Vandemark's Folly Part 42

I unwrapped her carefully, and kissed her. Did ever any peril turn to any one a face so full of clemency and tenderness as this blizzard to me?

"It takes," says she, "a storm to move _you_ to any, speed faster than a walk."

The darkness in the burrow was now full of light for me. I made it soft as a mouse-nest, by pulling down the clean straw, and spreading it in the bottom, with the c.o.o.nskin under her, and the buffalo-robe for a coverlid. There was scarcely room for two there, but we made it do, and found room for the little dog also. There was an inexpressible happiness in our safety from the awful storm, which we knew raged all about our nest; but to be together, and to feel that the things that stood between us had all been swept away at once--even the chaff that fell down our necks only gave us cause for laughter.

"Your coat is all wet!" she exclaimed.

"It was the snow, shoveling the way in," I said. "It's nothing."

But she began right there to take care of me. She made me take off the overcoat, and wrap myself in the blanket. The dampness went out into the dry straw; but when drowsiness came upon us, she would not let me take the chance of getting chilled, but made me wrap myself in the robes with her; and we lay there talking until finally, tired by my labors, I went to sleep with her arms about me, and her lips close to mine; and when I awoke, she was asleep, and I lay there listening to her soft breathing for hours.

We were both hungry when she awoke, and in the total darkness we felt about for the dinner-basket, in which were the dinners of the children of the McConkey family with whom she had boarded, and who had gone home at noon, because the fuel was gone. We ate frozen pie, and frozen boiled eggs, and frozen bread and b.u.t.ter; and then lay talking and caressing each other for hours. We talked about the poor horses, for which Virginia felt a deep pity, out there in the fierce storm and the awful cold. We talked of the beautiful cutter; and finally, I explained the way in which I had robbed Gowdy of horses and robes and sleigh, and dog.

"He can never have the dog back," said she. "And to think that I am hiding out in a strawstack with a robber and a horse-thief!"

Then she said she reckoned we'd have to join the Bunker gang, if we could find any of it to join. Certainly we should be fugitives from justice when the storm was over; but she for herself would rather be a fugitive always with me than to be rescued by "that man"--and it was lucky for him, too, she said, that I had licked him and shut him up in a house where he would be warm and fed; because he never would have been able to save himself in this awful storm as I had done. n.o.body could have done so well as I had done. I had s.n.a.t.c.hed her from the very jaws of death.

"Then," said I, "you're mine."

"Of course I am," said she. "I've been yours ever since we lived together so beautifully on the road, and in our Grove of Destiny. Of course I'm yours--and you are mine, Teunis--ain't you?"

"Then," said I, "just as soon as we get out of here, we'll be married."

It took argument to establish this point, but the jury was with me from the start; and finally nothing stood between me and a verdict but the fact that she must finish her term of school. I urged upon her that my house was nearer the school than was McConkey's, and she could finish it if she chose. Then she said she didn't believe it would be legal for Virginia Vandemark to finish a contract signed by Virginia Royall--and pretty soon I realized that she was making fun of me, and I hugged her and kissed her until she begged my pardon.

And all the time the storm raged. We finished the food in the dinner pail, and began wondering how long we had been imprisoned, and how hungry we ought to be by this time. I was not in the least hungry myself; but I began to feel panicky for fear Virginia might be starving to death. She had a watch, of course, as a teacher; but it had run down long ago, and even if it had not, we could not have lit a match in that place by which to look at it. Becoming really frightened as the thought of starvation and death from thirst came oftener and oftener into my mind, I dug my way to the opening of the burrow, and found it black night, and the snow still sweeping over the land; but there was hope in the fact that I could see one or two bright stars overhead. The gale was abating; and I went back with this word, and a basket of snow in lieu of water.

Whether it was the first night out or the second, I did not know, and this offered ground for argument. Virginia said that we had lived through so much that it had probably made the time seem longer than it was; but I argued that the time of holding her in my arms, kissing her, telling her how much I loved her, and persuading her to marry me as soon as we could get to Elder Thornd.y.k.e's, made it seem shorter--and this led to more efforts to make the time pa.s.s away. Finally, I dug out again, just as we both were really and truly hungry, and went back after Virginia. I made her wrap up warmly, and we crawled out, covered with chaff, rumpled, mussed up, but safe and happy; and found the sun shining over a landscape of sparkling frost, with sun-dogs in the sky and millions of bright needles of frost in the air, and a light breeze still blowing from the northwest, so bitingly cold that a finger or cheek was nipped by it in a moment's exposure. And within forty rods of us was the farmstead of Amos Bemisdarfer; who stood looking at us in amazement as we came across the rippled surface of the snow to his back door.

