I got the saleratus at Dyersville, and just as I came out of the little store which was, as I remember it, the only one there, I saw the Gowdy carriage come down the short street, the horses making an effort to prance under the skilful management of Pinck Johnson, who occupied the front seat alone, while Virginia Royall sat in the back seat with Buckner Gowdy, her arm about the upright of the cover, her left foot over the side as it might be in case of a person who was ready to jump out to escape the danger of a runaway, an overturn, or some other peril.
Gowdy did not recognize me, or if he did he did not speak to me. He got out of the carriage and went first into the store, coming out presently with some packages in his hand which he tossed to the darky, and then he joined the crowd of men in front of the saloon across the way. Soon I saw him go into the gin-mill, the crowd following him, and the noise of voices grew louder. I had had enough experience with such things to know pretty well what was going on; the stink of spilled drinks, and profanity and indecency--there was nothing in them to toll me in from the flowery prairie.
As I passed the carriage Virginia nodded to me; and looking at her I saw that she was pale and tremulous, with a look in her eyes like that of a crazy man I once knew who imagined that he was being followed by enemies who meant to kill him. There is no word for it but a hunted look.
She came to my wagon, pretty soon, and surprised me by touching my arm as I was about to start on so as to make a few more miles before camping. I had got my team straightened out, and ready to start, when I felt her hand on my arm, and on turning saw her standing close to me, and speaking almost in a whisper.
"Do you know any one," she asked, "good people--along the road ahead--people we'll overtake--that would be friends to a girl that needs help?"
"Be friends," I blundered, "be friends? How be friends?"
"Give her work," she said; "take her in; take care of her. This girl needs friends--other girls--women--some one to take the place of a mother and sisters. Yes, and she needs friends to take the place of a father and brothers. A girl needs friends--friends all the time--as you were to me back there in the night."
I wondered if she meant herself; and after thinking over it for two or three days I made up my mind that she did; and then I was provoked at myself for not understanding: but what could I have done or said if I had understood? I remembered, though, how she had skithered[7]back to the carriage as she saw Pinck Johnson coming out of the saloon with Buck Gowdy; and had then clambered out again and gone into the little hotel where they seemed to have decided to stay all night; while I went on over roads which were getting more and more miry as I went west. I had only been able to tell her of the Fewkes family--Old Man Fewkes, with his bird's claws and a beard where a chin should have been, Surajah Dowlah Fewkes with no thought except for silly inventions, Celebrate Fourth Fewkes with no ideas at all--
[7]A family word, to the study of which one would like to direct the attention of the philologists, since traces of it are found in the conversation of folk of unsophisticated vocabulary outside the Clan van de Marck. Doubtless it is of Yankee origin, and hence old English. It may, of course, be derived according to Alice-in-Wonderland principles from "skip" and "hither" or "thither" or all three; but the claim is here made that it comes, like monkeys and men, from a common linguistic ancestor.--G.v.d.M.
"But isn't there a man among them?" she had asked.
"A man!" I repeated.
"A man that knows how to shoot a pistol, or use a knife," she explained; "and who would shoot or stab for a weak girl with nobody to take care of her."
I shook my head. Not one of these was a real man in the Kentucky, or other proper sense: and Ma Fewkes with her boneless shoulders was not one of those women of whom I had seen many in my life, who could be more terrible to a wrong-doer than an army with bowie-knives.
"There's only two in the outfit," I went on, "that have got any sprawl to them; and they are old Tom their bunged-up horse, and Rowena Fewkes."
"Who is she?" inquired Virginia Royall.
"A girl about your age," said I. "She's ragged and dirty, but she has a little gumption."
And then she had skipped away, as I finally concluded, to keep Gowdy from seeing her in conversation with me.
I pulled out for Manchester with Nathaniel Vincent Creede, whom everybody calls just "N.V.," riding in the spring seat with me, and his carpetbag and his law library in the back of the wagon.
His library consisted ofBlackstone's Commentaries--I saw them in his present library in Monterey Centre only yesterday--Chitty on Pleading, theCode of Iowa of1850, theSession Lawsof the state so far as it had any session laws--a few thin books bound in yellow and pink boards. Even these few books made a pretty heavy bundle for a man to carry in one hand while he lugged all his other worldly goods in the other.
