And, of course, the male was named Uncle Henry and the other one was named Aunt Mollie, for I was now presented to them. They shyly greeted me as one returned to them after many years in which they had given me up. And again I wondered what particular iniquity we had come here to do.
Then Ma Pettengill eased my worry. She said in a few simple but affecting words, that we had stopped in for a bite to eat. No self-torturing stylist could have put the thing better. And results were sudden. Uncle Henry, the male one, went to take our horses round to the barn, and the other one said they had et an hour ago; but give her ten minutes and she'd have a couple of them young pullets skinned and on the fire.
Ma Pettengill said, with very questionable taste, I thought: "Oh, no; nothing like that!"—because we didn't want to make the least bit of trouble. The woman is dense at times. What else had we come there for? But Aunt Mollie said, then, how about some prime young pork tenderline? And Ma Pettengill said she guessed that would do, and I said I guessed that would do. And there we were! The ladies went to the kitchen, where they made quick and grateful noises.
Pretty soon Uncle Henry came round a lovely corner and said try a tumbler of this here grape wine, which he poured from a pressed-glass pitcher; so I tried it and gave him a town cigarette, which he tucked between his beautiful white moustache and his beautiful white whiskers. And I hoped he didn't use gasoline to get them so clean, because if he did something might happen when he lighted the cigarette; but nothing did, so probably he didn't. I tried the grape wine again; and dear old Uncle Henry said he was turning out quite a bit of it since the Gov'ment had shet down on regular dram-shops, quite considerable of parties happening along from time to time to barter with him, getting it for dances or colds, or something.
A yellow cat, with blue eyes like Uncle Henry's, came and slept on his lap. A large fussy hen with a litter of chickens—or however a hen designates her assemblage of little ones—clucked her way to our feet. I could see three hives of bees, a grape arbour, and a row of milk pans drying in the sun, each leaning on its neighbour along a white bench. Uncle Henry said drink it up while it was cold. All Nature seemed to smile. The hen found a large and charming bug, and chuckled humorously while her cunning little ones tore it limb from limb. It was idyllic.
Then Aunt Mollie pushed open the screen door and said come in and set up; so I came in and set up quickly, having fried pork tenderloin and fried potatoes, and hot biscuit and pork gravy, and cucumber pickles, and cocoanut cake and pear preserves, peach preserves, apricot preserves, loganberry jelly, crab-apple jelly, and another kind of preserves I was unable to identify, though trying again and again.
Ma Pettengill ate somewhat, but talked also, keeping Uncle Henry and Aunt Mollie shiny with smiles. They both have polished white teeth of the most amazing regularity. I ate almost exclusively, affecting to be preoccupied about something. The time was urgent. I formed an entangling alliance with the pork tenderloin, which endured to a point where but one small fragment was left on the platter. I coolly left it there, so that Aunt Mollie might believe she had cooked more than enough.
I have never ceased to regret that hollow bit of chivalry. Was it honest, genuine, open? No! Why will men at critical junctures stoop to such trickery? Aunt Mollie said I might think that tenderline was fresh-killed; but not so—she has fried it last December and put it down in its own juice in a four-gallon crock, and now look how fresh it come out! She seemed as proud as if she had invented something. She had a right to be. It was a charming notion and I could have eaten the rest of the crock—but, no matter. Half a dozen biscuits copiously gummed up with preserves of one kind or another would do as well—almost.
So Aunt Mollie showed me objects of interest in the room, including her new carpet sweeper, a stuffed road runner, a ship built in a bottle, and the coloured crayon portraits of herself and Uncle Henry, wearing blue clothes and gold jewellery and white collars and ecru neckties. Also, the marriage certificate. This was no mere official certificate. It was the kind that costs three dollars flat, over and above what you give to the party that does it for you, being genuine steel-engraved, with a beautiful bridal couple under a floral bell, the groom in severe evening dress, and liberally spotted with cupids and pigeons. It is worth the money and an ornament to any wall, especially in the gilt frame.
Aunt Mollie seemed as proud of this document as she had been with the tenderloin. I scanned it word by word for her pleasure. I noticed especially the date. Aunt Mollie said that her and Henry were now in the fortieth year on this place, and it had changed in looks a whole lot since they came here. I again looked at the date of the certificate.
Ma Pettengill said, well, we must be getting on, and they must both come over to the Arrowhead for a day right soon. And Uncle Henry said here was a quart bottle of his peach brandy, going on eight year old, and would I take it along back with me and try it? Parties had told him it was good; but he didn't know—mebbe so, mebbe not. He'd like to know what I thought. It seemed little enough to do to bring a bit of gladness into this old gentleman's life, and I was not the man to wound him by refusal. It was as if Michelangelo had said "Come on round to the Sistine Chapel this afternoon and look over a little thing I've dashed off." If he had brought two bottles instead of one my answer would have been the same.
So we were out on our refreshed horses and heading home; and I said, without loss of time, that Aunt Mollie might have a good heart and a cunning way with pork interiors, and it was none of my business, anyway; but, nevertheless, she had mentioned forty long years with this amateur saloon keeper, whereas her marriage certificate was dated but one year previous, in figures all too shamefully legible. So what about it? I said I mind observing the underworld from time to time; but I like to be warned in advance, even when its denizens were such a charming, bright-eyed winter-apple-cheeked old couple as the two we were now leaving.
The sun was on our backs, a light breeze fanned us, the horses knew which way they were going, and work for the day was over; so Ma Pettengill spoke, in part, as follows:
"Oh, well, of course everyone knows about that. Simple enough! Aunt Mollie and her first husband trekked in here forty years ago. He was a consumptive and the first winter put him out. They had a hard time; no neighbours to speak of, harsh weather, hard work, poor shelter, and a dying man. Henry Mortimer happened by and stayed to help—nursed the invalid, kept the few head of stock together, nailed up holes in the shack, rustled grub and acted like a friend in need. At the last he nailed a coffin together; did the rest of that job; then stayed on to nurse Aunt Mollie, who was all in herself. After he got her to stepping again he put in a crop for her. Then he stayed to build a barn and do some fencing. Then he harvested the crop. And getting no wages! They was both living off the land. Pretty soon they got fond of each other and decided to marry. It's one of Aunt Mollie's jokes that she owed him two years' wages and had to marry him.
"Marriage was easier said than done. No preacher, or even a justice of the peace, was within ninety miles, which meant a four days' trip over the roads of that day, and four days back, providing high water or some other calamity didn't make it a month; and no one to leave on the place, which meant there wouldn't be a head of stock left when they got back, what with Indians and rustlers. Uncle Henry will tell you how it seemed too bad that just one of 'em wouldn't make the trip down and have the ceremony done, leaving the other to protect the place.
"Then along comes a horse trader, who stops over to rest his stock, and learns their trouble. He tells 'em to quit their worry; that he's a notary public and can perform a marriage as good as any Baptist preacher they ever saw. I never been able to make out whether he was crazy or just a witty, practical joker. Anyway, he married the pair with something like suitable words, wouldn't take a cent for it, and gave 'em a paper saying he had performed the deed. It had a seal on it showing he was a genuine notary public, though from back in Iowa somewhere. That made no difference to the new bride and groom. A notary public was a notary public to them, highly important and official.
