CHAPTER IIITHE SPARK IN THE CLOD

47CHAPTER IIITHE SPARK IN THE CLOD

It did not cost Isom so many pangs to minister to the gross appetite of his bound boy as the spring weeks marched into summer, for gooseberries followed rhubarb, then came green peas and potatoes from the garden that Ollie had planted and tilled under her husband’s orders.Along in early summer the wormy codlings which fell from the apple-trees had to be gathered up and fed to the hogs by Ollie, and it was such a season of blighted fruit that the beasts could not eat them all. So there was apple sauce, sweetened with molasses from the new barrel that Isom broached.If it had not been so niggardly unnecessary, the faculty that Isom had for turning the waste ends of the farm into profit would have been admirable. But the suffering attendant upon this economy fell only upon the human creatures around him. Isom’s beasts wallowed in plenty and grew fat in the liberality of his hand. For himself, it looked as if he had the ability to extract his living from the bare surface of a rock.All of this green truck was filling, as Isom had said, but far from satisfying to a lad in the process of building on such generous plans as Joe. Isom knew that too much skim-milk would make a pot-bellied calf, but he was too stubborn in his rule of life to admit the cause when he saw that Joe began to lag at his work, and grow surly and sour.Isom came in for quick and startling enlightenment in the middle of a lurid July morning, while he and Joe were at work with one-horse cultivators, “laying by” the corn.48Joe threw his plow down in the furrow, cast the lines from his shoulders, and declared that he was starving. He vowed that he would not cultivate another row unless assured, then and there, that Isom would make an immediate enlargement in the bill-of-fare.Isom stood beside the handles of his own cultivator, there being the space of ten rows between him and Joe, and took the lines from around his shoulders, with the deliberate, stern movement of a man who is preparing for a fight.“What do you mean by this kind of capers?” he demanded.“I mean that you can’t go on starving me like you’ve been doing, and that’s all there is to it!” said Joe. “The law don’t give you the right to do that.”“Law! Well, I’ll law you,” said Isom, coming forward, his hard body crouched a little, his lean and guttered neck stretched as if he gathered himself for a run and jump at the fence. “I’ll feed you what comes to my hand to feed you, you onery whelp! You’re workin’ for me, you belong to me!”“I’m working for mother–I told you that before,” said Joe. “I don’t owe you anything, Isom, and you’ve got to feed me better, or I’ll walk away and leave you, that’s what I’ll do!”“Yes, I see you walkin’ away!” said Isom, plucking at his already turned-up sleeve. “I’m goin’ to give you a tannin’ right now, and one you’ll not forget to your dyin’ day!”At that moment Isom doubtless intended to carry out his threat. Here was a piece of his own property, as much his property as his own wedded wife, defying him, facing him with extravagant demands, threatening to stop work unless more bountifully fed! Truly, it was a state of insurrection such as no upright citizen like Isom Chase could49allow to go by unreproved and unquieted by castigation of his hand.“You’d better stop where you are,” advised Joe.He reached down and righted his plow. Isom could see the straining of the leaders in his lean wrist as he stood gripping the handle, and the thought passed through him that Joe intended to wrench it off and use it as a weapon against him.Isom had come but a few steps from his plow. He stopped, looking down at the furrow as if struggling to hold himself within bounds. Still looking at the earth, he went back to his implement.“I’ll put you where the dogs won’t bite you if you ever threaten my life ag’in!” said he.“I didn’t threaten your life, Isom, I didn’t say a word,” said Joe.“A motion’s a threat,” said Isom.“But I’ll tell you now,” said Joe, quietly, lowering his voice and leaning forward a little, “you’d better think a long time before you ever start to lay hands on me again, Isom. This is twice. The next time––”Joe set his plow in the furrow with a push that sent the swingle-tree knocking against the horse’s heels. The animal started out of the doze into which it had fallen while the quarrel went on. Joe grinned, thinking how even Isom’s dumb creatures took every advantage of him that opportunity offered. But he left his warning unfinished as for words.There was no need to say more, for Isom was cowed. He was quaking down to the tap-root of his salt-hardened soul, but he tried to put a different face on it as he took up his plow.“I don’t want to cripple you, and lay you up,” he said. “If I was to begin on you once I don’t know where I’d leave50off. Git back to your work, and don’t give me any more of your sass!”“I’ll go back to work when you give me your word that I’m to have meat and eggs, butter and milk, and plenty of it,” said Joe.“I orto tie you up to a tree and lash you!” said Isom, jerking angrily at his horse. “I don’t know what ever made me pity your mother and keep her out of the poorhouse by takin’ in a loafer like you!”“Well, if you’re sick of the bargain go and tell mother. Maybe she is, too,” Joe suggested.“No, you’ll not git out of it now, you’ll stick right here and put in your time, after all the trouble and expense I’ve been put to teachin’ you what little you know about farmin’,” Isom declared.He took up his plow and jerked his horse around into the row. Joe stood watching him, with folded arms, plainly with no intention of following. Isom looked back over his shoulder.“Git to work!” he yelled.“You didn’t promise me what I asked,” said Joe, quietly.“No, and that ain’t all!” returned Isom.The tall corn swallowed Isom and his horse as the sea swallowed Pharaoh and his host. When he returned to the end of the field where the rebellion had broken out, he found Joe sitting on the beam of his plow and the well-pleased horse asleep in the sun.Isom said nothing, but plunged away into the tall corn. When he came back next time Joe was unhitching his horse.“Now, look a-here, Joe,” Isom began, in quite a changed tone, “don’t you fly up and leave an old man in the lurch that way.”“You know what I said,” Joe told him.“I’ll give in to you, Joe; I’ll give you everything you ask51for, and more,” yielded Isom, seeing that Joe intended to leave. “I’ll put it in writing if you want me to Joe–I’ll do anything to keep you, son. You’re the only man I ever had on this place I wouldn’t rather see goin’ than comin’.”Isom’s word was satisfactory to Joe, and he returned to work.That turned out a day to be remembered in the household of Isom Chase. If he had come into the kitchen at noon with all the hoarded savings of his years and thrown them down before her eyes, Ollie could not have been more surprised and mystified than she was when he appeared from the smokehouse carrying a large ham.After his crafty way in a tight pinch Isom turned necessity into profit by making out that the act was free and voluntary, with the pleasure and comfort of his pretty little wife underlying and prompting it all. He grinned as if he would break his beard when he put the ham down on the table and cut it in two at the middle joint as deftly as a butcher.“I’ve been savin’ that ham up for you, Ollie. I think it’s just about right now,” said he.“That was nice of you, Isom,” said she, moved out of her settled taciturnity by his little show of thought for her, “I’ve been just dying for a piece of ham!”“Well, fry us a big skilletful of it, and some eggs along with it, and fetch up a crock of sweet milk, and stir it up cream and all,” directed Isom.Poor Ollie, overwhelmed by the suddenness and freedom of this generosity, stood staring at him, her eyes round, her lips open. Isom could not have studied a more astounding surprise. If he had hung diamonds on her neck, rubies on her wrists, and garnets in her hair, she could quicker have found her tongue.“It’s all right, Ollie, it’s all right,” said Isom pettishly. “We’re going to have these things from now on. Might as52well eat ’em, and git some of the good of what we produce, as let them city people fatten off ’em.”Isom went out with that, and Ollie attacked the ham with the butcher knife in a most savage and barbarous fashion.Isom’s old wife must have shifted in her grave at sight of the prodigal repast which Ollie soon spread on the kitchen table. Granting, of course, that people in their graves are cognizant of such things, which, according to this old standard of comparison in human amazement, they must be.But whether the old wife turned over or lay quiescent in the place where they put her when they folded her tired old hands upon her shrunken breast, it is indisputable that the new one eased the pangs of many a hungry day in that bountiful meal. And Joe’s face glowed from the fires of it, and his eyes sparkled in the satisfaction of his long-abused stomach.Next day a more startling thing happened. Twice each week there passed through the country, from farm to farm, a butcher’s wagon from Shelbyville, the county-seat, a few miles away. Isom Chase never had been a customer of the fresh meat purveyor, and the traveling merchant, knowing from the old man’s notoriety that he never could expect him to become one, did not waste time in stopping at his house. His surprise was almost apoplectic when Isom stopped him and bought a soup-bone, and it almost became fatal when the order was made a standing one. It was such a remarkable event that the meat man told about it at every stop. It went round the country like the news of a wedding or a death.Isom seemed to be satisfied with the new dietary regulations, for hams were cheap that summer, anyhow, and the season was late. Besides that, the more that Joe ate the harder he worked. It seemed a kind of spontaneous effort on the lad’s part, as if it was necessary to burn up the energy in surplus of the demand of his growing bone and muscle.53Ollie had picked up and brightened under the influence of ham and milk also, although it was all a foolish yielding to appetite, as Isom very well knew. He had beaten that weakness in himself to death with the club of abstinence; for himself he could live happily on what he had been accustomed to eating for thirty years and more. But as long as the investment of ham and milk paid interest in kitchen as well as field, Isom was grudgingly willing to see them consumed.Ollie’s brightening was only physical. In her heart she was as gloomily hopeless as before. After his first flash of fire she had not found much comfort or hope of comradeship in the boy, Joe Newbolt. He was so respectful in her presence, and so bashful, it seemed, that it almost made her uncomfortable to have him around.Man that he was in stature, he appeared no more than a timid boy in understanding, and her little advances of friendliness, her little appeals for sympathy, all glanced from the unconscious armor of his youthful innocence and reserve. She was forced to put him down after many weeks as merely stupid, and she sighed when she saw the hope of comradeship in her hard lot fade out and give way to a feeling bordering upon contempt.On Sunday evenings, after he came back from visiting his mother, Ollie frequently saw Joe reading the little brown Bible which he had carried with him when he came. She had taken it up one day while making Joe’s bed. It brought back to her the recollection of her Sunday-school days, when she was all giggles and frills; but there was no association of religious training to respond to its appeal. She wondered what Joe saw in it as she put it back on the box beside his bed.It chanced that she met Joe the next morning after she had made that short incursion between the brown covers of his book, as she was returning from the well and he was setting54out for the hog-lot between two pails of sour swill. He stood out of the path to let her pass without stepping into the long, dewy grass. She put her bucket down with a gasp of weariness, and looked up into his eyes with a smile.The buckets were heavy in Joe’s hands; he stood them down, meeting her friendly advances with one of his rare smiles, which came as seldom to his face, thought she, as a hummingbird to the honeysuckle on the kitchen porch.“Whew, this is going to be a scorcher!” said she.“I believe it is,” he agreed.From the opposite sides of the path their eyes met. Both smiled again, and felt better for it.“My, but you’re a mighty religious boy, aren’t you?” she asked suddenly.“Religious?” said he, looking at her in serious surprise.She nodded girlishly. The sun, long slanting through the cherry-trees, fell on her hair, loosely gathered up after her sleep, one free strand on her cheek.“No, I’m not religious.”“Well, you read the Bible all the time.”“Oh, well!” said he, stooping as if to lift his pails.“Why?” she wanted to know.Joe straightened his long back without his pails. Beyond the orchard the hogs were clamoring shrilly for their morning draught; from the barn there came the sound of Isom’s voice, speaking harshly to the beasts.“Well, because I like it, for one thing,” said he, “and because it’s the only book I’ve got here, for another.”“My, I think it’s awful slow!” said she.“Do you?” he inquired, as if interested in her likes and dislikes at last.“I’d think you’d like other books better–detective stories and that kind,” she ventured. “Didn’t you ever read any other book?”55“Some few,” he replied, a reflection as of amusement in his eyes, which she thought made them look old and understanding and wise. “But I’ve always read the Bible. It’s one of the books that never seems to get old to you.”“Did you ever readTrue as Steel?”“No, I never did.”“OrTempest and Sunshine?”He shook his head.“Oh-h,” said she, fairly lifting herself by the long breath which she drew, like the inhalation of a pleasant recollection, “you don’t know what you’ve missed! They are lovely!”“Well, maybe I’d like them, too.”He stooped again, and this time came up with his pails.“I’m glad you’re not religious, anyhow,” she sighed, as if heaving a trouble off her heart.“Are you?” he asked, turning to her wonderingly.“Yes; religious people are so glum,” she explained. “I never saw one of them laugh.”“There are some that way,” said Joe. “They seem to be afraid they’ll go to hell if they let the Almighty hear them laugh. Mother used to be that way when she first gotherreligion, but she’s outgrowing it now.”“The preachers used to scare me to death,” she declared. “If I could hear some comfortable religion I might take up with it, but it seems to me that everybody’s so sad after they get it. I don’t know why.”Joe put down the pails again. Early as the day was, it was hot, and he was sweating. He pushed his hat back from his forehead. It was like lifting a shadow from his serious young face. She smiled.“A person generally gets the kind of religion that he hears preached,” said he, “and most of it you hear is kind of heavy, like bread without rising. I’ve never seen a laughing preacher yet.”56“There must be some, though,” she reflected.“I hope so,” said Joe.“I’mgladyou’re not full of that kind of religion,” said she. “For a long time I thought you were.”“You did? Why?”