The Desert and The Sown

M >> Mary Hallock Foote >> The Desert and The Sown

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Uncle John remained silent, working at his hands. His mouth, trembled
under his thin straggling beard. "I never was better treated in my life,
and you know it. It ain't handsome of you, Lewis, to talk that way!"

"He don't mean nothing, Uncle John! What makes you so foolish, Looander!
He just wants you to know there's no begrudgers around here. You're
welcome, and more than welcome, to settle down and camp right along with
us."

"Winter and summer!" Leander put in, "if you're satisfied. There's nobody
in a hurry to see the last of ye."

Uncle John's mild but determined resistance was a keen disappointment to
his friends. Leander thought himself offended. "What fly's stung you,
anyhow! Heard from any of your folks lately?"

The old man smiled.

"Got any money salted down that needs turning?"

"Looander! Quit teasing of him!"

"Let him have his fun, ma'am. It's all he's likely to get out of me. I
have got a little money," he pursued. "'T would be an insult to name it in
the same breath with what you've done for me. I'd like to leave it here,
though. You could pass it on. You'll have chances enough. 'T ain't likely
I'll be the last one you'll take in and do for, and never git nothing out
of it in return."

There was a mild sensation, as the speaker, fumbling in his loose trousers,
appeared to be seeking for that money. Aunt Polly's eyes flamed indignation
behind her tears. She was a foolish, warm-hearted creature, and her eyes
watered on the least excuse.

"Looander, you shouldn't have taunted him," she admonished her husband,
who felt he had been a little rough.

"Look here, Uncle John, d'you ever know anybody who wasn't by way of
needing help some time in their lives? We don't ask any one who comes
here"--

"He didn't come!" Aunt Polly corrected.

"Well, who was brought, then! We don't ask for their character, nor their
private history, nor their bank account. I don't know but you're the first
one for years I've ever took a real personal shine to, and we've h'isted a
good many up them stairs that wasn't able to walk much further. I'd like
you to stay as a favor to us, dang it!"

Leander delivered this invitation as if it were a threat. His straight-cut
mustache stiffened and projected itself by the pressure of his big lips;
his dark red throat showed as many obstinate creases as an old
snapping-turtle's.

"I'm much obliged to you both. I want you to remember that. We--I--I'll
talk with ye in the morning."

"That means he's going all the same," said Leander, after Uncle John had
closed the outside door.

Sure enough, next morning he had made up his little pack, oiled his boots,
and by breakfast-time was ready for the road. They argued the point long
and fiercely with him whether he should set out on foot or wait a day and
ride with Leander to the Ferry. It was not supposed he could be thinking
of any other road. By to-morrow, if he would but wait, Aunt Polly would
have comfortably outfitted him after the custom of the house; given his
clothes a final "going over" to see everything taut for the journey,
shoved a week's rations into a corn-sack, choosing such condensed forms of
nourishment as the system allowed--nay, straining a point and smuggling in
a nefarious pound or two of real miner's coffee.

Aunt Polly's distress so weighed with her patient that he consented to
remain overnight and ride with Leander as far as the dam across the
Bruneau, at its junction with the Snake. There he would cross and take the
trail down the river, cutting off several miles of the road to the Ferry.
As for going on to see Jimmy or Jimmy's "folks," the nervous resistance
which this plan excited warned the good couple not to press the old man
too far, or he might give them the slip altogether.

A strangeness in his manner which this last discussion had brought out,
lay heavy on aunt Polly's mind all day after the departure of the team for
the Ferry. She watched the two men drive off in silence, Leander's bush
beard reddening in the sun, his big body filling more than his half of the
seat.

"Well, by Gum! If he ain't the blamedest, most per-sistent old fool!" he
complained to his wife that night. Their first words were of the old man,
already missed like one of the family from the humble place he had made
for himself. Leander was still irritable over his loss. "I set him down
with his grub and blankets, and I watched him footing it acrost the dam.
He done it real handsome, steady on his pins. Then he set down and waited,
kind o' dreaming, like he used to, settin' on the choppin'-block. I hailed
him. 'What's the matter?' I says. 'Left anything?' No: every time I hailed
he took off his hat and waved to me real pleasant. Nothing the matter.
There he set. Well, thinks I, I can't stay here all day watching ye take
root. So I drove on a piece. And, by Gum! when I looked back going around
the bend, there he went a-pikin' off up the bluffs--just a-humping himself
for all he was worth. I wouldn't like to think he was cunning, but it
looked that way for sure,--turning me off the scent and then taking to the
bluffs like he was sent for! Where in thunder is he making for? He knows
just as well as I do--you have heard me tell him a dozen times--the stages
were hauled off that Wood River road five year and more ago. He won't git
nowhere! And he won't meet up with a team in a week's walking."

