Chapter VII: Part III (3)

At that moment the dog lifted his head and sent a long, mournful howl to die in faint echoes in the mountains across the river.

* * * * *

At daylight they were ready to start. Snow lay on the ground to a depth of six inches. But a terrible surprise awaited them. At the last moment they discovered that the cook was conscious.

“You’re not going—to leave me?” he said, in a whisper. His eyes seemed to be leaping out of their hollow sockets with terror.

“Only for a few hours,” said Brotherton, huskily. “Only to find a way out of this,—to make a path over which we can carry you.”

“Oh,” he said, faintly; “I thought—— but you wouldn’t. In the name o’ God, don’t leave me to die alone!”

They assured him that they would soon return. Then, making him as comfortable as possible, they went,—without hesitation, without one backward look. There was no noise. The snow fell softly and silently through the firs; the river flowed swiftly through its wild banks. The sick man lay with closed eyes, trustfully. But the dog knew. For the first time he left his master. He ran after them, and threw himself before them, moaning. His lifted eyes had a soul in them. He leaped before them, and upon them, licking their hands and clothing; he cast himself prone upon their feet, like one praying. No human being ever entreated for his life so passionately, so pathetically, as that dog pleaded for his master’s.

At last, half desperate as they were, they kicked him savagely and flung him off. With a look in his eyes that haunted them as long as they lived, he retreated then to his master’s side, and lay down in a heavy huddle of despair, still watching them. As they disappeared, he lifted his head, and for the last time they heard that long, heart-breaking howl.

It was answered by a coyote in the canyon above.

* * * * *

A week later the Associated Press sent out the following dispatch:

“The Darnell party, who were supposed to have perished in the
Bitter Root Mountains, returned last night. Their hardships and
sufferings were terrible. There is great rejoicing over their
safe return. They were compelled to leave the cook, who had
been sick the entire time, to die in the mountains. But for
their determined efforts to bring him out alive, they would
certainly have returned a month earlier.”

The world read the dispatch and rejoiced with those rejoicing. But one woman, reading it, fell, as one dead, beside her laughing boy.

PATIENCE APPLEBY’S CONFESSING-UP

PATIENCE APPLEBY’S CONFESSING-UP

“It must be goin’ to rain! My arm aches me so I can hardly hold my knitting needles.”

“Hunh!” said Mrs. Wincoop. She twisted her thread around her fingers two or three times to make a knot; then she held her needle up to the light and threaded it, closing one eye entirely and the other partially, and pursing her mouth until her chin was flattened and full of tiny wrinkles. She lowered her head and looking at Mrs. Willis over her spectacles with a kind of good-natured scorn, said—“Is that a sign o’ rain?”

“It never fails.” Mrs. Willis rocked back and forth comfortably. “Like as not it begins to ache me a whole week before it rains.”

“I never hear tell o’ such a thing in all my days,” said Mrs. Wincoop, with unmistakable signs of firmness, as she bent over the canton flannel night-shirt she was making for Mr. Wincoop.

“Well, mebbe you never. Mebbe you never had the rheumatiz. I’ve had it twenty year. I can’t get red of it, anyways. I’ve tried the Century liniment—the one that has the man riding over snakes an’ things—and the arnicky, and ev’ry kind the drug-store keeps. I’ve wore salt in my shoes tell they turned white all over; and I kep’ a buckeye in my pocket tell it wore a hole and fell out. But I never get red o’ the rheumatiz.”

Mrs. Wincoop took two or three stitches in silence; then she said—“Patience, now, she _can_ talk o’ having rheumatiz. She’s most bent in two with it when she has it—and that’s near all the time.”

The rocking ceased abruptly. Mrs. Willis’s brows met, giving a look of sternness to her face.

“That’s a good piece o’ cotton flannel,” she said. “Hefty! Fer pity’s sake! D’ you put ruffles on the bottom o’ Mr. Wincoop’s night-shirt? Whatever d’you do that fer?”

“Because he likes ’em that way,” responded Mrs. Wincoop, tartly. “There’s no call fer remarks as I see, Mis’ Willis. You put a pocket ’n Mr. Willis’s, and paw never’d have that—never!” firmly.

“Well, I never see ruffles on a man’s night-shirt before,” said Mrs. Willis, laughing rather aggravatingly. “But they do look reel pretty, anyways.”

“The longer you live the more you learn.” Mrs. Wincoop spoke condescendingly. “But talking about Patience—have you see her lately?”

“No, I ain’t.” Mrs. Willis got up suddenly and commenced rummaging about on the table; there were two red spots on her thin face. “I’d most fergot to show you my new winter underclo’s. Ain’t them nice and warm, though? They feel so good to my rheumatiz. I keep thinking about them that can’t get any. My, such hard times! All the banks broke, and no more prospect of good times than of a hen’s being hatched with teeth! It puts me all of a trimble to think o’ the winter here and ev’rybody so hard up. It’s a pretty pass we’ve come to.”

“I should say so. I don’t see what Patience is a-going to live on this winter. She ain’t fit to do anything; her rheumatiz is awful. She ain’t got any fine wool underclo’s.”

Mrs. Willis sat down again, but she did not rock; she sat upright, holding her back stiff and her thin shoulders high and level.

“I guess this tight spell’ll learn folks to lay by money when they got it,” she said, sternly. “I notice we ain’t got any mortgage on our place, and I notice we got five thousand dollars invested. We got some cattle besides. We ain’t frittered ev’rything we made away on foolishness, like some that I know of. We have things good and comf’terble, but we don’t put on any style. Look at that Mis’ Abernathy! I caught her teeheeing behind my back when I was buying red checked table clo’s. Her husband a bookkeeper! And her a-putting on airs over me that could buy her up any day in the week! Now, he’s lost his place, and I reckon she’ll come down a peg or two.”