“Oh, because–” said she.Her cheek was toward him; he saw that it was red, like the first tint of a cherry. She snatched up her bucket then and sped along the path.Joe walked on a little way, stopped, turned, and looked after her. He saw the flick of her skirt as her nimble heels flew up the three steps of the kitchen porch, and he wondered why she was glad that he was not religious, and why she had gone away like that, so fast. The pigs were clamoring, shriller, louder. It was no hour for a youth who had not yet wetted his feet in manhood’s stream to stand looking after a pair of heels and try to figure out a thing like that.As Joe had said, he was not religious, according to catechisms and creeds. He could not have qualified in the least exacting of the many faiths. All the religion that he had was of his own making, for his mother’s was altogether too ferocious in its punishments and too dun and foggy in its rewards for him.He read the Bible, and he believed most of it. There was as much religion, said he, in the Commandments as a man needed; a man could get on with that much very well. Beyond that he did not trouble.He read the adventures of David and the lamentations of Jeremiah, and the lofty exhortations of Isaiah for the sonority of the phrasing, the poetry and beauty. For he had not been sated by many tales nor blunted by many books. If he could manage to live according to the Commandments, he sometimes told his mother, he would not feel uneasy over a better way to die.57But he was not giving this matter much thought as he emptied the swill-pails to the chortling hogs. He was thinking about the red in Ollie’s cheeks, like the breast of a bright bird seen through the leaves, and of her quick flight up the path. It was a new Ollie that he had discovered that morning, one unknown and unspoken to before that day. But why had her face grown red that way, he wondered? Why had she run away?And Ollie, over her smoking pan on the kitchen stove, was thinking that something might be established in the way of comradeship between herself and the bound boy, after all. It took him a long time to get acquainted, she thought; but his friendship might be all the more stable for that. There was comfort in it; as she worked she smiled.There was no question of the need in which Ollie stood of friendship, sympathy, and kind words. Joe had been in that house six months, and in that time he had witnessed more pain than he believed one small woman’s heart could bear. While he was not sure that Isom ever struck his wife, he knew that he tortured her in endless combinations of cruelty, and pierced her heart with a thousand studied pangs. Often, when the house was still and Isom was asleep, he heard her moaning and sobbing, her head on the kitchen table.These bursts of anguish were not the sudden gusts of a pettish woman’s passion, but the settled sorrow of one who suffered without hope. Many a time Joe tiptoed to the bottom of the staircase in his bare feet and looked at her, the moonlight dim in the cheerless kitchen, her head a dark blotch upon the whiteness of her arms, bowed there in her grief. Often he longed to go to her with words of comfort and let her know that there was one at least who pitied her hard fate and sad disillusionment.In those times of tribulation Joe felt that they could be of mutual help and comfort if they could bring themselves to58speak, for he suffered also the pangs of imprisonment and the longings for liberty in that cruel house of bondage. Yet he always turned and went softly, almost breathlessly, back to his bed, leaving her to sob and cry alone in the struggle of her hopeless sorrow.It was a harder matter to keep his hands from the gristly throat of grim old Isom Chase, slumbering unfeelingly in his bed while his young wife shredded her heart between the burr-stones of his cruel mill. Joe had many an hour of struggle with himself, lying awake, his hot temples streaming sweat, his eyes staring at the ribs of the roof.During those months Joe had set and hardened. The muscles had thickened over his chest and arms; his neck was losing the long scragginess of youth; his fingers were firm-jointed in his broadening hands. He knew that Isom Chase was no match for him, man to man.But, for all his big body and great strength, he was only a boy in his sense of justice, in his hot, primitive desire to lunge out quickly and set the maladjustments of that household straight. He did not know that there was a thing as old as the desires of men at the bottom of Ollie’s sorrow, nor understand the futility of chastisement in the case of Isom Chase.Isom was as far as ever from his hope of a son or heir of any description–although he could not conceive the possibility of fathering a female child–and his bitter reproaches fell on Ollie, as they had fallen upon and blasted the woman who had trudged that somber course before her into the grateful shelter of the grave. It was a thing which Ollie could not discuss with young Joe, a thing which only a sympathetic mother might have lightened the humiliation of or eased with tender counsel.Isom, seeing that the book of his family must close with him, expelled the small grain of tenderness that his dry heart59had held for his wife at the beginning, and counted her now nothing but another back to bear his burdens. He multiplied her tasks, and snarled and snapped, and more than once in those work-crowded autumn days, when she had lagged in her weariness, he had lifted his hand to strike. The day would come when that threatened blow would fall; of that Ollie had no consoling doubt. She did not feel that she would resent it, save in an addition to her accumulated hate, for hard labor by day and tears by night break the spirit until the flints of cruelty no longer wake its fire.Day after day, as he worked by the side of Isom in the fields, Joe had it foremost in his mind to speak to him of his unjust treatment of his wife. Yet he hung back out of the Oriental conception which he held, due to his Scriptural reading, of that relationship between woman and man. A man’s wife was his property in a certain, broad sense. It would seem unwarranted by any measure of excess short of murder for another to interfere between them. Joe held his peace, therefore, but with internal ferment and unrest.It was in those days of Joe’s disquietude that Ollie first spoke to him of Isom’s oppressions. The opportunity fell a short time after their early morning meeting in the path. Isom had gone to town with a load of produce, and Joe and Ollie had the dinner alone for the first time since he had been under that roof.Ollie’s eyes were red and swollen from recent weeping, her face was mottled from her tears. Much trouble had made her careless of late of her prettiness, and now she was disheveled, her apron awry around her waist, her hair mussed, her whole aspect one of slovenly disregard. Her depression was so great that Joe was moved to comfort her.“You’ve got a hard time of it,” said he. “If there’s anything I can do to help you I wish you’d let me know.”Ollie slung a dish carelessly upon the table, and followed60it with Joe’s coffee, which she slopped half out into the saucer.“Oh, I feel just like I don’t care any more!” said she, her lips trembling, tears starting again in her irritated eyes. “I get treatment here that no decent man would give a dog!”Joe felt small and young in Ollie’s presence, due to the fact that she was older by a year at least than himself.That feeling of littleness had been one of his peculiarities as long as he could remember when there were others about older than himself, and supposed from that reason to be graver and wiser. It probably had its beginning in Joe’s starting out rather spindling and undersized, and not growing much until he was ten or thereabout, when he took a sudden shoot ahead, like a water-sprout on an apple-tree.And then he always had regarded matrimony as a state of gravity and maturity, into which the young and unsophisticated did not venture. This feeling seemed to place between them in Joe’s mind a boundless gulf, across which he could offer her only the sympathy and assistance of a boy. There was nothing in his mind of sympathy from an equality of years and understanding, only the chivalric urging of succor to the oppressed.“It’s a low-down way for a man to treat a woman, especially his wife,” said Joe, his indignation mounting at sight of her tears.“Yes, and he’d whip you, too, if he dared to do it,” said she, sitting in Isom’s place at the end of the table, where she could look across into Joe’s face. “I can see that in him when he watches you eat.”“I hope he’ll never try it,” said Joe.“You’re not afraid of him?”“Maybe not,” admitted Joe.“Then why do you say you hope he’ll never try it?” she pressed.61“Oh, because I do,” said Joe, bending over his plate.“I’d think you’d be glad if he did try it, so you could pay him off for his meanness,” she said.Joe looked across at her seriously.“Did he slap you this morning?” he asked.Ollie turned her head, making no reply.“I thought I heard you two scuffling around in the kitchen as I came to the porch with the milk,” said he.“Don’t tell it around!” she appealed, her eyes big and terrified at the recollection of what had passed. “No, he didn’t hit me, Joe; but he choked me. He grabbed me by the throat and shook me–his old hand’s as hard as iron!”Joe had noticed that she wore a handkerchief pinned around her neck. As she spoke she put her hand to her throat, and her tears gushed again.“That’s no way for a man to treat his wife,” said Joe indignantly.“If you knew everything–if you knew everything!” said she.Joe, being young, and feeling younger, could not see how she was straining to come to a common footing of understanding with him, to reach a plane where his sympathy would be a balm. He could not realize that her orbit of thought was similar to his own, that she was nearer a mate for him, indeed, than for hairy-limbed, big-jointed Isom Chase, with his grizzled hair and beard.“It was all over a little piece of ribbon I bought yesterday when I took the eggs up to the store,” she explained. “I got two cents a dozen more than I expected for them, and I put the extra money into a ribbon–only half a yard. Here it is,” said she, taking it from the cupboard; “I wanted it to wear on my neck.”She held it against her swathed throat with a little unconscious play of coquetry, a sad smile on her lips.62“It’s nice, and becoming to you, too,” said Joe, speaking after the manner of the countryside etiquette on such things.“Isom said I ought to have put the money into a package of soda, and when I wouldn’t fuss with him about it, that made him madder and madder. And then he–he–did that!”“You wouldn’t think Isom would mind ten cents,” said Joe.“He’d mind one cent,” said she in bitter disdain. “One cent–huh! he’d mind one egg! Some people might not believe it, but I tell you, Joe, that man counts the eggs every day, and he weighs every pound of butter I churn. If I wanted to, even, I couldn’t hide away a pound of butter or a dozen of eggs any more than I could hide away that stove.”“But I don’t suppose Isom means to be hard on you or anybody,” said Joe. “It’s his way to be close and stingy, and he may do better by you one of these days.”“No, he’ll never do any better,” she sighed. “If anything, he’ll do worse–if he can do any worse. I look for him to strike me next!”“He’d better not try that when I’m around!” said Joe hotly.“What would you do to him, Joe?” she asked, her voice lowered almost to a whisper. She leaned eagerly toward him as she spoke, a flush on her face.“Well, I’d stop him, I guess,” said Joe deliberately, as if he had considered his words. As he spoke he reached down for his hat, which he always placed on the floor beside his chair when he took his meals.“If there was a soul in this world that cared for me–if I had anywhere to go, I’d leave him this hour!” declared Ollie, her face burning with the hate of her oppressor.Joe got up from his chair and left the table; she rose with him and came around the side. He stopped on his way to63the door, looking at her with awkward bashfulness as she stood there flushed and brilliant in her tossed state, scarcely a yard between them.“But there’s nobody in the world that cares for me,” she complained sorrowfully.Joe was lifting his hat to his head. Midway he stayed his hand, his face blank with surprise.“Why, you’ve got your mother, haven’t you?” he asked.“Mother!” she repeated scornfully. “She’d drive me back to him; she was crazy for me to marry him, for she thinks I’ll get all his property and money when he dies.”“Well, he may die before long,” consoled Joe.“Die!” said she; and again, “Die! He’ll never die!”She leaned toward him suddenly, bringing her face within a few inches of his. Her hot breath struck him on the cheek; it moved the clustered hair at his temple and played warm in the doorway of his ear.“He’ll never die,” she repeated in low, quick voice, which fell to a whisper in the end, “unless somebody he’s tramped on and ground down and cursed and driven puts him out of the way!”Joe stood looking at her with big eyes, dead to that feminine shock which would have tingled a mature man to the marrow, insensible to the strong effort she was making to wake him and draw him to her. He drew back from her, a little frightened, a good deal ashamed, troubled, and mystified.“Why, you don’t suppose anybody would do that?” said he.Ollie turned from him, the fire sinking down in her face.“Oh, no; I don’t suppose so,” she said, a little distant and cold in her manner.She began gathering up the dishes.Joe stood there for a little while, looking at her hands as64they flew from plate to plate like white butterflies, as if something had stirred in him that he did not understand. Presently he went his way to take up his work, no more words passing between them.Ollie, from under her half raised lids, watched him go, tiptoeing swiftly after him to the door as he went down the path toward the well. Her breath was quick upon her lips; her breast was agitated. If that slow hunk could be warmed with a man’s passions and desires; if she could wake him; if she could fling fire into his heart! He was only a boy, the man in him just showing its strong face behind that mask of wild, long hair. It lay there waiting to move him in ways yet strange to his experience. If she might send her whisper to that still slumbering force and charge it into life a day before its time!She stood with hand upon the door, trailing him with her eyes as he passed on to the barn. She felt that she had all but reached beyond the insulation of his adolescence in that burning moment when her breath was on his cheek; she knew that the wood, even that hour, was warm under the fire. What might a whisper now, a smile then, a kindness, a word, a hand laid softly upon his hair, work in the days to come?She turned back to her work, her mind stirred out of its sluggish rut, the swirl of her new thoughts quickening in her blood. Isom Chase would not die; he would live on and on, harder, drier, stingier year by year, unless a bolt from heaven withered him or the hand of man laid him low. What might come to him, he deserved, even the anguish of death with a strangling cord about his neck; even the strong blow of an ax as he slept on his bed, snatching from him the life that he had debased of all its beauty, without the saving chance of repentance in the end.She had thought of doing it with her own hand; a hundred ways she had planned and contrived it in her mind,65goaded on nearer and nearer to it by his inhuman oppressions day by day. But her heart had recoiled from it as a task for the hand of a man. If a man could be raised up to it, a man who had suffered servitude with her, a man who would strike for the double vengeance, and the love of her in his heart!She went to the door again, gripping the stove-lid lifter in her little hand, as the jangle of harness came to her when Joe passed with the team. He rode by toward the field, the sun on his broad back, slouching forward as his heavy horses plodded onward. The man in him was asleep yet, yes; but there was a pit of fire as deep as a volcano’s throat in his slumbering soul.If she could lift him up to it, if she could pluck the heart out of him and warm it in her own hot breast, then there would stand the man for her need. For Isom Chase would not die. He would live on and on, like a worm in wood, until some strong hand fed him to the flames.

