Lydia of the Pines Part 50

"I'm going to get a government investigation started, somehow," he replied. "It'll take time, but I'll get it."

Lydia looked at him admiringly, then she s.h.i.+vered a little. "I hate to think of it, but I'll stand by you, Billy, whatever you do."

"I'm going into ex-Senator Alvord's law office this June. I'll bet he'll help. He's so sore at Levine. It'll be lovely muckraking, Lyd!"

"I hate to think of it," she said unsteadily. "Lizzie is miserable, to-day. Will you tell your mother, Billy, and ask her to come over to see her this evening? I mustn't stop any longer now."

Poor old Lizzie was miserable, indeed. For years, she had struggled against rheumatism, but now it had bound her, hand and foot. Ma Norton came over in the evening. Lizzie was in bed s.h.i.+vering and flushed and moaning with pain.

"Now, don't bother about me," she insisted. "Lydia's threatening to stay home to-morrow, and I tell you I won't have it," and the poor old soul began to cry weakly.

Ma pulled the covers over the shaking shoulders. "If I were you, Lizzie, I'd think about getting well and let Lydia do what she thinks best. A day or so out of school isn't going to count in the long run with a young thing like her."

She waited till Lizzie slept, then she told Lydia and Amos that Dr.

Fulton had better be called, and Amos with a worried air, started for town at once.

Dr. Fulton shook his head and sighed.

"She's in for a run of rheumatic fever. Get some extra hot water bottles and make up your mind for a long siege, Lydia."

And it was a long siege. Six weeks of agony for Lizzie, of nursing and housework and worrying for Lydia. Ma Norton and the neighbors gave what time they could, but the brunt, of course, fell on Lydia. She fretted most about her college work. Sitting by Lizzie's bed, when the old lady dozed in her brief respites from pain, she tried to carry on her lessons alone, but with indifferent success. She was too tired to concentrate her mind. Trigonometry rapidly became a hopeless tangle to her; Ancient History a stupid jumble of unrelated dates. And most of all, as the days went by, she felt the indifference of University folk.

n.o.body cared that she had dropped out, it seemed to her.

Billy called every evening on his way home to supper. He filled water buckets, chopped wood and fed the chickens, that Amos might be free to take Lydia's place. John Levine sat up two or three nights a week.

Kent came out once a week, with a cheery word and a basket of fruit.

And at frequent intervals, the Marshall surrey stopped at the gate and Elviry or Dave appeared with some of Elviry's delicious cookery for Lydia and Amos.

One afternoon in April when Lizzie had at last taken a turn for the better, Lydia elected to clean the kitchen floor. She was down on her hands and knees scrubbing when there came a soft tap on the open door.

She looked up. Professor Willis was standing on the steps.

"Goodness!" exclaimed Lydia, rising with burning cheeks.

"I--I couldn't make any one hear at the front door. I came to see why you didn't come to cla.s.s."

Lydia was wearing a faded and outgrown blue gingham. Her face was flushed but there were black rings round her eyes, and she was too tired to be polite.

"I think it's just awful for you to come on me, scrubbing floors! You should have knocked at the front door, till I heard," she said, crossly.

The Harvard man looked at her seriously. "I really never saw a girl playing golf look as pretty as you do, scrubbing floors. May I come in?"

He did not wait for an invitation but stepped over the pail and brush to the chair beside the table. An open book lay on the chair. He picked it up. "'Ancient Rome,'" he read.

"I'm trying to keep up." Lydia was drying her red hands on the roller towel. Her shoulders drooped despondently. "What's the use of trying to be a lady," she said, suddenly, "when you have to fight poverty like this! You oughtn't to have come on me this way!"

The Harvard man looked from the immaculate kitchen to the slender girl, with her fine head, and then at the book in his hand.

"Of course, I've never known a girl like you. But I should imagine that eventually you'll achieve something finer out of your poverty than the other girls at the University will out of their golf and tennis. I don't fancy that our New England mothers were ashamed of scrubbing floors."

He looked at her with a smile on his pale face. Suddenly Lydia smiled in return. "Sit down while I make us some tea," she said. "I'll never try to play lady with you again."

Willis stayed with her an hour, sitting in the kitchen where the open door showed the turquoise lake through a gray-green net of swelling tree buds. He did not leave till Lizzie wakened. He cleared up the tangle in Lydia's trigonometry for her and went over the lost lessons in Shakespeare, all the while with a vague lump in his throat over the wistful eagerness in the blue eyes opposite his, over the thin, red, watersoaked hands that turned the leaves of the books.

When Billy called that evening he found Lydia more cheerful than she had been in weeks. When she told him of her caller he looked at her thoughtfully and growled, "I hope he chokes," and not another word did he say while he finished Amos' ch.o.r.es.

Professor Willis came out regularly after this and when Lydia returned to cla.s.s work in May, she was able to work creditably through the reviews then taking place and in June to pa.s.s the examinations.

During all this time she said nothing to Billy about his muckraking campaign. In spite of her high resolves she half hoped he had given it up. But she did not know Billy as well as she thought she did. He finished his law course in June and entered ex-Senator Alvord's office as he had planned. There was another election in the fall and John Levine was returned to Congress, this time almost without a struggle.

So many of the voters of the community were profiting by the alienating of the mixed-blood pines that it would have been blatant hypocrisy on the part of Republicans as well as Democrats to have opposed him. In fact, thanks to Levine, the town had entered on a period of unprecedented prosperity. The college itself had purchased for a song a section of land to be used as an agricultural experiment station.

Like a bomb, then, late in December fell the news that the Indian Commissioner had been called before a senate committee to answer questions regarding the relations of Lake City to the reservation.

While following close on the heels of this announcement came word that a congressional commission of three had been appointed to sit at Lake City to investigate Indian matters.

"Billy, how did you do it?" asked Lydia, in consternation. He had overtaken her one bitter cold January afternoon, on her way home from college.

"I didn't do much," said Billy. "I just got affidavits, dozens of them, showing frauds, and gave them to Senator Alvord. He has a lot of influence among the Democratic senators and is a personal friend of the President. It was a wonderful chance, he saw, to hurt the Republicans, even though there were Democrats implicated. The Indian Commissioner and Levine are both Republicans, you know. Then, when he finally got the hearing before the Senate Committee, he smuggled Charlie Jackson and Susie and old Chief Wolf down there. n.o.body here knows that."

Lydia's lips were set tightly as she plodded along the snowy road.

"Billy," she said, finally, "are you doing this to get even with Dave Marshall?"

"Lydia!" cried Billy, catching her arm and forcing her to stop and face him. "Don't you know me better than that? Don't you?"

"Then why are you doing it?" demanded Lydia.

"I'm doing it because I'm ashamed of what New Englanders have done with their heritage. And I'm doing it for you. To make a name for you.

Look at me. No, not at the lake, into my eyes. You are going to marry me, some day, Lydia."

"I'm not," said Lydia flatly.

Billy laughed. "You can't help yourself, honey. It's fate for both of us. Come along home! You're s.h.i.+vering."

"When you talk that way, I hate you!" exclaimed Lydia, but Billy only laughed again.

Amos at first was furious when he heard of the investigation. He, with every one else in town, was eager to know who had started the trouble.

"Some sorehead," said Amos, "who couldn't get all the land he wanted, I'll bet. And a sweet time the commission will have. Why, they'll have to dig into the private history of every one in Lake City. It'll ruin Levine! Oh, pshaw! No, it won't either! He can get everything whitewashed. That's the way American investigations always end!"

But Levine could not get everything whitewashed. The group of three commissioners sat for months and in that time they exposed to the burning sun of publicity the muck of thievery and dishonor on which Lake City's placid beauty was built.

By some strange turn of fortune, Congress had chosen three honest men for this unsavory task, three men grimly and unswervingly determined to see the matter through. They sat in rooms in the post-office building.

In and out of the building day after day pa.s.sed the Indians to face the sullen and unwilling whites summoned to hear and answer what these Indians had to say of them. Charlie Jackson acted as interpreter.

Lydia saw him once or twice on the street when he nodded coolly. He had dropped his white a.s.sociates completely.

The local papers refused to report the commission's session. But papers outside the State were voracious for the news and little by little tales were published to the world that made Lake City citizens when out of the city, hesitate to confess the name of their home town.

The leading trustee of the Methodist Church was found to have married a squaw in order to get her pine and her pitiful Government allowance.

His white wife and children left him when this was proved to them, and it was proved only when the starving squaw and her starving children were finally acknowledged by the trustee before the commission.

The Methodists were held up to scorn for a few months until a prominent Presbyterian who was the leading grocer in town was found to have supplied the Indian Agent for years with tainted groceries for the Indians.