"I kess," said Amos, "it mus' have peen your team I put in de parn la.s.s night. Come in. Preckfuss is retty."

I left it to Virginia--she had been so sensible and wise in all her words since we had agreed to be married at once--to tell the elder and Grandma Thornd.y.k.e about it. But she went to pieces when she tried it.

She ran into their little front room where the elder was working on a sermon, pulling grandma out of the kitchen by the hand.

"Teunis and I," she gasped, "have been lost in the storm, and nearly froze to death, and he tied that man up with the well-rope, and maybe he's starved to death in Teunis's house, and Teunis and I slept in a strawstack, and Teunis is just as brave as he can be, and we're going to be married awful soon, and I'm going to board with him then, and that'll be nicer than with the McConkeys' and nearer the schoolhouse, and cheaper, and Teunis will build fires for me, and we'll be just as happy as we can be, and when you quit this stingy church you'll both of you live with us forever and ever, and I want you to kiss Teunis and call him your son right now, and if you don't we'll both be mad at you always--no we won't, no we won't, you dear things, but you will marry us, won't you?"

And then she cried hysterically and kissed us all.

"What Virginia says," said I, "is all true--especially the getting married right now, and your living with us. We'll both be awful sorry if we can't have you right off."

"I snum!" exclaimed Grandma Thornd.y.k.e. "Just as I expected!"

Grandma outlived the elder by many years; and it was not very long before she came, a widow, to live with us "until she could hear from her folks in Ma.s.sachusetts." She finally heard from them, but she lived with us, and is buried in our lot in the Monterey Centre burying-ground. She always expected everything that happened. I have given some hints of her character; but she had one weakness; she always, when she was a little down, spoke of herself as being a burden to us, especially in the hard times in the 'seventies. There was never a better woman, or one that did more for a family than she did for Virginia and me and our children--and our chickens and our calves and our lambs and goslings and ducks and young turkeys. Of course, she wanted Virginia to do better than to marry me; and that was all right with me after I understood it: but grandma made that good, by always taking my side of every little difference in the family. Peace to her ashes!

5

Now I have reached the point in this history where things get beyond me.

I can't tell the history of Monterey County; and the unsettled matters like the Wade-Stone controversy, the outcome of the betrayal of Rowena Fewkes by Buckner Gowdy, and other beginnings of things like the doings of the Bushyager bandits; for some of them run out into the history of the state as well as the county. And as for the township history, it is now approaching the point where there is nothing to it but more settlers, roads, schools, and the drainage of the slew--of which, so far as the reader is concerned if he is not posted, he may post himself up by getting that Excelsior County History, which he can do cheaply from almost any one who was swindled by their slick agent. What remains to be told here is a short horse and soon curried. Vandemark Township was set off as a separate township within six weeks of the day we crawled out of the strawstack--and on that day we had been married a month, and Virginia was boarding with me as she predicted. Doctor Bliven as a member of the County Board voted for the new township just as his wife said he would after I talked with her about it.

N.V. Creede says that at this time I was threatened with political ability; but happily recovered. One reason for this joke he finds in the fact that I was elected justice of the peace in the township at the first election of officers; and got some reputation out of the fact that they named the township after me when it was fashionable to name them after Lincoln, Colfax, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan and the rest of the Civil War heroes. The second is the way I handled d.i.c.k McGill. N.V. says this was very subtle. I knew that if he wrote up my dragging Virginia into a straw-pile and keeping her there two nights and a day, while he would make folks laugh all over the county, he would make us ashamed; for he never failed to give everything a tint of his own color. So I went to him and told him that if he said a word about it, I should maul him into a slop and feed him to the hogs. This was my way of being "subtle."

"Why, Jake," he said, "I never would say anything to take the shine off the greatest thing ever done in these parts. I've got it all written up, and I'm sending a copy of it to the Chicago _Tribune_. It's an epic of prairie life. Read it, and if you don't want it printed, why, it's me for the swine; for it's already gone to Chicago."

