The Price of the Prairie Part 19

I declared. "Come, here's a haunted house waiting for us. Father says it hasn't been inhabited since the Frenchman left it. Are you afraid of ghosts?"

We were going up a gra.s.s-grown way toward the little stone structure, half buried in climbing vines and wild shrubbery.

"What a cunning place, Phil! It doesn't look quite deserted to me, somehow. No, I'm not afraid of anything but Indians."

My arm was about her in a moment. She looked up laughing, but she did not put it away.

"Why, there are no Indians here, Phil," and she looked out on the sunny draw.

My face was toward the cabin. I was in a blissful waking dream, else I should have taken quicker note. For sure as I had eyes, I caught a flash of red between the far corner of the cabin and the thick underbrush beyond it. It was just a narrow s.p.a.ce, where one might barely pa.s.s, between the corner of the little building and the surrounding shrubbery; but for an instant, a red blanket with a white centre flashed across this s.p.a.ce, and was gone. So swift was its flight and so full was my mind of the joy of living, I could not be sure I had seen anything. It was just a twitch of the eyelid. What else could it be?

We pushed open the solid oak door, and stood inside the little room. The two windows let in a soft green light. It was a rude structure of the early Territorial days, made for shelter and warmth. There was a dark little attic or loft overhead. A few pieces of furniture--a chair, a table, a stone hearth by the fireplace, and a sort of cupboard--these, with a strong, old worn chest, were all that the room held. Dust was everywhere, as might have been expected. And yet Marjie was right. The spirit of occupation was there.

"Do you know, Marjie, this cabin has hardly been opened since the poor woman drowned herself in the river, down there. They found her body in the Deep Hole. The Frenchman left the place, and it has been called haunted. An Indian and a ghost can't live together. The race fears them of all things. So the Indians would never come here."

"But look there, Phil!"--Marjie had not heeded my words--"there's a stick partly burned, and these ashes look fresh." She was bending over the big stone hearth.

As I started forward, my eye caught a bit of color behind the chair by the table. I stooped to see a purple bow of ribbon, tied b.u.t.terfly fashion--Lettie Conlow's ribbon. I put it in my pocket, determined to find out how it had found its way here.

"Ugh! Let's go," said Marjie, turning to me. "I'm cold in here. I'd want a home up under the cottonwood, not down in this lonely place. Maybe movers on the trail camp in here." Marjie was at the door now.

I looked about once more and then we went outside and stood on the broad, flat step. The late afternoon was dreamily still here, and the odor of some flowers, faint and woodsy, came from the thicket beside the doorway.

"It is dreary in there, Marjie, but I'll always love this place outside.

Won't you?" I said, and with a lover's happiness in my face, I drew her close to me.

She smiled and nodded. "I'll tell you all I think after a while. I'll write it to you in a letter."

"Do, Marjie, and put it in our 'Rockport' post-office, just like we used to do. I'll write you every day, too, and you'll find my letter in the same old crevice. Come, now, we must go home."

"We'll come again." Marjie waved her hand to the silent gray cabin. And slowly, as lovers will, we strolled down the walk and out into the open where the ponies neighed a hurry-up call for home.

Somehow the joy of youth and hope drove fear and suspicion clear from my mind, and with the opal skies above us and the broad sweet prairies round about us for an eternal setting of peace and beauty, we two came home that evening, lovers, who never afterwards might walk alone, for that our paths were become one way wherein we might go keeping step evermore together down the years.

CHAPTER XII

A MAN'S ESTATE

When I became a man I put away childish things.

The next day was the Sabbath. I was twenty-one that day. Marjie and I sang in the choir, and most of the solo work fell to us. Dave Mead was our tenor, and Bess Anderson at the organ sang alto. Dave was away that day. His girl sweetheart up on Red Range was in her last illness then, and Dave was at her bedside. Poor Dave! he left Springvale that Fall, and he never came back. And although he has been honored and courted of women, I have been told that in his luxurious bachelor apartments in Hong Kong there is only one woman's picture, an old-fashioned daguerreotype of a sweet girlish face, in an ebony frame.

Dr. Hemingway always planned the music to suit his own notions. What he asked for we gave. On this Sabbath morning there was no surprise when he announced, "Our tenor being absent, we will omit the anthem, and I shall ask brother Philip and sister Marjory to sing Number 549, 'Oh, for a Closer Walk with G.o.d.'"

