Chapter XII (1)

Mr. Van Kamp, back in the woodshed, looked about him with an eye of content.

“Rather cozy for a woodshed,” he observed. “I wonder if we couldn’t scare up a little session of dollar limit?”

Both Uncle Billy and Mr. Ellsworth were willing. Death and poker level all Americans. A fourth hand was needed, however. The stage driver was in bed and asleep, and Mr. Ellsworth volunteered to find the extra player.

“I’ll get Ralph,” he said. “He plays a fairly stiff game.” He finally found his son on the porch, apparently alone, and stated his errand.

“Thank you, but I don’t believe I care to play this evening,” was the astounding reply, and Mr. Ellsworth looked closer. He made out, then, a dim figure on the other side of Ralph.

“Oh! Of course not!” he blundered, and went back to the woodshed.

Three-handed poker is a miserable game, and it seldom lasts long. It did not in this case. After Uncle Billy had won the only jack-pot deserving of the name, he was allowed to go blissfully to sleep with his hand on the handle of the big jug.

After poker there is only one other always available amusement for men, and that is business. The two travelers were quite well acquainted when Ralph put his head in at the door.

“Thought I’d find you here,” he explained. “It just occurred to me to wonder whether you gentlemen had discovered, as yet, that we are all to be house guests at the Carston-Tyler wedding.”

“Why, no!” exclaimed his father in pleased surprise. “It is a most agreeable coincidence. Mr. Van Kamp, allow me to introduce my son, Ralph. Mr. Van Kamp and myself, Ralph, have found out that we shall be considerably thrown together in a business way from now on. He has just purchased control of the Metropolitan and Western string of interurbans.”

“Delighted, I’m sure,” murmured Ralph, shaking hands, and then he slipped out as quickly as possible. Some one seemed to be waiting for him.

Perhaps another twenty minutes had passed, when one of the men had an illuminating idea that resulted, later on, in pleasant relations for all of them. It was about time, for Mrs. Ellsworth, up in the bare suite, and Mrs. Van Kamp, down in the draughty barn, both wrapped up to the chin and both still chilly, had about reached the limit of patience and endurance.

“Why can’t we make things a little more comfortable for all concerned?” suggested Mr. Van Kamp. “Suppose, as a starter, that we have Mrs. Van Kamp give a shiver party down in the barn?”

“Good idea,” agreed Mr. Ellsworth. “A little diplomacy will do it. Each one of us will have to tell his wife that the other fellow made the first abject overtures.”

Mr. Van Kamp grinned understandingly, and agreed to the infamous ruse.

“By the way,” continued Mr. Ellsworth, with a still happier thought, “you must allow Mrs. Ellsworth to furnish the dinner for Mrs. Van Kamp’s shiver party.”

“Dinner!” gasped Mr. Van Kamp. “By all means!”

Both men felt an anxious yawning in the region of the appetite, and a yearning moisture wetted their tongues. They looked at the slumbering Uncle Billy and decided to see Mrs. Tutt themselves about a good, hot dinner for six.

“Law me!” exclaimed Aunt Margaret when they appeared at the kitchen door. “I swan I thought you folks ’u’d never come to yore senses. Here I’ve had a big pot o’ stewed chicken ready on the stove fer two mortal hours. I kin give ye that, an’ smashed taters an’ chicken gravy, an’ dried corn, an’ hot corn-pone, an’ currant jell, an’ strawberry preserves, an’ my own cannin’ o’ peaches, an’ pumpkin-pie an’ coffee. Will that do ye?” Would it _do_! _Would_ it do!!

As Aunt Margaret talked, the kitchen door swung wide, and the two men were stricken speechless with astonishment. There, across from each other at the kitchen table, sat the utterly selfish and traitorous younger members of the rival houses of Ellsworth and Van Kamp, deep in the joys of chicken, and mashed potatoes, and gravy, and hot corn-pone, and all the other “fixings,” laughing and chatting gaily like chums of years’ standing. They had seemingly just come to an agreement about something or other, for Evelyn, waving the shorter end of a broken wishbone, was vivaciously saying to Ralph:

“A bargain’s a bargain, and I always stick to one I make.”

FOOTNOTES:

[25] From McClure’s Magazine, June, 1905; copyright, 1905, by the S.S. McClure Co.; republished by the author’s permission.

A CALL[26]

By Grace MacGowan Cooke (1863- )

A boy in an unnaturally clean, country-laundered collar walked down a long white road. He scuffed the dust up wantonly, for he wished to veil the all-too-brilliant polish of his cowhide shoes. Also the memory of the whiteness and slipperiness of his collar oppressed him. He was fain to look like one accustomed to social diversions, a man hurried from hall to hall of pleasure, without time between to change collar or polish boot. He stooped and rubbed a crumb of earth on his overfresh neck-linen.

This did not long sustain his drooping spirit. He was mentally adrift upon the _Hints and Helps to Young Men in Business and Social Relations_, which had suggested to him his present enterprise, when the appearance of a second youth, taller and broader than himself, with a shock of light curling hair and a crop of freckles that advertised a rich soil threw him a lifeline. He put his thumbs to his lips and whistled in a peculiarly ear-splitting way. The two boys had sat on the same bench at Sunday-school not three hours before; yet what a change had come over the world for one of them since then!

“Hello! Where you goin’, Ab?” asked the newcomer, gruffly.

“Callin’,” replied the boy in the collar, laconically, but with carefully averted gaze.

