Chapter II: Part 2

Mrs. Osbourne, however, was always first of all a lady. With her, men kept their hats off and their coats on, and had an inclination to soften business with bows, and bargains with figures of speech. She was at once so patrician and so gracious that women felt it a kind of social function to deal with her. The drawl of the light voice with its rising inflection was only gently plaintive. The pretty way was winning, and rather pathetic in her position; it drifted about her an aroma of story, and that had its own appeal. The unvarying black of dress and bonnet, with touches of white at neck and wrist, was refined, and made her rosy plumpness look sweeter. It was all an uninventoried part of her stock in trade. And she came to take the same satisfaction in returns in success and cash that she had taken as a girl in results in valentines and cotillion favors.

Mrs. Osbourne had all the traditions of her class and generation. She let her distaste of the situation be known. If it had been possible, she would have concealed it like a scandal. As it was, with very proud apology, she made the necessity of her case understood: her object was bread and butter, not any of these new Woman's Rights--unwomanly, bourgeoise!

Nevertheless, it was not only true that it suited her to be doing something with some point and result, but that the life of action and influence among people suited her. The work came to interest her for itself as well as for its object; that interest was a factor in her success; and the success again both stimulated and further equipped her.

As she got into training and over the first sore muscles of mind and body, work began to strengthen her. The nerves and small ailments grew secondary, were overlooked, actually lessened. There need be nothing esoteric in saying that a vital interest in life is as essential to health as to happiness. One need consider only the practical and physical effects of interest and self-forgetfulness, serenity and self-resource.

Sometimes her increasing trade took her away for two or three days, as far as Louisville or Cincinnati. The thought of Guy followed her, a sweet pain. She found herself hurrying back to her bright prisoner, and because of both conditions the marvel of that brightness grew on her, together with certain embarrassed comparisons. More than anything else, she admired his strength where she had been weak.

His brightness seemed to her the most pathetic thing about him; it was so sorry. It was indeed the epitome of his tragedy. To be as unobtrusive as possible, and, when necessarily in evidence, as pleasant as possible, was the role he had assigned himself. It was the one thing he could do, the only thing he could do for her.

Doubtless the very controlling of the nervousness helped it. Moreover, his revolting organization was gradually adapting itself somewhat to the new conditions. Sensitive and uncertain tendrils of vitality began to creep out from the roots of a blighted vigor.

Bessie, increasingly perceptive, began to suspect that what she saw was the brightness after the storm. She wondered what his long solitary hours were like when she was away. What must they be, with him helpless, disappointed, lonely, liable to maddening attacks of nerves? But he assured her that he was perfectly comfortable; Mammy Dinah was faithful and competent; and he was really making headway with the German and French that he had taken up because he could put them down as need was, and because--they might come in, in some way, some time. “In heaven?” Bessie wondered secretly, but, enlightened by her own experience, saw the advantage of his being entertained.

“You're too much alone,” she said, feeling for the trouble. “And so am I,” she added, thoughtfully. She should have noticed his eyes at that last. He had developed a sort of controlled voracity for endearment, but he never asked for it. In the old days he had taken his own masterfully, with no doubts. Now he waited. He did not starve. She cajoled him and coaxed his appetite and patted the pillows, and made pretty, laughing eyes at him and fate quite in her habitual manner. Her touch and tone of affection had never been so free. But in that very fact he found another sting.

“The better I do on the road, the more they keep me out,” she was saying. “We can't go on this way. I've been thinking lately--Could you bear to go North, Guy, and to live in a city, among strangers? Perhaps at headquarters there might be an opening for me that would let me settle down.”

“What! Cincinnati! Is there any such chance?”

“You'd _like_ it? Why on earth--Are you so bored here?”

“Oh, Bibi, have you never thought of it? In a city there'd be some chance of something I could do!”

“You? Oh, Guy!” After she had accepted the care of him, and that so pleasantly, he wasn't satisfied! “Is there anything you lack here?” She was hurt.

It was replaying the old parts reversed. Once _he_ had grieved that he could not give her enough to content her.

“A--h--” He turned his head away and flung an arm up over his eyes.

She understood only that he was suffering. “But, Guy, there's nothing you could do, possibly. It's not to be expected. Have I complained?” She fell back on the kindly imbecility of the nurse. “Now you're not to worry about that, at least until you're better--”

“Better?” He forgot the lines in which he had schooled himself. The man overrode the amateur actor. “That's not the thing to hope for. Why couldn't it have killed me--that first fall?” (“My dear, my dear!” she stammered.) “There would have been some satisfaction in getting out of the way, and that in decent fashion; like a charge of powder, not like a rubbish-heap. I can't accept it of you, Bibi. I'm enraged for you. I can't be grateful. I'm ashamed.”

She understood now.

What could she say? A dozen things, and she did; things about as satisfying as theology at the grave. He did not answer nor respond. When he relaxed at last it was simply to her arms around him, his head on her bosom, her wordless notes of tenderness and consolation.

He was suffering, and chiefly for her, and what a fighter he was! Who but he would ever have thought of _his_ doing anything?

So there might be cases in which it was really more helpful and generous not to do things for people, but to let them do for themselves. She couldn't fancy his doing enough to amount to anything. He oughtn't to! But if it would make him any happier he should have his make-believe--yes, and without knowing it was make-believe. Doing things that were of no value to any one was so disheartening. She knew. Like perfunctory exercise for your health.

Her own business in Cincinnati proved so brief as to take her breath. His was more difficult. The plough was still mightier than either sword or pen. Few markets were open to an inactive man whose hours must be short and irregular, and whose chief qualifications seemed to be a valiant spirit and a store of reminiscences, in a time when reminiscences were as easy to get as advice.

