Lydia of the Pines Part 24

I'll begin my hunt to-morrow."

John smoothed her tumbled hair gently. "We're great friends, aren't we, Lydia! I've an idea you'll always believe in me no matter what folks say, eh?"

"You bet!" replied Lydia solemnly.

John Levine went back to his duties as sheriff and Lydia and Amos and Lizzie missed him for a long time. But gradually life fell back into the old routine and spring, then summer, were on them almost before they realized winter was gone.

Lydia did well at school, though she still was an isolated little figure among her schoolmates. The cooking teacher added sewing to the course, after Christmas, and Lydia took up "over and over st.i.tch" at the point where her gentle mother had left off five years before. She progressed so famously that by the time school closed she had learned how to use a shirtwaist pattern and how to fit a simple skirt. With her plans for a summer of dress-making she looked with considerable equanimity on the pretty spring wardrobes of her schoolmates.

They saw less than ever of Levine when summer came, for he was beginning his campaign for Congressman. He came out occasionally on Sunday and then he and Lydia would manage a little stroll in the woods or along the lake sh.o.r.e when they would talk over their progress in the Spiritual Traveling they had undertaken in January. Lydia had decided to give the churches a chance and was deliberately attending one Sunday School after another, studying each one with a child's simple sincerity.

One source of relief to Lydia during the summer was that Mrs. Marshall and Margery spent two months in the East. Lydia had faithfully kept in touch with Margery ever since her promise had been given to Dave Marshall. But she did not like the banker's daughter--nor her mother.

So again as far as playmates were concerned Lydia spent a solitary summer.

Yet she was not lonely. Never before had the lake seemed so beautiful to her. Sitting on the little pier with Adam while her father worked in his garden, she watched the sunset across the water, night after night. There was nothing that seemed to bring her nearer to a sense of G.o.d than this. Night after night the miracle, always the same, always different. The sun slipped down behind the distant hills, the clouds turned purple in the Western hill tops, fading toward the zenith to an orange that turned to azure as she watched. The lake beneath painted the picture again, with an added shimmer, a more mysterious glow.

Little fish flashed like flecks of gold from the water, dropping back in a shower of amethyst. Belated dragon flies darted home. And the young girl watching, listening, waiting, felt her spirit expand to a demand greater than she could answer.

Amos was keenly interested in Levine's campaign. His att.i.tude toward politics was curiously detached, when one considered that he was saturated with information--both as to state and national politics. He was vicious in his criticism of the Democrats, ardent in his support of the Republicans, yet it never seemed to occur to him that it was his political duty to do anything more than talk. He seemed to feel that his ancestors in helping to launch the government had forever relieved him from any duty more onerous than that of casting a vote.

He did, however, take Lydia one September evening just before school opened to hear John make a speech in the Square. Lydia up to this time had given little heed to the campaign, but she was delighted with the unwonted adventure of being away from home in the evening.

It was a soft, moonlit night. The old Square, filled with giant elms, was dotted with arc lights that threw an undulating light on the gray ma.s.s of the Capitol building. When Amos and Lydia arrived the Square was full of a laughing, chattering crowd. Well dressed men and women from the University and the lake sh.o.r.e, workingmen, smoking black pipes, pushing baby carriages, while their wives in Sunday best hung on their arms. Young boys and girls of Lydia's age chewed gum and giggled. Older boys and girls kept to the shadows of the elms and whispered. On the wooden platform extended from the granite steps of the Capitol, a band dispensed dance music and patriotic airs, breaking into "America" as Levine made his way to the front of the platform.

Almost instantly the crowd became quiet. A curious sort of tenseness became apparent as Levine began to speak.

Lydia stared up at him. He looked very elegant to her in his frock coat and gray trousers. She was filled with pride at the thought of how close and dear he was to her. She wished that the folk about her realized that she and her shabby father were intimate with the hero of the evening.

The first part of the address interested Lydia very little. It concerned the possibility of a new Post Office for Lake City and made numerous excursions into the matter of free trade. It did not seem to Lydia that in spite of their att.i.tude of tenseness, the people around her were much more interested than she.

Then of a sudden Levine launched his bolt.

"But after all," he said, "my friends, what is free trade or a new Post Office to you or me? Actually nothing, as far as our selfish and personal interests go. And who is not selfish, who is not personal in his att.i.tude toward his community and his country? I frankly admit that I am. I suspect that you are.

"Ladies and gentlemen, twenty miles north of this old and highly civilized city, lies a tract fifty miles square of primitive forest, inhabited by savages. That tract of land is as beautiful as a dream of heaven. Virgin pines tower to the heavens. Little lakes lie hid like jewels on its bosoms. Its soil is black. Fur bearing animals frequent it now as they did a century ago.

"Friends, in this city of white men there is want and suffering for the necessities of life. Twenty miles to the north lies plenty for every needy inhabitant of the town, lies a bit of loam and heaven-kissing pines for each and all.

