The year’s calendar of color was almost at an end; only white was
left for it now. The fields had been black. They had grown green,
shyly, softly. They had given themselves up to bold greenness. They
had achieved their golden maturity. They had reveled in gold, and
dazzled by it. They had faded into dullness and browns. They died and
lay withered. Snows would come soon for their burial. The morning’s
white frosts were the promise of it.
Chirstie must keep the doors shut now, for the baby’s sake. With
doors shut the house seemed a trap, a trap from whose windows she had
often to be looking to reassure herself. Out of doors she felt safer,
freer. So she said that the baby must have more air, and she took him
day after day to the field where Wully was husking corn. Since the
mosquitoes were no longer hungry, the baby’s face was free for the
first time in months from red blotches. He grew rosier and rosier in
the cornfield. He looked so blooming that Chirstie said she just had
to take him visiting, to show him to the neighbors. That was another
excuse for not staying at home alone, another which Wully pretended
to be deceived by.
It happened that one morning Squire McLaughlin, riding past, saw a
flock of wild turkeys alight in her dooryard, and leaving his horse,
he crept toward the house, to borrow Wully’s gun, and bring down a
bird for dinner. He had all but gained the house, when out of the
door shot Chirstie, crying out a cry unintelligible. Out of the
door and down towards the corn she flew. It gave him a startle, as
he said afterwards. He didn’t know what terrible thing might have
happened. He started after her. He called to her questioningly. She
never lessened her pace. He said later that he had never seen a woman
run as fast as she did. He could scarcely keep within sight of her
among the dead cornstalks. He happened to see Wully hear her cry of
anguish, and his swift, leaping answer. The Squire called to him, and
Wully heard him, and stopped, confusedly, and began calling to his
wife.
“It’s Uncle Wully, Chirstie! It’s only Uncle Wully!” he called to
her, as if he had some great news to give her. She stumbled against
him, panting and white, and the Squire hurried on to them, in
consternation. There the three of them stood, breathless, excited,
looking blankly from one to the other.
“Whatever’s the trouble?” the Squire gasped, recovering first.
Chirstie had grown red with relief and humiliation.
“Oh!” she stammered, confusedly. “Oh! I just thought--I thought you
were--a tramp!”
“You were never running from me, Chirstie!” he exclaimed.
“Yes, I was! I just thought--you came up so quietly--I didn’t know--”
She paused, and looked at her husband beseechingly. “I got a fright,”
she murmured.
Wully knew what she thought. Pitiful, she was. Just pitiful. Standing
there trembling, ashamed, trying to cover her folly. Let the Squire
laugh as loud as he would. Let him fill the prairies with his relief
and amusement. He said he had never seen anything so amazing. Him
to be chasing her, frightening her more and more! He didn’t know he
looked so much like a tramp! The birds must have been as frightened
as she had been. She had spoiled a fine shot for him. He had supposed
the house was on fire, at least.
“I hope they were scared! I don’t want them shot! I’m taming them.
They come every morning,” she retorted. She wanted to make him forget
what she had done. He stood laughing at her indulgently, amused
because she was a pretty thing. “Come back to the house and I’ll give
you a slice of cold turkey that father shot yesterday. Wasn’t it a
good bird, Wully!”
She started back towards the house. Wully went with them. After
all, it was nearly noon. She begged the Squire not to tell what had
happened. She had been having fever, and it would only worry Isobel
McLaughlin to know she was so flighty. He promised, but she saw from
his face he was already making a fine yarn about how he terrified
women. She knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it to himself.
That hour Wully came to a great decision. He had been considering for
some time a proposition a cousin of his had made to him, a son of the
Squire’s. Next spring the railroad would have completed its track to
its next western terminal, and the new station which would become a
town, was to be but three miles from Wully’s farm. From that town,
all the supplies that settlers must have would be hauled a hundred
miles west. What they would need first and always would be lumber.
The Squire’s John wanted Wully to leave his farm, and start with him
selling lumber. Wully would have a little money, and the cousin had
some, and for a great wonder, they knew where they could borrow more.