"Books are damned heavy, Mr. Vandemark," said he; "law books are particularly heavy. My library is small; but there is an adage in our profession which warns us to beware of the man of one book. He's always likely to know what's in the damned thing, you know, Mr. Vandemark; and the truth being a seamless web, if a lawyer knows all about the law in one book, he's prone to make a hell of a straight guess at what's in the rest of 'em. Hence beware of the man of one book. I may safely lay claim to being that man--in a figurative way; though there are half a dozen volumes or so back there--the small pedestal on which I stand reaching up toward a place on the Supreme Bench of the United States."
He had had a drink or two with Buckner Gowdy back there in the saloon, and this had taken the brakes off his tongue--if there were any provided in his temperament. So, aside from Buck Gowdy, I was the first of his fellow-citizens of Monterey County to become acquainted with N.V. Creede. He reminded me at first of Lawyer Jackway of Madison, the guardianad litemwho had sung the song that still recurred to me occasionally--
"Sold again,And got the tin,And sucked another Dutchman in!"
But N.V. looked a little like Jackway from the fact only that he wore a long frock coat, originally black, a white shirt, and a black cravat. He was very tall, and very erect, even while carrying those books and that bag. He was smooth-shaven, and was the first man I ever saw who shaved every day, and could do the trick without a looking-glass. His eyes were black and very piercing; and his voice rolled like thunder when he grew earnest--which he was likely to do whenever he spoke. He would begin to discuss my cows, the principles of farming, the sky, the birds of passage, the flowers, the sucking in of the Dutchman--which I told him all about before we had gone five miles--the mire-holes in the slews, anything at all--and rising from a joke or a flighty notion which he earnestly advocated, he would lower his voice and elevate his language and utter a little gem of an oration. After which he would be still and solemn for a while--to let it sink in I thought.
N.V. was at that time twenty-seven years old. He came from Evansville, Indiana, by the Ohio from Evansville to St. Louis, and thence up the Mississippi. From Dubuque he had partly walked and partly ridden with people who were willing to give him a lift.
"I am like unto the Apostle Peter," he said when he asked for the chance to ride with me, "silver and gold have I none; but such as I have I give unto thee."
"What do you mean?" I asked; for it is just as well always to be sure beforehand when it comes to pay—though, of course, I should have been glad to have him with me without money and without price.
"In the golden future of Iowa," he said, "you will occasionally want legal advice. I will accept transportation in your very safe, but undeniably slow equipage as a retainer."
"Captain Sproule used to say," I said, "that what you pay the lawyer is the least of the matter when you go to law."
"Wise Captain Sproule," replied N.V.; "and my rule shall be to keep my first client, Mr. Jacob T. Vandemark, out of the courts; and in addition to my prospective legal services, I can wield the goad-stick and manipulate the blacksnake. Moreover, when these feet of mine get their blisters healed, I can help drive the cattle; and I can gather firewood, kindle fires, and perhaps I may suggest that my conversation may not be entirely unprofitable."
I told him I would take him in as a passenger; and there our life-long friendship began. His conversation was not unprofitable. He had the vision of the future of Iowa which I had until then lacked. He could see on every quarter-section a prosperous farm, and he knew what the building of the railways must mean. As we forded the Maquoketa he laughed at the settlers working at the timber, grubbing out stumps, burning off the logs, struggling with roots.
"Your ancestors, the Dutch," said he, "have been held up to ridicule because they refused to establish a town until they found a place where dykes had to be built to keep out the sea, though there were plenty of dry places available. These settlers are acting just as foolishly. They have been used to grubbing, and they go where grubbing has to be done. Two miles either way is better land ready for the plow! Why can't every one be wise like us?"
"They have to have wood for houses, stables, and fuel," I said. "I hope my land has timber on it."
"The railroads are coming," said he, "and they will bring you coal and wood and everything you want. They are racing for the crossings of the Mississippi. Soon they will reach the Missouri--and some day they will cross the continent to the Pacific. No more Erie Canals; no more Aaron Burr conspiracies for the control of the mouth of the Mississippi. Towns! Cities! Counties! States! We are pioneers; but civilization is treading on our heels. I feel it galling my kibes[8]--and what are a few blisters to me! I see in my own adopted city of Lithopolis, Iowa, a future Sparta or Athens or Rome, or anyhow, a Louisville or Cincinnati or Dubuque--a place in which to achieve greatness--or anyhow, a chance to deal in town lots, defend criminals, or prosecute them, and where the unsettled will have to be settled in the courts as well as on the farm. On to Lithopolis! G'lang, Whiteface, g'lang!"