Of course it seemed all right to me, but I was afraid of it, and was thinking of pounding him up right then, when in came Elder Thornd.y.k.e to put in the paper something about his next Sunday's services, and McGill asked him to read the story and act as umpire. And after he had gone over it, he grasped my hand and said that Virginia and I had not told them half of the strange story of our living through the blizzard out on the prairie, and that it was a great drama of resolution, resource and bravery on my part, and seemed almost like a miracle.

"Will this hurt Virginia's feelings if it is printed?" I asked.

"No, no," he said. "It will make her fiance a hero. It will tickle her,"

said he, "half to death."

Then I told d.i.c.k he might go on with it if he would leave it just as it was. The joke was on him, after all, for there was nothing in it about my fight with Buck Gowdy, or of my robbing him of the team and sleigh and harness and robes and Nick, the little dog.

The third thing that N.V. thought might have sent me down through the greased tin horn of politics, which has ruined more good men than any other form of gambling, was my management of the business of getting the township set off, against the opposition of the whole Monterey Centre Ring. But he did not know of that day in Dubuque, and of my smuggling of Mrs. Bliven into Iowa, as I have told it in this history. It hurt Bliven politically, but he kept on boosting me, and it was his electioneering, that I knew nothing about, that elected me justice of the peace; and it was Mrs. Bliven's urging that caused me to qualify by being sworn in--though I couldn't see what she meant by her interest.

6

On my next birthday, the twenty-seventh of July, however, something happened that after a few months of figuring made me think that they knew what they were about all the time; for on that day they (the Blivens) got up a surprise party on us, and came in such rigs as they had (there were more light rigs than at the Governor Wade reception, a fact of historical interest as showing progress); though Virginia did not seem to be much surprised. In the course of the evening Doc Bliven started in making fun of me as a justice of the peace.

"I helped a little to elect you, Jake," said he, "but I'll bet you couldn't make out a mittimus if you had to send a criminal to jail to-night."

"I won't bet," I said, "I know I couldn't!"

"I'll bet the oysters for the crowd, Squire Vandemark," he went on deviling me, "that you couldn't perform the marriage ceremony."

Now here he came closer to my abilities, for I had been through a marriage ceremony lately, and I have a good memory--and oysters were a novelty in Iowa, coming in tin cans and called cove oysters, put up in Baltimore. It looked like a chance to stick Doc Bliven, and while I was hesitating, Mrs. Bliven whispered that there was a form for the ceremony in the instruction book.

"I'll bet you the oysters for the crowd I can," I said. "You furnish the happy couple--and I'll see that you furnish the oyster supper, too."

"Any couple will do," said the doctor. "Come, Mollie, we may as well go through it again."

The word "again" seemed suspicious. I began to wonder: and before the ceremony was over, I reading from the book of instructions, and people interrupting with their jokes, I saw that this meant a good deal to the Blivens. Mollie's voice trembled as she said "I do!"; and the doctor's hand was not steady as he took hers. I asked myself what had become of the man who had made the attack on Bliven as he stood in line for his mail at the Dubuque post-office away back there in 1855.

"Don't forget my certificate, Jake," said Mrs. Bliven, as they sat down; and I had to write it out and give it to her.

"And remember the report of it to the county clerk," said Henderson L.

Burns, who held that office himself. "The Doc will kick out of the supper unless you do everything."

I did not forget the report, and I suppose it is there in the old records to this day.

"We got word," whispered Mrs. Bliven to me as she went away, "that I have been a widow for more than a year. You've been a good friend to me, Jake[16]!"

[16] There is no record of this marriage in the clerk's office; where it was regarded, of course, as a joke. This was probably a unique case of a secret marriage made in public; but there is no doubt as to its validity. The editor remembers the Blivens as respected citizens. They are dead long since, and left no descendants. Otherwise the historian would not have told their story--which is not ill.u.s.trative of anything usual in our early history; but shows that in Iowa as in other new countries there were those who were escaping from their past.--G.v.d.M.

I shall not close this history, without clearing up my record as to the mares, Susie and Winnie, and the cutter, and Nick, the black-and-tan, that saved Virginia's fingers from freezing, and the robes. First, I kept the property, and every horse on the farm is descended from Susie and Winnie. Second, I paid Buck Gowdy all the outfit was worth, though he never knew it, and never would have taken pay: I drove a bunch of cattle over into his corn-field the next fall and left them just before day one morning, and he took them up, advertised them as estrays, and finally, as N.V. says, reduced them to possession. And third, they were legally mine, anyhow; for when I got home, I found this paper lying on the bed, where he had slept those two nights when we were nesting in the straw-pile: