A First Family of Tasajara Part 5

John Milton started dramatically, and then violently dashed at one of the shutters and began to detach it. "Ha!" he said hoa.r.s.ely. "Clear the s.h.i.+p for action! Open the ports! On deck there! Steady, you lubbers!"

In an instant his enthusiastic school-fellow was at his side attacking another shutter. "A long, low schooner bearing down upon us! Lively, lads, lively!" continued John Milton, desisting a moment to take another dramatic look at the distant plain. "How does she head now?" he demanded fiercely.

"Sou' by sou'east, sir," responded the other boy, frantically dancing before the window. "But she'll weather it."

They each then wrested another shutter away, violently depositing them, as they ran to and fro, in a rack at the corner of the veranda. Added to an extraordinary and unnecessary clattering with their feet, they accompanied their movements with a singular hissing sound, supposed to indicate in one breath the fury of the elements, the bustle of the eager crew, and the wild excitement of the coming conflict. When the last shutter was cleared away, John Milton, with the cry "Man the starboard guns!" dashed into the store, whose floor was marked by the muddy footprints of yesterday's buyers, seized a broom and began to sweep violently. A cloud of dust arose, into which his companion at once precipitated himself with another broom and a loud BANG! to indicate the somewhat belated sound of cannon. For a few seconds the two boys plied their brooms desperately in that stifling atmosphere, accompanying each long sweep and puff of dust out of the open door with the report of explosions and loud HA'S! of defiance, until not only the store, but the veranda was obscured with a cloud which the morning sun struggled vainly to pierce. In the midst of this tumult and dusty confusion--happily unheard and unsuspected in the secluded domestic interior of the building--a shrill little voice arose from the road.

"Think you're mighty smart, don't ye?"

The two naval heroes stopped in their imaginary fury, and, as the dust of conflict cleared away, recognized little Johnny Peters gazing at them with mingled inquisitiveness and envy.

"Guess ye don't know what happened down the run last night," he continued impatiently. "'Lige Curtis got killed, or killed hisself!

Blood all over the rock down thar. Seed it, myseff. Dad picked up his six-shooter,--one barrel gone off. My dad was the first to find it out, and he's bin to Squire Kerby tellin' him."

The two companions, albeit burning with curiosity, affected indifference and pre-knowledge.

"Dad sez your father druv 'Lige outer the store la.s.s night! Dad sez your father's 'sponsible. Dad sez your father ez good ez killed him. Dad sez the squire'll set the constable on your father. Yah!" But here the small insulter incontinently fled, pursued by both the boys. Nevertheless, when he had made good his escape, John Milton showed neither a disposition to take up his former nautical role, nor to follow his companion to visit the sanguinary scene of Elijah's disappearance. He walked slowly back to the store and continued his work of sweeping and putting in order with an abstracted regularity, and no trace of his former exuberant spirits.

The first one of those instinctive fears which are common to imaginative children, and often a.s.sume the functions of premonition, had taken possession of him. The oddity of his father's manner the evening before, which had only half consciously made its indelible impression on his sensitive fancy, had recurred to him with Johnny Peters's speech. He had no idea of literally accepting the boy's charges; he scarcely understood their gravity; but he had a miserable feeling that his father's anger and excitement last night was because he had been discovered hunting in the dark for that paper of 'Lige Curtis's. It WAS 'Lige Curtis's paper, for he had seen it lying there. A sudden dreadful conviction came over him that he must never, never let any one know that he had seen his father take up that paper; that he must never admit it, even to HIM. It was not the boy's first knowledge of that att.i.tude of hypocrisy which the grownup world a.s.sumes towards childhood, and in which the innocent victims eventually acquiesce with a Machiavellian subtlety that at last avenges them,--but it was his first knowledge that that hypocrisy might not be so innocent. His father had concealed something from him, because it was not right.

But if childhood does not forget, it seldom broods and is not above being diverted. And the two surveyors--of whose heroic advent in a raft John Milton had only heard that morning with their traveled ways, their strange instruments and stranger talk, captured his fancy. Kept in the background by his sisters when visitors came, as an unpresentable feature in the household, he however managed to linger near the strangers when, in company with Euphemia and Clementina, after breakfast they strolled beneath the sparkling sunlight in the rude garden inclosure along the sloping banks of the creek. It was with the average brother's supreme contempt that he listened to his sisters' "practicin'"

upon the goodness of these superior beings; it was with an exceptional pity that he regarded the evident admiration of the strangers in return.

