CHAPTER XV.IN QUEST OF NEWS.

CHAPTER XV.IN QUEST OF NEWS.

Olive was early astir the next morning, in order to see her husband off and also to provide him with food in ample abundance to last him for the trip. He carried a plentiful store of dried beef, a portable commodity much in request on the prairie. The old trappers had showed the settlers how to make it, and the trappers had acquired the art from the Indians. Dried beef is precisely what its name indicates. It is raw beef, somewhat salted, and then dried in the sun until it is like a piece of solid leather. It has to be cut into thin slices across the grain before the stoutest teeth can make the slightest impression upon it. It may be also cooked in a batter of eggs for the dainty, but has only to be sliced up with a jack-knife to be eaten by the average teamster on the prairie. Besides the dried meat and plenty of corn-bread, Ezra had milk in a bottle and one of Olive’s wedding presents to eat, namely, a tin of peaches. He travelled therefore in extreme luxury. He set off along with Brother Dummy just as the sun was rising, and the canvas coversof the waggons showed for a long time as two moving white specks as they slowly crept across the blackened landscape, finally disappearing behind the Mounds some twelve miles to the west of Perfection City.

Olive remained alone at home with Napoleon Pompey and Diana to keep her company, until Ezra should return in four days’ time. It was only with great reluctance that he had consented to this. He did not at all like the idea of her remaining alone in the house. As usual, when it came to Olive doing what the ordinary prairie settler’s wife did as a matter of course, Ezra’s love took fright. He urged her to go and stay at Madame’s house, she would be more than welcome, he declared, in fact it seemed to him almost necessary that she should go, and he insisted strongly upon the plan. Olive was as strongly opposed to it. Why couldn’t she stay in her own house? She would much prefer it, so as to be on hand to feed the chickens and milk the cows and generally see to things. Besides, she felt quite sure she would be vastly in Madame’s way. Ezra combated this position vigorously. Olive could not be in anyone’s way, even if she tried. Moreover, was not Madame a communist like the rest of them, and she would be only too pleased to take Olive into her home as she had already done into her heart. His spouse made no comment, except a mental one, to this argument, but reiterated her preference for staying at home. It would only be three days or four at most, and she would be very busy. Ezra hinted atpossible danger if it were known she was alone in the house.

“But I won’t be alone: there is Napoleon Pompey for one and Diana for two. Surely between so stout a pair nothing on earth can happen to me,” she said, smiling at his anxious face.

“I don’t feel easy about you,” said Ezra, looking at her with mournful eyes. “I never left you alone before, and it suddenly seems to me a most portentous thing.”

“Why, you dear silly old thing!” exclaimed Olive, “I do believe you’ll have omens next, and will look into tea-cups to see if it is a propitious moment for the success of this undertaking. I never knew you ‘take on’ like this before.”

“I never did so, but it is all because I love you, dear. I quite understand what it means, to be foolish with love. I used not to know what it was. I wonder do women ever feel the same as we men do?”

“Women, my dear, are sent into this world for the express purpose of making men do what they ought and not be silly,” said Olive severely. “Now I know you’ll have the feed for the horses all right, but remember the feed for yourself is in this basket, everything you’ll want, and there is salt for the boiled eggs.”

When the hurry of getting the waggons off was over, Olive sat down to think, and immediately there rose up before her the image of a hunted man flyingfor his life. In some ways it was a relief that Ezra was gone, she would not have to be constantly making an effort to hide the real anxiety in her mind. Then she thought of Ezra and of his great and boundless devotion to her, and the words Madame had spoken in her wrath rose up before her and rebuked her. Were they true? Had she hidden her real nature from her husband before her marriage? She had never meant to do so, but in their long pre-nuptial conversations it had not appeared to her that she and Ezra were so different in their views of life and its duties as perhaps was now the case. He certainly had told her of the experiment of Perfection City, and she had accepted him and the experiment together because they were indissoluble. She of herself would never have initiated the communistic idea; but then there was nothing wonderful in that, woman never do initiate anything, they only follow some man’s lead with more or less enthusiasm and intelligence.

Were she to have expressed her own private predilection, it certainly would have been for a little home of her own on the usual lines, which little home it would have been her pride and her pleasure to make as beautiful as she could. Olive did not possess a large and speculative mind, capable of vast dreamy projects, whose limitless possibilities were in imagination not checked by small practical obstacles. On the contrary, it was the tendency of her intellect to perceive those obstacles with startling clearness, and to demonstrate,by a few biting truisms, the impossibility of turning the dreamy vastnesses to use. She was neither hard-headed nor dull-headed, but hers was a practical nature, very much jarred by idle vapourings, and above all she was kept in the straight path of common sense by her keen appreciation of the ridiculous.