“She’s been reel good to Patience, anyways,” said Mrs. Wincoop.

Mrs. Willis knitted so fast her needles fairly rasped together.

“She takes her in jell and perserves right frequent. You mind Patience always liked sweet things even when her ’n’ Lizy was girls together, Eunice.”

It was so unusual for one of these two women to speak the other’s name that they now exchanged quick looks of surprise. Indeed, Mrs. Wincoop seemed the more surprised of the two. But the hard, matter-of-fact expression returned at once to each face. If possible, Mrs. Willis looked more grim and sour than before the unwonted address had startled her out of her composure.

“Well,” she said, scarcely unclosing her thin lips, “I reckon she had all the sweet things she was a-hankering after when she was a girl. I reckon she had a plenty and to spare, and I expect they got to tasting pretty bitter a good spell ago. Too much sweet always leaves a bit’rish taste in the mouth. My religion is—do what’s right, and don’t wink at them that does wrong. I’ve stuck to my religion, I reckon you can’t get anybody to stand up and put their finger on anything wrong I’ve done—nor any of my fambly, either.” Mrs. Wincoop put her hand on her chest and coughed mournfully. “Let them that’s _sinned_,” went on Mrs. Willis, lifting her pale, cold eyes and setting them full on her visitor, “make allowance fer sinners, say I. Mis’ Abernathy, or Mis’ Anybody Else, can pack all the clo’s and all the sweet things they’ve got a mind to over to Patience Appleby; mebbe they’ve sinned, too—_I_ don’t know! But I do know that I ain’t, and so I don’t pack things over to her, even if she is all doubled up with the rheumatiz,” unconsciously imitating Mrs. Wincoop’s tone. “And I don’t make no allowance for her sins, either, Mis’ Wincoop.”

A faint color came slowly, as if after careful consideration, to Mrs. Wincoop’s face.

“There wa’n’t no call fer you a-telling that,” she said, with a great calmness. “The whole town knows you wouldn’t fergive a sin, if your fergiving it ’u’d save the sinner hisself from being lost! The whole town knows what your religion is, Mis’ Willis. You set yourself up and call yourself perfeck, and wrap yourself up in yourself—”

“There come the men—sh!” said Mrs. Willis. Her face relaxed, but with evident reluctance. She began to knit industriously. But the temptation to have the last word was strong.

“It ain’t my religion, either,” she said, her voice losing none of its determination because it was lowered. “I’d of fergive her if she’d a-confessed up. We all tried to get her to. I tried more ’n anybody. I told her”—in a tone of conviction—“that nobody but a brazen thing ’u’d do what she’d done and not confess up to ’t—and it never fazed her. She _wouldn’t_ confess up.”

The men were scraping their feet noisily now on the porch, and Mrs. Willis leaned back with a satisfied expression, expecting no reply. But Mrs. Wincoop surprised her. She was sewing the last pearl button on Mr. Wincoop’s night-shirt, and as she drew the thread through and fastened it with scrupulous care, she said, without looking up—“I don’t take much stock in confessings myself, Mis’ Willis. I don’t see just how confessings is good for the soul when they hurt so many innocent ones as well as the guilty ones. Ev’ry confessing affex somebody else; and so I say if you repent and want to atone you can do ’t without confessing and bringing disgrace on others. It’s nothing but curiosity that makes people holler out—‘Confess-up now! Confess-up now.’ It ain’t anybody’s business but God’s—and I reckon _He_ knows when a body’s sorry he’s sinned and wants to do better, and I reckon He helps him just as much as if he got up on a church tower and kep’ a-hollering out—‘Oh, good grieve, I’ve sinned! I’ve sinned!’—so’s the whole town could run and gap’ at him! Mis’ Willis, if some confessing-ups was done in this town that I know of, some people ’u’d be affected that ’u’d surprise you.” Then she lifted up her voice cheerfully—“That you, father? Well, d’ you bring the lantern? I reckon we’d best go right home; it’s getting latish, and Mis’ Willis thinks, from the way her arm aches her, that it’s going to rain.”

Mrs. Willis sat knitting long after Mr. Willis had gone to bed. Her face was more stern even than usual. She sat uncomfortably erect and did not rock. When the clock told ten, she arose stiffly and rolled the half finished stocking around the ball of yarn, fastening it there with the needles. Then she laid it on the table and stood looking at it intently, without seeing it. “I wonder,” she said, at last, drawing a deep breath, “what she was a-driving at! I’d give a pretty to know.”

* * * * *

“Mother, where’s my Sund’y pulse-warmers at?”

“_I_ don’t know where your Sund’y pulse-warmers are at. Father, you’d aggravate a body into her grave! You don’t half look up anything—and then begin asking me where it’s at. What’s under that bunch o’ collars in your drawer? Looks some like your Sund’y pulse-warmers, don’t it? This ain’t Sund’y, anyways. Wa’n’t your ev’ryday ones good enough to wear just to a church meeting?”

Mr. Willis had never been known to utter an oath; but sometimes he looked as if his heart were full of them.

“I reckon you don’t even know where your han’ke’cher’s at, father.”

“Yes, I do, mother. I guess you might stop talking, an’ come on now—I’m all ready.”

He preceded his wife, leaving the front door open for her to close and lock. He walked stiffly, holding his head straight, lest his collar should cramp his neck or prick his chin. He had a conscious, dressed-up air. He carried in one hand a lantern, in the other an umbrella. It was seven o’clock of a Thursday evening and the bell was ringing for prayer-meeting. There was to be a church meeting afterward, at which the name of Patience Appleby was to be brought up for membership. Mrs. Willis breathed hard and deep as she thought of it.

