Saxe Holm's Stories Part 5

Part II.

As the spring drew near, a new anxiety began to press upon Draxy. Reuben drooped. The sea-sh.o.r.e had never suited him. He pined at heart for the inland air, the green fields, the fragrant woods. This yearning always was strongest in the spring, when he saw the earth waking up around him; but now the yearning became more than yearning. It was the home-sickness of which men have died. Reuben said little, but Draxy divined all. She had known it from the first, but had tried to hope that he could conquer it.

Draxy spent many wakeful hours at night now. The deed of the New Hampshire land lay in her upper bureau drawer, wrapped in an old handkerchief. She read it over, and over, and over. She looked again and again at the faded pink township on the old atlas. "Who knows," thought she, "but that land was overlooked and forgotten? It is so near the 'ungranted lands,' which must be wilderness, I suppose!" Slowly a dim purpose struggled in Draxy's brain. It would do no harm to find out. But how? No more journeys must be taken on uncertainties. At last, late one night, the inspiration came.

Who shall say that it is not an unseen power which sometimes suggests to sorely tried human hearts the one possible escape? Draxy was in bed. She rose, lighted her candle, and wrote two letters. Then she went back to bed and slept peacefully. In the morning when she kissed her father good-by, she looked wistfully in his face. She had never kept any secret from him before, except the secret of her verses. "But he must not be disappointed again," said Draxy; "and there is no real hope."

She dropped her letter into the post-office and went to her work.

The letter was addressed--

"To the Postmaster of Clairvend,

"New Hampshire."

It was a very short letter.

"DEAR SIR:--I wish to ask some help from a minister in your town. If there is more than one minister, will you please give my letter to the kindest one. Yours truly,

"DRAXY MILLER."

The letter inclosed was addressed--

"To the Minister of Clairvend."

This letter also was short.

"DEAR SIR:--I have asked the Postmaster to give this letter to the kindest minister in the town.

"I am Reuben Miller's daughter. My father is very poor. He has not known how to do as other men do to be rich. He is very good, sir. I think you can hardly have known any one so good. Mr. Stephen Potter, a man who owed him money, has given us a deed of land in your town. My father thinks the deed is not good for anything. But I thought perhaps it might be; and I would try to find out. My father is very sick, but I think he would get well if he could come and live on a farm. I have written this letter in the night, as soon as I thought about you; I mean as soon as I thought that there must be a minister in Clairvend, and he would be willing to help me.

"I have not told my father, because I do not want him to be disappointed again as he was about the deed.

"I have copied for you the part of the deed which tells where the land is; and I put in a stamp to pay for your letter to me, and if you will find out for us if we can get this land, I shall be grateful to you all my life. DRAXY MILLER."

Inclosed was a slip of paper on which Draxy had copied with great care the description of the boundaries of the land conveyed by the deed. It was all that was necessary. The wisest lawyer, the shrewdest diplomatist in the land never put forth a subtler weapon than this simple girl's simple letter.

It was on the morning of the 3d of April that Draxy dropped her letter in the office. Three days later it was taken out of the mail-bag in the post-office of Clairvend. The post-office was in the one store of the village. Ten or a dozen men were lounging about curiosity about the odd name was soon swallowed up in curiosity as to the contents of the letter.

The men of Clairvend had not been so stirred and roused by anything since the fall election. Luckily for Draxy's poor little letter, there was but one minister in the village, and the only strife which rose was as to who should carry him the letter. Finally, two of the most persistent set out with it, both declaring that they had business on that road, and had meant all along to go in and see the Elder on their way home.

Elder Kinney lived in a small cottage high up on a hill, a mile from the post-office, and on a road very little travelled. As the men toiled up this hill, they saw a tall figure coming rapidly towards them.

"By thunder! there's the Elder now! That's too bad," said little Eben Hill, the greatest gossip in the town.

The Elder was walking at his most rapid rate; and Elder Kinney's most rapid rate was said to be one with which horses did not easily keep up.

"No, thank you, friend, I haven't time to ride to-day," he often replied to a parishioner who, jogging along with an old farm-horse, offered to give him a lift on the road.

"Elder! Elder! here's a letter we was a bringin' up to you!" called out both of the men at once as he pa.s.sed them like a flash, saying hurriedly "Good evening! good evening!" and was many steps down the hill beyond them before he could stop.

"Oh, thank you!" he said, taking it hastily and dropping it into his pocket. "Mrs. Williams is dying, they say; I cannot stop a minute," and he was out of sight while the baffled parishioners stood confounded at their ill-luck.

"Now jest as like's not we shan't never know what was in that letter,"

said. Eben Hill, disconsolately. "Ef we'd ha'gone in and set down while he read it, we sh'd ha' had some chance."

"But then he mightn't ha' read it while we was there," replied Joseph Bailey resignedly; an' I expect It ain't none o' our business anyhow, one way or t'other."

"It's the queerest thing's ever happened in this town," persisted Eben; "what's a girl--that is, if 'tis a girl--got to do writin' to a minister she don't know? I don't believe it's any good she's after."

"Wal, ef she is, she's come to the right place; and there's no knowin' but that the Lord's guided her, Eben; for ef ever there was a man sent on this airth to do the Lord's odd jobs o' looking arter folks, it's Elder Kinney," said Joseph.

"That's so," answered Eben in a dismal tone, "that's so; but he's dreadful close-mouthed when he's a mind to be. You can't deny that!"

