Vandemark's Folly Part 32

"Girls come where dey want to come," said he, "in spite of--"

"Of h.e.l.l and high water," I supplied, as he hesitated.

"So!" he answered, adopting my words, and afterward using them at a church social with some effect. "In spite of h.e.l.l Slew and high water.

An' if dey bane too soft in de hand to come, I bring you out a fine farm girl from Norvay."

3

This idea furnished us meat for much joking, and then it grew almost earnest, as jokes will. We finally settled down to a cousin of his, Christina Quale. And whenever I bought anything for the house, which I did from time to time as I got money, we discussed the matter as to whether or not Christina would like it. The first thing I bought was a fine silver-plated castor, with six bottles in it, to put in the middle of the table so that it could be turned around as the company helped themselves to salt, mustard, vinegar, red or black pepper; and the sixth thing I never could figure out until Grandma Thornd.y.k.e told me it was oil. A castor was a sort of t.i.tle of n.o.bility, and this one always lifted me in the opinions of every one that sat down at my table. Magnus said he was sure Christina would be tickled yust plumb to death with it.

Ah! Christina was a wonderful legal fiction, as N.V. calls it. How many times Virginia's ears must have burned as we tenderly discussed the poor yellow-haired peasant girl far off there by the foaming fjords.

One trouble with all of us Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p settlers was that we had no money. I had long since stopped going to church or to see anybody, because I was so beggarly-looking. Going away from our farms to earn wages put back the development of the farms, and made the job of getting started so much slower. It is so to-day in the new parts of the country, and something ought to be done about it. With us it was hard to get work, even when we were forced to look for it. I hated to work for Buck Gowdy, because there was that thing between us, whether he knew it or not; but when Magnus came to me one day after we had got our oats sowed, and said that Mr. Gowdy wanted hands, I decided that I would go over with Magnus and work out a while.

4

I was astonished, after we had walked the nine miles between the edge of the Gowdy tract and the headquarters, to see how much he had done. There were square miles of land under plow, and the yards, barns, granaries and houses looked almost as much like a town as Monterey Centre. We went straight to Gowdy's office. His overseer was talking with us, when Gowdy came in.

"h.e.l.lo, Thorkelson," said he; "you're quite a stranger. Haven't seen you for a week."

Magnus stole a look at me and blushed so that his face was as red as his hair. I was taken aback by this for he had never said a word to me about the frequent visits to the Gowdy ranch which Buck's talk seemed to show had taken place. What had he been coming over for? I wondered, as I heard Gowdy greeting me.

"Glad to see you, Mr. Vandemark," said he. "What can I do for you-all?"

"We heard you wanted a couple of hands," said I, "and we thought--"

"I need a couple of hundred," said he. "Put 'em to work, Mobley,"

turning to the overseer; and then he went off into a lot of questions and orders about the work, after which he jumped into the buckboard buggy, in which Pinck Johnson sat with the whip in his hands, and they went off at a keen run, with Pinck urging the team to a faster pace, and Gowdy holding to the seat as they went careering along like the wind.

We lived in a great barracks with his other men, and ate our meals in a long room like a company of soldiers. It was a most interesting business experiment which he was trying; and he was going behind every day. Where land is free n.o.body will work for any one else for less than he can make working for himself; and land was pretty nearly free in Monterey County then. All a man needed was a team, and he could get tools on credit; and I know plenty of cases of people breaking speculator's land and working it for years without paying rent or being molested. The rent wasn't worth quarreling about. But Gowdy couldn't get, on the average, as much out of his hired men in the way of work as they would do for themselves.

Most of the aristocrats who came early to Iowa to build up estates, lost everything they had, and became poor; for they did not work with their own hands, and the work of others' hands was inefficient and cost, anyhow, as much as it produced or more. Gowdy would have gone broke long before the cheap land was gone, if it had not been for the money he got from Kentucky. The poor men like me, the peasants from Europe like Magnus--we were the ones who made good, while the gentility went bankrupt.

After a few years the land began to take on what the economists call "unearned increment," or community value, and the Gowdy lands began the work which finally made him a millionaire; but it was not his work. It was mine, and Magnus Thorkelson's, and the work of the neighbors generally, on the farms and in the towns. It was the railroads and school and churches. He would have made property faster to let his land lie bare until in the 'seventies. I could see that his labor was bringing him a loss, every day's work of it; and at breakfast I was studying out ways to organize it better,--when a small hand pushed a cup of coffee past my cheek, and gave my nose a little pinch as it was drawn back. I looked up, and there was Rowena, waiting on our table!

"h.e.l.lo, Jake!" said she. "I heared you was dead."

"h.e.l.lo, Rowena," I answered. "I'm just breathin' my last!"

All the hands began yelling at us.

"No sparkin' here!"

"None o' them love pinches, Rowena!"

