THE year’s calendar of color was almost at an end; only white was left for it now. The fields had been black. They had grown green, shyly, softly. They had given themselves up to bold greenness. They had achieved their golden maturity. They had reveled in gold, and dazzled by it. They had faded into dullness and browns. They died and lay withered. Snows would come soon for their burial. The morning’s white frosts were the promise of it. Chirstie must keep the doors shut now, for the baby’s sake. With doors shut the house seemed a trap, a trap from whose windows she had often to be looking to reassure herself. Out of doors she felt safer, freer. So she said that the baby must have more air, and she took him day after day to the field where Wully was husking corn. Since the mosquitoes were no longer hungry, the baby’s face was free for the first time in months from red blotches. He grew rosier and rosier in the cornfield. He looked so blooming that Chirstie said she just had to take him visiting, to show him to the neighbors. That was another excuse for not staying at home alone, another which Wully pretended to be deceived by.
It happened that one morning Squire McLaughlin,[230] riding past, saw a flock of wild turkeys alight in her dooryard, and leaving his horse, he crept toward the house, to borrow Wully’s gun, and bring down a bird for dinner. He had all but gained the house, when out of the door shot Chirstie, crying out a cry unintelligible. Out of the door and down towards the corn she flew. It gave him a startle, as he said afterwards. He didn’t know what terrible thing might have happened. He started after her. He called to her questioningly. She never lessened her pace. He said later that he had never seen a woman run as fast as she did. He could scarcely keep within sight of her among the dead cornstalks. He happened to see Wully hear her cry of anguish, and his swift, leaping answer. The Squire called to him, and Wully heard him, and stopped, confusedly, and began calling to his wife.
“It’s Uncle Wully, Chirstie! It’s only Uncle Wully!” he called to her, as if he had some great news to give her. She stumbled against him, panting and white, and the Squire hurried on to them, in consternation. There the three of them stood, breathless, excited, looking blankly from one to the other.
“Whatever’s the trouble?” the Squire gasped, recovering first.
Chirstie had grown red with relief and humiliation.
“Oh!” she stammered, confusedly. “Oh! I just thought—I thought you were—a tramp!”
[231]“You were never running from me, Chirstie!” he exclaimed.
“Yes, I was! I just thought—you came up so quietly—I didn’t know—” She paused, and looked at her husband beseechingly. “I got a fright,” she murmured.
Wully knew what she thought. Pitiful, she was. Just pitiful. Standing there trembling, ashamed, trying to cover her folly. Let the Squire laugh as loud as he would. Let him fill the prairies with his relief and amusement. He said he had never seen anything so amazing. Him to be chasing her, frightening her more and more! He didn’t know he looked so much like a tramp! The birds must have been as frightened as she had been. She had spoiled a fine shot for him. He had supposed the house was on fire, at least.
“I hope they were scared! I don’t want them shot! I’m taming them. They come every morning,” she retorted. She wanted to make him forget what she had done. He stood laughing at her indulgently, amused because she was a pretty thing. “Come back to the house and I’ll give you a slice of cold turkey that father shot yesterday. Wasn’t it a good bird, Wully!”
She started back towards the house. Wully went with them. After all, it was nearly noon. She begged the Squire not to tell what had happened. She had been having fever, and it would only worry Isobel McLaughlin to know she was so flighty. He promised, but she saw from his[232] face he was already making a fine yarn about how he terrified women. She knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it to himself.
That hour Wully came to a great decision. He had been considering for some time a proposition a cousin of his had made to him, a son of the Squire’s. Next spring the railroad would have completed its track to its next western terminal, and the new station which would become a town, was to be but three miles from Wully’s farm. From that town, all the supplies that settlers must have would be hauled a hundred miles west. What they would need first and always would be lumber. The Squire’s John wanted Wully to leave his farm, and start with him selling lumber. Wully would have a little money, and the cousin had some, and for a great wonder, they knew where they could borrow more.
The money they could borrow was a thing which even in those days startled men’s minds. Wully’s cousin John had an aunt who had come with her husband, a miller, from Scotland, and had settled some hundred miles away, where Houghton could get work in a mill. His employer was an old Yankee of some wealth. In the winter of sixty, the old man had decided suddenly and irrevocably, to sell the mill, and the Houghtons had wondered where they would be able to find work anew. The miller had ordered Houghton to find a purchaser. His orders were always imperious and startling. Houghton had[233] set about the task, and had persuaded two men to buy the plant, which he promised to manage. They had come and looked the place over carefully. But just as the papers were to be signed, they had changed their minds, so that when the miller was already rejoicing erratically because of his freedom from responsibility he found himself still encumbered with a business.
He was beside himself with anger. He was determined to sell that mill at once, without delay. He wouldn’t wait. So it came about that almost before he knew what he was doing, Houghton himself had bought that mill, with fifty thousand bushels of wheat for fifty cents a bushel, paying down for it all the money he could raise, which was eighty-five dollars. The miller had simply bullied him into the bargain. Houghton was overwhelmed with the burden of so great a debt. He felt that he had been basely taken advantage of. Then in a few weeks came the war. The first thing he knew he sold his wheat for three times what he paid for it. Wealth has perhaps seldom fallen so suddenly upon a man so little dreaming of it. Houghton bought at once ten thousand acres of Iowa land, and nowadays, his sons who go round and round this stuffy little stupid globe in their yachts, berate his memory yawningly because he didn’t buy a hundred thousand acres. He was the man who would lend two soldiers of his kin a few hundred dollars to begin business.
Wully had thought before the bomb of Peter’s[234] return that farming was no life for Chirstie. She was no tireless woman like his mother. Malaria was a hard thing for young wives and nursing mothers. Wully had often wished that in some way he might make her necessary work lighter. And now that this intolerable menace of violence hung over their home, it seemed best altogether to leave it. He knew what his father would say to the idea that a man getting a dollar and seventy cents for wheat, should leave his land. His father thought a man who left off tilling his land to dig gold out of it a poor shiftless creature. None of those who would advise him so vigorously against his contemplated course could foresee that wheat, that brought so great a price that fall, would the next year be selling for thirty cen............