The Cost Part 22

"Good-by," he now said. "The caravan"--his tone was half-jesting, half-serious--"has been spending the heat and dust of the day on the oasis. It makes night journeys only. It must push on."

"Night journeys only," repeated Pauline. "That sounds gloomy."

"But there are the stars--and the moon."

She laughed. "And other oases ahead. Good-by--and thank you!"

The boy, close to his mother and facing Scarborough, was looking from her to him and back again--curiously, it almost seemed suspiciously.

Both noticed it; both flushed slightly. Scarborough shook hands with her, bowed to the little boy with a formality and constraint that might have seemed ludicrous to an onlooker. He went toward his horse; Gardiner and his mother took the course at right angles across the field in the direction in which the towers of the Eyrie could be seen above the tree-tops. Suddenly the boy said, as if it were the conclusion of a long internal argument: "I like Mr. Scarborough."

"Why not?" asked his mother, amused.

"I--I don't know," replied the boy. "Anyhow, I like him. I wish he'd come and stay with us and Aunt Gladys."

Gladys! The reminder made her uncomfortable, made her feel that she ought to be remorseful. But she hastened on to defend herself. What reason had she to believe that Gladys cared for him, except as she always cared for difficult conquest? Hadn't Gladys again and again gone out of her way to explain that she wasn't in love with him?

Hadn't she said, only two days before: "I don't believe I could fall in love with any man. Certainly I couldn't unless he had made it very clear to me that he was in love with me."

Pauline had latterly been suspecting that these elaborations of superfluous protestation were Gladys' efforts to curtain herself. Now she dwelt upon them with eager pleasure, and a.s.sured and rea.s.sured herself that she had been supersensitive and that Gladys had really been frank and truthful with her.

XVIII.

ON THE FARM.

On his way down the bluffs to town Scarborough felt as calm and peaceful as that tranquil evening. He had a sense of the end of a long strain of which he had until then been unconscious. "NOW I can go away and rest," he said to himself. And at sundown he set out for his farm.

He arrived at ten o'clock, by moonlight, amid a baying of dogs so energetic that it roused every living thing in the barnyard to protest in a peevish chorus of clucking and grunting and quacking and squealing.

"What on airth!" exclaimed Mrs. Gabbard, his farmer's wife, standing at the back door, in calico skirt and big shawl. When she saw who it was, her irritated voice changed to welcome. "Why, howdy, Mr. Scarborough!

I thought it was old John Lovel among the chickens or at the granary.

I might 'a' knowed he wouldn't come in the full of the moon and no clouds."

"Go straight back to bed, Mrs. Gabbard, and don't mind me," said Scarborough. "I looked after my horse and don't want anything to eat.

Where's Eph?"

"Can't you hear?" asked Mrs. Gabbard, dryly. And in the pause a l.u.s.ty snore penetrated. "When anything out of the way happens, I get up and nose around to see whether it's worth while to wake him."

Scarborough laughed. "I've come for a few days--to get some exercise,"

he said. "But don't wake me with the others to-morrow morning. I'm away behind on sleep and dead tired."

He went to bed--the rooms up-stairs in front were reserved for him and were always ready. His brain was apparently as busy and as determined not to rest as on the worst of his many bad nights during the past four months. But the thoughts were vastly different; and soon those millions of monotonous murmurings from brook and field and forest were soothing his senses. He slept soundly, with that complete relaxing of every nerve and muscle which does not come until the mind wholly yields up its despotic control and itself plunges into slumber unfathomable.

The change of the air with dawn slowly wakened him. It was only a little after five, but he felt refreshed. He got himself into farm working clothes and went down to the summer dining-room--a shed against the back of the house with three of its walls latticed. In the adjoining kitchen Mrs. Gabbard and her daughters, Sally and Bertha, were washing the breakfast dishes--Gabbard and his two sons and the three "hands" had just started for the meadows with the hay wagons.

"Good morning," said Scarborough, looking in on the three women.

They stopped work and smiled at him, and the girls dried their hands and shook hands with him--all with an absolute absence of embarra.s.sment that, to one familiar with the awkward shyness of country people, would have told almost the whole story of Scarborough's character. "I'll get you some breakfast in the dining-room," said Mrs. Gabbard.

"No--just a little--on the corner of the table out here," replied Scarborough.