"Wal, I dunno's I want ter deny it," said Joseph, who was beginning, in Eben's company, to grow ashamed of curiosity; "I dunno's it's anything agin him," and so the men parted.

It was late at night when Elder Kinney went home from the bedside of the dying woman. He had forgotten all about the letter. When he undressed, it fell from his pocket, and lay on the floor. It was the first thing he saw in the morning. "I declare!" said the Elder, and reaching out a long arm from the bed, he picked it up.

The bright winter sun was streaming in on the Elder's face as he read Draxy's letter. He let it fall on the scarlet and white counterpane, and lay thinking. The letter touched him unspeakably. Elder Kinney was no common man; he had a sensitive organization and a magnetic power, which, if he had had the advantages of education and position, would have made him a distinguished preacher. As a man, he was tender, chivalrous, and impulsive; and even the rough, cold, undemonstrative people among whom his life had been spent had, without suspecting it, almost a romantic affection for him. He had buried his young wife and her first-born still-born child together in this little village twelve years before, and had ever since lived in the same house from which they had been carried to the grave-yard. "If you ever want any other man to preach to you," he said to the people, "you've only to say so to the Conference. I don't want to preach one sermon too many to you. But I shall live and die in this house; I can't ever go away. I can get a good livin' at farmin'--good as preachin', any day!"

The sentence, "I am Reuben Miller's daughter," went to his heart as it had gone to every man's heart who had heard it before from Draxy's unconscious lips. But it sunk deeper in his heart than in any other.

"If baby had lived she would have loved me like this perhaps," thought the Elder, as he read the pathetic words over and over. Then he studied the paragraph copied from the deed. Suddenly a thought flashed into his mind.

He knew something about this land. It must be--yes, it must be on a part of this land that the sugar-camp lay from which he had been sent for, five years before, to see a Frenchman who was lying very ill in the little log sugar-house. The Elder racked his brains. Slowly it all came back to him.

He remembered that at the time some ill-will had been shown in the town toward this Frenchman; that doubts had been expressed about his right to the land; and that no one would go out into the clearing to help take care of him. Occasionally, since that time, the Elder had seen the man hanging about the town. He had an evil look; this was all the Elder could remember.

At breakfast he said to old Nancy, his housekeeper: "Nancy, did you ever know anything about that Frenchman who had a sugar-camp out back of the swamp road? I went to see him when he had the fever a few years ago."

Nancy was an Indian woman with a little white blood in her veins. She never forgot an injury. This Frenchman had once jeered at her from the steps of the village store, and the village men had laughed.

"Know anythin' about him? Yes, sir. He's a son o' Satan, an' I reckon he stays to hum the great part o' the year, for he's never seen round here except jest sugarin' time."

The Elder laughed in spite of himself. Nancy's tongue was a member of which he strongly disapproved; but his efforts to enforce charity and propriety of speech upon her were sometimes rendered null and void by his lack of control of his features. Nancy loved her master, but she had no reverence in her composition, and nothing gave her such delight as to make him laugh out against his will. She went on to say that the Frenchman came every spring, bringing with him a gang of men, some twelve or more, "all sons o' the same father, sir; you'd know 'em's far's you see 'em." They took a large stock of provisions, went out into the maple clearing, and lived there during the whole sugar season in rough log huts. "They do say he's jest carried off a good thousand dollar's worth o' sugar this very week," said Nancy.

The Elder brought his hand down hard on the table and said "Whew!" This was Elder Kinney's one e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n. Nancy seldom heard it, and she knew it meant tremendous excitement. She grew eager, and lingered, hoping for further questions; but the Elder wanted his next information from a more accurate and trustworthy source than old Nancy. Immediately after breakfast he set out for the village; soon he slackened his pace, and began to reflect. It was necessary to act cautiously; he felt instinctively sure that the Frenchman had not purchased the land. His occupation of it had evidently been acquiesced in by the town for many years; but the Elder was too well aware of the slack and unbusinesslike way in which much of the town business was managed, to attach much weight to this fact. He was perplexed--a rare thing for Elder Kinney. He stopped and sat down on the top of a stone wall to think. In a few minutes he saw the steaming heads of a pair of oxen coming up the hill. Slowly the cart came in sight: it was loaded with sugar-buckets; and there, walking by its side, was--yes! it was--the very Frenchman himself.

Elder Kinney was too much astonished even to say "Whew!"

"This begins to look like the Lord's own business," was the first impulsive thought of his devout heart. "There's plainly something to be done. That little Draxy's father shall get some o' the next year's sugar out o' that camp, or my name isn't Seth Kinney;" and the Elder sprang from the wall and walked briskly towards the Frenchman. As he drew near him, and saw the forbidding look on the fellow's face, he suddenly abandoned his first intention, which was to speak to him, and, merely bowing, pa.s.sed on down the hill.

"He's a villain, if I know the look of one," said honest Elder. "I'll think a little longer. I wonder where he stores his buckets. Now, there's a chance," and Elder Kinney turned about and followed the plodding cart up the hill again. It was a long pull and a tedious one; and for Elder Kinney to keep behind oxen was a torture like being in a straight waistcoat. One mile, two miles, three miles! the Elder half repented of his undertaking; but like all wise and magnetic natures, he had great faith in his first impulses, and he kept on.

At last the cart turned into a lane on the right-hand side of the road.

"Why, he's goin' to old Ike's," exclaimed the Elder. "Well, I can get at all old Ike knows, and it's pretty apt to be all there is worth knowin',"

and Elder Kinney began, in his satisfaction, to whistle

"Life is the time to serve the Lord,"