IN HUSKING-TIME.
BY ELIA W. PEATTIE.Originally published in Harper's Weekly on October 15, 1892: 993-994, 999
DICK MERLIN could husk eighty bushels of corn in a day. And he was looking forward to the time when he would be able to husk eighty-five, which would give him the championship of Nebraska, where every one, almost, knows how to husk corn. For Nebraska is built of corn. Her cities prosper because of it. In summer her fields rustle with it from boundary to boundary, and in winter the snow falls on the dripping and faded bundles of stalks which stand among the stubble. Dick Merlin had been brought up among the corn. He played with the cobs when he was a baby, beside the hot cob fire; he ate the meal and the bread, and the sweet-corn from the ear—and little else, if the truth is told, excepting salt pork, which he detested. And now it gave him his living. Not that he was a farmer. He was only a "hand." He might have had his farm as well as the rest. But he was too clever.
"I'll not sell myself to an eight-per-cent. man," he declared. "I know when I'm well off. No interest for me, thank you. I prefer to work for the good of Dick Merlin, not for the good of the money—lender."
But he wasn't given to talking much, and he never harangued. Only once or twice, when his close friends tried to prove that it was a shame for a man of his abilities to be hiring out to farmers no older than himself as if he were a common laborer, he made that answer.
It is somehow difficult for a man who has assumed the responsibilities of a mortgage and a corn crop to feel any respect for a man less hampered. Dick got better wages than any other man in the county, for the simple reason that he did more work. He was in great demand. And the women, who play a very important part in the business of husking—time, also liked him. He did not eat as did the other men at table, with such disregard for the labors of the cuisine. Sometimes he remembered to praise a dish. And he ate no more than he wanted. At harvest–time and in the husking season some men give themselves up to gluttony which is little less than a debauch. The women talk this over among themselves, be sure, when they are alone together in the afternoon. But Dick was different. They all agreed that he was. And some of them hazarded guesses as to how much he had laid up in the bank. It seemed wonderful to these women, who faced an absorbing indebtedness, to think that one of their number had an account at the bank.
"If Dick Merlin was to get married," Kate McGovern said, as she washed the dishes after the noonday meal, "he would think nothing of taking his wife to Omaha for a month or two. He went there himself last year, and he told Ed, my brother, that he went to the theatre every night."
No one replied. They were all very much impressed. And after the dishes were all washed, and the biscuits set for supper, the three girls who had come over to help Mrs. Catlin went to the barn door to watch the men work. There were fifteen men there, for the Catlins had an enormous crop this year, but the girls all looked at Dick Merlin. He sat with his shaggy hair falling over his eyes, his brown big arms bared to the elbow, and every sense concentrated on his work, while near him steadily rose the pyramid of red and yellow corn.
The man who shells fifty bushels of corn a day must deny himself pause or speech; he must recklessly toss from him the unaimed ears, and drop the husks with perfect disregard. To shell eighty bushels of corn requires not only a silence of the lips, but a terrible intensity of the mind. Fatigue must be triumphed over. The hands must be kept at their task by a compelling will. One may not see, hear, smell, anything but corn. In fact, no perfectly healthy or happy man can work like that. It requires the mad speed of one who is devil-driven.
"You're wearing yourself out for nothing," Kate McGovern called to Dick. "Don't make a goose of yourself. There's no use in working like that just for the sake of saying that you can shell more corn than anybody else. You'll get old before you've cut your wisdom-teeth."
Dick smiled, but without pausing. "I'm not overdoing, I guess," he said. But though the girls lured him with further remarks, he would not speak again, and they turned away at last discouraged.
Faster and more furious flew the ears from Dick's nervous hand. Now and then his lips moved as the lips of a man do who dreams in his sleep.
The truth is, Dick was having it out with himself. That is to say, he was trying to obliterate a vision. He was trying to bury a memory under that enormous pyramid of corn. Yet, let the corn fly from his impelling hand as it would, let eyes, energy, mind, every sense, strive to concentrate themselves on his task, still before his burning eyes would come over and over again the same picture—a desolate stretch of the sand-hill country, with its little blue ponds in the midst of the wind-beaten dunes, and a hut in the valley among the bunch-grass. This hut, standing in the very draught of the "draw," seemed to be the target for all the winds that blew from the west. Its siding gaped like the seams of a rotting boat high-pitched on the beach. The rain had left a streak of rust below each nail, and the weather had roughened the unpainted fibre of the wood, and the scant glass in the window-sashes was pieced out with shingles. Dick could even see the sag of the door, with the wooden latch and leather hinges. The interior was dim enough with smoke of bad tobacco and of griddle-cakes to have become a most a most indistinct memory. Yet of all the rooms in the world it was the one in which Dick was forced to live in spirit, no matter where his body might be.
"It's easy enough," he muttered to himself, wrenching the crisp covering from the brilliant ears, "to send our legs where we please. But to get a mind to do as you like, that's quite another matter. It's like rounding up the cattle on the range, only there never was a steer as wild as my mind."
Then, too, there were voices which he could not shut out of his ears.
"I'm not like the girls you know back East," one voice said. It had a timid way of speaking. Dick almost thought now, as he heard it here from the phonograph of his memory, that it had tears in it. "Remember, I've never been any further than the next town, Dick. Don't be thinking too bad of my ways. I've studied some. We had a good teacher once. He said I was a natural scholar. And he sent me books, which I read. Indeed, there is nothing else to do but to read them. Why, I do not know a girl of my own age. So few of the people around here have ever had children. Most of the men are not even married. They keep their stock here part of the year and 'bach' it. Then they go to Salt Lake or to Denver or to Omaha for a while; and do no good, I guess, from the way they look when they come home. I will not speak to them. When they come here I go up the ladder to my room. It is quiet there, and there is not so much smoke. I hate smoke. Mother is always cooking things in grease, and father is smoking. I have never had a worsted dress. Think of that, Dick. There's a girl in one of the books that teacher sent me who dressed all in faded silk. And, Dick, once a lover came and got her new dresses and took her to see the Queen. Oh, but I wouldn't mind faded silk. Not at all. That might be beautiful. But these prints always fade the first time they wash, and we never have starch to put in them. Say, Dick! If I was dressed like the girls you know East, would I look as well as they do? Am I bad to look at? And, Dick, if I had a looking-glass, maybe I could do up my hair better. I might cut a lot of it off in the front, and curl it over a slate-pencil."
Dick remembered how they were plodding through the sand together as they talked. The wind came nippingly down the draw and tossed her yellow straight hair about her face. Her rough shoes made her walk lumberingly, and her scant ill-made dress clung about her form in grace-less folds. If it were only possible to forget what he said then!
"You are beautiful!" he cried; "and I would rather be with you than any girl I ever saw. Why, you can't imagine what nonsense they talk! And you talk so beautifully! And they have talked English all their lives, while it is only such a little time since you learned it. As for the looking-glass, I would rather you did not have it. Now there is no one but me to tell you how nice you look; and I never want any one else to tell you as long as you live. Do you hear, Marie? You must never let any other man tell you what I have told you just now. It wouldn't be right."
The girl stopped, and looked at him seriously, her blue eyes resting in perfect trust on his face.
"Wouldn't it?" she said. "Then I never will as long as I live! You may feel sure about that. But I think I ought to tell you something. That school-teacher, you know, when he went away, he—well, he kissed me good-by-just once-and not on the lips. And he said something—but not like what you have been saying."
"What did he say, Marie? Look me in the face and tell me."
"Oh, I am always looking you in the face. I like to. You have a pleasant face. It is different from any other I know. Father and mother—but you know what they are like. They are never happy; at least they do not smile; sometimes they laugh. But happy people smile. It is different when you laugh. You may do that because some one else is having a bad time. Father laughs when the men lose their cattle. And the teacher—his face was different from yours. He walked with his head down, and he was taller than you, but not with big shoulders like yours. He was happy in a way, but not as you are. Why, even your ears laugh. It is possible to have a very nice time with you—"
"Marie, what did he say to you?"
