The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe SherrodsThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The SherrodsAuthor: George Barr McCutcheonIllustrator: C. D. WilliamsRelease date: February 24, 2011 [eBook #35335]Most recently updated: January 7, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Al Haines*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHERRODS ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The SherrodsAuthor: George Barr McCutcheonIllustrator: C. D. WilliamsRelease date: February 24, 2011 [eBook #35335]Most recently updated: January 7, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Al Haines
Title: The Sherrods
Author: George Barr McCutcheonIllustrator: C. D. Williams
Author: George Barr McCutcheon
Illustrator: C. D. Williams
Release date: February 24, 2011 [eBook #35335]Most recently updated: January 7, 2021
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHERRODS ***
JUSTINE SHERROD.JUSTINE SHERROD.
JUSTINE SHERROD.JUSTINE SHERROD.
Title page
Title page
THESHERRODS
By
George Barr McCutcheon
Author of "Graustark", "Castle Craneycrow", Etc.
With Illustrations byC. D. Williams
Grosset & DunlapNew York
Copyright, 1903, byDodd, Mead and CompanyEntered atStationers' HallPublished September, 1903HILL AND LEONARDNEW YORK CITY, U. S. A.
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Through the soft summer night came the sounds of the silence that is heard only when nature sleeps, imperceptible except as one feels it behind the breath he draws or perhaps realizes it in the touch of an unexpected branch or flower. The stillness of a silence that is not silent; a stillness so dead that the croaking of frogs, the chirping of crickets, the barking of dogs, the hooting of owls, the rustling of leaves are not heard, although the air is heavy with those voices of the night—the stillness of a night in the country. All human activity apparently at an end, all sign of life lost in somber shadows. The ceaseless croaking, the chirping, the hooting, the rustling themselves make up this unspeakable silence—this sweet, unconscious solitude.
A country lane, dark and gloomy, awaited the moon from the clouded east. Lighted only here and there by the twinkling windows in roadside homes, it lay asleep in its bed of dust. Far off it straggled into a village, but out there in the country it was lost to the world with the setting of the sun.
The faint glow from the window of a cottage poured its feeble but willing self into the night as if seeking to dispel the gloom, dimly conscious that its efforts were unappreciated and undesired. Down at the rickety front gate, cloaked in blackness, stood two persons. Darkness could not hide the world from them, for the whole world dwelt within the confines of a love-lit garden gate. For them there was no sound of life except their tender voices, no evidence that a world existed beyond the posts between which they stood, his arm about her, her head upon his breast. They spoke softly in the silence about them.
"And to-morrow night at this time you will be mine—all mine," he murmured. She looked again into his face, indistinct in the night.
"To-morrow night! Oh, Jud, it does not seem possible. We are both so young and so—so—"
"So foolish!" he smiled.
"So poor," she finished plaintively.
"But, Justine, you don't feel afraid to marry me because I am poor, do you?" he asked.
"Do you think I have been poor only to be afraid of it? We love each other, dear, and we are rich. To-morrow night I shall be the richest girl in the world," she sighed tremulously.
"To-morrow night," he whispered. His arm tightened about her, his head dropped until his lips met hers and clung to them until the world was forgotten.
Far away in the night sounded the steady beat of a galloping horse's hoofs. Louder and nearer grew the pounding on the dry roadway until at last the rollicking whistle of the rider could be heard. Standing in the gateway, the silent lovers, their happy young hearts beating as one, listened dreamily to the approach.
"He has been in the village," said she, at length breaking the silence that had followed their passionate kiss. Her slender body trembled slightly in his arms.
"And he is going home drunk, as usual," added the youth sententiously. "Has he annoyed you lately?"
"We must pay no attention to what he says or does," she answered evasively.
"Then he has said or done something?"
"He came to the schoolhouse yesterday morning, dear—just for a moment—and he was not so very rude," she pleaded hurriedly.
"What did he say to you; what did he want?" persisted her lover.
"Oh, nothing—nothing, Jud. Just the same old thing. He wanted me to give you up and—and—" She hesitated.
"And wait for him, eh? If he bothers you again I'll kill him. You're mine, and he knows it, and he's got to let you alone."
