A WOMAN AND SHEEP
None had acquired a more general regard among the passengers than the
Kansas Farmer. He bore no resemblance to the typical farmer as
represented in the comic publications but was, on the contrary, a
well-dressed, imposing looking man of middle age, a college graduate, as
Stafford knew, and one who had selected his occupation because it
appealed to him as, to their own and general good, it might appeal to
hosts of others of the educated men of the country. Stafford and he had
become friends, as was almost a matter of course, and it was the former
who insisted that the Farmer bring to the front some curious experience
of human nature in connection with farm life. "You are the tree we must
tap now," he jested. "It's just because you are what you are that we
want the thing. Inevitably, you, with your experience and associations,
can tell us something of the inner being and its ways on a farm which
will be edifying. Tell us the queerest and most unexplainable thing you
remember in connection with such life and of one man or woman's part in
it."
The farmer stroked his grizzled, close-cut beard and laughed:
"It seems to me that the element of love has entered with tolerable
regularity into most of the narratives to which I have had the pleasure
of listening here. That is right, certainly, and natural. What I'm going
to tell is a love story, too, in its way. It is of a love which budded
and bloomed but bore no fruit, for the oddest reason in the world. It is
about a man who loved a woman and was won away by sheep. No, he wasn't
exactly won away; he just forgot. It was the strangest thing I ever knew
or heard of, but it is true. I know the man and his sheep myself, though
I never saw the woman. This is
JASON'S LOVE STORY
A swamp oak stump is one of the most contumacious stumps in the world.
It is usually big and its roots extend, like the arms of an octopus, in
all directions save upward. Furthermore, having been bred to the wet,
feeding on dampness when alive, the wood does not rot willingly. The
upper portion of the stump absorbs the showers of heaven and endures
the cracking heat of the sun apathetically and remains pretty much the
same for a long time, while the roots lie solid in their dark bed,
almost regardless of the years as men grow old. So it is that an
otherwise cleared area of land occupied largely by swamp oak stumps is
what the farmers in Michigan's Lower Peninsula call an unpromising place
for present making of crops. It was such an area that Jason Goodell--who
was in love--owned. He possessed eighty acres, an eighth of a section,
with fifteen acres cleared--but for stumps. The young woman whom he
loved was Melissa Trumbull, the eldest daughter of "old man" Trumbull,
who was well-to-do.
The place where swamp oaks grow is of a sort to command respect. It has
features. It is often a black ash swale. A swale is low ground, but not
a swamp, crossed sometimes, at irregular intervals, by strips of higher
ground referred to generally as beech ridges. In the lower ground thrive
the black ash, the huge swamp oak, various moisture-loving bushes and
luxurious growths of ferns. Up on the ridges grow the maple, the white
ash, the beech, ironwood and birch and bushes which do not object to
less damp soil, nannyberries elders and the like.
In the swale proper the growth underfoot is bush and there are hundreds
of puddles where the frogs congregate in thousands, mostly the small,
brown wood frog, not the big, green "kerplunk" sort of the ponds and
streams. Here the raccoon finds what is, to him, a land flowing with
milk and honey, for he agrees with a frog diet as a frog diet agrees
with him; here upon dead white trunks the solitary log-cock, the great
black, red-crested woodpecker, largest of his genus, in the region,
hammers away like a blacksmith; here the hermit thrush sings sometimes;
and here little streams are born, to trickle at first, then ripple and
then leap, bubbling and noisy, into the sloping fields outside, to
attain the dignity of brooks at last and join the undercreek.
On the beech ridges life is different. There the ruffed grouse struts
about and feeds upon the nuts and berries; and there are the squirrels,
black, gray and red. The grouse raise great families on the ridges and
the wooing "drumming" of the males in spring is like nothing else in the
world. It is the most distinctively wildwood sound there is. As for the
squirrels, the black is no longer holding his own with the red and the
gray. He is going like the Red Indian and the buffalo and no one can
tell why. He was not born to civilization. The red and gray adapt
themselves. Of such swale and ridge, so peopled, consisted (as has been
said) the greater portion of the estate of Jason Goodell; excellent land
but requiring much work in its subjugation.