"His food will last him a week if he's careful; he's no great eater. I
ain't afraid his feet will get lost; he's to home out of doors almost
anywhere;--it's his head I'm afraid of. He's got some sort of a skew on
him. I used to notice if he went out for a little walk anywhere, he'd
always slope for the East."

XX

A STATION IN THE DESERT

That forsworn identity which Adam Bogardus had submitted to be clothed in
as a burial garment was now become a thing for the living to flee from. He
had seen a woman in full health whiten and cower before it;--she who stood
beside his bed and looked at him with dreadful eyes, eyes of his girl-wife
growing old in the likeness of her father. Hard, reluctant eyes forced to
own the truth which the ashen lips denied. Are we responsible for our
silences? He had not spoken to her. Nay, the living must speak first, or
the ghostly dead depart unquestioned. He asked only that he might forget
her and be himself forgotten. If it were that woman's right to call
herself Emily Bogardus, then was there no Adam her husband. Better the old
disguise which left him free to work out his own sentence and pay his
forfeit to the law. He had never desired that one breath of it should be
commuted, or wished to accept an enslaving pardon from those for whose
sake he had put himself out of the way. If he could have taken his own
comparative spiritual measurement, he might have smiled at the humor of
that forgiveness promised him in the name of the Highest by his son.

For many peaceful years solitude had been the habit of his soul. Gently as
he bore with human obligations, he escaped from them with a sense of
relief which shamed him somewhat when he thought of the good friends to
whom he owed this very blessed power to flee. It was quite as Leander had
surmised. He could not command his faculties--memory especially--when a
noise of many words and questions bruised his brain.

The stillness of the desert closed about him with delicious healing. He
was a world-weary child returned to the womb of Nature. His old camp-craft
came back; his eye for distance, his sense of the trail, his little pet
economies with food and fire. There was no one to tell him what to eat and
when to eat it. He was invisible to men. Each day's march built up his
muscle, and every night's deep sleep under the great high stars steadied
his nerves and tightened his resolve.

He thought of the young man--his son--with a mixture of pain and
tenderness. But Paul was not the baby-boy he had put out of his arms
with a father's smile at One Man station. Paul was himself a man now; he
had coerced him at the last, neither did he understand.

The blind instinct of flight began after a while to shape its own
direction. It was no new leaning with the packer. As many times as he
had crossed this trail he never had failed to experience the same pull.
He resisted no longer. He gave way to strange fancies and made them his
guides.

At some time during his flight from the hospital, in one of those blanks
that overtook him, he knew not how, he had met with a great loss. The
words had slipped from his memory--of that message which had kept him in
fancied touch with his wife all these many deluding years. Without them he
was like a drunkard deprived of his habitual stimulant. The craving to
connect and hold them--for they came to him sometimes in tantalizing
freaks of memory, and slipped away again like beads rolling off a broken
thread--was almost the only form of mental suffering he was now conscious
of. What had become of the message itself? Had they left it exposed to
every heartless desecration in that abandoned spot?--a scrap of paper
driven like a bit of tumble-weed before the wind, snatched at by spikes of
sage, trampled into the mire of cattle, nuzzled by wild beasts? Or, had
they put it away with that other beast where he lay with the scoff on his
dead face? Out of dreams and visions of the night that place of the
parting ways called to him, and the time was now come when he must go.

He approached it by one of those desert trails that circle for miles on
the track of water and pounce as a bird drops upon its prey into the
trampled hollow at One Man station--a place for the gathering of hoofs in
the midst of the plain.

He could trace what might have been the foundation of a house, a few
blackened stones, a hearthstone showing where a chimney perhaps had stood,
but these evidences of habitation would never have been marked except by
one who knew where to look. He searched the ground over for signs of the
tragedy that bound him to that spot--a smiling desolation, a sunny
nothingness. The effect of this careless obliteration was quieting. Nature
had played here once with two men and a woman. One of the toy men was
lost, the other broken. She had forgotten where she put the broken one.
There were mounds which looked like graves, but the seeker knew that
artificial mounds in a place like this soon sink into hollows; and there
were hollows like open graves, filled with unsightly human rubbish, washed
in by the yearly rains.