"But it will all be over to-morrow night, dear. I'll be yours, and he'll have to give up. He's crazy now, and you must not mind what he does. When I'm your wife he'll quit—maybe he'll go away. I've told him I don't love him. Don't you see, Jud, he has hope now, because I am not married. Just as soon as the wedding's over he'll see that it's no use and—and he'll let us alone."
"The drunken hound! The idea of him daring to love you! Justine, I could kill him!"
The horseman swept past the gate, a swift black shadow amid the thunder of hoof-beats, and the lovers drew closer together. Just as he roared past them his whistling ceased and a strong, bold voice shouted:
"Hello, Justine!" He was saluting, in drunken gallantry, the girl whom he believed to be asleep beneath a counterpane near some black window in the little house. The horse shied, his whip swished through the air and cut across the animal's flank; the ugly snort of the beast mingled with oaths from the rider.
The girl shuddered and placed her hands over her ears; her companion set his teeth and muttered:
"The dog! I wish that horse would throw him and break his neck! He's not fit to live. Justine, if there is a man who will go to hell when he dies, that man is 'Gene Crawley. And he wants you—the hound! The sweetest, gentlest, purest girl in the world! He wants you!"
They forgot the rider, and the clatter of the horse's hoofs died away in the night. The lovers turned slowly toward the house. At the door he stooped and kissed her.
"The last night we are to part like this," he whispered.
She laid both hands upon his face.
"Let us pray to-night, dear, that we may be always as happy as we now are," she said softly.
She opened the door, and the two stood for a moment in the fair light from the cottage lamp. From above him on the door-sill, she laid her fingers in his curly brown hair, and said, half timidly, half joyfully:
"The last night we shall say good-bye like this."
Then she kissed him suddenly and was gone, blushing and trembling. He looked at the closed door for an instant, and then dropped to his knees and kissed the step on which she had stood.
The next night they were married. In the little cottage there were lights and the revelry known only in country nuptials. The doors and windows were open, and scores of young people in their best clothes flitted in and out, their merry voices ringing with excitement, their faces glowing with pleasure, their eyes sparkling with the mischief peculiar to occasions of the kind. There were the congratulations and the teasings; the timid jests and the coarse ones; the cynical bits of advice from lofty experts; the blushes of prospective brides; the red-faced denials of guilty beaux; the smiles, the winks, and the songs; the feasting and the farewells.
"That boy," Jud Sherrod, and "Cap" Van's daughter, Justine, were to be married. The community would have liked to be glad. Everybody had "allowed" they would be married some day. Now that the day had come, amid the rejoicing there were doubts, such as this:
"They's a mighty nice-appearin' couple, but dinged 'f I see how they're goin' to git along. Jud ain't got no more bizness workin' on a farm than a hog hez in a telegraft office. Course, his pap was a farmer, but Jud's been off to seminary. He don't give a dodgast fer the farm, nohow, an' I perdict that she'll haf to keep on teachin' school fer a livin'. Course, that little land o' hern might keep 'em goin', but I bet a barrel o' cider 'at Jud won't be wuth a bushel o' corn-husks at runnin' it. He's a dern nice boy, though, an' I'd hate like Sam Patch to see a morgidge put on the place. What she'd orter done wuz to married some big cuss like Link Overshine er Luther Hitchcock. They'd 'a' made somethin' out'n that little eighty up yander, an' she'd never need to worry. Dinged if she ain't put' nigh the purtiest girl I ever see. Looks jest like her ma. 'Member her? Don't see what she ever could see in Jud Sherrod. He cain't do a dasted thing but draw picters. His pap had orter walloped him good an' made him chop wood er somethin', 'stead o' lettin' him go on the way he did. They do say he kin sketch things powerful fine. He tuck off a picter uv Sim Brookses' sucklin' calves that was a daisy, I've hearn. But that ain't farmin' by a dern sight."
