"Jake, Jake!" Judge Stone whispered in my ear, looking anxiously around, "have you seen the governor in the last half or three-quarters of an hour?"
"He hain't been in here," I said, jerking away from him.
"Sure?" he persisted. "I've looked everywhere except in his office where he put the money--and that's locked."
I broke away from him and went out. I had no desire to see Governor Wade or any one else. I wanted to be alone. I had seen Virginia kissed by Bob Wade--and they were still singing that sickish play in there. They would be kissing and kissing all the rest of the night. She to be kissed in this way, and I had been so careful of her, when I was all alone with her for days, and would have given my right hand for a kiss! It was terrible. I walked back and forth in the yard, and then came up on the porch and sat down on a bench, so as to hear the play-singing. They were singingThe Gay Balonza-Man, now. I started up once to walk home, but I thought that Judge Stone was paying me wages for guarding the county's money, and turned to go back where I could watch the games, lured by a sort of fascination to see how many times Virginia would allow herself to be kissed. A woman came out of the house, and in passing saw and recognized me. It was Mrs. Bliven. She dropped down on the bench.
"My God!" she sobbed. "I'll go crazy! I'll kill myself!"
I sat down again on the bench. She had been so happy a few minutes ago, to all appearances, that I was astonished; but after waiting quite a while I could think of nothing to say to her. So I turned my face away for fear that she might see what I felt must show in it.
"You're in trouble, too," she said. "You babies! My God, how I'd like to change places with you! Did you see him kissing them?"
"Who?" I asked.
"My man," she cried. "Bliven. You know how it is, with us. You're the only one that knows about me--about us--Jake. I've been scared to death for fear you'd tell ever since I found you were coming here to live; and I dasn't tell him--he don't know you know. And now I almost wish you would tell--put it in Dick McGill's paper. He wants somebody else already. A woman that's done as I have--he can throw me away like an old shoe! But I want you to promise me that if he ever shelves me you'll let the world know. Did you see him hugging them girls? He's getting ready to shelve me, I tell you!"
I sat for some time thinking this matter over. Finally I spoke, and she seemed surprised, as if she had forgotten I was there.
"I'll tell you what I'll do," said I. "I won't tell on you just because you think you want me to. What would happen if everything in the lives of us folks out here was to be told, especially as it would be told in Dick McGill's paper? But if you ever find out for sure that he is going to--going to--to shelve you, why, come to me, and I'll go to him. I think he would be a skunk to--to shelve you. And I don't see that--that--that he--was any more fairce to hug and kiss than--than some others. Than you!"
"Or you," said she, sort of snickering through her tears.
"I hated it!" I said.
"So did I," said she.
"Maybe Doc did, too," I suggested.
"No," she replied, after a while. "I'll tell you, Jake, I'll hold you to your promise. Sometime I may come to you or send for you. May I?"
"Any time," I answered, and she went in, seeming quite cheered up. I suppose she needed that blow-off, like an engine too full of steam. I wonder if it was wrong to feel for her? But it must be remembered that I had very little religious bringing up.
Well, the party came to an end presently, and Judge Stone came out and holloed for me to bring the team. When I drove up to the door he asked me in a low tone to come and help carry the money out. The governor unlocked his office, and then the safe, and took out the bag, which he handed to Judge Stone.
"Heavy as ever," said the judge. "Catch hold here, Jake, and help me carry it."
"A heavy responsibility at least," said the governor. The governor's hired people of whom he had always a large force had not taken part in the proceedings of the party, but most of them were gathered about as we took our departure. They were to a great extent the younger men among the settlers, and the governor in later times never got tired of saying how much he had done for the early settlers in giving them employment.
N.V. Creede in answering him in campaigns always said that if he gave the boys work, they gave the governor labor in return, and at a dollar a day it seemed to him that the governor was the one who was under obligations to them. It is a curious thing that people who receive money are supposed to be under obligations to those who pay it, no matter what the deal may be. We say "thank you" to the man who pays us for a day's wages; but why, if the work is worth the money?
Well, as I looked about among the governor's working people, as I have said, I saw a head taller than the rest, the big form of Pitt Bushyager. He was looking at me with that daredevil smile of his, the handsomest man there, with his curling brown mustache and goatee; and nodded at me as the judge got into the carriage in the back seat with Mrs. Stone, and Virginia came up in her pretty pink silk, with the Paisley shawl around her shoulders, to be helped up into the front seat with me. The satchel of money was placed under the seat where the judge could feel it with his feet.
We drove off in that silence which comes with the drowsiness that follows excitement, especially along toward morning. The night was dark and still. Virginia's presence reminded me of those days of happiness wher we drove into Iowa alone together; but I was not happy I had lived with this girl in my dreams ever since, and now I faced the wrench of giving her up; for I repeated in my own mind over and over again that she would never think of me with such big bugs as Bob Wade shining around her.
