THE SOD TAVERN.
Here and there Charlton noticed the little claim-shanties, built in every
sort of fashion, mere excuses for pre-emption. Some were even constructed
of brush. What was lacking in the house was amply atoned for by the
perjury of the claimant who, in pre-empting, would swear to any necessary
number of good qualities in his habitation. On a little knoll ahead of
the stage he saw what seemed to be a heap of earth. There must have been
some inspiration in this mound, for, as soon as it came in sight, Whisky
Jim began to chirrup and swear at his horses, and to crack his long whip
threateningly until he had sent them off up the hill at a splendid pace.
Just by this mound of earth he reined up with an air that said the
forenoon route was finished. For this was nothing less than the "Sod
Tavern," a house built of cakes of the tenacious prairiesod. No other
material was used except the popple-poles, which served for supports to
the sod-roof. The tavern was not over ten feet high at the apex of the
roof; it had been built for two or three years, and the grass was now
growing on top. A red-shirted publican sallied out of this artificial
grotto, and invited the ladies and gentlemen to dinner.
It appeared, from a beautifully-engraved map hanging on the walls of the
Sod Tavern, that this earthly tabernacle stood in the midst of an ideal
town. The map had probably been constructed by a poet, for it was quite
superior to the limitations of sense and matter-of-fact. According to the
map, this solitary burrow was surrounded by Seminary, Depôt, Court-House,
Woolen Factory, and a variety of other potential institutions, which
composed the flourishing city of New Cincinnati. But the map was meant
chiefly for Eastern circulation.
Charlton's dietetic theories were put to the severest test at the table.
He had a good appetite. A ride in the open air in Minnesota is apt to
make one hungry. But the first thing that disgusted Mr. Charlton was the
coffee, already poured out, and steaming under his nose. He hated coffee
because he liked it; and the look of disgust with which he shoved it away
was the exact measure of his physical craving for it. The solid food on
the table consisted of waterlogged potatoes, half-baked salt-rising
bread, and salt-pork. Now, young Charlton was a reader of the _Water-Cure
Journal_ of that day, and despised meat of all things, and of all meat
despised swine's flesh, as not even fit for Jews; and of all forms of
hog, hated fat salt-pork as poisonously indigestible. So with a dyspeptic
self-consciousness he rejected the pork, picked off the periphery of the
bread near the crust, cautiously avoiding the dough-bogs in the middle;
but then he revenged himself by falling furiously upon the aquatic
potatoes, out of which most of the nutriment had been soaked.
Jim, who sat alongside him, doing cordial justice to the badness of the
meal, muttered that it wouldn't do to eat by idees in Minnesoty. And with
the freedom that belongs to the frontier, the company begun to discuss
dietetics, the fat gentleman roundly abusing the food for the express
purpose, as Charlton thought, of diverting attention from his voracious
eating of it.
"Simply despicable," grunted the fat man, as he took a third slice of the
greasy pork. "I do despise such food."
"Eats it _like_ he was mad at it," said Driver Jim in an undertone.
But as Charlton's vegetarianism was noticed, all fell to denouncing it.
Couldn't live in a cold climate without meat. Cadaverous Mr. Minorkey,
the broad-shouldered, sad-looking man with side-whiskers, who complained
incessantly of a complication of disorders, which included dyspepsia,
consumption, liver-disease, organic disease of the heart, rheumatism,
neuralgia, and entire nervous prostration, and who was never entirely
happy except in telling over the oft-repeated catalogue of his disgusting
symptoms--Mr. Minorkey, as he sat by his daughter, inveighed, in an
earnest crab-apple voice, against Grahamism. He would have been in his
grave twenty years ago if it hadn't been for good meat. And then he
recited in detail the many desperate attacks from which he had been saved
by beefsteak. But this pork he felt sure would make him sick. It might
kill him. And he evidently meant to sell his life as dearly as possible,
for, as Jim muttered to Charlton, he was "goin' the whole hog anyhow."
"Miss Minorkey," said the fat gentleman checking a piece of pork in the
middle of its mad career toward his lips, "Miss Minorkey, we _should_
like to hear from you on this subject." In truth, the fat gentleman was
very weary of Mr. Minorkey's pitiful succession of diagnoses of the awful
symptoms and fatal complications of which he had been cured by very
allopathic doses of animal food. So he appealed to Miss Minorkey for
relief at a moment when her father had checked and choked his utterance
with coffee.
Miss Minorkey was quite a different affair from her father. She was
thoroughly but not obtrusively healthy. She had a high, white forehead, a
fresh complexion, and a mouth which, if it was deficient in sweetness and
warmth of expression, was also free from all bitterness and
aggressiveness. Miss Minorkey was an eminently well-educated young lady
as education goes. She was more--she was a young lady of reading and of
ideas. She did not exactly defend Charlton's theory in her reply, but she
presented both sides of the controversy, and quoted some scientific
authorities in such a way as to make it apparent that there _were_ two
sides. This unexpected and rather judicial assistance called forth from
Charlton a warm acknowledgment, his pale face flushed with modest
pleasure, and as he noted the intellectuality of Miss Minorkey's forehead
he inwardly comforted himself that the only person of ideas in the whole
company was not wholly against him.
Albert Charlton was far from being a "ladies' man;" indeed, nothing was
more despicable in his eyes than men who frittered away life in ladies'
company. But this did not at all prevent him from being very human
himself in his regard for ladies. All the more that he had lived out of
society all his life, did his heart flutter when he took his seat in the
stage after dinner. For Miss Minorkey's father and the fat gentleman felt
that they must have the back seat; there were two other gentlemen on the
middle seat; and Albert Charlton, all unused to the presence of ladies,
must needs sit on the front seat, alongside the gray traveling-dress of
the intellectual Miss Minorkey, who, for her part, was not in the least
bit nervous. Young Charlton might have liked her better if she had been.
But if she was not shy, neither was she obtrusive. When Mr. Charlton had
grown weary of hearing Mr. Minorkey pity himself, and of hearing the fat
gentleman boast of the excellence of the Minnesota climate, the dryness
of the air, and the wonderful excess of its oxygen, and the entire
absence of wintry winds, and the rapid development of the country, and
when he had grown weary of discussions of investments at five per cent a
month, he ventured to interrupt Miss Minorkey's reverie by a remark to
which she responded. And he was soon in a current of delightful talk. The
young gentleman spoke with great enthusiasm; the young woman without
warmth, but with a clear intellectual interest in literary subjects, that
charmed her interlocutor. I say literary subjects, though the range of
the conversation was not very wide. It was a great surprise to Charlton,
however, to find in a new country a young woman so well informed.
Did he fall in love? Gentle reader, be patient. You want a love-story,
and I don't blame you. For my part, I should not take the trouble to
record this history if there were no love in it. Love is the universal
bond of human sympathy. But you must give people time. What we call
falling in love is not half so simple an affair as you think, though it
often looks simple enough to the spectator. Albert Charlton was pleased,
he was full of enthusiasm, and I will not deny that he several times
reflected in a general way that so clear a talker and so fine a thinker
would make a charming wife for some man--some intellectual man--some man
like himself, for instance. He admired Miss Minorkey. He liked her. With
an enthusiastic young man, admiring and liking are, to say the least,
steps that lead easily to something else. But you must remember how
complex a thing love is. Charlton--I have to confess it--was a little
conceited, as every young man is at twenty. He flattered himself that the
most intelligent woman he could find would be a good match for him. He
loved ideas, and a woman of ideas pleased his fancy. Add to this that he
had come to a time of life when he was very liable to fall in love with
somebody, and that he was in the best of spirits from the influence of
air and scenery and motion and novelty, and you render it quite probable
that he could not be tossed for half a day on the same seat in a coach
with such a girl as Helen Minorkey was--that, above all, he could not
discuss Hugh Miller and the "Vestiges of Creation" with her, without
imminent peril of experiencing an admiration for her and an admiration
for himself, and a liking and a palpitating and a castle-building that
under favorable conditions might somehow grow into that complex and
inexplicable feeling which we call love.
In fact, Jim, who drove both routes on this day, and who peeped into the
coach whenever he stopped to water, soliloquized that two fools with
idees would make a quare span ef they had a neck-yoke on.