Even Jud and Justine had looked forward to the great day with anxious minds. Both realized the importance of the step they were to take, for they were possessed of a judgment and a keenness uncommon in young and ardent lovers. Justine, little more than a girl in years, knew that Jud was not and never could be a farmer; it was not in him. He knew it as well as she, though he was not indolent; he was far from that. He was ambitious and he was an indefatigable toiler—in art, not of the soil. He was a born artist. By force of circumstances he was a farmer. The tan on his hands and face, the hardness in his palms had not been acquired unwillingly, for he was not a sluggard, nor a grumbler. He plowed, though his thoughts were not of the plowing; he reaped, though his thoughts were not of the harvest.
They had been sweethearts from childhood. They had played together, read together, studied together, and suffered together. It seemed to them that they just grew up to their wedding day, a perfectly natural growth. Had this marriage come five years earlier everything would have been different. Instead of the little cottage, clean, cozy, and poor, there would have been the big white house on the hill, surrounded by maples and oaks; instead of the simple gown of white lawn there would have been a magnificent silk or satin; instead of the sympathy and the somber head-shakings of wedding guests there would have been rejoicing; and approval.
To-night, as the little clock on Justine's bureau struck eight, she left her room and met Jud in the narrow hall upstairs. Downstairs could be heard the muffled voices of an expectant crowd, an occasional giggle breaking through the buzz. He kissed her and both were silent, thinking of other homes. One remembered the big white house on the hill, the other the old yellow farmhouse, large and rambling, "over on the pike." To-night they faced the minister in the parlor of one of the lowliest dwellings in the neighborhood. The boy had not an acre of all his father's lands; the girl was poor, at the gates of the famous Van homestead. They were married not in his house, but in hers. The cottage stood in the corner of a thirty-acre farm that had come to her through her grandmother. This was all except memories that the child had to connect her present life with the comfortable days of the past.
Old Mrs. Crane, who lived with Justine in the little cot, met them at the foot of the creaking stairway and threw open the door to the parlor. Before the boy and girl gleamed the faces of a score or more of eager, excited friends. There was hardly a girl in the crowd who was not dressed more expensively than the bride. Justine was proudly aware of the critical, simpering gaze that swept over her simple gown; she could almost read the exultant thoughts of her guests, as they compared her plain lawn to the ridiculous finery that hid their sunburnt necks, scrawny arms, and perspiring bodies.
Her face was fresh and flushed with happiness, pride—perhaps disdain; their faces had, at least, been washed and lavishly powdered. Most of them wore absurd white gloves over their red arms. Yet they were the élite of the county. There were red dresses, blue dresses, yellow dresses, and there were other dresses in which the colors of the rainbow shone, all made to fit women other than those who wore them. The men, old and young, bearded and beardless, were the most uncouth aristocrats that ever lorded it over a countryside. True, they had put on their store clothes and had blackened their boots and shoes; they had shaved, and they had plastered their hair faultlessly; they had cast aside their quids of tobacco and they were as circumspect as if they were at church.
Justine and Jud stood with clasped hands before the young minister, listening to his lengthy and timely discourse on the blessedness of matrimony. Then came the vows. Their eyes met. The answers! They breathed them—the yes and the yes and the yes—almost unconsciously. Then the last words—"Whom God hath joined together let not man put asunder!"
For the next two or three hours they were in a whirl of emotions; everything was hazy, uncertain, misty to them. They had taken up each other's burdens, each other's joys for life; they had begun a new existence. She was no longer Justine Van, he was no longer the thoughtless boy. They were husband and wife. The laughter, the jests, the quips, and the taunts of their merry friends were a jangle of discordant sounds, unpleasant and untimely, and kindly as they were meant, unkind. There were aimless hand-shakings, palsied kisses, inane responses to crude congratulations, and it was all over. The guests departed, singing, shouting, and laughing. The last to leave was old Mrs. Crane, Justine's companion for four long years. She was going to live with her brother up near the village. Jud and Justine were to live alone.
Down at the toll-gate, nearly a mile from Justine's home in the direction of the village, a small and select company of loungers spent that evening. The toll-gate, kept by Jim Hardesty and his wife, Matilda, was at the junction of the big gravel pike which led to the county seat and the slim, shady lane that passed Justine's cottage. Here of evenings the "hired hands" of the neighborhood gathered to gossip, tell lies, and "talk ugly" about the farmers by whom they were employed. On the night of the wedding there were five or six slouchy, sweat-smelling rustics lounging on the porch. The wedding formed the only topic of conversation.