She walked behind her husband to receive the full light of the lantern, holding her skirts up high above her gaiter-tops which were so large and so worn as to elastic, that they fairly ruffled around her spare, flat ankles. Her shadow danced in piece-meal on the picket fence. After a while she said—

“Father, I wish you wouldn’t keep swinging that lantern so! A body can’t see where to put their feet down. Who’s that ahead o’ us?”

“I can’t make out yet.”

“No wonder—you keep swinging that lantern so! Father, what does _possess_ you to be so aggravating? If I’d of asked you to swing it, you couldn’t of b’en _drug_ to do it!”

Mrs. Willis was guiltless of personal vanity, but she did realize the importance of her position in village society, and something of this importance was imparted to her carriage as she followed Mr. Willis up the church aisle. She felt that every eye was regarding her with respect, and held her shoulders so high that her comfortable shawl fell therefrom in fuller folds than usual. She sat squarely in the pew, looking steadily and unwinkingly at the wonderful red velvet cross that hung over the spindle-legged pulpit, her hands folded firmly in her lap. She had never been able to understand how Sister Wirth who sat in the pew in front of the Willises, could always have her head a-lolling over to one side like a giddy, sixteen-year-old. Mrs. Willis abominated such actions in a respectable, married woman of family.

Mr. Willis crouched down uneasily in the corner of the seat and sat motionless, with a self-conscious blush across his weak eyes. His umbrella, banded so loosely that it bulged like a soiled-clothes bag, stood up against the back of the next pew.

At the close of prayer-meeting no one stirred from his seat. An ominous silence fell upon the two dozen people assembled there. The clock ticked loudly, and old lady Scranton, who suffered of asthma, wheezed with every breath and whispered to her neighbor that she was getting so phthisicy she wished to mercy they’d hurry up or she’d have to go home without voting. At last one of the deacons arose and said with great solemnity that he understood sister Wincoop had a name to propose for membership.

When Mrs. Wincoop stood up she looked pale but determined. Mrs. Willis would not turn to look at her, but she caught every word spoken.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Wincoop, “I want to bring up the name of Patience Appleby. I reckon you all know Patience Appleby. She was born here, and she’s always lived here. There’s them that says she done wrong onct, but I guess she’s about atoned up for that—if any mortal living has. I’ve know her fifteen year, and I don’t know any better behaving woman anywheres. She never talks about anybody”—her eyes went to Mrs. Willis’s rigid back—“and she never complains. She’s alone and poor, and all crippled up with the rheumatiz. She wants to join church and live a Christian life, and I, fer one, am in favor o’ us a-holding out our hand to her and helping her up.”

“Amen!” shrilled out the minister on one of his upper notes. There was a general rustle of commendation—whispers back and forth, noddings of heads, and many encouraging glances directed toward sister Wincoop.

But of a sudden silence fell upon the small assembly. Mrs. Willis had arisen. Her expression was grim and uncompromising. At that moment sister Shidler’s baby choked in its sleep, and cried so loudly and so gaspingly that every one turned to look at it.

In the momentary confusion Mr. Willis caught hold of his wife’s dress and tried to pull her down; but the unfortunate man only succeeded in ripping a handful of gathers from the band. Mrs. Willis looked down at him from her thin height.

“You let my gethers be,” she said, fiercely. “You might of knew you’d tear ’em, a-taking holt of ’em that way!”

Then quiet was restored and the wandering eyes came back to Mrs. Willis. “Brothers and sisters,” she said, “it ain’t becoming in me to remind you all what Mr. Willis and me have done fer this church. It ain’t becoming in me to remind you about the organ, and the new bell, and the carpet fer the aisles—let alone our paying twenty dollars more a year than any other member. I say it ain’t becoming in me, and I never ’d mention it if it wa’n’t that I don’t feel like having Patience Appleby in this church. If she does come in, _I_ go out.”

A tremor passed through the meeting. The minister turned pale and stroked his meagre whiskers nervously. He was a worthy man, and he believed in saving souls. He had prayed and plead with Patience to persuade her to unite with the church, but he had not felt the faintest presentiment that he was quarreling with his own bread and butter in so doing. One soul scarcely balances a consideration of that kind—especially when a minister has six children and a wife with a chronic disinclination to do anything but look pretty and read papers at clubs and things. It was small wonder that he turned pale.

“I want that you all should know just how I feel about it,” continued Mrs. Willis. “I believe in doing what’s right yourself and not excusing them that does wrong. I don’t believe in having people like Patience Appleby in this church; and she don’t come in while _I’m_ in, neither. That’s all I got to say. I want that you all should understand plain that her coming in means my going out.”

Mrs. Willis sat down, well satisfied. She saw that she had produced a profound sensation. Every eye turned to the minister with a look that said, plainly—“What have you to say to _that_?”

But the miserable man had not a word to say to it. He sat helplessly stroking his whiskers, trying to avoid the eyes of both Mrs. Wincoop and Mrs. Willis. At last Deacon Berry said—“Why, sister Willis, I think if a body repents and wants to do better, the church ’ad ort to help ’em. That’s what churches are for.”

Mrs. Willis cleared her throat.

“I don’t consider that a body’s repented, Deacon Berry, tell he confesses-up. Patience Appleby’s never done that to this day. When she does, I’m willing to take her into this church.”

“Brothers and sisters,” said Mrs. Wincoop, in a voice that held a kind of cautious triumph, “I fergot to state that Patience Appleby reckoned mebbe somebody ’u’d think she’d ort to confess before she come into the church; and she wanted I should ask the meeting to a’point Mis’ Willis a committee o’ one fer her to confess up to. Patience reckoned if she could satisfy Mis’ Willis, ev’rybody else ’u’d be satisfied.”

“Why—yes,” cried the minister, with cheerful eagerness. “That’s all right—bless the Lord!” he added, in that jaunty tone with which so many ministers daily insult our God. “I know Mrs. Willis and Patience will be able to smooth over all difficulties. I think we may now adjourn.”