[8]The editor acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Honorable N.V. Creede in the editing of the proofs of this and a few other passages.--G.v.d.M.
[8]The editor acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Honorable N.V. Creede in the editing of the proofs of this and a few other passages.--G.v.d.M.
"I thought you were going to Monterey Centre," I said.
"Not if the court knows itself," he said, "and it thinks it does. Lithopolis is the permanent town in Monterey County, and Monterey Centre is the mushroom."
Monterey County, like all the eastern counties of Iowa, all the counties along the Missouri, and every other county which was crossed by a considerable river, was dotted with paper towns. We passed many of these staked-out sites on the Old Ridge Road; and we heard of them from buyers of and dealers in their lots.
Lithopolis was laid out by Judge Horace Stone, the great outsider in the affairs of the county until he died. He platted a town in Howard County when the town-lot fever first broke out, at a place called Stone's Ferry, and named it Lithopolis, because his name was Stone, and for the additional reason that there was a stone quarry there. I've been told that the word means Stone City. The people insisted upon calling it Stone's Ferry and would not have the name Lithopolis. Judge Stone raved and tore, but he was voted down, and pulled up stakes in disgust, sold out his interests and went on to Monterey County, where he could establish a new city and name it Lithopolis. He seemed to care more for the name than anything else, and never seemed to see how funny it was that he felt it possible to make a city wherever he decreed. This was a part of the spirit of the time. The prairies were infested with Romuluses and Remuses, flourishing, not on the milk of the wolves, but seemingly on their howls, of which they often gave a pretty fair imitation.
"But Monterey Centre is the county-seat," I suggested.
"It just thinks it's going to be," said N.V. "The fact is that Monterey County is not organized, but is attached to the county south of it for judicial purposes. Let me whisper in your ear that it will soon be organized, and that the county-seat will not be Monterey Centre, but Lithopolis--that classic municipality whose sonorous name will be the admiration of all true Americans and the despair of the spelling classes in our schools. Lithopolis! It has the cadence of Alexander, and Alcibiades, and Numa Pompilius, and Belisarius--it reeks of greatness! Monterey Centre--ever been there? Ever seen that poverty-stricken, semi-hamlet, squatting on the open prairie, and inhabited by a parcel of dreaming Nimshies?"
"No," said I; "have you?"
"No," he replied. "What difference does it make? He that goeth up against Lithopolis and them that dwell therein, the same is a dreaming Nimshi."
The beginnings of faction were in our town-sites; for most of them were in no sense towns, or even villages. There was a future county-seat fight in the rivalry between Monterey Centre and Lithopolis--and not only these, but in the rival rivalries of Cole's Grove, Imperial City, Rocksylvania, New Baltimore, Cathedral Rock, Waynesville and I know not how many more projects, all ambitiously laid out in the still-unorganized county of Monterey, and all but one or two now quite lost to all human memory or thought, except as some diligent abstractor of titles or real-estate lawyer discovers something of them in the chain of title of a farm; the spires and gables of the 'fifties realized only in the towering silo, the spinning windmill, or the vine-clad porch of a substantial farm-house. But in the heyday of their new-driven corner stakes, what wars were waged for the power to draw people into them; and especially, how the county-seat fights raged like prairie fires set out by those Nimrods who sought to make up in the founding of cities for what they lacked as hunters, in comparison with the establisher of Babel and Erech and Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar.
Between the Maquoketa and Independence I lost N.V. Creede, merely because I traded for some more lame cows and a young Alderney bull, and had to stop to break them. He stayed with me two days, and then caught a ride with one of Judge Horace Stone's teams which was making a quick trip to Lithopolis.
"Good-by, Mr. Vandemark," said he at parting, "and good luck. I am sorry not to be able to remunerate you for your hospitality, which I shall always remember for its improving conversation, its pancakes, its pork and beans, and its milk and butter, rather than for its breathless speed. And take the advice of your man of the law in parting: in your voyages over the inland waterways of life, look not upon the flush when it is red--not even the straight one; for had I not done that on a damned steamboat coming up from St. Louis I should not have been thus in my old age forsaken. And let me tell you, one day my coachman will pull up at the door of your farm-house and take you and your wife and children in my coach and four for a drive--perhaps to see the laying of the corner-stone of the United States court-house in Lithopolis. I go from your ken, but I shall return--good-by."