"They had enough other things to worry about, anyway. They had to buckle down to the hard life that waits for any young couple without capital in a new country. They had years of hard sledding; but they must of had a good time somehow, because they never have any but pleasant things to tell of it. Whatever that notary public was, he seemed to of pulled off a marriage that took as well or better than a great many that may be more legal. So that's all there is to it—only, here about a year ago they was persuaded to have it done proper at last by a real preacher who makes Kulanche two Sundays a month. That's why the late date's on that certificate. The old lady is right kittenish about that; shows it to everyone, in spite of the fact that it makes her out of been leading an obliquitous life, or something, for about thirty-eight years.
"But then, she's a sentimental old mush-head, anyhow. Guess what she told me out in the kitchen! She's been reading what the Germans did to women and children in Belgium, and she says: 'Of course I hate Germans; and yet it don't seem as if I could ever hate 'em enough to want to kill a lot of German babies!' Wasn't that the confession of a weakling? I guess that's all you'd want to know about that woman. My sakes! Will you look at that mess of clouds? I bet it's falling weather over in Surprise Valley. A good moisting wouldn't hurt us any either."
That seemed to be about all. Yet I was loath to leave the topic. I still had a warm glow in my heart for the aged couple, and I could hear Uncle Henry's bottle of adolescent peach brandy laughing to itself from where it was lashed to the back of my saddle. I struck in the only weak spot in the wall.
"You say they were persuaded into this marriage. Well, who persuaded them? Isn't there something interesting about that?"
It had, indeed, been a shrewd stroke. Ma Pettengill's eyes lighted.
"Say, didn't I ever tell you about Mrs. Julia Wood Atkins, the well-known lady reformer?"
"You did not. We have eight miles yet."
"Oh, very well!"
So for eight miles of a road that led between green fields on our right and a rolling expanse of sagebrush on our left, I heard something like this:
"Well, this prominent club lady had been out on the Coast for some time heading movements and telling people how to do things, and she had got run down. She's a friend of Mrs. W.B. Hemingway, the well-known social leader and club president of Yonkers, who is an old friend of mine; and Mrs. W.B. writes that dear Julia is giving her life to the cause—I forget what cause it was right then—and how would it be for me to have her up here on the ranch for a vacation, where she could recover her spirits and be once more fitted to enter the arena. I say I'm only too glad to oblige, and the lady comes along.
"She seemed right human at first—kind of haggard and overtrained, but with plenty of fights left in her; a lady from forty-eight to fifty-four, with a fine hearty manner that must go well on a platform, and a kind of accusing face. That's the only word I can think of for it. She'd be pretty busy a good part of the day with pamphlets and papers that she or someone else had wrote, but I finally managed to get her out on a gentle old horse—that one you're riding—so she could liven up some; and we got along quite well together.
"The only thing that kind of went against me was, she's one of them that thinks a kind word and a pleasant smile will get 'em anywhere, and she worked both on me a little too much like it was something professional.
"Still, I put it by and listened to her tell about the awful state the world is in, and how a few earnest women could set it right in a week if it wasn't for the police.
"Prison reform, for instance. That was the first topic on which she delivered addresses to me. I couldn't make much out of it, except that we don't rely enough on our convicts' rugged honour. It was only a side line with her; still, she didn't slight it. She could talk at length about the innate sterling goodness of the misunderstood burglar. I got tired of it. I told her one day that, if you come right down to it, I'd bet the men inside penitentiaries didn't average up one bit higher morally than the men outside. She said, with her pleasantest smile, that I didn't understand; so I never tried to after that.
"The lady had a prowling mind. Mebbe that ain't the right word, but it come to me soon after she got here. I think it was the day she begun about our drinking water. She wanted to know what the analysis showed it to contain. She was scared out of her pleasant smile for a minute when she found I'd never had the water analyzed. I thought, first, the poor thing had been reading these beer advertisements; you know—the kind they print asking if you are certain about the purity of your drinking water, telling of the fatal germs that will probably be swimming there, and intimating that probably the only dead-safe bet when you are thirsty is a pint of their pure, wholesome beer, which never yet gave typhoid fever to any one. But, no; Julia just thought all water ought to be analyzed on general principles, and wouldn't I have a sample of ours sent off at once? She'd filled a bottle with some and suggested it with her pleasantest platform smile.
"'Yes,' I says; 'and suppose the report comes back that this water is fatal to man and beast? And it's the only water round here. What then? I'd be in a hell of a fix—wouldn't I?'
"I don't deny I used to fall back on words now and then when her smile got to me. And we went right on using water that might or might not make spicy reading in a chemist's report; I only been here thirty years and it's too soon to tell. Anyway, it was then I see she was gifted with a prowling mind, which is all I can think of to call it. It went with her accusing face. She didn't think anything in this world was as near right as it could be made by some good woman.
"Of course she had other things besides the water to worry about. She was a writer, too. She would write about how friction in the home life may be avoided by one of the parties giving in to the other and letting the wife say how the money shall be spent, and pieces about what the young girl should do next, and what the young wife should do if necessary, and so on. For some reason she was paid money for these pieces.
"However, she was taking longer rides and getting her pep back, which was what she had come here for. And having failed to reform anything on the Arrowhead, she looked abroad for more plastic corruption as you might say. She rode in one night and said she was amazed that this here community didn't do something about Dave Pickens. That's the place we stopped this morning. She said his children were neglected and starving, his wife worked to the bone, and Dave doing nothing but play on a cheap fiddle! How did they get their bread from day to day?
"I told her no one in the wide world had ever been able to answer this puzzle. There was Dave and his wife and five children, all healthy, and eating somehow, and Dave never doing a stroke of work he could side-step. I told her it was such a familiar puzzle we'd quit being puzzled by it.
"She said someone ought to smash his fiddle and make him work. She said she would do something about it. I applauded. I said we needed new blood up here and she seemed to of fetched it.
"She come back the next day with a flush of triumph on her severely simple face. And guess the first thing she asked me to do! She asked me to take chances in a raffle for Dave's fiddle. Yes, sir; with her kind words and pleasant smile she had got Dave to consent to raffle off his fiddle, and she was going to sell twenty-four chances at fifty cents a chance, which would bring twelve dollars cash to the squalid home. I had to respect the woman at that moment.
"'There they are, penniless,' says she, 'and in want for the barest necessities; and this man fiddling his time away! I had a struggle persuading him to give up his wretched toy; but I've handled harder cases. You should of seen the light in the mother's wan face when he consented! The twelve dollars won't be much, though it will do something for her and those starving children; and then he will no longer have the instrument to tempt him.'
"I handed over a dollar for two chances right quick, and Julia went out to the bunk-house and wormed two dollars out of the boys there. And next day she was out selling off the other chances. She didn't dislike the work. It give her a chance to enter our homes and see if they needed reforming, and if the children was subjected to refining influences, and so on. The first day she scared parties into taking fifteen tickets, and the second day she got rid of the rest; and the next Sunday she held the drawing over at Dave's house. The fiddle was won by a nester from over in Surprise Valley, who had always believed he could play one if he only had a fair chance.