She was delayed in her return, growing more and more anxious at the thought of his anxiety. When she boarded the south-bound train, she went down the aisle, looking for a seat, with her short steps hurried as if it would get her home sooner.

Mrs. Grey leaned over and motioned her, and as she sat down, looked critically at the bright eyes and pink cheeks. “You certainly do look well nowadays, Bessie.”

Doubtless Bessie's color was partly excitement and rush.

“Oh, I'm well,” absently.

“Funny kind of dyspepsia, wasn't it, to be cured by eating around, the way you have to do.”

“Oh, dyspepsia!” The nettles brought back her attention. People needn't belittle her troubles! “I still have that dyspepsia. But if you had to be as busy as I, Mrs. Grey, you'd know that there are times when nothing but sudden death can interfere.” Even Mrs. Grey's prickings, however, were washed over to-day by Balm of Gilead. “Still, it has come to something. The company has given me Cincinnati for my territory.”

“Really?” Not that Mrs. Grey doubted her veracity. “Well, you always did succeed at anything you put your hand to. It has been the most surprising thing! You know, I tell everybody, Bessie, that you deserve all the credit in the world for the way you have taken hold.” Bessie stiffened; neither need they sympathize too much! “A girl brought up as you were, who always had the best of everything.” _The best of everything!_ The familiar phrase was like a bell, sending wave after wave of memory singing through Bessie's mind. “And still I never saw any one to whom the wind has been so tempered as to you: when you were sick you could afford it, and now that it's inconvenient--Things always did seem to work smoother with you, and come out better, than with any of the rest of us.”

Bessie sat looking at her, and, in the speech, saw her own petulance of a moment before--any number of her own speeches, in fact, inverted, as things are in a glass. Indeed, Mrs. Grey had held up a reflector. Bessie had met herself. And she saw herself, as in a mirror-maze, from all angles, down diminishing perspectives, from the woman she was to the girl she had been.

She had been quite unconscious of the slow transformation in her habits of thought. It is so in life. One toils up the thickly wooded hillside, intent only on the footing, and comes suddenly on a high clearing, overlooking valley and path, defining a new horizon.

“I never had the best of everything, Mrs. Grey,” she said. “Nobody has. Every life and every situation in life has its bad conditions--and its good ones. I haven't had any more happiness--nor trouble than most people. It strikes me things are pretty equally divided. We only think they aren't when we don't know all about it. We see the surface of other people's lives, not their private drawbacks or compensations. There are always both. But other people's troubles are so much easier to bear than our own, their good luck so much less deserved and qualified! With all I had as a girl I didn't have contentment. And now, with all I lack, I don't know any one with whom I'd change places.”

What was the use with Mrs. Grey?

But alone, the thought kept widening ring after ring: How little choice there was of conditions in life; how fortune tends to seek its level; how one man has the meat and another the appetite; and another, without either, can find in the fact the flavor of a joke or chew the cud of reflection over it. Of the three, Bessie thought she would rather be the one with the disposition. But that could be cultivated. Look at hers! Circumstances had started it in a sort of aside, but she would take the hint.

The cure for dissatisfaction was to recognize one's balance of good.

Guy was watching for her at the window. She was half conscious that he looked unusually haggard, but there were so many other thoughts at sight of him that they washed over the first.

She swung her reticule. “It's all right!” and she ran up the walk, a most feminine swirl of progress. She got to him breathless. “I've found a house that will give you its German correspondence to translate and write, and it won't be so much but that you can do it as you're able, within reason. Now, sir!”

For a minute it seemed as if Guy's whole body was alive. The weak and shaken invalid still had something of unconquerable boyishness in the lift of his head and the light of his eyes. “Good! That will do for a start.” The old spirit, to which hers always answered. If she didn't believe he would actually do something worth while in the end! Then promptly, of old habit, he thought of her. “Bibi! You took your time for that.”

“Not all of it, in good sooth, fair lord.” She spread out her skirts, lady-come-to-see fashion, and strutted across the room. “Mrs. Osbourne has a new 'job' and a 'raise.'” (Incidentally Mrs. Osbourne had never before been so advanced in her language.)

“Bully for you!” he shouted, so genuinely that she ran back to him and shook and hugged his shoulders. How she _liked_ him!

“What a thorough girl you are, Bibi!”

“Oh, and to-day I've been laughing at myself; as silly as I used to be, counting so much on a mere change of circumstances. Of course something unpleasant will develop there too. But at least the harness will rub in a different place. On the whole, it will be better. Guy, do you know, I have just gotten rid of envy and discontent, and that without endangering ambition. I'll give you the charm; it's a sort of cabalistic _spell_--the four P's--Occu_p_ation, Res_p_onsibility, _P_urpose, and _P_hilosophy.”

“Yes,” he said, “the most worth-while thing in life is to feel you are accomplishing something--doing your work well and getting proportionate returns.”

The tone touched her. “Poor old Guy!” so generously congratulatory of her flaunted advantages. How stupid she was! Poor Guy! her pretty creed scattered at a breath like a dead dandelion-ball. Envy she had disposed of, but what about pity? What had he to make up? “The idea of my talking of happiness, with you caged here!”

“Perhaps that was the point of it all,” he said, “to give you your chance.”

“That would be a beautifully humble thing for me to think, now wouldn't it?” Yet she had once complained that the point of it all was to interfere with her. “And so sweetly generous. Your chance being--?”