“Whatever did she do that fer?” said Mrs. Willis, following the lantern homeward. “She’s got something in her mind, _I_ know, or she’d never want me a’p’inted. Father, what made you pull my gethers out? D’you think you could make me set down when I’d once made up my mind to stand up? You’d ought to know me better by this time. This is my secon’-best dress, and I’ve only wore it two winters—and now look at all these gethers tore right out!”

“You hadn’t ought to get up and make a fool o’ yourself, mother. You’d best leave Patience Appleby be.”

“You’d ort to talk about anybody a-making a fool o’ hisself! After you a-pulling my gethers clean out o’ the band—right in meeting! You’d ort to tell me I’d best leave Patience Appleby be! I don’t mean to leave her be. I mean to let her know she can’t ac’ scandalous, and then set herself up as being as good’s church folks and Christians. _I’ll_ give her her come-uppings!”

For probably the first time in his married life Mr. Willis yielded to his feelings. “God-a’mighty, mother,” he said; “sometimes you don’t seem to have common sense! I reckon you’d best leave Patience Appleby be, if you know when you’re well off.” Then, frightened at what he had said, he walked on, hurriedly, swinging the lantern harder than ever.

Mrs. Willis walked behind him, dumb.

* * * * *

The day was cold and gray. Mrs. Willis opened with difficulty the broken-down gate that shut in Patience Appleby’s house. “And no wonder,” she thought, “it swags down so!”

There was a foot of snow on the ground. The path to the old, shabby house was trackless. Not a soul had been there since the snow fell—and that was two days ago! Mrs. Willis shivered under her warm shawl.

Patience opened the door. Her slow, heavy steps on the bare floor of the long hall affected Mrs. Willis strangely.

Patience was very tall and thin. She stooped, and her chest was sunken. She wore a dingy gray dress, mended in many places. There was a small, checked shawl folded in a “three-cornered” way about her shoulders. She coughed before she could greet her visitor.

“How d’you do, Mis’ Willis,” she said, at last. “Come in, won’t you?”

“How are you, Patience?” Mrs. Willis said, and, to her own amazement, her voice did not sound as stern as she had intended it should.

She had been practicing as she came along, and this voice bore no resemblance whatever to the one she had been having in her mind. Nor, as she preceded Patience down the bare, draughty hall to the sitting-room, did she bear herself with that degree of frigid dignity which she had always considered most fitting to her position, both socially and morally.

Somehow, the evidences of poverty on every side chilled her blood. The sitting-room was worse, even, than the hall. A big, empty room with a small fireplace in one corner, wherein a few coals were turning gray; a threadbare carpet, a couple of chairs, a little table with the Bible on it, ragged wall-paper, and a shelf in one corner filled with liniment bottles.

Mrs. Willis sat down in one of the rickety chairs, and Patience, after stirring up the coals, drew the other to the hearth.

“I’m afraid the room feels kind o’ coolish,” she said. “I’ve got the last o’ the coal on.”

“D’you mean,” said Mrs. Willis—and again her voice surprised her—“that you’re all out o’ coal?”

“All out.” She drew the tiny shawl closer to her throat with trembling, bony fingers. “But Mis’ Abernathy said she’d send me a scuttleful over to-day. I hate to take it from her, too; her husband’s lost his position and they ain’t overly well off. But sence my rheumatiz has been so bad I can’t earn a thing.”

Mrs. Willis stared hard at the coals. For the life of her she could think of nothing but her own basement filled to the ceiling with coal.

“I reckon,” said Patience, “you’ve come to hear my confessing-up?”

“Why—yes.” Mrs. Willis started guiltily.

“What’s the charges agen me, Mis’ Willis?”

Mrs. Willis’s eyelids fell heavily.

“Why, I reckon you know, Patience. You done wrong onct when you was a girl, and I don’t think we’d ort to take you into the church tell you own up to it.”

There was a little silence. Then Patience said, drawing her breath in heavily—“Mebbe I did do wrong onct when I was a little girl—only fourteen, say. But that’s thirty year ago, and that’s a long time, Mis’ Willis. I don’t think I’d ort to own up to it.”

“_I_ think you’d ort.”

“Mis’ Willis,”—Patience spoke solemnly. “D’you think I’d ort to own up if it ’u’d affec’ somebody else thet ain’t never b’en talked about?”

“Yes, I do,” said Mrs. Willis, firmly. “If they deserve to be talked about, they’d _ort_ to be talked about.”

“Even if it was about the best folks in town?”

“Yes.” Mrs. Willis thought of the minister.

“Even if it was about the best-off folks? Folks that hold their head the highest, and give most to churches and missionary; and thet ev’rybody looks up to?”

“Ye-es,” said Mrs. Willis. That did not describe the minister, certainly. She could not have told you why her heart began to beat so violently. Somehow, she had been surprised out of the attitude she had meant to assume. Instead of walking in boldly and haughtily, and giving Patience her “come-uppings,” she was finding it difficult to conquer a feeling of pity for the enemy because she was so poor and so cold. She must harden her heart.

“Even”—Patience lowered her eyes to the worn carpet—“if it was folks thet had b’en loudest condemin’ other folks’s sins, and that had bragged high and low thet there wa’n’t no disgrace in their fambly, and never had b’en none, and who’d just be about killed by my confessing-up?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Willis, sternly. But she paled to the lips.

“I don’t think so,” said Patience, slowly. “I think a body’d ort to have a chance if they want to live better, without havin’ anybody a-pryin’ into their effairs exceptin’ God. But if you don’t agree with me, I’m ready to confess-up all _I’ve_ done bad. I guess you recollect, Mis’ Willis, thet your ’Lizy and me was just of an age, to a day?”

