Wayside Courtships Part 20

"You read Latin?"

"Yes, a little--Vergil."

"Maybe you can help me out on these _oratia obliqua_. They bother me yet. I hate these 'Caesar saids.' I like Vergil better."

She stood at his shoulder while he pointed out the knotty pa.s.sage. She read it easily, and he thanked her. It was amazing how well acquainted they felt after this; they were as fellow-students.

The wind roared outside in the bare maples, and the fire boomed in its pent place within. The young people forgot the time and place. The girl sank into a chair almost unconsciously as they talked of Madison--a great city to them--of the Capitol building, of the splendid campus, of the lakes and the gay sailing there in summer and ice-boating in winter, of the struggles of "rooming."

"Oh, it makes me homesick!" cried the girl, with a deep sigh. "It was the happiest, sunniest time of all my life. Oh, those walks and talks!

Those recitations in the dear, chalky old rooms! Oh, _how_ I would like to go back over that hollow doorstone again!"

She broke off, with tears in her eyes. He was obliged to cough two or three times before he could break the silence.

"I know just how you feel. I know, the first spring when I went back on the farm, it seemed as if I couldn't stand it. I thought I'd go crazy.

The days seemed forty-eight hours long. It was so lonesome, and so dreary on rainy days! But of course I expected to go back; that's what kept me up. I don't think I could have stood it if I hadn't had hope."

"I've given it up now," she said plaintively; "it's no use hoping."

"Why don't you teach?" asked Albert, deeply affected by her voice and manner.

"I did teach here for a year, but I couldn't endure the noise; I'm not very strong, and the boys were so rude. If I could teach in a seminary--teach Latin and English--I should be happy, I think. But I can't leave mother now."

She began to appear a different girl in the boy's eyes; the cheap dress, the check ap.r.o.n, could not hide her pure intellectual spirit. Her large blue eyes were deep with thought, and the pale face, lighted by the glow of the fire, was as lovely as a rose. Almost before he knew it, he was telling her of his life.

"I don't see how I endured it as long as I did," he went on. "It was nothing but work, work, and mud the whole year round; it's just so on all farms."

"Yes, I guess it is," said she. "Father was a carpenter, and I've always lived here; but we have people who are farmers, and I know how it is with them."

"Why, when I think of it now it makes me crawl! To think of getting up in the morning before daylight, and going out to the barn to do ch.o.r.es, to get ready to go into the field to work! Working, wasting y'r life on dirt. Goin' round and round in a circle, and never getting out."

"It's just the same for us women," she corroborated. "Think of us going around the house day after day, and doing just the same things over an'

over, year after year! That's the whole of most women's lives.

Dish-washing almost drives me crazy."

"I know it," said Albert; "but a fellow has t' do it. If his folks are workin' hard, why, of course he can't lay around and study. They're not to blame. I don't know that anybody's to blame."

"No, I don't; but it makes me sad to see mother going around as she does, day after day. She won't let me do as much as I would." The girl looked at her slender hands. "You see, I'm not very strong. It makes my heart ache to see her going around in that quiet, patient way; she's so good."

"I know, I know! I've felt just like that about my mother and father, too."

There was a long pause, full of deep feeling, and then the girl continued in a low, hesitating voice:

"Mother's had an awful hard time since father died. We had to go to keeping boarders, which was hard--very hard for mother." The boy felt a sympathetic lump in his throat as the girl went on again: "But she doesn't complain, and she didn't want me to come home from school; but of course I couldn't do anything else."

It didn't occur to either of them that any other course was open, nor that there was any heroism or self-sacrifice in the act; it was simply _right_.

"Well, I'm not going to drudge all my life," said the boy at last. "I know it's kind o' selfish, but I can't live on a farm; it 'u'd kill me in a year. I've made up my mind to study law and enter the bar. Lawyers manage to get hold of enough to live on decently, and that's more than you can say of the farmers. And they live in town, where something is going on once in a while, anyway."

In the pause which followed, footsteps were heard on the walk outside, and the girl sprang up with a beautiful blush.

"My stars! I didn't think--I forgot--I must go."

Hartley burst into the room shortly after she left it, in his usual breeze.

"Hul-_lo_! Still at the Latin, hey?"

"Yes," said Bert, with ease. "How goes it?"

"Oh, I'm whooping 'er up! I'm getting started in great shape. Been up to the courthouse and roped in three of the county officials. In these small towns the big man is the politician or the clergyman. I've nailed the politicians through the ear; now you must go for the ministers to head the list--that's your lay-out."

"How'm I t' do it?" said Bert, in an anxious tone. "I can't sell books if they don't want 'em."

"Yes, yeh can. That's the trade. Offer a big discount. Say full calf, two fifty; morocco, two ninety. Regular discount to the clergy, ye know. Oh, they're on to that little racket--no trouble. If you can get a few of these leaders of the flock, the rest will follow like lambs to the slaughter. Tra-la-la--who-o-o-_ish_, whish!"

Albert laughed at Hartley as he plunged his face into the ice-cold water, puffing and wheezing.

"Jeemimy Crickets! but ain't that water cold! I worked Rock River this way last month, and made a boomin' success. If you take hold here in the----"

"Oh, I'm all ready to do anything that is needed, short of being kicked out."

"No danger of that if you're a real book agent. It's the snide that gets kicked. You've got t' have some savvy in this, just like any other business." He stopped in his dressing to say, "We've struck a great boarding place, hey?"

"Looks like it."

"I begin t' cotton to the old lady a'ready. Good 'eal like mother used t' be 'fore she broke down. Didn't the old lady have a time of it raisin' me? Phewee! Patient! Job wasn't a patchin'. But the test is goin' t' come on the biscuit; if her biscuit comes up t' mother's I'm hern till death."

He broke off to comb his hair, a very nice bit of work in his case.

II.

There was no discernible reason why the little town should have been called Tyre, and yet its name was as characteristically American as its architecture. It had the usual main street lined with low brick or wooden stores--a street which developed into a road running back up a wide, sandy valley away from the river. Being a county town, it had a courthouse in a yard near the center of the town, and a big summer hotel. The valley was peculiarly picturesque. Curiously shaped and oddly distributed hills rose out of the valley sand abruptly, forming a sort of amphitheater in which the village lay. These square-topped hills rose to a common level, showing that they were not the result of an upheaval, but were the remains of the original stratification left standing after the vast scooping action of the post-glacial floods.

The abrupt cliffs and lone huge pillars and peaks rising out of tamarack swamps here and there showed the original layers of rock unmoved. They looked like ruined walls of castles ancient as hills, on whose ma.s.sive tops time had sown st.u.r.dy oaks and cedars. They lent a distinct air of romance to the valley at all times; but when in summer vines clambered over their rugged sides and underbrush softened their broken lines, it was not at all difficult to imagine them the remains of an unrecorded, very warlike people.

Even now, in winter, with yellow-brown and green cedars standing starkly upon their summits, the hickories and small ashes blue-black with their ma.s.ses of fine bare limbs meshed against the snow, these towers had a distinct charm. The weather was glorious winter, and in the early morning when the trees glistened with frost, or at evening when the white light of the sun was softened and violet shadows lay along the snow, the whole valley was a delight to the eye, full of distinct and lasting charm, part of the beautiful and strange Mississippi River scenery.

In the campaign which Hartley began Albert did his best, and his best was done unconsciously, for the charm of his manner (all unknown to himself) was the most potent factor in securing consideration.

"I'm not a book agent," he said to one of the clergymen to whom he first appealed; "I'm a student trying to sell a good book and make a little money to help me to complete my course at the university."

He did not go to the back door, but walked up to the front, asked to see the minister, and placed his case at once before him with a smiling candor and a leisurely utterance quite the opposites of the brazen timidity and rapid, parrot-like tone of the professional. He secured three clergymen of the place to head his list, much to the delight and admiration of Hartley.

"Good! Now corral the alumni of the place. Work the fraternal racket to the bitter end. Oh, say! there's a sociable to-morrow night; I guess we'd better go, hadn't we?"

"Go alone?"