“On the girls?” inquired the other, awestruck. In Mount Pisgah you saw the girls home from night church, socials, or parties; you could hang over the gate; and you might walk with a girl in the cemetery of a Sunday afternoon; but to ring a front-door bell and ask for Miss Heart’s Desire one must have been in long trousers at least three years—and the two boys confronted in the dusty road had worn these dignifying garments barely six months.

“Girls,” said Abner, loftily; “I don’t know about girls—I’m just going to call on one girl—Champe Claiborne.” He marched on as though the conversation was at an end; but Ross hung upon his flank. Ross and Champe were neighbors, comrades in all sorts of mischief; he was in doubt whether to halt Abner and pummel him, or propose to enlist under his banner.

“Do you reckon you could?” he debated, trotting along by the irresponsive Jilton boy.

“Run home to your mother,” growled the originator of the plan, savagely. “You ain’t old enough to call on girls; anybody can see that; but I am, and I’m going to call on Champe Claiborne.”

Again the name acted as a spur on Ross. “With your collar and boots all dirty?” he jeered. “They won’t know you’re callin’.”

The boy in the road stopped short in his dusty tracks. He was an intense creature, and he whitened at the tragic insinuation, longing for the wholesome stay and companionship of freckle-faced Ross. “I put the dirt on o’ purpose so’s to look kind of careless,” he half whispered, in an agony of doubt. “S’pose I’d better go into your house and try to wash it off? Reckon your mother would let me?”

“I’ve got two clean collars,” announced the other boy, proudly generous. “I’ll lend you one. You can put it on while I’m getting ready. I’ll tell mother that we’re just stepping out to do a little calling on the girls.”

Here was an ally worthy of the cause. Abner welcomed him, in spite of certain jealous twinges. He reflected with satisfaction that there were two Claiborne girls, and though Alicia was so stiff and prim that no boy would ever think of calling on her, there was still the hope that she might draw Ross’s fire, and leave him, Abner, to make the numerous remarks he had stored up in his mind from _Hints and Helps to Young Men in Social and Business Relations_ to Champe alone.

Mrs. Pryor received them with the easy-going kindness of the mother of one son. She followed them into the dining-room to kiss and feed him, with an absent “Howdy, Abner; how’s your mother?”

Abner, big with the importance of their mutual intention, inclined his head stiffly and looked toward Ross for explanation. He trembled a little, but it was with delight, as he anticipated the effect of the speech Ross had outlined. But it did not come.

“I’m not hungry, mother,” was the revised edition which the freckle-faced boy offered to the maternal ear. “I—we are going over to Mr. Claiborne’s—on—er—on an errand for Abner’s father.”

The black-eyed boy looked reproach as they clattered up the stairs to Ross’s room, where the clean collar was produced and a small stock of ties.

“You’d wear a necktie—wouldn’t you?” Ross asked, spreading them upon the bureau-top.

“Yes. But make it fall carelessly over your shirt-front,” advised the student of _Hints and Helps_. “Your collar is miles too big for me. Say! I’ve got a wad of white chewing-gum; would you flat it out and stick it over the collar button? Maybe that would fill up some. You kick my foot if you see me turning my head so’s to knock it off.”

“Better button up your vest,” cautioned Ross, laboring with the “careless” fall of his tie.

“Huh-uh! I want ‘‘that easy air which presupposes familiarity with society’—that’s what it says in my book,” objected Abner.

“Sure!” Ross returned to his more familiar jeering attitude. “Loosen up all your clothes, then. Why don’t you untie your shoes? Flop a sock down over one of ’em—that looks ‘‘easy’ all right.”

Abner buttoned his vest. “It gives a man lots of confidence to know he’s good-looking,” he remarked, taking all the room in front of the mirror.

Ross, at the wash-stand soaking his hair to get the curl out of it, grumbled some unintelligible response. The two boys went down the stairs with tremulous hearts.

“Why, you’ve put on another clean shirt, Rossie!” Mrs. Pryor called from her chair—mothers’ eyes can see so far! “Well—don’t get into any dirty play and soil it.” The boys walked in silence—but it was a pregnant silence; for as the roof of the Claiborne house began to peer above the crest of the hill, Ross plumped down on a stone and announced, “I ain’t goin’.”

“Come on,” urged the black-eyed boy. “It’ll be fun—and everybody will respect us more. Champe won’t throw rocks at us in recess-time, after we’ve called on her. She couldn’t.”

“Called!” grunted Ross. “I couldn’t make a call any more than a cow. What’d I say? What’d I do? I can behave all right when you just go to people’s houses—but a call!”

Abner hesitated. Should he give away his brilliant inside information, drawn from the _Hints and Helps_ book, and be rivalled in the glory of his manners and bearing? Why should he not pass on alone, perfectly composed, and reap the field of glory unsupported? His knees gave way and he sat down without intending it.

“Don’t you tell anybody and I’ll put you on to exactly what grown-up gentlemen say and do when they go calling on the girls,” he began.

“Fire away,” retorted Ross, gloomily. “Nobody will find out from me. Dead men tell no tales. If I’m fool enough to go, I don’t expect to come out of it alive.”

Abner rose, white and shaking, and thrusting three fingers into the buttoning of his vest, extending the other hand like an orator, proceeded to instruct the freckled, perspiring disciple at his feet.

“‘Hang your hat on the rack, or give it to a servant.’” Ross nodded intelligently. He could do that.

“‘Let your legs be gracefully disposed, one hand on the knee, the other—’”

Abner came to an unhappy pause. “I forget what a fellow does with the other hand. Might stick it in your pocket, loudly, or expectorate on the carpet. Indulge in little frivolity. Let a rich stream of conversation flow.’”