Mrs. Gabbard and Sally bustled about while he stood in the doorway of the shed, looking out into the yard and watching the hens make their careful early morning tour of the inclosure to glean whatever might be there before scattering for the day's excursions and depredations. He had not long to wait and he did not linger over what was served.

"You've et in a manner nothing," complained Mrs. Gabbard.

"I haven't earned an appet.i.te yet," he replied. "Just wait till this evening."

As soon as he was out of view he gave a great shout and started to run.

"What folly to bother with, a foolish, trouble-breeding thinking apparatus in a world like this!" he thought, as the tremendous currents of vitality surged through him. And he vaulted a six-rail fence and ran on. Down the hollow drenched with dew, across the brook which was really wide enough to be called a creek, up the steep slope of the opposite hill at a slower pace, and he was at the edge of the meadows.

The sun was clear of the horizon now, and the two wagons, piled high with hay and "poled down" to keep the loads steady, were about to move off to the barn.

"Bring back a fork for me, Bill!" he called to the driver of the nearer wagon--Bill was standing on the lofty top of his load, which projected forward and rear so far that, forward, the horses were half canopied.

Against Bill's return he borrowed Gabbard's fork and helped complete the other wagon, the sweat streaming from his face as his broad shoulders swung down with the empty fork and up with a great mat of hay.

They worked alternately in the fields and at the barns until half-past eleven. Then they went into the shade at the edge of the meadow and had their dinner.

"My old woman," said Gabbard, "says that two set-down meals a day in harvest time's as many as she'll stand for. So we have dinner out here in good weather, and to the barn when it rains."

The talk was of weather prospects, of probable tonnage to the acre, of the outlook for the corn, of the health and family expectations of the mares and the cows and the pigs. It died away gradually as one man after another stretched out upon his back with a bunch of hay for an odorous pillow and his broad-brimmed straw hat for a light-shade.

Scarborough was the fourth man to yield; as he dozed off his hat was hiding that smile of boundless content which comes only to him who stretches his well body upon gra.s.s or soft stubble and feels the vigor of the earth steal up and through him. "Why don't I do this oftener?"

Scarborough was saying to himself. "I must--and I shall, now that my mind's more at ease."

A long afternoon of the toil that tires and vexes not, and at sundown he was glad to ride home on top of the last wagon instead of walking as he had intended. The supper-table was ready--was spread in the dining-shed. They washed their hands and sunburnt arms and soused their heads in cold water from the well, and sat, Scarborough at one end, Gabbard at the other, the strapping sons and the "hands" down either side. The whole meal was before them--huge platters of fried chicken, great dishes full of beans and corn and potatoes; plates piled high with hot corn bread, other plates of "salt-rising"; Mrs. Gabbard's miraculous apple pies, and honey for which the plundered flowers might still be mourning. Yesterday it would have seemed to Scarborough dinner enough for a regiment. To-day--he thought he could probably eat it all, and wished that he might try. To drink, there were coffee and cider and two kinds of milk. He tried the b.u.t.termilk and kept on with it.

"You must 'a' had a busy summer," said Gabbard. "This is the first time you've been with us."

"Yes," Scarborough replied. "I did hope to get here for the threshing, but I couldn't."

The threshing set them all off--it had been a record year; thirty-eight bushels to the acre on the average, twenty-seven on the hillsides which Gabbard had hesitated whether to "put in" or not. An hour after supper Scarborough could no longer hold his eyes open. "Wake me with the others," he said to Mrs. Gabbard, who was making up the "salt-rising"

yeast for the morrow's baking. "I'll have breakfast when they do."

"I reckon you've earned it," said Mrs. Gabbard. "Eph says you laid it over 'em all to-day."

"Well, I guess I at least earned my supper," replied Scarborough. "And I guess I ate it."

"You didn't do so bad, considerin'," Mrs. Gabbard admitted. "Nothin'

like livin' in town to take appet.i.te away."

"That isn't all it takes away," said Scarborough, going on to his own part of the house without explaining his remark. When his head touched the pillow his brain instantly stopped the machinery. He needed no croonings or dronings from the fields to soothe him. "Not an idea in my head all day," he said to himself with drowsy delight.

Four days of this, and on the fifth came the outside world in the form of Burd.i.c.k, chairman of the county committee of his party in the county in which his farm lay. They sat on the fence under the big maple, out of earshot of the others.

"Larkin's come out for John Frankfort for the nomination for governor,"

said Burd.i.c.k.

Scarborough smiled. "Even Larkin couldn't get it for Frankfort--he's too notorious."