In the Midst of Alarms Part 14

"Never mind about that. What have you been learning?"

"Wisdom, my boy; wisdom in solid chunks. In the first place, I am learning to admire the resourcefulness of these people around us.

Practically, they make everything they need. They are the most self-helping people that I was ever thrown among. I look upon theirs as the ideal life."

"I think you said something like that when we first came here."

"I said that, you a.s.s, about camping out. I am talking now about farm life. Farmers eliminate the middleman pretty effectually, and that in itself is going a long way toward complete happiness. Take the making of soap, that I told you about; there you have it, cheap and good. When you've made it, you know what is in it, and I'll be hanged if you do when you pay a big price for it in New York. Here they make pretty nearly everything they need, except the wagon and the crockery; and I'm not sure but they made them a few years back. Now, when a man with a good sharp ax and a jack-knife can do anything from building his house to whittling out a chair, he's the most independent man on earth. n.o.body lives better than these people do. Everything is fresh, sweet, and good.

Perhaps the country air helps; but it seems to me I never tasted such meals as Mrs. Bartlett, for instance, gets up. They buy nothing at the stores except the tea, and I confess I prefer milk myself. My tastes were always simple."

"And what is the deduction?"

"Why, that this is the proper way to live. Old Hiram has an anvil and an amateur forge. He can tinker up almost anything, and that eliminates the blacksmith. Howard has a bench, saws, hammers, and other tools, and that eliminates the carpenter. The women eliminate the baker, the soap boiler, and a lot of other parasites. Now, when you have eliminated all the middlemen, then comes independence, and consequently complete happiness. You can't keep happiness away with a shotgun then."

"But what is to become of the blacksmith, the carpenter, and all the rest?"

"Let them take up land and be happy too; there's plenty of land. The land is waiting for them. Then look how the master is eliminated. That's the most beautiful riddance of all. Even the carpenter and blacksmith usually have to work under a boss; and if not, they have to depend on the men who employ them. The farmer has to please n.o.body but himself.

That adds to his independence. That's why old Hiram is ready to fight the first comer on the slightest provocation. He doesn't care whom he offends, so long as it isn't his wife. These people know how to make what they want, and what they can't make they do without. That's the way to form a great nation. You raise, in this way, a self-sustaining, resolute, unconquerable people. The reason the North conquered the South was because we drew our armies mostly from the self-reliant farming cla.s.s, while we had to fight a people accustomed for generations to having things done for them."

"Why don't you buy a farm, Yates?"

"Several reasons. I am spoiled for the life here. I am like the drunkard who admires a temperate life, yet can't pa.s.s a ginshop. The city virus is in my blood. And then, perhaps, after all, I am not quite satisfied with the tendency of farm life; it is unfortunately in a transition state. It is at the frame-house stage, and will soon blossom into the red-brick stage. The log-house era is what I yearn for. Then everything a person needed was made on the farm. When the brick-house era sets in, the middleman will be rampant. I saw the other day at the Howards' a set of ancient stones that interested me as much as an a.s.syrian marble would interest you. They were old, home-made millstones, and they have not been used since the frame house was built. The grist mill at the village put them out of date. And just here, notice the subtlety of the crafty middleman. The farmer takes his grist to the mill, and the miller does not charge him cash for grinding it. He takes toll out of the bags, and the farmer has a vague idea that he gets his grinding for almost nothing. The old way was the best, Renny, my boy. The farmer's son won't be as happy in the brick house which the mason will build for him as his grandfather was in the log house he built for himself. And fools call this change the advance of civilization."

"There is something to be said for the old order of things," admitted Renmark. "If a person could unite the advantages of what we call civilization with the advantages of a pastoral life, he would inaugurate a condition of things that would be truly idyllic."

"That's so, Renmark, that's so!" cried Yates enthusiastically. "A brownstone mansion on Fifth Avenue, and a log hut on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Superior! That would suit me down to the ground. Spend half the year in each place."

"Yes," said the professor meditatively; "a log hut on the rocks and under the trees, with the lake in front, would be very nice if the hut had a good library attached."

"And a daily paper. Don't forget the press."

"No. I draw the line there. The daily paper would mean the daily steamer or the daily train. The one would frighten away the fish, and the other would disturb the stillness with its whistle."

Yates sighed. "I forgot about the drawbacks," he said. "That's the trouble with civilization. You can't have the things you want without bringing in their trail so many things you don't want. I shall have to give up the daily paper."

"Then there is another objection, worse than either steamer or train."

"What's that?"

"The daily paper itself."

Yates sat up indignantly.

"Renmark!" he cried, "that's blasphemy. For Heaven's sake, man, hold something sacred. If you don't respect the press, what do you respect?

Not my most cherished feelings, at any rate, or you wouldn't talk in that flippant manner. If you speak kindly of my daily paper, I'll tolerate your library."

"And that reminds me: Have you brought any books with you, Yates? I have gone through most of mine already, although many of them will bear going over again; still, I have so much time on my hands that I think I may indulge in a little general reading. When you wrote asking me to meet you in Buffalo, I thought you perhaps intended to tramp through the country, so I did not bring as many books with me as I should have done if I had known you were going to camp out."

Yates sprang from the hammock.