The Judge and Mrs. Stone were talking together now, and I heard references to the money. Then I began to turn over in my slow mind the fact, known to me alone, that there was a man at the Wade farm who was one of a band of thieves, and who knew about our having the money. If he really was connected with the Bunker boys, what was more likely than that he had ways of passing the word along to some of them who might be waiting to rob us on our way home? But the crime that I was sure had been committed back along the road the spring before had been horse-stealing. I wondered whether or not the business of outlawry was not specialized, so that some stole horses, others robbed banks, others were highwaymen, and the like.
All this time Virginia seemed to be snuggling up a little closer. Maybe Pitt Bushyager and his brothers were just plain horse-thieves, and nothing else. Perhaps they were just hired to help drive in the horses; but why, then, did Pitt have two animals in Monterey Centre when I saw him there the morning I arrived?
Jim Boyd's light buggy had got far ahead of us, out of hearing, and the lumber wagons, with the bulk of the crowd, were far in the rear. We were alone. As we came to a road which wound off to the south toward where there was a settlement of Hoosiers who had made a trail to the Wade place, I turned off and followed it, knowing that when I got to the Hoosier settlement, I should find a road into the Centre. It was a mistake made a-purpose, done on that instinct which protects the man who feels that he may be trailed. I was on an unexpected path to any one waiting for us. Finally Virginia spoke to me.
"How is our farm?" she asked.
Now I had not forgotten how she had been kissed by Bob Wade, and probably, while I was outside sulking, by a dozen others. By instinct again--the instinct of a jealous boy--I started in to punish her.
"All right," I said surlily.
"What crops have you planted?" she went on.
"About ten acres of wheat," I said, "and the rest of my breaking in corn and oats. You see, I have to put in all the time I can in breaking."
"How is the white heifer?" she asked, inquiring as to one of my cattle that she had petted a lot.
"She has a calf," said I.
"Oh, has she? How I wish I could see it! What color is it?"
"Spotted."
There followed a long silence, during which we went farther and farther off the road.
"Jake," said the judge, "whose house is that we just passed?"
"It's that new Irishman's," said I. "Mike Cosgrove, ain't that his name?"
"Well, then," said the judge, "we're off the road. Stop!"
"Yes," I said, "I made the wrong turn back there. It's only a little farther."
The judge was plainly put out about this. He even wanted to go back to the regular road again, and when I explained that we would soon reach a trail which would lead right into the Centre, he still persisted.
"If we were to be robbed on this out-of-the-way road," said he, "it would look funny."
"It would look funnier," I said, "if we were to go back and then get robbed. Any one waiting to rob us would be on the regular road, wouldn't they?"
So I stubbornly drove on, the judge grumbling all the while for a mile or so. Then he and Mrs. Stone began talking in a low tone, under the cover of which Virginia resumed her conversation with me.
"You are a stubborn Dutchman," said she. To which I saw no need of making any reply.
"You seemed to have a good time," she said, presently.
"I didn't," said I. "I'm nobody by the side of such people as Bob Wade. I wasn't even invited. I'm just paid to come along with the judge to protect the county's money. You'll never see me again at any of your grand kissing parties."
"It was the first I ever went to," said she; "but you seemed to know what to do pretty well--you and Kittie Fleming."
This stumped me for a while, and we drove on in silence.
"I didn't kiss her," I said.
"It looked like it," said Virginia.
"She kissed me," I protested.
"You seemed to like it," she insisted.
"I didn't!" I said, mad all over. "And I quit just as soon as the kissing began."
"You ought to have stayed," she said stiffly. "The fun was just beginning when you flounced out."
And then came one of the interesting events of this eventful night. We turned into the main road to Monterey Centre, just where Duncan McAlpine's barn now stands, and I thought I saw down in the hollow where it was still dark, though the light was beginning to dawn in the east, a clump of dark objects like cattle or horses--or horsemen. As I looked, they moved into the road as if to stop us. I drew my pistol, fired it over their heads, and they scattered. Then, I was scared still more, by a sound as of a cavalry or a battery of artillery coming behind us. It was three loads of people on the hayracks, who had overtaken us on account of our having gone by the roundabout way; coming at a keen gallop down the hill to have the credit of passing a fancy carriage. They passed us like a tornado; shouting as they went by, asking what I had shot at, and telling us to hurry up so as to get home by breakfast time. The horsemen ahead, whatever might have been their plans, did not seem to care to argue matters with so large a force, and rode off in several directions, while I pressed close to the rear of the last hayrack. Thus we drove into Monterey Centre.