They talked of Justine's good looks and how "they'd liked to be in Jud's boots"; and of the days when old "Cap" Van lived and the bride of the night had not had to teach school; of the days when she rode horses of her own, and went to the city to make purchases instead of to the humble village as now; they talked of her kindly in their rough way. They discussed Jud with enthusiasm. Everybody liked him. His two years at college had not "swelled his head." He was "jest the feller fer Justine Van, an' she got him, too, 'g'inst ever' girl in the township—an' ever' one of 'em had set their caps fer him, too, you bet." The loungers agreed it was "too bad that Jud and Justine was so derned pore, but mebbe they'd make out somehow er 'nother."
They laughed about 'Gene Crawley's affection for Justine Van.
'Gene Crawley! A "hand" over at Martin Grimes' place—a plain, every-day hired man, working for eighteen dollars a month for the meanest, stingiest farmer in Clay Township! He was not any better than the rest of the hands on the place, "'s fer as learnin' an' manners wuz concerned. Hadn't no more license to be skylarkin' 'round after Justine Van 'n he had after Queen Willimeny. 'S if she'd notice sech a derned cuss as him; allus cussin' an' drinkin' an' fightin'. No 'spectabull girl would want to be saw with him."
About nine o'clock a dark figure approached the toll-gate afoot. It was a man, and he came from the night somewhere to the east, probably from the village of Glenville. There was no mistaking his identity. The heavy, swift tread told the watchers that it was 'Gene Crawley long before he came within the radius of light that shot through the open doorway. Someone in the crowd called out:
"H' are ye, 'Gene! Thought you'd be up to the weddin'."
'Gene did not reply. He strode up to the porch and threw himself into a vacant chair near the window. The light from within shone fairly upon his dark, sullen face, his scowling brow, and his flushed, unshaven cheeks. An ugly gleam was in his black eyes. He had been drinking, but he was not intoxicated. His hickory shirt, dirty and almost buttonless, was open at the throat as if it had been torn that its wearer might save himself from choking. He wore no coat, and his faded, patched blue overalls were pushed into the tops of his heavy boots. An old straw hat lay where he had cast it behind his chair. The black, coarse hair, rumpled and unkempt, grew low on his scowling forehead. His face was hard and deeply marked, not unlike that of an Indian. The jaw was firm, the chin square and defiant, the mouth broad and cruel, the nose large and straight, the eyes coal-black and set far apart, beneath heavy brows. The arm which rested on the sill was bare to the elbow; it was rugged, with cords of muscle that looked like ropes interlaced. A glimpse of the arm revealed, as if he stood stark naked, the strength of this young Samson. He was a huge, unwieldy man, a little above medium height; he might have weighed one hundred and seventy pounds; but with his square shoulders, broad chest, and an unusually erect carriage for an overworked farm-boy, he looked larger than he really was.
"You ain't got your Sunday-go-to-meetin' close on, 'Gene," commented Jim Hardesty, tilting back in his chair and spitting tobacco juice half way across the road.
"Didn' y' git a bid to the weddin'?" asked Harve Crose, with mock sympathy.
A flush of anger and humiliation reddened the face of Grimes' hired man, but it was gone in a second.
"No; I didn' git no bid," he answered, a trifle hoarsely. "Guess they didn' want me. I ain't good 'nough, 'pears like."
"Seems to me she'd orter ast you, 'Gene. You be'n kinder hangin' 'round an' teasin' her to have you, an' seems no more'n right fer her to have give you a bid to the weddin'," said Doc Ramsey, meaningly. "She'd orter done that, jest to show you why she wouldn' have you, don't y' see?"
Crawley's only reply was a baleful glare.
"How does it feel to be cut out by another feller, 'Gene?" asked Crose tauntingly.
"I'd never let a feller like Jud Sherrod beat my time," added Joe Perkins.