"Books? Well, I should say so! Perhaps you think I don't read anything but the daily papers. I'd have you know that I am something of a reader myself. You mustn't imagine you monopolize all the culture in the township, professor."

The young man went into the tent, and shortly returned with an armful of yellow-covered, paper-bound small volumes, which he flung in profusion at the feet of the man from Toronto. They were mostly Beadle's Dime Novels, which had a great sale at the time.

"There," he said, "you have quant.i.ty, quality, and variety, as I have before remarked. 'The Murderous Sioux of Kalamazoo;' that's a good one.

A hair-raising Indian story in every sense of the word. The one you are looking at is a pirate story, judging by the burning ship on the cover.

But for first-cla.s.s highwaymen yarns, this other edition is the best.

That's the 'Sixteen String Jack set.' They're immense, if they do cost a quarter each. You must begin at the right volume, or you'll be sorry.

You see, they never really end, although every volume is supposed to be complete in itself. They leave off at the most exciting point, and are continued in the next volume. I call that a pretty good idea, but it's rather exasperating if you begin at the last book. You'll enjoy this lot. I'm glad I brought them along."

"It is a blessing," said Renmark, with the ghost of a smile about his lips. "I can truthfully say that they are entirely new to me."

"That's all right, my boy," cried Yates loftily, with a wave of his hand. "Use them as if they were your own."

Renmark arose leisurely and picked up a quant.i.ty of the books.

"These will do excellently for lighting our morning camp fire," he said.

"And if you will allow me to treat them as if they were my own, that is the use to which I will put them. You surely do not mean to say that you read such trash as this, Yates?"

"Trash?" exclaimed Yates indignantly. "It serves me right. That's what a man gets for being decent to you, Renny. Well, you're not compelled to read them; but if you put one of them in the fire, your stupid treatises will follow, if they are not too solid to burn. You don't know good literature when you see it."

The professor, buoyed up, perhaps, by the conceit which comes to a man through the possession of a real sheepskin diploma, granted by a university of good standing, did not think it necessary to defend his literary taste. He busied himself in pruning a stick he had cut in the forest, and finally he got it into the semblance of a walking cane. He was an athletic man, and the indolence of camp life did not suit him as it did Yates. He tested the stick in various ways when he had trimmed it to his satisfaction.

"Are you ready for a ten-mile walk?" he asked of the man in the hammock.

"Good gracious, no. Man wants but little walking here below, and he doesn't want it ten miles in length either. I'm easily satisfied. You're off, are you? Well, so long. And I say, Renny, bring back some bread when you return to camp. It's the one safe thing to do."

CHAPTER IX.

Renmark walked through the woods and then across the fields, until he came to the road. He avoided the habitations of man as much as he could, for he was neither so sociably inclined nor so frequently hungry as was his companion. He strode along the road, not caring much where it led him. Everyone he met gave him "Good-day," after the friendly custom of the country. Those with wagons or lighter vehicles going in his direction usually offered him a ride, and went on, wondering that a man should choose to walk when it was not compulsory. The professor, like most silent men, found himself good company, and did not feel the need of companionship in his walks. He had felt relieved rather than disappointed when Yates refused to accompany him. And Yates, swinging drowsily in his hammock, was no less gratified. Even where men are firm and intimate friends, the first few days of camping out together is a severe strain on their regard for each other. If Damon and Pythias had occupied a tent together for a week, the worst enemy of either, or both, might at the end of that time have ventured into the camp in safety, and would have been welcome.

Renmark thought of these things as he walked along. His few days'

intimacy with Yates had shown him how far apart they had managed to get by following paths that diverged more and more widely the farther they were trodden. The friendship of their youth had turned out to be merely ephemeral. Neither would now choose the other as an intimate a.s.sociate.

Another illusion had gone.

"I have surely enough self-control," said Renmark to himself, as he walked on, "to stand his shallow flippancy for another week, and not let him see what I think of him."

Yates at the same time was thoroughly enjoying the peaceful silence of the camp. "That man is an exaggerated schoolmaster, with all the faults of the species abnormally developed. If I once open out on him, he will learn more truth about himself in ten minutes than he ever heard in his life before. What an unbearable prig he has grown to be." Thus ran Yates' thoughts as he swung in his hammock, looking up at the ceiling of green leaves.

Nevertheless, the case was not so bad as either of them thought. If it had been, then were marriage not only a failure, but a practical impossibility. If two men can get over the first few days in camp without a quarrel, life becomes easier, and the tension relaxes.

Renmark, as he polished off his ten miles, paid little heed to those he met; but one driver drew up his horse and accosted him.

"Good-day," he said. "How are you getting on in the tent?"

The professor was surprised at the question. Had their tenting-out eccentricity gone all over the country? He was not a quick man at recognizing people, belonging, as he did, to the "I-remember-your-face-but-can't-recall-your-name" fraternity. It had been said of him that he never, at any one time, knew the names of more than half a dozen students in his cla.s.s; but this was an undergraduate libel on him. The young man who had accosted him was driving a single horse, attached to what he termed a "democrat"--a four-wheeled light wagon, not so slim and elegant as a buggy, nor so heavy and clumsy as a wagon. Renmark looked up at the driver with confused unrecognition, troubled because he vaguely felt that he had met him somewhere before.