He felt that in the case of Euphemia, who sometimes evinced a laudable curiosity in his pleasures, and a flattering ignorance of his reading, this might be pardonable; but what any one could find in the useless statuesque Clementina pa.s.sed his comprehension. Could they not see at once that she was "just that kind of person" who would lie abed in the morning, pretending she was sick, in order to make Phemie do the housework, and make him, John Milton, clean her boots and fetch things for her? Was it not perfectly plain to them that her present sickening politeness was solely with a view to extract from them caramels, rock-candy, and gum drops, which she would meanly keep herself, and perhaps some "buggy-riding" later? Alas, John Milton, it was not! For standing there with her tall, perfectly-proportioned figure outlined against a willow, an elastic branch of which she had drawn down by one curved arm above her head, and on which she leaned--as everybody leaned against something in Sidon--the two young men saw only a straying G.o.ddess in a glorified rosebud print. Whether the clearly-cut profile presented to Rice, or the full face that captivated Grant, each suggested possibilities of position, pride, poetry, and pa.s.sion that astonished while it fascinated them. By one of those instincts known only to the freemasonry of the s.e.x, Euphemia lent herself to this advertis.e.m.e.nt of her sister's charms by subtle comparison with her own prettinesses, and thus combined against their common enemy, man.

"Clementina certainly is perfect, to keep her supremacy over that pretty little sister," thought Rice.

"What a fascinating little creature to hold her own against that tall, handsome girl," thought Grant.

"They're takin' stock o' them two fellers so as to gabble about 'em when their backs is turned," said John Milton gloomily to himself, with a dismal premonition of the prolonged tea-table gossip he would be obliged to listen to later.

"We were very fortunate to make a landing at all last night," said Rice, looking down upon the still swollen current, and then raising his eyes to Clementina. "Still more fortunate to make it where we did. I suppose it must have been the singing that lured us on to the bank,--as, you know, the sirens used to lure people,--only with less disastrous consequences."

John Milton here detected three glaring errors; first, it was NOT Clementina who had sung; secondly, he knew that neither of his sisters had ever read anything about sirens, but he had; thirdly, that the young surveyor was glaringly ignorant of local phenomena and should be corrected.

"It's nothin' but the current," he said, with that feverish youthful haste that betrays a fatal experience of impending interruption. "It's always leavin' drift and rubbish from everywhere here. There ain't anythin' that's chucked into the creek above that ain't bound to fetch up on this bank. Why, there was two sheep and a dead hoss here long afore YOU thought of coming!" He did not understand why this should provoke the laughter that it did, and to prove that he had no ulterior meaning, added with pointed politeness, "So IT ISN'T YOUR FAULT, you know--YOU couldn't help it;" supplementing this with the distinct courtesy, "otherwise you wouldn't have come."

"But it would seem that your visitors are not all as accidental as your brother would imply, and one, at least, seems to have been expected last evening. You remember you thought we were a Mr. Parmlee," said Mr. Rice looking at Clementina.

It would be strange indeed, he thought, if the beautiful girl were not surrounded by admirers. But without a trace of self-consciousness, or any change in her reposeful face, she indicated her sister with a slight gesture, and said: "One of Phemie's friends. He gave her the accordion.

She's very popular."

"And I suppose YOU are very hard to please?" he said with a tentative smile.

She looked at him with her large, clear eyes, and that absence of coquetry or changed expression in her beautiful face which might have stood for indifference or dignity as she said: "I don't know. I am waiting to see."

But here Miss Phemie broke in saucily with the a.s.sertion that Mr.

Parmlee might not have a railroad in his pocket, but that at least he didn't have to wait for the Flood to call on young ladies, nor did he usually come in pairs, for all the world as if he had been let out of Noah's Ark, but on horseback and like a Christian by the front door.

All this provokingly and bewitchingly delivered, however, and with a simulated exaggeration that was incited apparently more by Mr. Lawrence Grant's evident enjoyment of it, than by any desire to defend the absent Parmlee.

"But where is the front door?" asked Grant laughingly.

The young girl pointed to a narrow zigzag path that ran up the bank beside the house until it stopped at a small picketed gate on the level of the road and store.