Ross mentally dug within himself for sources of rich streams of conversation. He found a dry soil. “What you goin’ to talk about?” he demanded, fretfully. “I won’t go a step farther till I know what I’m goin’ to say when I get there.”

Abner began to repeat paragraphs from _Hints and Helps_. “‘‘It is best to remark,’” he opened, in an unnatural voice, “‘‘How well you are looking!’ although fulsome compliments should be avoided. When seated ask the young lady who her favorite composer is.’”

“What’s a composer?” inquired Ross, with visions of soothing-syrup in his mind.

“A man that makes up music. Don’t butt in that way; you put me all out—‘‘composer is. Name yours. Ask her what piece of music she likes best. Name yours. If the lady is musical, here ask her to play or sing.’”

This chanted recitation seemed to have a hypnotic effect on the freckled boy; his big pupils contracted each time Abner came to the repetend, “Name yours.”

“I’m tired already,” he grumbled; but some spell made him rise and fare farther.

When they had entered the Claiborne gate, they leaned toward each other like young saplings weakened at the root and locking branches to keep what shallow foothold on earth remained.

“You’re goin’ in first,” asserted Ross, but without conviction. It was his custom to tear up to this house a dozen times a week, on his father’s old horse or afoot; he was wont to yell for Champe as he approached, and quarrel joyously with her while he performed such errand as he had come upon; but he was gagged and hamstrung now by the hypnotism of Abner’s scheme.

“‘‘Walk quietly up the steps; ring the bell and lay your card on the servant,’” quoted Abner, who had never heard of a server.

“‘‘Lay your card on the servant!’” echoed Ross. “Cady’d dodge. There’s a porch to cross after you go up the steps—does it say anything about that?”

“It says that the card should be placed on the servant,” Abner reiterated, doggedly. “If Cady dodges, it ain’t any business of mine. There are no porches in my book. Just walk across it like anybody. We’ll ask for Miss Champe Claiborne.”

“We haven’t got any cards,” discovered Ross, with hope.

“I have,” announced Abner, pompously. “I had some struck off in Chicago. I ordered ’em by mail. They got my name Pillow, but there’s a scalloped gilt border around it. You can write your name on my card. Got a pencil?”

He produced the bit of cardboard; Ross fished up a chewed stump of lead pencil, took it in cold, stiff fingers, and disfigured the square with eccentric scribblings.

“They’ll know who it’s meant for,” he said, apologetically, “because I’m here. What’s likely to happen after we get rid of the card?”

“I told you about hanging your hat on the rack and disposing your legs.”

“I remember now,” sighed Ross. They had been going slower and slower. The angle of inclination toward each other became more and more pronounced.

“We must stand by each other,” whispered Abner.

“I will—if I can stand at all,” murmured the other boy, huskily.

“Oh, Lord!” They had rounded the big clump of evergreens and found Aunt Missouri Claiborne placidly rocking on the front porch! Directed to mount steps and ring bell, to lay cards upon the servant, how should one deal with a rosy-faced, plump lady of uncertain years in a rocking-chair. What should a caller lay upon her? A lion in the way could not have been more terrifying. Even retreat was cut off. Aunt Missouri had seen them. “Howdy, boys; how are you?” she said, rocking peacefully. The two stood before her like detected criminals.

Then, to Ross’s dismay, Abner sank down on the lowest step of the porch, the westering sun full in his hopeless eyes. He sat on his cap. It was characteristic that the freckled boy remained standing. He would walk up those steps according to plan and agreement, if at all. He accepted no compromise. Folding his straw hat into a battered cone, he watched anxiously for the delivery of the card. He was not sure what Aunt Missouri’s attitude might be if it were laid on her. He bent down to his companion. “Go ahead,” he whispered. “Lay the card.”

Abner raised appealing eyes. “In a minute. Give me time,” he pleaded.

“Mars’ Ross—Mars’ Ross! Head ’em off!” sounded a yell, and Babe, the house-boy, came around the porch in pursuit of two half-grown chickens.

“Help him, Rossie,” prompted Aunt Missouri, sharply. “You boys can stay to supper and have some of the chicken if you help catch them.”

Had Ross taken time to think, he might have reflected that gentlemen making formal calls seldom join in a chase after the main dish of the family supper. But the needs of Babe were instant. The lad flung himself sidewise, caught one chicken in his hat, while Babe fell upon the other in the manner of a football player. Ross handed the pullet to the house-boy, fearing that he had done something very much out of character, then pulled the reluctant negro toward to the steps.

“Babe’s a servant,” he whispered to Abner, who had sat rigid through the entire performance. “I helped him with the chickens, and he’s got to stand gentle while you lay the card on.”

Confronted by the act itself, Abner was suddenly aware that he knew not how to begin. He took refuge in dissimulation.

“Hush!” he whispered back. “Don’t you see Mr. Claiborne’s come out?—He’s going to read something to us.”

Ross plumped down beside him. “Never mind the card; tell ’em,” he urged.

“Tell ’em yourself.”

“No—let’s cut and run.”

“I—I think the worst of it is over. When Champe sees us she’ll—”

Mention of Champe stiffened Ross’s spine. If it had been glorious to call upon her, how very terrible she would make it should they attempt calling, fail, and the failure come to her knowledge! Some things were easier to endure than others; he resolved to stay till the call was made.

For half an hour the boys sat with drooping heads, and the old gentleman read aloud, presumably to Aunt Missouri and themselves. Finally their restless eyes discerned the two Claiborne girls walking serene in Sunday trim under the trees at the edge of the lawn. Arms entwined, they were whispering together and giggling a little. A caller, Ross dared not use his voice to shout nor his legs to run toward them.