He smiled benignly upon us. We were accustomed to his way, and we knew everybody in that little congregation. And yet, somehow, a flutter went through the company when we stood up together, as if everybody knew our thoughts. We had stood side by side on Sabbath mornings and had sung from the same book since childhood, with never a thought of embarra.s.sment. It dawned on Springvale that day as a revelation what Marjie meant to me. All the world, including our town, loves a lover, and it was suddenly clear to the town that the tall, broad-shouldered young man who looked down at the sweet-browed little girl-woman beside him as he looked at n.o.body else, whose hand touched hers as they turned the leaves, and who led her by the arm ever so gently down the steps from the choir seats, was reading for himself

That old fair story Set round in glory Wherever life is found.

And Marjie, in spotless white, with her broad-brimmed hat set back from her curl-shaded forehead, the tinted lights from the memorial window which Amos Judson had placed there for his wife, falling like an aureole about her, who could keep from loving her?

"Her an' Phil Baronet's jist made fur one another," Cam Gentry declared to a bunch of town gossips the next day.

"Now'd ye ever see a finer-lookin' couple?" broke in Grandpa Mead. "An'

the way they sung that hymn yesterday--well, I just hope they'll repeat it over my remains." And Grandpa began to sing softly in his quavering voice:

Oh, for a closer walk with G.o.d, A cam and heavenli frame, A light toe shine upon tha road That leads me toe tha Lamb.

Everybody agreed with Cam except Judson. He was very cross with O'mie that morning. O'mie was clerk and manager for him now, as Judson himself had been for Irving Whately. He rubbed his hands and joined the group, smiling a trifle scornfully.

"Seems to me you're all gossiping pretty freely this morning. The young man may be pretty well fixed some day. But he's young, he's young. Mrs.

Whately's my partner, and I know their affairs very well, very well.

She'll provide her daughter with a man, not a mere boy."

"Well, he was man enough to keep this here town from burnin' up, an' no tellin' how many bloodsheds," Grandpa Mead piped in.

"He was man enough to find O'mie and save his life," Cam protested.

"Well, we'll leave it to Dr. Hemingway," Judson declared, as the good doctor entered the doorway. Judson paid liberally into the church fund and accounted that his wishes should weigh much with the good minister.

"We--these people here--were just coupling the name of Marjory Whately with that boy of Judge Baronet's. Now I know how Mrs. Whately is circ.u.mstanced. She is peculiarly situated, and it seems foolish to even repeat such gossip about this young man, this very young man, Philip."

The minister smiled upon the group serenely. He knew the life-purpose of every member of it, and he could have said, as Kipling wrote of the Hindoo people:

I have eaten your bread and salt, I have drunk your water and wine; The deaths ye died I have watched beside, And the lives ye led were mine.

"I never saw a finer young man and woman in my life," he said gently. "I know nothing of their intentions--as yet. They haven't been to me," his eyes twinkled, "but they are good to look upon when they stand up together. Our opinions, however, will cut little figure in their affairs. Heaven bless them and all the boys and girls! How soon they grow to be men and women."

The good man made his purchase and left the store.

"But he's a young man, a very boy yet," Amos Judson insisted, unable to hide his disappointment at the minister's answer.

The very boy himself walked in at that instant. Judson turned a scowling face at O'mie, who was chuckling among the calicoes, and frowned upon the group as if to ward off any further talk. I nodded good-morning and went to O'mie.

"Aunt Candace wants some Jane P. Coats's thread, number 50 white, two spools."

"That's J. & P. Coats, young man." Judson spoke more sharply than he need to have done. "Goin' East to school doesn't always finish a boy; size an' learnin' don't count," and he giggled.

I was whistling softly, "Oh, for a Closer Walk with G.o.d," and I turned and smiled down on the little man. I was head and shoulders above him.

"No, not always. I can still learn," I replied good-naturedly, and went whistling on my way to the courthouse.

I was in a good humor with all the world that morning. Out on "Rockport"

in the purple twilight of the Sabbath evening I had slipped my mother's ring on Marjie's finger. I was on my way now for a long talk with my father. I was twenty-one, a man in years, as I had been in spirit since the night the town was threatened by the Rebel raiders--aye, even since the day Irving Whately begged me to take care of Marjie. I had no time to quarrel with the little widower.

"He's got the best of you, Judson," Cam declared. "No use to come, second hand, fur a girl like that when a handsome young feller like Phil Baronet, who's run things his own way in this town sence he was a little feller, 's got the inside track. Why, the young folks, agged on by some older ones, 'ud jist natcherly mob anybody that 'ud git in Phil's way of whatever he wanted. Take my word, if he wants Marjie he kin have her; and likewise take it, he does want her."