"So this good deed was now completed, there being no music, and twelve dollars in the Pickens home that night. And Mrs. Julia now felt that she was ready for the next big feat of uplift, which was a lot more important because it involved the very sanctity of the marriage tie. Yes, sir; she'd come back from her prowling one night and told me in a hushed voice, behind a closed door, about a couple that had been for years living in a state of open immorality.
"I didn't get her, at first, not thinking of Uncle Henry and Aunt Mollie. But she meant just them two. I give her a good hearty laugh, at first; but it pained her so much I let her talk. It seems she'd gone there to sell raffle tickets, and they'd taken four, and cooked food for her, and give her some cherry cordial, which she took on account of being far from a strong woman; and then Aunt Mollie had told all her past life, with this horrid scandal about the notary public sticking innocently out of it.
"Mrs. Julia hadn't been able to see anything but the scandal, she being an expert in that line. So she had started in to persuade Aunt Mollie that it was her sacred duty to be married decently to her companion in crime for forty years. And Aunt Mollie had been right taken with the idea; in fact, she had entered into it with a social enthusiasm that didn't seem to Mrs. Julia to have quite enough womanly shame for her dark past in it. Still, anything to get the guilty couple lawful wedded; and before she left it was all fixed. Uncle Henry was to make an honest woman of Aunt Mollie as soon as she could get her trousseau ready.
"Me? I didn't know whether to laugh or get mad. I said the original marriage had satisfied the peace and dignity of the state of Washington; and it had done more—it had even satisfied the neighbours. So why not let it rest? But, no, indeedy! It had never been a marriage in the sight of God and couldn't be one now. Facts was facts! And she talked some more about Aunt Mollie not taking her false position in the proper way.
"It had been Mrs. Julia's idea to have the preacher come up and commit this ceremony quite furtively, with mebbe a couple of legal witnesses, keeping everything quiet, so as not to have a public scandal. But nothing like that for the guilty woman! She was going to have a trousseau and a wedding, with guests and gayety. She wasn't taking it the right way at all. It seemed like she wanted all the scandal there was going.
"'Really, I can't understand the creature,' says Mrs. Julia. 'She even speaks of a wedding breakfast! Can you imagine her wishing to flaunt such a thing?'
"It was then I decided to laugh instead of telling this lady a few things she couldn't of put in an article. I said Aunt Mollie's taking it this way showed how depraved people could get after forty years of it; and we must try to humour the old trollop, the main thing being to get her and her debased old Don Juan into a legal married state, even if they did insist on going in with a brass band. Julia said she was glad I took it this way.
"She came back to my room again that night, after her hair was down. The only really human thing this lady ever did, so far as I could discover, was to put some of this magic remedy on her hair that restores the natural colour if the natural colour happened to be what this remedy restores it to. Any way, she now wanted to know if I thought it was right for Aunt Mollie to continue to reside there in that house between now and the time when they would be lawful man and wife. I said no; I didn't think it was right. I thought it was a monstrous infamy and an affront to public morals; but mebbe we better resolve to ignore it and plow a straight furrow, without stopping to pull weeds. She sadly said she supposed I was right.
"So Uncle Henry hitched up his fat white horse to the buggy, and him and Aunt Mollie drove round the country for three days, inviting folks to their wedding. Aunt Mollie had the time of her life. It seemed as if there wasn't no way whatever to get a sense of shame into that brazen old hussy. And when this job was done she got busy with her trousseau, which consisted of a bridge gown in blue organdie, and a pair of high white shoes. She didn't know what a bridge gown was for, but she liked the looks of one in a pattern book and sent down to Red Gap for Miss Gunslaugh to bring up the stuff and make it. And she'd always had this secret yearning for a pair of high white shoes; so they come up, too.
"Furthermore, Aunt Mollie had read the city paper for years and knew about wedding breakfasts; so she was bound to have one of those. It looked like a good time was going to be had by all present except the lady who started it. Mrs. Julia was more malignantly scandalized by these festal preparations than she had been by the original crime; but she had to go through with it now.
"The date had been set and we was within three days of it when Aunt Mollie postponed it three days more because Dave Pickens couldn't be there until this later day. Mrs. Julia made a violent protest, because she had made her plans to leave for larger fields of crime; but Aunt Mollie was stubborn. She said Dave Pickens was one of the oldest neighbours and she wouldn't have a wedding he couldn't attend; and besides, marriage was a serious step and she wasn't going to be hurried into it.
"So Mrs. Julia went to a lot of trouble about her ticket and reservations, and stayed over. She was game enough not to run out before Uncle Henry had made Aunt Mollie a lady. I was a good deal puzzled about this postponement. Dave Pickens was nothing to postpone anything for. There never was any date that he couldn't be anywhere—at least, unless he had gone to work after losing his fiddle, which was highly ridiculous.
"The date held this time. We get word the wedding is to be held in the evening and that everyone must stay there overnight. This was surprising, but simple after Aunt Mollie explained it. The guests, of course, had to stay over for the wedding breakfast. Aunt Mollie had figured it all out. A breakfast is something you eat in the morning, about six-thirty or seven; so a wedding breakfast must be held the morning after the wedding. You couldn't fool Aunt Mollie on social niceties.
"Anyway, there we all was at the wedding; Uncle Henry in his black suit and his shiny new teeth, and Aunt Mollie in her bridge gown and white shoes, and this young minister that wore a puzzled look from start to finish. I guess he never did know what kind of a game he was helping out in. But he got through with the ceremony. There proved to be not a soul present knowing any reason why this pair shouldn't be joined together in holy wedlock, though Mrs. Julia looked more severe than usual at this part of the ceremony. Uncle Henry and Aunt Mollie was firm in their responses and promised to cling to each other till death did them part. They really sounded as if they meant it.
"Mrs. Julia looked highly noble and sweet when all was over, like she had rescued an erring sister from the depths. You could see she felt that the world would indeed be a better place if she could only give a little more time to it.
"We stood round and talked some after the ceremony; but not for long. Aunt Mollie wound the clock and set the mouse-trap, and hustled us all off to bed so we could be up bright and early for the wedding breakfast. You'd think she'd been handling these affairs in metropolitan society for years. The women slept on beds and sofas, and different places, and the men slept out in the barn and in a tent Uncle Henry had put up or took their blanket rolls and bunked under a tree.
"Then ho! for the merry wedding breakfast at six-thirty A.M.! The wedding breakfast consisted of ham and eggs and champagne. Yes, sir; don't think Aunt Mollie had overlooked the fashionable drink. Hadn't she been reading all her life about champagne being served at wedding breakfasts? So there it was in a new wash boiler, buried in cracked ice. And while the women was serving the ham and eggs and hot biscuits at the long table built out in the side yard, Uncle Henry exploded several bottles of this wine and passed it to one and all, and a toast was drunk to the legal bride and groom; after which eating was indulged in heartily.
"It was a merry feast, even without the lobster salad, which Aunt Mollie apologized for not having. She said she knew lobster salad went with a wedding breakfast, the same as champagne; but the canned lobster she had ordered hadn't come, so we'd have to make out with the home-cured ham and some pork sausage that now come along. Nobody seemed downhearted about the missing lobster salad. Uncle Henry passed up and down the table filling cups and glasses, and Aunt Mollie, in her wedding finery, kept the food coming with some buckwheat cakes at the finish.