“Why don’t you go and talk to the girls, Rossie?” Aunt Missouri asked, in the kindness of her heart. “Don’t be noisy—it’s Sunday, you know—and don’t get to playing anything that’ll dirty up your good clothes.”

Ross pressed his lips hard together; his heart swelled with the rage of the misunderstood. Had the card been in his possession, he would, at that instant, have laid it on Aunt Missouri without a qualm.

“What is it?” demanded the old gentleman, a bit testily.

“The girls want to hear you read, father,” said Aunt Missouri, shrewdly; and she got up and trotted on short, fat ankles to the girls in the arbor. The three returned together, Alicia casting curious glances at the uncomfortable youths, Champe threatening to burst into giggles with every breath.

Abner sat hard on his cap and blushed silently. Ross twisted his hat into a three-cornered wreck.

The two girls settled themselves noisily on the upper step. The old man read on and on. The sun sank lower. The hills were red in the west as though a brush fire flamed behind their crests. Abner stole a furtive glance at his companion in misery, and the dolor of Ross’s countenance somewhat assuaged his anguish. The freckle-faced boy was thinking of the village over the hill, a certain pleasant white house set back in a green yard, past whose gate, the two-plank sidewalk ran. He knew lamps were beginning to wink in the windows of the neighbors about, as though the houses said, “Our boys are all at home—but Ross Pryor’s out trying to call on the girls, and can’t get anybody to understand it.” Oh, that he were walking down those two planks, drawing a stick across the pickets, lifting high happy feet which could turn in at that gate! He wouldn’t care what the lamps said then. He wouldn’t even mind if the whole Claiborne family died laughing at him—if only some power would raise him up from this paralyzing spot and put him behind the safe barriers of his own home!

The old man’s voice lapsed into silence; the light was becoming too dim for his reading. Aunt Missouri turned and called over her shoulder into the shadows of the big hall: “You Babe! Go put two extra plates on the supper-table.”

The boys grew red from the tips of their ears, and as far as any one could see under their wilting collars. Abner felt the lump of gum come loose and slip down a cold spine. Had their intentions but been known, this inferential invitation would have been most welcome. It was but to rise up and thunder out, “We came to call on the young ladies.”

They did not rise. They did not thunder out anything. Babe brought a lamp and set it inside the window, and Mr. Claiborne resumed his reading. Champe giggled and said that Alicia made her. Alcia drew her skirts about her, sniffed, and looked virtuous, and said she didn’t see anything funny to laugh at. The supper-bell rang. The family, evidently taking it for granted that the boys would follow, went in.

Alone for the first time, Abner gave up. “This ain’t any use,” he complained. “We ain’t calling on anybody.”

“Why didn’t you lay on the card?” demanded Ross, fiercely. “Why didn’t you say: ‘‘We’ve-just-dropped-into-call-on-Miss-Champe. It’s-a-pleasant-evening. We-feel-we-must-be-going,’ like you said you would? Then we could have lifted our hats and got away decently.”

Abner showed no resentment.

“Oh, if it’s so easy, why didn’t you do it yourself?” he groaned.

“Somebody’s coming,” Ross muttered, hoarsely. “Say it now. Say it quick.”

The somebody proved to be Aunt Missouri, who advanced only as far as the end of the hall and shouted cheerfully: “The idea of a growing boy not coming to meals when the bell rings! I thought you two would be in there ahead of us. Come on.” And clinging to their head-coverings as though these contained some charm whereby the owners might be rescued, the unhappy callers were herded into the dining-room. There were many things on the table that boys like. Both were becoming fairly cheerful, when Aunt Missouri checked the biscuit-plate with: “I treat my neighbors’ children just like I’d want children of my own treated. If your mothers let you eat all you want, say so, and I don’t care; but if either of them is a little bit particular, why, I’d stop at six!”

Still reeling from this blow, the boys finally rose from the table and passed out with the family, their hats clutched to their bosoms, and clinging together for mutual aid and comfort. During the usual Sunday-evening singing Champe laughed till Aunt Missouri threatened to send her to bed. Abner’s card slipped from his hand and dropped face up on the floor. He fell upon it and tore it into infinitesimal pieces.

“That must have been a love-letter,” said Aunt Missouri, in a pause of the music. “You boys are getting ‘‘most old enough to think about beginning to call on the girls.” Her eyes twinkled.

Ross growled like a stoned cur. Abner took a sudden dive into _Hints and Helps_, and came up with, “You flatter us, Miss Claiborne,” whereat Ross snickered out like a human boy. They all stared at him.

“It sounds so funny to call Aunt Missouri ‘‘Mis’ Claiborne,’” the lad of the freckles explained.

“Funny?” Aunt Missouri reddened. “I don’t see any particular joke in my having my maiden name.”

Abner, who instantly guessed at what was in Ross’s mind, turned white at the thought of what they had escaped. Suppose he had laid on the card and asked for Miss Claiborne!

“What’s the matter, Champe?” inquired Ross, in a fairly natural tone. The air he had drawn into his lungs when he laughed at Abner seemed to relieve him from the numbing gentility which had bound his powers since he joined Abner’s ranks.

“Nothing. I laughed because you laughed,” said the girl.

The singing went forward fitfully. Servants traipsed through the darkened yard, going home for Sunday night. Aunt Missouri went out and held some low-toned parley with them. Champe yawned with insulting enthusiasm. Presently both girls quietly disappeared. Aunt Missouri never returned to the parlor—evidently thinking that the girls would attend to the final amenities with their callers. They were left alone with old Mr. Claiborne. They sat as though bound in their chairs, while the old man read in silence for a while. Finally he closed his book, glanced about him, and observed absently:

“So you boys were to spend the night?” Then, as he looked at their startled faces: “I’m right, am I not? You are to spent the night?”