“To serve as a means of grace to you?” He smiled. “I am glad to be of some use--and honored to be of that one!” he hurried to add, elaborately humorous.

But what she was noticing was the flagging effort of his vivacity. Her half-submerged first impression of him was coming to the surface: he did look unusually haggard. “You haven't been good while I was away. Now don't tell stories. Don't I know you? No more storms, Guy!” she warned.

His eye evaded hers. “I am seriously questioning whether you ought to make this change. All your friends are here.”

“Oh, as to that! There might be advantages in working among strangers. Mrs. Grey fairly puts herself out to let me understand that she is a friend in need!” She reined herself up, recollecting, but too late. “Oh, Guy, don't mind so for me. Why, the South is full of women doing what I am, only so many of them are doing it--without--the Guys who never came back!”

“Lucky dogs!” subterraneously. Then, seeing her apprehensive of a second flare-up of that volcanic fire: “So gentlemanly of them, too, Bibi. How can those few years of love be worth a life of this to you?”

“Those few years? why, Guy! of love? Is that how _you_ feel?” Her eyes filled; her whole face quivered. “Oh, Guy--be willing for my sake. I never knew what love could mean until lately.”

His grasp hurt her knuckles. “Yes, dear, I have seen. It's very sweet. It's the mother in you, Bibi, and my helplessness. Of course! What could a woman _love_ in a dependent, half-corpse of a no-man?”

For a moment she was too surprised to speak. She stared at him. “What a notion! and it isn't true! You never were any more a man than you've been through these two dreadful years.” She sounded fairly indignant. “And for my part, I never appreciated what you were half as much.”

“Love doesn't begin with a _P_,” he remarked to the opposite wall.

“But what do you suppose the _purpose_ was?”

“Love?”

“More. _You_.”

“You never told me.” That strange voice and averted face!

“How should I fancy you wouldn't know? I had never thought it out myself until just now. It has simply been going on from day to day, as natural and quiet as growing--” A bewildering illumination was spreading in her mind. “Look here, young man”--she forced his face around to see it,--“what goblins have you been hatching in the night-watches?” The raillery broke. “Dear, is that what has been troubling you? Is there anything else?”

He looked at her now. “Anything else trouble me, if I really have you, and a chance to do a little something for you?”

It was their apotheosis. They had never known a moment equal to it before; could never know just another such again. In a very deep way it was the first kiss of love for them both.

Bessie came back to herself with that sense of arriving, of having been infinitely away, with which one drops from abstraction.

Where had they been in that state of absent mind?

It was as if they had met out of time, space, matter.... And as she thought of his words, in the light of his eyes, pity too was qualified, and that without endangering helpfulness. He, too, had his balance of good. Yes, things squared in the end.

Her creed was quick. The scattered dandelion seed sprouted all around her.

Pap Overholt

BY ALICE MACGOWAN

Up and down the long corn rows Pap Overholt guided the old mule and the small, rickety, inefficient plough, whose low handles bowed his tall, broad shoulders beneath the mild heat of a mountain June sun. As he went--ever with a furtive eye upon the cabin--he muttered to himself, shaking his head:

“Say I sha'n' do hit. Say he don't want me a-ploughin' his co'n. My law! Whut you gwine do? Thar's them chillen--thar's Huldy. They got to be fed--they 'bleeged to have meat and bread. Ef I don't--”

Again he lifted his apprehensive glance toward the cabin; and this time it encountered a figure stepping from the low doorway--a young fellow with an olive face, delicately cut features, black curling hair, the sleep still lingering in his dark eyes. He approached the fence--the sorry, broken fence,--put his hands upon it, and called sharply, “Pap!”

The old man released the plough-handles and came toward the youth, shrinking like a truant schoolboy called up for discipline.

“Pap, this is the way you do me all the time--come an' plough in my co'n when I don't know nothin' about hit--when I don't want hit done,--tryin' to make everybody think I'm lazy and no 'count. Huldy tellin' me I ought to be ashamed of myse'f, in bed while my po' old pappy--'at hain't ploughed a row of his own for years--is a-gittin' my co'n outen the weeds.”

The father stood, a chidden culprit. The boy had worked himself up to the desired point.

“You jest do hit to put a shame on me. Now, Pap, you take that mule--”

“W'y, Sammy,--w'y, Sammy honey, you know Pappy don't do it fer nair sech a reason. Hit don't look no sech a thing--like you was shif'less an' lazy. Hit jes look like Pappy got nothin' to do, an' love to come and give you a turn with yo' co'n; an', Sammy honey,”--the good farmer for the moment getting the better of the timid, soft-hearted parent,--“hit is might'ly in the weeds, boy. Don't you reckon I better jes--”

The other began, “I tell you--”

“There, there! Ne'mine, Sammy. Ef you don't want Pappy to plough no mo', Pappy jes gwine to take the plough right outen the furrow and put old Beck up. Pappy gwine--”

The boy turned away, his point made, and strolled back to the cabin. The old man, murmuring a mixture of apologies, assurances, and expostulations, went pathetically about the putting up of the mule, the setting away of the plough.

Nobody knew when Pap Overholt began to be so called, nor when his wife had received the affectionate title of Aunt Cornelia. It was a naming that grew of itself. Forty years ago the pair had been married--John, a sturdy, sunny-tempered young fellow of twenty-one, six feet in his stockings, broad of shoulder, deep of chest, and with a name and a nature clean of all tarnish; Cornelia Blackshears, a typical mountain girl of the best sort.