It did not cost Isom so many pangs to minister to the gross appetite of his bound boy as the spring weeks marched into summer, for gooseberries followed rhubarb, then came green peas and potatoes from the garden that Ollie had planted and tilled under her husband’s orders.

Along in early summer the wormy codlings which fell from the apple-trees had to be gathered up and fed to the hogs by Ollie, and it was such a season of blighted fruit that the beasts could not eat them all. So there was apple sauce, sweetened with molasses from the new barrel that Isom broached.

If it had not been so niggardly unnecessary, the faculty that Isom had for turning the waste ends of the farm into profit would have been admirable. But the suffering attendant upon this economy fell only upon the human creatures around him. Isom’s beasts wallowed in plenty and grew fat in the liberality of his hand. For himself, it looked as if he had the ability to extract his living from the bare surface of a rock.

All of this green truck was filling, as Isom had said, but far from satisfying to a lad in the process of building on such generous plans as Joe. Isom knew that too much skim-milk would make a pot-bellied calf, but he was too stubborn in his rule of life to admit the cause when he saw that Joe began to lag at his work, and grow surly and sour.

Isom came in for quick and startling enlightenment in the middle of a lurid July morning, while he and Joe were at work with one-horse cultivators, “laying by” the corn.48Joe threw his plow down in the furrow, cast the lines from his shoulders, and declared that he was starving. He vowed that he would not cultivate another row unless assured, then and there, that Isom would make an immediate enlargement in the bill-of-fare.

Isom stood beside the handles of his own cultivator, there being the space of ten rows between him and Joe, and took the lines from around his shoulders, with the deliberate, stern movement of a man who is preparing for a fight.

“What do you mean by this kind of capers?” he demanded.

“I mean that you can’t go on starving me like you’ve been doing, and that’s all there is to it!” said Joe. “The law don’t give you the right to do that.”

“Law! Well, I’ll law you,” said Isom, coming forward, his hard body crouched a little, his lean and guttered neck stretched as if he gathered himself for a run and jump at the fence. “I’ll feed you what comes to my hand to feed you, you onery whelp! You’re workin’ for me, you belong to me!”

“I’m working for mother–I told you that before,” said Joe. “I don’t owe you anything, Isom, and you’ve got to feed me better, or I’ll walk away and leave you, that’s what I’ll do!”

“Yes, I see you walkin’ away!” said Isom, plucking at his already turned-up sleeve. “I’m goin’ to give you a tannin’ right now, and one you’ll not forget to your dyin’ day!”

At that moment Isom doubtless intended to carry out his threat. Here was a piece of his own property, as much his property as his own wedded wife, defying him, facing him with extravagant demands, threatening to stop work unless more bountifully fed! Truly, it was a state of insurrection such as no upright citizen like Isom Chase could49allow to go by unreproved and unquieted by castigation of his hand.

“You’d better stop where you are,” advised Joe.

He reached down and righted his plow. Isom could see the straining of the leaders in his lean wrist as he stood gripping the handle, and the thought passed through him that Joe intended to wrench it off and use it as a weapon against him.

Isom had come but a few steps from his plow. He stopped, looking down at the furrow as if struggling to hold himself within bounds. Still looking at the earth, he went back to his implement.

“I’ll put you where the dogs won’t bite you if you ever threaten my life ag’in!” said he.

“I didn’t threaten your life, Isom, I didn’t say a word,” said Joe.

“A motion’s a threat,” said Isom.

“But I’ll tell you now,” said Joe, quietly, lowering his voice and leaning forward a little, “you’d better think a long time before you ever start to lay hands on me again, Isom. This is twice. The next time––”

Joe set his plow in the furrow with a push that sent the swingle-tree knocking against the horse’s heels. The animal started out of the doze into which it had fallen while the quarrel went on. Joe grinned, thinking how even Isom’s dumb creatures took every advantage of him that opportunity offered. But he left his warning unfinished as for words.

There was no need to say more, for Isom was cowed. He was quaking down to the tap-root of his salt-hardened soul, but he tried to put a different face on it as he took up his plow.

“I don’t want to cripple you, and lay you up,” he said. “If I was to begin on you once I don’t know where I’d leave50off. Git back to your work, and don’t give me any more of your sass!”

“I’ll go back to work when you give me your word that I’m to have meat and eggs, butter and milk, and plenty of it,” said Joe.

“I orto tie you up to a tree and lash you!” said Isom, jerking angrily at his horse. “I don’t know what ever made me pity your mother and keep her out of the poorhouse by takin’ in a loafer like you!”

“Well, if you’re sick of the bargain go and tell mother. Maybe she is, too,” Joe suggested.

“No, you’ll not git out of it now, you’ll stick right here and put in your time, after all the trouble and expense I’ve been put to teachin’ you what little you know about farmin’,” Isom declared.

He took up his plow and jerked his horse around into the row. Joe stood watching him, with folded arms, plainly with no intention of following. Isom looked back over his shoulder.

“Git to work!” he yelled.

“You didn’t promise me what I asked,” said Joe, quietly.

“No, and that ain’t all!” returned Isom.

The tall corn swallowed Isom and his horse as the sea swallowed Pharaoh and his host. When he returned to the end of the field where the rebellion had broken out, he found Joe sitting on the beam of his plow and the well-pleased horse asleep in the sun.

Isom said nothing, but plunged away into the tall corn. When he came back next time Joe was unhitching his horse.

“Now, look a-here, Joe,” Isom began, in quite a changed tone, “don’t you fly up and leave an old man in the lurch that way.”

“You know what I said,” Joe told him.

“I’ll give in to you, Joe; I’ll give you everything you ask51for, and more,” yielded Isom, seeing that Joe intended to leave. “I’ll put it in writing if you want me to Joe–I’ll do anything to keep you, son. You’re the only man I ever had on this place I wouldn’t rather see goin’ than comin’.”

Isom’s word was satisfactory to Joe, and he returned to work.

That turned out a day to be remembered in the household of Isom Chase. If he had come into the kitchen at noon with all the hoarded savings of his years and thrown them down before her eyes, Ollie could not have been more surprised and mystified than she was when he appeared from the smokehouse carrying a large ham.

After his crafty way in a tight pinch Isom turned necessity into profit by making out that the act was free and voluntary, with the pleasure and comfort of his pretty little wife underlying and prompting it all. He grinned as if he would break his beard when he put the ham down on the table and cut it in two at the middle joint as deftly as a butcher.

“I’ve been savin’ that ham up for you, Ollie. I think it’s just about right now,” said he.

“That was nice of you, Isom,” said she, moved out of her settled taciturnity by his little show of thought for her, “I’ve been just dying for a piece of ham!”

“Well, fry us a big skilletful of it, and some eggs along with it, and fetch up a crock of sweet milk, and stir it up cream and all,” directed Isom.

Poor Ollie, overwhelmed by the suddenness and freedom of this generosity, stood staring at him, her eyes round, her lips open. Isom could not have studied a more astounding surprise. If he had hung diamonds on her neck, rubies on her wrists, and garnets in her hair, she could quicker have found her tongue.

“It’s all right, Ollie, it’s all right,” said Isom pettishly. “We’re going to have these things from now on. Might as52well eat ’em, and git some of the good of what we produce, as let them city people fatten off ’em.”

Isom went out with that, and Ollie attacked the ham with the butcher knife in a most savage and barbarous fashion.

Isom’s old wife must have shifted in her grave at sight of the prodigal repast which Ollie soon spread on the kitchen table. Granting, of course, that people in their graves are cognizant of such things, which, according to this old standard of comparison in human amazement, they must be.

But whether the old wife turned over or lay quiescent in the place where they put her when they folded her tired old hands upon her shrunken breast, it is indisputable that the new one eased the pangs of many a hungry day in that bountiful meal. And Joe’s face glowed from the fires of it, and his eyes sparkled in the satisfaction of his long-abused stomach.

Next day a more startling thing happened. Twice each week there passed through the country, from farm to farm, a butcher’s wagon from Shelbyville, the county-seat, a few miles away. Isom Chase never had been a customer of the fresh meat purveyor, and the traveling merchant, knowing from the old man’s notoriety that he never could expect him to become one, did not waste time in stopping at his house. His surprise was almost apoplectic when Isom stopped him and bought a soup-bone, and it almost became fatal when the order was made a standing one. It was such a remarkable event that the meat man told about it at every stop. It went round the country like the news of a wedding or a death.

Isom seemed to be satisfied with the new dietary regulations, for hams were cheap that summer, anyhow, and the season was late. Besides that, the more that Joe ate the harder he worked. It seemed a kind of spontaneous effort on the lad’s part, as if it was necessary to burn up the energy in surplus of the demand of his growing bone and muscle.53

Ollie had picked up and brightened under the influence of ham and milk also, although it was all a foolish yielding to appetite, as Isom very well knew. He had beaten that weakness in himself to death with the club of abstinence; for himself he could live happily on what he had been accustomed to eating for thirty years and more. But as long as the investment of ham and milk paid interest in kitchen as well as field, Isom was grudgingly willing to see them consumed.

Ollie’s brightening was only physical. In her heart she was as gloomily hopeless as before. After his first flash of fire she had not found much comfort or hope of comradeship in the boy, Joe Newbolt. He was so respectful in her presence, and so bashful, it seemed, that it almost made her uncomfortable to have him around.

Man that he was in stature, he appeared no more than a timid boy in understanding, and her little advances of friendliness, her little appeals for sympathy, all glanced from the unconscious armor of his youthful innocence and reserve. She was forced to put him down after many weeks as merely stupid, and she sighed when she saw the hope of comradeship in her hard lot fade out and give way to a feeling bordering upon contempt.

On Sunday evenings, after he came back from visiting his mother, Ollie frequently saw Joe reading the little brown Bible which he had carried with him when he came. She had taken it up one day while making Joe’s bed. It brought back to her the recollection of her Sunday-school days, when she was all giggles and frills; but there was no association of religious training to respond to its appeal. She wondered what Joe saw in it as she put it back on the box beside his bed.

It chanced that she met Joe the next morning after she had made that short incursion between the brown covers of his book, as she was returning from the well and he was setting54out for the hog-lot between two pails of sour swill. He stood out of the path to let her pass without stepping into the long, dewy grass. She put her bucket down with a gasp of weariness, and looked up into his eyes with a smile.

The buckets were heavy in Joe’s hands; he stood them down, meeting her friendly advances with one of his rare smiles, which came as seldom to his face, thought she, as a hummingbird to the honeysuckle on the kitchen porch.

“Whew, this is going to be a scorcher!” said she.

“I believe it is,” he agreed.

From the opposite sides of the path their eyes met. Both smiled again, and felt better for it.

“My, but you’re a mighty religious boy, aren’t you?” she asked suddenly.

“Religious?” said he, looking at her in serious surprise.

She nodded girlishly. The sun, long slanting through the cherry-trees, fell on her hair, loosely gathered up after her sleep, one free strand on her cheek.

“No, I’m not religious.”

“Well, you read the Bible all the time.”

“Oh, well!” said he, stooping as if to lift his pails.

“Why?” she wanted to know.

Joe straightened his long back without his pails. Beyond the orchard the hogs were clamoring shrilly for their morning draught; from the barn there came the sound of Isom’s voice, speaking harshly to the beasts.

“Well, because I like it, for one thing,” said he, “and because it’s the only book I’ve got here, for another.”

“My, I think it’s awful slow!” said she.

“Do you?” he inquired, as if interested in her likes and dislikes at last.

“I’d think you’d like other books better–detective stories and that kind,” she ventured. “Didn’t you ever read any other book?”55

“Some few,” he replied, a reflection as of amusement in his eyes, which she thought made them look old and understanding and wise. “But I’ve always read the Bible. It’s one of the books that never seems to get old to you.”

“Did you ever readTrue as Steel?”

“No, I never did.”

“OrTempest and Sunshine?”

He shook his head.

“Oh-h,” said she, fairly lifting herself by the long breath which she drew, like the inhalation of a pleasant recollection, “you don’t know what you’ve missed! They are lovely!”

“Well, maybe I’d like them, too.”

He stooped again, and this time came up with his pails.

“I’m glad you’re not religious, anyhow,” she sighed, as if heaving a trouble off her heart.

“Are you?” he asked, turning to her wonderingly.

“Yes; religious people are so glum,” she explained. “I never saw one of them laugh.”

“There are some that way,” said Joe. “They seem to be afraid they’ll go to hell if they let the Almighty hear them laugh. Mother used to be that way when she first gotherreligion, but she’s outgrowing it now.”

“The preachers used to scare me to death,” she declared. “If I could hear some comfortable religion I might take up with it, but it seems to me that everybody’s so sad after they get it. I don’t know why.”

Joe put down the pails again. Early as the day was, it was hot, and he was sweating. He pushed his hat back from his forehead. It was like lifting a shadow from his serious young face. She smiled.

“A person generally gets the kind of religion that he hears preached,” said he, “and most of it you hear is kind of heavy, like bread without rising. I’ve never seen a laughing preacher yet.”56

“There must be some, though,” she reflected.