I was sorry to see him go. It was lonesome without him; and I was troubled by my live stock. I soon saw that I was getting so many cattle that without help in driving them I should be obliged to leave and come back for some of them. I found a farmer named Westervelt who lived by the roadside, and had come to Iowa from Herkimer County, in York State. He even knew some of the relatives of Captain Sproule; so in view of the fact that he seemed honest, I left my cattle with him, all but four cows, and promised to return for them not later than the middle of July. I made him give me a receipt for them, setting forth just what the bargain was, and I paid him then and there for looking out for them--and N.V. Creede said afterward that the thing was a perfectly good legal document, though badly spelled.
"It calls," said he, "for an application of the doctrine ofidem sonans--but it will serve, it will serve."
I marveled that the Gowdy carriage still was astern of me after all this time; and speculated as to whether there was not some other road between Dyersville and Independence, by which they had passed me; but a few miles east of Independence they came up behind me as I lay bogged down in a slew, and drove by on the green tough sod by the roadside. I had just hitched the cows to the end of the tongue, by means of the chain, when they trotted by, and sweeping down near me halted. Virginia still sat as if she had never moved, her hand gripping the iron support of the carriage top, her foot outside the box as if she was ready to spring out. Buck Gowdy leaped out and came down to me.
"In trouble, Mr. Vandemark?" he inquired. "Can we be of any assistance?"
"I guess I can make it," I said, scraping the mud off my trousers and boots. "Gee-up there, Liney!"
My cows settled slowly into the yoke, and standing, as they did now, on firm ground, they deliberately snaked the wagon, hub-deep as it was, out of the mire, and stopped at the word on the western side of the mud-hole.
"Good work, Mr. Vandemark!" he said. "Those knowledgy folk back along the road who said you were trading yourself out of your patrimony ought to see you put the thing through. If you ever need work, come to my place out in the new Earthly Eden."
"I'll have plenty of work of my own," I said; "but maybe, sometime, I may need to earn a little money. I'll remember."
I stopped at Independence that night; and so did the Gowdy party. I was on the road before them in the morning, but they soon passed me, Virginia looking wishfully at me as they went by, and Buck Gowdy waving his hand in a way that made me think he must be a little tight--and then they drove on out of sight, and I pursued my slow way wondering why Virginia Royall had asked me so anxiously if I knew any good people who would take in and shelter a friendless girl--and not only take her in, but fight for her. I could not understand what she had said in any other way.
I had a hard time that day. The road was already cut up and at the crossings of the swales the sod on which we relied to bear up our wheels was destroyed by the host of teams that had gone on before me. That endless stream across the Dubuque ferry was flowing on ahead of me; and the fast-going part of it was passing me every hour like swift schooners outstripping a slow, round-bellied Dutch square-rigger.
The mire-holes were getting deeper and deeper; for the weather was showery. I helped many teams out of their troubles, and was helped by some; though my load was not overly heavy, and I had four true-pulling heavy cows that, when mated with the Alderney bull I had left behind me with Mr. Westervelt, gave me the best stock of cattle--they and my other cows--in Monterey County, until Judge Horace Stone began bringing in his pure-bred Shorthorns; and even then, by grading up with Shorthorn blood I was thought by many to have as good cattle as he had. So I got out of most of my troubles on the Old Ridge Road with my cows, as I did later with them and their descendants when the wheat crop failed us in the 'seventies; but I had a hard time that day. It grew better in the afternoon; and as night drew on I could see the road for miles ahead of me a solitary stretch of highway, without a team; but far off, coming over a hill toward me, I saw a figure that looked strange and mysterious to me, somehow.
It seemed to be a woman or girl, for I could see even at that distance her skirts blown out by the brisk prairie wind. She came over the hill as if running, and at its summit she appeared to stop as if looking for something afar off. At that distance I could not tell whether she gazed backward, forward, to the left or the right, but it impressed me that she stood gazing backward over the route to the west along which she had come. Then, it was plain, she began running down the gentle declivity toward me, and once she fell and either lay or sat on the ground for some time. Presently, though, she got up, and began coming on more slowly, sometimes as if running, most of the time going from side to side of the road as if staggering--and finally she went out of my sight, dropping into a wide valley, to the bottom of which I could not see. It was strange, as it appeared to me; this lone woman, the prairie, night, and the sense of trouble; but, I thought, like most queer things, it would have some quite simple explanation if one could see it close-by.