Oh, for courage to say: “Thank you, no. We’ll be going now. We just came over to call on Miss Champe.” But thought of how this would sound in face of the facts, the painful realization that they dared not say it because they _had_ not said it, locked their lips. Their feet were lead; their tongues stiff and too large for their mouths. Like creatures in a nightmare, they moved stiffly, one might have said creakingly, up the stairs and received each—a bedroom candle!

“Good night, children,” said the absent-minded old man. The two gurgled out some sounds which were intended for words and doged behind the bedroom door.

“They’ve put us to bed!” Abner’s black eyes flashed fire. His nervous hands clutched at the collar Ross had lent him. “That’s what I get for coming here with you, Ross Pryor!” And tears of humiliation stood in his eyes.

In his turn Ross showed no resentment. “What I’m worried about is my mother,” he confessed. “She’s so sharp about finding out things. She wouldn’t tease me—she’d just be sorry for me. But she’ll think I went home with you.”

“I’d like to see my mother make a fuss about my calling on the girls!” growled Abner, glad to let his rage take a safe direction.

“Calling on the girls! Have we called on any girls?” demanded clear-headed, honest Ross.

“Not exactly—yet,” admitted Abner, reluctantly. “Come on—let’s go to bed. Mr. Claiborne asked us, and he’s the head of this household. It isn’t anybody’s business what we came for.”

“I’ll slip off my shoes and lie down till Babe ties up the dog in the morning,” said Ross. “Then we can get away before any of the family is up.”

Oh, youth—youth—youth, with its rash promises! Worn out with misery the boys slept heavily. The first sound that either heard in the morning was Babe hammering upon their bedroom door. They crouched guiltily and looked into each other’s eyes. “Let pretend we ain’t here and he’ll go away,” breathed Abner.

But Babe was made of sterner stuff. He rattled the knob. He turned it. He put in a black face with a grin which divided it from ear to ear. “Cady say I mus’ call dem fool boys to breakfus’,” he announced. “I never named you-all dat. Cady, she say dat.”

“Breakfast!” echoed Ross, in a daze.

“Yessuh, breakfus’,” reasserted Babe, coming entirely into the room and looking curiously about him. “Ain’t you-all done been to bed at all?” wrapping his arms about his shoulders and shaking with silent ecstasies of mirth. The boys threw themselves upon him and ejected him.

“Sent up a servant to call us to breakfast,” snarled Abner. “If they’d only sent their old servant to the door in the first place, all this wouldn’t ’a’ happened. I’m just that way when I get thrown off the track. You know how it was when I tried to repeat those things to you—I had to go clear back to the beginning when I got interrupted.”

“Does that mean that you’re still hanging around here to begin over and make a call?” asked Ross, darkly. “I won’t go down to breakfast if you are.”

Abner brightened a little as he saw Ross becoming wordy in his rage. “I dare you to walk downstairs and say, ‘‘We-just-dropped-in-to-call-on-Miss-Champe’!” he said.

“I—oh—I—darn it all! there goes the second bell. We may as well trot down.”

“Don’t leave me, Ross,” pleaded the Jilton boy. “I can’t stay here—and I can’t go down.”

The tone was hysterical. The boy with freckles took his companion by the arm without another word and marched him down the stairs. “We may get a chance yet to call on Champe all by herself out on the porch or in the arbor before she goes to school,” he suggested, by way of putting some spine into the black-eyed boy.

An emphatic bell rang when they were half-way down the stairs. Clutching their hats, they slunk into the dining-room. Even Mr. Claiborne seemed to notice something unusual in their bearing as they settled into the chairs assigned to them, and asked them kindly if they had slept well.

It was plain that Aunt Missouri had been posting him as to her understanding of the intentions of these young men. The state of affairs gave an electric hilarity to the atmosphere. Babe travelled from the sideboard to the table, trembling like chocolate pudding. Cady insisted on bringing in the cakes herself, and grinned as she whisked her starched blue skirts in and out of the dining-room. A dimple even showed itself at the corners of pretty Alicia’s prim little mouth. Champe giggled, till Ross heard Cady whisper:

“Now you got one dem snickerin’ spells agin. You gwine bust yo’ dress buttons off in the back ef you don’t mind.”

As the spirits of those about them mounted, the hearts of the two youths sank—if it was like this among the Claibornes, what would it be at school and in the world at large when their failure to connect intention with result became village talk? Ross bit fiercely upon an unoffending batter-cake, and resolved to make a call single-handed before he left the house.

They went out of the dining-room, their hats as ever pressed to their breasts. With no volition of their own, their uncertain young legs carried them to the porch. The Claiborne family and household followed like small boys after a circus procession. When the two turned, at bay, yet with nothing between them and liberty but a hypnotism of their own suggestion, they saw the black faces of the servants peering over the family shoulders.

Ross was the boy to have drawn courage from the desperation of their case, and made some decent if not glorious ending. But at the psychological moment there came around the corner of the house that most contemptible figure known to the Southern plantation, a shirt-boy—a creature who may be described, for the benefit of those not informed, as a pickaninny clad only in a long, coarse cotton shirt. While all eyes were fastened upon him this inglorious ambassador bolted forth his message:

“Yo’ ma say”—his eyes were fixed upon Abner—“ef yo’ don’ come home, she gwine come after yo’—an’ cut yo’ into inch pieces wid a rawhide when she git yo’. Dat jest what Miss Hortense say.”