"Course, Jud's been to college and learned how to spoon with the girls, so I guess it's no wonder he ketched Justine. She's jest like all girls, I reckon. Smooth cuss kin ketch 'em all, b'gosh. Never seed it fail yit. Trouble with you, 'Gene, is 'at you—"
'Gene sprang to his feet with an oath so ugly that the jesters shrank back. For several minutes he tramped up and down the porch like a caged animal, cursing hoarsely to himself, his broad shoulders hunched forward as if he were bent on crushing everything before them. Finally he came to a standstill in front of the expectant crowd. The devil was in his face.
"Don't none o' you fellers ever say anything more to me about this. Ef you do I'll break somebody's neck. It's none o' your business how I feel, an' I won't have no more of it. Do y' hear me?" he snarled.
"I on'y ast fer information—" began Crose, apologetically.
"Well, I'll give you some, dang ye! You say I'm cut out, eh! Mebbe I am—mebbe I am! But you'll see—you'll see! I'll make him sorry fer it! He's whupped me this time, but I'll win yet! D' y' hear? I'll win yet!"
His face was almost white under the coat of tan, his eyes glowed, his voice was low and intense. The loungers waited in suspense.
"He thinks he's won! But I'll show him—I'll show him! She's like all women! She kin be won ag'in—she kin love more'n once! You say he's cut me out! Mebbe he has—mebbe he has! But this ain't a marker to the way I'll cut him out. I'll take her away from him, I will, so he'p me God! D' y' hear that? She'll shake him fer me some day, sure 's there's a hell, an' then! Then where'll he be? She'll be mine! Fair 'r foul, I'll have her! I won't give up tell I take her 'way from him! An' she'll come, too; she'll come! She'll leave him, jest like other women have done, an' then who'll be cut out? Answer, damn ye! Who'll be cut out?"
He was facing them and his lips were almost as white as the gleaming teeth beneath them. For a moment no one dared to reply. At last Doc Ramsey scrambled to his feet.
"Consarn ye, 'Gene Crawley!" he exclaimed. "You cain't stan' up there an' say that 'bout Justine Van! She's a good girl, an' you're a dern hound fer talkin' like thet! They ain't a bad drop o' blood in her body—they ain't a wrong thought in her head, an' you know it. You kin lick me, I know, but dern ef you kin say them things to me. She won't look at you no more'n she'd look at that dog o' Jim's over yander."
'Gene Crawley's arm struck out and Doc Ramsey crashed to the floor of the porch. He lay motionless for a long time. The dealer of the blow stood over him like a wild beast waiting for its prey to move. Not another man in the group lifted a hand against him.
At last he stooped and picked up his hat.
"That's what you'll all git ef you open your heads," he grated. "What I said about her goes!"
He fixed his hat roughly on his head and swung away in the darkness.
In the open door of the cottage down the lane Jud and Justine stood side by side, her hand in his, long after the last guest had departed. It was near midnight and behind them the lamps flickered and sputtered with the last gasps of waning life. Silhouetted in the long, bright frame of the doorway, the silent lovers presented a picture of a new life begun, youth on the threshold of a new world.
His arm drew her to his breast and her fluttering hands went slowly, gently to his cheeks. He bent and kissed the upturned lips.
Then the door closed and the picture was gone.
Across the road, beside the great oak that sent its branches almost to the little gateway, a man fell away from the fence, upon which, with murder in his heart, he had been leaning. His hands were clasped to his eyes, his strong figure writhed convulsively in the damp grass; his breath came almost in sobs. At last, taking his hands from his hot eyes, he raised his head and looked again toward the cottage. One by one the bright windows, grew dark, until at last the house was as black as the night about it. Then he sprang to his feet, clutching blindly at the darkness, uttering inarticulate moans and curses. For the first time in his life he knew a sense of loneliness and despair.
He turned his back to the cottage and fled across the meadow.
Dudley Sherrod was the only son of John Sherrod, who had died about four years before the marriage. Up to the day of his death he was considered the wealthiest farmer in Clay Township. On that day he was a pauper; his lands were no longer his own; his wife and his son were penniless. In an upstairs room of the great old farmhouse, built by his grandfather when the country was new, he blew out his brains, unable to face the ruin that fate had brought to his door.
