A Busy Year at the Old Squire's Part 17

When they reached the Sylvester farm that morning grandmother went indoors with Mrs. Sylvester, and the old Squire proceeded to the barn.

All was very dark and still there, and it was some moments before he discovered Rufus; the man was sitting on a heckling block at the far dark end of the barn, huddled down, with his head bowed in his hands.

"Good morning, neighbor!" the old Squire said cheerily. "A fine Sabbath morning. Spring never looked more promising for us."

Rufus neither stirred nor answered. The old Squire drew near and laid his hand gently on his shoulder.

"Is it something you could tell me about?" he asked.

Rufus groaned and raised two dreary eyes from his hands. "Oh, I can't!

I'm 'shamed. It's nothin' I can tell!" he cried out miserably and then burst into fearful sobs.

"Don't let me ask, then, unless you think it might do you good," the old Squire said.

"Nothin'll ever do me any good again!" Rufus cried. "I'm beyond it, Squire. I'm a lost soul. The door of mercy is closed on me, Squire. I've committed the unpardonable sin!"

The old Squire saw that no effort to cheer Rufus that did not go to the root of his misery would avail. Sitting down beside him, he said:

"A great many of us sometimes fear that we have committed the unpardonable sin. But there is one sure way of knowing whether a person has committed it or not. I once knew a man who in a drunken brawl had killed another. He was convicted of manslaughter, served his term in prison, then went back to his farm and worked hard and well for ten years. One spring that former crime began to weigh on his mind. He brooded on it and finally became convinced that he had committed the sin for which there can be no forgiveness. He wanted desperately to atone for what he had done, and the idea got possession of his mind that since he had taken a human life the only way for him was to take his own life--a life for a life. The next morning they found that he had hanged himself in his barn.

"The young minister who was asked to officiate at the funeral declined to do so on doctrinal grounds; and the burial was about to take place without even a prayer at the grave when a stranger hurriedly approached.

He was a celebrated divine who had heard the circ.u.mstances of the man's death and who had journeyed a hundred miles to offer his services at the burial.

"'My good friends,' the stranger began, 'I have come to rectify a great mistake. This poor fellow mortal whose body you are committing to its last resting place mistook the full measure of G.o.d's compa.s.sion. He believed that he had committed that sin for which there is no forgiveness. In his extreme anxiety to atone for his former crime, he was led to commit another, for G.o.d requires no man to commit suicide, and his Word expressly forbids it. My friends, I am here to-day to tell you that there is _only one sin for which there is no forgiveness, and that is the sin which we do not repent. That alone is the unpardonable sin._ This man was sincerely sorry for his sin, and I am as certain that G.o.d has forgiven him as I am that I am standing here by his grave.'"

As the old Squire spoke, Rufus raised his head, and a ray of hope broke across his woebegone face.

"Now the question is," the old Squire continued, "are you sorry for what you did?"

"Oh, yes, Squire, yes! I'm terribly sorry!" he cried eagerly. "I do repent of it! I never in the world would do such a thing again!"

"Then what you have done was not the unpardonable sin at all!" the old Squire exclaimed confidently.

"Do you think so?" Rufus cried imploringly.

"I know so!" the old Squire declared authoritatively. "Now let's feed those cows and your horse. Then we will go out and take a look at the fields where you are going to put in a crop this spring."

When the old Squire and grandmother Ruth came away the shadows at the Sylvester farm had visibly lifted, and life was resuming its normal course there. They had proceeded only a short distance on their homeward way, however, when they heard footsteps behind, and saw Rufus hastening after them bareheaded.

"Tell me, Squire, what d'ye think I ought to do about that--what I done once?" he cried.

"Well, Rufus," the old Squire replied, "that is a matter you must settle with your own conscience. Since you ask me, I should say that, if the wrong you did can be righted in any way, you had better try to right it."

"I will. I can. That's what I will do!" he exclaimed.

"I feel sure you will," the old Squire said; and Rufus went back, looking much relieved.

"Did you ever find out just what it was that Sylvester had done?" I asked.

"Well, never exactly," the old Squire replied, smiling. "But I made certain surmises. Less than a fortnight after my talk with Rufus our neighbors, the Wilburs, were astonished one morning to find that during the night a full barrel of salt pork had been set on their porch by the kitchen door. Every mark had been carefully sc.r.a.ped off the barrel, but on the top head were the words, printed with a lead pencil, 'This is yourn and I am sorry.'

"Fourteen years before, the Wilburs had lost a large hog very mysteriously. At that time domestic animals were allowed to run about much more freely than at present, and they often strayed along the highway. Sylvester was always in poor circ.u.mstances; and I believe that Wilbur's hog came along the road by night and that Rufus was tempted to make way with it privately and to conceal all traces of the theft.

"In spite of the words on the head of the barrel, Mr. Wilbur was in some doubt what to do with the pork and asked my advice. I told him that if I were in his place I should keep it and say nothing. But I didn't tell him of my talk with Sylvester about the unpardonable sin," the old gentleman added, smiling. "That was hardly a proper subject for gossip."

CHAPTER XV

THE CANTALOUPE COAXER

Every spring at the old farm we used to put in a row of hills for cantaloupes and another for watermelons. But, truth to say, our planting melons, like our efforts to raise peaches and grapes, was always more or less of a joke, for frosts usually killed the vines before the melons were half grown. Nevertheless, spring always filled us with fresh hope that the summer would prove warm, and that frosts would hold off until October. But we never really raised a melon fit for the table until the old Squire and Addison invented the "haymaker."