As though such a book as _Hints and Helps_ had never existed, Abner shot for the gate—he was but a hobbledehoy fascinated with the idea of playing gentleman. But in Ross there were the makings of a man. For a few half-hearted paces, under the first impulse of horror, he followed his deserting chief, the laughter of the family, the unrestrainable guffaws of the negroes, sounding in the rear. But when Champe’s high, offensive giggle, topping all the others, insulted his ears, he stopped dead, wheeled, and ran to the porch faster than he had fled from it. White as paper, shaking with inexpressible rage, he caught and kissed the tittering girl, violently, noisily, before them all.

The negroes fled—they dared not trust their feelings; even Alicia sniggered unobtrusively; Grandfather Claiborne chuckled, and Aunt Missouri frankly collapsed into her rocking-chair, bubbling with mirth, crying out:

“Good for you, Ross! Seems you did know how to call on the girls, after all.”

But Ross, paying no attention, walked swiftly toward the gate. He had served his novitiate. He would never be afraid again. With cheerful alacrity he dodged the stones flung after him with friendly, erratic aim by the girl upon whom, yesterday afternoon, he had come to make a social call.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] From _Harper’s Magazine_, August, 1906. Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers. Republished by the author’s permission.

HOW THE WIDOW WON THE DEACON[27]

By William James Lampton ( -1917)

Of course the Widow Stimson never tried to win Deacon Hawkins, nor any other man, for that matter. A widow doesn’t have to try to win a man; she wins without trying. Still, the Widow Stimson sometimes wondered why the deacon was so blind as not to see how her fine farm adjoining his equally fine place on the outskirts of the town might not be brought under one management with mutual benefit to both parties at interest. Which one that management might become was a matter of future detail. The widow knew how to run a farm successfully, and a large farm is not much more difficult to run than one of half the size. She had also had one husband, and knew something more than running a farm successfully. Of all of which the deacon was perfectly well aware, and still he had not been moved by the merging spirit of the age to propose consolidation.

This interesting situation was up for discussion at the Wednesday afternoon meeting of the Sisters’ Sewing Society.

“For my part,” Sister Susan Spicer, wife of the Methodist minister, remarked as she took another tuck in a fourteen-year-old girl’s skirt for a ten-year-old—“for my part, I can’t see why Deacon Hawkins and Kate Stimson don’t see the error of their ways and depart from them.”

“I rather guess _she_ has,” smiled Sister Poteet, the grocer’s better half, who had taken an afternoon off from the store in order to be present.

“Or is willing to,” added Sister Maria Cartridge, a spinster still possessing faith, hope, and charity, notwithstanding she had been on the waiting list a long time.

“Really, now,” exclaimed little Sister Green, the doctor’s wife, “do you think it is the deacon who needs urging?”

“It looks that way to me,” Sister Poteet did not hesitate to affirm.

“Well, I heard Sister Clark say that she had heard him call her ‘Kitty’ one night when they were eating ice-cream at the Mite Society,” Sister Candish, the druggist’s wife, added to the fund of reliable information on hand.

“‘Kitty,’ indeed!” protested Sister Spicer. “The idea of anybody calling Kate Stimson ‘Kitty’! The deacon will talk that way to ’most any woman, but if she let him say it to her more than once, she must be getting mighty anxious, I think.”

“Oh,” Sister Candish hastened to explain, “Sister Clark didn’t say she had heard him say it twice.’”

“Well, I don’t think she heard him say it once,” Sister Spicer asserted with confidence.

“I don’t know about that,” Sister Poteet argued. “From all I can see and hear I think Kate Stimson wouldn’t object to ’most anything the deacon would say to her, knowing as she does that he ain’t going to say anything he shouldn’t say.”

“And isn’t saying what he should,” added Sister Green, with a sly snicker, which went around the room softly.

“But as I was saying—” Sister Spicer began, when Sister Poteet, whose rocker, near the window, commanded a view of the front gate, interrupted with a warning, “’Sh-’sh.”

“Why shouldn’t I say what I wanted to when—” Sister Spicer began.

“There she comes now,” explained Sister Poteet, “and as I live the deacon drove her here in his sleigh, and he’s waiting while she comes in. I wonder what next,” and Sister Poteet, in conjunction with the entire society, gasped and held their eager breaths, awaiting the entrance of the subject of conversation.

Sister Spicer went to the front door to let her in, and she was greeted with the greatest cordiality by everybody.

“We were just talking about you and wondering why you were so late coming,” cried Sister Poteet. “Now take off your things and make up for lost time. There’s a pair of pants over there to be cut down to fit that poor little Snithers boy.”

The excitement and curiosity of the society were almost more than could be borne, but never a sister let on that she knew the deacon was at the gate waiting. Indeed, as far as the widow could discover, there was not the slightest indication that anybody had ever heard there was such a person as the deacon in existence.

“Oh,” she chirruped, in the liveliest of humors, “you will have to excuse me for to-day. Deacon Hawkins overtook me on the way here, and here said I had simply got to go sleigh-riding with him. He’s waiting out at the gate now.”

“Is that so?” exclaimed the society unanimously, and rushed to the window to see if it were really true.

“Well, did you ever?” commented Sister Poteet, generally.

“Hardly ever,” laughed the widow, good-naturedly, “and I don’t want to lose the chance. You know Deacon Hawkins isn’t asking somebody every day to go sleighing with him. I told him I’d go if he would bring me around here to let you know what had become of me, and so he did. Now, good-by, and I’ll be sure to be present at the next meeting. I have to hurry because he’ll get fidgety.”

The widow ran away like a lively schoolgirl. All the sisters watched her get into the sleigh with the deacon, and resumed the previous discussion with greatly increased interest.

