As long as I live I shall remember that journey along old Providence Road with a lovely nature like Peter's. He glowed with his inward flame there at my side, until I felt that it would be bad for him. Peter has seen all kinds of wonderful scenery all his life; but of course, there is none in the world anything like the Harpeth Valley. All the other in the world is either grand or placid or swept and garnished and tended or brilliant or moist, but this valley under Paradise Ridge is different. Peter expressed it so that my throat tightened and I had to hold steadier to the wheel as we passed an old farm wagon.
"It's the hollow of God's hand in which He has gathered His children and their homes, Betty," he said, huskily. "Look at that white-haired old grand dame in her frilled frock with the string of chickens following her and the two kiddies bringing up the rear. And look at that old red-gray brick house. England has nothing finer."
"That is old Mrs. Georgetta Johnson," I answered, as I waved my hand and got a stately wave in return. "She is the fifth generation to live in that house, and the two kiddies are the eighth. Her mother danced with Lafayette, and she is over eighty-five. I'll take you to see her some day."
"Betty," said Peter, with positive awe, "I have never seen such homes and furniture and people as I have found here. What is it that makes it so—so satisfying?"
"It must be that everything has had time to root here, people and all," I answered as I again avoided a farm wagon and a negro driving two fine milk-cows with cow babies wobbling along at their flanks.
"Yes," answered Peter, thoughtfully—"yes, I should say that 'rooted' would about express the life, and I am wondering—" But just here we turned off into Brier Lane, and Peter went up in the air and began to float among the tree-tops, only being able to take in the high-lights like the gnarled old cedars that jutted out from the lichen-covered stone wall and hung over the moss-green snake-rail fences, or the old oaks which were beginning to draw young, green loveliness around them, or the feathery buckbushes and young hackberries that were harboring all varieties of mating birds who were wooing and flirting and cheeping baby talk in a delightfully confidential and unabashed manner. Peter had become wildly absorbed in a brilliant scarlet cardinal that followed the car, scolding and swearing in the most pronounced bird language, all for no fault of ours that we could see, when we turned in the cedar-pole gate of The Briers and began to wind our way up through the potato and corn field on one side and the primeval forest on the other. It was difficult to get Peter past the old thorn-tree view of the Harpeth Valley we had come through, and he wanted to get out and stay for ever at the milk-house; but I finally landed him in a Homeric daze up in front of the house, which stood with its hospitable old door wide open but deserted.
"Sam! Byrd! Mammy!" I shouted at the top of my lungs, while Peter sat paralyzed at the sight of Sam's farm-house. Peter had got the old Crittenden house and all the others where he had been entertained in his mind's eye, and that Sam's present residence was a shock to him I could see plainly. That was the beginning.
"Hi, Betty, come here quick—I need you!" came in Sam's most business-like voice from the barn up on the hill, while I could hear wild and excited cheeps from the Byrd and disturbed clucks from Mammy.
Leaving Peter to disembark as he recovered himself, I sped around the house and up to the barn.
"Here, Betty, this blamed mule has kicked old Jude, and I must have somebody to hold the edges together while I sew it up. Mammy's hands aren't steady enough. Now press the edges together and never mind the blood on your hands. Hold the halter, Mammy. You get that can of lime ready to dust it, Byrd." Thus in dirty, blood-stained overalls, with his hair on ends and an earth smudge as usual right across his face like a Heidelberg scar, Sam was commanding his forces of nature.
"Ugh—uu—ow, Sam," I shivered; but I came up under his arm and tried to push one dripping section of old-roan hide until it joined the other, though I couldn't quite make it. Over my shoulder Sam began to sew it across with a huge crooked needle, helping me push the edges together as best he could. At this auspicious moment the poet appeared at the barn door in an absolutely dazed condition.
"Here you, Pete, too!" Sam commanded, without looking up. "Get here on the other side and press the hide together as Betty is doing. This is an awful long cut, but I can manage it, thanks to seeing Chubb sew up Bates's mule. Whoah, Jude, old girl! Hold her steady, Mammy! Now, Pete, press hard; never mind the blood!"
