Chapter XII: Herbs and Simples

Miss Sophia, notwithstanding the unexpected turn that affairs had taken, had by no means relinquished her point of view. No sooner was she satisfied that Stella would not desert her post for any other offer, however flattering, than she recovered herself sufficiently to make quite clear to the girl her changed footing in the Spellman household.

“Our work is light,” she announced, coldly, “and I shall expect you to earn your board. I have no doubt you prefer to be independent, as far as possible. I will pay such bills as are necessary, but there must be no more extras nor nonsense, mind. As for clothes, you’ll scarcely outgrow them now, and my sister kept you so generously supplied that I should not think you would need anything new for a long time. A girl in your position must not expect to dress as well as a prosperous man like Mr. Parker or Dr. Brown can afford to dress _his_ daughter.”

Yellow Star said nothing, but she was not slow to take a hint, and she made up her mind then and there never to ask Miss Sophia for a dollar or a new dress. Neither did she want to draw any of her precious money out of the savings-bank where Mother Waring had placed it for her, on their first coming to Laurel.

She was quick and capable; all the housework for two, except laundry and heavy cleaning, now fell to her share, and took up nearly all her time, out of school. However, there was the long summer vacation to plan for; and in the spring after Mrs. Waring’s death, Stella began to seek and to find opportunities for earning small sums of money. She delivered hats for the local milliner and gowns for the village dressmaker. She took a neighbor’s baby out in his carriage on fine days, at ten cents an errand or an airing. One April afternoon, Doctor Brown found her on her knees with basket and trowel, grubbing up dandelions in Miss Sophia’s front yard.

“She pays me a cent apiece, because she doesn’t like to see them in her grass,” Stella explained, gravely. Miss Sophia had at least a sense of justice, and although she exacted full service of the orphan, to the utmost equivalent of her modest living, she would not ask her to do out-of-door work without paying for it. She had been going to hire a boy for the dandelions, and Stella had begged for the chance.

“Why, my child, you’ll soon be a Crœsus at that rate,” laughed the good Doctor.

“I really need the money for a new dress,” pursued Stella, who was thoroughly in earnest. “Miss Frost, the dressmaker, would like to have me help her in my spare time; I can make good buttonholes, and she’ll pay me thirty cents a dozen. But I would so much rather do something out-of-doors. You see, I am indoors nearly all the time, with my books and the housework, and I’m _starving_ for some fresh air.”

“Ahem!” The Doctor cleared his throat and took the matter under consideration. He would have dearly liked to put his big, generous hand in his pocket and buy the new dress, but he was half afraid the child wouldn’t take it—or, even if she would, how about that dawning sense of personal independence? No, no! let her earn the dress, especially since she was wisely choosing the open-air tasks that should soon restore its color and roundness to the eager, appealing young face.

“Sensible girl!” he approved. “Do you know, Stella, those dandelion roots you are digging have medicinal value? The wholesale drug-stores will pay you a few cents a pound for them, when they’re properly washed and dried. There’s burdock, too, and tansy, and—let me see—wild mustard and boneset, beside several more. You must gather the seed-pods of the mustard, and the leaves and tops of boneset and tansy. They’re all worth money; and all as common as dirt hereabouts. The farmers ought to pay you, too, for helping to get rid of them; almost every one I’ve named is a troublesome pest.”

“Oh, Doctor Brown! How perfectly splendid!” Stella clasped her long, brown hands eagerly, still kneeling on the soft turf, and once more the dull glow crept up in her quiet cheek. “I know them all now except the tansy, and you’ll show me that, won’t you? And tell me just where to take them. It will be exactly what my own mother and her mother must have done many a time—digging roots and herbs for medicine. There’s nothing else in the whole world I should like so much.”

* * * * *

“Yes, it was I set her up in business, and a fair sort of business it’s turning out,” chuckled the Doctor some three months later, from the depths of his shabby easy chair. “Not a fortune in it, of course; but she makes seventy-five cents or a dollar many days, with Cynthia’s help. Why aren’t you out with them, Doris? Afraid of a freckle or two my girl? Well, health is beauty, and their long days in the sun and air, close to the life-giving earth, will be worth more than a fortune to them.”

Doris tossed her pretty head, from her favorite perch in the broad window-seat, where she was putting careful stitches in the daintiest of shirt waists.

“The hot sun and the stooping over give me a headache,” she complained. She loved Jibby as much as ever, of course, but the sacrifice of that apple-blossom complexion to the Sun-God was too much to expect.

“When I was a girl,” her mother observed, “I used to be told that it made a young girl coarse and blowsy to expose her skin to the wind and sun. Why, I never thought of going out in summer without shade-hat, gloves and a veil; and nowadays the girls won’t wear any one of them.”

“I d’ know what the present generation’s comin’ to,” agreed Grandpa Brown, discontentedly. “This new-fangled idee of livin’ outdoors is suthin’ I don’t take no stock in, fer one. Houses was made to be lived in, says I; more specially for the wimmen folks. It used to be thought ondecent to sleep aout; an’ if folks had sot a table in the back yard for comp’ny, you’d of said they’d gone plump crazy. I dunno whether ’twas Stella set the fashion, or mebbe that school-teacher from up-state that was always gassin’ ’bout ‘fresh-air;’ but anyhow, Laurel’s got the disease, an’ got it bad.”

“When him an’ me went to house-keepin’,” chimed in Grandma, briskly, “folks nailed all the winders down hard an’ fast before ’Lection day, an’ never took the nails out till spring cleanin’. We didn’t hold with warmin’ all outdoors, like they ’pear to nowadays. Considerin’ them nailed-up winders, an’ the things we ate an’ drunk, an’ the germs we hadn’t never heard of, I’ve never rightly onderstood, Ezry, how you ’count for Grampa an’ me bein’ as peart as we be, an’ both on us goin’ on for seventy-seven.”