This faculty enabled her to perceive how often reformers run off the track of common sense, and while pinning their faith to one particular little tenet which they constitute the corner-stone of their philosophy, lose sight of the whole world beyond. Olive possessed in a high degree the sense of proportion, which in a true reformer is generally absent. When Ezra with his cultivated mind and really fine intellect, talked to her of the reforming of the present type of civilization, and briefly sketched out what he hoped would be the result of the introduction of the communistic idea into life, she could not help remarking that he used very much the same expressions, and seemed animated by very much the same hopes, as those indulged in by one of the dietetic reformers she knew in Smyrna, who promised all the glories of the golden age to mankind if the human race would only give up the baneful practices of eating meat and of cooking vegetables!

And every few minutes, across the mirror of her reflections, there came a shadow of a desperate man spurring on a jaded horse. Olive could not shake off a sense of impending disaster, but unlike Ezra, who attributed his melancholy to his great love for Oliveand a vague, unreasoning dread of something happening to her in his absence, she knew quite well what she feared and why.

As the morning wore on, Olive began to feel it impossible to remain quietly at home in the midst of her anxiety. She must go out and hear what news there was, or at all events she must learn if there was any news. Resolved not to hold any communication with Madame other than what was publicly necessary—for between the two there was now maintained a sort of armed neutrality—she decided to call at the blacksmith’s, as Brother Green was in the way of most of the gossip, if gossip is a term that could be rightly applied to the feeble and intermittent stream of prairie news that trickled through the smithy. Brother Green was a silent, self-absorbed man who worked steadily and brought much personal devotion into the project of Perfection City. He was a lonely man, a widower, and to judge by appearances a disappointed man as well. He was surprised to see Sister Olive, and very pleased, but could not shake hands as he was very dirty, and she looked so brightly clean. Having wiped a wooden bench with his leather apron and again with the sleeve of his shirt, he invited her to be seated. Brother Green was welding some iron, and Olive waited until the operation was concluded and the plough-hook made before she talked to him. Meanwhile she watched with interest the white glowing fire and the pulpy white-hot iron-bar, helplessly bendingover at the end like a piece of half boiled molasses candy.

“I felt so lonesome, I thought I would come out and talk to someone,” she said, by way of excuse for a first visit. “Diana isn’t a bit of company when you feel really lonesome. Ezra is gone for four days, did you know?”

Diana had cocked one ear at the mention of her name, but had speedily uncocked it again on becoming satisfied that nothing in the way of excitement was at hand.

“Yes, I suppose you do feel lonely,” said Brother Green slowly, as he seated himself on his anvil and crossed his brawny arms. “I’ve been used to it for so long, I have almost forgotten how anything else feels.”

Olive looked kindly at him. “Are you ever homesick, and do you ever wish you had stayed in England? It must be very different from here.”

“Very,” said Brother Green gazing with a far-away sort of look through the large forge door out over the shimmering prairie. He suddenly seemed to see rolling hills with oak woods tufting their slopes, and a deep valley, where blue curling smoke ascended in high spirals, and a church steeple rose from among elms, and jackdaws croaked around the steeple. He put his head a little on one side, almost as if he would catch more distinctly the hoarse croak of the jackdaws, or maybe the first sound of the bell which hung in the steeple and used to ring on Sundays.

“Yes,” he said, as this picture faded away and the prairie returned in its place, “there can’t be much greater differences in the world than between Perfection City and the little village in Sussex, where I was born.”

“Which do you like best, Brother Green?” asked Olive a little thoughtlessly.

“I don’t expect ever to be as unhappy again as I was in that pretty little village,” said Brother Green, and Olive remembered that she had been told he had lost a young wife in his youth. She felt sorry for him, and regretted having touched upon an old wound that still could throb with pain.

“Have you heard any news lately? Has anybody been to the forge? You are always the first to hear news,” said she quickly, desiring to change the subject.

“A man from down south passed this morning.”

“Did he?” said Olive anxiously, “what did he say?”

“He said the fire was just bellowing its way towards Fort Scott, and had done a good deal of damage one way or another. It was one of the hottest they ever had and the hardest to stop. It crossed one of the South Fork Creeks and got into the broken land round Osage.”