“I hope so,” said Joe.

“I’mgladyou’re not full of that kind of religion,” said she. “For a long time I thought you were.”

“You did? Why?”

“Oh, because–” said she.

Her cheek was toward him; he saw that it was red, like the first tint of a cherry. She snatched up her bucket then and sped along the path.

Joe walked on a little way, stopped, turned, and looked after her. He saw the flick of her skirt as her nimble heels flew up the three steps of the kitchen porch, and he wondered why she was glad that he was not religious, and why she had gone away like that, so fast. The pigs were clamoring, shriller, louder. It was no hour for a youth who had not yet wetted his feet in manhood’s stream to stand looking after a pair of heels and try to figure out a thing like that.

As Joe had said, he was not religious, according to catechisms and creeds. He could not have qualified in the least exacting of the many faiths. All the religion that he had was of his own making, for his mother’s was altogether too ferocious in its punishments and too dun and foggy in its rewards for him.

He read the Bible, and he believed most of it. There was as much religion, said he, in the Commandments as a man needed; a man could get on with that much very well. Beyond that he did not trouble.

He read the adventures of David and the lamentations of Jeremiah, and the lofty exhortations of Isaiah for the sonority of the phrasing, the poetry and beauty. For he had not been sated by many tales nor blunted by many books. If he could manage to live according to the Commandments, he sometimes told his mother, he would not feel uneasy over a better way to die.57

But he was not giving this matter much thought as he emptied the swill-pails to the chortling hogs. He was thinking about the red in Ollie’s cheeks, like the breast of a bright bird seen through the leaves, and of her quick flight up the path. It was a new Ollie that he had discovered that morning, one unknown and unspoken to before that day. But why had her face grown red that way, he wondered? Why had she run away?

And Ollie, over her smoking pan on the kitchen stove, was thinking that something might be established in the way of comradeship between herself and the bound boy, after all. It took him a long time to get acquainted, she thought; but his friendship might be all the more stable for that. There was comfort in it; as she worked she smiled.

There was no question of the need in which Ollie stood of friendship, sympathy, and kind words. Joe had been in that house six months, and in that time he had witnessed more pain than he believed one small woman’s heart could bear. While he was not sure that Isom ever struck his wife, he knew that he tortured her in endless combinations of cruelty, and pierced her heart with a thousand studied pangs. Often, when the house was still and Isom was asleep, he heard her moaning and sobbing, her head on the kitchen table.

These bursts of anguish were not the sudden gusts of a pettish woman’s passion, but the settled sorrow of one who suffered without hope. Many a time Joe tiptoed to the bottom of the staircase in his bare feet and looked at her, the moonlight dim in the cheerless kitchen, her head a dark blotch upon the whiteness of her arms, bowed there in her grief. Often he longed to go to her with words of comfort and let her know that there was one at least who pitied her hard fate and sad disillusionment.

In those times of tribulation Joe felt that they could be of mutual help and comfort if they could bring themselves to58speak, for he suffered also the pangs of imprisonment and the longings for liberty in that cruel house of bondage. Yet he always turned and went softly, almost breathlessly, back to his bed, leaving her to sob and cry alone in the struggle of her hopeless sorrow.

It was a harder matter to keep his hands from the gristly throat of grim old Isom Chase, slumbering unfeelingly in his bed while his young wife shredded her heart between the burr-stones of his cruel mill. Joe had many an hour of struggle with himself, lying awake, his hot temples streaming sweat, his eyes staring at the ribs of the roof.

During those months Joe had set and hardened. The muscles had thickened over his chest and arms; his neck was losing the long scragginess of youth; his fingers were firm-jointed in his broadening hands. He knew that Isom Chase was no match for him, man to man.

But, for all his big body and great strength, he was only a boy in his sense of justice, in his hot, primitive desire to lunge out quickly and set the maladjustments of that household straight. He did not know that there was a thing as old as the desires of men at the bottom of Ollie’s sorrow, nor understand the futility of chastisement in the case of Isom Chase.

Isom was as far as ever from his hope of a son or heir of any description–although he could not conceive the possibility of fathering a female child–and his bitter reproaches fell on Ollie, as they had fallen upon and blasted the woman who had trudged that somber course before her into the grateful shelter of the grave. It was a thing which Ollie could not discuss with young Joe, a thing which only a sympathetic mother might have lightened the humiliation of or eased with tender counsel.

Isom, seeing that the book of his family must close with him, expelled the small grain of tenderness that his dry heart59had held for his wife at the beginning, and counted her now nothing but another back to bear his burdens. He multiplied her tasks, and snarled and snapped, and more than once in those work-crowded autumn days, when she had lagged in her weariness, he had lifted his hand to strike. The day would come when that threatened blow would fall; of that Ollie had no consoling doubt. She did not feel that she would resent it, save in an addition to her accumulated hate, for hard labor by day and tears by night break the spirit until the flints of cruelty no longer wake its fire.

Day after day, as he worked by the side of Isom in the fields, Joe had it foremost in his mind to speak to him of his unjust treatment of his wife. Yet he hung back out of the Oriental conception which he held, due to his Scriptural reading, of that relationship between woman and man. A man’s wife was his property in a certain, broad sense. It would seem unwarranted by any measure of excess short of murder for another to interfere between them. Joe held his peace, therefore, but with internal ferment and unrest.

It was in those days of Joe’s disquietude that Ollie first spoke to him of Isom’s oppressions. The opportunity fell a short time after their early morning meeting in the path. Isom had gone to town with a load of produce, and Joe and Ollie had the dinner alone for the first time since he had been under that roof.

Ollie’s eyes were red and swollen from recent weeping, her face was mottled from her tears. Much trouble had made her careless of late of her prettiness, and now she was disheveled, her apron awry around her waist, her hair mussed, her whole aspect one of slovenly disregard. Her depression was so great that Joe was moved to comfort her.

“You’ve got a hard time of it,” said he. “If there’s anything I can do to help you I wish you’d let me know.”

Ollie slung a dish carelessly upon the table, and followed60it with Joe’s coffee, which she slopped half out into the saucer.

“Oh, I feel just like I don’t care any more!” said she, her lips trembling, tears starting again in her irritated eyes. “I get treatment here that no decent man would give a dog!”

Joe felt small and young in Ollie’s presence, due to the fact that she was older by a year at least than himself.

That feeling of littleness had been one of his peculiarities as long as he could remember when there were others about older than himself, and supposed from that reason to be graver and wiser. It probably had its beginning in Joe’s starting out rather spindling and undersized, and not growing much until he was ten or thereabout, when he took a sudden shoot ahead, like a water-sprout on an apple-tree.

And then he always had regarded matrimony as a state of gravity and maturity, into which the young and unsophisticated did not venture. This feeling seemed to place between them in Joe’s mind a boundless gulf, across which he could offer her only the sympathy and assistance of a boy. There was nothing in his mind of sympathy from an equality of years and understanding, only the chivalric urging of succor to the oppressed.

“It’s a low-down way for a man to treat a woman, especially his wife,” said Joe, his indignation mounting at sight of her tears.

“Yes, and he’d whip you, too, if he dared to do it,” said she, sitting in Isom’s place at the end of the table, where she could look across into Joe’s face. “I can see that in him when he watches you eat.”

“I hope he’ll never try it,” said Joe.

“You’re not afraid of him?”

“Maybe not,” admitted Joe.

“Then why do you say you hope he’ll never try it?” she pressed.61

“Oh, because I do,” said Joe, bending over his plate.

“I’d think you’d be glad if he did try it, so you could pay him off for his meanness,” she said.

Joe looked across at her seriously.

“Did he slap you this morning?” he asked.

Ollie turned her head, making no reply.

“I thought I heard you two scuffling around in the kitchen as I came to the porch with the milk,” said he.

“Don’t tell it around!” she appealed, her eyes big and terrified at the recollection of what had passed. “No, he didn’t hit me, Joe; but he choked me. He grabbed me by the throat and shook me–his old hand’s as hard as iron!”

Joe had noticed that she wore a handkerchief pinned around her neck. As she spoke she put her hand to her throat, and her tears gushed again.

“That’s no way for a man to treat his wife,” said Joe indignantly.

“If you knew everything–if you knew everything!” said she.

Joe, being young, and feeling younger, could not see how she was straining to come to a common footing of understanding with him, to reach a plane where his sympathy would be a balm. He could not realize that her orbit of thought was similar to his own, that she was nearer a mate for him, indeed, than for hairy-limbed, big-jointed Isom Chase, with his grizzled hair and beard.

“It was all over a little piece of ribbon I bought yesterday when I took the eggs up to the store,” she explained. “I got two cents a dozen more than I expected for them, and I put the extra money into a ribbon–only half a yard. Here it is,” said she, taking it from the cupboard; “I wanted it to wear on my neck.”

She held it against her swathed throat with a little unconscious play of coquetry, a sad smile on her lips.62

“It’s nice, and becoming to you, too,” said Joe, speaking after the manner of the countryside etiquette on such things.

“Isom said I ought to have put the money into a package of soda, and when I wouldn’t fuss with him about it, that made him madder and madder. And then he–he–did that!”

“You wouldn’t think Isom would mind ten cents,” said Joe.

“He’d mind one cent,” said she in bitter disdain. “One cent–huh! he’d mind one egg! Some people might not believe it, but I tell you, Joe, that man counts the eggs every day, and he weighs every pound of butter I churn. If I wanted to, even, I couldn’t hide away a pound of butter or a dozen of eggs any more than I could hide away that stove.”

“But I don’t suppose Isom means to be hard on you or anybody,” said Joe. “It’s his way to be close and stingy, and he may do better by you one of these days.”

“No, he’ll never do any better,” she sighed. “If anything, he’ll do worse–if he can do any worse. I look for him to strike me next!”

“He’d better not try that when I’m around!” said Joe hotly.

“What would you do to him, Joe?” she asked, her voice lowered almost to a whisper. She leaned eagerly toward him as she spoke, a flush on her face.

“Well, I’d stop him, I guess,” said Joe deliberately, as if he had considered his words. As he spoke he reached down for his hat, which he always placed on the floor beside his chair when he took his meals.

“If there was a soul in this world that cared for me–if I had anywhere to go, I’d leave him this hour!” declared Ollie, her face burning with the hate of her oppressor.

Joe got up from his chair and left the table; she rose with him and came around the side. He stopped on his way to63the door, looking at her with awkward bashfulness as she stood there flushed and brilliant in her tossed state, scarcely a yard between them.

“But there’s nobody in the world that cares for me,” she complained sorrowfully.

Joe was lifting his hat to his head. Midway he stayed his hand, his face blank with surprise.

“Why, you’ve got your mother, haven’t you?” he asked.

“Mother!” she repeated scornfully. “She’d drive me back to him; she was crazy for me to marry him, for she thinks I’ll get all his property and money when he dies.”

“Well, he may die before long,” consoled Joe.

“Die!” said she; and again, “Die! He’ll never die!”

She leaned toward him suddenly, bringing her face within a few inches of his. Her hot breath struck him on the cheek; it moved the clustered hair at his temple and played warm in the doorway of his ear.

“He’ll never die,” she repeated in low, quick voice, which fell to a whisper in the end, “unless somebody he’s tramped on and ground down and cursed and driven puts him out of the way!”

Joe stood looking at her with big eyes, dead to that feminine shock which would have tingled a mature man to the marrow, insensible to the strong effort she was making to wake him and draw him to her. He drew back from her, a little frightened, a good deal ashamed, troubled, and mystified.

“Why, you don’t suppose anybody would do that?” said he.

Ollie turned from him, the fire sinking down in her face.

“Oh, no; I don’t suppose so,” she said, a little distant and cold in her manner.

She began gathering up the dishes.

Joe stood there for a little while, looking at her hands as64they flew from plate to plate like white butterflies, as if something had stirred in him that he did not understand. Presently he went his way to take up his work, no more words passing between them.

Ollie, from under her half raised lids, watched him go, tiptoeing swiftly after him to the door as he went down the path toward the well. Her breath was quick upon her lips; her breast was agitated. If that slow hunk could be warmed with a man’s passions and desires; if she could wake him; if she could fling fire into his heart! He was only a boy, the man in him just showing its strong face behind that mask of wild, long hair. It lay there waiting to move him in ways yet strange to his experience. If she might send her whisper to that still slumbering force and charge it into life a day before its time!

She stood with hand upon the door, trailing him with her eyes as he passed on to the barn. She felt that she had all but reached beyond the insulation of his adolescence in that burning moment when her breath was on his cheek; she knew that the wood, even that hour, was warm under the fire. What might a whisper now, a smile then, a kindness, a word, a hand laid softly upon his hair, work in the days to come?

She turned back to her work, her mind stirred out of its sluggish rut, the swirl of her new thoughts quickening in her blood. Isom Chase would not die; he would live on and on, harder, drier, stingier year by year, unless a bolt from heaven withered him or the hand of man laid him low. What might come to him, he deserved, even the anguish of death with a strangling cord about his neck; even the strong blow of an ax as he slept on his bed, snatching from him the life that he had debased of all its beauty, without the saving chance of repentance in the end.

