Chapter VII: Part 7

"Then along comes a horse trader, who stops over to rest his stock, and learns their trouble. He tells 'em to quit their worry; that he's a notary public and can perform a marriage as good as any Baptist preacher they ever saw. I never been able to make out whether he was crazy or just a witty, practical joker. Anyway, he married the pair with something like suitable words, wouldn't take a cent for it, and gave 'em a paper saying he had performed the deed. It had a seal on it showing he was a genuine notary public, though from back in Iowa somewhere. That made no difference to the new bride and groom. A notary public was a notary public to them, highly important and official.

"They had enough other things to worry about, anyway. They had to buckle down to the hard life that waits for any young couple without capital in a new country. They had years of hard sledding; but they must of had a good time somehow, because they never have any but pleasant things to tell of it. Whatever that notary public was, he seemed to of pulled off a marriage that took as well or better than a great many that may be more legal. So that's all there is to it--only, here about a year ago they was persuaded to have it done proper at last by a real preacher who makes Kulanche two Sundays a month. That's why the late date's on that certificate. The old lady is right kittenish about that; shows it to everyone, in spite of the fact that it makes her out of been leading an obliquitous life, or something, for about thirty-eight years.

"But then, she's a sentimental old mush-head, anyhow. Guess what she told me out in the kitchen! She's been reading what the Germans did to women and children in Belgium, and she says: 'Of course I hate Germans; and yet it don't seem as if I could ever hate 'em enough to want to kill a lot of German babies!' Wasn't that the confession of a weakling? I guess that's all you'd want to know about that woman. My sakes! Will you look at that mess of clouds? I bet it's falling weather over in Surprise Valley. A good moisting wouldn't hurt us any either."

That seemed to be about all. Yet I was loath to leave the topic. I still had a warm glow in my heart for the aged couple, and I could hear Uncle Henry's bottle of adolescent peach brandy laughing to itself from where it was lashed to the back of my saddle. I struck in the only weak spot in the wall.

"You say they were persuaded into this marriage. Well, who persuaded them? Isn't there something interesting about that?"

It had, indeed, been a shrewd stroke. Ma Pettengill's eyes lighted.

"Say, didn't I ever tell you about Mrs. Julia Wood Atkins, the well-known lady reformer?"

"You did not. We have eight miles yet."

"Oh, very well!"

So for eight miles of a road that led between green fields on our right and a rolling expanse of sagebrush on our left, I heard something like this:

"Well, this prominent club lady had been out on the Coast for some time heading movements and telling people how to do things, and she had got run down. She's a friend of Mrs. W.B. Hemingway, the well-known social leader and club president of Yonkers, who is an old friend of mine; and Mrs. W.B. writes that dear Julia is giving her life to the cause--I forget what cause it was right then--and how would it be for me to have her up here on the ranch for a vacation, where she could recover her spirits and be once more fitted to enter the arena. I say I'm only too glad to oblige, and the lady comes along.

"She seemed right human at first--kind of haggard and overtrained, but with plenty of fights left in her; a lady from forty-eight to fifty-four, with a fine hearty manner that must go well on a platform, and a kind of accusing face. That's the only word I can think of for it. She'd be pretty busy a good part of the day with pamphlets and papers that she or someone else had wrote, but I finally managed to get her out on a gentle old horse--that one you're riding--so she could liven up some; and we got along quite well together.

"The only thing that kind of went against me was, she's one of them that thinks a kind word and a pleasant smile will get 'em anywhere, and she worked both on me a little too much like it was something professional.

"Still, I put it by and listened to her tell about the awful state the world is in, and how a few earnest women could set it right in a week if it wasn't for the police.

"Prison reform, for instance. That was the first topic on which she delivered addresses to me. I couldn't make much out of it, except that we don't rely enough on our convicts' rugged honour. It was only a side line with her; still, she didn't slight it. She could talk at length about the innate sterling goodness of the misunderstood burglar. I got tired of it. I told her one day that, if you come right down to it, I'd bet the men inside penitentiaries didn't average up one bit higher morally than the men outside. She said, with her pleasantest smile, that I didn't understand; so I never tried to after that.

"The lady had a prowling mind. Mebbe that ain't the right word, but it come to me soon after she got here. I think it was the day she begun about our drinking water. She wanted to know what the analysis showed it to contain. She was scared out of her pleasant smile for a minute when she found I'd never had the water analyzed. I thought, first, the poor thing had been reading these beer advertisements; you know--the kind they print asking if you are certain about the purity of your drinking water, telling of the fatal germs that will probably be swimming there, and intimating that probably the only dead-safe bet when you are thirsty is a pint of their pure, wholesome beer, which never yet gave typhoid fever to any one. But, no; Julia just thought all water ought to be analyzed on general principles, and wouldn't I have a sample of ours sent off at once? She'd filled a bottle with some and suggested it with her pleasantest platform smile.