Mrs. Willis’s lips moved, but the words stuck in her throat.

“And how we ust to play together and stay nights with each other. We _loved_ each other, Mis’ Willis. You ust to give us big slices o’ salt-risin’ bread, spread thick with cream and sprinkled with brown sugar—I can just see you now, a-goin’ out to the spring-house to get the cream. And I can just taste it, too, when I get good and hungry.”

“What’s all this got to do with your a-owning up?” demanded Mrs. Willis, fiercely. “What’s my ’Lizy got to do with your going away that time? Where was you at, Patience Appleby?”

“I’m comin’ to that,” said Patience, calmly; but a deep flush came upon her face. “I’ve attoned-up fer that time, if any mortal bein’ ever did, Mis’ Willis. I’ve had a hard life, but I’ve never complained, because I thought the Lord was a-punishin’ me. But I have suffered.... Thirty year, Mis’ Willis, of prayin’ to be fergive fer one sin! But I ain’t ever see the day I could confess-up to ’t—and I couldn’t now, except to ’Lizy’s mother.”

An awful trembling shook Mrs. Willis’s heart. She looked at Patience with straining eyes. “Go on,” she said, hoarsely.

“’Lizy and me was fourteen on the same day. She was goin’ to Four Corners to visit her a’nt, but I had to stay at home and work. I was cryin’ about it when, all of a sudden, ’Lizy says—“Patience, let’s up and have a good time on our birthday!”

“Well, let’s,” I says, “but how?”

“I’ll start fer Four Corners and then you run away, and I’ll meet you, and we’ll go to Springville to the circus and learn to ride bareback”—

Mrs. Willis leaned forward in her chair. Her face was very white; her thin hands were clenched so hard the knuckles stood out half an inch.

“Patience Appleby,” she said, “you’re a wicked, sinful liar! May the Lord A’mighty fergive you—_I_ won’t.”

“I ain’t askin’ you to take my word; you can ask Mr. Willis hisself. He didn’t go to Springville to buy him a horse, like he told you he did. ’Lizy and me had been at the circus two days when she tuk sick, and I sent fer Mr. Willis unbeknownst to anybody. He come and tuk her home and fixed it all up with her a’nt at Four Corners, and give out thet she’d been a-visitin’ there. But I had to sneak home alone and live an outcast’s life ever sense, and see her set up above me—just because Mr. Willis got down to beg me on his knees never to tell she was with me. And I never did tell a soul, Mis’ Willis, tell last winter I was sick with a fever and told Mis’ Wincoop when I was out o’ my head. But she’s never told anybody, either, and neither of us ever will. Mr. Willis has helped me as much as he could without your a-findin’ it out, but I know how it feels to be hungry and cold, and I know how it feels to see ’Lizy set up over me, and marry rich, and have nice children; and ride by me ’n her kerriage without so much as lookin’ at me—and me a-chokin’ with the dust off o’ her kerriage wheels. But I never complained none, and I ain’t a-complainin’ now, Mis’ Willis; puttin ’Lizy down wouldn’t help me any. But I do think it’s hard if I can’t be let into the church.”

Her thin voice died away and there was silence. Patience sat staring at the coals with the dullness of despair on her face. Mrs. Willis’s spare frame had suddenly taken on an old, pathetic stoop. What her haughty soul had suffered during that recital, for which she had been so totally unprepared, Patience would never realize. The world seemed to be slipping from under the old woman’s trembling feet. She had been so strong in her condemnation of sinners because she had felt so sure she should never have any trading with sin herself. And lo! all these years her own daughter—her one beloved child, dearer than life itself—had been as guilty as this poor outcast from whom she had always drawn her skirts aside, as from a leper. Ay, her daughter had been the guiltier of the two. She was not spared that bitterness, even. Her harsh sense of justice forced her to acknowledge, even in that first hour, that this woman had borne herself nobly, while her daughter had been a despicable coward.

It had been an erect, middle-aged woman who had come to give Patience Appleby her “come-uppings;” it was an old, broken-spirited one who went stumbling home in the early, cold twilight of the winter day. The fierce splendor of the sunset had blazed itself out; the world was a monotone in milky blue—save for one high line of dull crimson clouds strung along the horizon.

A shower of snow-birds sunk in Mrs. Willis’s path, but she did not see them. She went up the path and entered her comfortable home; and she fell down upon her stiff knees beside the first chair she came to—and prayed as she had never prayed before in all her hard and selfish life.

* * * * *

When Mr. Willis came home to supper he found his wife setting the table as usual. He started for the bedroom, but she stopped him.

“We’re a-going to use the front bedroom after this, father,” she said.

“Why, what are we going to do that fer, mother?”

“I’m a-going to give our’n to Patience Appleby.”

“You’re a-going to—_what_, mother?”

“I’m a-going to give our’n to Patience Appleby, I say. I’m a-going to bring her here to live, and she’s got to have the warmest room in the house, because her rheumatiz is worse ’n mine. I’m a-going after her myself to-morrow in the kerriage.” She turned and faced her husband sternly. “She’s confessed-up ev’rything. I was dead set she should, and she has. I know where she was at that time, and I know who was with her. I reckon I’d best be attoning up as well as Patience Appleby; and I’m going to begin by making her comf’terble and taking her into the church.”

“Why, mother,” said the old man, weakly. His wife repressed him with one look.

“Now, don’t go to talking back, father,” she said, sternly. “I reckon you kep’ it from me fer the best, but it’s turrable hard on me now. You get and wash yourself. I want that you should hold this candle while I fry the apple-fritters.”

THE MOTHER OF “PILLS”

THE MOTHER OF “PILLS”

“Pills! Oh, Pills! You Pillsy!”