She had thought of doing it with her own hand; a hundred ways she had planned and contrived it in her mind,65goaded on nearer and nearer to it by his inhuman oppressions day by day. But her heart had recoiled from it as a task for the hand of a man. If a man could be raised up to it, a man who had suffered servitude with her, a man who would strike for the double vengeance, and the love of her in his heart!

She went to the door again, gripping the stove-lid lifter in her little hand, as the jangle of harness came to her when Joe passed with the team. He rode by toward the field, the sun on his broad back, slouching forward as his heavy horses plodded onward. The man in him was asleep yet, yes; but there was a pit of fire as deep as a volcano’s throat in his slumbering soul.

If she could lift him up to it, if she could pluck the heart out of him and warm it in her own hot breast, then there would stand the man for her need. For Isom Chase would not die. He would live on and on, like a worm in wood, until some strong hand fed him to the flames.

66CHAPTER IVA STRANGER AT THE GATE

Rain overtook Isom as he was driving home from town that evening, and rain was becoming one of the few things in this world from which he would flee. It aggravated the rheumatism in his knotted toes and stabbed his knee-joints with awl-piercing pains.For upward of forty-five years Isom had been taking the rains as they came wherever they might find him. It made him growl to turn tail to them now, and trot to shelter from every shower like a hen.So he was in no sweet humor as he drew near his own barn-yard gate with the early autumn downpour already finding its way through his coat. It came to him as he approached that portal of his domain that if he had a son the boy would be there, with the gate flung wide, to help him. It was only one of the thousand useful offices which a proper boy could fill around that place, thought he; but his wives had conspired in barrenness against him; no son ever would come to cheer his declining days.Even if he had the kind of a wife that a man should have, reflected he, she would be watching; she would come through rain and hail, thunder and wild blast, to open the gate and ease him through without that troublesome stop.Matrimony had been a profitless investment for him, said he in bitterness. His first wife had lived long and eaten ravenously, and had worn out shoes and calico slips, and his second, a poor unwilling hand, was not worth her keep.So, with all this sour summing up of his wasted ventures in his mind, and the cold rain spitting through his years-worn67coat, Isom was in no humor to debate the way with another man when it came to entering into his own property through his own wide gate.But there was another man in the road, blocking it with his top-buggy, one foot out on the step, his head thrust around the side of the hood with inquiring look, as if he also felt that there should be somebody at hand to open the gate and let him pass without muddying his feet.“Ho!” called Isom uncivilly, hailing the stranger as he pulled up his team, the end of his wagon-tongue threatening the hood of the buggy; “what do you want here?”The stranger put his head out a bit farther and twisted his neck to look behind. He did not appear to know Isom, any more than Isom knew him, but there was the surliness of authority, the inhospitality of ownership, in Isom’s mien, and it was the business of the man in the buggy to know men at a glance. He saw that Isom was the landlord, and he gave him a nod and smile.“I’d like to get shelter for my horse and buggy for the night, and lodging for myself,” said he.“Well, if you pay for it I reckon you can git it,” returned Isom. “Pile out there and open that gate.”That was the way that Curtis Morgan, advance agent of the divine light of literature, scout of knowledge, torch-bearer of enlightenment into the dark places of ignorance, made his way into the house of Isom Chase, and found himself in due time at supper in the low-ceiled kitchen, with pretty Ollie, like a bright bead in a rusty purse, bringing hot biscuits from the oven and looking him over with a smile.Curtis Morgan was a slim and limber man, with a small head and a big mouth, a most flexible and plastic organ. Morgan wore a mustache which was cut back to stubs, giving his face a grubby look about the nose. His light hair was short and thick, curling in little love-locks about his ears.68Morgan sold books. He would put you in a set of twenty-seven volumes of theHistory of the Worldfor fifty-three dollars, or he would open his valise and sell you a ready-reckoner for six bits. He carriedHousehold Compendiums of Useful KnowledgeandMedical Advisers; he had poultry guides and horse books, and books on bees, and if he couldn’t sell you one thing he would sell you another, unless you were a worm, or a greased pig, and able, by some extraordinary natural or artificial attribute, to slip out of his hands.As has been the case with many a greater man before him, Morgan’s most profitable business was done in his smallest article of trade. In the country where men’s lives were counted too short for all the work they had to do, they didn’t have any time for histories of the world and no interest in them, anyhow. The world was to them no more than they could see of it, and the needs of their lives and their longings–save in some adventurer who developed among them now and then–went no farther than the limit of their vision.The ready-reckoner was, therefore, the money-maker for Morgan, who seemed to carry an inexhaustible supply. It told a farm-hand what his pay amounted to by days and hours down to the fraction of a cent; it told the farmer what the interest on his note would be; it showed how to find out how many bushels of corn there were in a crib without measuring the contents, and how many tons of hay a stack contained; it told how to draw up a will and write a deed, and make liniment for the mumps.Isom drew all this information out of his guest at supper, and it did not require much effort to set the sap flowing.Morgan talked to Isom and looked at Ollie; he asked Joe a question, and cocked his eye on Ollie’s face as if he expected to find the answer there; he pronounced shallow platitudes of philosophy aiming them at Isom, but looking at Ollie for approval or dissent.69Isom appeared to take rather kindly to him, if his unusual volubility indicated the state of his feelings. He asked Morgan a great deal about his business, and how he liked it, and whether he made any money at it. Morgan leaned back on the hinder legs of his chair, having finished his supper, and fumbled in his waistcoat pocket for his goose-quill pick. He winked at Isom on the footing of one shrewd man to another as he applied the quill to his big white teeth.“Well, I pay my way,” said he.There was a great deal back of the simple words; there was an oily self-satisfaction, and there was a vast amount of portentous reserve. Isom liked it; he nodded, a smile moving his beard. It did him good to meet a man who could get behind the sham skin of the world, and take it by the heels, and turn it a stunning fall.Next morning, the sun being out again and the roads promising to dry speedily, Morgan hitched up and prepared to set out on his flaming path of enlightenment. Before going he made a proposal to Isom to use that place as headquarters for a week or two, while he covered the country lying about.Anything that meant profit to Isom looked good and fitting in his eyes. The feeding of another mouth would entail little expense, and so the bargain was struck. Morgan was to have his breakfast and supper each day, and provender for his horse, at the rate of four dollars a week, payable in advance.Morgan ran over his compendiums and horse books, but Isom was firm for cash; he suggested at least one ready-reckoner on account, but Isom had no need of that. Isom could guess to a hundredweight the contents of a stack of hay, and there never was a banker in this world that could outfigure him on interest. He had no more need for a ready-reckoner than a centipede has of legs. Morgan, seeing that nothing but money would talk there, produced the week’s70charge on the spot, and drove off to his day’s canvassing well satisfied.Morgan had not been a paying guest in that house two days before the somber domestic tragedy that it roofed was as plain to him as if he had it printed and bound, and in his valise along with the compendiums of his valuable assortment.He found it pleasant to return to the farm early of an afternoon and sit in the kitchen door with his pipe, and watch Ollie’s face clear of clouds as he talked. Consolation and cheer were strangers to her heart; it required no words from her to tell Morgan that.Her blushing gratitude for small offices of assistance, such as fetching a pail of water or a basket of garden greens, repaid Morgan all that he missed in sales by cutting short his business day just for the pleasure of returning and talking with her.Isom was too self-centered, and unconscious of his wife’s uncommon prettiness, to be jealous or suspicious of Morgan’s late goings or early returns. If a man wanted to pay him four dollars a week for the pleasure of carrying up water, cutting stove-wood or feeding the calves, the fool was welcome to do it as long as his money held.So it was that old Isom, blind and deaf and money-mad, set with his own hand and kindled with his own breath, the insidious spark which trustful fools before his day have seen leap into flame and strip them of honor before the eyes of men.Morgan made a long stay of it in that section, owing to the density of the population, he claimed, and the proximity of several villages which he could reach in a few miles’ drive. He was in his third week when Isom was summoned on jury service to the county seat.Twelve dollars had passed from the book agent’s hands into Isom’s, and Isom grinned over it as the easiest money71that it ever had been his pleasure to collect. He put it away with his savings, which never had earned interest for a banker, and turned the care of the farm over to Joe.Jury service at the county seat was an uncertain thing. It might last a day, and then it might tie a man up for two or three weeks, but Isom was able to leave home with a more comfortable feeling than ever before. He had a trustworthy servant to leave behind him, one in whose hands everything would be safe, under whose energy and conscientious effort nothing would drag or fall behind.Isom felt that he could very well afford to spread on a little soft-soap, as flattery was provincially called, and invest Joe with a greater sense of his responsibility, if possible. When occasion required, Isom could rise to flattery as deftly as the best of them. It was an art at which his tongue was wonderfully facile, considering the fact that he mingled so seldom with men in the outside doings of life. His wits had no foil to whet against and grow sharp, save the hard substance of his own inflexible nature, for he was born with that shrewd faculty for taking men “on the blind side,” as they used to call that trick in Missouri.“I’m turnin’ the whole farm over to you to look after like it was your own while I’m away,” said he, “and I’m doing it with the feeling that it’s in worthy hands. I know you’re not the boy to shirk on me when my back’s turned, for you never tried to do it to my face. You stand by me, Joe, and I’ll stand by you; you’ll never lose anything by it in the end.“I may be a crabbed old feller once in a while, and snarl around some, but my bark’s worse than my bite, you know that by this time. So I’ll put everything in your hands, with a feeling that it’ll be looked after just the same as if I was here.”“I’ll do the best I can by you,” promised Joe, his generous heart warming to Isom a little in spite of past indignities,72and the fact that Joe knew very well the old man’s talk was artful pretense.“I know you will,” said Isom, patting his shoulder in fatherly approbation. “In case I’m held over there a week, you keep your eye on that agent, and don’t let him stay here a day overtime without another week’s board in advance.”“I’ll attend to him,” promised Joe.Isom’s hand had lingered a minute on Joe’s shoulder while he talked, and the old man’s satisfaction over the depth of muscle that he felt beneath it was great. He stood looking Joe over with quick-shifting, calculating eyes, measuring him in every part, from flank to hock, like a farrier. He was gratified to see how Joe had filled out in the past six months. If he had paid for a colt and been delivered a draft-horse, his surprise would not have been more pleasant.As it was, he had bargained for the services of a big-jointed, long-boned lad, and found himself possessed of a man. The fine part of it was that he had nearly two years more of service at ten dollars a month coming from Joe, who was worth twenty of any man’s money, and could command it, just as he stood. That was business, that was bargaining.Isom’s starved soul distended over it; the feeling was warm in his veins, like a gill of home-made brandy. He had him, bound body and limb, tied in a corner from which he could not escape, to send and call, to fetch and carry, for the better part of two good, profitable years.As Isom rode away he rubbed his dry, hard hands above his saddle-horn, feeling more comfortable than he had felt for many a day. He gloated over the excellent bargain that he had made with the Widow Newbolt; he grinned at the roots of his old rusty beard. If ever a man poked himself in the ribs in the excess of self-felicitation, Isom Chase did it as he rode along on his old buckskin horse that autumn morning, with the sun just lifting over the hill.73It was an excellent thing, indeed, for a patriot to serve his country once in a while on a jury, thought Isom, especially when that patriot had been shrewd in his dealings with the widow and orphan, and had thus secured himself against loss at home while his country called him abroad. Jury duty was nothing but a pleasant season of relaxation in such case.There would be mileage andper diem, and the state would bear the expense of lodging and meals in the event of his being drawn out of the panel to serve in some long criminal case. Mileage andper diemwould come in very nicely, in addition to the four dollars a week that loose-handed book agent was paying. For the first time in his life when called upon for jury service, Isom went to meet it with no sourness in his face. Mileage andper diem, but best of all, a great strong man left at home in his place; one to be trusted in and depended upon; one who would do both his master’s work and his own.Joe had no such pleasant cogitations to occupy his mind as he bent his long back to assume the double burden when Isom went away. For many days he had been unquiet with a strange, indefinable unrest, like the yearn of a wild-fowl when the season comes for it to wing away to southern seas. Curtis Morgan was behind that strong, wild feeling; he was the urge of it, and the fuel of its fire.Why it was so, Joe did not know, although he struggled in his reason to make it clear. For many days, almost from the first, Joe had felt that Morgan should not be in that house; that his pretext of lingering there on business was a blind too thin to deceive anybody but Isom. Anybody could deceive Isom if he would work his scheme behind a dollar. It was a shield beyond which Isom could not see, and had no wish to inquire.Joe did not like those late starts which Morgan made of74a morning, long after he and Isom were in the field, nor the early homings, long before they came in to do the chores. Joe left the house each morning with reluctance, after Isom’s departure, lingering over little things, finding hitherto undiscovered tasks to keep him about in the presence of Ollie, and to throw him between her and the talkative boarder, who seemed always hanging at her heels. Since their talk at dinner on the day that Morgan came, Joe had felt a new and deep interest in Ollie, and held for her an unaccountable feeling of friendliness.This feeling had been fed, for a few days, by Ollie, who found odd minutes to talk with him as she had not talked before, and by small attentions and kindnesses. She had greeted him in the morning with smiles, where her face once wore the sad mask of misery; and she had touched his hand sometimes, with encouraging or commending caress.Joe had yielded to her immediately the unreserved loyalty of his unsophisticated soul. The lot of his bondage was lightened by this new tie, the