"'Yes,' I says; 'and suppose the report comes back that this water is fatal to man and beast? And it's the only water round here. What then? I'd be in a hell of a fix--wouldn't I?'

"I don't deny I used to fall back on words now and then when her smile got to me. And we went right on using water that might or might not make spicy reading in a chemist's report; I only been here thirty years and it's too soon to tell. Anyway, it was then I see she was gifted with a prowling mind, which is all I can think of to call it. It went with her accusing face. She didn't think anything in this world was as near right as it could be made by some good woman.

"Of course she had other things besides the water to worry about. She was a writer, too. She would write about how friction in the home life may be avoided by one of the parties giving in to the other and letting the wife say how the money shall be spent, and pieces about what the young girl should do next, and what the young wife should do if necessary, and so on. For some reason she was paid money for these pieces.

"However, she was taking longer rides and getting her pep back, which was what she had come here for. And having failed to reform anything on the Arrowhead, she looked abroad for more plastic corruption as you might say. She rode in one night and said she was amazed that this here community didn't do something about Dave Pickens. That's the place we stopped this morning. She said his children were neglected and starving, his wife worked to the bone, and Dave doing nothing but play on a cheap fiddle! How did they get their bread from day to day?

"I told her no one in the wide world had ever been able to answer this puzzle. There was Dave and his wife and five children, all healthy, and eating somehow, and Dave never doing a stroke of work he could side-step. I told her it was such a familiar puzzle we'd quit being puzzled by it.

"She said someone ought to smash his fiddle and make him work. She said she would do something about it. I applauded. I said we needed new blood up here and she seemed to of fetched it.

"She come back the next day with a flush of triumph on her severely simple face. And guess the first thing she asked me to do! She asked me to take chances in a raffle for Dave's fiddle. Yes, sir; with her kind words and pleasant smile she had got Dave to consent to raffle off his fiddle, and she was going to sell twenty-four chances at fifty cents a chance, which would bring twelve dollars cash to the squalid home. I had to respect the woman at that moment.

"'There they are, penniless,' says she, 'and in want for the barest necessities; and this man fiddling his time away! I had a struggle persuading him to give up his wretched toy; but I've handled harder cases. You should of seen the light in the mother's wan face when he consented! The twelve dollars won't be much, though it will do something for her and those starving children; and then he will no longer have the instrument to tempt him.'

"I handed over a dollar for two chances right quick, and Julia went out to the bunk-house and wormed two dollars out of the boys there. And next day she was out selling off the other chances. She didn't dislike the work. It give her a chance to enter our homes and see if they needed reforming, and if the children was subjected to refining influences, and so on. The first day she scared parties into taking fifteen tickets, and the second day she got rid of the rest; and the next Sunday she held the drawing over at Dave's house. The fiddle was won by a nester from over in Surprise Valley, who had always believed he could play one if he only had a fair chance.

"So this good deed was now completed, there being no music, and twelve dollars in the Pickens home that night. And Mrs. Julia now felt that she was ready for the next big feat of uplift, which was a lot more important because it involved the very sanctity of the marriage tie. Yes, sir; she'd come back from her prowling one night and told me in a hushed voice, behind a closed door, about a couple that had been for years living in a state of open immorality.

"I didn't get her, at first, not thinking of Uncle Henry and Aunt Mollie. But she meant just them two. I give her a good hearty laugh, at first; but it pained her so much I let her talk. It seems she'd gone there to sell raffle tickets, and they'd taken four, and cooked food for her, and give her some cherry cordial, which she took on account of being far from a strong woman; and then Aunt Mollie had told all her past life, with this horrid scandal about the notary public sticking innocently out of it.

"Mrs. Julia hadn't been able to see anything but the scandal, she being an expert in that line. So she had started in to persuade Aunt Mollie that it was her sacred duty to be married decently to her companion in crime for forty years. And Aunt Mollie had been right taken with the idea; in fact, she had entered into it with a social enthusiasm that didn't seem to Mrs. Julia to have quite enough womanly shame for her dark past in it. Still, anything to get the guilty couple lawful wedded; and before she left it was all fixed. Uncle Henry was to make an honest woman of Aunt Mollie as soon as she could get her trousseau ready.

"Me? I didn't know whether to laugh or get mad. I said the original marriage had satisfied the peace and dignity of the state of Washington; and it had done more--it had even satisfied the neighbours. So why not let it rest? But, no, indeedy! It had never been a marriage in the sight of God and couldn't be one now. Facts was facts! And she talked some more about Aunt Mollie not taking her false position in the proper way.

"It had been Mrs. Julia's idea to have the preacher come up and commit this ceremony quite furtively, with mebbe a couple of legal witnesses, keeping everything quiet, so as not to have a public scandal. But nothing like that for the guilty woman! She was going to have a trousseau and a wedding, with guests and gayety. She wasn't taking it the right way at all. It seemed like she wanted all the scandal there was going.