At Sam's determined reiteration of the word blood, my senses reeled, and if it had been anybody but Sam sewing over my shoulder, I would have gone down in a crumpled heap. Also I was stirred by one glance at Peter's lovely long oval face with its Keats lock of jet-black hair tossed aloft, and I remained conscious from astonishment.
This was a new Peter. His eyes burned in his face with determination. He squared his legs, clad in his elegant idea of farming corduroys, at the exact angle at which Sam's were set; then his long, white hands pulled the bloody old hide together exactly in place.
"That's it, Pete, hold it there. You slip out, Betty, and hold Jude while Mammy gets the hot water ready to wash it when it is finished. Now, Pete, an inch farther along! Whoah, Jude!" And with his long needle Sam began rapidly to draw the gaping wound together.
"Here, Byrd, you hold Jude," I said, suddenly; and giving the halter to the dirty fledgling, who was snubbing tears in his distress over the accident to his old friend, I quit the scene of the operation and fled to the woods to faint down on a log and be as ill as I wanted to. It was rather bad; and it lasted about a quarter of an hour.
Then, with my head turned determinedly away from the barn, I sought distraction in an interview with my garden.
Oh, it was rapturous! Can anything in the world be as wonderful as putting queer little brown things in the earth, where it scares you to think of their getting all cold and wet and rotted, and then coming to see them sprout and curl and run out of the ground? No, nothing can compare with it unless it is seeing whole rows of them bursting out into blooms and tassels and little pods and burrs. I felt extravagant and wanted to kiss the whole vegetable family in a way of encouragement and greeting. And the two lilacs were both most beautifully plumed out in their long, white blossoms to greet me. Now, weren't they the plucky young things to bloom that way in a perfectly strange place? Still, everybody always did have confidence in Sam.
But then in every joy patch some weeds are bound to shoot up overnight, and I was horrified to look down the rows of purple beet fronds and see what a lot of bold pepper-grass and chickweed were doing in their trenches. Without waiting to get my gloves from my bag in the car, I fell to and began a determined onslaught. Furiously I charged down two rows and up a third, at whose end I sank with exhaustion.
"Say, Betty, could a cat give kitten dinner to a poor little duck that all the hens peck?" asked the Byrd, anxiously, as he came and squatted beside me with two of the new kittens and the duck orphan in question in his arms.
"No, Byrd, I don't believe so," I answered, from instinct rather than direct knowledge.
"Why is they so many little ones in the world without mothers, me and the duck and the cow that died 'fore Dr. Chubb came, her calf, and now that mean old dog have left her puppies to eat out of a plate?" he asked. He let the kittens slide to the ground, where they sprawled in their blind helplessness, while he began to tenderly pry open the small yellow ball's wide bill and insert crumbs of bread rolled into very realistic pills, but which the patient gobbled with evident appreciation.
"See, Byrd, you are just as good as a mother any day," I said, a choke in my throat as I cuddled his thin little shoulder in the hollow between my arm and my breast, and bent over to watch the orphan's meal.
"Like Sam," answered Byrd, with a queer little flash of his keen eyes up at me, and a grin that was so like Sam's that I tumbled him over onto the grass, duck and all, and began a frolic with him which delighted his heart and eased mine. I've loved that "little one" since the day they let me hold him in my arms when he was only a few hours old and motherless. Examining him from heels to head had comforted Sam in his anguish and eased my own sympathetic sorrow. It is a tradition that Mammy Kitty rescued him just in time; but I've always felt that nothing would have happened to him at Sam's sixteen-year-old hands if he had been left for hours.
In the midst of our frolic Peter and Sam came on the scene, and as far as Peter was concerned it was indeed a transformation scene. Sam was very much washed and slick from some time at the wash-bench, and Peter was likewise, only Peter was not the Peter whom I had brought from town that very morning. He was attired in a pair of Sam's overalls that could have been wrapped around him twice, and he had a bit of color in his cheeks under his eyes, though the eyes were slightly dazed as to expression.
