Over Paradise Ridge Part 10

"I don't know, either," answered Tolly; and again his head dropped into his hands.

"What did she say the last time you asked her?" I questioned. I considered it my duty to get to the bottom of the matter, as I had been called in consultation.

"Ask her? Thunderation! I never have asked her! I've never got that near to her!" he exclaimed, in a perfect outburst of indignation.

Then I laughed. I laughed so that Tolly had to pat me on the back to make me get my breath, and a sleeping mocking-bird scolded outright from a tree by the porch.

"Why don't you do it by telephone?" I gasped.

"By George! that _is_ the idea, all right, Betty!" Tolly exclaimed, with his face positively radiant. I had flung his love troubles into a cla.s.s of affairs that he could handle. "I tell you what I am going to do. I am going to have my wire chief cut Edith's line and make me a direct connection with mine at about nine o'clock to-morrow morning, as that is the time he is in less of a rush with all the other things to attend to.

Then I'll put it to her good and straight if she holds on to the receiver and hears me out."

"But Edith might go over to Boliver to visit May Jessamine Ray for a week at nine o'clock to-morrow. Oh, go do it to-night, Tolly!" I pleaded.

"And let that doll-faced girl at Central hear me? Not much!" answered Tolly, indignantly.

"I didn't mean that," I answered. "Go to her armed with your love, Tolly, and make--make her listen to you."

"Armed with a sand-bag to slug her would be more like it, if I expected to get anywhere with her. No, you've hit it, Betty, and I'm going on down the street and see just where that Morris line goes into the trunk.

Hope Judson won't have to run more than a mile of wire to make that connection." And with no more grat.i.tude or good night than that Tolly went down the street with his head up among his telephone wires, just as Edith keeps hers in the clouds. I hope some day they will run into each other so hard that they will crash out ignition sparks and take fire.

As I said, being so interested in Edith and Tolly, and trying to get her to postpone her visit until he could get the wires up between them both in a material and a sentimental sense, and also wanting to let Sam and Peter miss me sadly, I let quite a few days elapse without being in any of the events out at The Briers. When I did go back I found that things had happened.

"Where's Peter?" I asked, as Sam came to unload me and a huge bag of smoke iris that old Mrs. Johnson had given me for my garden. There was also Byrd's basket from mother, and a pair of small alligators that daddy had got from Florida for him, having run out of natural animal inhabitants of the Harpeth Valley.

"Pete's off with the bit in his mouth--haven't seen him for three days,"

answered Sam as he lifted me and swung me way out into the middle of my own clover-pink bed. It was starred with sweet, white blossoms, having been treated according to Eph's directions and those of Grandmother Nelson's book.

"Peter off? Where? What's happened, Sam?" I exclaimed, with astonished anxiety.

"The play," answered Sam, calmly, as he lit his cob pipe and blew a ring of smoke. "It hit him in the middle of the night before last, and he wrote me a note. Mammy grubs him, and I haven't seen him since. I've paid the Byrd a half interest in the next young that happens to us not to go down the hill to the shack, and we're all just going on as usual."

"Maybe I'd better not go, either," I said, with awe and sympathy for Peter fairly dropping from the words as I uttered them.

"Betty," said Sam as he looked at me through a ring of smoke that the warm wind blew away over our heads, "you run just a little more sense to the cubic foot of dirt than the average, it seems to me. Come on down and watch them begin to cut wheat. It is one week ahead of time, so I can get all the harvesters and not a grain will be lost. They say it'll run sixty bushels to the acre. Think of that, with only a thirty-six record to beat in the Valley. It is that Canadian cross. The Commissioner is down there, and so is your admirer, Chubb. He wastes many hours riding over here to see you when you are in town on frivolous pursuits."

"Frivolous!" I echoed as we went up the path back of the house; and on our way over the hill I told him about Tolly and Edith. Sam laughed; he always does when I want him to; but his eyes were grave after a second.

"The mating season is a troublesome time, isn't it, Betty?" he asked, as he swung me to the top rail of the fence, vaulted over it, and held up his arms to lift me down on the other side; but I sat poised in midair to argue his proposition.

"It ought not to be, Sam," I said, with an experienced feeling rising in my mind and voice at thus discussing fundamentals with a man that could break a wheat record and be attended by the agricultural envoys of the United States government. "People ought to sensibly pick each other from their needs, and not act unintelligent about it."

At which perfectly sage remark a strange thing happened to Samuel Foster Crittenden. He laid his head down on the rail beside my knee and laughed until he almost shook me from my perch. It made me so furious that I slipped past him and ran on ahead. I vaulted the next fence in fine style and landed among the Commissioner and Dr. Chubb and the tobacco-juice neighbors, who had come to see the output of the first book-grown acre. I did not speak again to Sam that day until he tucked in Dr. Chubb beside me for a spin over to Spring Hill, leaving the doctor's old roan for a week's complimentary grazing on Sam's east meadow of thick blue-gra.s.s, grown through a rock-lime dressing that all the neighbors had a.s.sured him would kill the land outright.