I made camp a few hundred yards from the road by a creek, along the banks of which grew many willows, and some little groves of box-elders and popples, which latter in this favorable locality grew eight or ten feet tall, and were already breaking out their soft greenish catkins and tender, quivering, pointed leaves: in one of these clumps I hid my wagon, and in the midst of it I kindled my camp-fire. It seemed already a little odd to find myself where I could not look out afar over the prairie.
The little creek ran bank-full, but clear, and not muddy as our streams now always are after a rain. One of the losses of Iowa through civilization has been the disappearance of our lovely little brooks. Then every few miles there ran a rivulet as clear as crystal, its bottom checkered at the riffles into a brilliant pattern like plaid delaine by the shining of the clean red, white and yellow granite pebbles through the crossed ripples from the banks. Now these watercourses are robbed of their flow by the absorption of the rich plowed fields, are all silted up, and in summer are dry; and in spring and fall they are muddy bankless wrinkles in the fields, poached full by the hoofs of cattle and the snouts of hogs; and through many a swale, you would now be surprised to know, in 1855 there ran a brook two feet wide in a thousand little loops, with beautiful dark quiet pools at the turns, some of them mantled with white water-lilies, and some with yellow. Over-hanging banks of rooty turf, had these creeks, under which the larger and soberer fishes lurked in dignified caution like bank presidents, too wise for any common bait, but eager for the big good things. The narrower reaches were all overshadowed by the long grass until you had to part the greenery to see the water. Now such a valley is a forest of corn unbroken by any vestige of brook, creek, rivulet or rill.
That night at a spot which is now plow-land, I have no doubt, I listened to the frogs and prairie-chickens while I caught a mess of chubs, shiners, punkin-seeds and bullheads in a little pond not ten feet broad, within a hundred yards of my wagon, and then rolled them in flour and fried them in butter over my fire, wondering all the time about the woman I had seen coming eastward on the road ahead of me.
I was still in sight of the road, and the twilight was settling down gradually; the air was so clear that even in the absence of a moon, it was long after sunset before it was dark; so I could sit in my dwarf forest, and keep watch of the road to the west to see whether that woman was really a lonely wanderer against the stream of travel, or only a stray from some mover's wagon camped ahead of me along the road.
A pack of wolves just off the road and to the west at that moment began their devilish concert over some wayside carcass--just at the moment when she came in sight. She appeared in the road where it came into my view twenty rods or so beyond the creek, and on the other side of it.
I heard her scream when the first howls of the wolves broke the silence; and then she came running, stumbling, falling, partly toward me and partly toward a point up-stream, where I thought she must mean to cross the brook--a thing which was very easy for one on foot, since it called only for a little jump from one bank to the other. She seemed to be carrying something which when she fell would fly out of her hand, and which in spite of her panic she would pick up before she ran on again.
She came on uncertainly, but always running away from the howls of the wolves, and just before she reached the little creek, she stopped and looked back, as if for a sight of pursuers--and there were pursuers. Perhaps a hundred yards back of her I saw four or five slinking dark forms; for the cowardly prairie wolf becomes bold when fled from, and partly out of curiosity, and perhaps looking forward to a feast on some dead or dying animal, they were stalking the girl, silent, shadowy, evil, and maybe dangerous. She saw them too--and with another scream she plunged on through the knee-high grass, fell splashing into the icy water of the creek, and I lost sight of her.
My first thought was that she was in danger of drowning, notwithstanding the littleness of the brook; and I ran to the point from which I had heard her plunge into the water, expecting to have to draw her out on the bank; but I found only a place where the grass was wallowed down as she had crawled out, and lying on the ground was the satchel she had been carrying. Dark as it was I could see her trail through the grass as she had made her way on; and I followed it with her sachel in my hand, with some foolish notion of opening a conversation with her by giving it back to her.
A short distance farther, on the upland, were my four cows, tied head and foot so they could graze, lying down to rest; and staggering on toward them went the woman's form, zigzagging in bewilderment. She came all at once upon the dozing cows, which suddenly gathered themselves together in fright, hampered by their hobbling ropes, and one of them sent forth that dreadful bellow of a scared cow, worse than a lion's roar. The woman uttered another piercing cry, louder and shriller than any she had given yet; she turned and ran back to me, saw my dark form before her, and fell in a heap in the grass, helpless, unnerved, quivering, quite done for.