"Who? Oh, Mr. Eckhardt? He said, 'I do not know why God has placed you here in such a place; but I try to think it is for some good reason, and that you are to find your work here.' And then he kissed me. That's all. Mother was there, only she doesn't understand English well enough to know what he was saying. I used to hate English; I never learned it till Mr. Eckhardt came. That is to say, I never spoke it. But as he taught it, it was different from that I had always heard. It was beautiful; I was glad to learn it. And now I can talk it to you. That is so nice. What if you had come, and I had loved you, and never been able to tell you of it?"
Dick turned red now as he remembered his reply.
"You would not need to speak," he had said, "to let me know that you loved me."
They had been amazingly happy together. Dick had to admit that even now, when there were such terrible reasons for being ashamed of it all. Not that she was to blame. But he had been so weak, so—
It happened this way. For years that part of the country where Marie Hultz lived had been annoyed by some adroit "cattle-rustler." Let the herds be as well guarded as they might be, they could not be protected against the depredations of this successful thief. Up in the sand-hill country a murderer may be held in some esteem. That is to say, there is no strong objection to a man's taking the law into his own hands. If an injustice is done one, it is considered rather more honorable to settle the difficulty one's self than to pusillanimously take the matter to the courts. Such methods are thought well enough for city men, or for clerks, but they are at best effeminate. But while this leniency is shown toward the murderer, no quarter is given to the cattle-thief. For him there is a rope in waiting.
It happened that Dick met one of the worst of the sufferers from the mysterious exploits of the rustler down in Nebraska City. Dick was out of a job. The man was willing to pay anything for his fill of revenge. He sent Dick up to get at the meat of the nut if he could. Dick liked the idea well enough. No Nebraska man has any compunction about hunting down a cattle-thief. Besides, he had never been up in the sand-hill country, and he wanted to see it. He had an idea he might go into the cattle business himself. For in this arid region nothing can be grown, or almost nothing; but in the hollows between the sandy hillocks there is a coarse grass on which cattle thrive surprisingly well. And over this far-reaching expanse, many miles apart, are scattered the farms of men who are perhaps, of all farmers in the West, the most abject. They are surrounded by a desert; they have no enjoyments whatever; there is little companionship existing among them; they have no ambitions; comparatively few of them have families. They maintain life by means not distinctly perceptible to the ordinary man, and their reason for desiring to continue to exist must be inexplicable even to those who know them best. Only, it is a fact that the meanest worm will feign death to escape that which he feigns. Perhaps it is not surprising that a man's instinct for life should be at least as strong as that of a grub.
Dick spent three months up there. He made friends with every one. He pretended to be a buyer for a farmer in the eastern part of the State, who made a business of fattening the cattle before they were driven into the great yards at South Omaha. He managed to get a reputation for being a hard drinker, though, as a matter of fact, he drank next to nothing, and, in common with many other men of his walk, was a prohibitionist in theory. But this reputation explained every inconsistency in his conduct. It even explained his sleeping in the day and disappearing at night. So it came about, after some patience, that Dick tracked the fox to his hole. In other words, he found that the seemingly poor, stolid, easy-going Peter Hultz, who appeared to have no thought beyond his pipe and his keg of beer, was in reality one of the most energetic, daring, and indefatigable cattle-thieves in the country.
And he was the one of all others who had never been suspected. He had apparently an inveterate laziness. His little blue eyes were lost in the flesh of his cheeks. His great legs moved slowly. He drawled when he spoke, and he never spoke in English. His cattle were few in number and poorly attended to. Such care as they received was given them by his daughter Marie. Dick, watching this man drowsing over his fire, smoking, and growling in marital complacency at his wife, could hardly believe that this was the man he had seen ride out of the darkness into the very midst of the cattle, lash up a few of them, and hurry them off, his gigantic form alert with ferocity, his eyes gleaming dangerously, the pistol in his belt ready for action. He had many confederates, that was evident. And they were men of ability. It was more than suspected that some of them were connected with the railroad, and managed to secure transportation for the cattle immediately. At any rate, it was a well-known fact that no cattle taken away from that part of the country had ever been recovered.
Dick did not feel that there was any particular hurry about bringing matters to a focus. He argued that it would be better to wait and catch the rest of the gang. And he got down near the Hultz place in a shack with an unmarried man who had a place of his own. An hour's walking would bring him to the Hultzes'. And when he found there was a girl in the house, he congratulated himself on having a reasonable excuse for visiting there often. Dick had seen a girl around there. But he had never particularly noticed her. He did not have a scruple about going up to "keep company" with her. For one thing, a young man's attentions to a young woman are not necessarily taken seriously out in the West. And besides, it was not likely that the daughter of a cattle-rustler would be injured in any way by spending a few evenings and afternoons with a young man whose only attitude toward her was one of indifference.
Dick had seen the mother. A hideous old woman she was. Not so old in years, perhaps; but the life on a Nebraska range in the sand-hill country will make a hag of a woman of thirty-five. She bore as much superfluous thinness as her husband did superfluous flesh, and her ratty eyes had a look in them suggestive of madness. Beneath were rings so black and deep that they almost divided the cheek. Her discolored teeth were half gone; her lean brown arms, with the sinews standing out, in them, were always bared to the elbow. She worked constantly about the shack, yet seemed never to reach any point of order or cleanliness. Her task was like the fabled ones given long ago to the half-gods. The labor was incessant, and there were no results.
In the grime, the smoke, the odors, of this place, Dick made himself at home. The first evening he came he saw, over in one corner, reading by the light of the sputtering coal-oil lamp, the girl whom he had come to see. He had been talking in indifferent German to Peter Hultz, who watched him narrowly all the time, smoking as he watched. When Dick made sure that the girl was not likely to join them around the stove, he walked over to where she sat in her chilly corner.
"Do you also speak no English?" he said to her in German.
She looked up from her book and smiled—an innocent smile, such as any one might give who had received an unexpected kindness—not at all the sort of smile one would expect from a cattle-rustler's daughter. "I speak English better than I do German," she responded; "and the reason of it is that I learned German from those who were no scholars, while my English was learned from one who spoke the tongue well. Only those who talk much in English tell me that I do not speak it as the folk do about this part of the country. And there are many words they speak which I do not know the meaning of."
"And you read in English?" Dick sat down by her.
"I have only six books. They were given me. They are in English. If ever I go down into the corn country to help at harvest-time and earn money for myself, I shall get more books."
"I thought girls liked ribbons better than books," said Dick, in a flattering tone, thinking he was getting on famously. "If I was as pretty as you are, I would want to get ribbons."
"Would you?" said the girl. Then she went on reading. Dick fidgeted. He was embarrassed. He took a more careful look at the girl. Her hands were clean; that in itself was a surprise. And there was a fold of white cotton cloth basted in the neck of her faded calico. Her hair was braided. Dick felt somehow, without being able to define it, that this girl had know some person other than those who surrounded her. She had received her bit of inspiration. Merlin did not try to put his impression into words. It was merely an emotion. But he knew the girl before him was not without self-respect, or at least not without self-consciousness.
"She may be the best working member of the whole gang," he said to himself. "Ten to one she's in the business somehow;" and he resumed his conversation. Old Peter nodded, or seemed to nod, over his pipe, his fat loathsome legs stretched out before him. The mother worked on in her wild way, talking to herself as she did it. No one seemed to be paying any attention to Dick and the girl. Yet the young man was conscious of a feeling every minute that any suspicious action on his part or any indiscreet word might cost him his life; for he knew what that swinish face by the fire was like when it was aroused.
A few nights after that Dick got the girl to go for a walk. It was a quiet evening, the sun looking near and familiar in the west, the sky quivering with arms of light that darted from the disappearing great disk as the electric light of the borealis does from its mystical focus. The wind was whispering audibly, and on it was that indescribable perfume which belongs to the plains as distinctly as the salt does to the ocean, but for which there is no descriptive word. It is an invigorating perfume, and the nostrils open eagerly to receive it, and it fills the mind with a sense of vastness almost unbearable, yet very dear. For the might of the plains is as great as the might of the sea. And he who has known either one or the other can never be content amid surroundings less majestic.