"It was a very satisfactory wedding breakfast, if any one should ever make inquiries of you. By the time Uncle Henry had the ends out of half the champagne bottles I guess everyone there was glad he had decided to drag Aunt Mollie back from the primrose path.
"It all passed off beautifully, except for one tragedy. Oh, yes; there's always something to mar these affairs. But this hellish incident didn't come till the very last. After the guests had pretty well et themselves to a standstill, Dave Pickens got up and come back with a fiddle, and stood at the end of the grape arbour and played a piece.
"'Someone must have supplied that wretch with another fiddle!' says Mrs. Julia, who was kind of cross, anyway, having been bedded down on a short sofa and not liking champagne for breakfast—and, therefore, not liking to see others drink it.
"'Oh, he's probably borrowed one for your celebration,' I says.
"Dave played a couple more lively pieces; and pretty soon, when we got up from the table, he come over to Mrs. Julia and me.
"'It's a peach of a fiddle,' says Dave. 'It says in the catalogue it's a genuine Cremonika—looks like a Cremona and plays just as good. I bet it's the best fiddle in the world to be had for twelve dollars!'
"'What's that?' says Mrs. Julia, erecting herself like an alarmed rattlesnake.
"'Sure! It's a genuine twelve-dollar one,' says Dave proudly. 'My old one, that you so kindly raffled off, cost only five. I always wanted a better one, but I never had the money to spare till you come along. It's awful hard to save up money round here.'
"'Do you mean to tell me—' says Mrs. Julia. She was so mad she couldn't get any farther. Dave thought she was merely enthusiastic about his new fiddle.
"'Sure! Only twelve dollars for this beauty,' he says, fondling the instrument. 'We got down the mail-order catalogue the minute you left that money with us, and had a postal order on the way to Chicago that very night. I must say, lady, you brought a great pleasure into our life.'
"'What about your poor wife?' snaps Mrs. Julia.
"His poor wife comes up just then and looks affectionately at Dave and the new fiddle.
"'He spent that money for another fiddle!' says Mrs. Julia to her in low tones of horror.
"'Sure! What did you think he was going to do with it?' says Mrs. Dave. 'I must say we had two mighty dull weeks while Dave was waiting for this new one. He just mopes round the house when he ain't got anything to play on. But this is a lot better than the old fiddle; it was worth waiting for. Did you thank the lady, Dave?'
"Mrs. Julia was now plumb speechless and kind of weak. And on top of these blows up comes Aunt Mollie the new-wed, and beams fondly on her.
"'There!' says she. 'Ain't that a fine new fiddle that Dave bought with his twelve dollars? And wasn't it worth postponing my wedding for, so we could have some music?'
"'What's that?' says Mrs. Julia again. 'Why did you postpone it?'
"'Because the fiddle didn't get here till last night,' says Aunt Mollie, 'and I wasn't going to have a wedding without music. It wouldn't seem right. And don't you think, yourself, it's a lot better fiddle than Dave's old one?'
"So this poor Mrs. Julia woman was now stricken for fair, thinking of all the trouble she'd been to about her tickets, and all to see this new fiddle.
"She went weakly into the house and lay down, with a headache, till I was ready to leave the gay throng. And the next day she left us to our fate. Still, she'd done us good. Dave has a new fiddle and Aunt Mollie has her high white shoes. So now you know all about it."
We neared the Arrowhead gate. Presently its bell would peal a sweet message to those who laboured. Ma Pettengill turned in her saddle to scan the western horizon.
"A red sun has water in his eye," said she. "Well, a good soak won't hurt us."
And a moment later:
"Curious thing about reformers: They don't seem to get a lot of pleasure out of their labours unless the ones they reform resist and suffer, and show a proper sense of their degradation. I bet a lot of reformers would quit to-morrow if they knew their work wasn't going to bother people any."
VI
THE PORCH WREN
So it befell, in a shining and memorable interlude that there was talk of the oldest living boy scout, who was said to have rats in his wainscoting; of the oldest living débutante, who was also a porch wren; and of the body snatcher. Little of the talk was mine; a query now and again. It was Ma Pettengill's talk, and I put it here for what it may be worth, hoping I may close-knit and harmonize its themes, so diverse as that of the wardrobe trunk, the age of the earth, what every woman thinks she knows, and the Upper Silurian trilobites.
It might be well to start with the concrete, and baby's picture seems to be an acceptable springboard from which to dive into the recital. It came in the evening's mail and was extended to me by Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, with poorly suppressed emotion. The thing excited no emotion in me that I could not easily suppress. It was the most banal of all snapshots—a young woman bending Madonna-wise above something carefully swathed, flanked by a youngish man who revealed a self-conscious smirk through his carefully pointed beard. The light did harshly by the bent faces of the couple and the disclosed fragment of the swathed thing was a weakish white blob.
I need not say that there must be millions of these pathetic revealments burdening our mails day by day. I myself must have looked coldly upon over a thousand.
"Well, what of it?" I demanded shortly.
"I bet you can't guess what's in that bundle!" said my hostess in a large playful manner.
I said what I could see of it looked like a half portion of plain boiled cauliflower, but that in all probability the object was an infant, a human infant—or, to use a common expression, a baby. Whereupon the lady drew herself up and remarked in the clipped accent of a parrot:
"No, sir; it's a carboniferous trilobite of the Upper Silurian."
This, indeed, piqued me. It made a difference. I said was it possible? Mrs. Pettengill said it was worse than possible; it was inevitable. She seemed about to rest there; so I accused her of ill-natured jesting and took up the previous day's issue of the Red Gap Recorder, meaning to appear bored. It worked.
"Well, if Professor Oswald Pennypacker don't call his infant that, you can bet your new trout rod he calls it something just as good. Mebbe I better read what the proud mother says."
"It would be the kind thing before you spread evil reports," I murmured in a tone of gentle rebuke.
So the woman polished her nose glasses and read a double sheet of long up-and-down calligraphy—that is, she read until she exploded in triumphant retort:
"Ha! There now! Don't I know a thing or two? Listen: 'Oswald is so enraptured with the mite; you would never guess what he calls it—"My little flower with bones and a voice!"' Now! Don't tell me I didn't have Oswald's number. I knew he wouldn't be satisfied to call it a baby; he'd be bound to name it something animal, vegetable, or mineral. Ain't it the truth? 'Little flower with bones and a voice!' What do you know about that? That's a scientist trying to be poetic.
"And here—get this: She says that one hour after the thing was born the happy father was caught by the doctor and nurse seeing if it could hold its own weight up on a broomstick, like a monkey. She says he was acutely distressed when these authorities deprived him of the custody of his child. Wouldn't that fade you? Trying to see if a baby one hour old could chin itself! Quite all you would wish to know about Oswald."
I hastily said no; it was not nearly all I wanted to know about Oswald. I wanted to know much more. Almost any one would. The lady once more studied the hairy face with its bone-rimmed glasses.
"Shucks!" said she. "He don't look near as proud in this as he does in that one he sent me himself—here, where is that thing?"