"'Really, I can't understand the creature,' says Mrs. Julia. 'She even speaks of a wedding breakfast! Can you imagine her wishing to flaunt such a thing?'

"It was then I decided to laugh instead of telling this lady a few things she couldn't of put in an article. I said Aunt Mollie's taking it this way showed how depraved people could get after forty years of it; and we must try to humour the old trollop, the main thing being to get her and her debased old Don Juan into a legal married state, even if they did insist on going in with a brass band. Julia said she was glad I took it this way.

"She came back to my room again that night, after her hair was down. The only really human thing this lady ever did, so far as I could discover, was to put some of this magic remedy on her hair that restores the natural colour if the natural colour happened to be what this remedy restores it to. Any way, she now wanted to know if I thought it was right for Aunt Mollie to continue to reside there in that house between now and the time when they would be lawful man and wife. I said no; I didn't think it was right. I thought it was a monstrous infamy and an affront to public morals; but mebbe we better resolve to ignore it and plow a straight furrow, without stopping to pull weeds. She sadly said she supposed I was right.

"So Uncle Henry hitched up his fat white horse to the buggy, and him and Aunt Mollie drove round the country for three days, inviting folks to their wedding. Aunt Mollie had the time of her life. It seemed as if there wasn't no way whatever to get a sense of shame into that brazen old hussy. And when this job was done she got busy with her trousseau, which consisted of a bridge gown in blue organdie, and a pair of high white shoes. She didn't know what a bridge gown was for, but she liked the looks of one in a pattern book and sent down to Red Gap for Miss Gunslaugh to bring up the stuff and make it. And she'd always had this secret yearning for a pair of high white shoes; so they come up, too.

"Furthermore, Aunt Mollie had read the city paper for years and knew about wedding breakfasts; so she was bound to have one of those. It looked like a good time was going to be had by all present except the lady who started it. Mrs. Julia was more malignantly scandalized by these festal preparations than she had been by the original crime; but she had to go through with it now.

"The date had been set and we was within three days of it when Aunt Mollie postponed it three days more because Dave Pickens couldn't be there until this later day. Mrs. Julia made a violent protest, because she had made her plans to leave for larger fields of crime; but Aunt Mollie was stubborn. She said Dave Pickens was one of the oldest neighbours and she wouldn't have a wedding he couldn't attend; and besides, marriage was a serious step and she wasn't going to be hurried into it.

"So Mrs. Julia went to a lot of trouble about her ticket and reservations, and stayed over. She was game enough not to run out before Uncle Henry had made Aunt Mollie a lady. I was a good deal puzzled about this postponement. Dave Pickens was nothing to postpone anything for. There never was any date that he couldn't be anywhere--at least, unless he had gone to work after losing his fiddle, which was highly ridiculous.

"The date held this time. We get word the wedding is to be held in the evening and that everyone must stay there overnight. This was surprising, but simple after Aunt Mollie explained it. The guests, of course, had to stay over for the wedding breakfast. Aunt Mollie had figured it all out. A breakfast is something you eat in the morning, about six-thirty or seven; so a wedding breakfast must be held the morning after the wedding. You couldn't fool Aunt Mollie on social niceties.

"Anyway, there we all was at the wedding; Uncle Henry in his black suit and his shiny new teeth, and Aunt Mollie in her bridge gown and white shoes, and this young minister that wore a puzzled look from start to finish. I guess he never did know what kind of a game he was helping out in. But he got through with the ceremony. There proved to be not a soul present knowing any reason why this pair shouldn't be joined together in holy wedlock, though Mrs. Julia looked more severe than usual at this part of the ceremony. Uncle Henry and Aunt Mollie was firm in their responses and promised to cling to each other till death did them part. They really sounded as if they meant it.

"Mrs. Julia looked highly noble and sweet when all was over, like she had rescued an erring sister from the depths. You could see she felt that the world would indeed be a better place if she could only give a little more time to it.

"We stood round and talked some after the ceremony; but not for long. Aunt Mollie wound the clock and set the mouse-trap, and hustled us all off to bed so we could be up bright and early for the wedding breakfast. You'd think she'd been handling these affairs in metropolitan society for years. The women slept on beds and sofas, and different places, and the men slept out in the barn and in a tent Uncle Henry had put up or took their blanket rolls and bunked under a tree.

"Then ho! for the merry wedding breakfast at six-thirty A.M.! The wedding breakfast consisted of ham and eggs and champagne. Yes, sir; don't think Aunt Mollie had overlooked the fashionable drink. Hadn't she been reading all her life about champagne being served at wedding breakfasts? So there it was in a new wash boiler, buried in cracked ice. And while the women was serving the ham and eggs and hot biscuits at the long table built out in the side yard, Uncle Henry exploded several bottles of this wine and passed it to one and all, and a toast was drunk to the legal bride and groom; after which eating was indulged in heartily.