Dick had never given himself leisure to think of any of this, though he had felt it, as every plainsman must. But now, with the eyes of the girl turning from the wide-reaching west to him, full of strange passion, he had something the feeling that a young bison must have when, with exultant bellow, it puts its head low and rushes forward in the delicious madness of mere youth and strength over the solitary prairies.
"The world seems larger sometimes than it does others," he said, vaguely struggling against the new power that was making turbulence in his soul.
"It is large," Marie responded, tensely, with the little German accent unusually distinct. "And the sky is large. And the wind is large at night when it blows. But also I—you—are large. We do not feel any weaker than the wind or the sky. A bird, he is part of the sky when he is in it. And it makes him very happy. It makes him sing. And when we are in the wind, we are part of that."
Dick said nothing. None of the girls he had known "back East," as his companion called the eastern part of the State, had ever talked like that. He could feel in his heart, but he could not quite understand in his mind, what she meant.
"I can sing also. Did you never hear me sing?" she went on. "And I know some songs which were taught me by a good friend. And my mother, she used to sing, and I learned from her some songs. Some are of love. And others are to sing little babies to sleep with. Mother never sings now."
"She doesn't seem very happy," Dick ventured. "Isn't your father's business good? Have you had hard times?"
Marie looked up at him with a puzzled expression.
"I do not know," she said, slowly. "But if it had been good, do you think that would have made us happy? Are you happy?"
"Why, yes. I guess so. I never thought about it. I have a pretty good time."
"Do you? Perhaps it's because you live in another part of the country. Here no one is happy. Mother says sometimes, if she had flowers maybe she could stand it better. One day father was going away to Nebraska City on business. And mother asked him if he would bring her a flower. And he forgot it. Mother tells me men always forget all they are asked to get. And mother went out back of the house and sat down on the banking and cried when she found he had come without it. That was a funny time. I kissed her. She was surprised. Since I got big I have never kissed her. Days and days we do not like each other very much. She talks all the time to herself, and her eyes frighten me. But this funny day when I kissed her she said: 'Where I lived when I was a maiden we had flowers all summer, and vines. We ate in a little house covered with vines. And my father, after supper, took his knife each night and went out to trim them. And all of us children followed. And in the winter there were pines with hoar-frost. And here, Marie, there is nothing but sand, sand, sand!' I was astonished. I thought mother cared for nothing but to cook little cakes in grease. And that funny night, after she had cried some more, she took me by the hand, and without saying anything, showed me a little strange place back of the shed, where there is a bush that in summer has berries on it, and under this often I had noticed a little raised place covered with hard black dirt, and she said: 'That is a little baby that died before you were born. And I wish we were all there.'"
Dick and the girl walked on in silence. Dick had never imagined such possibilities of suffering as opened up before him. Neither before had he ever felt so like talking to any girl. They wandered on together down the road, and the red disk dropped, and the light faded out of the eastern sky, and a pallid moon became visible up above, and the wind rose and flirted scurries of sand over the tops of the dunes, and still they walked. There was a host of stars out when they parted at the door.
"Good-night," Marie had said. "This has been a different day from most days." And she held out her hand.
It happened to be Dick's fateful moment. Such moments came to every man and woman. It is never possible to presage their arrival. And the more unexpected they are, the more beautiful they seem, and the more memorable. Dick found his soul suddenly in shackles. He was as surprised as the fugitive who, secure in the belief of his unrecognized identity, finds the iron cuffs on his wrists. He stood gazing into the eyes of the girl before him. In those eyes the soft sky, the powerful westerly wind, the immeasurable silence, the unbroken spaces of the plains, had left their eloquence.
"My God!" Dick groaned. He made an effort to wrench himself away, but the girl's exultant and womanly happiness held him fast. He struggled mentally and physically to free himself, and—he sank, rather than leaned forward, and laid his lips on the lips of Marie.