The money they could borrow was a thing which even in those days
startled men’s minds. Wully’s cousin John had an aunt who had come
with her husband, a miller, from Scotland, and had settled some
hundred miles away, where Houghton could get work in a mill. His
employer was an old Yankee of some wealth. In the winter of sixty,
the old man had decided suddenly and irrevocably, to sell the mill,
and the Houghtons had wondered where they would be able to find work
anew. The miller had ordered Houghton to find a purchaser. His orders
were always imperious and startling. Houghton had set about the
task, and had persuaded two men to buy the plant, which he promised
to manage. They had come and looked the place over carefully. But
just as the papers were to be signed, they had changed their minds,
so that when the miller was already rejoicing erratically because of
his freedom from responsibility he found himself still encumbered
with a business.
He was beside himself with anger. He was determined to sell that
mill at once, without delay. He wouldn’t wait. So it came about that
almost before he knew what he was doing, Houghton himself had bought
that mill, with fifty thousand bushels of wheat for fifty cents a
bushel, paying down for it all the money he could raise, which was
eighty-five dollars. The miller had simply bullied him into the
bargain. Houghton was overwhelmed with the burden of so great a debt.
He felt that he had been basely taken advantage of. Then in a few
weeks came the war. The first thing he knew he sold his wheat for
three times what he paid for it. Wealth has perhaps seldom fallen so
suddenly upon a man so little dreaming of it. Houghton bought at once
ten thousand acres of Iowa land, and nowadays, his sons who go round
and round this stuffy little stupid globe in their yachts, berate
his memory yawningly because he didn’t buy a hundred thousand acres.
He was the man who would lend two soldiers of his kin a few hundred
dollars to begin business.
Wully had thought before the bomb of Peter’s return that farming
was no life for Chirstie. She was no tireless woman like his mother.
Malaria was a hard thing for young wives and nursing mothers. Wully
had often wished that in some way he might make her necessary work
lighter. And now that this intolerable menace of violence hung over
their home, it seemed best altogether to leave it. He knew what his
father would say to the idea that a man getting a dollar and seventy
cents for wheat, should leave his land. His father thought a man who
left off tilling his land to dig gold out of it a poor shiftless
creature. None of those who would advise him so vigorously against
his contemplated course could foresee that wheat, that brought so
great a price that fall, would the next year be selling for thirty
cents. But after Chirstie’s flight from her uncle, Wully didn’t care
what they advised. He wouldn’t have his wife trembling. He would give
his answer to his cousin at once. They would move to town.
A Sabbath some weeks later Wully and Chirstie and Bonnie Wee Johnnie
were at Isobel McLaughlin’s for dinner, and the Squire was there,
with several of his smaller children, and the McNairs. The women and
the girls were clearing away the dinner things in the big kitchen,
and the men had withdrawn to the Sabbath parlor, where the best rag
carpet was, and the basket quilt spread on the bed. In the stiff
propriety of that room they had been talking with less cordiality
than usual. McNair had only scorn for Wully’s folly in leaving his
farm, and Wully had no great patience with his father-in-law’s
disapproval. He had been saying that he would get a renter, and
McNair had commented scoffingly that that was a likely thing. Who
would rent land that could be had almost for the asking? The place
would go back to weeds, he averred. Wully protested that he never
would allow that. Somebody would come along glad to get a bit of
broken ground for a crop. If not, he would drive back and forth
from town every day, and care for it himself. That would be great
farming, McNair had remarked, significantly. Farming was just now
beginning to amount to something. Look at the years they had spent
miles from markets. Consider the money they had lost before the war
when they had got for their produce greenbacks which depreciated in
value before they could get them spent. And now when the iron horse
was here to serve them, when their millennium was at hand, Wully was
going to quit farming! (They never called the railroad anything but
the iron horse at that time and place.) Hadn’t they prayed for its
coming? Hadn’t they waited and paid in their hard-earned dollars for
its advent? John McLaughlin himself had contributed three hundred
dollars when the subscription paper went round for funds to help out
the prospective builders of the road, and McNair himself had been
moved to give a hundred and fifty. Well, that money had been wasted.
That company had failed. But now-- Ah, now, the day was at hand. They
had the land. The nation needed food. The railroad solved their last
problem. How rich they were to be! They sat exulting in hope of years
that were to be born starved and dying. And now the young men talked
of selling lumber!