"It was a merry feast, even without the lobster salad, which Aunt Mollie apologized for not having. She said she knew lobster salad went with a wedding breakfast, the same as champagne; but the canned lobster she had ordered hadn't come, so we'd have to make out with the home-cured ham and some pork sausage that now come along. Nobody seemed downhearted about the missing lobster salad. Uncle Henry passed up and down the table filling cups and glasses, and Aunt Mollie, in her wedding finery, kept the food coming with some buckwheat cakes at the finish.

"It was a very satisfactory wedding breakfast, if any one should ever make inquiries of you. By the time Uncle Henry had the ends out of half the champagne bottles I guess everyone there was glad he had decided to drag Aunt Mollie back from the primrose path.

"It all passed off beautifully, except for one tragedy. Oh, yes; there's always something to mar these affairs. But this hellish incident didn't come till the very last. After the guests had pretty well et themselves to a standstill, Dave Pickens got up and come back with a fiddle, and stood at the end of the grape arbour and played a piece.

"'Someone must have supplied that wretch with another fiddle!' says Mrs. Julia, who was kind of cross, anyway, having been bedded down on a short sofa and not liking champagne for breakfast--and, therefore, not liking to see others drink it.

"'Oh, he's probably borrowed one for your celebration,' I says.

"Dave played a couple more lively pieces; and pretty soon, when we got up from the table, he come over to Mrs. Julia and me.

"'It's a peach of a fiddle,' says Dave. 'It says in the catalogue it's a genuine Cremonika--looks like a Cremona and plays just as good. I bet it's the best fiddle in the world to be had for twelve dollars!'

"'What's that?' says Mrs. Julia, erecting herself like an alarmed rattlesnake.

"'Sure! It's a genuine twelve-dollar one,' says Dave proudly. 'My old one, that you so kindly raffled off, cost only five. I always wanted a better one, but I never had the money to spare till you come along. It's awful hard to save up money round here.'

"'Do you mean to tell me--' says Mrs. Julia. She was so mad she couldn't get any farther. Dave thought she was merely enthusiastic about his new fiddle.

"'Sure! Only twelve dollars for this beauty,' he says, fondling the instrument. 'We got down the mail-order catalogue the minute you left that money with us, and had a postal order on the way to Chicago that very night. I must say, lady, you brought a great pleasure into our life.'

"'What about your poor wife?' snaps Mrs. Julia.

"His poor wife comes up just then and looks affectionately at Dave and the new fiddle.

"'He spent that money for another fiddle!' says Mrs. Julia to her in low tones of horror.

"'Sure! What did you think he was going to do with it?' says Mrs. Dave. 'I must say we had two mighty dull weeks while Dave was waiting for this new one. He just mopes round the house when he ain't got anything to play on. But this is a lot better than the old fiddle; it was worth waiting for. Did you thank the lady, Dave?'

"Mrs. Julia was now plumb speechless and kind of weak. And on top of these blows up comes Aunt Mollie the new-wed, and beams fondly on her.

"'There!' says she. 'Ain't that a fine new fiddle that Dave bought with his twelve dollars? And wasn't it worth postponing my wedding for, so we could have some music?'

"'What's that?' says Mrs. Julia again. 'Why did you postpone it?'

"'Because the fiddle didn't get here till last night,' says Aunt Mollie, 'and I wasn't going to have a wedding without music. It wouldn't seem right. And don't you think, yourself, it's a lot better fiddle than Dave's old one?'

"So this poor Mrs. Julia woman was now stricken for fair, thinking of all the trouble she'd been to about her tickets, and all to see this new fiddle.

"She went weakly into the house and lay down, with a headache, till I was ready to leave the gay throng. And the next day she left us to our fate. Still, she'd done us good. Dave has a new fiddle and Aunt Mollie has her high white shoes. So now you know all about it."

We neared the Arrowhead gate. Presently its bell would peal a sweet message to those who laboured. Ma Pettengill turned in her saddle to scan the western horizon.

"A red sun has water in his eye," said she. "Well, a good soak won't hurt us."

And a moment later:

"Curious thing about reformers: They don't seem to get a lot of pleasure out of their labours unless the ones they reform resist and suffer, and show a proper sense of their degradation. I bet a lot of reformers would quit to-morrow if they knew their work wasn't going to bother people any."

VI

THE PORCH WREN

So it befell, in a shining and memorable interlude that there was talk of the oldest living boy scout, who was said to have rats in his wainscoting; of the oldest living débutante, who was also a porch wren; and of the body snatcher. Little of the talk was mine; a query now and again. It was Ma Pettengill's talk, and I put it here for what it may be worth, hoping I may close-knit and harmonize its themes, so diverse as that of the wardrobe trunk, the age of the earth, what every woman thinks she knows, and the Upper Silurian trilobites.