"Don't be afraid," said I; "I won't let them hurt you--I won't let anything hurt you!"
I didn't go very near her at first, and I did not touch her. I stood there repeating that the wolves would not hurt her, that it was only a gentle cow which had made that awful noise, that I was only a boy on my way to my farm, and not afraid of wolves at all, or of anything else. I kept repeating these simple words of reassurance over and over, standing maybe a rod from her; and from that distance stepping closer and closer until I stood over her, and found that she was moaning and catching her breath, her face in her arms, stretched out on the cold ground, wet and miserable, all alone on the boundless prairie except for a foolish boy who did not know what to do with her or with himself, but was repeating the promise that he would not let anything hurt her. She has told me since that if I had touched her she would have died. It was a long time before she said anything.
"The wolves!" she cried. "The wolves!"
"They are gone," I said. "They are all gone--and I've got a gun."
"Oh! Oh!" she cried: "Keep them away! Keep them away!"
She kept saying this over and over, sitting on the ground and staring out into the darkness, starting at every rustle of the wind, afraid of everything. It was a long time before she uttered a word except exclamations of terror, and every once in a while she broke down in convulsive sobbings. I thought there was something familiar in her voice; but I could not see well enough to recognize her features, though it was plain that she was a young girl.
"The wolves are gone," I said; "I have scared them off."
"Don't let them come back," she sobbed. "Don't let them come back!"
"I've got a little camp-fire over yonder," I said; "and if we go to it, I'll build it up bright, and that will scare them most to death. They're cowards, the wolves--camp-fire will make 'em run. Let's go to the fire."
She made an effort to get up, but fell back to the ground in a heap. I was just at that age when every boy is afraid of girls; and while I had had my dreams of rescuing damsels from danger and serving them in other heroic ways as all boys do, when the pinch came I did not know what to do; she put up her hand, though, and I took it and helped her to her feet; but she could not walk. Summoning up my courage I picked her up and carried her toward the fire. She said nothing, except, of course, that she was too heavy for me to carry; but she clung to me convulsively. I could feel her heart beating furiously against me, and she was twitching and quivering in every limb.
"You are the boy who took care of me back there when my sister died," said she as I carried her along.
"Are you Mrs. Gowdy's sister?" I asked.
"I am Virginia Royall," she said.
She was very wet and very cold. I set her down on the spring seat where she could lean back, and wrapped her in a buffalo robe, building up the fire until it warmed her.
"I'm glad it's you!" she said.
Presently I had hot coffee for her, and some warm milk, with the fish and good bread and butter, and a few slices of crisp pork which I had fried, and browned warmed-up potatoes. There was smear-case too, milk gravy and sauce made of English currants. She began picking at the food, saying that she could not eat; and I noticed that her lips were pale, while her face was crimson as if with fever. She had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours except some crackers and cheese which she had hidden in her satchel before running away; so in spite of the fact that she was in a bad way from all she had gone through, she did eat a fair meal of victuals.
I thought she ought to be talked to so as to take her mind from her fright; but I could think of nothing but my way of cooking the victuals, and how much I wished I could give her a better meal--just the same sort of talk a woman is always laughed at for--but she did not say much to me. I suppose her strange predicament began returning to her mind.
I had already made up my mind that she should sleep in the wagon, while I rolled up in the buffalo robe by the fire; but it seemed a very bad and unsafe thing to allow her to go to bed wet as she was. I was afraid to mention it to her, however, until finally I saw her shiver as the fire died down. I tried to persuade her to use the covered wagon as a bedroom, and to let me dry her clothes by the fire; but she hung back, saying little except that she was not very wet, and hesitating and seeming embarrassed; but after I had heated the bed-clothes by the fire, and made up the bed as nicely as I could, I got her into the wagon and handed her the satchel which I had clung to while bringing her back; and although she had never consented to my plan she finally poked her clothes out from under the cover at the side of the wagon, in a sort of damp wad, and I went to work getting them in condition to wear again.