prospect of the unserved term under Isom was not so forbidding now. And now this fellow Morgan had stepped between them, in some manner beyond his power to define. It was as one who beholds a shadow fall across his threshold, which he can neither pick up nor cast away.Ollie had no more little attentions for Joe, but endless solicitude for Morgan’s comfort; no more full smiles for him, but only the reflections of those which beamed for the chattering lounger who made a pretense of selling books while he made love to another man’s wife.It was this dim groping after the truth, and his half-conception of it, that rendered Joe miserable. He did not fully understand what Morgan was about, but it was plain to him that the man had no honest purpose there. He could not repeat his fears to Isom, for Isom’s wrath and correction75would fall on Ollie. Now he was left in charge of his master’s house, his lands, his livestock, andhis honor.The vicarious responsibility rested on him with serious weight. Knowing what he knew, and seeing what he saw, should he allow things to proceed as they had been going? Would he be true to the trust that Isom had placed in him with his parting word in standing aside and knowingly permitting this man to slip in and poison the heart of Isom’s wife?She was lonely and oppressed, and hungry for kind words, but it was not this stranger’s office to make green the barrenness of her life. He was there, the bondboy, responsible to his master for his acts. She might come to him for sympathy, and go away with honor. But with this other, this man whose pale eyes shifted and darted like a botfly around a horse’s ear, could she drink his counsel and remain undefiled?Joe thought it up and down as he worked in the field near the house that morning, and his face grew hot and his eyes grew fevered, and his resentment against Morgan rose in his throat.He watched to see the man drive away on his canvassing round, but the sun passed nine o’clock and he did not go. He had no right there, alone in the house with that woman, putting, who could say, what evil into her heart.Ten o’clock and the agent’s buggy had not left the barn. Joe could contain himself no longer. He was at work in a little stony piece of late clover, so rough he did not like to risk the mower in it. For three hours he had been laying the tumbled swaths in winding tracks across the field, and he had a very good excuse for going to the well, indeed. Coupled with that was the need of a whet-rock, and behind it all the justification of his position. He was there in his master’s place; he must watch and guard the honor of his house.76Joe could not set out on that little trip without a good deal of moral cudgeling when it came to the point, although he threw down his scythe with a muttered curse on his lips for the man who was playing such an underhanded game.It was on Ollie’s account he hesitated. Ollie would think that he suspected her, when there was nothing farther from his mind. It was Morgan who would set the snare for her to trip into, and it was Morgan that he was going to send about his business. But Ollie might take offense and turn against him, and make it as unpleasant as she had shown that she could make it agreeable.But duty was stronger than friendship. It was stern and implacable, and there was no pleasant road to take around it and come out with honor at the other end.Joe made as much noise as he could with his big feet–and that was no inconsiderable amount–as he approached the house. But near the building the grass was long, and soft underfoot, and it bore Joe around to the kitchen window silently. His lips were too dry to whistle; his heart was going too fast to carry a tune.He paused a little way beyond the window, which stood open with the sun falling through it, listening for the sound of their voices. It was strangely silent for a time when the book-agent was around.Joe went on, his shadow breaking the sunbeam which whitened the kitchen floor. There was a little quick start as he came suddenly to the kitchen door; a hurried stir of feet. As he stepped upon the porch he saw Morgan in the door, Ollie not a yard behind him, their hands just breaking their clasp. Joe knew in his heart that Morgan had been holding her in his arms.Ollie’s face was flushed, her hair was disturbed. Her bosom rose and fell like troubled water, her eyes were brighter than Joe ever had seen them. Even Morgan was different,77sophisticated and brazen that he was. A flash of red showed on his cheekbones and under his eyes; his thin nostrils were panting like gills.Joe stood there, one foot on the porch, the other on the ground, as blunt as honesty, as severe as honor. There was nothing in his face that either of them could read to indicate what was surging in his breast. He had caught them, and they wondered if he had sense enough to know.Joe pushed his hat back from his sweating forehead and looked inquiringly at Morgan.“Your horse sick, or something?” he asked.“No,” said Morgan, turning his back on Joe with a little jerk of contempt in his shoulders.“Well, I think he must be down, or something,” said Joe, “for I heard a racket in the barn.”“Why didn’t you go and see what was the matter?” demanded Morgan crossly, snatching his hat from the table.Ollie was drowned in a confusion of blushes. She stood hanging her head, but Joe saw the quick turn of her eyes to follow Morgan as he went away in long strides toward the barn.Joe went to the tool-chest which stood in a corner of the kitchen and busied himself clattering over its contents. Presently he looked at Ollie, his hand on the open lid of the box.“Did you see that long whetstone lying around anywhere, Ollie?” he asked.She lifted her head with a little start. Joe never had called her familiarly by her name before. It always had been “Missis Chase,” distant and respectful.“No, I haven’t seen it, Joe,” she answered, the color leaving her cheeks.“All right, Ollie,” said he, holding her eyes with steady gaze, until she shifted hers under the pain of it, and the questioning reproach.78Joe slammed down the lid of the tool-chest, as if with the intention of making as much noise as possible.There was something in the way he had spoken her name that was stranger than the circumstance itself. Perhaps she felt the authority and the protection which Joe meant that his voice should assume; perhaps she understood that it was the word of a man. She was afraid of him at that moment, as she never had been afraid of Isom in all their married life.“I suppose Isom put it away somewhere around the barn,” said Joe.“Maybe he did, Joe.”“I’ll go down there and see if I can find it,” he said.Ollie knew, as well as Joe himself, that he was making the whetstone the vehicle to carry his excuse for watching Morgan away from the farm, but she was not certain whether this sudden shrewdness was the deep understanding of a man, or the domineering spirit of a crude lad, jealous of his passing authority.The uncertainty troubled her. She watched him from the door and saw him approach Morgan, where he was backing his horse into the shafts.“All right, is he?” asked Joe, stopping a moment.Morgan was distant.“I guess he’ll live another day, don’t worry about him,” said he, in surly voice.“What time do you aim to be back today?” pursued Joe, entirely unmoved by Morgan’s show of temper.“Say, I’ll set up a bulletin board with my time-table on it if you’ve got to have it, Mr. Overseer!” said Morgan, looking up from the buckling of a shaft-strap, his face coloring in anger.“Well, you don’t need to get huffy over it.”“Mind your business then,” Morgan growled.79He didn’t wait to discuss the matter farther, but got into the buggy without favoring Joe with as much as another glance, gave his horse a vindictive lash with the whip and drove off, leaving the gate open behind him.Joe shut it, and turned back to his mowing.Many a time he paused that morning in his labor, leaning on the snath of his scythe, in a manner of abstraction and seeming indolence altogether strange to him. There was a scene, framed by the brown casing of the kitchen door, with two figures in it, two clinging hands, which persisted in its disturbing recurrence in his troubled mind.Ollie was on dangerous ground. How far she had advanced, he did not know, but not yet, he believed, to the place where the foulness of Morgan had defiled her beyond cleansing. It was his duty as the guardian of his master’s house to watch her, even to warn her, and to stop her before she went too far.Once he put down his scythe and started to go to the house, his mind full of what he felt it his duty to say.Then there rose up that feeling of disparity between matron and youth which had held him at a distance from Ollie before. He turned back to his work with a blush upon his sun-scorched face, and felt ashamed. But it was not a thing to be deferred until after the damage had been done. He must speak to her that day, perhaps when he should go in for dinner. So he said.Ollie seemed self-contained and uncommunicative at dinner. Joe thought she was a little out of humor, or that she was falling back into her old gloomy way, from which she had emerged, all smiles and dimples, like a new and youthful creature, on the coming of Morgan. He thought, too, that this might be her way of showing her resentment of the familiarity that he had taken in calling her by her name.The feeling of deputy-mastership was no longer important upon his shoulders. He shrank down in his chair with a80sense of drawing in, like a snail, while he burned with humiliation and shame. The pinnacle of manhood was too slippery for his clumsy feet; he had plumped down from its altitudes as swiftly as he had mounted that morning under the spur of duty. He was a boy, and felt that he was a boy, and far, far from being anything nobler, or stronger, or better qualified to give saving counsel to a woman older, if not wiser, than himself.Perhaps it was Ollie’s purpose to inspire such feeling, and to hold Joe in his place. She was neither so dull, nor so unpractised in the arts of coquetry, to make such a supposition improbable.It was only when Joe sighted Morgan driving back to the farm late in the afternoon that his feeling of authority asserted itself again, and lifted him up to the task before him. He must let her understand that he knew of what was going on between them. A few words would suffice, and they must be spoken before Morgan entered the house again to pour his poison into her ears.Ollie was churning that afternoon, standing at her task close by the open door. Joe came past the window, as he had crossed it that morning, his purpose hot upon him, his long legs measuring the ground in immense, swift steps. He carried his hat in his hand, for the day was one of those with the pepper of autumn in it which puts the red in the apple’s cheeks.Ollie heard him approaching; her bare arm stayed the stroke of the churn-dasher as she looked up. Her face was bright, a smile was in her eyes, revealing the clear depths of them, and the life and the desires that issued out of them, like the waters of a spring in the sun. She was moist and radiant in the sweat of her labor, and clean and fresh and sweet to see.Her dress was parted back from her bosom to bare it to81the refreshment of the breeze, and her skin was as white as the cream on the dasher, and the crimson of her cheeks blended down upon her neck, as if the moisture of her brow had diffused its richness, and spread its beauty there.She looked at Joe, halted suddenly like a post set upright in the ground, stunned by the revelation of the plastic beauty of neck and bare bosom, and, as their eyes met, she smiled, lifted one white arm and pushed back a straying lock of hair.Joe’s tongue lay cold, and numb as wood against his palate; no word would come to it; it would not move. The wonder of a new beauty in God’s created things was deep upon him; a warm fountain rose in him and played and tossed, with a new and pleasurable thrill. He saw and admired, but he was not ashamed.All that he had come to say to her was forgotten, all that he had framed to speak as he bore hastily on toward the house had evaporated from his heated brain. A new world turned its bright colors before his eyes, a new breadth of life had been revealed, it seemed to him. In the pleasure of his discovery he stood with no power in him but to tremble and stare.The flush deepened in Ollie’s cheeks. She understood what was moving in his breast, for it is given to her kind to know man before he knows himself. She feigned surprise to behold him thus stricken, staring and silent, his face scarlet with the surge of his hot blood.With one slow-lifted hand she gathered the edges of her dress together, withdrawing the revealed secret of her breast.“Why, Joe! What are you looking at?” she asked.“You,” he answered, his voice dry and hoarse, like that of one who asks for water at the end of a race. He turned away from her then, saying no more, and passed quickly out of her sight beyond the shrubbery which shouldered the kitchen wall.82Slowly Ollie lifted the dasher which had settled to the bottom of the churn, and a smile broke upon her lips. As she went on with the completion of her task, she smiled still, with lips, with eyes, with warm exultation of her strong young body, as over a triumphant ending of some issue long at balance and undefined.Joe went away from the kitchen door in a strange daze of faculties. For that new feeling which leaped in him and warmed him to the core, and gave him confidence in his strength never before enjoyed, and an understanding of things hitherto unrevealed, he was glad. But at heart he felt that he was a traitor to the trust imposed in him, and that he had violated the sanctity of his master’s home.Now he knew what it was that had made his cheeks flame in anger and his blood leap in resentment when he saw Ollie in the door that morning, all flushed and trembling from Morgan’s arms; now he understood why he had lingered to interpose between them in past days. It was the wild, deep fear of jealousy. He was in love with his master’s wife! What had been given him to guard, he had looked upon with unholy hunger; that which had been left with him to treasure, he had defiled with lustful eyes.Joe struck across the fields, his work forgotten, now hot with the mounting fires of his newly discovered passion, now cold with the swelling accusation of a trust betrayed. Jealousy, and not a regard for his master’s honor, had prompted him to put her on her guard against Morgan. He had himself coveted his neighbor’s wife. He had looked upon a woman to lust after her, he had committed adultery in his heart. Between him and Morgan there was no redeeming difference. One was as bad as the other, said Joe. Only this difference; he would stop there, in time, ashamed now of the offending of his eyes and the trespass of his heart. Ollie did not know. He had not wormed his way into her83heart by pitying her unhappiness, like the false guest who had emptied his lies into her ears.Joe was able to see now how little deserving Isom was of any such blessing as Ollie, how ill-assorted they were by nature, inclination and age. But God had joined them, for what pains and penances He alone knew, and it was not the work of any man to put them apart.At the edge of a hazel coppice, far away from the farmhouse that sheltered the object of his tender thoughts and furtive desires, Joe sat among the first fallen leaves of autumn, fighting to clear himself from the perplexities of that disquieting situation. In the agony of his aching conscience, he bowed his head and groaned.A man’s burden of honor had fallen upon him with the disclosure of a man’s desires. His boyhood seemed suddenly to have gone from him like the light of a lamp blown out by a puff of wind. He felt old, and responsible to answer now for himself, since the enormity of his offense was plain to his smarting conscience.And he was man enough to look after Morgan, too. He would proceed to deal with Morgan on a new basis, himself out of the calculation entirely. Ollie must be protected against his deceitful wiles, and against herself as well.Joe trembled in his newer and clearer understanding of the danger that threatened her as he hastened back to the barn-yard to take up his neglected chores. The thought that Morgan and Ollie were alone in the house almost threw him into a fever of panic and haste.He must not be guilty of such an oversight again; he must stand like a stern wall between them, and be able to account for his trust to Isom with unclouded heart.