To make hay properly we thought we needed two successive days of sun.

When rain falls nearly every day haying comes to a standstill, for if the mown gra.s.s is left in the field it blackens and rots; if it is drawn to the barn, it turns musty in the mow. Usually the sun does its duty, but once in a while there comes a summer in Maine when there is so much wet weather that it is nearly impossible to harvest the hay crop. Such a summer was that of 1868.

At the old farm our rule was to begin haying the day after the Fourth of July and to push the work as fast as possible, so as to get in most of the crop before dog-days. That summer I remember we had mowed four acres of gra.s.s on the morning of the fifth. But in the afternoon the sky clouded, the night turned wet, and the sun scarcely showed again for a week. A day and a half of clear weather followed; but showers came before the sodden swaths could be shaken up and the moisture dried out, and then dull or wet days followed for a week longer; that is, to the twenty-first of the month. Not a hundredweight of hay had we put into the barn, and the first hay we had mown had spoiled in the field.

At such times the northeastern farmer must keep his patience--if he can.

The old Squire had seen Maine weather for many years and had learned the uselessness of fretting. He looked depressed, but merely said that Halstead and I might as well begin going to the district school with the girls.

In the summer we usually had to work on the farm during good weather, as boys of our age usually did in those days; but it was now too wet to hoe corn or to do other work in the field. We could do little except to wait for fair weather. Addison, who was older than I, did not go back to school and spent much of the time poring over a pile of old magazines up in the attic.

Halstead and I had been going to school for four or five days when on coming home one afternoon we found a great stir of activity round the west barn. Timbers and boards had been fetched from an old shed on the "Aunt Hannah lot"--a family appurtenance of the home farm--and lay heaped on the ground. Two of the hired men were laying foundation stones along the side of the barn. Addison, who had just driven in with a load of long rafters from the old Squire's mill on Lurvey's Stream, called to us to help him unload them.

"Why, what's going to be built?" we exclaimed.

"Haymaker," he replied shortly.

The answer did not enlighten us.

"'Haymaker'?" repeated Halstead wonderingly.

"Yes, haymaker," said Addison. "So bear a hand here. We've got to hurry, too, if we are to make any hay this year." He then told us that the old Squire had driven to the village six miles away, to get a load of hothouse gla.s.s. While we stood pondering that bit of puzzling information, a third hired man drove into the yard on a heavy wagon drawn by a span of work horses. On the wagon was the old fire box and the boiler of a stationary steam engine that we had had for some time in the shook shop a mile down the road.

We learned at supper that Addison and the old Squire, having little to do that day except watch the weather, had put their heads together and hatched a plan to make hay from freshly mown gra.s.s without the aid of the sun. I have always understood that the plan originated in something that Addison had read, or in some picture that he had seen in one of the magazines in the garret. But the old Squire, who had a spice of Yankee inventiveness in him, had improved on Addison's first notion by suggesting a gla.s.s roof, set aslant to a south exposure, so as to utilize the rays of the sun when it did shine.

The haymaker was simply a long shed built against the south side of the barn. The front and the ends were boarded up to a height of eight feet from the ground. At that height strong cedar cross poles were laid, six inches apart, so as to form a kind of rack, on which the freshly mown gra.s.s could be pitched from a cart.

The gla.s.s roof was put on as soon as the gla.s.s arrived; it slanted at an angle of perhaps forty degrees from the front of the shed up to the eaves of the barn. The rafters, which were twenty-six feet in length, were hemlock scantlings eight inches wide and two inches thick, set edgewise; the panes of gla.s.s, which were eighteen inches wide by twenty-four inches long, were laid in rows upon the rafters like shingles. The s.p.a.ce between the rack of poles and the gla.s.s roof was of course pervious to the sun rays and often became very warm. Three scuttles, four feet square, set low in the gla.s.s roof and guarded by a framework, enabled us to pitch the gra.s.s from the cart directly into the loft; and I may add here that the dried hay could be pitched into the haymow through apertures in the side of the barn.

That season the sun scarcely shone at all. The old fire box and boiler were needed most of the time. We installed the antiquated apparatus under the open floor virtually in the middle of the long s.p.a.ce beneath, where it served as a hot-air furnace. The tall smoke pipe rose to a considerable height above the roof of the barn; and to guard against fire we carefully protected with sheet iron everything round it and round the fire box. As the boiler was already worn out and unsafe for steam, we put no water into it and made no effort to prevent the tubes from shrinking. For fuel we used slabs from the sawmill. The fire box and boiler gave forth a great deal of heat, which rose through the layer of gra.s.s on the poles.

The entire length of the loft was seventy-four feet, and the width was nineteen feet. We threw the gra.s.s in at the scuttles and spread it round in a layer about eighteen inches thick. As thus charged, the loft would hold about as much hay as grew on an acre. From four to seven hours were needed to make the gra.s.s into hay, but the time varied according as the gra.s.s was dry or green and damp when mown. Once in the haymaker it dried so fast that you could often see a cloud of steam rising from the scuttles in the gla.s.s roof, which had to be left partly open to make a draft from below.

Of course, we used artificial heat only in wet or cloudy weather. When the sun came out brightly we depended on solar heat. Perhaps half a day served to make a "charge" of gra.s.s into hay, if we turned it and shook it well in the loft. Pa.s.sing the gra.s.s through the haymaker required no more work than making hay in the field in good weather.