When, at the end of the first year, old Dr. Pastergood, who had ushered Cornelia herself into this world, turned to them with her first child in his arms, the young father stood by, controlling his great rush of primal joy, his boyish desire to do something noisy and violent; the mother looked first at her husband, then into the old doctor's face, with eyes of passionate delight and appeal. He was speechless a moment, for pity. Then he said, gently:

“Hit's gone, befo' hit ever come to us, Cornely. Hit never breathed a breath of this werrisome world.”

A man who had practised medicine in the Turkey Tracks for twenty-five years --a doctor among these mountain people, where poverty is the rule, hardship a condition of life, and tragedy a fairly familiar element, would have had his fibre well stiffened. The brave old campaigner, who had sat beside so many death-beds and so many birth-beds, and had seen so many come and so many go, at the exits and entrances of life, met the matter stoutly and without flinching. His stoic air, his words of passive acceptance, laid a calm upon the first outburst of bitter grief from the two young creatures. Later, when John had gone to do the chores, the old doctor still sat by Cornelia's bed. He took the girl's hand in his--an unusual demonstration of feeling for a mountaineer--and said to her, gently,

“Cornely, there won't never be no mo'--there'll be nair another baby to you, honey.”

The stricken girl fastened her eyes upon his in dumb pain and protest. She said nothing, the wound was too deep; only her lips quivered pitifully and the tears ran down upon the pillow.

“Now, now, honey, don't ye go to fret that-a-way. W'y, Cornely, ye was made for a mother; the Lord made ye for such--an' do ye 'low 'at He don't know what He's a-gwine to do with the work of His hands? 'For mo' air the children of the desolate'--don't ye know Scripter says?--than of them that has many. Lord love ye, honey, girl, you'll be mother to a minny and a minny. They air a-comin'; the Lord's a-sendin' 'em. W'y, honey,--you and John will have children gathered around you--”

The one cry broke forth from Cornelia which she ever uttered through all her long grief of childlessness: “Oh, but, Dr. Pastergood, I wanted mine--my own--and John's! Oh, I reckon it was idolatry the way I felt in my heart; I thought, to have a little trick-bone o' my bone, flesh o' my flesh--look up at me with John's eyes--” A sob choked her utterance, and never again was it resumed.

In the years that followed, the pair--already come to be called Pap Overholt and Aunt Cornely--well fulfilled the old doctor's prophecy. The very next year after their baby was laid away, John's older brother, Jeff, lost his wife, and the three little children Mandy left were brought at once to them, remaining in peace and welfare for something over a year (Jeff was a circumspect widower), making the place blithe with their laughter and their play. Then their father married, and they were taken to the new home. He was an Overholt too, and shared that powerful paternal instinct with John. Three times this thing happened. Three times Jeff buried a wife, and the little Jeff Overholts, with recruited ranks, were brought to Aunt Cornelia and Pap John. When Jeff married his fourth wife--Zulena Spivey, a powerful, vital, affluent creature, of an unusual type for the mountains,--and the children (there were nine of them by this time) went to live with their step-mother, whose physique and disposition promised a longer tenure than any of her predecessors, Pap and Aunt Cornelia sat upon the lonely hearth and assured each other with tears that never again would they take into their home and their lives, as their very own, any children upon whom they could have no sure claim.

“Tell ye, Cornely, this thing o' windin' yer heart-strings around and around a passel o' chaps for a year or so and then havin' 'em tore out--well, hit takes a mighty considerable chunk o' yer heart along with 'em.” And the wife, looking at him with wet eyes, nodded an assent.

It was next May that Pap Overholt, who had been doing some hauling over as far as Big Turkey Track, returned one evening with a little figure perched beside him on the high wagon seat. “The Lord sent him, honey,” he said, and handed the child down to his wife. “He ain't got a livin' soul on this earth to lay claim to him. He is ourn as much as ef he was flesh and bone of us. I even tuck out the papers.”

That evening, the two sitting watching the little dark face in its sleep, Pap told his story. Driving across the flank of Yellow Old Bald, beyond Lost Cabin, he had passed a woman with five children sitting beside the road in Big Buck Gap.

“Cornely, she looked like a picture out of a book,” whispered Pap. “This chap's the livin' image of her. Portugee blood--touch o' that melungeon tribe from over in the Fur Cove. She had a little smooth face shaped like a aig; that curly hair hangin' clean to her waist, dark like this baby's, but with the sun all through it; these eyebrows o' his'n that's lifted in the middle o' his forred, like he cain't see why some onkindness was did him; and little slim hands and feet; all mighty furrin to the mountains. I give 'er a lift--she was goin' to Hepzibah, huntin' fer some kind o' charity she'd heard could be got there; and this little trick he tuck to me right then.”

The woman bent over and looked long at the small olive face, so delicately cut, the damp rings of hair on his forehead, the tragic lift of the brows above the nose bridge, the thin-lipped scarlet mouth. “My baby,” she murmured; then lifted her glance with the question: “An' how come ye to have him? Did she--did that womern--”

“No, no. 'Twas this-a-way,” Pap interrupted her. “When I came back from Big Turkey Track, I went down through Hepzibah--I couldn't git this chap's eyes--ner his little hands--out o' my head; I found myse'f a-studyin' on 'em the hull enjurin' time. She was dead when I got thar. She'd died to Squire Cannon's, and they was a-passellin' out the chillen 'mongst the neighbors. No sooner I put foot on the po'ch 'n this little soul come a-runnin' to me, an' says: W'y, here's my pappy, now. I tole you-all I did have a pappy. Now look--see--here he is.' Then he peeked up at me, and he put up his little arms, an' he says, jest as petted, and yit a little skeered, he says, 'Take me, pappy.' When I tuck him up, he grabbed me round the neck and dug his little face into mine. Then he looked around at all the folks, and sort o' shivered, and put his face back in my neck--still ez a little possum when you've killed the old ones an' split up the tree an' drug out the nest.”