Rain overtook Isom as he was driving home from town that evening, and rain was becoming one of the few things in this world from which he would flee. It aggravated the rheumatism in his knotted toes and stabbed his knee-joints with awl-piercing pains.

For upward of forty-five years Isom had been taking the rains as they came wherever they might find him. It made him growl to turn tail to them now, and trot to shelter from every shower like a hen.

So he was in no sweet humor as he drew near his own barn-yard gate with the early autumn downpour already finding its way through his coat. It came to him as he approached that portal of his domain that if he had a son the boy would be there, with the gate flung wide, to help him. It was only one of the thousand useful offices which a proper boy could fill around that place, thought he; but his wives had conspired in barrenness against him; no son ever would come to cheer his declining days.

Even if he had the kind of a wife that a man should have, reflected he, she would be watching; she would come through rain and hail, thunder and wild blast, to open the gate and ease him through without that troublesome stop.

Matrimony had been a profitless investment for him, said he in bitterness. His first wife had lived long and eaten ravenously, and had worn out shoes and calico slips, and his second, a poor unwilling hand, was not worth her keep.

So, with all this sour summing up of his wasted ventures in his mind, and the cold rain spitting through his years-worn67coat, Isom was in no humor to debate the way with another man when it came to entering into his own property through his own wide gate.

But there was another man in the road, blocking it with his top-buggy, one foot out on the step, his head thrust around the side of the hood with inquiring look, as if he also felt that there should be somebody at hand to open the gate and let him pass without muddying his feet.

“Ho!” called Isom uncivilly, hailing the stranger as he pulled up his team, the end of his wagon-tongue threatening the hood of the buggy; “what do you want here?”

The stranger put his head out a bit farther and twisted his neck to look behind. He did not appear to know Isom, any more than Isom knew him, but there was the surliness of authority, the inhospitality of ownership, in Isom’s mien, and it was the business of the man in the buggy to know men at a glance. He saw that Isom was the landlord, and he gave him a nod and smile.

“I’d like to get shelter for my horse and buggy for the night, and lodging for myself,” said he.

“Well, if you pay for it I reckon you can git it,” returned Isom. “Pile out there and open that gate.”

That was the way that Curtis Morgan, advance agent of the divine light of literature, scout of knowledge, torch-bearer of enlightenment into the dark places of ignorance, made his way into the house of Isom Chase, and found himself in due time at supper in the low-ceiled kitchen, with pretty Ollie, like a bright bead in a rusty purse, bringing hot biscuits from the oven and looking him over with a smile.

Curtis Morgan was a slim and limber man, with a small head and a big mouth, a most flexible and plastic organ. Morgan wore a mustache which was cut back to stubs, giving his face a grubby look about the nose. His light hair was short and thick, curling in little love-locks about his ears.68

Morgan sold books. He would put you in a set of twenty-seven volumes of theHistory of the Worldfor fifty-three dollars, or he would open his valise and sell you a ready-reckoner for six bits. He carriedHousehold Compendiums of Useful KnowledgeandMedical Advisers; he had poultry guides and horse books, and books on bees, and if he couldn’t sell you one thing he would sell you another, unless you were a worm, or a greased pig, and able, by some extraordinary natural or artificial attribute, to slip out of his hands.

As has been the case with many a greater man before him, Morgan’s most profitable business was done in his smallest article of trade. In the country where men’s lives were counted too short for all the work they had to do, they didn’t have any time for histories of the world and no interest in them, anyhow. The world was to them no more than they could see of it, and the needs of their lives and their longings–save in some adventurer who developed among them now and then–went no farther than the limit of their vision.

The ready-reckoner was, therefore, the money-maker for Morgan, who seemed to carry an inexhaustible supply. It told a farm-hand what his pay amounted to by days and hours down to the fraction of a cent; it told the farmer what the interest on his note would be; it showed how to find out how many bushels of corn there were in a crib without measuring the contents, and how many tons of hay a stack contained; it told how to draw up a will and write a deed, and make liniment for the mumps.

Isom drew all this information out of his guest at supper, and it did not require much effort to set the sap flowing.

Morgan talked to Isom and looked at Ollie; he asked Joe a question, and cocked his eye on Ollie’s face as if he expected to find the answer there; he pronounced shallow platitudes of philosophy aiming them at Isom, but looking at Ollie for approval or dissent.69

Isom appeared to take rather kindly to him, if his unusual volubility indicated the state of his feelings. He asked Morgan a great deal about his business, and how he liked it, and whether he made any money at it. Morgan leaned back on the hinder legs of his chair, having finished his supper, and fumbled in his waistcoat pocket for his goose-quill pick. He winked at Isom on the footing of one shrewd man to another as he applied the quill to his big white teeth.

“Well, I pay my way,” said he.

There was a great deal back of the simple words; there was an oily self-satisfaction, and there was a vast amount of portentous reserve. Isom liked it; he nodded, a smile moving his beard. It did him good to meet a man who could get behind the sham skin of the world, and take it by the heels, and turn it a stunning fall.

Next morning, the sun being out again and the roads promising to dry speedily, Morgan hitched up and prepared to set out on his flaming path of enlightenment. Before going he made a proposal to Isom to use that place as headquarters for a week or two, while he covered the country lying about.

Anything that meant profit to Isom looked good and fitting in his eyes. The feeding of another mouth would entail little expense, and so the bargain was struck. Morgan was to have his breakfast and supper each day, and provender for his horse, at the rate of four dollars a week, payable in advance.

Morgan ran over his compendiums and horse books, but Isom was firm for cash; he suggested at least one ready-reckoner on account, but Isom had no need of that. Isom could guess to a hundredweight the contents of a stack of hay, and there never was a banker in this world that could outfigure him on interest. He had no more need for a ready-reckoner than a centipede has of legs. Morgan, seeing that nothing but money would talk there, produced the week’s70charge on the spot, and drove off to his day’s canvassing well satisfied.

Morgan had not been a paying guest in that house two days before the somber domestic tragedy that it roofed was as plain to him as if he had it printed and bound, and in his valise along with the compendiums of his valuable assortment.

He found it pleasant to return to the farm early of an afternoon and sit in the kitchen door with his pipe, and watch Ollie’s face clear of clouds as he talked. Consolation and cheer were strangers to her heart; it required no words from her to tell Morgan that.

Her blushing gratitude for small offices of assistance, such as fetching a pail of water or a basket of garden greens, repaid Morgan all that he missed in sales by cutting short his business day just for the pleasure of returning and talking with her.

Isom was too self-centered, and unconscious of his wife’s uncommon prettiness, to be jealous or suspicious of Morgan’s late goings or early returns. If a man wanted to pay him four dollars a week for the pleasure of carrying up water, cutting stove-wood or feeding the calves, the fool was welcome to do it as long as his money held.

So it was that old Isom, blind and deaf and money-mad, set with his own hand and kindled with his own breath, the insidious spark which trustful fools before his day have seen leap into flame and strip them of honor before the eyes of men.

Morgan made a long stay of it in that section, owing to the density of the population, he claimed, and the proximity of several villages which he could reach in a few miles’ drive. He was in his third week when Isom was summoned on jury service to the county seat.

Twelve dollars had passed from the book agent’s hands into Isom’s, and Isom grinned over it as the easiest money71that it ever had been his pleasure to collect. He put it away with his savings, which never had earned interest for a banker, and turned the care of the farm over to Joe.

Jury service at the county seat was an uncertain thing. It might last a day, and then it might tie a man up for two or three weeks, but Isom was able to leave home with a more comfortable feeling than ever before. He had a trustworthy servant to leave behind him, one in whose hands everything would be safe, under whose energy and conscientious effort nothing would drag or fall behind.

Isom felt that he could very well afford to spread on a little soft-soap, as flattery was provincially called, and invest Joe with a greater sense of his responsibility, if possible. When occasion required, Isom could rise to flattery as deftly as the best of them. It was an art at which his tongue was wonderfully facile, considering the fact that he mingled so seldom with men in the outside doings of life. His wits had no foil to whet against and grow sharp, save the hard substance of his own inflexible nature, for he was born with that shrewd faculty for taking men “on the blind side,” as they used to call that trick in Missouri.

“I’m turnin’ the whole farm over to you to look after like it was your own while I’m away,” said he, “and I’m doing it with the feeling that it’s in worthy hands. I know you’re not the boy to shirk on me when my back’s turned, for you never tried to do it to my face. You stand by me, Joe, and I’ll stand by you; you’ll never lose anything by it in the end.

“I may be a crabbed old feller once in a while, and snarl around some, but my bark’s worse than my bite, you know that by this time. So I’ll put everything in your hands, with a feeling that it’ll be looked after just the same as if I was here.”

“I’ll do the best I can by you,” promised Joe, his generous heart warming to Isom a little in spite of past indignities,72and the fact that Joe knew very well the old man’s talk was artful pretense.

“I know you will,” said Isom, patting his shoulder in fatherly approbation. “In case I’m held over there a week, you keep your eye on that agent, and don’t let him stay here a day overtime without another week’s board in advance.”

“I’ll attend to him,” promised Joe.

Isom’s hand had lingered a minute on Joe’s shoulder while he talked, and the old man’s satisfaction over the depth of muscle that he felt beneath it was great. He stood looking Joe over with quick-shifting, calculating eyes, measuring him in every part, from flank to hock, like a farrier. He was gratified to see how Joe had filled out in the past six months. If he had paid for a colt and been delivered a draft-horse, his surprise would not have been more pleasant.

As it was, he had bargained for the services of a big-jointed, long-boned lad, and found himself possessed of a man. The fine part of it was that he had nearly two years more of service at ten dollars a month coming from Joe, who was worth twenty of any man’s money, and could command it, just as he stood. That was business, that was bargaining.

Isom’s starved soul distended over it; the feeling was warm in his veins, like a gill of home-made brandy. He had him, bound body and limb, tied in a corner from which he could not escape, to send and call, to fetch and carry, for the better part of two good, profitable years.

As Isom rode away he rubbed his dry, hard hands above his saddle-horn, feeling more comfortable than he had felt for many a day. He gloated over the excellent bargain that he had made with the Widow Newbolt; he grinned at the roots of his old rusty beard. If ever a man poked himself in the ribs in the excess of self-felicitation, Isom Chase did it as he rode along on his old buckskin horse that autumn morning, with the sun just lifting over the hill.73

It was an excellent thing, indeed, for a patriot to serve his country once in a while on a jury, thought Isom, especially when that patriot had been shrewd in his dealings with the widow and orphan, and had thus secured himself against loss at home while his country called him abroad. Jury duty was nothing but a pleasant season of relaxation in such case.

There would be mileage andper diem, and the state would bear the expense of lodging and meals in the event of his being drawn out of the panel to serve in some long criminal case. Mileage andper diemwould come in very nicely, in addition to the four dollars a week that loose-handed book agent was paying. For the first time in his life when called upon for jury service, Isom went to meet it with no sourness in his face. Mileage andper diem, but best of all, a great strong man left at home in his place; one to be trusted in and depended upon; one who would do both his master’s work and his own.

Joe had no such pleasant cogitations to occupy his mind as he bent his long back to assume the double burden when Isom went away. For many days he had been unquiet with a strange, indefinable unrest, like the yearn of a wild-fowl when the season comes for it to wing away to southern seas. Curtis Morgan was behind that strong, wild feeling; he was the urge of it, and the fuel of its fire.

Why it was so, Joe did not know, although he struggled in his reason to make it clear. For many days, almost from the first, Joe had felt that Morgan should not be in that house; that his pretext of lingering there on business was a blind too thin to deceive anybody but Isom. Anybody could deceive Isom if he would work his scheme behind a dollar. It was a shield beyond which Isom could not see, and had no wish to inquire.

Joe did not like those late starts which Morgan made of74a morning, long after he and Isom were in the field, nor the early homings, long before they came in to do the chores. Joe left the house each morning with reluctance, after Isom’s departure, lingering over little things, finding hitherto undiscovered tasks to keep him about in the presence of Ollie, and to throw him between her and the talkative boarder, who seemed always hanging at her heels. Since their talk at dinner on the day that Morgan came, Joe had felt a new and deep interest in Ollie, and held for her an unaccountable feeling of friendliness.

This feeling had been fed, for a few days, by Ollie, who found odd minutes to talk with him as she had not talked before, and by small attentions and kindnesses. She had greeted him in the morning with smiles, where her face once wore the sad mask of misery; and she had touched his hand sometimes, with encouraging or commending caress.

Joe had yielded to her immediately the unreserved loyalty of his unsophisticated soul. The lot of his bondage was lightened by this new tie, the prospect of the unserved term under Isom was not so forbidding now. And now this fellow Morgan had stepped between them, in some manner beyond his power to define. It was as one who beholds a shadow fall across his threshold, which he can neither pick up nor cast away.

Ollie had no more little attentions for Joe, but endless solicitude for Morgan’s comfort; no more full smiles for him, but only the reflections of those which beamed for the chattering lounger who made a pretense of selling books while he made love to another man’s wife.