The Keiths came driving in, and the men joined the women in the
kitchen to welcome them. Even the children playing at the door
followed them in. Libby Keith took off her hat and wrap and gave them
to a niece. She was more gray, more flabby than ever now, and her
eyes were dull and brooding. But just as she went to sit down, Bonnie
Wee Johnnie came in, and she saw him, and instantly her face grew
soft and warm with tenderness, and her eyes grew bright. She ran and
knelt down on the floor, and folded her arms about him.
“Oh, the bonnie wee laddie!” she murmured, kissing him. “Oh, the gay
lit’lin’!” And then, kneeling as she was, she turned her face up
towards her old husband and exclaimed,
“Look, John! Is he not like him?”
The unimportant John, peering intently out of his kindly old face,
smiled down on them, sighing.
“As like as two peas!” he said gently.
Then Libby, fumbling with one hand while her other held the little
boy, pulled from a pocket in her voluminous cotton skirt a picture in
a little case. No other woman of her class had dreamed in Scotland
of aping the gentry to such an extent as having a picture of her
children made. But Libby Keith had, of course, gone without food to
save the necessary money. She could starve more easily than lose the
remembrance of those tender child faces of hers. She opened the case,
and looked at it intently for only a moment. Then she handed it to
Isobel McLaughlin.
“Look at _this_, Isobel! You said he was more like Wully!”
Isobel took the picture, and looked at it. Tears came unexpectedly
into her eyes. There before her was Libby’s Davie, a little,
innocent, broad-faced laddie, with his arm protestingly around his
sister Flora, who, with her head shyly on one side, looked out at
the world with wondering round eyes. And seated before them, on a
stool with fringe, one leg crossed under him, sat little Peter,
with a plaid cap lying proudly in his lap. Isobel blinked away her
tears. “Ah, Davie was like that!” she murmured. And then she turned
and looked at her grandson still in Libby’s arms. He had on his best
Sunday dress that his stepgrandmother had made for him, of scarlet
wool nunsveiling, a little frock that Chirstie keeps to this day
folded immaculately away. It was low in the neck, and had no sleeves
to hide the soft dimpled arms. Around the neck and the flaring skirt
were three rows of very narrow black velvet ribbon. Chirstie had
curled his hair that morning around her finger. The curls at the back
of his head were still in shape, and the long one that came down the
top of his head to his forehead, disarranged as it was, still showed
what a soft, sweet thing it must have been before his romp with the
children. And there in the frame Isobel looked at what might have
been the picture of the child before her, the very forehead, the same
childish nose. Only little Johnnie had a winsome way of screwing his
mouth into smiles which he must have got from his secret grandfather
Keith who, quite unadmired, stood watching him indulgently.
Isobel McLaughlin said gently;
“You’re right, Libby. He’s like it. Peter is a McLaughlin if ever
there was one.” And having taken away any cause for apprehension that
Chirstie might have had, and having given her husband’s family a
little knock from which under the circumstances, the two McLaughlin
men were not able to defend themselves, she handed the picture calmly
to Chirstie, saying again;
“It might have been our baby’s picture.” She never again had any
doubt about the paternity of the child. And so simply had she
justified the resemblance, that Chirstie studied the picture
unabashed, with a natural interest. The picture was handed from one
to another, and Wully, when he got it, studied it intently.
No one noticed him doing it. Libby Keith had sighed again, and said,
just about that time;
“‘To them that hath, it shall be given.’ Them that has sons, has
grandsons.”
Wully looked up from the picture to her, and wondered if it would
have comforted her to know that the child so brutally begotten was
indeed her grandson. Not that it made any difference, of course. He
wouldn’t tell her in any case. He hated that little picture. It had
possibilities against which he couldn’t fight. And the women were
saying to the baby;
“Say ‘Aunt Libby,’ Johnnie. Come on, now! Say ‘Aunt Libby.’ Say it,
baby! Look, he’s going to say it!”
They had reason to think so. Johnnie prepared for action. He pursed
up his red lips. He looked around upon his admirers, complacently,
happily. All eyes were upon him. He let them wait a moment. Then he
manipulated his lips more earnestly. The great moment was at hand.
“Pr-r-r-r-r!” he articulated proudly. “Pr-r-r!”
Various aunties dived for him, rewarding him with laughter and
huggings, enthusiastically. Was there ever so silly a baby, ever a
bairn so lovable, they asked. It occurred to Wully casually that
perhaps the secure son of Wully McLaughlin was a more fortunate being
than the unfathered offspring of Peter Keith would have been.