From the far end of the big table she brought under the lamp a basket of Indian weave and excavated from its trove of playing cards, tobacco sacks, cigarette papers, letters, and odd photographs another snapshot of Oswald. It was a far different scene. Here Oswald stood erect beside the mounted skeleton of some prehistoric giant reptile that dwarfed yet left him somehow in kingly triumph.
"There now!" observed the lady. "Don't he look a heap more egregious by that mess of bones than he does by his own flesh and blood? Talk about pride!"
And I saw that it was so. Here Oswald looked the whole world in the face, proud indeed! One hand rested upon the beast's kneecap in a proprietary caress. Oswald looked too insufferably complacent. It was the look to be forgiven a man only when he wears it in the presence of his first-born. If snapshots tell anything at all, these told that Oswald was the father of a mammoth sauropod and had merely dug up the baby in a fossil bed somewhere.
"That's where the man's heart really lies," said his stern critic, "even if he does drivel about his little flower with bones and a voice! Probably by now he's wishing the voice had been left out of his little flower." Impressively she planted a rigid forefinger on the print of the mounted skeleton.
"That there," she glibly rattled off, "is the organic remains of a three-toed woolly bronsolumphicus of the carboniferous limestone, or Upper Silurian trilobite period. I believe I have the name correct. It was dug up out of a dry lake in Wyoming that years ago got to be mere loblolly, so that this unfortunate critter bogged down in it. The poor thing passed on about six million or four hundred million years ago—somewhere along there. Oswald and his new father-in-law dug it from its quiet resting place in the old cemetery. Such is their thrilling work in life.
"This father-in-law is just an old body snatcher that snoops round robbing the graves of antiquity and setting up his loot in their museum at the university. No good telling that old ghoul to let the dead rest. He simply won't hear of it. He wants remains. He wants to have 'em out in the light of day and stick labels on their long-peaceful skulls. He don't act subdued or proper about it either, or kind of buttery sad, like a first-class undertaker. He's gleeful. Let him find the skeleton of something as big as a freight car, that perished far in the dead past, and he's as tickled as a kid shooting at little sister with his new air gun.
"Bones in his weakness—and periods of geology. He likes period bones the way some folks like period furniture; and rocks and geography and Lower Triassics, and so forth. He knows how old the earth is within a few hundred million years; how the scantling and joists for it was put together, and all the different kinds of teeth that wild animals have. He's a scientist. Oswald is a scientist. I was a scientist myself two summers ago when they was up here.
"By the time they left I could talk a lot of attractive words. I could speak whole sentences so good that I could hardly understand myself. Of course after they left I didn't keep up my science. I let myself get rusty in it. I probably don't know so much more about it now than you would. Oh, perhaps a little more. It would all come back to me if I took it up again."
So I said that I had nothing to do for an hour or so, and if she would not try to be scientific, but talk in her own homely words, I might consent to listen; in this event she might tell the whole thing, omitting nothing, however trifling it might seem to her, because she was no proper judge of values. I said it was true I might be overtaken by sleep, since my day had been a hard one, reaching clear to the trout pool under the big falls and involving the transportation back to seventeen rainbow trout weighing well over seventeen pounds, more or less, though feeling much like more. And what about Oswald and the primeval ooze, and so forth. And would it be important if true? The lady said—well, yes, and no; but, however—
He's Professor Marwich up at the university—this confirmed old coroner I'm telling you about. Has a train of capital letters streaming along after he's all through with his name. I don't know what they mean—doctor of dental surgery, I guess, or zoology or fractions or geography, or whatever has to do with rocks and animals and vertebraes. He ain't a bad old scout out of business hours. He pirooted round here one autumn about a dozen years ago and always threatened to come back and hold some more of these here inquests on the long departed; but I heard nothing until two summers ago. He wrote that he wanted to come up to do field work. That's the innocent name he calls his foul trade by. And he wanted to bring his assistant, Professor Pennypacker; and could I put them up?
I said if they would wait till haying was over I could and would. He answered they would wait till my hay was garnered—that's the pretty word he used—and could he also bring his mouthless chit with him? I didn't quite make him. He writes a hand that would never get by in a business college. I thought it might be something tame he carried in a cage, and would stay quiet all day while he was out pursuing his repulsive practices. It didn't sound troublesome.
I never made a worse guess. It was his daughter he talked about that way. She was all right enough, though astounding when you had expected something highly zoological and mouthless instead of motherless. She was a tall roan girl with the fashionable streamline body, devoted to the ukulele and ladies' wearing apparel. But not so young as that sounds. Her general manner of conduct was infantile enough, but she had tired eyes and a million little lines coming round 'em, and if you got her in a strong light you saw she was old enough to have a serious aim in life.
She did use massage cream and beauty lotions with a deep seriousness you wouldn't suspect her of when she sat out in the hammock in the moonlight and scratched this ukulele and acted the part of a mere porch wren. That was really the girl's trade; all she'd ever learned. Mebbe she had misspent her early youth, or mebbe she wasn't meant for anything else—just a butterfly with some of the gold powder brushed off and the wings a little mite crumpled.
Gee! How times have changed since I took my own hair out of a braid! In them fond old days when a girl didn't seem attractive enough for marriage she took up a career—school-teaching probably—and was looked at sidewise by her family. It's different now. In this advanced day a girl seems to start for the career first and take up marriage only when all other avenues is closed. She's the one that is now regarded by her brainy sisters as a failure. I consider it an evil state for the world to be in—but no matter; I can't do anything about it from up here, with haytime coming on.
Anyway, this Lydia girl had not been constructed for any career requiring the serious use of the head; and yet so far she had failed in the other one. She was on the way to being an outcast if she didn't pull something desperate pretty soon. She was looking down on thirty, and I bet her manner hadn't changed a bit since she was looking up to twenty.
Of course she'd learned things about her game. Living round a college she must of tried her wiles on at least ten graduating classes of young men. Naturally she'd learned technique and feminine knavery. She was still flirty enough. She had a little short upper lip that she could lift with great pathos. And the party hadn't more than landed here when I saw that at last she did have a serious aim in life.
It was this here assistant to her father, who was named Professor Oswald Pennypacker; and he was a difficult aim in life, because he didn't need a wife any more than the little dicky birds need wrist watches. You seen his picture there. About thirty-five he was and had devoted all his years to finding out the names of wild animals, which is said to be one of our best sciences. He hadn't got round to women yet. A good snappy skeleton of one might of entertained him if he could of dug it up himself and called it a sedimentary limestone; but he had never trifled with one that was still in commission and ornamented with flesh and clothes.
And fussy! I wish you could of seen that man's room after he had carefully unpacked! A place for everything, and he had everything, too—everything in the world. And if someone switched his soap over to where his tooth paste belonged it upset his whole day. The Chink never dared to go into his room after the first morning. Oswald even made his own bed. Easy to call him an old maid, but I never saw any woman suffer as much agony in her neatness.
His shoes had to be in a row, and his clothes and hats and caps had to be in a row, and there was only one hook in the room his pyjamas could lawfully hang on, and his talcum powder had to stand exactly between the mosquito dope and the bay rum, which had to be flanked precisely by his manicure tools and succeeded by something he put on his hair, which was going the way of all flesh. If some marauder had entered his room in the night and moved his compass over to where his fountain pen belonged he would of woke up instantly and screamed.