"Good work, Betty, for only two hours," said Sam, looking at the three long ranks of slain weeds and then at his watch. "Pete and I are going to pick peas for to-morrow's market right after dinner. Want to help?"
I assented from pure ignorance, and we all went in to devour one of Mammy's chicken dinners, the like of which is not cooked by another person in the Harpeth Valley. The way Peter ate would have made the black beauty in mother's kitchen swell with jealousy until there were danger to her own black skin. Immediately after the gorge Sam gave me a basket, gave Peter another, and then looked around for the Byrd, with a smaller box; but the Byrd had flown.
"I'll have to tan him for shirking like that," said Sam, looking off into the bushes. "You Byrd!" But there was no response. That ought to have roused my suspicions, but it didn't. I went on down to that pea-patch as innocent as a newly born lamb, with Peter walking beside me, enthusing over the landscape and swinging the light basket with elegant nonchalance.
"I see, Betty dear—I see that there is a great satisfaction in the pragmatic accomplishment, and—" he was saying when we came out of the woods onto the southern slope, where lie the long rows of peas, which are making Sam's fortune. He got them in by working two days and all one night in a bright spell in mid-February, and nobody for twenty miles around has any, while he has more than he can gather to market at a top price; that is, more than he can gather himself with Byrd's assistance, he explained to us, as he showed us just how to snap the pod against our thumbs.
"I ought to put five barrels into Hayesboro every day now for a week before anybody else gets any," he said, as he squatted at the head of a row between Peter and me, and we all began to pull at the beautiful gray-green vines and snap off the full, green pods. I looked across at poor, innocent, enthusiastic Peter and saw his finish.
About three o'clock I saw my own finish, and threw up the basket.
"You poor, dear child!" exclaimed Peter as he came stiffly across the row Sam had long since finished. He, Sam, was four rows ahead of us, and a quarter of a mile away, more or less. I had collapsed, with my tired legs stuck out in front of me and my thumb, swollen from snapping the pods, in my mouth. "This is too hard work for you."
"Yes, it is; but Sam won't think so," I answered, with a glance at the strong, broad back swinging so easily down the slope. "Now, Peter, we must go right along picking the peas. Sam must get those five barrels," I said, as I hastily scrambled up and began to pull at the vicious vines again.
"Well, I certainly don't intend to stop until they are filled," answered Peter, stiffly, in more ways than one, and without any more waste of sympathy he turned his back and went doggedly at the vines. That was my opportunity, and I took it. I rose, looked with fear at the two men at work in front of me, and fled, basket and all. I stopped long enough to empty my full basket in one of the barrels that were already in the wagon; and as I climbed laboriously down over the wheels, with my paralyzed legs working slowly, I caught a glimpse of a flash of blue out in the bushes, topped by a glint of red that was too large to be that of any bird inhabitant of The Briers.
"Byrd," I called, softly.
No answer.
"Byrd, do you want to go to town with me to see Mother Hayes?" I asked in subdued tones. That brought its response.
There were difficulties; but we surmounted them. We were afraid to wake Mammy at her afternoon nap for the clean clothes of civilization, so we purloined a fairly clean blue jumper hanging on the porch, while I left a note for Sam pinned on my old doll seed-basket hanging by his door. It was large enough for him to see, and it read:
I'm a good young mule, but I've broken down. Poor Peter! All that
is left of
BETTY.
P.S.—I've rescued the Byrd for overnight. I'll return him to
his fate to-morrow. Poor Peter! Poor Peter!
I wish I could have seen Sam's face when he found it! The next morning mother's black beauty found my old grass basket full of delicious little peas on the front steps with this note in it:
You'll be docked a quarter of a cent every hour you are off your
job. Bring that brat home and both of you get to work.
SAM.
P.S.—Something is sprouting in your garden that I don't
understand.
I knew those hollyhocks would rise up some day and bear witness against me. For the life of me I couldn't make up my mind what to say about them, so I sent the Byrd home by Tolly, who was going to take Edith out to see how her okra was progressing, and stayed in the safe shelter of my home. On the Byrd's rompers I pinned this note:
Strike, if you will, my young back,
But spare, oh spare, this little brat!
BETTY.
There are all kinds of poetry in the world.
That night when I was beginning to get restless and wish I had gone out to my fate, even if it included being throttled with a pea-vine, Tolly and Edith came into town and stopped at my gate in such a condition that I was positively alarmed about them.
"Five baskets of peas!" gasped Tolly, as he fell forward limp over his wheel.
"My thumb! my thumb!" moaned Edith, with the afflicted member in her mouth.
"But, say, Betty," Tolly revived enough to say, "we are not going to tell Sue and Billy and Julia and Pink. They are going out to-morrow to call. Let 'em go—it's coming to 'em."
"Oh no, I won't say a word," I agreed, with the intensest joy. "Come over to-morrow, Edith, and let's finish My Lady's Fan. I'm dying to know what happened to her at the court ball. Good night!"
"No, you come over to my house; I'll be in bed," Edith wailed from the middle of the road as Tolly turned and made his machine buzz for home.
Then for five days—glorious, warm, growing, blooming days—I stayed in town in a state of relapse from gardening of which the sorenesses in the calves of my legs and my thumbs were the strongest symptoms, and listened to my martyred friends' accounts of what Sam was doing to Peter. I also had a bulletin from Peter every day by the rural-delivery route. That is, they were in Peter's handwriting, but they read more like government crop reports than a poet's letters to the girl to whom he considered himself engaged. I sent them on to Judge Vandyne, and I got a glorious written chuckle in return for them.
Then, one morning when I had about got over the bashfulness about the hollyhocks, and had decided to deny them absolutely and stick to it, for a time at least, I happened to pick up Grandmother Nelson's book. It was full time—maybe past time—for thinning out my sugar-beets and resetting my cosmos. I fled out to the wilderness in greater speed than I had left it, and fairly threw myself prostrate at the feet of my neglected garden. Peter helped me, a sun-blistered, brier-scratched, ragged Peter, whose face had lost none of its beautiful, lofty, aloof expression, but which was rendered almost ordinary by a long scratch across the top of its nose. The scratch was inflicted, he told me, when he held one of the thoroughbred Plymouth Rock biddies to be greased by Sam for lice under her wings.
"Yes, but what about the play, Peter dear?" I asked, after we had weeded and dug and watered and pulled up for an hour or two and had then seated ourselves at the end of one of the long rows to rest.
"The play—oh, Betty, it is—" And his old look of rapture shot across his face. Then Sam yelled to him, and me, too.
"Come on and help tie up onions," he called. "You Byrd!"
We went and we tied up—a whole white smelly mountain of them; but I didn't care, for Sam showed me his day-book, and in just one week his balance had shot up like the beautiful pink pie-plant in my garden. A great big entry was from my beets that he had thinned and sold without waiting for me.
"I'll give you a check when they are all sold, Betty," he said, in a business-like way, and something in me made me glory in him and my beets. "And isn't old Pete hitting the agricultural pace in fine style?" he asked, as we walked out into my garden between the rows of my blush peonies which had been grateful for the bone meal, and had bloomed, though everybody who had given me the clumps had warned me that they wouldn't flower until the second season.
"But isn't he going to write, too, Sam?" I asked, a trifle uneasily. "Now, you know, Sam, if somebody had kept Keats alive as a perfectly good lawyer or bank clerk—or farmer—he wouldn't have been half as much to the world as he is as a sadly dead poet. Now, would he?"
"Well, Pete will know all about the vegetable kingdom before he makes entry into the heavenly one, and we'll see what he reports when the time comes. Just come over and look at the wheat in my north field." Sam answered my anxiety so easily that I let it slip from my shoulders as I went with him to sit on a rail fence on the edge of a gray-green ocean of future food and be perfectly happy. "It'll fill dinner-pails and give babies mother's milk," said Sam, as he sat beside me and smoldered out over his crop. "The Commissioner of Agriculture was out here five times last week, and a complete report on the whole place goes in to the Food Commission in Washington. Pretty good for a less-than-two-year-old farmer, eh, Bettykin?" And Sam tipped the rail enough to make me sure I was falling before he caught me.
I didn't answer—I just clung, but Sam understood and roughed my hair into my misty eyes and lifted me off the fence.
Daddy got me two copies of that Agricultural Commissioner's report, and I sent one to Judge Vandyne and pasted the other in the front of Grandmother Nelson's book. Little did I know that simple action of pride in Sam would bring such results to Samuel Foster Crittenden and to Tennessee, and even to perhaps the third and fourth generation, or maybe—
Daddy says that when a man owns a bottom field, a hillside, and a creek in the Harpeth Valley all he has to do is to go out and swing his hoe around his head a few times and he'll have a living before he is ready to harvest it. I don't know about that, and I do know that since I came home in early April Sam has worked like two men, and maybe more. But his harvests certainly amazed even the oldest inhabitants, who had sat around at the cross-roads grocery and spat tobacco-juice at the idea of his farming by government books, with no experience. They came to sit on the rail fences around his fields and to spit out of the other side of their mouths before the end of July, and I never went out to marvel, myself, that I didn't step on that Commissioner of Agriculture, who couldn't seem to keep away more than a few hours at a time.
As things grew and bloomed and burst and flowered and seeded, Sam went calmly on his way of work with the crops from dawn to dark, and Peter did likewise. I never saw anything like his friendly pride in every successful test of Sam's work. And his own fat was getting packed on him at a rate that beat the record-breaking red pig down in the long, clean pens that Sam maintained in the condition of a sanitary detention hospital. Also Peter never mentioned the play, I never mentioned it, and Sam appeared to have completely forgotten it.
I didn't quite like for Sam to forget Peter's play like that, and I liked it less when I heard Julia say that she thought it was so fortunate that Sam had cured Peter of being a poet, so he could go into his father's office to learn to take care of his great fortune. Peter likes Julia so much that I think she ought to have appreciated the great thing in him more than she did. When the copy of the Review, with Peter's poem on the Ultimate, came, he read the whole poem to her while she embroidered an initial in the corner of a handkerchief for him. The next day she told me that she couldn't understand a word about it, and that it made Pink mad because she wouldn't tell him what to say to Peter about it. Pink has grown fond of Peter, but he wouldn't try to read the poem after the third stanza. But Peter went on back to help with the rye crop, knowing nothing of all that.
Of course, I had all the confidence that there is in the world in Sam, but I, about the first week in July, again began to feel responsible to the world for Peter's play; and I might have made the awful blunder of remonstrating with Peter or Sam or both of them if I hadn't got into so much trouble with Edith and Tolly.
Now, Clyde Tolbot is a very business-like young man, and he ought to be respected and considered for it, but that is just what Edith doesn't seem to understand how to do. She wants to go on with her head level with the moon, and Tolly wants to get married in November, and I think he is perfectly right. He hasn't any family, and he says Edith's "highstrikes," as he calls her moods and tenses, and the food at the Hayesboro Inn, are making him thin and pale, and hurting the prospects of The Electric Light Co.
"She acts as if she thought I was a cinnamon bear if I put my paw on her fair hand. And she seems to think it is scandal because I wanted to buy that old mahogany sideboard that the Vertreeses had to sell when they inherited old Mrs. Anderson and her furniture from his mother," he groaned, as he sat on my side porch with his head in his hands.
"Tolly," I said, with firm conviction in my voice and manner, "you must do something heroic to shock Edith down to earth again, or into opening her eyes as those kittens daddy gave Byrd did on their ninth day. The evening of Edith's eighth day has about struck."
"It most certainly has, and about eleven-thirty at that," answered Tolly, sitting up as if about to rush forth and do what I suggested, though neither he nor I knew what it was. "But what is your idea of a heroic deed that will pluck the child Edith?" he asked, just as if I were one of the clerks out at the power-house and he was conducting a business detail.
"Well, let me see, Tolly," I said, slowly, while I ran over in my mind all the lover heroics I had ever heard of from runaway horses to the use of a hated blond rival. "You couldn't get hurt slightly out at the power-house, could you?"