It was this dim groping after the truth, and his half-conception of it, that rendered Joe miserable. He did not fully understand what Morgan was about, but it was plain to him that the man had no honest purpose there. He could not repeat his fears to Isom, for Isom’s wrath and correction75would fall on Ollie. Now he was left in charge of his master’s house, his lands, his livestock, andhis honor.

The vicarious responsibility rested on him with serious weight. Knowing what he knew, and seeing what he saw, should he allow things to proceed as they had been going? Would he be true to the trust that Isom had placed in him with his parting word in standing aside and knowingly permitting this man to slip in and poison the heart of Isom’s wife?

She was lonely and oppressed, and hungry for kind words, but it was not this stranger’s office to make green the barrenness of her life. He was there, the bondboy, responsible to his master for his acts. She might come to him for sympathy, and go away with honor. But with this other, this man whose pale eyes shifted and darted like a botfly around a horse’s ear, could she drink his counsel and remain undefiled?

Joe thought it up and down as he worked in the field near the house that morning, and his face grew hot and his eyes grew fevered, and his resentment against Morgan rose in his throat.

He watched to see the man drive away on his canvassing round, but the sun passed nine o’clock and he did not go. He had no right there, alone in the house with that woman, putting, who could say, what evil into her heart.

Ten o’clock and the agent’s buggy had not left the barn. Joe could contain himself no longer. He was at work in a little stony piece of late clover, so rough he did not like to risk the mower in it. For three hours he had been laying the tumbled swaths in winding tracks across the field, and he had a very good excuse for going to the well, indeed. Coupled with that was the need of a whet-rock, and behind it all the justification of his position. He was there in his master’s place; he must watch and guard the honor of his house.76

Joe could not set out on that little trip without a good deal of moral cudgeling when it came to the point, although he threw down his scythe with a muttered curse on his lips for the man who was playing such an underhanded game.

It was on Ollie’s account he hesitated. Ollie would think that he suspected her, when there was nothing farther from his mind. It was Morgan who would set the snare for her to trip into, and it was Morgan that he was going to send about his business. But Ollie might take offense and turn against him, and make it as unpleasant as she had shown that she could make it agreeable.

But duty was stronger than friendship. It was stern and implacable, and there was no pleasant road to take around it and come out with honor at the other end.

Joe made as much noise as he could with his big feet–and that was no inconsiderable amount–as he approached the house. But near the building the grass was long, and soft underfoot, and it bore Joe around to the kitchen window silently. His lips were too dry to whistle; his heart was going too fast to carry a tune.

He paused a little way beyond the window, which stood open with the sun falling through it, listening for the sound of their voices. It was strangely silent for a time when the book-agent was around.

Joe went on, his shadow breaking the sunbeam which whitened the kitchen floor. There was a little quick start as he came suddenly to the kitchen door; a hurried stir of feet. As he stepped upon the porch he saw Morgan in the door, Ollie not a yard behind him, their hands just breaking their clasp. Joe knew in his heart that Morgan had been holding her in his arms.

Ollie’s face was flushed, her hair was disturbed. Her bosom rose and fell like troubled water, her eyes were brighter than Joe ever had seen them. Even Morgan was different,77sophisticated and brazen that he was. A flash of red showed on his cheekbones and under his eyes; his thin nostrils were panting like gills.

Joe stood there, one foot on the porch, the other on the ground, as blunt as honesty, as severe as honor. There was nothing in his face that either of them could read to indicate what was surging in his breast. He had caught them, and they wondered if he had sense enough to know.

Joe pushed his hat back from his sweating forehead and looked inquiringly at Morgan.

“Your horse sick, or something?” he asked.

“No,” said Morgan, turning his back on Joe with a little jerk of contempt in his shoulders.

“Well, I think he must be down, or something,” said Joe, “for I heard a racket in the barn.”

“Why didn’t you go and see what was the matter?” demanded Morgan crossly, snatching his hat from the table.

Ollie was drowned in a confusion of blushes. She stood hanging her head, but Joe saw the quick turn of her eyes to follow Morgan as he went away in long strides toward the barn.

Joe went to the tool-chest which stood in a corner of the kitchen and busied himself clattering over its contents. Presently he looked at Ollie, his hand on the open lid of the box.

“Did you see that long whetstone lying around anywhere, Ollie?” he asked.

She lifted her head with a little start. Joe never had called her familiarly by her name before. It always had been “Missis Chase,” distant and respectful.

“No, I haven’t seen it, Joe,” she answered, the color leaving her cheeks.

“All right, Ollie,” said he, holding her eyes with steady gaze, until she shifted hers under the pain of it, and the questioning reproach.78

Joe slammed down the lid of the tool-chest, as if with the intention of making as much noise as possible.

There was something in the way he had spoken her name that was stranger than the circumstance itself. Perhaps she felt the authority and the protection which Joe meant that his voice should assume; perhaps she understood that it was the word of a man. She was afraid of him at that moment, as she never had been afraid of Isom in all their married life.

“I suppose Isom put it away somewhere around the barn,” said Joe.

“Maybe he did, Joe.”

“I’ll go down there and see if I can find it,” he said.

Ollie knew, as well as Joe himself, that he was making the whetstone the vehicle to carry his excuse for watching Morgan away from the farm, but she was not certain whether this sudden shrewdness was the deep understanding of a man, or the domineering spirit of a crude lad, jealous of his passing authority.

The uncertainty troubled her. She watched him from the door and saw him approach Morgan, where he was backing his horse into the shafts.

“All right, is he?” asked Joe, stopping a moment.

Morgan was distant.

“I guess he’ll live another day, don’t worry about him,” said he, in surly voice.

“What time do you aim to be back today?” pursued Joe, entirely unmoved by Morgan’s show of temper.

“Say, I’ll set up a bulletin board with my time-table on it if you’ve got to have it, Mr. Overseer!” said Morgan, looking up from the buckling of a shaft-strap, his face coloring in anger.

“Well, you don’t need to get huffy over it.”

“Mind your business then,” Morgan growled.79

He didn’t wait to discuss the matter farther, but got into the buggy without favoring Joe with as much as another glance, gave his horse a vindictive lash with the whip and drove off, leaving the gate open behind him.

Joe shut it, and turned back to his mowing.

Many a time he paused that morning in his labor, leaning on the snath of his scythe, in a manner of abstraction and seeming indolence altogether strange to him. There was a scene, framed by the brown casing of the kitchen door, with two figures in it, two clinging hands, which persisted in its disturbing recurrence in his troubled mind.

Ollie was on dangerous ground. How far she had advanced, he did not know, but not yet, he believed, to the place where the foulness of Morgan had defiled her beyond cleansing. It was his duty as the guardian of his master’s house to watch her, even to warn her, and to stop her before she went too far.

Once he put down his scythe and started to go to the house, his mind full of what he felt it his duty to say.

Then there rose up that feeling of disparity between matron and youth which had held him at a distance from Ollie before. He turned back to his work with a blush upon his sun-scorched face, and felt ashamed. But it was not a thing to be deferred until after the damage had been done. He must speak to her that day, perhaps when he should go in for dinner. So he said.

Ollie seemed self-contained and uncommunicative at dinner. Joe thought she was a little out of humor, or that she was falling back into her old gloomy way, from which she had emerged, all smiles and dimples, like a new and youthful creature, on the coming of Morgan. He thought, too, that this might be her way of showing her resentment of the familiarity that he had taken in calling her by her name.

The feeling of deputy-mastership was no longer important upon his shoulders. He shrank down in his chair with a80sense of drawing in, like a snail, while he burned with humiliation and shame. The pinnacle of manhood was too slippery for his clumsy feet; he had plumped down from its altitudes as swiftly as he had mounted that morning under the spur of duty. He was a boy, and felt that he was a boy, and far, far from being anything nobler, or stronger, or better qualified to give saving counsel to a woman older, if not wiser, than himself.

Perhaps it was Ollie’s purpose to inspire such feeling, and to hold Joe in his place. She was neither so dull, nor so unpractised in the arts of coquetry, to make such a supposition improbable.

It was only when Joe sighted Morgan driving back to the farm late in the afternoon that his feeling of authority asserted itself again, and lifted him up to the task before him. He must let her understand that he knew of what was going on between them. A few words would suffice, and they must be spoken before Morgan entered the house again to pour his poison into her ears.

Ollie was churning that afternoon, standing at her task close by the open door. Joe came past the window, as he had crossed it that morning, his purpose hot upon him, his long legs measuring the ground in immense, swift steps. He carried his hat in his hand, for the day was one of those with the pepper of autumn in it which puts the red in the apple’s cheeks.

Ollie heard him approaching; her bare arm stayed the stroke of the churn-dasher as she looked up. Her face was bright, a smile was in her eyes, revealing the clear depths of them, and the life and the desires that issued out of them, like the waters of a spring in the sun. She was moist and radiant in the sweat of her labor, and clean and fresh and sweet to see.

Her dress was parted back from her bosom to bare it to81the refreshment of the breeze, and her skin was as white as the cream on the dasher, and the crimson of her cheeks blended down upon her neck, as if the moisture of her brow had diffused its richness, and spread its beauty there.

She looked at Joe, halted suddenly like a post set upright in the ground, stunned by the revelation of the plastic beauty of neck and bare bosom, and, as their eyes met, she smiled, lifted one white arm and pushed back a straying lock of hair.

Joe’s tongue lay cold, and numb as wood against his palate; no word would come to it; it would not move. The wonder of a new beauty in God’s created things was deep upon him; a warm fountain rose in him and played and tossed, with a new and pleasurable thrill. He saw and admired, but he was not ashamed.

All that he had come to say to her was forgotten, all that he had framed to speak as he bore hastily on toward the house had evaporated from his heated brain. A new world turned its bright colors before his eyes, a new breadth of life had been revealed, it seemed to him. In the pleasure of his discovery he stood with no power in him but to tremble and stare.

The flush deepened in Ollie’s cheeks. She understood what was moving in his breast, for it is given to her kind to know man before he knows himself. She feigned surprise to behold him thus stricken, staring and silent, his face scarlet with the surge of his hot blood.

With one slow-lifted hand she gathered the edges of her dress together, withdrawing the revealed secret of her breast.

“Why, Joe! What are you looking at?” she asked.

“You,” he answered, his voice dry and hoarse, like that of one who asks for water at the end of a race. He turned away from her then, saying no more, and passed quickly out of her sight beyond the shrubbery which shouldered the kitchen wall.82

Slowly Ollie lifted the dasher which had settled to the bottom of the churn, and a smile broke upon her lips. As she went on with the completion of her task, she smiled still, with lips, with eyes, with warm exultation of her strong young body, as over a triumphant ending of some issue long at balance and undefined.

Joe went away from the kitchen door in a strange daze of faculties. For that new feeling which leaped in him and warmed him to the core, and gave him confidence in his strength never before enjoyed, and an understanding of things hitherto unrevealed, he was glad. But at heart he felt that he was a traitor to the trust imposed in him, and that he had violated the sanctity of his master’s home.

Now he knew what it was that had made his cheeks flame in anger and his blood leap in resentment when he saw Ollie in the door that morning, all flushed and trembling from Morgan’s arms; now he understood why he had lingered to interpose between them in past days. It was the wild, deep fear of jealousy. He was in love with his master’s wife! What had been given him to guard, he had looked upon with unholy hunger; that which had been left with him to treasure, he had defiled with lustful eyes.

Joe struck across the fields, his work forgotten, now hot with the mounting fires of his newly discovered passion, now cold with the swelling accusation of a trust betrayed. Jealousy, and not a regard for his master’s honor, had prompted him to put her on her guard against Morgan. He had himself coveted his neighbor’s wife. He had looked upon a woman to lust after her, he had committed adultery in his heart. Between him and Morgan there was no redeeming difference. One was as bad as the other, said Joe. Only this difference; he would stop there, in time, ashamed now of the offending of his eyes and the trespass of his heart. Ollie did not know. He had not wormed his way into her83heart by pitying her unhappiness, like the false guest who had emptied his lies into her ears.

Joe was able to see now how little deserving Isom was of any such blessing as Ollie, how ill-assorted they were by nature, inclination and age. But God had joined them, for what pains and penances He alone knew, and it was not the work of any man to put them apart.

At the edge of a hazel coppice, far away from the farmhouse that sheltered the object of his tender thoughts and furtive desires, Joe sat among the first fallen leaves of autumn, fighting to clear himself from the perplexities of that disquieting situation. In the agony of his aching conscience, he bowed his head and groaned.

A man’s burden of honor had fallen upon him with the disclosure of a man’s desires. His boyhood seemed suddenly to have gone from him like the light of a lamp blown out by a puff of wind. He felt old, and responsible to answer now for himself, since the enormity of his offense was plain to his smarting conscience.

And he was man enough to look after Morgan, too. He would proceed to deal with Morgan on a new basis, himself out of the calculation entirely. Ollie must be protected against his deceitful wiles, and against herself as well.

Joe trembled in his newer and clearer understanding of the danger that threatened her as he hastened back to the barn-yard to take up his neglected chores. The thought that Morgan and Ollie were alone in the house almost threw him into a fever of panic and haste.

He must not be guilty of such an oversight again; he must stand like a stern wall between them, and be able to account for his trust to Isom with unclouded heart.

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