And then his new wardrobe trunk! This was a great and holy joy that had come into his bleak life; all new and shiny and complicated, with a beautiful brass lock, one side for clothes on correct hangers and the other side full of drawers and compartments and secret recesses, where he could hide things from himself. It was like a furnished flat, that trunk. And this was his first adventure out in the great cruel world with it. He cherished it as a man had ought to cherish his bride.
He had me in to gaze upon it that first afternoon. You'd of thought he was trying to sell it to me, the way he showed it off. It stood on end, having a bulge like a watermelon in the top, so no vandal could stand it up wrong; and it was wide open to show the two insides. He opened up every room in it, so I could marvel at 'em. He fawned on that trunk. And at the last he showed me a little brass hook he had screwed into the side where the clothes hangers was. It was a very important hook. He hung the keys of the trunk on it; two keys, strung on a cord, and the cord neatly on the hook. This, he told me, was so the keys would never get lost.
"I always have a dread I may lose those keys," says he. "That would be a catastrophe indeed, would it not? So I plan to keep them on that hook; then I shall always know where they are."
The crafty wretch! He could wake up in the night and put his hand on those keys in the dark. Probably he often done so. I spoke a few simple words of praise for his sagacity. And after this interesting lecture on his trunk and its keys, and a good look at the accurate layout of his one million belongings, I had his number. He was the oldest living boy scout.
And this poor girl with the designful eyes on him was the oldest living debutante. I learned afterward that the great aim of science is classification. I had these two classified in no time, like I'd been pottering away at science all my life. Why, say, this Oswald person even carried a patent cigar lighter that worked! You must of seen hundreds of them nickel things that men pay money for. They work fine in the store where you buy 'em. But did you ever see one work after the man got it outside, where he needed it? The owner of one always takes it out, looking strained and nervous, and presses the spring; and nothing happens except that he swears and borrows a match. But Oswald's worked every time. It was uncanny! Only a boy scout could of done it.
So they got settled and the field work begun next day. The two men would ride off early to a place about five miles north of here that used to be an ancient lake—so I was told. I don't know whether it did or not. It's dry enough now. It certainly can't be considered any part of our present water supply. They would take spades and hammers and magnifying glasses and fountain pens, and Oswald's cigar lighter and some lunch, and come back at night with a fine mess of these here trilobites and vertebrae; and ganoids and petrified horseflies, and I don't know what all; mebbe oyster shells, or the footprints of a bird left in solid rock, or the outlines of starfish, or a shrimp that was fifty-two million years old and perfectly useless.
They seemed to have a good time. And Oswald would set up late writing remarks about the petrified game they had brought in.
I didn't used to see much of 'em, except at night when we'd gather for the evening meal. But their talk at those times did wonders for me. All about the aims of science and how we got here and what of it. The Prof was a bulky old boy, with long gray hair and long black eyebrows, and the habit of prevailing in argument. Him and Oswald never did agree on anything in my hearing, except the Chink's corn muffins; and they looked kind of mad at each other when they had to agree on them.
Take the age of this earth on which we make our living. They never got within a couple of hundred million years of each other. Oswald was strong for the earth's being exactly fifty-seven million years old. Trust him to have it down fine! And the old man hung out for four hundred million. They used to get all fussed up about this.
They quoted authorities. One scientist had figured close and found it was fifty-six million years. And another, who seemed to be a headliner in the world of science, said it was between twenty million and four hundred million, with a probability of its being ninety-eight million. I kind of liked that scientist. He seemed so human, like a woman in a bean-guessing contest at the county fair. But still another scientist had horned in with a guess of five hundred million years, which was at least easy to remember.
Of course I never did much but listen, even when they argued this thing that I knew all about; for back in Fredonia, New York, where I went to Sunday-school, it was settled over fifty years ago. Our dear old pastor told us the earth was exactly six thousand years old. But I let the poor things talk on, not wanting to spoil their fun. When one of 'em said the world was made at least fifty-seven million years ago I merely said it didn't look anywhere near as old as that, and let it go.
We had some merry little meals for about a month. If it wasn't the age of God's footstool it would be about what we are descended from, the best bet in sight being that it's from fishes that had lungs and breathed under water as easy as anything, which at least put dimmers on that old monkey scandal in our ancestry. Or, after we moved outside on the porch, which we had to do on account of Oswald smoking the very worst cigars he was able to find in all the world, they would get gabby about all things in the world being simply nothing, which is known to us scientists as metaphysics.
Metaphysics is silly-simple—like one, two, three. It consists of subject and object. I only think I'm knitting this here sock. There ain't any sock here and there ain't any me. We're illusions. The sound of that Chink washing dishes out in the kitchen is a mere sensation inside my head. So's the check for eighty dollars I will have to hand him on the first of the month—though the fool bank down in Red Gap will look on it with uneducated eyes and think it's real. Philosophers have dug into these matters and made 'em simple for us. It took thousands of books to do it; but it's done at last. Everything is nothing. Ask any scientist; he'll make it just as clear to you as a mist in a fog.
And even nothing itself ain't real. They go to that extreme. Not even empty space is real. And the human mind can't comprehend infinite space. I got kind of hot when one of 'em said that. I asked 'em right off whether the human mind could comprehend space that had an end to it. Of course it can't comprehend anything else but infinite space. I had 'em, all right; they had to change the subject. So they switched over to free will. None of us has it.
That made me hot again. I told 'em to try for even five minutes and see if they could act as if they didn't have the power of choice. Of course I had 'em again. Mebbe there ain't free will, but we can't act as if there wasn't. Those two would certainly make the game of poker impossible if folks believed 'em.
I nearly broke up the party that night. I said it was a shame young men was being taught such stuff when they could just as well go to some good agricultural college and learn about soils and crops and what to do in case of a sick bull. Furthermore, I wanted to know what they would do to earn their daily bread when they'd got everything dug up and labelled. Pretty soon they'd have every last organic remains put into a catalogue, the whole set complete and unbroken—and then what? They'd be out of a job.
The Prof laughed and said let the future take care of itself. He said we couldn't tell what might happen, because, as yet, we was nothing really but supermonkeys. That's what he called our noble race—supermonkeys! So I said yes; and these here philosophers that talked about subject and object and the nothingness of nothing reminded me of monkeys that get hold of a looking-glass and hold it up and look into it, and then sneak one paw round behind the glass to catch the other monkey. So he laughed again and said "Not bad, that!"
You could kid the Prof, which is more than I can say for Oswald. Oswald always took a joke as if you'd made it beside the casket holding all that was mortal of his dear mother. In the presence of lightsome talk poor Oswald was just a chill. He was an eater of spoon-meat, and finicking. He could talk like Half Hours With the World's Best Authors, and yet had nothing to say but words.
Still, I enjoyed them evenings. I learned to be interested in vital questions and to keep up with the world's best thought, in company with these gents that was a few laps ahead of it. But not so with the motherless chit. This here Lydia made no effort whatever to keep up with the world's best thought. She didn't seem to care if she never perfected her intellect. It would of been plain to any eye that she was spreading a golden mesh for the Oswald party; yet she never made the least clumsy effort to pander to his high ideals.