It might be well to start with the concrete, and baby's picture seems to be an acceptable springboard from which to dive into the recital. It came in the evening's mail and was extended to me by Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, with poorly suppressed emotion. The thing excited no emotion in me that I could not easily suppress. It was the most banal of all snapshots--a young woman bending Madonna-wise above something carefully swathed, flanked by a youngish man who revealed a self-conscious smirk through his carefully pointed beard. The light did harshly by the bent faces of the couple and the disclosed fragment of the swathed thing was a weakish white blob.

I need not say that there must be millions of these pathetic revealments burdening our mails day by day. I myself must have looked coldly upon over a thousand.

"Well, what of it?" I demanded shortly.

"I bet you can't guess what's in that bundle!" said my hostess in a large playful manner.

I said what I could see of it looked like a half portion of plain boiled cauliflower, but that in all probability the object was an infant, a human infant--or, to use a common expression, a baby. Whereupon the lady drew herself up and remarked in the clipped accent of a parrot:

"No, sir; it's a carboniferous trilobite of the Upper Silurian."

This, indeed, piqued me. It made a difference. I said was it possible? Mrs. Pettengill said it was worse than possible; it was inevitable. She seemed about to rest there; so I accused her of ill-natured jesting and took up the previous day's issue of the Red Gap _Recorder_, meaning to appear bored. It worked.

"Well, if Professor Oswald Pennypacker don't call his infant that, you can bet your new trout rod he calls it something just as good. Mebbe I better read what the proud mother says."

"It would be the kind thing before you spread evil reports," I murmured in a tone of gentle rebuke.

So the woman polished her nose glasses and read a double sheet of long up-and-down calligraphy--that is, she read until she exploded in triumphant retort:

"Ha! There now! Don't I know a thing or two? Listen: 'Oswald is so enraptured with the mite; you would never guess what he calls it--"My little flower with bones and a voice!"' Now! Don't tell me I didn't have Oswald's number. I knew he wouldn't be satisfied to call it a baby; he'd be bound to name it something animal, vegetable, or mineral. Ain't it the truth? 'Little flower with bones and a voice!' What do you know about that? That's a scientist trying to be poetic.

"And here--get this: She says that one hour after the thing was born the happy father was caught by the doctor and nurse seeing if it could hold its own weight up on a broomstick, like a monkey. She says he was acutely distressed when these authorities deprived him of the custody of his child. Wouldn't that fade you? Trying to see if a baby one hour old could chin itself! Quite all you would wish to know about Oswald."

I hastily said no; it was not nearly all I wanted to know about Oswald. I wanted to know much more. Almost any one would. The lady once more studied the hairy face with its bone-rimmed glasses.

"Shucks!" said she. "He don't look near as proud in this as he does in that one he sent me himself--here, where is that thing?"

From the far end of the big table she brought under the lamp a basket of Indian weave and excavated from its trove of playing cards, tobacco sacks, cigarette papers, letters, and odd photographs another snapshot of Oswald. It was a far different scene. Here Oswald stood erect beside the mounted skeleton of some prehistoric giant reptile that dwarfed yet left him somehow in kingly triumph.

"There now!" observed the lady. "Don't he look a heap more egregious by that mess of bones than he does by his own flesh and blood? Talk about pride!"

And I saw that it was so. Here Oswald looked the whole world in the face, proud indeed! One hand rested upon the beast's kneecap in a proprietary caress. Oswald looked too insufferably complacent. It was the look to be forgiven a man only when he wears it in the presence of his first-born. If snapshots tell anything at all, these told that Oswald was the father of a mammoth sauropod and had merely dug up the baby in a fossil bed somewhere.

"That's where the man's heart really lies," said his stern critic, "even if he does drivel about his little flower with bones and a voice! Probably by now he's wishing the voice had been left out of his little flower." Impressively she planted a rigid forefinger on the print of the mounted skeleton.

"That there," she glibly rattled off, "is the organic remains of a three-toed woolly bronsolumphicus of the carboniferous limestone, or Upper Silurian trilobite period. I believe I have the name correct. It was dug up out of a dry lake in Wyoming that years ago got to be mere loblolly, so that this unfortunate critter bogged down in it. The poor thing passed on about six million or four hundred million years ago--somewhere along there. Oswald and his new father-in-law dug it from its quiet resting place in the old cemetery. Such is their thrilling work in life.

"This father-in-law is just an old body snatcher that snoops round robbing the graves of antiquity and setting up his loot in their museum at the university. No good telling that old ghoul to let the dead rest. He simply won't hear of it. He wants remains. He wants to have 'em out in the light of day and stick labels on their long-peaceful skulls. He don't act subdued or proper about it either, or kind of buttery sad, like a first-class undertaker. He's gleeful. Let him find the skeleton of something as big as a freight car, that perished far in the dead past, and he's as tickled as a kid shooting at little sister with his new air gun.