“Speakin’ of vittles, I ain’t never felt the same sence they took away my pie for breakfust,” grumbled Grandpa, and everybody laughed.

Doctor Brown lit his pipe and retired behind the newspaper, but found himself thinking less about State politics and the rise in certain stocks than about the new idea that his father had unwittingly let fall. Yes, there was no doubt about it; it was his little favorite and Miss Morrison, between them, who had boldly thrown open the windows and waked up the sleepy children in stuffy school-rooms, who had set the fashion of long cross-country walks among the younger set, had revived toboggan parties and skeeing and “one-day camps,” who had, in short, conducted an effective “anti-tuberculosis campaign” under the disguise of “fun.” He had not realized before how much they were all indebted to that natural hunger for fresh air, so naïvely confessed by his “outdoor girl.”

“Though it _is_ bad for my business—and the undertaker’s,” he humorously admitted to himself.

* * * * *

On that same midsummer day, Stella herself, with loyal Cynthia at her side and Scotty acting alternately as scout and rear-guard, was harvesting a field yellow with feathery wild mustard, down at “Uncle Si’s place.” That eccentric bachelor had offered to pay handsomely for the extermination of the weed by gathering its seed, and this bounty, together with the market price of five cents a pound, had spurred the girls to unusual exertions.

The work _was_ hard, and they had been at it steadily for two or three hours, when, with shoulders that ached from stooping and faces glowing with heat, they straightened up at last, and looked longingly over toward the cool shade of Wolcott’s Woods.

“Let’s get a drink at the spring, and then sit under that tree awhile and rest,” begged Cynthia. “I’ve got some sandwiches and a splendid book in my pocket.”

“Well,” consented Stella, “I suppose we might. You’ve helped like a Trojan, Sin, and I ’most know I’m going to have money enough for my new fall suit. I don’t want to disgrace our class, you know,” she added, merrily.

But long before they reached the giant maple that cast its green shade over a far corner of the field, Sir Walter began to bark wildly, and to make excited little dashes forward and runs backward, after his usual idiotic fashion when trouble was in the wind.

“What _do_ you suppose is the matter with him, Jibby?” Sin demanded.

Stella gave a long, searching look ahead and calmly answered:

“There’s a man lying down under that tree.”

“A man! Oh, Jibby! what shall we do? Hadn’t we better run home as fast as we can?”

“Let’s go a little nearer and see who it is, first,” suggested the other, suiting the action to the word.

“It’s a tramp, or somebody dreadful, I know,” Sin declared, but she would not desert her friend, and both girls, escorted by the cringing Sir Walter, drew near to the prone figure of a poorly dressed, black-bearded man, whose hat, stick and bundle lay at his side.

“How perfectly horrid he looks!” Cynthia shuddered under her breath. “It’s a tramp or a nasty peddler, and he’s either drunk or asleep. For goodness’ sake, Stella, don’t go any nearer!”

“He looks sick to me … and hungry … and out of work,” her friend pitifully declared. “Perhaps he hasn’t any place to go. He can’t hurt us, and Scotty would protect us, anyway. (Down, sir!) Get some water, quick, Cynthia! he’s had a sunstroke or something,” and she bent over the “horrid man” and loosened his coarse shirt at the neck, moistened the livid face with the tin cup of cold water that Cynthia hastened to fetch, and fanned him with her broad-brimmed hat.

When in a few minutes he came to himself, he was barely able to speak, and that in a broken sort of lingo that the girls could make little of, but dog-like gratitude looked out of the lusterless black eyes. Stella’s strong young arms helped to raise him to a more comfortable position, and Cynthia knelt down and eagerly fed him bits of bread-and-butter from her lunch-box.

“Go to Uncle Si, please!” directed Stella. “He will know what we ought to do. I shall stay here, with Sir Walter to take care of me, till you come back.”

But it was while she was still patiently fanning the stranger and trying to piece out a meaning from his foreign looks and words, that Stella was attracted by fresh activity on the part of the dog, who had lain apparently asleep at her feet. She looked up, and saw a tall, lightly built young man coming rapidly toward her, his serious face breaking into smiles as he noticed her start of pleased surprise.

“Why, Ethan! is it really you? Where did you come from?” she cried, springing to her feet, but quite forgetting to hold out her hand. The Sioux are not demonstrative in the matter of greetings.

Ethan, however, did not hesitate to take prompt possession of the little brown hand and press it warmly for a minute, as he looked into the soft, child-like eyes which met his with the old simplicity.

“Gad, but she’s a winner! Just about twice as handsome and ten times as magnetic as she promised to be, two years ago,” thought the boy, but he only said:

“Oh, I just ran down for a few days to see Uncle Si and all the folks! College opens in three weeks, you know—my last year. Uncle and I were busy talking over old times and the prospects of the crops, and the convivial moment had just arrived with the buttermilk, when Cynthia appeared, all out of breath, and from her story I judged I’d better come and look after you without loss of time.

“So this is your tramp, eh? The poor chap looks harmless enough, to be sure, but for all that it was a risky thing to do, for a girl. I suppose you ‘wanted to help’ like that time I had to fetch you home at ten o’clock at night from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West—do you remember?”

The girl’s rich color deepened a trifle under his openly admiring eyes, as he added, pleasantly:

“He’s better now, thanks to the little Samaritan; a green Polander out of a job, I should say at a guess. Suppose I toll him over to Uncle Si’s place and try to persuade the old fellow that he wants an extra hand?

“But if you often get into such scrapes, I don’t see how you could keep it up very long without me to help you out, Stella.”