The Boss of Little Arcady Part 5

Only a fool would have hoped after this--and at least I never gave her ground to call me that. Not even did I commit the folly of revealing my need. She alone ever knew it, and she only in the way that the child had known the schoolboy to gloom and rage afar in his pa.s.sion for her. She had no word of mine for it then, nor had she now, and I believe she felt rather certain there never would be any. She seemed to be grateful for this and doubly kind, with only now and then the flash of a knowing look, or the trifle of a deep, swiftly questioning glance, born, I dare say, of that curiosity which the devil contrives to kindle in G.o.d's most angelic women.

Doubtless she had a little speech of refusal patted into kindliness for me. Perhaps she would not have been wholly anguished to have me hear this--to be able to a.s.sure me tenderly, graciously, of the depth and pureness of her friendship for me. Who knows? I am older now, and things once hidden are revealed. Sometimes I think that a certain new respect for me grew within her as the days tried the metal of my silence--a respect, but nothing more. Her appreciation of my face was too palpably without those reservations that so often cry louder than words.

So we sealed our secret, she and I, in an unspoken pledge, and not even Solon Denney, so keen of scent for rivals, ever divined it.

He called me out with the old boyish whistle the day he confided to me the tremendous news of his engagement. He laughed, foolish with joy as he told it, and I felt tingling in my arms that old boyish, brute impulse to slay him for the wretched ease of his victory. But we were men, so I thrust one of those rebellious arms in among the strands of the creeper, where her own arm had once been, and laid the other on his shoulder in all friendliness. This, while he rambled on of the bigness of life, the great future before Arcady of the Little Country, the importance of the _Argus_, which he had just founded, and the supreme excellence of that splendid mechanism, the new Washington hand-press, installed the week before.

His life was builded of these many interests, of her and himself and his country and his town. In the fulness of his heart he even brought out the latest _Argus_ and read parts from his obituary of Douglas, while I stood stupidly striving to realize what I had long known must be true.

"A great man has fallen," he read, declaiming a little, as in our school days. "Stephen A. Douglas is dead. The voice that so lately and eloquently appealed to his countrymen is hushed in--"

How long he read is uncertain. But from moment to moment his tones would call me back from visions, and I would vaguely hear that one was gone who had warned his fellows against the pitfalls of political jealousy, and bade all who loved their country band against those who would seek to pluck a laurel from the wreath of our glorious confederacy.

But under visions I had made my resolve. Douglas was dead, but others were living.

Two months before in a gray dawn, the walls of a fort in Charleston Harbor had crumbled under fire from a score of rebel batteries. Now the shots echoed in my ears with a new volume.

"Good luck, Solon--and good-by--I'm going 'on to Richmond.'"

"Oh, _that!_" said he, easily, "that will be over before you can get to the front."

But I went, forthwith, and, triumphant lover though he was, the editor of the _Little Arcady Argus_ was less than a prophet.

I went to the "little" war; and of her I carried, as I marched, an ambrotype in a closed case, which I had obtained deviously. She smiled in it, a little questioning, inciting smile, that seemed to lurk back in her eyes rather than along her lips. It was the smile that had availed to keep me firm in my vows of silence.

It was another picture I brought back five years later--the picture of a young girl, not smiling but grave, even fearful, as if she had faced the camera full of apprehension. But I knew her not; the thing had come to me by chance, and I threw it aside to be forgotten.

It is best to tell quickly that those years were swift and full. Early in the second a letter from Solon, read at a random camp-fire, told me of my namesake's coming. For the other years I pleased myself prodigiously by remembering that she must speak my name openly to her first-born. And I l.u.s.ted for battle, then. I was an early Norseman, and I would escape the prosaic bed-death, since, for those dying thus, Held waited in her chill prison-house below, with hunger her dish, starvation her knife, care her bed, and anguish her curtains. To survive for easy death, long deferred, perhaps, I should have my empty dish and bed of care at once. Lacking the battle death, I could at least mimic it, as they did of old, that Odin's choosers of the slain might lead me to Valhalla. There should I forever fight at dawn and be healed at noon, if wounded, to be ready for the feast and song. The world was not big enough for us two if we must stay apart. Life was not to be lived in a beggarly and ign.o.ble compromise. War was its business, bravery its duty, and cowardice its greatest crime--above all, that ultimate, puling cowardice of accepting life empty for its own barren sake.

At the last I lay on a cot in a field hospital, entertained for the moment by the novelty of that vacant, s.p.a.cious feeling on my left side--wondering if I could shave now with one arm--without another hand to pull my face into hard little hummocks for the razor.

I heard the soft quick tread of a hospital steward, and standing before me, he took from its envelope the letter Solon Denney had sent me to say that she was dead. I handed it back, told him to burn it, and I shut my eyes to the sickening shapes of life. My fever came up again, and in the night I felt inch by inch over ground wet with blood for a picture I had relinquished in a Quixotic moment. I must have been troublesome, for they gave me the drug of dreams and I awakened peacefully. I watched the field surgeons gather about a young line officer brought in with a shot through his neck. For the better probing of the wound they removed his head and gave it to me to hold. Seeing that it was Solon Denney's head, I was seized with a mood of jest--I would hide it and make Solon search.

I advanced craftily down an endless corridor, but came to the edge of a wood, where there was a wicked spitting of shots. I cried out again, and once more they gave me the drug. Then I dreamed more quietly. I saw that the soul of my dead arm searched for her soul--that it would soon be drawn to her and offer itself to comfort her and never, never leave her.

It would say, "At least take the arm, since you may have it without the face." It seemed that my other arm should go to her, too. This side of her there could be nothing for either to close upon. It appeared to me that I fell asleep on this fancy and dreamt that I awoke painfully to a poor, one-sided life, effortless, barren, forbidding.

A year later I went back to the Little Country to be counsellor at law to its people in time of need, and a father to Solon Denney and his two children. Solon could direct large affairs acceptably, but he and his babes were as thistle-down in a prairie wind.

He brought the children to visit me the first day that I came home--to a home where I was now to live alone.

I sat on the little porch above the river bank, by the wall of blossoming creeper whose tendrils she had once embraced, bringing her cheek intrepidly against the blossoms of that year, and saw him come slowly up the path. He seemed so sadly alone because of the two little creatures that followed him.

I placed a chair for Solon and was confronted by my namesake.

"Did they shoot your arm off in the war?" he asked.

"Yes, in the war."

He patted the empty sleeve, and his eyes beamed with discovery.

"What did you have your sleeve rolled up for when your arm was shot?"

I made plain to him the mystery of the whole sleeve.

"She often spoke of you," said Solon. "She seemed to think you would like to be a help to us if you could."

I turned to greet the woman child, but she had strayed into the house. I heard her shouts from my bedroom. Then she came running to us, cooing in helpless joy.

"Candy--candy--Uncle Maje--lovely candy--all pink and dusty."

Well over a face set with the mother's eyes was spilled that which she had clutched and eaten of,--a thing pink and dusty, in truth, but which was not candy.

"She does those things constantly," said the dejected father. "I don't see what I can do to her."

I saw, however, and did it, first wiping the tooth-powder from her face.

She had called me Uncle Maje.

"She's a regular baddix," announced my namesake, gravely judicial. Then, as if with intention to indicate delicately that the family afforded striking contrasts, he added, "_I_ ain't a baddix--I can nearly sing."

The children fribbled about us while we talked away the afternoon. The woman child at last put me to thinking--to thinking that perhaps b.u.t.terflies are not meant to be happily caught. With many shouts she had clumsily enough imprisoned one--a fairy thing of green and bronze--in a hand so plump that it seemed to have been quilted. A moment she held it, then set it free, perhaps for its lack of spirit. It crawled and fluttered up the vine, trailing a crumpled wing most sadly, and I took it for my lesson. a.s.suredly they were not to be caught with any profit--at least not brutally in an eager hand. Brush them ever so lightly and the bloom is off the wings. They are to be watched in their pretty flitting, loved only in their freedom and from afar, with no clumsy reachings. That was a good thing to know in any world.