"And ruin my boast that I have the most perfectly organized force and machinery in the state? Not if I know myself," answered Tolly, with business indignation and an utter lack of lover's enthusiasm at the prospect of getting his lady-love by a ruse.
"Well, I don't know what you are going to do," I said, limply, as I saw that none of the things that had ever been acted before were within Tolly's reach.
"I don't know, either," answered Tolly; and again his head dropped into his hands.
"What did she say the last time you asked her?" I questioned. I considered it my duty to get to the bottom of the matter, as I had been called in consultation.
"Ask her? Thunderation! I never have asked her! I've never got that near to her!" he exclaimed, in a perfect outburst of indignation.
Then I laughed. I laughed so that Tolly had to pat me on the back to make me get my breath, and a sleeping mocking-bird scolded outright from a tree by the porch.
"Why don't you do it by telephone?" I gasped.
"By George! that is the idea, all right, Betty!" Tolly exclaimed, with his face positively radiant. I had flung his love troubles into a class of affairs that he could handle. "I tell you what I am going to do. I am going to have my wire chief cut Edith's line and make me a direct connection with mine at about nine o'clock to-morrow morning, as that is the time he is in less of a rush with all the other things to attend to. Then I'll put it to her good and straight if she holds on to the receiver and hears me out."
"But Edith might go over to Boliver to visit May Jessamine Ray for a week at nine o'clock to-morrow. Oh, go do it to-night, Tolly!" I pleaded.
"And let that doll-faced girl at Central hear me? Not much!" answered Tolly, indignantly.
"I didn't mean that," I answered. "Go to her armed with your love, Tolly, and make—make her listen to you."
"Armed with a sand-bag to slug her would be more like it, if I expected to get anywhere with her. No, you've hit it, Betty, and I'm going on down the street and see just where that Morris line goes into the trunk. Hope Judson won't have to run more than a mile of wire to make that connection." And with no more gratitude or good night than that Tolly went down the street with his head up among his telephone wires, just as Edith keeps hers in the clouds. I hope some day they will run into each other so hard that they will crash out ignition sparks and take fire.
As I said, being so interested in Edith and Tolly, and trying to get her to postpone her visit until he could get the wires up between them both in a material and a sentimental sense, and also wanting to let Sam and Peter miss me sadly, I let quite a few days elapse without being in any of the events out at The Briers. When I did go back I found that things had happened.
"Where's Peter?" I asked, as Sam came to unload me and a huge bag of smoke iris that old Mrs. Johnson had given me for my garden. There was also Byrd's basket from mother, and a pair of small alligators that daddy had got from Florida for him, having run out of natural animal inhabitants of the Harpeth Valley.
"Pete's off with the bit in his mouth—haven't seen him for three days," answered Sam as he lifted me and swung me way out into the middle of my own clover-pink bed. It was starred with sweet, white blossoms, having been treated according to Eph's directions and those of Grandmother Nelson's book.
"Peter off? Where? What's happened, Sam?" I exclaimed, with astonished anxiety.
"The play," answered Sam, calmly, as he lit his cob pipe and blew a ring of smoke. "It hit him in the middle of the night before last, and he wrote me a note. Mammy grubs him, and I haven't seen him since. I've paid the Byrd a half interest in the next young that happens to us not to go down the hill to the shack, and we're all just going on as usual."
"Maybe I'd better not go, either," I said, with awe and sympathy for Peter fairly dropping from the words as I uttered them.
"Betty," said Sam as he looked at me through a ring of smoke that the warm wind blew away over our heads, "you run just a little more sense to the cubic foot of dirt than the average, it seems to me. Come on down and watch them begin to cut wheat. It is one week ahead of time, so I can get all the harvesters and not a grain will be lost. They say it'll run sixty bushels to the acre. Think of that, with only a thirty-six record to beat in the Valley. It is that Canadian cross. The Commissioner is down there, and so is your admirer, Chubb. He wastes many hours riding over here to see you when you are in town on frivolous pursuits."
"Frivolous!" I echoed as we went up the path back of the house; and on our way over the hill I told him about Tolly and Edith. Sam laughed; he always does when I want him to; but his eyes were grave after a second.