"Do you love me?" he whispered. "I love you." He looked at her sternly. "I wish to God it was not so. But I love you." He said it as if he were admitting a terrible and irrevocable fact, and walked off down the road.
After that he was continually there. He no longer looked for the confederates of Peter Hultz. Certain facts were thrust upon him, but he tried not to understand their significance. One day he got a letter from the man who had sent him there, and he realized that it was a question of business faithfulness that confronted him. He wasn't much given to mental perplexities. Philosophy or moral responsibilities had never been taken into his cognizance. He had the morality of a healthy man. Nothing more. And now he saw without any struggle whatever that it was less culpable to break his word with the man in whose employ he was than to give up to certain death the father of the woman he loved. So he went down to see this man, and he told him that he had nothing to report, and so, refusing to take any money for the time he had spent, he went back to "the East," as Marie called it. When he had left her he expected to immediately return; but, once away, he took to himself the right to be alone for a while, and to think the matter over.
There is no prouder man on earth than your American farmer. His code may be a little peculiar from the point of view of the city man. He does not, in fact, think so much about "honor" as that quality is recognized by men of polite habits. But for an honest fellow to be obliged to realize the fact that he is certainly in love with the daughter of a "cattle-rustler" is a terrible position.
Dick went to work. He worked early and late. And he turned over and over in his mind this same question. He had reached an age when he realized the seriousness of life. And he thought far enough to ask himself if it "would pay," as he put it, to marry Marie, merely to satisfy this clamoring passion of his, and give to his children a mother whose antecedents were shameful. He asked himself again and again if he would not have to pay too high a price for his happiness.
The summer had come and gone while he waited, harvest was over, and the farmers had got to husking-time, with bad prices for a prospect, and a car famine in the bargain.
Dick, on his way through town to keep his engagement at the Catlin ranch, had got a morning paper. And in it he read the apprehension of the cattle-rustler Pete Hultz, of Chase County, and six of his confederates. They were in jail, and there was talk of lynching. The only thing, the dispatch apologetically said, that restrained the mob was the presence in the jail of two women, the wife and daughter of old Peter Hultz, the chief of the raiders. And that was why Dick succeeded that day in husking eighty bushels of corn. But after it was over he went to his room and threw himself on the bed. He would eat no supper, which made even the men commiserate him. Kate McGovern, tired as she was, brought up some toast and tea. She lingered a little after he had refused it, and put her hand on his head.
"Don't, please, Kate," he said, gently. "I don't want any one to think me a good fellow to-night."
"What have you been doing, Dick?" she whispered, apprehensively. "Can I help you out of any scrape? You 'ain't done anything to be ashamed of, I do hope." Dick stared at her in perplexity.
"I'm blest if I know," he said at length.
That night the fellow who slept with Dick felt him creep-ing out of bed. But he was too dead with sleep to bring an inquiry to his lips, and he did not know until he was called in the morning that Dick had not returned. A little after breakfast a young man came down from town.
"Dick Merlin sent me out," he said, "to take his place. He said he had a sudden call to the west—folks sick or somethin'."
"His folks don't live west," said Kate McGovern, who overheard. To herself she said that Dick might have asked her to help him out of his trouble. There is nothing that so flatters a woman as to be asked by a man to help him out of trouble.
It was near the morning of the second day when Dick Merlin reached the town of Lamar—a little town, built of pine, and surrounded by nothing in particular. He went to the hotel for his breakfast, for which he had to wait a couple of hours, and while he was waiting he sat in the chilly office staring straight before him, and listening to every word that was spoken by the men who lounged about. There were only a few of them, travelling men principally, who had come in on the early train. The clerk was telling them the news.
"You ought to have been here last night," he said; "we had a lynching."
Dick sat inert. He did not even tighten the grasp of his hands on the arms of the chair.