The girl turned from the door of the drug-store, and looked back under bent brows at her mother, who was wiping graduated glasses with a stained towel, at the end of the prescription counter.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” she said; her tone was impatient but not disrespectful.

Her mother laughed. She was a big, good-natured looking woman, with light-blue eyes and sandy eyebrows and hair. She wore a black dress that had a cheap, white cord-ruche at the neck. There were spots down the front of her dress where acids had been spilled and had taken out the color.

“How particular we are gettin’,” she said, turning the measuring glass round and round on the towel which had been wadded into it. “You didn’t use to mind if I called you ‘Pills,’ just for fun.”

“Well, I mind now.”

The girl took a clean towel from a cupboard and began to polish the show-cases, breathing upon them now and then. She was a good-looking girl. She had strong, handsome features, and heavy brown hair, which she wore in a long braid down her back. A deep red rose was tucked in the girdle of her cotton gown and its head lolled to and fro as she worked. Her hands were not prettily shaped, but sensitive, and the ends of the fingers were square.

“Well, Mariella, then,” said Mrs. Mansfield, still looking amused; “I was goin’ to ask you if you knew the Indians had all come in on their way home from hop pickin’.”

Mariella straightened up and looked at her mother.

“Have they, honest, ma?”

“Yes, they have; they’re all camped down on the beach.”

“Oh, I wonder where!”

“Why, the Nooksacks are clear down at the coal-bunkers, an’ the Lummies close to Timberline’s Row; an’ the Alaskas are all on the other side of the viaduct.”

“Are they goin’ to have the canoe race?”

“Yes, I guess so. I guess it’ll be about sundown to-night. There, you forgot to dust that milk-shake. An’ you ain’t touched that shelf o’ patent medicines!”

She set down the last graduate and hung the damp towel on a nail. Then she came out into the main part of the store and sat down comfortably behind the counter.

Long before Mariella was born her father had opened a drug-store in the tiny town of Sehome, on Puget Sound. There was a coal mine under the town. A tunnel led down into it, and the men working among the black diamonds, with their families, made up the town. But there was some trouble, and the mine was abandoned and flooded with salt water. The men went away, and for many years Sehome was little more than a name. A mail boat wheezed up from Seattle once a week; and two or three storekeepers—Mr. Mansfield among them—clung to the ragged edge of hope and waited for the boom. Before it came, Mr. Mansfield was bumped over the terrible road to the graveyard and laid down among the stones and ferns. Then Mrs. Mansfield “run” the store. The question “Can you fill perscriptions?” was often put to her fearfully by timid customers, but she was equal to the occasion.

“Well, I guess I can,” she would say, squaring about and looking her questioner unwaveringly in the eye. “I guess I’d ought to. I’ve been in the store with my husband, that’s dead, for twenty years. I’m not a regular, but I’m a practical—an’ that’s better than a regular any day.”

“It’s not so much what you know in a drug-store as what you _look_ like you know,” she sometimes confided to admiring friends.

It is true Mrs. Mansfield was often perplexed over the peculiar curdled appearance of some mixture—being as untaught in the mysterious ways of emulsions as a babe—but such trifles were dismissed with a philosophical sigh, and the prescriptions were handed over the counter with a complaisance that commanded confidence. The doctor hinted, with extreme delicacy, at times, that his emulsions did not turn out as smooth as he had expected; or that it would be agreeable to find some of his aqueous mixtures tinged with cochineal; or that it was possible to make pills in such a way that they would not—so to speak—melt in the patient’s mouth before he could swallow them. But Mrs. Mansfield invariably laughed at him in a kind of motherly way, and reminded him that he ought to be glad to have even a “practical” in a place like Sehome. And really this was so true that it was unanswerable.

So Mrs. Mansfield held the fort; and as her medicines, although abominable to swallow, never killed any one, she was looked upon with awe and respect by the villagers and the men in the neighboring logging-camps.

Mariella was brought up in the drug-store. She had the benefit of her mother’s experience, and, besides that, she had studied the “dispensatory”—a word, by the way, which Mrs. Mansfield began with a capital letter because of the many pitfalls from which it had rescued her.

“Mariella is such a good girl,” her mother frequently declared; “she got a real good education over at the Whatcom schools, an’ she’s such a help in the drug-store. She does make a beautiful pill.”

Indeed, the girl’s pill-making accomplishment was so appreciated by Mrs. Mansfield that she had nick-named her “Pills”—a name that had been the cause of much mirth between them.

Mariella was now sixteen, and the long-deferred “boom” was upon them. Mrs. Mansfield and her daughter contemplated it from the store door daily with increasing admiration. The wild clover no longer velveted the middle of the street. New buildings, with red, green or blue fronts and nondescript backs, leaped up on every corner and in between corners. The hammers and saws made music sweeter than any brass band to Sehome ears. Day and night the forests blazed backward from the town. When there were no customers in the store Mariella stood in the door, twisting the rope of the awning around her wrist, and watched the flames leaping from limb to limb up the tall, straight fir-trees. When Sehome hill was burning at night, it was a magnificent spectacle; like hundreds of torches dipped into a very hell of fire and lifted to heaven by invisible hands—while in the East the noble, white dome of Mount Baker burst out of the darkness against the lurid sky. The old steamer _Idaho_ came down from Seattle three times a week now. When she landed, Mrs. Mansfield and Mariella, and such customers as chanced to be in the store, hurried breathlessly back to the little sitting-room, which overlooked the bay, to count the passengers. The old colony wharf, running a mile out across the tide-lands to deep water, would be “fairly alive with ’em,” Mrs. Mansfield declared daily, in an ecstasy of anticipation of the good times their coming foretold. She counted never less than a hundred and fifty; and so many walked three and four abreast that it was not possible to count all.