Both faces were wet with tears now. Pap went on: “I had the papers made right out--I knowed you'd say yes, Cornely. He's Samuel Ephraim Overholt. A-comin' home, the little weenty chap looks up at me suddent an' axes, 'Is they a mammy to we-all's house whar we goin' now?' Lord! Lord!” Pap shook his head gently, as signifying the utter inadequacy of mere words.

Little Sammy grew and thrived in the Overholt home. The tiny rootlets of his avid, unconscious baby life he thrust out in all directions through that kind soil, sucking, sucking, grasping, laying hold, drawing to him and his great little needs sustenance material and spiritual. More keen and capable to penetrate were those thready little fibres than the irresistible water-seeking tap-root of the cottonwood or the mesquite of the plains; more powerful to clasp and to hold than the cablelike roots of the rock-embracing cedar. The little new member was so much living sunshine, gay, witching, brilliant, erratic in disposition as he was singular and beautiful in his form and coloring, but always irresistibly endearing, dangerously winning. When he had been Sammy Overholt only two weeks, he sat at table with his parents one day and scornfully rejected the little plate that was put before him.

“No!” he cried, sharply. “No, no! I won't have it--ole nassy plate!”

“W'y, baby! W'y, Sammy,” deprecated Cornelia, “that's yo' own little plate that mammy washed for you. You mustn't call it naisty.”

“Hit air nassy,” insisted young Samuel. “Hit got 'pecks--see!” and the small finger pointed to some minute flaw in the ware which showed as little dots on the white surface.

Cornelia, who, though mild and serene, was possessed of firmness and a sense of justice, would have had the matter fairly settled. “He ort not to cut up this-away, John,” she urged. “He ort to take his little plate and behave hisse'f; 'r else he ort to be spanked,--he really ort, John, in jestice to the child.”

But John was of another mould. “Law, Cornely! Hit's jest baby-doin's. The idee o' him a-settin' up 'at yo' dishes ain't clean! That shore do beat all!” And he had executed an exchange of plates under Cornelia's deprecating eyes. And so the matter went.

Again, upon a June day, Sammy was at play with the scion of the only negro family which had ever been known in all the Turkey Track regions. The Southern mountaineers have little affinity, socially or politically, with the people of the settlements. There were never any slaveholders among them, and the few isolated negroes were treated with almost perfect equality by the simple-minded mountain dwellers.

“Sammy honey, you an' Jimmy mus' cl'ar up yo' litter here. Don't leave it on mammy's nice flo'. Hit's mighty nigh supper-time. Cl'ar up now, 'fo' Pappy comes.”

Sammy stiffened his little figure to a startling rigidity. “I ain't a-goin' to work!” he flung out. “Let him do it; _he's a nigger_!” And this was the last word of the argument.

This was Sammy--handsome, graceful, exceedingly winning, sudden and passionate, disdaining like a young zebra the yoke of labor, and, when crossed, absolutely beyond all reason or bounds; the life of every gathering of young people as he grew up; much made of, deferred to, sought after, yet everywhere blamed as undutiful and ungrateful.

“Oh, I do p'intedly wish the neighbors would leave us alone,” sighed Pap Overholt, when these reports came to him. “As ef I didn't know what I wanted--as ef I couldn't raise my own chile;” and as he said this he ever avoided Aunt Cornelia's honest eye.

It was when Sammy was eighteen, the best dressed, the best horsed--and the idlest--to be found from Little Turkey Track to the Fur Cove, from Tatum's to Big Buck Gap--that he went one day, riding his sorrel filly, down to Hepzibah, ostensibly to do some errands for Aunt Cornelia, but in fact simply in search of a good time. The next day Blev Straly, a rifle over his shoulder and a couple of hounds at heel, stopped a moment at the chopping-block where Pap was splitting some kindling.

“I was a-passin',” he explained--“I was jest a-passin', an' I 'lowed I'd drap in an' tell ye 'bout Sammy. Hit better be me than somebody 'at likes to carry mean tales and wants to watch folks suffer.” Aunt Cornelia was beside her husband now.

“No, no,” Blev answered the look on the two faces; “nothin' ain't the matter of Sammy. He's jest married--that little Huldy Frew 'at's been waitin' on table at Aunt Randy Card's _ho_-tel. You know, Aunt Cornely, she is a mighty pretty little trick--and there ain't nothin' bad about the gal. I jest knowed you and Pap 'ud feel mighty hurt over Sammy doin' you-all like you was cruel to him--like he had to run away to git married; and I 'lowed I better come and tell you fust.”

The “little Huldy gal” was, as Blev Straly had described her, a mighty pretty little trick, and nothing bad about her. The orphan child of poor mountaineers, bound out since the death of her parents when she was ten years old, she had been two years now working for Aunt Randy Card, who kept the primitive hotel at Hepzibah. Even in this remote region Huldy showed that wonderful--that irrepressible--upward impulse of young feminine America, that instinctive affinity for the finer things of life, that marvellous understanding of graces and refinements, and that pathetic and persistent groping after them which is the marked characteristic of America's daughters. The child was not yet sixteen, a fair little thing with soft ashen hair and honest gray eyes, the pink upon her cheek like that of a New England girl.

At first this marriage--which had been so unkindly conducted by Sammy, used by him apparently as a weapon of affront--seemed to bring with it only good, only happiness. The boy was more contented at home, less wayward, and the feeling of apprehension that had dwelt continually in the hearts of Pap and Aunt Cornelia ever since his adolescence now slept. The little Huldy--her own small cup apparently full of happiness--was all affectionate gratitude and docility. She healed the bruises Sammy made, poured balm in the wounds he inflicted; she was sunny, obedient, grateful enough for two.

But a new trait was developed in Sammy's nature--perversity. Life was made smooth to his feet; the things he needed--even the things which he merely desired--were procured and brought to him. Love brooded above and around him--timid, chidden, but absolute, adoring. Nothing was left him--no occupation was offered for his energies--but to resent these things, to quarrel with his benefits. And now the quarrel began.

Its outcome was this: Toward the end of the first year of the marriage, upon a bleak, forbidding March day--a day of bitter wind and icy sleet,--there rode one to the Overholt door who called upon Pap and Aunt Cornelia to hitch up and come with all possible haste to old Eph'm Blackshears, Cornelia's father--a man who had lived to fourscore, and who now lay at his last, asking for his daughter, his baby chile, Cornely.

For days Sammy had been in a very ill-promising mood; but he brightened as the foster-parents drove away in the bleak, gray, hostile forenoon, Huldy helping Aunt Cornelia to dress and make ready, tucking her lovingly into the wagon and beneath the thick old quilt.

The elder woman yearned over the girl with a mother's compassionate tenderness. Both Aunt Cornelia and Pap John looked with a passionate, delighted anticipation to when they would have their own child's baby upon their hearth. It was the more notable marks of this tenderness, of this joyous anticipation, which Sammy had begun to resent--the gifts and the labors showered upon the young wife in relation to her coming importance, which he had barely come short of refusing and repelling. “Whose wife is she, I'd like to know? Looks like I cain't do nothin' for my own woman--a-givin' an' a-givin' to Huldy, like she was some po' white trash, some beggar!” But he had only “sulled,” as his mother called it, never quite able to reach the point he desired of actually flinging the care, the gifts, and the loving labors back in the foster-parents' faces.

Pappy Blackshears passed away quietly in the evening; and when he had been made ready for his grave by Cornelia's hands, her anxiety for the little daughter at home would not let her remain longer.

“I'm jest 'bleeged to go to Huldy,” she explained to the relatives and neighbors gathered at the old Blackshears place. “I p'intedly dassent to leave her over one night--and not a soul with her but Sammy, and he nothin' but a chile--and not a neighbor within a mild of our place--and sech a night! Pap and me we'll hitch up an' mak' 'as'e back to Huldy. We'll be here to the funeral a Sunday--but I dassent to stay away from Huldy nair another hour now.” And so, at ten o'clock that bitter night, Pap and Aunt Cornelia came hurrying home.

As the wagon drove up the mountain trail to the house, the hounds came belling joyously to meet them; but no light gleamed cheerfully from the windows; no door was flung gayly open; no little Huldy cried out her glad greeting. Filled with formless apprehensions, Pap climbed over the wheel, lifted Cornelia down, and dreading they knew not what, the two went,--holding by each other's hand,--opened the door, and entered, shrinking and reluctant. They blew the smouldering coals to a little flame, piled on light-wood till the broad blaze rolled up the chimney, then looked about. No living soul was in any room. Finally Cornelia caught sight of a bit of paper stuck upon the high mantel. She tore it down, and the two read slowly and laboriously together the few lines written in Sammy's hand:

“I ain't going to allow my wife to live off any man's charity. I ain't going to be made to look like nothing in the eyes of people any longer. I've taken my wife to my own place, where I can support her myself. I had to borrow your ox-cart and steers to move with, and Huldy made me bring some things she said mother had give her, but I'll pay all this back, and more, for I intend to be independent and not live on any man's bounty.

“Respectfully, your son,

“SAMUEL”

The two old faces, pallid and grief-struck, confronted each other in the shaken radiance of the pine fire.

“Oh, my po' chile, my po' little Huldy! Whar? His own place! My law!--whar? Whar has he drug that little soul?”

An intuition flashed into Pap Overholt's mind. He grasped his wife's arm. “W'y, Cornely,” he cried, “hit's that cabin on The Bench! Don't ye know, honey? I give him that land when he was sixteen year old,--time he brung the prize home from the school down in the settlemint.”

“The Bench! Oh, Lord--The Bench! W'y, hit 'll be the death of her. John, we cain't git to her too quick.” And she ran from cupboard to press, from press to chest, from chest to bureau drawer, piling into John's arms the flask of brandy, the homely medicines, the warm garments, such bits of food as she could catch up that were palatable and portable. Pap, with more vulnerable emotions and less resolute nature, was incapable of speech; he could only suffer dumbly.

Arrived at the abandoned cabin on The Bench, the picture that greeted them crushed Pap's soft heart to powder, but roused in Aunt Cornelia a rage that would have resulted in a sharp settlement with Sammy, had it not been that, now as always, to reach the offender a blow must go through that same pitiful heart of John's. The young people had not long been at the cabin when the parents arrived. The little Huldy, moaning piteously, with a stricken, terrified look in her big, childish eyes, was crouched upon the floor beside a rickety chair. Sammy, sullen and defiant, was at the desolate hearth, fumbling with unskilled hands at the sodden chunks of wood he had there gathered.

The situation was past words. Pap, after one look at Huldy, went about the fire-building, the slow tears rolling down his cheeks. While Aunt Cornelia brought the bedding, the warm blankets and wrappings, and made the little suffering creature a comfortable couch, Pap wrought at the forlorn, gaping fireplace like a suffering giant. When the leaping flames danced and shouted up the chimney till the whole cabin was filled with the physical joy of their light and warmth, when steaming coffee and the hastily fetched food had been served to the others, and the little wife lay quietly for the moment, the two elders talked together outside where a corner of the cabin cut off the driving sleet. Then Sammy was included, and another council was held, this time of three.

No. He would not budge. That was _his_ wife. A fellow that was man enough to have a wife ought to be man enough to take keer of her. He wasn't going to have his child born in the house of charity. There was no thoroughfare. Sammy was allowed to withdraw, and the council of two was resumed. As a result of its deliberations, Pap John drove away through the darkness and the sleet. By midnight two trips had been made between the big double log house at the Overholt place and the wretched cabin on The Bench, and all that Sammy would suffer to be brought to them or done for them had been brought and done. The cabin was, in a very humble way, inhabitable. There was food and a small provision for the immediate present. And here, upon that wild March night of screaming wind and sleet, and with only Aunt Cornelia as doctor and nurse, Huldy's child was born.

And now a new order of things began.

Sammy's energies appeared to be devoted to the thwarting of Pap Overholt's care and benefits. There should be no cow brought to the cabin; and so Pap John, who was getting on in years now, and had long since given up hard, active work, hastened from his bed at four o'clock in the morning, milked a cow, and carried the pail of fresh milk to Huldy and the baby, furtively, apologetically. The food, the raiment, everything had to be smuggled into the house little by little, explained, apologized for. The land on The Bench was rich alluvial soil. Sammy, in his first burst of independence, ploughed it (borrowing mule and plough from a neighbor--the one neighbor ever known to be on ill terms with Pap Overholt), and planted it to corn. He put in a little garden, too; while Pap had achieved the establishment of a small colony of hens (every one of whom, it appeared, laid two or three eggs each day--at least that was the way the count came out).

The baby thrived, unconscious of all the grief, the perverse cruelty, the baffled, defeated tenderness about her, and was the light of Pap Overholt's doting eyes, the delight of Aunt Cornelia's heart. When she was eighteen months old, and could toddle about and run to meet them, and chattered that wonderful language which these two hearts of love had all their lives yearned to hear--the dialect of babyhood,--the twin boys came to the cabin on The Bench. And Pap Overholt's lines were harder than ever. Cornelia had sterner stuff in her. She would have called a halt.

“Oh, John!” she expostulated finally, when she saw her husband come home crestfallen one day, with a ham which Sammy had detected him smuggling into the cabin and ordered back,--“John honey, ef you was to stop toting things to the cabin and let it all alone--not pester with it another--”

“Cornely, Cornely!” cried Pap John, “you know Sammy cain't no mo' keep a wife and chillen than a peckerwood kin. W'y, they'd starve! Huldy and the chaps would jest p'intedly starve.”

“No, they won't, John. Ef you could master yo' own soft heart--ef you could stay away (like he's tole ye a minny a time to do, knowin' 'at you was safe not to mind him)--Sammy would stop this here foolishness. He'd come to his senses and be thankful for what the Lord sent, like other people. W'y, John--”

“Cornely honey--don't. Don't ye say another word. I tell ye, this last year there's a feelin' in my throat and in my breast--hyer,”--he laid his hand pathetically over his heart,--“a cur'us, gone, flutterin' feelin'. And when Sammy r'ars up and threatens he'll take Huldy and the chaps--you know,”--he finished with a gesture of the hand and a glance of unspeakable pain,--“when he does that 'ar way, or something comes at me sudden like that--that we may lose 'em, hit seems like--right hyer,”--and his hand went again to his heart,--“that I can't bear it--that hit 'll take my life.”

This was the last time Cornelia ever remonstrated with Pap John. She had a little talk with the new doctor from Hepzibah who bad succeeded old Dr. Pastergood; and after that John was added to the list of her anxieties. He might carry the milk to the cabin on The Bench; he might slip in, when he deemed Sammy away--or asleep--and plough the corn; she saw the tragic folly of it, but must be silent. And so on that particular June morning, when Pap had put up the mule, clambered down the short-cut footway from The Bench to the old house, stopping several times to shake his head again and murmur to himself--“Whut you gwine do? There's them chaps; there's Huldy. Mustn't plough his co'n; mustn't take over air cow. Whut you gwine do?”--Aunt Cornelia's seeing eye noted his perturbation the moment he came in at the door. With tender guile she built up a considerable argument in the matter of a quarterly meeting which was approaching--the grove quarterly, in which Pap John was unfailingly interested, and during which there were always from two to half a dozen preachers, old and young, staying with them. So she led him away--ever so little away--from his ever-present grief.

It was the next day that he said to her, “Cornely, I p'intedly ain't gwine to suffer this hyer filchin' o' co'n them Fusons is a-keepin' up on me.”

“Is the Fusons a-stealin' yo' co'n, John?” she responded, in surprise. “W'y, they got a-plenty, ain't they?”

“Well, no, not adzactly, that is to say, Buck Fuson ain't got a-plenty. He too lazy and shif'less to make co'n of his own; and he like too well to filch co'n from them he puts his spite on. Buck Fuson he tuck a spite at me, last time the raiders was up atter that Fuson hideout; jes set up an' swore 'at I'd gin the word to 'em. You see, honey, he makes him up a spite that-a-way--jes out o' nothin'--'cause hit's sech a handy thing to have around when he comes to want co'n. Thar's some one already purvided to steal from--some one 'at's done him a injury.”