"Bones in his weakness--and periods of geology. He likes period bones the way some folks like period furniture; and rocks and geography and Lower Triassics, and so forth. He knows how old the earth is within a few hundred million years; how the scantling and joists for it was put together, and all the different kinds of teeth that wild animals have. He's a scientist. Oswald is a scientist. I was a scientist myself two summers ago when they was up here.

"By the time they left I could talk a lot of attractive words. I could speak whole sentences so good that I could hardly understand myself. Of course after they left I didn't keep up my science. I let myself get rusty in it. I probably don't know so much more about it now than you would. Oh, perhaps a little more. It would all come back to me if I took it up again."

So I said that I had nothing to do for an hour or so, and if she would not try to be scientific, but talk in her own homely words, I might consent to listen; in this event she might tell the whole thing, omitting nothing, however trifling it might seem to her, because she was no proper judge of values. I said it was true I might be overtaken by sleep, since my day had been a hard one, reaching clear to the trout pool under the big falls and involving the transportation back to seventeen rainbow trout weighing well over seventeen pounds, more or less, though feeling much like more. And what about Oswald and the primeval ooze, and so forth. And would it be important if true? The lady said--well, yes, and no; but, however--

He's Professor Marwich up at the university--this confirmed old coroner I'm telling you about. Has a train of capital letters streaming along after he's all through with his name. I don't know what they mean--doctor of dental surgery, I guess, or zoology or fractions or geography, or whatever has to do with rocks and animals and vertebraes. He ain't a bad old scout out of business hours. He pirooted round here one autumn about a dozen years ago and always threatened to come back and hold some more of these here inquests on the long departed; but I heard nothing until two summers ago. He wrote that he wanted to come up to do field work. That's the innocent name he calls his foul trade by. And he wanted to bring his assistant, Professor Pennypacker; and could I put them up?

I said if they would wait till haying was over I could and would. He answered they would wait till my hay was garnered--that's the pretty word he used--and could he also bring his mouthless chit with him? I didn't quite make him. He writes a hand that would never get by in a business college. I thought it might be something tame he carried in a cage, and would stay quiet all day while he was out pursuing his repulsive practices. It didn't sound troublesome.

I never made a worse guess. It was his daughter he talked about that way. She was all right enough, though astounding when you had expected something highly zoological and mouthless instead of motherless. She was a tall roan girl with the fashionable streamline body, devoted to the ukulele and ladies' wearing apparel. But not so young as that sounds. Her general manner of conduct was infantile enough, but she had tired eyes and a million little lines coming round 'em, and if you got her in a strong light you saw she was old enough to have a serious aim in life.

She did use massage cream and beauty lotions with a deep seriousness you wouldn't suspect her of when she sat out in the hammock in the moonlight and scratched this ukulele and acted the part of a mere porch wren. That was really the girl's trade; all she'd ever learned. Mebbe she had misspent her early youth, or mebbe she wasn't meant for anything else--just a butterfly with some of the gold powder brushed off and the wings a little mite crumpled.

Gee! How times have changed since I took my own hair out of a braid! In them fond old days when a girl didn't seem attractive enough for marriage she took up a career--school-teaching probably--and was looked at sidewise by her family. It's different now. In this advanced day a girl seems to start for the career first and take up marriage only when all other avenues is closed. She's the one that is now regarded by her brainy sisters as a failure. I consider it an evil state for the world to be in--but no matter; I can't do anything about it from up here, with haytime coming on.

Anyway, this Lydia girl had not been constructed for any career requiring the serious use of the head; and yet so far she had failed in the other one. She was on the way to being an outcast if she didn't pull something desperate pretty soon. She was looking down on thirty, and I bet her manner hadn't changed a bit since she was looking up to twenty.

Of course she'd learned things about her game. Living round a college she must of tried her wiles on at least ten graduating classes of young men. Naturally she'd learned technique and feminine knavery. She was still flirty enough. She had a little short upper lip that she could lift with great pathos. And the party hadn't more than landed here when I saw that at last she did have a serious aim in life.

It was this here assistant to her father, who was named Professor Oswald Pennypacker; and he was a difficult aim in life, because he didn't need a wife any more than the little dicky birds need wrist watches. You seen his picture there. About thirty-five he was and had devoted all his years to finding out the names of wild animals, which is said to be one of our best sciences. He hadn't got round to women yet. A good snappy skeleton of one might of entertained him if he could of dug it up himself and called it a sedimentary limestone; but he had never trifled with one that was still in commission and ornamented with flesh and clothes.

And fussy! I wish you could of seen that man's room after he had carefully unpacked! A place for everything, and he had everything, too--everything in the world. And if someone switched his soap over to where his tooth paste belonged it upset his whole day. The Chink never dared to go into his room after the first morning. Oswald even made his own bed. Easy to call him an old maid, but I never saw any woman suffer as much agony in her neatness.