I blushed as I unfolded the wet dress, the underwear, and the petticoats, and spread them over a drying rack of willow wands which I had put up by the fire. I had never seen such things before; and it seemed as if it would be very hard for me to meet Virginia in the open day afterward--and yet as I watched by the clothes I had a feeling of exaltation like that which young knights may have had as they watched through the darkness by their armor for the ceremony of knighthood; except that no such knight could have had all my thoughts and feelings.
Perhaps the Greek boy who once intruded upon a goddess in her temple had an experience more like mine; though in my case the goddess had taken part in the ceremony and consented to it. There would be something between us forever, I felt, different from anything that had ever taken place between a boy and girl in all the world (it always begins in that way), something of which I could never speak to her or to any one, something which would make her different to me, in a strange, intimate, unspeakable way, whether I ever saw her again or not. Oh, the lost enchantment of youth, which makes an idol of a discarded pair of corsets, and locates a dream land about the combings of a woman's hair; and lives a century of bliss in a day of embarrassed silence!
It must have been three o'clock, for the rooster of the half-dozen fowls which I had traded for had just crowed, when Virginia called to me from the wagon.
"That man," said she in a scared voice, "is hunting for me."
"Yes," said I, only guessing whom she meant.
"If he takes me I shall kill myself!"
"He will never take you from me," I said.
"What can you do?"
"I have had a thousand fights," I said; "and I have never been whipped!"
I afterward thought of one or two cases in which bigger boys had bested me, though I had never cried "Enough!" and it seemed to me that it was not quite honest to leave her thinking such a thing of me when it was not quite so. And it looked a little like bragging; but it appeared to quiet her, and I let it go. From the mention she had made back there at Dyersville of men who could fight, using pistol or knife, she apparently was accustomed to men who carried and used weapons; but, thought I, I had never owned, much less carried, any weapons except my two hard fists. Queer enough to say I never thought of the strangeness of a boy's making his way into a new land with a strange girl suddenly thrown on his hands as a new and precious piece of baggage to be secreted, smuggled, cared for and defended.
When I had got up in the morning and rounded up my cows I started a fire and began whistling. I was not in the habit of whistling much; but I wanted her to wake up and dress so I could get the makings of the breakfast out of the wagon. After I had the fire going and had whistled all the tunes I knew--Lorena, The Gipsy's Warning, I'd Offer Thee This Hand of Mine,andJoe Bowers, I tapped on the side of the wagon, and said "Virginia!"
She gave a scream, and almost at once I heard her voice calling in terror from the back of the wagon; and on running around to the place I found that she had stuck her head out of the opening of the wagon cover and was calling for help and protection.
"Don't be afraid," said I. "There's nobody here but me."
"Somebody called me 'Virginia,'" she cried, her face pale and her whole form trembling. "Nobody but that man in all this country would call me that."
She hardly ever called Gowdy by any other name but "that man," so far as I have heard. Something had taken place which struck her with a sort of dumbness; and I really believe she could not then have spoken the name Gowdy if she had tried. What it was that happened she never told any one, unless it was Grandma Thorndyke, who was always dumb regarding the sort of thing which all the neighbors thought took place. To Grandma Thorndyke sex must have seemed the original curse imposed on our first parents; eggs and link sausages were repulsive because they suggested the insides of animals and vital processes; and a perfect human race would have been to her made up of beings nourished by the odors of flowers, and perpetuated by the planting of the parings of finger-nails in antiseptic earth--or something of the sort. My live-stock business always had to her its seamy side and its underworld which she always turned her face away from--though I never saw a woman who could take a new-born pig, calf, colt or fowl, once it was really brought forth so it could be spoken of, and raise it from the dead, almost, as she could. But every trace of the facts up to that time had to be concealed, and if not they were ignored by Grandma Thorndyke. New England all over!
If Gowdy was actually guilty of the sort of affront to little Virginia for which the public thought him responsible, I do not see how the girl could ever have told it to grandma. I do not see how grandma could ever have been made to understand it. I suspect that the worst that grandma ever believed, was that Gowdy swore or used what she called vulgar language in Virginia's presence. Knowing him as we all did afterward, we suspected that he attempted to treat her as he treated all women--and as I believe he could not help treating them. It seems impossible of belief--his wife's orphan sister, the recent death of Ann Gowdy, the girl's helplessness and she only a little girl; but Buck Gowdy was Buck Gowdy, and that escape of his wife's sister and her flight over the prairie was the indelible black mark against him which was pointed at from time to time forever after whenever the people were ready to forgive those daily misdoings to which a frontier people were not so critical as perhaps they should have been. Indeed he gained a certain popularity from his boast that all the time he needed to gain control over any woman was half an hour alone with her--but of that later, if at all.