"What did you shoot for?" asked the judge as we stopped at his house.
"I wanted to warn a lot of men on horseback that were heading us off, that there'd be trouble if they tried to stop us," I answered.
"Damned foolishness," said the judge. "Well, come in and let's have a bite to eat."
Virginia was staying with them the rest of the night; but as I helped her out, feeling in her stiffness that she was offended with me, I insisted that I would go on home. The judge, who had been ready to abuse me a moment before, now took hold of me and forced me into the house. As we went in carrying the satchel, he lifted it up on the table.
"We may as well take a look at it," said he.
Mrs. Stone and Virginia and I all stood by the table as he unsnapped the catch and opened the bag. It was full almost to the top.
"That ain't the way I packed that money!" said the judge.
His hands trembled as he pulled the contents out. It was full of the bags and wrappers in which the money had been packed, according to the judge's tell; but there was no money in the wrappers, and the bags were full, not of coins, but of common salt. That was what made it so heavy; and that was what always made it such a mystery: for all the salt used in Monterey County then was common barrel salt. It was the same kind, whether it was got from the barrel from which the farmer salted his cattle, or from the supply in the kitchen of the dweller in the town. There was no clue in it. It was just salt! We all cried out in surprise, not understanding that we were looking at the thing which was to be fought over until either Judge Stone or Governor Wade was destroyed.
"I am ruined!" Judge Stone fell back into a chair groaning. Then he jumped to his feet. "They've taken it out while we were at the party!" he shouted. "The damned, canting, sniveling old thief! No wonder he's got money! He probably stole it where he came from! Jake, we've got to go back and make him give this money back--come on!"
"Make who give it back?" I asked.
"Who?" said he. "Why old DeWitt Clinton Wade, the old thief! Who else had the key to the office or knew how to open that safe? Come on, Jake, and bring your pistol!"
I handed him the pistol.
"I agreed to guard you and the county's money," I said, "and that's all. You hain't got the county's money, it seems, and my job's over. I've got to break prairie to-day, and I guess I'd better be going!"
I passed out of the door, and as I went I heard them--the judge and his wife, and I thought Virginia joined in--condemning me for deserting them. But I needed to think this thing over before I could see into it. It looked pretty dark for some one then, and I saw it was a matter to see N.V. about before taking any further part.
I never have seen through it. There it was: The money in the treasury, and supposed to be in the bag, and placed in Governor Wade's safe. There were the two men, both supposed to be rich. There was the time, when the kissing games were going on, when the governor was not seen by any of his guests. The governor was rich always afterward, while the judge struggled along with adversity and finally went away from the county poor as a church mouse. Then there was the jingle I seemed to remember at starting, and Judge Stone's twice speaking of it--the jingle Virginia did not hear. Salt does not jingle.
For a long time it appeared to me that these things seemed to prove that the governor got the money; but lately, since both the men have passed away, I have had my doubts. Judge Stone was a much nicer man than the governor to meet up with, but--well, what's the use? It is long past. It was past for me, too, as I walked out to my farm that morning as the dawn broadened into day, with the prairie-chickens singing their wonderful morning song, and the blue-joint grass soaking me with dew to my knees.
At that moment, or soon after, in a stormy encounter at the Wade farm, with witnesses that the judge took with him, began the great Wade-Stone feud of Monterey County, Iowa. It lasted until the flood of new settlers floated it away in a freshet of new issues during and after the great Civil War.
I took the story to N.V. as soon as I went to town. He sat looking at me with a mysterious grin on his face, as I told him of the loss of the county funds.
"Well," said he, "this will make history. I venture the assertion that the case will be compromised. I can't see this close corporation of a county government making Stone's bondsmen pay the loss. Or Stone either. And I can't see any one getting that amount of money out of old Wade, whether it was in the bag when it went into his safe or not. Your testimony on the jingle feature ain't worth a cuss. The Bunker boys had that bag marked for their own; for we know now that they were out on a raid that night and cleaned up several good horses. I must say, Jake, that you are a hell of a hired man. If you had kept the main road, this trouble which will raise blazes with things in this county till you and I are gray-headed, never would have happened. The Bunkers would have had that salt, and everybody else would have had an alibi. Maybe it was Judge Stone's instinct for party harmony that made him cross at you for dodging the Bunkers by driving down by the Hoosier settlement. He was cross, wasn't he? Instinct is a great matter, says Falstaff. He was mad on instinct, I reckon! And you drove off the road on instinct. Beware instinct,' say I on the authority aforesaid. It would have smoothed matters all out if the Bunker boys had got that salt!"