But little recked the widow and less recked the deacon. He had bought a new horse and he wanted the widow’s opinion of it, for the Widow Stimson was a competent judge of fine horseflesh. If Deacon Hawkins had one insatiable ambition it was to own a horse which could fling its heels in the face of the best that Squire Hopkins drove. In his early manhood the deacon was no deacon by a great deal. But as the years gathered in behind him he put off most of the frivolities of youth and held now only to the one of driving a fast horse. No other man in the county drove anything faster except Squire Hopkins, and him the deacon had not been able to throw the dust over. The deacon would get good ones, but somehow never could he find one that the squire didn’t get a better. The squire had also in the early days beaten the deacon in the race for a certain pretty girl he dreamed about. But the girl and the squire had lived happily ever after and the deacon, being a philosopher, might have forgotten the squire’s superiority had it been manifested in this one regard only. But in horses, too—that graveled the deacon.

“How much did you give for him?” was the widow’s first query, after they had reached a stretch of road that was good going and the deacon had let him out for a length or two.

“Well, what do you suppose? You’re a judge.”

“More than I would give, I’ll bet a cookie.”

“Not if you was as anxious as I am to show Hopkins that he can’t drive by everything on the pike.”

“I thought you loved a good horse because he was a good horse,” said the widow, rather disapprovingly.

“I do, but I could love him a good deal harder if he would stay in front of Hopkins’s best.”

“Does he know you’ve got this one?”

“Yes, and he’s been blowing round town that he is waiting to pick me up on the road some day and make my five hundred dollars look like a pewter quarter.”

“So you gave five hundred dollars for him, did you?” laughed the widow.

“Is it too much?”

“Um-er,” hesitated the widow, glancing along the graceful lines of the powerful trotter, “I suppose not if you can beat the squire.”

“Right you are,” crowed the deacon, “and I’ll show him a thing or two in getting over the ground,” he added with swelling pride.

“Well, I hope he won’t be out looking for you to-day, with me in your sleigh,” said the widow, almost apprehensively, “because, you know, deacon, I have always wanted you to beat Squire Hopkins.”

The deacon looked at her sharply. There was a softness in her tones that appealed to him, even if she had not expressed such agreeable sentiments. Just what the deacon might have said or done after the impulse had been set going must remain unknown, for at the crucial moment a sound of militant bells, bells of defiance, jangled up behind them, disturbing their personal absorption, and they looked around simultaneously. Behind the bells was the squire in his sleigh drawn by his fastest stepper, and he was alone, as the deacon was not. The widow weighed one hundred and sixty pounds, net—which is weighting a horse in a race rather more than the law allows.

But the deacon never thought of that. Forgetting everything except his cherished ambition, he braced himself for the contest, took a twist hold on the lines, sent a sharp, quick call to his horse, and let him out for all that was in him. The squire followed suit and the deacon. The road was wide and the snow was worn down smooth. The track couldn’t have been in better condition. The Hopkins colors were not five rods behind the Hawkins colors as they got away. For half a mile it was nip and tuck, the deacon encouraging his horse and the widow encouraging the deacon, and then the squire began creeping up. The deacon’s horse was a good one, but he was not accustomed to hauling freight in a race. A half-mile of it was as much as he could stand, and he weakened under the strain.

Not handicapped, the squire’s horse forged ahead, and as his nose pushed up to the dashboard of the deacon’s sleigh, that good man groaned in agonized disappointment and bitterness of spirit. The widow was mad all over that Squire Hopkins should take such a mean advantage of his rival. Why didn’t he wait till another time when the deacon was alone, as he was? If she had her way she never would, speak to Squire Hopkins again, nor to his wife, either. But her resentment was not helping the deacon’s horse to win.

Slowly the squire pulled closer to the front; the deacon’s horse, realizing what it meant to his master and to him, spurted bravely, but, struggle as gamely as he might, the odds were too many for him, and he dropped to the rear. The squire shouted in triumph as he drew past the deacon, and the dejected Hawkins shrivelled into a heap on the seat, with only his hands sufficiently alive to hold the lines. He had been beaten again, humiliated before a woman, and that, too, with the best horse that he could hope to put against the ever-conquering squire. Here sank his fondest hopes, here ended his ambition. From this on he would drive a mule or an automobile. The fruit of his desire had turned to ashes in his mouth.

But no. What of the widow? She realized, if the deacon did not, that she, not the squire’s horse, had beaten the deacon’s, and she was ready to make what atonement she could. As the squire passed ahead of the deacon she was stirred by a noble resolve. A deep bed of drifted snow lay close by the side of the road not far in front. It was soft and safe and she smiled as she looked at it as though waiting for her. Without a hint of her purpose, or a sign to disturb the deacon in his final throes, she rose as the sleigh ran near its edge, and with a spring which had many a time sent her lightly from the ground to the bare back of a horse in the meadow, she cleared the robes and lit plump in the drift. The deacon’s horse knew before the deacon did that something had happened in his favor, and was quick to respond. With his first jump of relief the deacon suddenly revived, his hopes came fast again, his blood retingled, he gathered himself, and, cracking his lines, he shot forward, and three minutes later he had passed the squire as though he were hitched to the fence. For a quarter of a mile the squire made heroic efforts to recover his vanished prestige, but effort was useless, and finally concluding that he was practically left standing, he veered off from the main road down a farm lane to find some spot in which to hide the humiliation of his defeat. The deacon, still going at a clipping gait, had one eye over his shoulder as wary drivers always have on such occasions, and when he saw the squire was off the track he slowed down and jogged along with the apparent intention of continuing indefinitely. Presently an idea struck him, and he looked around for the widow. She was not where he had seen her last. Where was she? In the enthusiasm of victory he had forgotten her. He was so dejected at the moment she had leaped that he did not realize what she had done, and two minutes later he was so elated that, shame on him! he did not care. With her, all was lost; without her, all was won, and the deacon’s greatest ambition was to win. But now, with victory perched on his horse-collar, success his at last, he thought of the widow, and he did care. He cared so much that he almost threw his horse off his feet by the abrupt turn he gave him, and back down the pike he flew as if a legion of squires were after him.