His father had been a member of the Legislature, and the boy had spent two years in the city, attending a medical college. When the diploma came he went back to the old home and hung out his shingle in quaint little Glenville. In less than a year he brought a bride to the farm—Cora Bloodgood, the daughter of a banker in the capital city of his State. Before the end of another year he was, as heir, owner of all his father's acres. So it was that John and Cora Sherrod began life rich and happy. Their boy was born, grew up a bright and sprightly lad, and was sent to college. From the rude country schoolhouse and its simple teachings he was sent to the busy university, among city boys and city girls, miserable in ungainly self-consciousness, altogether out of place. He left behind him the country lads and lasses, the tow-heads and the barefoots, and his heart was sore. But in the beginning of his second year the simplicity of his rural heart showed signs of giving way to urban improvements. His strength won for him a place on the football team, and the sense of dignity of this position displaced his self-consciousness and taught him to be interested in the world beyond his home. He began to know something besides the memory of green fields and meadows and clear blue skies.
All these months he was faithful to a slip of a girl down in the country to whom he had feared to utter a word of love. She knew she loved him because she had cried when he went away and had cried when he came back. Letters, stiff and painfully correct as to spelling and chirography, came each week from dear little Justine Van. To her his long letters, homesickness crowding between the lines, although she could not see it, were like messages from paradise. A dozen times a day she read each letter as she sat in her room, or in the hated schoolroom at Glenville, or in the shady orchard, or in the lonely lane. She longed to have him back at home, to hear his merry laugh, to romp with him as they had romped before he went away to school—but here she blushed and remembered that he was tall now, and dreadfully old and grand, and she was—she was fifteen! Jud thrashed a fellow student one day because he poked fun at an old tintype of Justine that he happened to see in the boy's room. The victim had laughed at the green bonnet, the long pig-tails, and the wide eyes of the girl in the picture—"just as if they were looking for the photographer's bird, you know."
Near the middle of his second year at college the crash came and the half-dazed boy hurried home. His father was dead and the whole country was telling the stories of his great financial losses. Every dollar, every foot of land had been swept away by reverses arising from investments in Arizona mines. Captain James Van went down in the same disaster. When word reached his home of the suicide of John Sherrod, he was on his way to the barn with a pistol hidden over his heart. Horror and the awakening of courage made him cast the pistol aside and turn to face the blow as a brave man should, with his wife and child behind his back.
Jud and Justine could not at first, and did not for many days, realize the force of the blow. One had lost father as well as home; the other had lost home and had sunk to a depth of poverty that grew more and more appalling as her young mind began to understand. The boy, when he finally grasped the situation, bared his arms and set forth to support himself and his mother by hard work. The shock of the suicide was too great for Mrs. Sherrod. Her reason fled soon after her husband was laid in the grave, but it was a year before death took her to him. During that last year of life she lived in the old place, a helpless invalid, mentally and physically, although the property belonged to another. David Strong held a mortgage on the home place, but he did not foreclose it until she was gone.
For a year Jud cared for his mother, and worked in the fields with David Strong's men at wages of twelve dollars a month. Half of the year's crop Strong gave to the widow of John Sherrod, although not a penny's worth of it was hers by right. After her death Strong and his family moved into the big old house, and Jud Sherrod lived in a room in what had been his home.
Justine Van's grandmother, in her will, left to the girl a thirty-acre piece of ground, half timber, half cultivated, about a mile from the white house in which the beneficiary was born and which was swallowed up by the great disaster. Bereft of every penny, James Van took his wife and daughter to the miserable little cottage. The girl shouldered as much of the burden of poverty as her young and tender shoulders could carry. She begged for an appointment as teacher in the humble schoolhouse where her a-b-abs had been learned, and for two years and a half before her marriage she had taught the little flock of boys and girls. Especially necessary did this means of earning a livelihood become when, two years after the failure, her father died. Then Mrs. Van followed him, and Justine, not nineteen, was face to face with the world, a trembling, guileless child.