"That was me that called you 'Virginia,'" said I. "I want to get into the wagon to get things for breakfast--after you get up."
"I never thought of your calling me Virginia," she answered--and I had no idea what was in her mind. I saw no reason why I shouldn't call her by her first name. "Miss" Royall would have been my name for the wife of a man named Royall. It was not until long afterward that I found out how different my manners were from those to which she was accustomed.
I never thought of such a thing as varying from my course of conduct on her account; and just as would have been the case if my outfit had been a boat for which time and tide would not wait, I yoked up, after the breakfast was done, and prepared to negotiate the miry crossing of the creek and pull out for Monterey County, which I hoped to reach in time to break some land and plant a small crop. We did not discuss the matter of her going with me--I think we both took that for granted. She stood on a little knoll while I was making ready to start, gazing westward, and when the sound of cracking whips and the shouts of teamsters told of the approach of movers from the East, even though we were some distance off the trail, she crept into the wagon so as to be out of sight. She had eaten little, and seemed weak and spent; and when we started, I arranged the bed in the wagon for her to lie upon, just as I had done for Doctor Bliven's woman, and she seemed to hide rather than anything else as she crept into it. So on we went, the wagon jolting roughly at times, and at times running smoothly enough as we reached dry roads worn smooth by travel.
Sometimes as I looked back, I could see her face with the eyes fixed upon me questioningly; and then she would ask me if I could see any one coming toward us on the road ahead.
"Nobody," I would say; or, "A covered wagon going the wrong way," or whatever I saw. "Don't be afraid," I would add; "stand on your rights. This is a free country. You've got the right to go east or west with any one you choose, and nobody can say anything against it. And you've got a friend now, you know."
"Is anybody in sight?" she asked again, after a long silence.
I looked far ahead from the top of a swell in the prairie and then back. I told her that there was no one ahead so far as I could see except teams that we could not overtake, and nobody back of us but outfits even slower than mine. So she came forward, and I helped her over the back of the seat to a place by my side. For the first time I could get a good look at her undisturbed--if a bashful boy like me could be undisturbed journeying over the open prairie with a girl by his side--a girl altogether in his hands.
First I noticed that her hair, though dark brown, gave out gleams of bright dark fire as the sun shone through it in certain ways. I kept glancing at that shifting gleam whenever we turned the slow team so that her hair caught the sun. I have seen the same flame in the mane of a black horse bred from a sorrel dam or sire. As a stock breeder I have learned that in such cases there is in the heredity the genetic unit of red hair overlaid with black pigment. It is the same in people. Virginia's father had red hair, and her sister Ann Gowdy had hair which was a dark auburn. I was fascinated by that smoldering fire in the girl's hair; and in looking at it I finally grew bolder, as I saw that she did not seem to suspect my scrutiny, and I saw that her brows and lashes were black, and her eyes very, very blue--not the buttermilk blue of the Dutchman's eyes, like mine, with brows and lashes lighter than the sallow Dutch skin, but deep larkspur blue, with a dark edging to the pupil--eyes that sometimes, in a dim light, or when the pupils are dilated, seem black to a person who does not look closely. Her skin, too, showed her ruddy breed--for though it was tanned by her long journey in the sun and wind, there glowed in it, even through her paleness, a tinge of red blood--and her nose was freckled. Glimpses of her neck and bosom revealed a skin of the thinnest, whitest texture--quite milk-white, with pink showing through on account of the heat. She had little strong brown hands, and the foot which she put on the dashboard was a very trim and graceful foot like that of a thoroughbred mare, built for flight rather than work, and it swelled beautifully in its grass-stained white stocking above her slender ankle to the modest skirt.
A great hatred for Buck Gowdy surged through me as I felt her beside me in the seat and studied one after the other her powerful attractions--the hatred, not for the man who misuses the defenseless girl left in his power by cruel fate; but the lust for conquest over the man who had this girl in his hands and who, as she feared, was searching for her. I mention these things because, while they do not excuse some things that happened, they do show that, as a boy who had lived the uncontrolled and, by association, the evil life which I had lived, I was put in a very hard place.