He spent three days in the hollow, doing nothing, steeped in sunshine,
lying down to rest broad awake in the tender twilight, making his peace
with this place of bitter memory before bidding it good-by. His thoughts
turned eastward as the planets rose. Time he was working back towards
home. He would hardly get there if he started now, before his day was
done. He saw his mother's grave beside his father's, in the southeast
corner of the burying-ground, where the trees were thin. All who drove in
through the big gate of funerals could see the tall white shafts of the
Beviers and Brodericks and Van Eltens, but only those who came on foot
could approach his people in the gravelly side-hill plots. "I'd like to be
put there alongside the old folks in that warm south corner." He could see
their names on the plain gray slate stones, rain-stained and green with
moss.

On the third May evening of his stay the horizon became a dust-cloud, the
setting sun a ball of fire. Loomed the figure of a rider topping the
heaving backs of his herd. All together they came lumbering down the
slopes, all heading fiercely for the water. The rider plunged down a
side-draw out of the main cloud. Clanking bells, shuffling hoofs, the
"Whoop-ee-youp!" came fainter up the gulch. The cowboy was not pleased as
he dashed by to see an earlier camp-fire smoking in the hollow. But he was
less displeased, being half French, than if he had been pure-bred
American.

The old man, squatting by his cooking-fire, gave him a civil nod, and he
responded with a flourish of his quirt. The reek of sage smoke, the smell
of dust and cattle rose rank on the cooling air. It was good to Boniface,
son of the desert; it meant supper and bed, or supper and talk, for
"Bonny" Maupin ("Bonny Moppin," it went in the vernacular) would talk
every other man to sleep, full or empty, with songs thrown in. To-night,
however, he must talk on an empty stomach, for his chuck wagon was not in
sight.

"W'ich way you travelin'?" he began, lighting up after a long pull at his
flask. The old man had declined, though he looked as if he needed a drink.

"East about," was the answer.

"Goin' far?"

"Well; summer's before us. I cal'late to keep moving till snow falls."

"Shucks! You ain' pressed for time. Maybe you got some friend back there.
Goin' back to git married?" He winked genially to point the jest and the
old man smiled indulgently.

"Won't you set up and take a bite with me? You don't look to have much of
a show for supper along."

"Thanks, very much! I had bully breakfast at Rock Spring middlin' late
this morning. They butcherin' at that place. Five fat hog. My chuck wagon
he stay behin' for chunk of fresh pig. I won' spoil my appetide for that
tenderloin. Hol' on yourself an' take supper wis me. No?--That fellah be
'long 'bout Chris'mas if he don' git los'! He always behin', pig or no
pig!"

Bonny strolled away collecting fire-wood. Presently he called back,
pointing dramatically with his small-toed boot. "Who's been coyotin' round
here?" The hard ground was freshly disturbed in spots as by the paws of
some small inquisitive animal. There was no answer.

"What you say? Whose surface diggin's is these? I never know anybody do
some mining here."

"That was me"--Bonny backed a little nearer to catch the old man's words.
"I was looking round here for something I lost."

"What luck you have? You fin' him?"

"Well, now, doos it reely matter to you, sonny?"

"Pardner, it don' matter to me a d--n, if you say so! I was jus' askin'
myself what a man _would_ look for if he los' it here. Since I strike this
'ell of a place the very groun' been chewed up and spit out reg'lar, one
hundred times a year. 'T'is a gris' mill!"

"I didn't gretly expect to find what I was lookin' for. I was just foolin'
around to satisfy myself."

"That satisfy me!" said Bonny pleasantly; and yet he was a trifle
discomfited. He strolled away again and began to sing with a boyish show
of indifference to having been called "sonny."

"Oh, Sally is the gal for me!
Oh, Sally's the gal for me!
On moonlight night when the star is bright--
Oh"--

"Halloa! This some more your work, oncle? You ain' got no chicken wing for
arm if you lif' this.--Ah, be dam! I see what you lif' him with. All same
stove-lid." Talking and swearing to himself cheerfully, Bonny applied the
end of a broken whiffletree to the blunt lip of the old hearthstone which
marked the stage-house chimney. He had tried a step-dance on it and found
it hollow. More fresh digging, and marks upon the stone where some prying
tool had taken hold and slipped, showed he was not the first who had been
curious.

"There you go, over on you' back, like snap' turtle; I see where you lay
there before. What the dev'! I say!" Bonny, much excited with his find,
extracted a rusty tin tobacco-box from the hole, pried open the spring lid
and drew forth its contents: a discolored canvas bag bulging with coin and
whipped around the neck with a leather whang. The canvas was rotten; Bonny
supported its contents tenderly as he brought it over to the old man.

"Oncle, I ask you' pardon for tappin' that safe. Pretty good lil'
nest-egg, eh? But now you got to find her some other place."

"That don't belong to me," said the old man indifferently.

"Aw--don't be bashful! I onderstan' now what you los'. You dig
here--there--migs up the scent. I just happen to step on that stone--ring
him, so, with my boot-heel!"

"That ain't my pile," the other persisted. "I started to build a fire on
that stone two nights ago. It rung hollow like you say. I looked and found
what you found."

--"And put her back! My soul to God! An' you here all by you'self!"

"Why not? The stuff ain't mine."

"Who _is_ she? How long since anybody live here?"

"I don't know,--good while, I guess."

"Well, sar! Look here! I open that bag. I count two hondre' thirteen
dolla'--make it twelve for luck, an' call it you' divvee! You strike her
first. What you say: we go snac'?"

"I haven't got any use for that money. You needn't talk to me about it."

"Got no h'use!--are you a reech man? Got you' private car waitin' for you
out in d' sagebrush? Sol' a mine lately?"

"I don't know why it strikes you so funny. It's no concern of mine if a
man puts his money in the ground and goes off and leaves it."

"Goes off and die! There was one man live here by himself--he die, they
say, 'with his boots on.' He, I think, mus' be that man belong to this
money. What an old stiff want with two hondre' thirteen dolla'? That money
goin' into a live man's clothes." Bonny slapped his chappereros, and the
dust flew.

"I've no objection to its going into _your_ clothes," said the old man.

"You thing I ain' particular, me? Well, eef the party underground was my
frien', and I knew his fam'ly, and was sure the money was belong to
him--I'd do differend--perhaps. Mais,--it is going--going--gone! You won'
go snac'?"

The old man smiled and looked steadily away.

"Blas' me to h--l! but you aire the firs' man ever I strike that jib at
the sight of col' coin. She don' frighten me!"

Bonny always swore when he felt embarrassed.

"Well, sar! Look here! You fin' you'self so blame indifferend--s'pose you
_so_ indifferend not to say nothing 'bout this, when my swamper fellah git
in. I don' wish to go snac' wis him. I don' feel oblige'. See?"

"What you want to pester me about this money for!" The old man was weary.
"I didn't come here, lookin' for money, and I don't expect to take none
away with me. So I'll say good-night to ye."

"Hol' on, hol' on! Don' git mad. What time you goin' off in the morning?"

"Before you do, I shouldn't wonder."

"But hol'! One fine idea--blazin' good idea--just hit me now in the head!
Wan' to come on to Chicago wis me? I drop this fellah at Felton. He take
the team back, and I get some one to help me on the treep. Why not you?
Ever tek' care of stock?"

"Some consid'able years ago I used to look after stock. Guess I'd know an
ox from a heifer."

"Ever handle 'em on cattle-car?"

"Never."

"Well, all there is, you feed 'em, and water 'em, and keep 'em on their
feets. If one fall down, all the others they have too much play. They
rock"--Bonny exhibited--"and fall over and pile up in heap. I like to do
one turn for you. We goin' the same way--you bring me the good luck, like
a bird in the han'. This is my clean-up, you understand. You bring me the
beautiful luck. You turn me up right bower first slap. Now it's goin' be
my deal. I like to do by you!"

The packer turned over and looked up at the cool sky, pricked through with
early stars. He was silent a long time. His pale old face was like a fine
bit of carving in the dusk.

"What you think?" asked Moppin, almost tenderly. "I thing you better come
wis me. You too hold a man to go like so--alone."

"I'll have to think about it first;--let you know in the morning."

XXI

INJURIOUS REPORTS CONCERNING AN OLD HOUSE

A Rush of wheels and a spatter of hoofs coming up the drive sent Mrs.
Dunlop to the sitting-room window. She tried to see out through streaming
showers that darkened the panes.

"Isn't that Mrs. Bogardus? Why, it is! Put on your shoes, Chauncey, quick!
Help her in 'n' take her horse to the shed. Take an umbrella with you."
Chauncey the younger, meekly drying his shoes by the kitchen fire, put
them on, not stopping to lace them, and slumped down the porch steps,
pursued by his mother's orders. She watched him a moment struggling with a
cranky umbrella, and then turned her attention to herself and the room.