“We had a very narrow escape ourselves,” said Olive, feeling remarkably little interest in the fire. “Did he say anything else? Who was he?”

“A stranger, I never saw him before. No, he didn’t say anything else, except to tell me that he calkerlated Britishers were mos’ly fools and couldn’t do a day’s work ’gain ’Mericans, no matter what it were, rail-splitting or tobacco-chawin’.”

Brother Green gave a deep gentle laugh, like the distant boom of a waterfall hidden among trees.

“Don’t you think these prairie folk are most conceited?” asked Olive, in some scorn.

“No, not more than other people, Sister,” replied Brother Green somewhat unexpectedly, “they only say what they think with remarkable frankness.”

“But that is conceit,” persisted Olive.

“I am not certain that it is more conceited to say what you think, than to think your thoughts in silence, and be consumed with a vast contempt for all the world. We are a conceited people too.”

“I thought the English prided themselves on not being conceited,” said Olive.

“We pride ourselves on showing no feeling of conceit and if possible on showing no feeling on any other subject either. If an Englishman’s heart were skinned, I think it would weigh up pretty much the same as an American’s. The difference lies in the tongue only.”

“Is that so?” said Olive.

“Yes, this morning, for instance, that man informed me that he was a better man than I, and that his country could lick mine. Well, in my heart Iknew he was wrong on both points, and that the precise contrary was the fact. As far as essentials go, I think we were pretty equal in the contest of conceit.”

“But you didn’t tell him what you thought,” remarked Olive.

“No, that was the difference of tongue, not of heart,” replied Brother Green.

“I didn’t know you were so severe in your criticisms and judgments. I wonder much what you really think of Perfection City,” said Olive, looking at him curiously. She had never particularly noticed him hitherto, and had not realized that he could have a store of knowledge of many things which lay far outside her experience.

“I think Perfection City will do good,” said Brother Green with conviction.

“Do you, and why?” asked Olive.

“Any honest human effort to benefit the world and raise mankind does good,” said Brother Green.

“But people have done such different things and all from a desire to do what seemed to them good,” objected Olive with feminine vagueness.

“I consider they have done good if their purpose was single-hearted,” maintained Brother Green.

“They didn’t succeed in doing what they aimed at very often, at all events,” observed Olive, “something quite different came out of their endeavours from what they had expected.”

“Nevertheless, if they honestly tried, then that very trying was of itself good.”

“Do you think Perfection City will do the good the Pioneers expect, or will something quite different come out of it too?”

“I think Perfection City will be the means of teaching a valuable lesson,” said Brother Green cordially.

“Do you think it is any use to try to change the world and its ideas?”

“If anyone has a truth let him preach it fearlessly. Who can foretell the moment when the world will listen and when it is ready to profit by your example.”

Olive longed to ask him what he thought of Madame, but dared not do so. She felt a little afraid before this simple-minded man, with his fervent, childlike faith and his sad and lonely life. Belief in Perfection City might be his only comfort now, shut off as he was from the joys of home and family, she would do nothing to lessen his belief and make him more lonely still. For what is more lonely than the heart out of which a faith has departed never to return? So she bade him good-bye, and then seeing Aunt Ruby’s chimney giving off the cheerful smoke of habitation, she turned her steps thither. Olive walked slowly along, for it was very hot indeed with a dry suffocating heat that made exertion somewhat irksome, and Diana, the discreet, followed dutifully behind her.

Aunt Ruby, as has been already hinted, had surrounded herself with a large family of chickens of all ages, to whose wants it was her great duty to attend. She had a rare hand for chickens, and could pick up the most spasmodic specimen and turn it upside down and examine it for the gapes without hurting it in the least. Her driving of the hens to roost was an exhibition of the talent of generalship worthy of a wider field. No screamings nor scurryings, no rushings madly hither and thither, took place, and above all no sticks were used in the ceremony: Aunt Ruby merely took her skirts gently at the side in each hand, and said “Shoo! Shoo!” in a soothing voice, while at the same time she slightly oscillated the folds of her skirt. The hens appeared hypnotized by the action, and no matter how eagerly they might be pursuing the afternoon fly, they would at once settle down into a conversational chuck-a-chu and begin forthwith to meander towards the hen-roost.