"Yes. Great times we're having now. I don't want to see anything like it again. I wouldn't have missed it, though, for a thousand dollars. There were six men and two women in the jail. Only two men were strung up. The rest of the gang was let off. It's hard to tell why. There wasn't no thought of hangin' th' women. It wa'n't known really if they had anything to do with the business. But folks suspicioned them. Letting the women off made the crowd milder someway. Two of the fellows was so young it seemed ridiculous to hang 'em—like stringin' up babies. It went against the grain, that's all. They're in jail now. Two of th' fellows took leg-bail. Nobody knows how they got away. I guess they'd been in the midst of heavenly joys by this time if they hadn't lit out."
"Pretty big crowd?" inquired one of the traveling men, quite as if he were inquiring about the attendance at some evening entertainment.
"'Stonishing! Didn't know there was so many folks in th' country. They was quiet, too, but awful determined. I felt queer. I wasn't used to such things. Once I felt like hollerin'. I wanted to go away, an' I didn't. I shook all over. It wasn't no fun, if that's what you're thinkin'."
Dick wondered if those men were never going to ask where the women were. What a fool he had been? What a coward! Would they never ask?
"The jail give way first blow. The sheriff didn't say nothin' except to ask if they was goin' to leave th' women alone. He's a fine fellow. He stood right up an' said, 'See here, boys, don't none of you forget that we ain't hangin' no women!' Th' men laughed at him. 'What'd yeh take us fur?' they said. I tell yeh what, this community ain't so bad as it gets credit fur being. Folks think we ain't law-abidin'! Well, the fun didn't las' long. It was hard work gettin' th' ole man up, though. He was a fat 'un. I was afraid th' rope was goin' to break—"
Dick sprang to his feet. "Where are the women?" he shouted. "What did they do with them?"
It didn't take long to find them—it wouldn't take long to find any one in Lamar. They were in the sitting-room of the little milliner, and the wife of the man who had been hung was lying on a sofa looking at a red geranium which bloomed in the milliner's window.
Dick stopped in the door, and motioned Marie back as she rose to meet him.
"Before God," he said, slowly, "no word of mine brought this on you! I never told a living soul."
"You!" Marie moved toward him again, with her sad eyes growing luminous. "Do you think you need to tell that?"
But Dick still paused there sternly in the doorway, and held out no hand toward her.
"But I've been a sneak all the same. I have left you to stand all this alone. I don't suppose you'll ever forget that." He looked at her doubtingly.
Marie came closer.
"Did you know?" she whispered.
He nodded. A flush spread over the girl's face.
"But it didn't keep you from—"
The love that had restrained him until now made restraint impossible longer.
"I knew before I loved you. There is nothing that could keep me from loving you—nothing."
It was as if he had never been away from her. The old charm was over him, compelling as ever.
It was several minutes before either of them noticed that Marie's mother was apparently unconscious of his presence. He spoke to her, but she did not answer. She did not even turn her eyes. Mind had perhaps been gone a long time. She never spoke again, though there seemed nothing except a defect of the will to prevent her from doing so. Marie, summoning up a natural tenderness long since in abeyance, would not let her be moved from the place where she could see the milliner's flowers, and Dick bought a lily from the Chinamen, and it sent up a new blossom every hour, each one holding a perfume like incense in its ivory cup.
When she was dead, Marie had her taken out and buried beside that little mound of black dirt where the baby lay who died before Marie was born.
Though he had so much to think of, Dick could not help hearing some talk that was going about the town. It had been started by the man who sent him out to the sand-hill country first.
"I thought it was mighty queer," this man said to a group of his friends about the station, "that he should be down there all that time and not find out anything. He wouldn't take any of my money—I'll give the devil his due. But it stands to reason that he must have been in with the gang. I guess he got enough out of it to make up for what he didn't get from me."
Dick heard all this, but he didn't tell Marie. He thought over what it would be best to do. There was no use in attempting a denial. Any one, even a fool, would deny a thing like that. But though the old pride of his honesty was still strong, it had given place to the courage to do the right thing regardless of appearances. He settled the matter dramatically.
They got married at the Squire's. Then they took the train westward.
"You said the world was large," Dick said to Marie. "Let's go and see how large it is."
October 15, 1892, 993–994; 999XML: ep.ss.0001.xml
