celluloid collar which was always added
to his attire when receiving callers or when working in his front field,
which adjoined the Toddburn road. He had a little sandy moustache and a
rather delicately-tipped chin which, as a cut in its cleft attested, had
just been shaven.
"Putt in y'r horse," he said, in a thin high voice like a woman's, "tie
him in the far stall, Jack. Come in, sir." This last to Sir William,
upon whom the eyes of Mr. Tomlinson--who wanted $20,000, for his
half-section--were fixed in timid appraisal.
Jimmy Tomlinson, who had been a country bachelor for over half a
century, now in his later but still sound and healthy years, wanted two
things--to move into town, and to get married. His father had worked out
in the harvest field when past ninety, and his mother had "run the
house" unaided till her death at eighty-seven. Neither had ever had "a
sick day"; so it was the reasonable expectation of their son, in his
fifties, that he had between thirty and forty more comfortable years
"above ground". As a result of a score and a half years of thrifty
farming, Jimmy Tomlinson had $30,000 in bank. This, with the $20,000
which he intended to ask and to get for his farm, would make $50,000. If
no young woman wanted a healthy bachelor with $50,000--even though
slightly above the usual age at which married life is commenced--then
the world had changed mightily from what it used to be. Besides, there
was no law against a man wearing a toupee. And if--as said a certain
beauty pamphlet which had come to Jimmy's house wrapped around a cake of
toilet soap--massage and a certain kind of "cream" could do marvels with
the wrinkles of womankind, where was the reason a man could not lock the
door, plug up the keyhole, pull down the window-blind, and regain
youthful beauty in the same way. Surely a man's fingers were his to use,
and to look pretty is a legitimate ambition.
Jimmy had once thought of Daisy for his own; and it was therefore with
a slight, but passing, tinge of envy that he now looked out of the
corner of a diffident eye at her husband, who was after all no younger
than himself.
Entering the house of Mr. Tomlinson, Sir William Ware found himself in a
single log-walled room, of which the floor was tidily swept and the
central small table covered with red oilcloth. On a shelf braced with
home-sawn brackets, stood a round alarm clock, a coal-oil lamp
and--their titled backs turned outward--a little pile of paper-bound
books whose names suggested that they were love stories. On top of all
was a department store catalogue, with the page turned back at the men's
attire section. There were in the room three kitchen chairs and an old
upholstered easy-chair, to the last of which Mr. Tomlinson escorted his
guest.
"Jolly healthy out here, old chap," Ware remarked, as he sat down, in
the chilly March-end breeze that blew in through the open door; "there
must be a bit of an Old Country strain in you. Do you keep the door open
all winter?"
"Pretty near all winter," said Jimmy Tomlinson, answering with the
simple truth, "I'm outside most o' the time."
With this, he sat down diffidently, put his knees together, and spread
his hands upon them; and, as Sir William was in a meditative mood, no
more words passed between host and guest till Nixon came in from the
stable.
"Well," he said, setting his hat to the back of his head and drawing up
a chair, "I s'pose we may as well get down to business--eh, boys? Jim
here's the only man that has all summer on his hands. You're mighty
foolish to sell out now, Jim, with wheat the price it is and the farmers
just commencin' to make a little money."
"I have all the money I want," said Jimmy Tomlinson, in his thin voice.
"You've kep' your nose down to the grindstone for thirty-odd years, eh,
and now you want a rest," prompted Nixon, slapping Tomlinson on the
knee; "ain't that it, Jim?"
"I--I--yes, that's it," said the bachelor. "Thirty-three years," he
continued--haltingly at first, but becoming fluent as he proceeded with
the verbal expression of a dream that had been so often turned over in
his mind that every detail of it was complete--"in storm and sunshine,
neighbors, I've walked up and down between m' plow-handles and figured
on the day when I could quit and take it easy and get married, like a
civilized man--"
"Civilized?" put in John Nixon. "Jim, boy, the only man that keeps out
of trouble is the man that has sense enough to stay single. Look at
him, Bill! Why, he could shave off his mustache, hang a schoolbag over
his shoulder, shorten up his pants, and start right in goin' to school,
and nobody would know him from a fifteen-year-old boy. Look at him, and
then look at us, the same age! Civilized! Jimmy, you take the advice of
a man that knows, and stay uncivilized. Eh, Bill?"
"Now, now, Nixon," Ware shook a finger at his father-in-law. "Go on,
Tomlinson."
"----like a civilized man," Tomlinson, wrapped up in his mental picture,
resumed as though he had never been interrupted, "and see a little of
town life and the things a man reads about. This is a mighty big world
we're in, boys, and we don't see much of it from out here. Here in this
settlement, every girl's either married or got a feller----"
"I thought it was the world you wanted to see, Jim----"
"Do shut-up, Nixon. You _are_ an incorrigible chap, you know. Don't mind
him, Tomlinson. He really is interested, just as much as I am--that is
to say, vastly. Please go on.