Really, that summer everything seemed to be going Mrs. Mansfield’s way. Mariella was a comfort to her mother and an attraction to the store; business was excellent; her property was worth five times more than it had ever been before; and, besides—when her thoughts reached this point Mrs. Mansfield smiled consciously and blushed—there was Mr. Grover! Mr. Grover kept the dry-goods store next door. He had come at the very beginning of the boom. He was slim and dark and forty. Mrs. Mansfield was forty and large and fair. Both were “well off.” Mr. Grover was lonely and “dropped into” Mrs. Mansfield’s little sitting-room every night. She invited him to supper frequently, and he told her that her fried chicken and “cream” potatoes were better than anything he had eaten since his mother died. Of late his intentions were not to be misunderstood, and Mrs. Mansfield was already putting by a cozy sum for a wedding outfit. Only that morning she had looked at herself in the glass more attentively than usual while combing her hair. Some thought made her blush and smile.

“You ought to be ashamed!” she said, shaking her head at herself in the glass as at a gay, young thing. “To be thinkin’ about gettin’ married! With a big girl like Pills too. One good thing: He really seems to think as much of Pills as you do yourself, Mrs. Mansfield. That’s what makes me so—happy, I guess. I believe it’s the first time I ever was real happy before.” She sighed unconsciously as she glanced back over her years of married life. “An’ I don’t know what makes me so awful happy now. But sometimes when I get up of a mornin’ I just feel as if I could go out on the hill an’ sing—foolish as any of them larks holler’n’ for joy.

“Mariella,” she said, watching the duster in the girl’s hands, “what made you flare up so when I called you ‘Pills?’ You never done that before, an’ I don’t see what ails you all of a sudden.”

“I didn’t mean to flare up,” said Mariella. She opened the cigar-case and arranged the boxes carefully. Then she closed it with a snap and looked at her mother. “But I wish you’d stop it, ma. Mr. Grover said——”

“Well, what ’id he say?”

“He said it wasn’t a nice name to call a girl by.” Mariella’s face reddened, but she was stooping behind the counter.

Mrs. Mansfield drummed on the show-case with broad fingers and looked thoughtful.

“Well,” she said with significance, after a pause, “if he don’t like it, I won’t do it. We’ve had lots o’ fun over it, Pills, ain’t we—I mean Mariella—but I guess he has a right to say what you’ll be called, Pi—— my dear.”

“Oh, ma,” said Mariella. Her face was like a poppy.

“Well, I guess you won’t object, will you? I’ve been wond’rin’ how you felt about it.”

“Oh, ma,” faltered the girl; “do you think, honest, he—— he——”

“Yes, I do,” replied her mother, laughing comfortably and blushing faintly. “I’m sure of it. An’ I’m happier ’n I ever was in my life over it. I don’t think I could give you a better stepfather, or one that would think more of you.”

Mariella stood up slowly behind the counter and looked—stared—across the room at her mother, in a dazed, uncomprehending way. The color ebbed slowly out of her face. She did not speak, but she felt the muscles about her mouth jerking. She pressed her lips more tightly together.

“I hope you don’t think I oughtn’t to marry again,” said her mother, returning her look without understanding it in the least. “Your pa’s been dead ten years”—this in an injured tone. “There ain’t many women—— Oh, good mornin’, Mr. Lester? Mariella, ’ll you wait on Mr. Lester? Well”—beaming good naturedly on her customer—“how’s real estate this mornin’? Any new sales afoot?”

“_Are_ there?” repeated that gentleman, leaning on the show-case and lighting his cigar, innocent of intentional discourtesy. “Well, I should _smile_—and smile broadly too, Mrs. Mansfield. There’s a Minneapolis chap here that’s buyin’ right an’ left; just _slashin’_ things! He’s bought a lot o’ water-front property, too; an’ let me tell _you_, right now, that Jim Hill’s behind him; an’ Jim Hill’s the biggest railroad man in the U. S. to-day, an’ the Great Northern’s behind _him_!”

“Well, I hope so.” Mrs. Mansfield drew a long breath of delight. Mr. Lester smiled, shrugged his shoulders, spread out his hands, and sauntered out with the air of a man who has the ear of railroad kings.

“Are you goin’ to the canoe races to-night, Mariella?” began her mother, in a conciliatory tone.

“I don’t know. Might as well, I guess.”

The girl was wiping the shelf bottles now; her face was pale, but her back was to her mother.

“Well, we will have an early supper, so you can get off. Mercy, child! Did you break one o’ them glass labels? How often ’v’ I told you not to press on ’em so hard? What one is it? The tincture cantharides! Well, tie a string around it, so we’ll know what it is. There ain’t no label on the aconite bottle, nor the Jamaica ginger either—an’ them settin’ side by side, too. I hate guessin’ at things in a drug-store—specially when one’s a poison. Have you scoured up them spatulas?”

“Yes’m.”

“Well, I’ll go in an’ do up the dishes, an’ leave you to ’tend store. Don’t forget to make Mr. Benson’s pills.”

But Mr. Benson’s pills were not made right away. When her mother was gone, Mariella got down from the step-ladder and leaned one elbow on the show-case and rested her chin in her hand. Her throat swelled in and out fitfully, and the blue veins showed, large and full, on her temples. For a long time she stood thus, twisting the towel in her hand and looking at the fires on the hill without seeing them. Some of their dry burning seemed to get into her own eyes.

Mr. Grover, passing, glanced in.

“Mariella,” he said, putting one foot across the threshold, “are you goin’ to the canoe races?”

The girl had darted erect instantly, and put on a look of coquettish indifference.

“Yes, I am.” Her eyes flashed at him over her shoulder from the corners of their lids as she started back to the prescription-case. “I’m goin’ with Charlie Walton!”