Never better man for conquering a forest or making good soil yield the
crops it has owed than this same brown-bearded Jason Goodell. Personally
strong, six full feet in height, though a trifle stooping, and slouchy
in his gait, thewed like a draft-horse, broad of forehead and strong of
chin, with firm mouth and steady gray eyes, this man was one to
accomplish things as thoroughly and doggedly as Victor Hugo's Gilliatt
toiling sturdily at the wrecked ship. Like Gilliatt, too, Jason was
toiling for love's sake. He had never spoken of his passion to Melissa
Trumbull, but they had studied together in the little district school,
had grown up together, had confided their plans and hopes to each other
and, until Jason left the employ of old man Trumbull and began work on
his own "eighty," had been almost constantly together. To Jason,
reticent, and timid as well, in a matter of this sort, it never occurred
to make a definite engagement, and to Melissa, black-eyed, gingham-clad,
buoyant and with plenty of work to do, the situation doubtless presented
itself with the same aspect. No pledged word, though, could have made
the matter more fixed and serious than it was, at least to Jason. What
need of words? The first thing to do was to make a home for the
occupancy of two young married people.
So Jason built a rude cabin and lived in it alone and began clearing his
land. At the end of the second year he had fifteen acres in crops of
grass and grain, and the beginning of a herd of cattle and a drove of
hogs, and was counted by his neighbors as a young man who would be well
off some day. They were right in their conclusion. Jason was the one to
succeed as a farmer. Living simply, working untiringly, the
accomplishments of the isolated man were a surprise even to the rugged
farmers who knew him well. At the end of the third year a new field had
been hewed into the forest and the land first cleared had become more
easily tillable. Fire had fed on the stumps. Half a dozen cows were
feeding on the grassland, the hogs were fattening on last year's corn
crop and chickens and turkeys cackled and called about the rough
log-barn. Butter and pork and eggs had a value at the nearest little
town, and Jason had saved money. He bought another eighty acres of
woodland--land was cheap then--and began to plan the building of a
house. There was Melissa!
No log house should this mansion be but one fit for a bride's reception.
It should be a framed house, with all proper rooms, clap-boarded as to
the sides and shingled as to the roof. There should be a porch in front
and the building should be of two stories. Jason brooded fondly over it
all and planned and dreamed. He consulted often with Jim Rubens, the
farmer carpenter of the locality: "Never saw a man so wrapped up in his
house-buildin' in all my life!" said Rubens.
The beams and plates and joists and rafters for the house were planned
and, with axe and broad-axe and saw, Jason and Rubens labored in the
forest until oak and pine were cut and hewed, true to the line, and were
then dragged by toiling oxen to the site of the house of which they were
to be the stay and strength. The farmers round about assembled for the
raising, there were heavings and shoutings, the parts were reared under
the hoarse overseeing of Carpenter Rubens and the great timbers, tongue
in socket, pinned lastingly together, stood aloft, the sturdy white
outline of a pleasant home to face the roadway. What days they were for
Jason as the two men labored afterward for weeks until the house stood
all complete from cellar to roof-peak, and even painted--white, with
green blinds, of course. Furnished it was too, well furnished for the
country. It was the finest house in the neighborhood and Jason walked
through the rooms with that feeling which comes to a man of purpose when
he looks upon the thing accomplished. Not yet, though, was the place
ready for Melissa. There was much to be done besides the mere building
of a shelter, but, even now, the front part of it must be sacred for
her. There Jason nailed up the door solidly.
What comfort could a farmer's wife have with merely a house to live in!
Here must be all convenience for her outdoor work in connection with the
household and all should be pleasant to look upon. Jason settled down
resolutely to what was yet to come.
Obviously the old log barn had outlasted its original purposes. Its
small stable no longer afforded shelter enough for the increasing herd
of cattle and the horses nor its mows room for the hay and grain. There
must be a frame barn, a big one, with high, wide doors into which a team
with a load might be driven and with long stables and mows and roof room
enough for all contingencies of harvest. The year after the completion
of the house, the barn was built and the one of logs abandoned. But the
barn had not absorbed Jason's thoughts so fully as had the house.
The lonely toiling of the man was not lonely to him. He was strong and
rejoiced in work, and there was ever Melissa and always something to be
done for her. From the front door of the house down to the roadway he
made a wide gravelled path and along its sides he made beds of
old-fashioned pinks and sowed and planted larkspur and phlox and dahlias
and peonies and golden coreopsis and bachelor's buttons and other
flowers named in the circulars of a seed firm in the distant city. He
made a neat picket gate in the fence where the walk opened on the
roadway and beside the fence he had hollyhocks, and sunflowers, the
latter trying every day to see Melissa, and turning their heads
resolutely from sunrise until evening and going to sleep every night
with their faces toward her home, which was in the West. Close beside
the house he planted rosebushes and "old hen and chickens" and
lady-slippers and morning-glories, and a madeira vine for the porch.
There was a path from the front around the house to the kitchen--which
had a porch as well--and beside this path Jason had planted an abundance
of sweet briar, thinking as he did so how its faint, sweet fragrance and
fair blossoms would match Melissa. A hop-vine clambered up the kitchen
porch. Jason was thirty years old, now, and Melissa twenty-five.
One day old man Trumbull, who was a great trader, suddenly disposed of
his farm and moved into the adjacent county. Somehow, the news did not
have much effect on Jason Goodell. It would be as easy to bring her from
thirty miles away as from where she had lived, he reasoned. The only
difference to come would be that he would not see her often in the
interval. There had never been any correspondence between them and it
did not occur to Jason to write now.
There came a hard winter, the horses and cattle and other stock required
close attendance, and Jason was much about the house. It was at this
time when he discovered the faults of the kitchen floor, which was of
pine. The boards had shrunk and there were cracks and the soft wood had
worn away under the tread of his heavy feet. That sort of kitchen floor
would never do for Melissa! He made a new floor and was happy at his
labor all through "the big snow." The floor was of hard, seasoned ash,
matched perfectly and smooth as the floor of a ball-room. "It will be
easier to mop" said he, and thought of Melissa's sunbonnet, and of how
it would look hanging against the whitewashed wall.
All winter in Jason's newer eighty acres the axes of two men had swung
hardily and, with spring and early summer, came to Jason a stress of
effort in helping at the clearing and in attendance on the crops. He had
little time for work about the garden, though it was not neglected, but
he felt that he must somewhat change his home life. He had lived in the
kitchen and a little room adjoining it. He had, from the time the house
was built, never changed in the feeling that the front part of the house
was sacred to Melissa, but he felt that now a little change must come.
His duties were increasing. He must have a hired man about him, one who
would live with him. So the hired man came and slept in the room Jason
had occupied while Jason slept upstairs in what, in fancy, he had
called "our room." "She won't mind," he thought.
There is spur to effort for the real farmer and a great comforting pride
in looking out upon a conquered province, to note the corn swaying
full-eared, the timothy and clover and grain fields changing color with
the shift of the clouds and sweep of the breeze, the lowing cattle in
the pastures and the general promise of Autumn's wealth. Jason enjoyed
it all, for was it not the product of his design and energy, and as the
farm grew, he grew with it. Success fairly earned made him zealous for
more. He broadened and was for trying things.
One day old Rubens came along, and leaning idly over the front fence,
began a farmer's chat with Jason, who was digging among the flowers.
Rubens looked away at the vacant log barn.
"What are you going to do with the old barn?" he asked, "tool-house?"
"No," said Jason, "I have a tool-room in the big barn. I don't know what
I'll do with the old one. Pull it down, maybe."
Rubens gazed meditatively at the abandoned but still sound structure:
"It would make a mighty good sheep barn," he suggested.
No more was said at the time, but Ruben's idea was not forgotten. It
remained in Jason's mind and the more he thought upon it the more he
became impressed. Jason had never raised sheep, successful as he had
been with other animals. He considered, and rightly, that most of his
land was too low for them. There was an eighty acres of woodland
adjoining that which he had latest bought that was hilly, not heavily
timbered and with many springs and brooks. Partly cleared, with what
woods were left well under-brushed, it would make a perfect sheep
pasture. He had half a mind to buy it and experiment. And the plan grew
in his mind until it overmastered him and he bought the land.
Not the sort of man to venture upon a new venture carelessly was Jason,
and he had a problem before him now: What sort of sheep should he raise?
His cattle and hogs were of good breeds and to have seen to it that it
was so he had found profitable. With sheep he was less acquainted. He
asked advice. "Get Merinos, by all means," pronounced Henry Wilson, who
lived to the north of him. "Get Southdowns and nothing else," said James
Remington, who lived to the west. "I'll get twenty of each and
experiment with them separately," decided Jason.
Now as between the Merino and the Southdown sheep there is a great gulf
fixed. The Merino is small with gnarled horns, wrinkled neck and nose;
with silk-like wool curling close to the skin in its fineness, yellow
underneath because of its oiliness, and dark outside because of the dust
gathered and held by such close, sticky coat. Well tried is the
endurance of the sheep-washer who, in late spring before shearing time,
stands waist deep in some stream and seeks to cleanse the fleece of a
flock of shivering Merinos driven bleating to the water, and dreading it
like a tramp. But the fine Merino wool commands a price; the fleece is
heavy and the breeder profits from that, not from the mutton. The flesh
of the Merino requires for its consumption people who have been long
besieged and who are hungry.
Different is the quality of the Southdown; not from Spanish ancestors,
feeding on Andalusian hills, as came the Merino, did he come, but from
Anglo-Saxon forefathers who cropped the herbage of the Hampshire and
Sussex downs. Big and white of body and dark-faced, sturdy of build and
garbed in clean, not over fine white wool, hornless but stepping free
and high, the Southdown has a healthy individuality. As concerns his
mutton, those who know how to eat, and what to eat, speak fluently while
their eyes glisten.
And almost as the flocks throve under Isaac, toiling for Rebecca, throve
the flocks of Jason, toiling for Melissa. In summer and autumn they fed
in the new pasture land and in winter they were sheltered and fared well
in the old barn, now renovated and with a great shed attached for
further room. Jason became absorbed in sheep-growing, as he had never
been before in the growing of anything. He read books on the subject and
tried experiments. At the end of the third year, with good flocks now
his he selected from each the finest ram and ewe and entered them at the
County fair. He wanted to learn with which breed he had been most
successful.
Canny and just are almost always the judges at an American County fair.
Known personally throughout the region, selected for their uprightness
and knowledge of special beast or fowl or any product of the fields,
their verdict is almost mechanically accepted as a final and just one.
More and more interested became Jason regarding the issue of his
experiments in thus entering into competition with breeders, some of
whom had raised sheep before he was born, and he puzzled himself much
over the problem of where, in the opinion of these unbiased experts, he
would prove to have done best. The decision, when it came, was hardly a
surprise to him. His Merinos, it is true, received favorable mention,
but his Southdowns took first prize in a field where there was decided
and worthy competition. A proud man was Jason Goodell when he saw the
blue ribbons tied by a gray-bearded giant in jeans about the necks of
his two entries. He made an instant resolution. "I'll not raise wool,"
he said, "I'll leave that to the Ohioans of the Western Reserve. I'll
raise mutton!"
He sold the prize-winners for a mighty price and returned to his farm.
Within a week the flock of Merinos was sold, as well, and the money so
received was invested in an importation of more Southdowns, with blood
as blue as that of the Hapsburgs, and far stronger. Then began
sheep-raising that was sheep-raising.
It is hard to serve two masters and it must be admitted that, since his
thoughts and plans had turned so absorbingly to Southdowns, Jason felt
less surpassingly the inspiration of Melissa. There had been a time when
he dreamed of her almost nightly, but, now, his sleeping visions were of
great flocks upon the hillsides and the eyes into which he looked were
not always the sparkling ones of Melissa, but it might be the soft,
gentle eyes of quite another color of some great ewe. Dreams are
grotesque things.
Still, instinctively, sometimes fervently, Jason worked and devised for
the girl who had gone away. The big orchard back of the house and barns,
now growing into fruitfulness, he cared for well. In the spring, feeding
the just-weaned calves, as he put his fingers in the mouth of some
vigorous youngster and then thrust its muzzle into the milk, that it
might learn to drink, he thought as the calf butted joyously at the pail
as if it were his own mother, how Melissa would like the calves and how
much better than he she would attend to them! He was somewhat troubled,
too, because the spring in the hollow was not nearer the house--he did
not want Melissa to carry water so many yards--but he planned a
"spring-house" with a cement floor, where Melissa should keep the milk
and make the butter. That would be less labor for her. There would not
be much butter-making anyhow He was not going to have butter and eggs
to sell. Only enough cattle and horses and hogs and chickens for farm
purposes did he intend to keep. And he bought yet another eighty acres
of land.
