Other Main-Travelled Roads Part 17

"It's hard, Lucretia, I know,--more than you can bear,--but you mustn't forget what Sim endures too. He goes out in the storms and in the heat and dust. His boots are hard, and see how his hands are all bruised and broken by his work! He was tired and hungry when he said that--he didn't really mean it."

The wife remained silent.

"Mr. Radbourn says work, as things go now, _does_ degrade a man in spite of himself. He says men get coa.r.s.e and violent in spite of themselves, just as women do when everything goes wrong in the house,--when the flies are thick, and the fire won't burn, and the irons stick to the clothes. You see, you both suffer. Don't lay up this fit of temper against Sim--will you?"

The wife lifted her head and looked away. Her face was full of hopeless weariness.

"It ain't this once. It ain't that 't all. It's having no let-up. Just goin' the same thing right over 'n' over--no hope of anything better."

"If you had hope of another world--"

"Don't talk that. I don't want that kind o' comfert. I want a decent chance here. I want 'o rest an' be happy _now_." Lily's big eyes were streaming with tears. What should she say to the desperate woman?

"What's the use? We might jest as well die--all of us."

The woman's livid face appalled the girl. She was gaunt, heavy-eyed, nerveless. Her faded dress settled down over her limbs, showing the swollen knees and thin calves; her hands, with distorted joints, protruded painfully from her sleeves. All about her was the ever recurring wealth and cheer of nature that knows no favor,--the bees and flies buzzing in the sun, the jay and the kingbird in the poplars, the smell of strawberries, the motion of lush gra.s.s, the s.h.i.+mmer of corn-blades tossed gayly as banners in a conquering army.

Like a flash of keener light, a sentence shot across the girl's mind: "Nature knows no t.i.tle-deed. The bounty of her mighty hands falls as the sunlight falls, copious, impartial; her seas carry all s.h.i.+ps; her air is for all lips, her lands for all feet."

"Poverty and suffering such as yours will not last." There was something in the girl's voice that roused the woman. She turned her dull eyes upon the youthful face.

Lily took her hand in both hers as if by a caress she could impart her own faith.

"Look up, dear. When nature is so good and generous, man must come to be better, surely. Come, go in the house again. Sim is there; he expects you; he told me to tell you he was sorry." Lucretia's face twitched a little at that, but her head was bent. "Come; you can't live this way.

There isn't any other place to go to."

No, that was the bitterest truth. Where on this wide earth, with its forth-shooting fruits and grains, its fragrant lands and s.h.i.+ning seas, could this dwarfed, bent, broken, middle-aged woman go? n.o.body wanted her, n.o.body cared for her. But the wind kissed her drawn lips as readily as those of the girl, and the blooms of clover nodded to her as if to a queen.

Lily had said all she could. Her heart ached with unspeakable pity and a sort of terror.

"Don't give up, Lucretia. This may be the worst hour of your life. Live and bear with it all for Christ's sake,--for your children's sake. Sim told me to tell you he was to blame. If you will only see that you are both to blame and yet neither to blame, then you can rise above it. Try, dear!"

Something that was in the girl imparted itself to the wife, electrically. She pulled herself together, rose silently, and started toward the house. Her face was rigid, but no longer sullen. Lily followed her slowly, wonderingly.

As she neared the kitchen door, she saw Sim still sitting at the table; his face was unusually grave and soft. She saw him start and shove back his chair, saw Lucretia go to the stove and lift the tea-pot, and heard her say, as she took her seat beside the baby:--

"Want some more tea?"

She had become a wife and mother again, but in what spirit the puzzled girl could not say.

DADDY DEERING

I

They were thres.h.i.+ng on Farmer Jennings's place when Daddy made his very characteristic appearance. Milton, a boy of thirteen, was gloomily holding sacks for the measurer, and the glory of the October day was dimmed by the suffocating dust, and poisoned by the smarting beards and chaff which had worked their way down his neck. The bitterness of the dreaded task was deepened also by contrast with the gambols of his cousin Billy, who was hunting rats with Growler amid the last sheaves of the stack bottom. The piercing shrieks of Billy, as he clapped his hands in murderous glee, mingled now and again with the barking of the dog.

The machine seemed to fill the world with its snarling boom, which became a deafening yell when the cylinder ran empty for a moment. It was nearly noon, and the men were working silently, with occasional glances toward the sun to see how near dinner-time it was. The horses, dripping with sweat, and with patches of foam under their harness, moved round and round steadily to the cheery whistle of the driver.

The wild, imperious song of the bell-metal cog-wheel had sung into Milton's ears till it had become a torture, and every time he lifted his eyes to the beautiful far-off sky, where the clouds floated like s.h.i.+ps, a lump of rebellious anger rose in his throat. Why should he work in this choking dust and deafening noise while the hawks could sail and sweep from hill to hill with nothing to do but play?

Occasionally his uncle, the feeder, smiled down upon him, his face black as a negro, great goggles of gla.s.s and wire-cloth covering his merry eyes. His great good-nature shone out in the flash of his white teeth, behind his dusky beard, and he tried to encourage Milton with his smile.