She was a wonder, that girl! All day she would set round the house, with her hair down, fixing over a lace waist or making fudge, and not appearing to care much about life. Come night, when the party was due to return, she would spry up, trick herself out in something squashy, with the fashionable streamlike effect and a pretty pair of hammock stockings with white slippers, and become an animated porch wren. That seemed to be the limit of her science.
Most motherless chits would of pretended a feverish interest in the day's hunt for fossil cockroaches, and would even of gone out to chip off rocks with a hammer; but not Lydia. She would never pretend to the least infatuation for organic remains, and would, like as not, strike up something frivolous on her ukulele while Oswald was right in the middle of telling all about the secret of life. She was confident all the time, though, like she already had him stuffed and mounted. She reminded me of that girl in the play What Every Woman Thinks She Knows.
Lydia had great ideas of cooking, which is an art to ensnare males. She said she was a dandy cook and could make Saratoga chips that was all to the Kenosha—whatever that meant. Think of it—Saratoga chips! Over eight hundred ways to cook potatoes, and all good but one; and, of course, she'd have to hit on this only possible way to absolutely ruin potatoes. She could cook other things, too—fudge and stuffed eggs and cheese straws, the latter being less than no food at all. It gives you a line on her.
I suppose it was all you could expect from a born debutante that had been brought up to be nice to college boys on a moonlit porch, allowing them to put another sofa pillow back of her, and wearing their class pins, and so forth. And here she was come to thirty, with fudge and cheese straws and the ukulele still bounding her mental horizon, yet looking far above her station to one of Oswald's serious magnitude.
I never have made out what she saw in him. But then we never do. She used to kid about him—and kid him, for that matter. She'd say to me: "He does care frightfully about himself, doesn't he?" And she said to me and said to him that he had mice in his wainscoting. Mice or rats, I forget which. Any wise bookmaker would of posted her up in this race as a hundred-to-one shot. She had plenty of blandishment for Oswald, but not his kind. She'd try to lure him with furtive femininity and plaintive melodies when she ought to have been putting on a feverish interest in organic fauna. Oswald generally looked through or past her. He give a whole lot more worry to whether his fountain pen would clog up on him. They was both set in their ways, and they was different ways; it looked to me like they never could meet. They was like a couple of trained seals that have learned two different lines of tricks.
Of course Oswald was sunk at last, sunk by a chance shot; and there was no doubt about his being destroyed, quantities of oil marking the surface where he went down. But it seemed like pure chance. Yet, if you believe Oswald and scientific diagnosis, he'd been up against it since the world was first started, twenty million or five hundred million years ago—I don't really know how many; but what's a few million years between scientists? I don't know that I really care. It's never kept me wakeful a night yet. I'd sooner know how to get eighty-five per cent. of calves.
Anyway, it was Oswald's grand new wardrobe trunk that had been predestined from the world's beginning to set him talkative about his little flower with bones and a voice; this same new wardrobe trunk that was the pride of his barren life and his one real worry because he might sometime lose the keys to it.
It's an affecting tale. It begun the night Oswald wanted the extra table put in his room. They'd come in that day with a good haul of the oldest inhabitants round here that had passed to their long rest three million years ago—petrified fishworms and potato bugs, and so forth, and rocks with bird tracks on 'em. Oswald was as near human as I'd seen him, on account of having found a stone caterpillar or something—I know it had a name longer than it was; it seemed to be one like no one else had, and would therefore get him talked about, even if it had passed away three million years before the Oregon Short Line was built.
And Oswald went on to ask if he could have this extra table in his room, because these specimens of the disturbed dead was piling up on him and he wanted to keep 'em in order. He had lighted one of his terrible cigars; so I said I would quickly go and see about a table. I said that with his venomous cigar going I would quickly have to go and see about something or else have my olfactory nerve resected, which was a grand scientific phrase I had brightly picked out and could play with one finger. It means having something done so you can't smell any more.
The Prof laughed heartily, but Oswald only said he hadn't supposed I would feel that way, considering the kind of tobacco my own cigarettes was made of, though he was sorry and would hereafter smoke out of doors. He took a joke like a child taking castor oil. Anyway, I went out and found a spare table in the storeroom, and the Chink took it to Oswald's room.
The fateful moment was at hand for which Nature had been conspiring all these ages. The Chink held the table up against him, with the legs sticking out, and Oswald went ahead to show him where to put it. Close by the door, inside his room, was the lovely, yawning new trunk. Oswald must of been afraid one of the table legs would spear it and mar its fair varnish. He raised one hand to halt the table, then closed the trunk tenderly, snapped the lock, and moved it over into the corner, beyond chance of desecration.
Then he give careful directions for placing the table, which had to be carried round the foot of the bed and past another table, which held marine fossils and other fishbones. It was placed between this table and still another, which held Oswald's compass and microscope and his kill-kare kamp stove and his first-aid kit and his sportsman's belt safe—all neatly arranged in line. I had followed to see if there was anything more he needed, and he said no, thank you. So I come out here to look over my mail that had just come.
Ten minutes later I felt the presence of a human being and looked up to see that Oswald, the oldest living boy scout, was dying on his feet in the doorway there. His face looked like he had been in jail three years. I thought he had seen a ghost or had a heart shock. He looked as if he was going to keel over. He had me scared. Finally he dragged himself over to the table here and says faintly:
"I believe I should like a severe drink of whisky!"
I didn't ask any questions. I saw it must be some private grief; so I got the whisky. It happened I had just one bottle in the house, and that was some perfectly terrible whisky that had been sent me by mistake. It was liquid barbed wire. Even a little drink of it would of been severe. Two drinks would make you climb a tree like a monkey. But the stricken Oswald seemed able to outfight it. He poured out half a tumblerful, drunk it neat and refused water. He strangled some, for he was only human after all. Then he sagged down on the couch and looked up at me with a feeble and pathetic grin and says:
"I'm afraid I've done something. I'm really afraid I have."
He had me in a fine state by this time. The only thing I could think of was that he had killed the Prof by accident. I waited for the horrible details, being too scared to ask questions.
"I'm afraid," he says, "that I've locked the keys of my new trunk inside of it. I'm afraid I really have! And what does one do in such a case?"
I nearly broke down then. I was in grave danger of fatal hysterics. I suffered from the reaction. I couldn't trust myself; so I got over to the door, where my face wouldn't show, and called to the Prof and Lydia. I now heard them out on the porch. Then I edged outside the door, where people wouldn't be quite so scared if I lost control of myself and yelled.
Then these two went in and listened to Oswald's solemn words. The Prof helped me out a lot. He yelled good. He yelled his head off; and under cover of his tumult I managed to get in a few whoops of my own, so that I could once more act something like a lady when I went in.
Lydia, the porch wren, was the only one to take Oswald's bereavement at all decent. The chit was sucking a stick of candy she had shoved down into a lemon. Having run out of town candy, one of the boys had fetched her some of the old-fashioned stick kind, with pink stripes; she would ram one of these down to the bottom of a lemon and suck up the juice through the candy. She looked entirely useless while she was doing this, and yet she was the only one to show any human sympathy.