"But, you say, they belong to the Indians! Friends, they belong to a filthy, degenerate, lazy race of savages, who refuse to till the fields or cut the pines, who spend on whiskey the money allowed them by a benevolent government and live for the rest, like beasts of the field.

"Why, I ask you, should Indians be pampered and protected, while whites live only in the bitter air of compet.i.tion?

"I am not mincing words to-night. I do not talk of taking the lands from the Indians by crooked methods. You all know the law. An Indian may not sell the lands allotted to him. I want you to send me to Congress to change that law. I want the Indian to be able to sell his acreage."

Levine stopped and bowed. Pandemonium broke loose in the Square.

Clapping, hisses, cheers and cat-calls. Lydia clung to her father's arm while he began to struggle through the crowd.

"Well," he said, as they reached the outer edge of the Square and headed for the trolley, "the battle is on."

"But what will the Indians do, Daddy, if they sell their land?" asked Lydia.

"Do! Why just what John intimated. Get out and hustle for a living like the rest of us do. Why not?"

Why not indeed! "What did some of the people hiss for?" asked Lydia.

"Oh, there's a cheap bunch of sentimentalists in the town,--all of 'em, you'll notice, with good incomes,--who claim the Indians are like children, so we should take care of 'em like children. Then there's another bunch who make a fat living looting the Indians. They don't want the reservation broken up. I'm going to sit on the back seat of the car and smoke."

Lydia clambered into the seat beside her father. "Well--but--well, I suppose if Mr. Levine feels that way and you too, it's right. But they are kind of like children. Charlie Jackson's awful smart, but he's like a child too."

"I don't care what they're like," said Amos. "We've babied 'em long enough. Let 'em get out and hustle."

"Do you think Mr. Levine'll get elected?"

Amos shrugged his shoulders. "Never can tell. This is a Democratic town, but Levine is standing for something both Democrats and Republicans want. It'll be a pretty fight. May split the Democratic party."

This was the beginning of Lydia's reading of the newspapers. To her father's secret amus.e.m.e.nt, she found the main details of Levine's battle as interesting as a novel. Every evening when he got home to supper he found her poring over the two local papers and primed with questions for him. Up to this moment she had lived in a quiet world bounded by her school, the home, the bit of lake sh.o.r.e and wood with which she was intimate, and peopled by her father and her few friends.

With John Levine's speech, her horizon suddenly expanded to take in the city and the vague picture of the reservation to the north. She realized that the eyes of the whole community were focused on her dearest friend. Up on the quiet, shaded college campus--the newspapers told her--they spoke of him contemptuously. He was a cheap politician, full of unsound economic principles, with a history of dishonest land deals behind him. It would be a shame to the community to be represented by such a man. They said that his Democratic opponent, a lawyer who had been in Congress some five terms, was at least a gentleman whose career had been a clean and open book.

When these slurs reached Levine, he answered in a vitriolic speech in which he named the names of several members of the faculty who had profited through the Indian agent in quiet little sales of worthless goods to Indians.

The saloon element, Lydia learned, was against Levine. It wanted the reservation to stand. That the saloon element should be in harmony with them was galling to the college crowd, though the fact that their motives for agreement were utterly different was some solace.

The "fast crowd" were for John. Clubmen, politicians, real estate men were high in his praise. The farmers all were going to vote for him.

Lake City was always interested in the national election but this year, where the presidential candidates were mentioned once, Levine and his opponent were mentioned a hundred times. Ministers preached sermons on the campaign. The Ladies' Aid Society of the Methodist Church, the Needlework Guild of the Episcopalian, the Woman's Auxiliary of the Unitarian, hereditary enemies, combined forces to work for Levine, and the freeing of the poor Indian from bondage.

CHAPTER VIII

THE NOTE

"Each year I strew the ground with cones, yet no young pines grow up.

This has been true only since the Indians went."--_The Murmuring Pine_.

Margery Marshall had entered High School this fall. She had returned from New York with a trousseau that a bride might have envied. She was growing tall, and her beauty already was remarkable. Her little head carried its great black braid proudly. The pallor of her skin was perfectly healthy--and even the Senior lads were seen to observe her with interest and appreciation.

The results of Lydia's summer dressmaking had not been bad. She had made herself several creditable shirtwaists and a neat little blue serge skirt. Her shoes were still shabby. Poor Lydia seemed somehow never to have decent shoes. But her hands and the back of her neck were clean; and her pile of Junior school books already had been paid for--by picking small fruit for Ma Norton during the summer and helping her to can it. She came back to school with zeal and less than her usual sense of shabbiness.

It was a day toward the first of October at the noon hour that Lydia met Kent and Charlie Jackson. She had finished her lunch, which she ate in the cloakroom, and bareheaded and coatless was walking up and down the sidewalk before the schoolhouse.

"h.e.l.lo, Lyd! How's everything?" asked Kent. "I haven't seen you to talk to since last spring."

"Did you have a fine summer?" said Lydia.

"Aw, only part of it. Dad made me work till the middle of August, then Charlie and I camped up on the reservation."