It is wonderful how some over-mastering aim, one the accomplishment of
which requires concentration of thought and exertion of all energy in
one direction, will get its grip upon a man and hold it to the end. With
high and low it is the same. Mozart died with the score of the Requiem
Mass hardly dry from his feeble hand. Napoleon died with the word of
command upon his lips. Seekers, investigators, experimenters in all
fields, great and small, have grown into a forgetfulness of aught save
one object, have abandoned all outside, and have dreamed and devised and
labored toward one absorbing end. Such compelling influence in life may
come to the farmer as to others. With Jason, who recognized a farmer's
dignity, who knew that the farmer often fought men's battles and at all
times fed them, the attainment of his own ambition was nothing small. He
became almost a monomaniac over Southdowns. How they thrived!--for
Nature ever loves a mentor. Peas grew where oats had grown, clover where
was before a cornfield, turnips where had been potatoes, for sheep
must eat in winter. It became a Southdown farm, and acres were yet
added, for the undertaking was most profitable--until the time came when
Jason's keen eyes could not, as he stood looking from the barn door,
reach more than vaguely the outlines of his own domain. One day, a girl
wearing a sunbonnet matching exactly in shape and color the one Melissa
had once worn, passed by and Jason's thoughts went back. That afternoon
he took horses and wagon and drove to the growing town. He returned with
a piano. "Melissa may have learned to play," he said to himself, "and
she will be glad to find it here." But, for weeks, perhaps for months
afterward, no Melissa came again into his waking dreams nor in his
sleep.
[Illustration: "THE CHILDREN CARRIED AWAY ARMFULS OF BLOSSOMS"]
He had abundance of help about him now. Another hired man, accompanied
by his wife, had been brought into the house, the wife proving a notable
housekeeper and relieving Jason of all petty duties. He visited his
neighbors and was liked among them. The children especially were fond of
him and he allowed them to visit his house at will and to carry away
armfuls of blossoms from his great flower-garden, seeing to it only that
they did not harm the plants. But the parlor, with its furniture still
unworn, though becoming somewhat old-fashioned now, and with its piano
still untouched, was never entered except for dusting, and the front
door was never opened.
Far and wide as the great breeder of Southdown sheep, became known the
name of Jason Goodell, and his flocks and barns grew with acres
steadily. One afternoon a traveling nurseryman came to see him upon
business and stayed to dinner. They chatted over the meal:
"I was over at Wishtigo last week," said the man; "drove over one day
and came back the next. Who d'ye think I met?"
"Couldn't guess."
"I met County Clerk Jim Lacey's wife--her that used to be Melissa
Trumbull, you know. It was the first I knew of it. I took dinner with
'em; she wouldn't allow anything else. They've been married seven years
and they've got a mighty nice little family: three children. Jim's a
good fellow."
Jason said nothing for a few moments. Then he assented deliberately:
"Yes, Jim's a good fellow. I've met him often. I didn't know whether he
was married or not, though. What was it you said about them young pear
trees? I may take a dozen or two of 'em."
In the middle of the forenoon a few days later, while Jason was looking
over the sheep barns and giving directions to the men at work there, a
sudden fancy came upon him. He went to the house, asked for a hammer and
withdrew the nails from the front door. Then he opened all the parlor
windows and let in the sunlight. "It'll be healthier," he explained to
the astonished and delighted housekeeper. "Keep them open as much as you
want to now, in pleasant weather, and let the children in, too, if they
like it. It'll brighten things up."
At a table in one of the fine restaurants in the big city sat, recently,
at dinner a man and woman, he a man of the world, she charming as women
so often are. They were delighted with the wonderful mutton they had
just eaten and were talking of it.
"It's a mutton only kings would be allowed to eat, if these were ancient
times," the man asserted laughingly. "It's delicate as strawberries,
though that isn't a good comparison. It may have come direct from the
Goodell fields."
"Who is Goodell?" queried the lady.
"Goodell, my dear madam, is a public benefactor. He is one of the
wisest raisers of Southdown sheep the country knows. He's a splendid old
fellow, too. I've visited his farm and met him. He's awfully fond of
children."