"----or got a feller," Jimmy Tomlinson continued, staring before him and
unconsciously moving his hands on his knees with a species of animation,
"and they won't look sideways at you, let alone make up to you----"
"Make up to you?" commented Nixon. "Did you hear that, Bill--he wants
them to make up to him. I don't want for to interrupt. But could you
listen to that, and keep still? I can't! That's why you're still single,
Jimmy--at fifty-six."
"Fifty-five past," corrected Jimmy Tomlinson, breaking the thread of his
thought for the first time; then he went on, "it ain't right for a man
to live all his lone, out here among the kyoots (coyotes), an' see
nothin' at all of life. I was born and fetched up on a farm. My father,
he married late in life--you know that, Jack--an' when I was born, my
parents was both old. I was their first an' their last, an' I never had
nobody to talk to--no brothers n'r sisters--so it's natural, ain't it,
that I grew up kind of backward.
"Well, nobody has ever seemed to want for to talk to me, an' I ain't the
kind that can push myself in; so I made up my mind, a long time ago, I'd
stay in the shack here and save money; and when I got enough to pay my
way, so I wouldn't have to ask no favors of nobody, nowhere, I'd sell
out an' pack my grip and travel. I could have quit ten years ago or
more, an' had worlds-an'-a-plenty of cash to carry me through; but I'm
kind of slow to move, and I guess a feller gets more so as he gets
older--not that I'm anyways old yet, you know----"
"Oh, no," said Nixon; "just beginnin' life, Jimmy--that's all."
"----and I guess I would have b'en here for another ten years maybe,
Jack, if you and your friend hadn't come along. But I feel just as good
now, better if anything, as I did at forty-five past, and I have
considerable more money, so maybe it's just as well after all. Now,"
Jimmy Tomlinson, concluding this explanatory prelude to the sale of his
farm in the manner in which he had often rehearsed it to himself, swung
his chair around facing Ware, and injected into his tone a bargaining
briskness that cracked his voice to a squeal, "whutt's it to be. Twenty
thousand, cash down, takes this place--buildin's, stock, implements,
what grain's in the grennery, fowls, feed, everything: want to get it
all off my hands in one sling. All that the man I sell to's got to do is
to hitch up my team--his team, it will be then--and drive me and my
trunk into Toddburn. But I got to have the cash, right in my hand--no
notes to worry over, no fear of the place comin' back onto me when I
thought I was through with it, nothin' to worry about in this wide
world. Well, sir?"
"Have you a pen and ink?" said Sir William, bustling from his chair to
accommodate himself to the other's mood, moving over to a seat by the
table, and laying his cheque-book on the red oilcloth.
Jimmy Tomlinson, his hands trembling with the excitement of this
climactic moment of his whole life, brought an old stone ink-bottle and
a pen with a nib that sputtered like an angry cat as the baronet wrote.
An interval of quick writing; a brisk ripping sound, as perforated edges
tore apart: and Jimmy Aleck Tomlinson, bachelor and recluse, held at
last in his hand the small precious oblong slip which spelled
emancipation from the farm life that had held the Tomlinsons of four
tardy-marrying generations.
It was a final instinct of caution that made the vendor, a few moments
later, as Nixon returned from the hitched buckboard for the leather
mittens he had accidentally left on the window-sill, whisper hoarsely,
"Is he good for it, Jack?"
"Good for it!" Nixon, drawing on the mittens, dealt Jimmy Tomlinson such
a congratulatory whack on the shoulder that the latter took two
involuntary steps forward; "good for it, Jimmy! Why, Bill yonder could
buy up the whole settlement, with Toddburn throwed in for good measure,
if he had any use for it."
"Well, I s'pose it's so, if you say it is, neighbor. He's your girl's
man, and you ought to know, if anybody does. But somebody, I forget just
who, was tellin' me he heard this Ware was goin' to run the farm
himself, without hirin' any help. So naturally I figured, if that was
so, he hadn't the money to pay a man."
"No, it ain't that," said John Nixon, as he turned toward the door;
"it's true that he don't intend to hire any more men than he has to, and
it's true that he's going to work right along with the ones he does
hire. But when you say why--I don't know. All I know is, Bill's just
a-pawin' the air to get to a pitchfork. Ain't that always the way,
Jim?--ain't it, now? Nobody satisfied. Them that has to buck wood, like
you an' me, don't want to. Them that don't have to, is fairly bawlin'
and pawin' up the sod, to get to a sawhorse."