Aunt Ruby’s numerous hens and chickens were all in the yard and around the wood-pile, seeking in an aimless over-fed fashion after chance insects, when suddenly, without a moment’s warning, the devil was upon them according to the gallinaceous imagination. The devil was possessed of four paws, a most terrifying bark, and a mouth that seemed to the affrighted birds to be on the point of devouring each one especially and individually. The dog flew hither and thither, and so did the chickens, and so did the tail-feathers.

“Diana! Bad dog, down, down!” screamed Olive, rushing to the rescue, while Aunt Ruby with shrill cry and a broom-stick appeared in the door-way. Never before or since did a more tempestuous guest appear at Aunt Ruby’s house. Full a quarter of an hour of gentle “shoo-shooings” to the hens, interspersed with smart whippings to Diana, elapsed before quiet was restored, and the ladies could even begin their visit together. Even then there was a sort of nervous tension on Aunt Ruby’s part, which prevented her thorough enjoyment of the opportunity for a gossip. Her attention was distracted by Diana, who lay with lamb-like docility at Olive’s feet and slept the sleep of the just.

“I wouldn’t keep a dawg roun’ nohow,” said Aunt Ruby eyeing the delinquent sternly. “I’d mos’ as lief hev a rattlesnake. I shouldn’t never sleep easy in my bed won’erin’ an’ won’erin’ what the pesky crittur ’ud do nex’.”

“I know that Diana is very naughty now, but she is only a puppy, and she’ll get sense by and bye, and it is so nice to have something that is your own and loves you, and doesn’t care for any body else, you know,” observed Olive somewhat rashly.

“Wal, I reckon you’ll hev a sight o’ trouble ’long o’ that dawg ’fore you learn it the rights o’ people, let alone teachin’ it community idees,” said Aunt Ruby.

“No, you can’t teach a dog communistic notions,thank goodness,” observed Olive, patting the sinful Diana.

“Reckon you ain’t partic’ler sot on the idees of Perfection City,” said the old lady, looking at her visitor with bright twinkling eyes. “I allow there be a p’int or two we’ll hev to consider over agin at ’Sembly. We are gettin’ on too fas’ fur this here prairie folk, they hain’t got the sense to un’erstan’ all o’ our highest principles. Guess while there’s Injuns roun’ we hed better jes’ hol’ back a mite ’bout non-resistance.”

“Oh,” said Olive, who had never given any attention to this point, being as indifferent as the wives of strong men usually are. “I never heard a word about Indians. Are there any about?”

“Not as I hearn on special. But there’s Injuns and worse nor Injuns in the world, an’ I reckon we’d better take that p’int up at ’Sembly and see if we can’t do su’thin’ to make things a bit straight,” said Aunt Ruby in language that was vaguely enough expressed to serve in the highest walks of diplomacy.

“Oh, I dare say,” replied Olive carelessly, “some very excellent reason could be devised to excuse a departure from any one of the Perfection City principles, which seem more difficult to manage in practice than on paper. They are all pretty new, and of course can’t be expected to be as useful in all the difficult circumstances of life as principles which have stood the test of time.”

“Dear me, suz!” exclaimed Aunt Ruby admiringly. “How gran’ you kin talk! Deal sight finer nor Brother Wright. Why don’t you hold forth in ’Sembly? I’d liefer hear you nor any on ’em. I’m jes’ ’bout tired o’ listenin’ to Brother Wright. Lard! how he do love to hear his own voice! Hens is jes’ like that too, they’ll talk an’ talk till you’re mos’ crazy, an’ they hain’t nothin’ to say, on’y jes’ to cackle an’ hear themselves talk.”

Olive agreed with Aunt Ruby, but hardly dared to express her opinion in all its force. Therefore she turned the conversation by inquiring had she ever heard anything about lynch-law and about its being put into practice in their neighbourhood?

“Course I hev, an’ hearn o’ hangin’ too.”

“Do Perfection City principles uphold hanging?” asked Olive.

“Guess not,” was the reply.

“No matter if it was for murder?”

“Wal, I don’t see as we could ever be called upon to settle that p’int, ’cause no ’Fectionist could ever be a murderer no how,” said Aunt Ruby.

“But suppose an outsider who had shot a man, even if it was not a real bad murder, came to us for protection, would they help him, do you think?” asked Olive.

“Wal, I never hearn that debated at the ’Sembly, but I reckon Perfection City don’t lay out to hide folks as has killed a feller critter. It don’t ’pear tome as how we was called upon to min’ anyone ’cept our own selves, an’ we hed best keep clear ’way o’ them sort o’ folks. That’s pretty nigh my ’pinion, an’ I guess it’s mos’ folks too as hes a mite o’ common sense.”