His shoes had to be in a row, and his clothes and hats and caps had to be in a row, and there was only one hook in the room his pyjamas could lawfully hang on, and his talcum powder had to stand exactly between the mosquito dope and the bay rum, which had to be flanked precisely by his manicure tools and succeeded by something he put on his hair, which was going the way of all flesh. If some marauder had entered his room in the night and moved his compass over to where his fountain pen belonged he would of woke up instantly and screamed.

And then his new wardrobe trunk! This was a great and holy joy that had come into his bleak life; all new and shiny and complicated, with a beautiful brass lock, one side for clothes on correct hangers and the other side full of drawers and compartments and secret recesses, where he could hide things from himself. It was like a furnished flat, that trunk. And this was his first adventure out in the great cruel world with it. He cherished it as a man had ought to cherish his bride.

He had me in to gaze upon it that first afternoon. You'd of thought he was trying to sell it to me, the way he showed it off. It stood on end, having a bulge like a watermelon in the top, so no vandal could stand it up wrong; and it was wide open to show the two insides. He opened up every room in it, so I could marvel at 'em. He fawned on that trunk. And at the last he showed me a little brass hook he had screwed into the side where the clothes hangers was. It was a very important hook. He hung the keys of the trunk on it; two keys, strung on a cord, and the cord neatly on the hook. This, he told me, was so the keys would never get lost.

"I always have a dread I may lose those keys," says he. "That would be a catastrophe indeed, would it not? So I plan to keep them on that hook; then I shall always know where they are."

The crafty wretch! He could wake up in the night and put his hand on those keys in the dark. Probably he often done so. I spoke a few simple words of praise for his sagacity. And after this interesting lecture on his trunk and its keys, and a good look at the accurate layout of his one million belongings, I had his number. He was the oldest living boy scout.

And this poor girl with the designful eyes on him was the oldest living debutante. I learned afterward that the great aim of science is classification. I had these two classified in no time, like I'd been pottering away at science all my life. Why, say, this Oswald person even carried a patent cigar lighter that worked! You must of seen hundreds of them nickel things that men pay money for. They work fine in the store where you buy 'em. But did you ever see one work after the man got it outside, where he needed it? The owner of one always takes it out, looking strained and nervous, and presses the spring; and nothing happens except that he swears and borrows a match. But Oswald's worked every time. It was uncanny! Only a boy scout could of done it.

So they got settled and the field work begun next day. The two men would ride off early to a place about five miles north of here that used to be an ancient lake--so I was told. I don't know whether it did or not. It's dry enough now. It certainly can't be considered any part of our present water supply. They would take spades and hammers and magnifying glasses and fountain pens, and Oswald's cigar lighter and some lunch, and come back at night with a fine mess of these here trilobites and vertebrae; and ganoids and petrified horseflies, and I don't know what all; mebbe oyster shells, or the footprints of a bird left in solid rock, or the outlines of starfish, or a shrimp that was fifty-two million years old and perfectly useless.

They seemed to have a good time. And Oswald would set up late writing remarks about the petrified game they had brought in.

I didn't used to see much of 'em, except at night when we'd gather for the evening meal. But their talk at those times did wonders for me. All about the aims of science and how we got here and what of it. The Prof was a bulky old boy, with long gray hair and long black eyebrows, and the habit of prevailing in argument. Him and Oswald never did agree on anything in my hearing, except the Chink's corn muffins; and they looked kind of mad at each other when they had to agree on them.

Take the age of this earth on which we make our living. They never got within a couple of hundred million years of each other. Oswald was strong for the earth's being exactly fifty-seven million years old. Trust him to have it down fine! And the old man hung out for four hundred million. They used to get all fussed up about this.

They quoted authorities. One scientist had figured close and found it was fifty-six million years. And another, who seemed to be a headliner in the world of science, said it was between twenty million and four hundred million, with a probability of its being ninety-eight million. I kind of liked that scientist. He seemed so human, like a woman in a bean-guessing contest at the county fair. But still another scientist had horned in with a guess of five hundred million years, which was at least easy to remember.

Of course I never did much but listen, even when they argued this thing that I knew all about; for back in Fredonia, New York, where I went to Sunday-school, it was settled over fifty years ago. Our dear old pastor told us the earth was exactly six thousand years old. But I let the poor things talk on, not wanting to spoil their fun. When one of 'em said the world was made at least fifty-seven million years ago I merely said it didn't look anywhere near as old as that, and let it go.

We had some merry little meals for about a month. If it wasn't the age of God's footstool it would be about what we are descended from, the best bet in sight being that it's from fishes that had lungs and breathed under water as easy as anything, which at least put dimmers on that old monkey scandal in our ancestry. Or, after we moved outside on the porch, which we had to do on account of Oswald smoking the very worst cigars he was able to find in all the world, they would get gabby about all things in the world being simply nothing, which is known to us scientists as metaphysics.

