A Breath of Prairie and other stories Part 3

At one corner of the garden an oblong mound of earth, bordered with bright stones and river-clam sh.e.l.ls, marked the "posy" bed. Within its boundaries a collection of overgrown house plants, belated pinks, and seeding sweet-peas, fought for life with the early fall frosts.

Landers looked steadily down at the sorry little garden. Like everything else he had seen that night, it told its pathetic tale of things that had been but would be no more.

As he looked, a mult.i.tude of homely blossoms that he had plucked in the past flowered anew in his memory. The mild faces of violets and pansies, the gaudy blotches of phlox, stood out like nature. He could almost smell the heavy odor of mignonette. A mist gathered over his eyes, and again, as at the good-bye of a moment ago, the lump rose chokingly in his throat.

He turned away from the tiny, damaged bed to send a searching look around the garden.

"Faith!" he called gently.

"Faith!"--louder.

A soft little sound caught his ear from the gra.s.s-plot at the border.

He started swiftly toward it, but stopped half-way, for the sound was repeated, and this time came distinctly--a bitter, half-choked sob.

With a motion of weariness and of pain the man pa.s.sed his hand over his eyes, then walked on firmly, his footsteps m.u.f.fled in the short gra.s.s.

A dainty little figure in the plainest of calico, lay curled up on the sod beneath the big maple. Her face was buried in both arms; her whole body trembled, as she struggled hard against the great sobs.

"Faith--" interrupted the man softly, "Faith--"

The sobs became more violent.

"Go away, Guy," pleaded a tearful, m.u.f.fled voice between the breaks.

"Please go away, please--"

The man knelt swiftly down on the gra.s.s; irresistibly his arm spread over the dainty, trembling, little woman. Then as suddenly he drew back with a face white as moonlight, and a sound in his throat that was almost a groan.

He knelt a moment so, then touched her shoulder gently--as he would have touched earth's most sacred thing.

"Faith--" he repeated uncertainly.

The girl buried her head more deeply.

"I won't, I tell you," she cried chokingly, "I won't--" she could say no more. There were no words in her meagre vocabulary to voice her bitterness of heart.

The man got to his feet almost roughly, face and hands set like a lock. He stood a second looking pa.s.sionately down at her.

"Good-bye, Faith," he said, and his trembling voice was the gentlest of caresses. He started swiftly away down the path.

The girl listened a moment to the retreating steps, then raised a tear-stained face above her arms.

"Guy!" she called chokingly, "Guy!"

The man quickened his steps at the sound, but did not turn.

The girl sprang to her feet.

"Oh, Guy! Guy!" pleadingly, desperately. "Guy!"

The man had reached the open. With a motion that was almost insane, he clapped his hands over his ears, and ran blindly down the dusty path until he was tired, then dropped hopelessly by the roadside.

Overhead the big cottonwoods whispered softly in the starlight, and a solitary catbird sang its lonely night song.

The man flung his arms around the big, friendly tree, and sobbed wildly--as the girl had sobbed.

"Oh, Faith!" he groaned.

IV

A month had pa.s.sed by, bringing to Guy Landers a new Heaven and a new earth. Already the prosy old university town had begun to a.s.sume an atmosphere of home. The well-clipped campus, with its huge oaks and its limestone walks, had taken on the familiar possessive plural "our campus," and the solitary red squirrel which sported fearlessly in its midst had likewise become "our squirrel." The imposing, dignified college buildings had ceased to elicit open-mouthed observance, and among the student-body surnames had yielded precedence to Christian names--oftener, though, to some outlandish sobriquet which satirized an idiosyncrasy of temperament or outward aspect.

Meantime the farmer had learned many things. Prominent among these was a conception of the preponderant amount he had yet to learn. Another matter of illumination involved the relation of clothes to man. He had been reared in the delusion that the person who gave thought to that which he wore, must necessarily think of nothing else. Very confusing, therefore, was the experience of having representatives of this same cla.s.s immeasurably outdistance him in the quiz room.

Again, on the athletic field he saw men of much lighter weight excel him in a way that made his face burn with a redness not of physical exertion. It was a wholesome lesson that he was learning--that there are everywhere scores of others, equally or better fitted by Nature for the struggle of life than oneself, and who can only be surpa.s.sed by the indomitable application and determination that wins all things.

Landers' nature though was that of the born combatant. The cla.s.s that laughed openly at his first tremblingly bashful, and ludicrously inapt answer at quiz, was indelibly photographed upon his memory.

"Before this session is complete--" he challenged softly to himself, and glared at those members nearest him in a way that made them suddenly forget the humor of the situation.

But youth is ever tractable, and even this short time had accomplished much. Already the warm, contagious, college comradeship possessed him.

Violent attacks of homesickness that made gray the brightest fall days, like the callous spots on his palms, were becoming more rare.

The old existence was already a dream, as yet a little sad, but none the less a thing without a substance. The new life was a warm, magnetic reality; the future glowed bright with limitless promise.

"The first day of the second month," remarked Landers, meeting a fellow-cla.s.sman on the way to college hall one morning.

"Yes, an auspicious time to quit--this," completed the student with a suggestive shuffle of his feet. "We've furnished our share of amus.e.m.e.nt."

Landers looked up questioningly.

"Is that from the cla.s.s president?" he asked.

"Yes," answered the other, "hadn't you heard? No more dancing, 'his nibs' says."

They had reached the entrance to the big college building, and at that moment a great roar of voices sounded from out the second-floor windows. Simultaneously the two freshmen quickened their pace.

"The fun's on," commented Landers' informant excitedly, as together they broke for the lecture-room, two stairs at the jump.

The large department amphitheatre opened up like a fan--the handle in the centre of the building on the entrance floor, the spread edge, nearly a complete half-circle, marked by the boundary walls of the building, a full story higher. The intervening s.p.a.ce, at an inclination of thirty odd degrees, was a field of seats, cut into three equal parts by two aisles that ran from the entrance, divergently upward. The small s.p.a.ce at the entrance--popularly dubbed "the pit"--was professordom's own particular region. From this point, by an unwritten law, the cla.s.ses ranged themselves according to the length of their university life; the seniors at the extreme apex of the angle, the other cla.s.ses respectively above, leaving the freshmen far beyond in s.p.a.ce.

As guardians of the two narrow aisles, the seniors dealt lightly with juniors and "sophs," but demanded insatiable toll of every freshman before he was allowed to ascend.

That a first-year man must dance was irrevocable. It had the authority of precedent in uncounted graduate cla.s.ses. To be sure, it was neither required nor expected that all applicants be masters of the art; but, agitate his feet in some manner, every able-bodied male member must, or remain forever a freshman.

When Landers and his companion arrived at the top of the stairs they found the hall packed close with fellow-cla.s.smates. The lower rows of seats were already filled with triumphant seniors, waiting for the throng that crowded pit and lobby to come within their reach. With regular tapping of feet and clapping of hands in unison, the cla.s.s as one man beat the steady time of one who marches.

"Dance, freshies!" they repeated monotonously. "Dance!"

"Clear the pit for a rush," yelled the president of the besieging freshmen, elbowing his way back into the ma.s.s.