The _Argus_ announced my home-coming with a fine flourish of my t.i.tle in Solon's best style. It said that I had come back to take up the practice of the law. Not even Solon knew that I had come back to the memory of her.

This is how it befell that I was presently engrossed to outward seeming with the affairs of Little Arcady--even to the extent of a casual Potts, and those blessed contingencies that were later to unfold from him. Thus I took my allotted place and the years began.

CHAPTER V

A MAD PRANK OF THE G.o.dS

A week after the publication of that blithe bit of acrimony which opens this tale, Colonel J. Rodney Potts, recreated and natty in a new summer suit of alpaca, his hat freshly ironed, sued the town of Little Arcady for ten thousand dollar damages to his person and announced his candidacy at the ensuing election for the honorable office of Judge of Sloc.u.m County. He did this at the earnest solicitation of his many friends, in whose hands he had placed himself,--at least so read his card of announcement in the _Banner_, our other paper. He did not name these solicitous friends; but it was an easy suspicion that they were the Democratic leaders, who thought by this means to draw votes from the Republican candidate to the advantage of their own, who, otherwise, was conceded to have no hope of election in a county overwhelmingly Republican.

It may be told with adequate confidence that Westley Keyts was not of their number. As to the damage suit, Westley found it unthinkable that Potts could deteriorate ten thousand dollars worth and still walk the earth. Indeed, he believed, and uttered a few rough words to express it, that ten dollars would be an excessive valuation even if Potts were utterly destroyed.

Being an earnest soul, Westley had taken the Potts affair very seriously. He made it a point to encounter the Colonel on an early day and to address him on Main Street in tones that lacked the least affectation of suavity or diplomatic guile. He had seen diplomacy tried and found wretchedly wanting. He would have no more of it ever. Like the straightaway man he was, he went to the meat of the matter.

"You squandered that hundred dollars we give you to git out of town on,"

he burst forth to Potts, breathing with an ominous difficulty.

"You just wait till you hear the worst of it," answered Potts, as he confidingly dusted the shoulder of Westley's coat. "The worst of it is I had over twelve dollars of my own money that I'd saved up--you know how hard it is to save money in these little towns--well, that went, too, _every cent of it!_"

It was admitted by witnesses competent to form an opinion that Westley's contorted face, his troubled breathing, his manner of stepping back, and the curious writhing of his stout arms, all encouraged a supposition that he might be contemplating immediate violence upon the person of Potts. At all events, this view was taken by the aggrieved and puzzled Colonel, who fled through the Boston Cash Store and, by means of a rear exit from that emporium, gained the office of Truman Baird, Justice of the Peace, where he swore to a legal doc.u.ment which averred that "the said Jonas R. Potts" was "in fear of immediate and great bodily harm, which he has reasonable cause to believe will be inflicted upon him by the said Westley Keyts."

The majesty of the law being thus invoked, Westley was put under a good and sufficient bond to refrain from "in any manner of attacking or molesting the said Potts, against the statutes therein made and provided, and against the peace and dignity of the State of Illinois."

A proceeding so official somewhat dampened the fires of Mr. Keyts. He was a citizen, law-abiding by intention, with a patriot's esteem for government. It had merely not occurred to him that the summary extinction of Potts could be a performance at all incompatible with the peace and dignity of the great commonwealth to which he was at heart loyal. Being convinced otherwise, he abode grimly by the statutes therein made and provided. Nevertheless he returned to his shop and proceeded to cut up a quarter of beef with an energy of concentration and a ruthlessness of fury that caused Potts to shudder as he pa.s.sed the door sometime later. By such demeanor, also, were the bondsmen of Westley--the first flush of their righteous enthusiasm faded--greatly disturbed. They agreed that he ought to be watched closely by day, and they even debated the wisdom of sitting up nights with him for a time, turn by turn. But their charge dissuaded them from this precaution. He expended his first vicious fury usefully upon his stock in trade, with knife and saw and cleaver, and thereafter he was but petulant or sarcastic.