He seemed tireless to the other hands. He was so big and strong. He had always been Milton's boyish hero. So Milton crowded back the tears that came into his eyes, and would not let his uncle see how childish he was.

A spectator riding along the road would have remarked upon the lovely setting for this picturesque scene--the low swells of prairie, shrouded with faint, misty light from the unclouded sky, the flaming colors of the trees, the faint sound of cow-bells, and the cheery sound of the machine. But to be a tourist and to be a toiler in a scene like this are quite different things.

They were anxious to finish the setting by noon, and so the feeder was crowding the cylinder to its limit, rolling the grain in with slow and apparently effortless swaying from side to side, half buried in the loose yellow straw. But about eleven o'clock the machine came to a stand, to wait while a broken tooth was being replaced, and Milton fled from the terrible dust beside the measuring spout, and was shaking the chaff out of his clothing, when he heard a high, snappy, nasal voice call down from the straw-pile. A tall man, with a face completely masked in dust, was speaking to Mr. Jennings:--

"Say, young man, I guess you'll haf to send another man up here. It's poorty stiff work f'r two; yes, sir, poorty stiff."

"There, there! I thought you'd cry 'cavy,'" laughed Mr. Jennings. "I told you it wasn't the place for an old man."

"Old man," snarled the figure in the straw. "I ain't so old but I can daown you, sir,--yessir, condemmit, yessir!"

"I'm your man," replied Jennings, smiling up at him.

The man rolled down the side of the stack, disappearing in a cloud of dust and chaff. When he came to light, Milton saw a tall, gaunt old man of sixty years of age, or older. Nothing could be seen but a dusty expanse of face, ragged beard, and twinkling, sharp little eyes. His color was lost, his eyes half hid. Without waiting for ceremony, the men clenched. The crowd roared with laughter, for though Jennings was the younger, the older man was a giant still, and the struggle lasted for some time. He made a gallant fight, but his breath gave out, and he lay at last flat on his back.

"I wish I was your age, young man," he said ruefully, as he rose. "I'd knock the heads o' these young scamps t'gether,--yessir!--I could do it, too!"

"Talk's a good dog, uncle," said a young man.

The old man turned on him so ferociously that he fled.

"Run, condemn yeh! I own y' can beat me at that."

His face was not unpleasant, though his teeth were mainly gone, and his skin the color of leather and wrinkled as a pan of cream. His eyes had a certain sparkle of fun that belied his rasping voice, which seemed to have the power to lift a boy clean off his feet. His frame was bent and thin, but of great height and breadth, bony and tough as hickory. At some far time vast muscles must have rolled on those giant limbs, but toil had bent and stiffened him.

"Never been sick a day 'n my life; no, sir!" he said, in his rapid, rasping, emphatic way, as they were riding across the stubble to dinner.

"And, by gol! I c'n stand as long at the tail of a stacker as any man, sir. Dummed if I turn my hand for any man in the state; no, sir; no, sir! But if I do two men's works, I am goin' to have two men's pay--that's all, sir!"

Jennings laughed and said: "All right, uncle. I'll send another man up there this afternoon."

The old man seemed to take a morbid delight in the hard and dirty places, and his endurance was marvellous. He could stand all day at the tail of a stacker, tirelessly pus.h.i.+ng the straw away with an indifferent air, as if it were all mere play.

He measured the grain the next day, because it promised to be a noisier and dustier job than working in the straw, and it was in this capacity that Milton came to know and to hate him, and to a.s.sociate him with that most hated of all tasks, the holding of sacks. To a twelve-year-old boy it seems to be the worst job in the world.

All day, while the hawks wheel and dip in the glorious air, and the trees glow like banks of roses; all day, while the younger boys are tumbling about the sunlit straw, to be forced to stand holding sacks, like a convict, was maddening. Daddy, whose rugged features, bent shoulders, and ragged cap loomed through the suffocating, blinding dust, necessarily came to seem like the jailer who held the door to freedom.

And when the dust and noise and monotony seemed the very hardest to bear, the old man's cackling laugh was sure to rise above the howl of the cylinder.

"Nem mind, sonny! Chaff ain't pizen; dust won't hurt ye a mite." And when Milton was unable to laugh, the old man tweaked his ear with his leathery thumb and finger.

Then he shouted long, disconnected yarns, to which Milton could make neither head nor tail, and which grew at last to be inaudible to him, just as the steady boom and snarl of the great machine did. Then he fell to studying the old man's clothes, which were a wonder to him. He spent a good deal of time trying to discover which were the original sections of the coat, and especially of the vest, which was ragged and yellow with age, with the cotton batting working out; and yet Daddy took the greatest care of it, folding it carefully and putting it away during the heat of the day out of reach of the crickets.

One of his peculiarities, as Mrs. Jennings learned on the second day, was his habit of coming to breakfast. But he always earned all he got, and more too; and, as it was probable that his living at home was frugal, Mrs. Jennings smiled at his thrift, and quietly gave him his breakfast if he arrived late, which was not often.