Iowa lived in the future in those days. It was a land of poverty and privations and small things, but a land of dreams. We shivered in the winter storms, and dreamed; we plowed and sowed and garnered in; but the great things, the happy things, were our dreams and visions. We felt that we were plowing the field of destiny and sowing for the harvest of history; but we scarcely thought it. The power that went out of us as we scored that wonderful prairie sod and built those puny towns was the same power that nerved the heart of those who planted Massachusetts and Rhode Island and Virginia, the power that has thrilled the world whenever the white man has gone forth to put a realm under his feet.
Our harvest of that day seems pitifully small as I sit on my veranda and look at my barns and silos, and see the straight rows of corn leaning like the characters of God's handwriting across the broad intervale of Vandemark's Folly flat, sloping to the loving pressure of the steady warm west wind of Iowa, and clapping a million dark green hands in acclamation of the full tide of life sucked up from the richest breast that Mother Earth in all her bountiful curves turns to the lips of her offspring. But all our children for all future generations shall help to put the harvests of those days into the barns and silos of the future state. God save it from the mildews of monopoly and tyranny, and the Red rot of insurrection and from repression's explosions!
We were children, most of those of whom I have been writing. It was a baby county, a baby state, and Vandemark Township was still struggling up toward birth. "The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts": but after all they are only the stirrings of the event in the womb of life. I would not have married Virginia on the day after the party at Governor Wade's if she had in some way conveyed to me that she wanted me. I should not have dared; for I was a child. I suppose that Magnus would have taken Rowena Fewkes in a minute, for he was older; but I don't know. It takes a Norwegian or a Swede a long time to get ripe.
The destinies of the county and state were in the hands of youth, dreaming of the future: and when the untamed prairie turned and bit us, as it did in frosts and blizzards and floods and locusts and tornadoes, we said to each other, like the boy in the story when the dog bit his father, "Grin and bear it, Dad! It'll be the makin' o' the pup!" Even the older men like Judge Stone and Governor Wade and Elder Thorndyke and heads of families like the Bemisdarfers, were dreamers: and as for such ne'er-do-weels as the Fewkeses, they, with Celebrate's schemes for making money, and Surrager's inventions, and their plans for palaces and estates, were only a little more absurd in their visions than the rest of us. The actual life of to-day is to the dreams of that day as the wheat plant to the lily. It starts to be a lily, but the finger and thumb of destiny--mainly in the form of heredity--turn it into the wheat, and then into the prosaic flour and bran in the bins.
As I came driving into Monterey County, every day had its event, different from that of the day before; but now comes a period when I must count by years, not days, and a lot of time passes without much to record. As for the awful to-do about the county's lost money, I heard nothing of it, except when, once in a while, somebody, nosing into the matter for one reason or another, would come prying around to ask me about it. I began by telling them the whole story whenever they asked, and Henderson L. Burns once took down what I said and made me swear to it. Whenever I came to the jingle of the money in the bag as we put it in the carriage on starting for the Wades', they cross-examined me till I said I sort of seemed to kind of remember that it jingled, and anyhow I recollected that Judge Stone had said "Hear it jingle, Jake!" This proved either that the money was there and jingled, or that it wasn't there and that the judge was, as N.V. said, "As guilty as hell."
Dick McGill didn't know which way the cat would jump, and kept pretty still about it in his paper; but he printed a story on me that made everybody laugh. "There was once a Swede," said the paper, "that was running away from the minions of the law, and took refuge in a cabin where they covered him with a gunny sack. When the Hawkshaws came they asked for the Swede. No information forthcoming. 'What's in that bag?' asked the minions. 'Sleighbells,' replied the accomplices. The minion kicked the bag, and there came forth from under it the cry, 'Yingle! Yingle!' We know a Dutchman who is addicted to the same sort of ventriloquism." (MontereyJournal, September 3, 1857.)
In 1856 we cut our grain with cradles. In 1857 Magnus and I bought a Seymour & Morgan hand-rake reaper. I drove two yoke of cows to this machine, and Magnus raked off. I don't think we gained much over cradling, except that we could work nights with the cows, and bind day-times, or the other way around when the straw in the gavels got dry and harsh so that heads would pull off as we cinched up the sheaves. At that very moment, the Marsh brothers back in De Kalb County, Illinois, were working on the greatest invention ever given to agriculture since the making of the first steel plow, the Marsh Harvester.
Every year we broke some prairie, and our cultivated land increased. By the fall of 1857, my little cottonwood trees showed up in a pretty grove of green for a distance of two or three miles, and were ten to fifteen feet high: so I could lie in the shade of the trees I had planted.
But if the trees flourished, the community did not. The panic of 1857 came on in the summer and fall; but we knew nothing, out in our little cabins, of the excitement in the cities, the throngs on Wall Street and in Philadelphia, the closing banks, the almost universal bankruptcy of the country. It all came from land speculation. According to what they said, there was more land then laid out in town-sites in Kansas than in all the cities and towns of the settled parts of the country. In Iowa there were town-sites along all the streams and scattered all over the prairies. Everybody was in debt, in the business world, and when land stopped growing in value, sales stopped, and then the day of reckoning came. All financial panics come from land speculation. Show me a way to keep land from advancing in value, and I will tell you how to prevent financial panics[14].
[14]The author, when his attention is called to the Mississippi Bubble, insists that it was nothing more nor less than betting on the land development of a great new region. As to the "Tulipomania" which once created a small panic in Holland, he insists that such a fool notion can not often occur, and never can have wide-spread results like a genuine financial panic. In which the editor is inclined to believe the best economists will agree with him.--G.v.d.M.
But, though we knew nothing about this general wreck and ruin back east, we knew that we were miserably poor. In the winter of 1857-8 Magnus and I were beggarly ragged and so short of fuel and bedding that he came over and stayed with me, so that we could get along with one bed and one fire. My buffalo robes were the things that kept us warm, those howling nights, or when it was so still that we could hear the ice crack in the creek eighty rods off. My wife has always said that Magnus and I holed up in our den like wild animals, and sometimes like a certain domestic one. But what with Magnus and the fiddle and his stories of Norway and mine of the canal we amused ourselves pretty well and got along without baths. My cows, and the chickens, and our vegetables and potatoes, and our white and buckwheat flour and the corn-meal mush and johnny-cake kept us fat, and I entirely outgrew my best suit, so that I put it on for every day, and burst it at most of the seams in a week.
I was sorry for the people in the towns, and sold most of my eggs, fowls, butter, cream and milk on credit: and though Virginia and I were not on good terms and I never went to see her any more; and though Grandma Thorndyke was, I felt sure, trying to get Virginia's mind fixed on a better match, like Bob Wade or Paul Holbrook, I used to take eggs, butter, milk or flour to the elder's family almost every time I went to town: and when the weather was warm enough so that they would not freeze, I took potatoes, turnips, and sometimes some cabbage for a boiled dinner, with a piece of pork to go with it.
When the elder found out who was sending it he tried to thank me, but I made him promise not to tell his family where these things came from, on pain of not getting any more. I said I had as good right to contribute to the church as any one, and just because I had no money it was tough to have the little I could give made public. By this time I had worked up quite a case, and was looking like a man injured in his finest feelings and twitted of his poverty. The elder looked bewildered, and promised that he wouldn't tell.
"But I'm sure, Jake, that the Lord won't let your goodness go unrewarded, in the next world, anyhow, and I don't think in this."
I don't think he actually told, but I have reason to believe he hinted. In fact, Kittie Fleming told me when I went down to their place after some seed oats, that Grandma Thorndyke had said at the Flemings' dinner table that I was an exemplary boy, in my way, and when I grew up I would make some girl a husband who would be kind and a good provider.
"I was awful interested," she said.
"Why?" I asked; for I couldn't see for the life of me how it interested her.
"I'm a girl," said she, "and I feel interested in--in--in such things--husbands, and good providers." Here I grew hot all over, and twisted around like a worm on a hot griddle. "I didn't think, when you were playing the needle's eye with me, that you acted as if you would be a very good husband!"
I peeked up at her through my eyebrows, and saw she was grinning at me, and sort of blushing, herself. But I had only one word for her.
"Why?"
"You didn't seem to--to--kiss back very much," she giggled; and as I was struggling to think of something to say (for it seemed a dreadful indictment as I looked at her, so winning to a boy who hadn't seen a girl for weeks) she ran off; and it was not till I was sitting by the stove at home after washing up the dishes that evening that I thought what a fine retort it would have been if I had offered to pay back then, with interest, all I owed her in the way of response. I spent much of the evening making up nice little speeches which I wished I had had the sprawl to get off on the spur of the moment. I grew fiery hot at the thought of how badly I had come off in this little exchange of compliments with Kittie. Poor Kittie! She supped sorrow with a big spoon before many years; and then had a long and happy life. I forgave her, even at the time, for making fun of the Hell Slew Dutch boy. All the girls made fun of me but Virginia, and she did sometimes--Virginia and Rowena Fewkes.
Thinking of Rowena reminded me of the fact that I had not seen any of the Fewkeses for nearly two years. This brought up the thought of Buck Gowdy, who had carried them off to his great farmstead which he called Blue-grass Manor. Whenever I was in conversation with him I was under a kind of strain, for all the fact that he was as friendly with me as he was with any one else. I remembered how I had smuggled Virginia away from him; and wondered whether or not he had got intimate enough by this time at Elder Thorndyke's so that she had given him any inkling as to my share in that matter.
This brought me back to Virginia--and then the whole series of Virginia dreams recurred. She sat in the chair which I had bought for her, in the warm corner next the window. She was sewing. She was reading to me. She was coming over to my chair to sit in my lap while we talked over our adventures. She looked at my chapped and cracked hands and told me I must wear my mittens every minute. She--but every boy can go on with the series: every boy who has been in the hopeless but blissful state in which I then was: a state which out of hopelessness generates hope as a dynamo generates current.
This was followed by days of dark despondency. Magnus Thorkelson and I were working together plowing for oats, for we did not work our oats on the corn ground of last year then as we do now, and he tried to cheer me up. I had been wishing that I had never left the canal; for there I always had good clothes and money in my pocket. We couldn't stay in this country, I said. Nobody had any money except a few money sharks, and they robbed every one that borrowed of them with their two per cent. a month. I was getting raggeder and raggeder every day. I wished I had not bought this other eighty. I wished I had done anything rather than what I had done. I wished I knew where I could get work at fair wages, and I would let the farm go--I would that! I would be gosh-blasted if I wouldn't, by Golding's bow-key[15]!
[15]"By Golding's bow-key" was a very solemn objurgation. It could be used by professors of religion, but under great provocation only. It harks back to the time when every man who had oxen named them Buck and Golding, and the bow-key held the yoke on. Ah, those far-off, Arcadian days, and the blessing of blowing those who lived in them!--G.v.d.M.
"Oh!" exclaimed Magnus, "you shouldn't talk so! Ve got plenty to eat. Dere bane lots people in Norvay would yump at de shance to yange places wit' us. What nice land here in Iovay! Some day you bane rich man. All dis slew bane some day dry for plow. I see it in Norvay and Sveden. And now dat ve got ralroad, dere bane t'ousan's an' t'ousan's people in Norvay, and Denmark, and Sveden and Yermany come here to Iovay, an' you an' your vife an' shildern bane big bugs. Yust vait, Yake. Maybe you see your sons in county offices an' your girls married vit bankers, an' your vife vare new calico dress every day. Yust vait, Yake. And to-night I pop some corn if you furnish butter, hey?"
To hear the pop-corn going off in the skillet, like the volleys of musketry we were so soon to hear at Shiloh; to see Magnus with his coat off, stirring it round and round in the sizzling butter until one or two big white kernels popped out as a warning that the whole regiment was about to fire; to see him, with his red hair all over his freckled face, lift the hissing skillet and shake it until the volleys died down to sharpshooting across the lines; and then to hear him laugh when he turned the vegetable snowdrift out into the wooden butter-bowl a little too soon, and a last shot or two blew the fluffy kernels all over the room--all this was the very acme of success in making a pleasant evening. All the time I was thinking of Magnus's prediction.
"County officer!" I snorted. "Banker! Me!"
"Ay dank so," said Magnus. "Or maybe lawyers and yudges."
"Any girl I would have," I said, "wouldn't have me; and any girl that would have me, the devil wouldn't have!"
"Anybody else say dat to me, I lick him," he stated.
"There ain't any farm girls out in this prairie," I said; "and no town girl would come in here," and I spread my hands out to show that I thought my house the worst place in the world, though I was really a little proud of it--for wasn't it mine? made with my own hands, mainly?
"Girls come where dey want to come," said he, "in spite of--"
"Of hell and high water," I supplied, as he hesitated.
"So!" he answered, adopting my words, and afterward using them at a church social with some effect. "In spite of Hell Slew and high water. An' if dey bane too soft in de hand to come, I bring you out a fine farm girl from Norvay."
This idea furnished us meat for much joking, and then it grew almost earnest, as jokes will. We finally settled down to a cousin of his, Christina Quale. And whenever I bought anything for the house, which I did from time to time as I got money, we discussed the matter as to whether or not Christina would like it. The first thing I bought was a fine silver-plated castor, with six bottles in it, to put in the middle of the table so that it could be turned around as the company helped themselves to salt, mustard, vinegar, red or black pepper; and the sixth thing I never could figure out until Grandma Thorndyke told me it was oil. A castor was a sort of title of nobility, and this one always lifted me in the opinions of every one that sat down at my table. Magnus said he was sure Christina would be tickled yust plumb to death with it. Ah! Christina was a wonderful legal fiction, as N.V. calls it. How many times Virginia's ears must have burned as we tenderly discussed the poor yellow-haired peasant girl far off there by the foaming fjords.
One trouble with all of us Vandemark Township settlers was that we had no money. I had long since stopped going to church or to see anybody, because I was so beggarly-looking. Going away from our farms to earn wages put back the development of the farms, and made the job of getting started so much slower. It is so to-day in the new parts of the country, and something ought to be done about it. With us it was hard to get work, even when we were forced to look for it. I hated to work for Buck Gowdy, because there was that thing between us, whether he knew it or not; but when Magnus came to me one day after we had got our oats sowed, and said that Mr. Gowdy wanted hands, I decided that I would go over with Magnus and work out a while.
I was astonished, after we had walked the nine miles between the edge of the Gowdy tract and the headquarters, to see how much he had done. There were square miles of land under plow, and the yards, barns, granaries and houses looked almost as much like a town as Monterey Centre. We went straight to Gowdy's office. His overseer was talking with us, when Gowdy came in.
"Hello, Thorkelson," said he; "you're quite a stranger. Haven't seen you for a week."
Magnus stole a look at me and blushed so that his face was as red as his hair. I was taken aback by this for he had never said a word to me about the frequent visits to the Gowdy ranch which Buck's talk seemed to show had taken place. What had he been coming over for? I wondered, as I heard Gowdy greeting me.
"Glad to see you, Mr. Vandemark," said he. "What can I do for you-all?"
"We heard you wanted a couple of hands," said I, "and we thought--"
"I need a couple of hundred," said he. "Put 'em to work, Mobley," turning to the overseer; and then he went off into a lot of questions and orders about the work, after which he jumped into the buckboard buggy, in which Pinck Johnson sat with the whip in his hands, and they went off at a keen run, with Pinck urging the team to a faster pace, and Gowdy holding to the seat as they went careering along like the wind.
We lived in a great barracks with his other men, and ate our meals in a long room like a company of soldiers. It was a most interesting business experiment which he was trying; and he was going behind every day. Where land is free nobody will work for any one else for less than he can make working for himself; and land was pretty nearly free in Monterey County then. All a man needed was a team, and he could get tools on credit; and I know plenty of cases of people breaking speculator's land and working it for years without paying rent or being molested. The rent wasn't worth quarreling about. But Gowdy couldn't get, on the average, as much out of his hired men in the way of work as they would do for themselves.
Most of the aristocrats who came early to Iowa to build up estates, lost everything they had, and became poor; for they did not work with their own hands, and the work of others' hands was inefficient and cost, anyhow, as much as it produced or more. Gowdy would have gone broke long before the cheap land was gone, if it had not been for the money he got from Kentucky. The poor men like me, the peasants from Europe like Magnus--we were the ones who made good, while the gentility went bankrupt.
After a few years the land began to take on what the economists call "unearned increment," or community value, and the Gowdy lands began the work which finally made him a millionaire; but it was not his work. It was mine, and Magnus Thorkelson's, and the work of the neighbors generally, on the farms and in the towns. It was the railroads and school and churches. He would have made property faster to let his land lie bare until in the 'seventies. I could see that his labor was bringing him a loss, every day's work of it; and at breakfast I was studying out ways to organize it better,--when a small hand pushed a cup of coffee past my cheek, and gave my nose a little pinch as it was drawn back. I looked up, and there was Rowena, waiting on our table!
"Hello, Jake!" said she. "I heared you was dead."
"Hello, Rowena," I answered. "I'm just breathin' my last!"
All the hands began yelling at us.
"No sparkin' here!"
"None o' them love pinches, Rowena!"
"I swan to man if that Dutchman ain't cuttin' us all out!"
"Quit courtin' an' pass them molasses, sweetness!"
"Mo' po'k an' less honey, thar!"--this from a Missourian.
"Magnus, your pardner's cuttin' you out!"
I do not need to say that all this hectoring from a lot of men who were most of them strangers, almost put me under the table; but Rowena, tossing her head, sent them back their change, with smiles for everybody. She was as pretty a twenty-year-old lass as you would see in a day's travel. No longer was she the ragged waif to whom I had given the dress pattern back toward Dubuque. She was rosy, she was plump, her new calico dress was as pretty as it could be, and her brown skin and browner hair made with her dark eyes a study in brown and pink, as the artists say.
It was two or three days before I had a chance to talk with her. She had changed a good deal, I sensed, as she told me all about her folks. Old Man Fewkes was working in the vegetable garden. Celebrate was running a team. Surajah was working on the machinery. Ma Fewkes was keeping house for the family in a little cottage in the corner of the garden. I went over and had a talk with them. Ma Fewkes, with her shoulder-blades almost touching, assured me that they were in clover.
"I feel sure," said she, "that Celebrate Fourth will soon git something better to do than make a hand in the field. He has idees of makin' all kinds of money, if he could git Mr. Gowdy to lis'en to him. But Surrager Dowler is right where he orto be. He has got a patent corn-planter all worked out, and I guess Mr. Gowdy'll help him make and sell it. Mr. Gowdy is awful good to us--ain't he, Rowena."
Rowena busied herself with her work; and when Mrs. Fewkes repeated her appeal, the girl looked out of the window and paused a long time before she answered.
"Good enough," she finally said. "But I guess he ain't strainin' himself any to make something of us."
There was something strange and covered up in what she said, and in the way she said it. She shot a quick glance at me, and then looked down at her work again.
"Well, Rowena Fewkes!" exclaimed her mother, with her hands thrown up as if in astonishment or protest. "In all my born days, I never expected to hear a child of mine--"
Old Man Fewkes came in just then, and cut into the talk by his surprised exclamation at seeing me there. He had supposed that I had gone out of his ken forever. He had thought that one winter in this climate would be all that a young man like me, free as I was to go and come as I pleased, would stand. As he spoke about my being free, he looked at his wife and sighed, combing his whiskers with his skinny bird's claws, and showing the biggest freckles on the backs of his hands that I think I ever saw. He was still more stooped and frail-looking than when I saw him last; and when I told him I had settled down for life on my farm, I could see that I had lost caste with him. He was pining for the open road.
"Negosha," he said, "is the place for a young man. You can be a baron out there with ten thousan' head of rattle. But the place for me is Texas. Trees is in constant varder!"
"But," said Ma Fewkes, repeating her speech of three years ago, "it's so fur, Fewkes!"
"Fur!" he scornfully shouted, just as he had before. "Fur!" this time letting his voice fall in contempt for the distance, for any one that spoke of the distance, and for things in general in Iowa. "Why, Lord-heavens, womern, it hain't more'n fifteen hundred mile!"
"Fewkes," she retorted, drawing her shoulders back almost as far as she had had them forward a moment before, "I've been drailed around the country, fifteen hundred miles here, and fifteen hundred miles there, with old Tom takin' mad fits every little whip-stitch, about as much as I'm a-going to!"
"I don't," said Rowena, "see why you've got so sot on goin' into your hole here, an' pullin' the hole in after you. You hook up ol' Tom, pa, an' me an' you'll go to Texas. I'll start to-morrow morning, pa!"
"I never seen sich a girl," said her mother; "to talk of movin' when prospects is as good f'r you as they be now!"
"Wal, le's stop jourin' at each other," said Rowena, hastily, as if to change the subject. "It ain't the way to treat company."
I discovered that Rowena was about to change her situation in the Blue-grass Manor establishment. She was going into "the Big House" to work under Mrs. Mobley, the wife of the superintendent, or as we called him, the overseer.
"Well, that'll be nice," said I.
"I don't want to," she said. "I like to wait on table better."
"Then why do you change?" said I.
"Mr. Gowdy--," began Ma Fewkes, but was interrupted by her daughter, who talked on until her mother was switched off from her explanation.
"I wun't work with niggers!" said Rowena. "That Pinck has brought a yellow girl here from Dubuque, and she's goin' to wait on the table as she did in Dubuque. They claim they was married the last time he was back there, an' he brought her here. I wun't work with her. I wun't demean myself into a black slave--. But tell me, Jake," coming over and sitting by me, "how you're gittin' along. Off here we don't hear no news from folks over to the Centre at all. We go to the new railroad, an' never see any one from over there--."
"Exceptin' Magnus," said Ma Fewkes.
"You ain't married, yet, be you?" Rowena asked.
"I should say not! Me married!"
We sat then for quite a while without saying anything. Rowena sat smoothing out a calico apron she had on. Finally she said: "Am I wearin' anything you ever seen before, Jake?"
Looking her over carefully I saw nothing I could remember. I told her so at last, and said she was dressed awful nice now and looked lots better than I had ever seen her looking. My own rags were sorely on my mind just then.
"This apern," said she, spreading it out for me to see, "is the back breadth of that dress you give me back along the road. I'm goin' to keep it always. I hain't goin' to wear it ever only when you come to see me!"
This was getting embarrassing; but her next remarks made it even more so.
"How old be you, Jake?" she asked.
"I'll be twenty," said I, "the twenty-seventh day of next July."
"We're jest of an age," she ventured--and after a long pause, "I should think it would be awful hard work to keep the house and do your work ou'-doors."
I told her that it was, and spread the grief on very thick, thinking all the time of the very precious way in which I hoped sometime to end my loneliness, and give myself a house companion: in the very back of my head even going over the plans I had made for an "upright" to the house, with a bedroom, a spare room, a dining-room and a sitting-room in it.
"Well," said she, "for a smart, nice-lookin' young man, like you, it's your own fault--"