"Wheez-chekk! nice young buck for a husband," wheezed the b.u.t.terball as I shot down the hill from under Sam's big hand reached out for my hair.

"Sam?" I gasped.

"Women critters always back and shy, but they git the wedding-bit from a steady hand--and like it," he chuckled, still further. I felt as if I ought not to let Sam rest under such a suspicion, and that I ought to tell him about Peter. But just then he launched forth on a case of a spavined horse he had beyond the cross-roads, which he wanted me to take him to see, and I didn't do it.

I don't much like to think about the long, hot July weeks that followed.

The whole of Harpeth Valley sweltered, and everybody did likewise. That is, I suppose Peter did, for not one glimpse did I or anybody else get of him. Sam says Mammy set his meals down in the doorway of the shack with one of her soft, soothing, "Dah, dah, chile," which was answered with a growl from Peter. That ended the events of his life at The Briers.

Sam worked early and late, and got tanned to the most awful deep mahogany. All of him held out pretty well but his heels, which he came in three times to have me fix for him; and once mother and I had to dress a blister on his back that he got from wearing a torn shirt in the potato-field.

I was wild with anxiety about Peter and the play and the poor little heroine; I didn't know whether she was being murdered or separated for life from the hero. Still, it was good to have Sam to myself for long, quiet, hot evenings out on the front porch under the brooding doves in the eaves above us. Sam never talks much but he listens to me, and sometimes he tells me things from way down inside himself. And little by little I began to understand all about the things he had been too busy doing to tell me about.

"You see, it is this way, Bettykin," he said, one evening when the young moon was attempting to silver the dark all around us as we sat on the front steps, with mother away rounding off the second pair of socks for Peter. "There wasn't one cent of money for me to take Byrd and Mammy and make a start in New York. Even with the best sort of a backing, it is always a ten-year pull for a youngster before he counts in the world. I could have sold The Briers, but I couldn't make up my mind to do it, and then while I hesitated I--I"--he paused a minute and steadied his voice, while I took his hand and held on to it tight--"I got a call--a land call that I had to answer. G.o.d just picked me up and planted me here on my bit of land, and I've got to root and grow or--or dishonor Him."

"Oh, Sam, you have, you have honored Him," I said as I crept closer to his arm.

"I've been all uprooted and pruned, Betty, and I've lost--lost--you know! But for Him I must go on just the same and bear fruit." At the pain in Sam's low voice something in me throbbed.

"Lost? Oh, Sam, what?" I exclaimed, as I hugged his arm against my breast. "What's happened to you, Sam? Tell--"

But just here we were interrupted by a clatter and a clash of hoofs, a wild shout in Peter's voice, and a cheer in the fledgling's high treble.

The biggest mule lurched up to the gate, and two figures took a flying leap from his back to the pavement. With a rush they swept up the path and brought up panting at the bottom of our steps.

"Peter!" I gasped, descending to be sure that neither of them was bodily broken or demented.

"It's across! it's across!" shouted Peter as he reached out his arms and grabbed me in a wild embrace.

"What?" Sam and I both demanded, though, of course, in a way we knew.

"The play!" exclaimed Peter, putting his head down on my shoulder and fairly sobbing out his relief. "Farrington is going to begin rehearsals from the first two acts I've sent him, and I am to go right on to New York with the third that I finished an hour before the wire came over from the cross-roads station. You'll go with me, won't you, Betty? I can't go without you and Sam." And as he hugged me close Peter reached out and grasped Sam's big hand that rested on his arm.

"Of course Betty will go, and I'll come as soon as I get the whole crop in," answered Sam in his deep, kind, strong voice that steadied all our nerves. "I knew you'd make it, Pete. I never doubted that all you needed was a bit of brawn to punch from."

"Peter--Sam!" I gasped, trying to get my balance as I felt as if I were being hurried through s.p.a.ce without even being told where to. "I don't know. I--"

"I can't do without you, Betty," Peter said again, as he held me close and Sam withdrew from us for the distance of about two steps.

"Betty is the real thing, Pete, and she'll stand by when you need her.

She always does," Sam said, in a quiet voice that sank down into the depths of my soul and made a cold spot.

"I--I--don't know. I--" I was just reiterating when daddy and Julia, with a plate of something, came through the gate and up the walk. They had to be told, and they had to congratulate, and then mother came out to see what it was all about. They were all happy and gloriously excited, and I was dead--dead.

Then Sam took Peter home because he had to pack and get into town for the morning train. I begged for the fledgling to be left with me, and Sam consented without even mentioning the string-beans to be picked or the weeds in the parsnips. He said good night to everybody before he did to me, and then started to go with just the farewell word, hesitated a second, and came back and roughed my hair down over my eyes with the greatest roughness he had ever employed in that action. It would have broken my heart if he hadn't.

"Betty," said the Byrd, as he crouched at my side with his thin, scantily clad little body hovered against my skirts, "you ain't going to no New York with Pete and leave me and Sam and all the poor little ones, is you?"

"Oh, Byrd, I'm afraid I'll have to!" I sobbed, cuddling him close.

"Well, then, d.a.m.n Pete!" he exploded.