Mrs. Bogardus made her calls in the morning, and always plainly on
business. She had not seen the inside of Cerissa's parlor for ten years.
This was a grievance which Cerissa referred to spasmodically, being seized
with it when she was otherwise low in her mind.

"My sakes! Can't I remember my mother telling how _her_ mother used to
drive over and spend the afternoon, and bring her sewing and the
baby--whichever one was the baby. They called each other Chrissy and
Angevine, and now she don't even speak of her own children to us by their
first names. It's 'Mrs. Bowen' and 'Mr. Paul;' just as if she was talking
to her servants."

"What's that to us? We've got a good home here for as long as we want to
stay. She's easy to work for, if you do what she says."

Chauncey respected Mrs. Bogardus's judgment and her straightforward
business habits. Other matters he left alone. But Cerissa was ambitious
and emotional, and she stayed indoors, doing little things and thinking
small thoughts. She resented her commanding neighbor's casual manners.
There was something puzzling and difficult to meet in her plainness of
speech, which excluded the personal relation. It was like the cut and
finish of her clothes--mysterious in their simplicity, and not to be
imitated cheaply.

When the two met, Cerissa was immediately reduced to a state of flimsy
apology which she made up for by being particularly hot and self-assertive
in speaking of the lady afterward.

"There is the parlor, in perfect order," she fretted, as she stood waiting
to open the front door; "but of course she wouldn't let me take her in
there--that would be too much like visiting."

The next moment she had corrected her facial expression, and was offering
smiling condolences to Mrs. Bogardus on the state of her attire.

"It is only my jacket. You might put that somewhere to dry," said the lady
curtly. Raindrops sparkled on the wave of thick iron-gray hair that lifted
itself, with a slight turn to one side, from her square low brow. Her eyes
shone dark against the fresh wind color in her cheeks. She had the
straight, hard, ophidian line concealing the eyelid, which gives such a
peculiar strength to the direct gaze of a pair of dark eyes. If one
suspects the least touch of tenderness, possibly of pain, behind that iron
fold, it lends a fascination equal to the strength. There was some
excitement in Mrs. Bogardus's manner, but Cerissa did not know her well
enough to perceive it. She merely thought her looking handsomer, and, if
possible, more formidable than usual.

She sat by the fire, folding her skirts across her knees, and showing the
edges of the most discouragingly beautiful petticoats,--a taste perhaps
inherited from her wide-hipped Dutch progenitresses. Mrs. Bogardus reveled
in costly petticoats, and had an unnecessary number of them.

"How nice it is in here!" she said, looking about her. Cerissa, with the
usual apologies, had taken her into the kitchen to dry her skirts. There
was a slight taint of steaming shoe leather, left by Chauncey when driven
forth. Otherwise the kitchen was perfection,--the family room of an old
Dutch farmhouse, built when stone and hardwood lumber were cheap,--thick
walls; deep, low window-seats; beams showing on the ceiling; a modern
cooking-stove, where Emily Bogardus could remember the wrought brass
andirons and iron backlog, for this room had been her father's
dining-room. The brick tiled hearth remained, and the color of those
century and a half old bricks made a pitiful thing of Cerissa's new
oil-cloth. The woodwork had been painted--by Mrs. Bogardus's orders, and
much to Cerissa's disgust--a dark kitchen green,--not that she liked the
color herself, but it was the artistic demand of the moment,--and the
place was filled with a green golden light from the cherry-trees close to
the window, which a break in the clouds had suddenly illumined.

"You keep it beautifully," said Mrs. Bogardus, her eyes shedding
compliments as she looked around. "I should not dare go in my own kitchen
at this time of day. There are no women nowadays who know how to work in
the way ladies used to work. If I could have such a housekeeper as you,
Cerissa."

Cerissa flushed and bridled. "What would Chauncey do!"

"I don't expect you to be my housekeeper," Mrs. Bogardus smiled. "But I
envy Chauncey."

"She has come to ask a favor," thought Cerissa. "I never knew her so
pleasant, for nothing. She wants me to do up her fruit, I guess." Cerissa
was mistaken. Mrs. Bogardus simply was happy--or almost happy--and deeply
stirred over a piece of news which had come to her in that morning's mail.

"I have telephoned Bradley not to send his men over on Monday. My son is
bringing his wife home. They may be here all summer. The place belongs to
them now. Did Chauncey tell you? Mr. Paul writes that he has some building
plans of his own, and he wishes everything left as it is for the present,
especially this house. He wants his wife to see it first just as it is."

"Well, to be sure! They've been traveling a long time, haven't they? And
how is his health now?"

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