She asked the stricken man how it happened, and he told the whole horrible story—how he always kept the keys hanging on this little brass hook inside the trunk so he would know where they was, and how he had shut the trunk in a hurry to get it out of the way of the table legs, and the spring lock had snapped. And what did one do now—if anything?
"Why, it's perfectly simple! You open it some other way," says Lydia.
"Ah, but how?" says Oswald. "Those trunks are superbly built. How can one?"
"Oh, it must be easy," says Lydia, still clinging to her candy sour.
"I'll open it for you to-morrow if you will remind me."
"Remind you?" says Oswald in low, tragic tones. You could see he was never going to think of anything else the rest of his life.
By this time the Prof and I had controlled our heartless merriment; so we all traipsed in to the scene of this here calamity and looked at the shut trunk. It was shut good; no doubt about that. There was also no doubt about the keys being inside.
"You can hear them rattle!" says the awed Oswald, teetering the trunk on one corner. So each one of us took a turn and teetered the trunk back and forth and heard the imprisoned keys jingle against the side where they was hung.
"But what's to be done?" says Oswald. "Of course something must be done."
That seemed to be about where Oswald got off.
"Why, simply open it some other way," says Lydia, which seemed to be about where she got off, too.
"But how?" moans the despairing man. And she again says:
"Oh, it must be too simple!"
At that she was sounding the only note of hope Oswald could hear; and right then I believe he looked at her fair and square for the first time in his life. He was finding a woman his only comforter in his darkest hour.
The Prof took it lightly indeed. He teetered the trunk jauntily and says:
"Your device was admirable; you will always know where those keys are." Then he teetered it again and says, like he was lecturing on a platform: "This is an ideal problem for the metaphysical mind. Here, veritably, is life itself. We pick it up, we shake it, and we hear the tantalizing key to existence rattle plainly just inside. We know the key to be there; we hear it in every manifestation of life. Our problem is to think it out. It is simple, as my child has again and again pointed out. Sit there before your trunk and think effectively, with precision. You will then think the key out. I would take it in hand myself, but I have had a hard day."
Then Lydia releases her candy long enough to say how about finding some other trunk keys that will unlock it. Oswald is both hurt and made hopeful by this. He don't like to think his beautiful trunk could respond to any but its rightful key; it would seem kind of a slur against its integrity. Still, he says it may be tried. Lydia says try it, of course; and if no other key unlocks it she will pick the lock with a hairpin. Oswald is again bruised by this suggestion; but he bears up like a man. And so we dig up all the trunk keys and other small keys we can find and try to fool that trunk. And nothing doing!
"I was confident of it," says Oswald; he's really disappointed, yet proud as Punch because his trunk refuses coldly to recognize these strange keys.
Then Lydia brings a bunch of hairpins and starts to be a burglar. She says in clear tones that it is perfectly simple; and she keeps on saying exactly this after she's bent the whole pack out of shape and not won a trick. Yet she cheered Oswald a lot, in spite of her failures. She never for one instant give in that it wasn't simple to open a trunk without the key.
But it was getting pretty late for one night, so Oswald and Lydia knocked off and set out on the porch a while. Oswald seemed to be awakening to her true woman's character, which comes out clad in glory at times when things happen. She told him she would sure have that trunk opened to-morrow with some more hairpins—or something.
But in the morning she rushed to Oswald and said they would have the blacksmith up to open it. He would be sure to open it in one minute with a few tools; and how stupid of her not to of thought of it before! I liked that way she left Oswald out of any brain work that had to be done. So they sent out to Abner to do the job, telling him what was wanted.
Abner is a simple soul. He come over with a hammer and a cold chisel to cut the lock off. He said there wasn't any other way. Oswald listened with horror to this cold-blooded plan of murder and sent Abner sternly away. Lydia was indignant, too, at the painful suggestion. She said Abner was a shocking old bounder.
Then Oswald had to go out to his field work; but his heart couldn't of been in it that day. I'll bet he could of found the carcass of a petrified zebra with seven legs and not been elated by it. He had only the sweet encouragement of Lydia to brace him. He was depending pathetically on that young woman.
He got back that night to find that Lydia had used up another pack of hairpins and a number of the tools from my sewing machine. All had been black failure, but she still said it was perfectly simple. She never lost the note of hope out of her voice. Oswald was distressed, but he had to regard her more and more like an object of human interest.
She now said it was a simple matter of more keys. So the next day I sent one of the boys down to Red Gap; and he rode a good horse to its finish and come back with about five dozen nice little trunk keys with sawed edges. They looked cheerful and adequate, and we spent a long, jolly evening trying 'em out. Not one come anywhere near getting results.
Oswald's trunk was still haughty, in spite of all these overtures. Oswald was again puffed up with pride, it having been shown that his trunk was no common trunk. He said right out that probably the only two keys in all the world that would open that lock was the two hanging inside. He never passed the trunk without rocking it to hear their sad tinkle.
Lydia again said, nonsense! It was perfectly simple to open a trunk without the right key. Oswald didn't believe her, and yet he couldn't help taking comfort from her. I guess that was this girl's particular genius—not giving up when everyone else could see that she was talking half-witted. Anyway, she was as certain as ever, and I guess Oswald believed her in spite of himself. His ponderous scientific brain told him one thing in plain terms, and yet he was leaning on the words of a chit that wouldn't know a carboniferous vertebra from an Upper Silurian gerumpsus.
The keys had gone back, hairpins was proved to be no good, and scientific analysis had fell down flat. There was the trunk and there was the keys inside; and Oswald was taking on a year in age every day of his life. He was pretty soon going to be as old as the world if something didn't happen. He'd got so that every time he rocked the trunk to hear the keys rattle he'd shake his head like the doctor shakes it at a moving-picture deathbed to show that all is over. He was in a pitch-black cavern miles underground, with one tiny candle beam from a possible rescuer faintly showing from afar, which was the childish certainty of this oldest living débutante that it was perfectly simple for a woman to do something impossible. She was just blue-eyed confidence.
After the men left one morning on their hunt for long-defunct wood ticks and such, Lydia confided to me that she was really going to open that trunk. She was going to put her mind on it. She hadn't done this yet, it seemed, but to-day she would.
"The poor boy has been rudely jarred in his academic serenity," says she.
"He can't bear up much longer; he has rats in his wainscoting right now.
It makes me perfectly furious to see a man so helpless without a woman.
Today I'll open his silly old trunk for him."
"It will be the best day's work you ever done," I says, and she nearly blushed.
"I'm not thinking of that," she says.
The little liar! As if she hadn't seen as well as I had how Oswald was regarding her with new eyes. So I wished her good luck and started out myself, having some field work of my own to do that day in measuring a lot of haystacks down at the lower end of the ranch.
She said there would be no luck in it—nothing but cool determination and a woman's intuition. I let it go at that and went off to see that I didn't get none of the worst of it when this new hay was measured. I had a busy day, forgetting all scientific problems and the uphill fight our sex sometimes has in bringing a man to his just mating sense.
I got back about five that night. Here was Miss Lydia, cool and negligent on the porch, like she'd never had a care in the world; fresh dressed in something white and blue, with her niftiest hammock stockings, and tinkling the ukulele in a bored and petulant manner.
"Did you open it?" I says as I went in.