Olive was fain to confess to herself that in all probability Aunt Ruby did fairly express the collective opinion of Perfection City. They had only enough righteousness for themselves, and, like a ship already short of provisions, could not help another vessel, even though it might be flying the Union Jack upside down and showing all the other flags of acute distress recognized in the naval code of signals. Had Aunt Ruby heard of anything concerning a horse-thief who was supposed to be somewhere around, inquired Olive with a view to eliciting information, but she only elicited feminine alarms in overwhelming abundance.

“Do tell! Land o’ liberty! Was there horse-thieves ’bout? What a pity Brother Ezry an’ Brother Dummy was both gone jes’ now: they might meet in ’Sembly right away an’ discuss the p’int o’ non-resistance an’ buy revolvers next time anyone went to Union Mills. Horse-thieves was mos’ as bad as Injuns, an’ if it was lawful an’ right to defen’ yourself ’gainst Injuns as was ign’rant savages as never hed Christian teachin’, it couldn’t be wrong to look a’ter your hosses as was bought an’ paid for by ’Fection City money.”

Aunt Ruby was so convinced and loquacious upon this subject and upon the aspect of the case as presentedto her mind by her terrors, that Olive heartily regretted her question, and began to try and do away with the effects of it as far as possible. It was only a vague report she averred, and Olive herself had not the slightest idea that there were horse-thieves about. Upon the strength of this assurance Aunt Ruby, somewhat comforted, allowed her attention to be engaged by other topics of conversation. She was much distressed that she could not persuade her visitor to stay all the rest of the day and have a real good soul-satisfying talk, but Olive declared she must go home and see to her own chickens, an argument that appealed very strongly to Aunt Ruby’s maternal instincts.

A difficulty arose as to how Diana was to be decently conducted out through the yard.

“I’d mos’ as soon hev to conten’ with a roarin’ lion as that pup,” remarked Aunt Ruby as the difficulty presented itself to her mind in an acute form.

“If I could get her past without seeing the hens and chickens she would be all right,” said Olive, who of course had no whip, regarding meditatively the dog, who of course had no collar.

“Wal, that ’ud do, I guess, sort o’ take her out o’ the way o’ temptation,” said Aunt Ruby, surveying Diana with an anxious eye. “I kin give you an ole caliker skirt o’ mine, an’ you kin tie up her head in that reg’lar tight, so as she wouldn’t see ne’er a hen this side o’ Christmas, ’less you took it off.”

This seemed a hopeful arrangement; so the “calikerskirt” was brought, and the misguided Diana, under the impression that a brand new game was on foot, allowed her head to be hidden in the folds of the skirt. Olive then led her to the door, but Diana objected, not seeing where the joke came in for her; and as soon as she found that she was ignominiously tied into the dreadful skirt, her rage was boundless. In an instant she wrenched herself free from Olive’s guiding hand. She then commenced a wild career around the yard backwards, swaying this way and that in the most ghastly and unlooked-for manner.

The hens and chickens no sooner beheld this portent than with one universal squawk of horror they betook themselves to places of safety under the corn-crib and into the cracks of the wood-pile, whence they could not again be coaxed for many hours. Diana meanwhile continued her fearsome course and ere long came into violent contact with the chicken-tub, a large receptacle with loose wooden cover where various sorts of food suitable for fowls were collected together, first thinned with water and then thickened into a glutinous mass by intermixture of corn-meal. Into this tub Diana sat with extreme violence and then rolled over. Olive caught her as she was emerging from the chicken-tub and by uncovering her eyes restored her to reason. Aunt Ruby, speechless with indignation, and Olive, equally speechless with laughter, then set to work with two big spoons to scrape the chicken food from the ground and from the hindquarters of the dog. Diana, now at peace with all the world, wagged her tail benevolently during this process, and soon specked Olive over with corn-meal, potatoes, scraps of peelings, and bits of greens, until she looked as if she had been out in a snow-storm as severe in character as it was diversified in composition. When this job was over Aunt Ruby arose and straightened her old back with a groan.

“Wal, I guess I would a deal sight sooner hev a rattlesnake to look a’ter than a dawg,” she observed.

Olive, apologetic, departed along with the unrepentant Diana, and together they returned homewards.

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