"But I should think it would be easier to have a door and private pa.s.sage through the store," said Grant.

"WE don't," said the young lady pertly, "we have nothing to do with the store. I go in to see paw sometimes when he's shutting up and there's n.o.body there, but Clem has never set foot in it since we came. It's bad enough to have it and the lazy loafers that hang around it as near to us as they are; but paw built the house in such a fas.h.i.+on that we ain't troubled by their noise, and we might be t'other side of the creek as far as our having to come across them. And because paw has to sell pork and flour, we haven't any call to go there and watch him do it."

The two men glanced at each other. This reserve and fastidiousness were something rare in a pioneer community. Harkutt's manners certainly did not indicate that he was troubled by this sensitiveness; it must have been some individual temperament of his daughters. Stephen felt his respect increase for the G.o.ddess-like Clementina; Mr. Lawrence Grant looked at Miss Phemie with a critical smile.

"But you must be very limited in your company," he said; "or is Mr.

Parmlee not a customer of your father's?"

"As Mr. Parmlee does not come to us through the store, and don't talk trade to me, we don't know," responded Phemie saucily.

"But have you no lady acquaintances--neighbors--who also avoid the store and enter only at the straight and narrow gate up there?" continued Grant mischievously, regardless of the uneasy, half-reproachful glances of Rice.

But Phemie, triumphantly oblivious of any satire, answered promptly: "If you mean the Pike County Billingses who live on the turnpike road as much as they do off it, or the six daughters of that Georgia Cracker who wear men's boots and hats, we haven't."

"And Mr. Parmlee, your admirer?" suggested Rice. "Hasn't he a mother or sisters here?"

"Yes, but they don't want to know us, and have never called here."

The embarra.s.sment of the questioner at this unexpected reply, which came from the faultless lips of Clementina, was somewhat mitigated by the fact that the young woman's voice and manner betrayed neither annoyance nor anger.

Here, however, Harkutt appeared from the house with the information that he had secured two horses for the surveyors and their instruments, and that he would himself accompany them a part of the way on their return to Tasajara Creek, to show them the road. His usual listless deliberation had given way to a certain nervous but uneasy energy. If they started at once it would be better, before the loungers gathered at the store and confused them with lazy counsel and languid curiosity. He took it for granted that Mr. Grant wished the railroad survey to be a secret, and he had said nothing, as they would be pestered with questions. "Sidon was inquisitive--and old-fas.h.i.+oned." The benefit its inhabitants would get from the railroad would not prevent them from throwing obstacles in its way at first; he remembered the way they had acted with a proposed wagon road,--in fact, an idea of his own, something like the railroad; he knew them thoroughly, and if he might advise them, it would be to say nothing here until the thing was settled.

"He evidently does not intend to give us a chance," said Grant good-humoredly to his companion, as they turned to prepare for their journey; "we are to be conducted in silence to the outskirts of the town like horse-thieves."

"But you gave him the tip for himself," said Rice reproachfully; "you cannot blame him for wanting to keep it."

"I gave it to him in trust for his two incredible daughters," said Grant with a grimace. "But, hang it! if I don't believe the fellow has more concern in it than I imagined."

"But isn't she perfect?" said Rice, with charming abstraction.

"Who?"

"Clementina, and so unlike her father."

"Discomposingly so," said Grant quietly. "One feels in calling her 'Miss Harkutt' as if one were touching upon a manifest indiscretion. But here comes John Milton. Well, my lad, what can I do for you?"

The boy, who had been regarding them from a distance with wistful and curious eyes as they replaced their instruments for the journey, had gradually approached them. After a moment's timid hesitation he said, looking at Grant: "You don't know anybody in this kind o' business,"

pointing to the instruments, "who'd like a boy, about my size?"

"I'm afraid not, J. M.," said Grant, cheerfully, without suspending his operation. "The fact is, you see, it's not exactly the kind of work for a boy of your size."

John Milton was silent for a moment, s.h.i.+fting himself slowly from one leg to another as he watched the surveyor. After a pause he said, "There don't seem to be much show in this world for boys o' my size. There don't seem to be much use for 'em any way." This not bitterly, but philosophically, and even politely, as if to relieve Grant's rejection of any incivility.

"Really you quite pain me, John Milton," said Grant, looking up as he tightened a buckle. "I never thought of it before, but you're right."