Her wages at the schoolhouse were twenty-five dollars a month, for six months in a year, and the yield of grain from her poorly tilled farm was barely enough to pay the taxes and the help hire. Old Jim Hardesty farmed the place for her, and he robbed her. For six months after the mother's death she lived alone in the cottage, and then the neighbors finally taking the matter in hand and insisting that she be provided with a companion, her old nurse, Mrs. Crane, came to the place. She was shrewd from years of adversity and persuaded Justine to send Jim Hardesty packing—and that was the hardest duty Justine had ever had to meet.
The discouraged boy, over on David Strong's place, worn thin with hard work and sickness, deprived of every chance, as he thought, to realize his ambitions, found in the girl a sympathetic comrade. Of all the people in his world she was the only one who understood his desires, and could, in a way, share with him the despair that made life as he lived it seem like a narrow cell from which he could look longingly with no hope of escape. Tired and sore from misfortune, these two simple, loving natures turned to each other. His first trembling kiss upon her surprised, parted lips was a treasure that never left her memory. The bloom came to her cheeks, lightness touched her flagging heart, happiness shone through the gloom, and the whole countryside marveled at her growing beauty. This slim, budding maid of the meadow and wood was as fair a bit as nature ever perfected. The sweetness and purity of womanhood undefiled dwelt in her body and soul. No taint of worldliness had blighted her. She was a pure, simple, country girl, ignorant of wile, sinless and trustful.
Justine was like her father, fair faced and straight of form. Her hair was long and reddish-brown, her brow was broad and full, her eyes big and brown and soft with love, her cheeks smooth and clear. A trifle above the medium height, straight and strong, of slender mold, she was as graceful as a gazelle. Health seemed to glow in the atmosphere about her.
With Jud, too, the realization of love and the feeling that there was something to live for, brought a change. His stooping shoulders straightened, his eyes brightened, his steps became springy. He whistled and sang at his work, took an interest in life, and presently even resumed his drawing. The country folk winked knowingly. The two were constantly together when opportunity afforded, so it soon became common report that he was her "feller, fer sure," and she was his "girl."
One evening, as they sat in the dusk down by the creek, which ran through her bit of pasture land, Jud drew his mother's plain gold ring from his little finger and slipped it upon Justine's third. They were betrothed.
Never were such sweethearts as Jud and Justine. They were lovers, friends, comrades. Her sweet, serious face took a new life, new color at his approach, her dreamy eyes grew softer and more wistful, her low voice more musical. Her soul was his, her life belonged to him, her heart beat only for him. Jud's famished hopes of something beyond the farm found fresh encouragement in her simple, wondering praise. She was his critic, his unconscious mentor. Beneath her untrained eye he sketched as he never sketched before. Looking over his shoulder as he lay stretched upon the grass, she marveled at the skill with which his pencil transferred the world about them to the dearly bought drawing pads, and her enthusiastic little cries of delight were tributes that brought confidence to the heart of the artist.
The girl had scores of admirers. Every boy, every man in the township longed to "make up" to her, but she gave no thought to them. Half a dozen widowers with children asked her to marry them. She and Jud laughed when Eversole Baker besought her to become mother to his nine children, including two daughters older than herself.
But there was one determined suitor, and she feared him with an uncanny dread that knew no rest until she was safely Jud's on the wedding night. That one was Eugene Crawley, drunkard and blasphemer.
Crawley was born in the dense timber land north of Glenville. His father had been a woodchopper, hunter, and fisherman. Hard stories came down to town about Sam Crawley. Of 'Gene, the boy, nothing against his honesty at least could be said. He was a vile wretch when drinking, little better when sober, but he was as honest as the sun.
He had gone to school with Jud and Justine when they were little "tads," and his rough affection for her began when they were mastering the "first reader." He and Jud had fought over her twice and each had been a victor. The girl despised him, from childhood, and he knew it. Still, he clung to the hope that he could take her away from his rival. He dogged her footsteps, frightened her with his mad protestations, and finally alarmed her by his threats. The day before the wedding he had met her as she left the schoolhouse and had sworn to kill Jud Sherrod. She did not tell Jud of this, nor did she tell him that she had pleaded with Crawley to spare her lover's life. Had she told Jud all this she would have been obliged to tell him how the brute had suddenly burst into tears and promised he would not harm Jud if he could help it.