Metaphysics is silly-simple--like one, two, three. It consists of subject and object. I only think I'm knitting this here sock. There ain't any sock here and there ain't any me. We're illusions. The sound of that Chink washing dishes out in the kitchen is a mere sensation inside my head. So's the check for eighty dollars I will have to hand him on the first of the month--though the fool bank down in Red Gap will look on it with uneducated eyes and think it's real. Philosophers have dug into these matters and made 'em simple for us. It took thousands of books to do it; but it's done at last. Everything is nothing. Ask any scientist; he'll make it just as clear to you as a mist in a fog.

And even nothing itself ain't real. They go to that extreme. Not even empty space is real. And the human mind can't comprehend infinite space. I got kind of hot when one of 'em said that. I asked 'em right off whether the human mind could comprehend space that had an end to it. Of course it can't comprehend anything else but infinite space. I had 'em, all right; they had to change the subject. So they switched over to free will. None of us has it.

That made me hot again. I told 'em to try for even five minutes and see if they could act as if they didn't have the power of choice. Of course I had 'em again. Mebbe there ain't free will, but we can't act as if there wasn't. Those two would certainly make the game of poker impossible if folks believed 'em.

I nearly broke up the party that night. I said it was a shame young men was being taught such stuff when they could just as well go to some good agricultural college and learn about soils and crops and what to do in case of a sick bull. Furthermore, I wanted to know what they would do to earn their daily bread when they'd got everything dug up and labelled. Pretty soon they'd have every last organic remains put into a catalogue, the whole set complete and unbroken--and then what? They'd be out of a job.

The Prof laughed and said let the future take care of itself. He said we couldn't tell what might happen, because, as yet, we was nothing really but supermonkeys. That's what he called our noble race--supermonkeys! So I said yes; and these here philosophers that talked about subject and object and the nothingness of nothing reminded me of monkeys that get hold of a looking-glass and hold it up and look into it, and then sneak one paw round behind the glass to catch the other monkey. So he laughed again and said "Not bad, that!"

You could kid the Prof, which is more than I can say for Oswald. Oswald always took a joke as if you'd made it beside the casket holding all that was mortal of his dear mother. In the presence of lightsome talk poor Oswald was just a chill. He was an eater of spoon-meat, and finicking. He could talk like Half Hours With the World's Best Authors, and yet had nothing to say but words.

Still, I enjoyed them evenings. I learned to be interested in vital questions and to keep up with the world's best thought, in company with these gents that was a few laps ahead of it. But not so with the motherless chit. This here Lydia made no effort whatever to keep up with the world's best thought. She didn't seem to care if she never perfected her intellect. It would of been plain to any eye that she was spreading a golden mesh for the Oswald party; yet she never made the least clumsy effort to pander to his high ideals.

She was a wonder, that girl! All day she would set round the house, with her hair down, fixing over a lace waist or making fudge, and not appearing to care much about life. Come night, when the party was due to return, she would spry up, trick herself out in something squashy, with the fashionable streamlike effect and a pretty pair of hammock stockings with white slippers, and become an animated porch wren. That seemed to be the limit of her science.

Most motherless chits would of pretended a feverish interest in the day's hunt for fossil cockroaches, and would even of gone out to chip off rocks with a hammer; but not Lydia. She would never pretend to the least infatuation for organic remains, and would, like as not, strike up something frivolous on her ukulele while Oswald was right in the middle of telling all about the secret of life. She was confident all the time, though, like she already had him stuffed and mounted. She reminded me of that girl in the play What Every Woman Thinks She Knows.

Lydia had great ideas of cooking, which is an art to ensnare males. She said she was a dandy cook and could make Saratoga chips that was all to the Kenosha--whatever that meant. Think of it--Saratoga chips! Over eight hundred ways to cook potatoes, and all good but one; and, of course, she'd have to hit on this only possible way to absolutely ruin potatoes. She could cook other things, too--fudge and stuffed eggs and cheese straws, the latter being less than no food at all. It gives you a line on her.

I suppose it was all you could expect from a born debutante that had been brought up to be nice to college boys on a moonlit porch, allowing them to put another sofa pillow back of her, and wearing their class pins, and so forth. And here she was come to thirty, with fudge and cheese straws and the ukulele still bounding her mental horizon, yet looking far above her station to one of Oswald's serious magnitude.

I never have made out what she saw in him. But then we never do. She used to kid about him--and kid him, for that matter. She'd say to me: "He does care frightfully about himself, doesn't he?" And she said to me and said to him that he had mice in his wainscoting. Mice or rats, I forget which. Any wise bookmaker would of posted her up in this race as a hundred-to-one shot. She had plenty of blandishment for Oswald, but not his kind. She'd try to lure him with furtive femininity and plaintive melodies when she ought to have been putting on a feverish interest in organic fauna. Oswald generally looked through or past her. He give a whole lot more worry to whether his fountain pen would clog up on him. They was both set in their ways, and they was different ways; it looked to me like they never could meet. They was like a couple of trained seals that have learned two different lines of tricks.