“Pappy! W'y, Johnny honey, sakes alive! What air ye ever a-gwine to do 'long o' that there thing?” For the old man had laboriously fetched out a rusty wolf-trap, and was now earnestly inspecting and overhauling it.

“Whut am I a-gwine to do 'long o' this hyer, Cornely? W'y, I am jes p'intedly a-gwine to set it in my grain-room. Buck Fuson air a bad man, honey. There's two men's blood to his count. They cain't nothin' be done to him for nair a one of 'em--you know, same's I do--'ca'se hit cain't be proved in a co't o' law. But I kin ketch him in this meanness with this hyer little jigger, and I'm a-gwine to do hit, jest ez sure ez my name's John Overholt!”

“Oh, Pappy! A leetle bit o' co'n fer a man's chillen--”

“Now, Cornely honey, that's a womern! Buck Fuson is the wrong kind o' man to have round. He's ben a stealin' my co'n now fer two weeks and mo'. Ef I kin ketch him right out, and give him a fa'r shamin', he'll quit the Turkey Tracks fer good. So fer as Elmiry and the chaps is consarned, they'll be better off without Buck 'n what they is with him.”

At this moment Aunt Cornelia cried out joyously, “Oh, thar's my chile!” and ran to meet her daughter-in-law. The little girl--Cornelia the second--could navigate bravely by herself now, and Huldy was carrying the lusty twin boys. In the flutter of delight over this stolen visit, the ugly wolf-trap threat was forgotten. It had been a month and more since Sammy had set foot in his parents' house. It had gone all over both Turkey Tracks that Sam Overholt declared he would never darken Pap Overholt's door again--Pap Overholt, who had tried to make a pauper of him, loading him with gifts and benefits, like he was shif'less, no-'count white trash! The little Huldy reported him gone to Far Canaan, over beyond Big Turkey Track, in the matter of some employment, which he had not deigned to make clearer to his wife. He would not be back until the day after to-morrow; and meantime she might stay with the old folks two whole days and nights! In the severe school to which life had put her, the little Huldy had developed an astonishing amount of character, of shrewdness, and perception, and a very fair philosophy of her own. To the elder woman's sad observation that it was mighty strange what made Sammy so “onthankful” and so “ha'sh” to his pappy, who had done so much for him, Huldy responded,

“No, Aunt Cornely, hit ain't strange, not a bit.”

“Ain't strange? Huldy child, what do you mean?”

“W'y, don't you know, Aunt Cornely, ef he do Pappy that-a-way, when Pappy do so much fer him, then he don't have to be thankful. When everybody's a-tellin' him, 'Yo' pap's so kind, yo' pap does everything for you; look like you cain't be good enough to him,' he 'bleeged to find some way to shake off all that thankfulness 'at's sech a burden to him. And so when Pappy come a-totin' milk, an' a-totin' pork, an' a-ploughin' his co'n outen the weeds, w'y, Sammy jest draw down his face an' look black at Pappy, and make like he mad at him--like he don't want none o' them things--like Pappy jest pesterin' round him fer nothin'. but meanness. Now mind, Aunt Cornely, I ain't say Sammy knows this his own se'f. But I studied Sammy mighty well, an' _I_ know. Sammy gittin' tell he do me the same way. I wait on him hand and foot; I cook his bacon jest like he tol' me you did it fer him. I fix everything the best I kin (and mebby all three of the chillen a-cryin' after me); and when he come in and see it all ready, and see how hard I got it, and seem like there's a call fer him to be thankful, then Sammy jest turns on hit all. He draw down his face at me and he say, black like: 'I don't want no bacon--what did you fix that shirt for that-a-way? Take away that turnip sallet--I cain't git nothin' like I want it.' Then, you know,” with a little smile up into the other's face, half pitiful, half saucy,--“Then you know, Sammy don't have to be thankful. Hit was all done wrong.”

It was the next evening--Saturday evening. The entire household (which included Elder Justice and two young preachers from Big Turkey Track, with Brother Tarbush, one of the new exhorters) had returned from the afternoon's meeting in the grove. Supper had been eaten and cleared away. The babies had been put to sleep; the two women and the five men--all strong and striking types of the Southern mountaineer--were gathered for the evening reading and prayer. Elder Justice, now nearly eighty years old, a beautiful and venerable person, had opened the big Bible, and after turning the leaves a moment, raised his grave, rugged face and read: “'Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death.'”

He paused, and on the intense stillness which followed the ceasing of his voice--the silence of evening in the deep mountains--there broke a long, shrill, agonized scream.

As every one of the little circle leaped to his feet, Aunt Cornelia's eyes sought her husband's face, and his hers. After that grinding, terrible cry, the stillness of the night was unstirred. Pap Overholt sprang to the hearth--where even in the midsummer months a log smoulders throughout the day, to be brightened into a cheery blaze mornings and evenings,--seized a brand, one or two of the others following his example, and ran through the doorway, across the little chip-yard, making for the low-browed log barn and the grain-room beside it.

None who witnessed that scene ever forgot it. Each one told it afterward in his own way, declaring that not while he lived could the remembrance of it pass from his mind. Pap Overholt's tall figure leaped crouching through the low doorway, and next instant lifted the blazing brand high above his head; the others followed, doing the same. There by the grain-bin, with ashy countenance and shaking limbs, the sweat of anguish upon his forehead, his eyes roving dumbly around the circle of faces revealed by the flickering light of the brands--there with the dreadful wolf-trap (locked by its chain to a stanchion) hanging to his right arm, its fangs bitten through and through the flesh, stood Sammy.