When Mariella had gone to the races that night, and customers were few and far between, Mr. Grover walked with a determined air through Mrs. Mansfield’s store and, pushing aside the crimson canton-flannel portieres, entered her cheerful sitting-room. On the floor was a Brussels carpet, large-flowered and vivid. A sewing-machine stood in one corner and Mariella’s organ in another. The two narrow windows overlooking the sound were gay with blooming geraniums and white curtains tied with red ribbons. There was a trunk deceptively stuffed and cretonned into the semblance of a settee; and there was a wicker-chair that was full of rasping, aggravating noises when you rocked in it. It had red ribbon twisted through its back and arms. Mrs. Mansfield was sitting in it now, reading a novel, and the chair was complaining unceasingly.

Mr. Grover sat down on the trunk.

“Mrs. Mansfield,” he said, looking squarely at her, “I’ve got somethin’ to ask of you, an’ I’m goin’ to do it while Mariella’s away.”

“That so?” said Mrs. Mansfield.

The color in her cheek deepened almost to a purple. She put one hand up to her face, and with the other nervously wrinkled the corners of the leaves of her novel. She lowered her lids resolutely to hide the sudden joy in her eyes.

“I guess you know what I’ve been comin’ here so much for. I couldn’t help thinkin’, too, that you liked the idea an’ was sort of encouragin’ me.”

Mrs. Mansfield threw one hand out toward him in a gesture at once deprecating, coquettish and helpful.

“Oh, you!” she exclaimed, laughing and coloring more deeply. There was decided encouragement in her honest blue eyes under their sandy lashes.

“Well, didn’t you, now?” Mr. Grover leaned toward her.

She hesitated, fingering the leaves of her book. She turned her head to one side; the leaves swished softly as they swept past her broad thumb; the corners of her mouth curled in a tremulous smile; the fingers of her other hand moved in an unconscious caress across her warm cheek; she remembered afterward that the band across the bay on the long pier, where the races were, was playing “Annie Laurie,” and that the odor of wild musk, growing outside her window in a box, was borne in, sweet and heavy, by the sea winds. It was the one perfect moment of Mrs. Mansfield’s life—in which there had been no moments that even approached perfection; in which there had been no hint of poetry—only dullest, everyday prose. She had married because she had been taught that women should marry; and Mr. Mansfield had been a good husband. She always said that; and she did not even know that she always sighed after saying it. Her regard for Mr. Grover was the poetry—the wine—of her hard, frontier life. Never before that summer had she stood and listened to the message of the meadow-lark with a feeling of exaltation that brought tears to her eyes; or gone out to gather wild pink clover with the dew on it; or turned her broad foot aside to spare a worm. Not that Mr. Grover ever did any of these things; but that love had lifted the woman’s soul and given her the new gift of seeing the beauty of common things. No one had guessed that there was a change in her heart, not even Mariella.

It was well that Mrs. Mansfield prolonged that perfect moment. When she did lift her eyes there was a kind of appealing tenderness in them.

“I guess I did,” she said.

“Well, then,”—Mr. Grover drew a breath of relief—“you might’s well say I can have her. I want it all understood before she gets home. I want to stop her runnin’ with that Walton. Once or twice I’ve been afraid you’d just as leave she’d marry him as me. I don’t like to see girls gallivant with two or three fellows.”

Mrs. Mansfield sat motionless, looking at him. Her eyes did not falter; the smile did not wholly vanish from her face. Only the blood throbbed slowly away, leaving it paler than Mariella’s had been that morning. She understood her mistake almost before his first sentence. While he was speaking her thoughts were busy. She felt the blood coming back when she remembered what she had said to Mariella. If _only_ she had not spoken!

“Well,” she said, calmly, “have you said anything to Mariella?”

“Yes, I have; lots o’ times. An’ I know she likes me; but she’s some flirtish, and that’s what I want to put a stop to. So, with your permission, I’ll have a talk with her to-night.”

“I’d like to talk to her first myself.” Mrs. Mansfield looked almost stern. “But I guess it’ll be all right, Mr. Grover. If you’d just as soon wait till to-morrow, I’d like to be alone and make up my mind what to say to her.”

Mr. Grover got up and shook hands with her awkwardly.

“I’ll make her a good husband,” he said, earnestly.

“I don’t doubt that,” replied Mrs. Mansfield.

Then he went out and the crimson curtain fell behind him.

* * * * *

When Mariella came home her mother was sitting, rocking, by the window. The lamp was lighted.

“Pills,” she said, “I want you to stop goin’ with that fello’.”

The girl looked at her in silence. Then she took off her turban and stuck the long black pins back into it.

“I thought you liked him,” she said, slowly.

“I do, but Mr. Grover wants you—an’ I like him better.”

“Wants _me_!” Mariella drew up her shoulders proudly.

“Yes, you,” replied Mrs. Mansfield, laughing. The humor of the situation was beginning to appeal to her. “He says he’d told you. You must of laughed after I told you he wanted me.”

“Oh, ma, does he want me, honest?”

“Yes, he does.” She was still laughing.

“An’ don’t you mind, ma?”

“Not a mite,” said the widow, cheerfully. “I’d rather he’d marry you than me; only, I thought he was too nice a man to be lost to the fam’ly.”

“Oh, ma!”

“Well, get to bed now. He’s comin’ in the mornin’ to see you.”

She took up the lamp and stood holding it irresolutely.

“Pills,” she said, looking embarrassed, “You won’t ever tell him that I—— that I——”

“Never, ma!” exclaimed the girl, earnestly; “as long as I live.”

“All right, then. Look out! You’re droppin’ tallo’ from your candle! Don’t hold it so crooked, child! I wouldn’t like him to laugh about it. Good-night.”

As she passed through the kitchen she called out: “Oh, Pills! Mr. Jordan brought in a mess of trout. We’ll have ’em fried for breakfast.”

The girl came running after her mother, and threw her arms around her.