He did not know what injury she might have sustained; She might have been seriously hurt, if not actually killed. And why? Simply to make it possible for him to win. The deacon shivered as he thought of it, and urged his horse to greater speed. The squire, down the lane, saw him whizzing along and accepted it profanely as an exhibition for his especial benefit. The deacon now had forgotten the squire as he had only so shortly before forgotten the widow. Two hundred yards from the drift into which she had jumped there was a turn in the road, where some trees shut off the sight, and the deacon’s anxiety increased momentarily until he reached this point. From here he could see ahead, and down there in the middle of the road stood the widow waving her shawl as a banner of triumph, though she could only guess at results. The deacon came on with a rush, and pulled up alongside of her in a condition of nervousness he didn’t think possible to him.

“Hooray! hooray!” shouted the widow, tossing her shawl into the air. “You beat him. I know you did. Didn’t you? I saw you pulling ahead at the turn yonder. Where is he and his old plug?”

“Oh, bother take him and his horse and the race and everything. Are you hurt?” gasped the deacon, jumping out, but mindful to keep the lines in his hand. “Are you hurt?” he repeated, anxiously, though she looked anything but a hurt woman.

“If I am,” she chirped, cheerily, “I’m not hurt half as bad as I would have been if the squire had beat you, deacon. Now don’t you worry about me. Let’s hurry back to town so the squire won’t get another chance, with no place for me to jump.”

And the deacon? Well, well, with the lines in the crook of his elbow the deacon held out his arms to the widow and——. The sisters at the next meeting of the Sewing Society were unanimously of the opinion that any woman who would risk her life like that for a husband was mighty anxious.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] From Harper’s Bazaar, April, 1911; copyright, 1911, by Harper & Brothers; republished by permission.

GIDEON[28]

By Wells Hastings (1878- )

“An’ de next’ frawg dat houn’ pup seen, he pass him by wide.”

The house, which had hung upon every word, roared with laughter, and shook with a storming volley of applause. Gideon bowed to right and to left, low, grinning, assured comedy obeisances; but as the laughter and applause grew he shook his head, and signaled quietly for the drop. He had answered many encores, and he was an instinctive artist. It was part of the fuel of his vanity that his audience had never yet had enough of him. Dramatic judgment, as well as dramatic sense of delivery, was native to him, qualities which the shrewd Felix Stuhk, his manager and exultant discoverer, recognized and wisely trusted in. Off stage Gideon was watched over like a child and a delicate investment, but once behind the footlights he was allowed to go his own triumphant gait.

It was small wonder that Stuhk deemed himself one of the cleverest managers in the business; that his narrow, blue-shaven face was continually chiseled in smiles of complacent self-congratulation. He was rapidly becoming rich, and there were bright prospects of even greater triumphs, with proportionately greater reward. He had made Gideon a national character, a headliner, a star of the first magnitude in the firmament of the vaudeville theater, and all in six short months. Or, at any rate, he had helped to make him all this; he had booked him well and given him his opportunity. To be sure, Gideon had done the rest; Stuhk was as ready as any one to do credit to Gideon’s ability. Still, after all, he, Stuhk, was the discoverer, the theatrical Columbus who had had the courage and the vision.

A now-hallowed attack of tonsilitis had driven him to Florida, where presently Gideon had been employed to beguile his convalescence, and guide him over the intricate shallows of that long lagoon known as the Indian River in search of various fish. On days when fish had been reluctant Gideon had been lured into conversation, and gradually into narrative and the relation of what had appeared to Gideon as humorous and entertaining; and finally Felix, the vague idea growing big within him, had one day persuaded his boatman to dance upon the boards of a long pier where they had made fast for lunch. There, with all the sudden glory of crystallization, the vague idea took definite form and became the great inspiration of Stuhk’s career.

Gideon had grown to be to vaudeville much what _Uncle Remus_ is to literature: there was virtue in his very simplicity. His artistry itself was native and natural. He loved a good story, and he told it from his own sense of the gleeful morsel upon his tongue as no training could have made him. He always enjoyed his story and himself in the telling. Tales never lost their savor, no matter how often repeated; age was powerless to dim the humor of the thing, and as he had shouted and gurgled and laughed over the fun of things when all alone, or holding forth among the men and women and little children of his color, so he shouted and gurgled and broke from sonorous chuckles to musical, falsetto mirth when he fronted the sweeping tiers of faces across the intoxicating glare of the footlights. He had that rare power of transmitting something of his own enjoyments. When Gideon was on the stage, Stuhk used to enjoy peeping out at the intent, smiling faces of the audience, where men and women and children, hardened theater-goers and folk fresh from the country, sat with moving lips and faces lit with an eager interest and sympathy for the black man strutting in loose-footed vivacity before them.

“He’s simply unique,” he boasted to wondering local managers—“unique, and it took me to find him. There he was, a little black gold-mine, and all of ’em passed him by until I came. Some eye? What? I guess you’ll admit you have to hand it some to your Uncle Felix. If that coon’s health holds out, we’ll have all the money there is in the mint.”