"I swan to man if that Dutchman ain't cuttin' us all out!"

"Quit courtin' an' pa.s.s them mola.s.ses, sweetness!"

"Mo' po'k an' less honey, thar!"--this from a Missourian.

"Magnus, your pardner's cuttin' you out!"

I do not need to say that all this hectoring from a lot of men who were most of them strangers, almost put me under the table; but Rowena, tossing her head, sent them back their change, with smiles for everybody. She was as pretty a twenty-year-old la.s.s as you would see in a day's travel. No longer was she the ragged waif to whom I had given the dress pattern back toward Dubuque. She was rosy, she was plump, her new calico dress was as pretty as it could be, and her brown skin and browner hair made with her dark eyes a study in brown and pink, as the artists say.

It was two or three days before I had a chance to talk with her. She had changed a good deal, I sensed, as she told me all about her folks. Old Man Fewkes was working in the vegetable garden. Celebrate was running a team. Surajah was working on the machinery. Ma Fewkes was keeping house for the family in a little cottage in the corner of the garden. I went over and had a talk with them. Ma Fewkes, with her shoulder-blades almost touching, a.s.sured me that they were in clover.

"I feel sure," said she, "that Celebrate Fourth will soon git something better to do than make a hand in the field. He has idees of makin' all kinds of money, if he could git Mr. Gowdy to lis'en to him. But Surrager Dowler is right where he orto be. He has got a patent corn-planter all worked out, and I guess Mr. Gowdy'll help him make and sell it. Mr. Gowdy is awful good to us--ain't he, Rowena."

Rowena busied herself with her work; and when Mrs. Fewkes repeated her appeal, the girl looked out of the window and paused a long time before she answered,

"Good enough," she finally said. "But I guess he ain't strainin' himself any to make something of us."

There was something strange and covered up in what she said, and in the way she said it. She shot a quick glance at me, and then looked down at her work again.

"Well, Rowena Fewkes!" exclaimed her mother, with her hands thrown up as if in astonishment or protest. "In all my born days, I never expected to hear a child of mine--"

Old Man Fewkes came in just then, and cut into the talk by his surprised exclamation at seeing me there. He had supposed that I had gone out of his ken forever. He had thought that one winter in this climate would be all that a young man like me, free as I was to go and come as I pleased, would stand. As he spoke about my being free, he looked at his wife and sighed, combing his whiskers with his skinny bird's claws, and showing the biggest freckles on the backs of his hands that I think I ever saw.

He was still more stooped and frail-looking than when I saw him last; and when I told him I had settled down for life on my farm, I could see that I had lost caste with him. He was pining for the open road.

"Negosha," he said, "is the place for a young man. You can be a baron out there with ten thousan' head of rattle. But the place for me is Texas. Trees is in constant varder!"

"But," said Ma Fewkes, repeating her speech of three years ago, "it's so fur, Fewkes!"

"Fur!" he scornfully shouted, just as he had before. "Fur!" this time letting his voice fall in contempt for the distance, for any one that spoke of the distance, and for things in general in Iowa. "Why, Lord-heavens, womern, it hain't more'n fifteen hundred mile!"

"Fewkes," she retorted, drawing her shoulders back almost as far as she had had them forward a moment before, "I've been drailed around the country, fifteen hundred miles here, and fifteen hundred miles there, with old Tom takin' mad fits every little whip-st.i.tch, about as much as I'm a-going to!"

"I don't," said Rowena, "see why you've got so sot on goin' into your hole here, an' pullin' the hole in after you. You hook up ol' Tom, pa, an' me an' you'll go to Texas. I'll start to-morrow morning, pa!"

"I never seen sich a girl," said her mother; "to talk of movin' when prospects is as good f'r you as they be now!"

"Wal, le's stop jourin' at each other," said Rowena, hastily, as if to change the subject. "It ain't the way to treat company."

I discovered that Rowena was about to change her situation in the Blue-gra.s.s Manor establishment. She was going into "the Big House" to work under Mrs. Mobley, the wife of the superintendent, or as we called him, the overseer.

"Well, that'll be nice," said I.

"I don't want to," she said. "I like to wait on table better."

"Then why do you change?" said I.

"Mr. Gowdy--," began Ma Fewkes, but was interrupted by her daughter, who talked on until her mother was switched off from her explanation.

"I wun't work with n.i.g.g.e.rs!" said Rowena. "That Pinck has brought a yellow girl here from Dubuque, and she's goin' to wait on the table as she did in Dubuque. They claim they was married the last time he was back there, an' he brought her here. I wun't work with her. I wun't demean myself into a black slave--. But tell me, Jake," coming over and sitting by me, "how you're gittin' along. Off here we don't hear no news from folks over to the Centre at all. We go to the new railroad, an'

never see any one from over there--."

"Exceptin' Magnus," said Ma Fewkes.