"The mating season is a troublesome time, isn't it, Betty?" he asked, as he swung me to the top rail of the fence, vaulted over it, and held up his arms to lift me down on the other side; but I sat poised in midair to argue his proposition.
"It ought not to be, Sam," I said, with an experienced feeling rising in my mind and voice at thus discussing fundamentals with a man that could break a wheat record and be attended by the agricultural envoys of the United States government. "People ought to sensibly pick each other from their needs, and not act unintelligent about it."
At which perfectly sage remark a strange thing happened to Samuel Foster Crittenden. He laid his head down on the rail beside my knee and laughed until he almost shook me from my perch. It made me so furious that I slipped past him and ran on ahead. I vaulted the next fence in fine style and landed among the Commissioner and Dr. Chubb and the tobacco-juice neighbors, who had come to see the output of the first book-grown acre. I did not speak again to Sam that day until he tucked in Dr. Chubb beside me for a spin over to Spring Hill, leaving the doctor's old roan for a week's complimentary grazing on Sam's east meadow of thick blue-grass, grown through a rock-lime dressing that all the neighbors had assured him would kill the land outright.
"Wheez-chekk! nice young buck for a husband," wheezed the Butterball as I shot down the hill from under Sam's big hand reached out for my hair.
"Sam?" I gasped.
"Women critters always back and shy, but they git the wedding-bit from a steady hand—and like it," he chuckled, still further. I felt as if I ought not to let Sam rest under such a suspicion, and that I ought to tell him about Peter. But just then he launched forth on a case of a spavined horse he had beyond the cross-roads, which he wanted me to take him to see, and I didn't do it.
I don't much like to think about the long, hot July weeks that followed. The whole of Harpeth Valley sweltered, and everybody did likewise. That is, I suppose Peter did, for not one glimpse did I or anybody else get of him. Sam says Mammy set his meals down in the doorway of the shack with one of her soft, soothing, "Dah, dah, chile," which was answered with a growl from Peter. That ended the events of his life at The Briers.
Sam worked early and late, and got tanned to the most awful deep mahogany. All of him held out pretty well but his heels, which he came in three times to have me fix for him; and once mother and I had to dress a blister on his back that he got from wearing a torn shirt in the potato-field.
I was wild with anxiety about Peter and the play and the poor little heroine; I didn't know whether she was being murdered or separated for life from the hero. Still, it was good to have Sam to myself for long, quiet, hot evenings out on the front porch under the brooding doves in the eaves above us. Sam never talks much but he listens to me, and sometimes he tells me things from way down inside himself. And little by little I began to understand all about the things he had been too busy doing to tell me about.
"You see, it is this way, Bettykin," he said, one evening when the young moon was attempting to silver the dark all around us as we sat on the front steps, with mother away rounding off the second pair of socks for Peter. "There wasn't one cent of money for me to take Byrd and Mammy and make a start in New York. Even with the best sort of a backing, it is always a ten-year pull for a youngster before he counts in the world. I could have sold The Briers, but I couldn't make up my mind to do it, and then while I hesitated I—I"—he paused a minute and steadied his voice, while I took his hand and held on to it tight—"I got a call—a land call that I had to answer. God just picked me up and planted me here on my bit of land, and I've got to root and grow or—or dishonor Him."
"Oh, Sam, you have, you have honored Him," I said as I crept closer to his arm.
"I've been all uprooted and pruned, Betty, and I've lost—lost—you know! But for Him I must go on just the same and bear fruit." At the pain in Sam's low voice something in me throbbed.
"Lost? Oh, Sam, what?" I exclaimed, as I hugged his arm against my breast. "What's happened to you, Sam? Tell—"
But just here we were interrupted by a clatter and a clash of hoofs, a wild shout in Peter's voice, and a cheer in the fledgling's high treble. The biggest mule lurched up to the gate, and two figures took a flying leap from his back to the pavement. With a rush they swept up the path and brought up panting at the bottom of our steps.
"Peter!" I gasped, descending to be sure that neither of them was bodily broken or demented.
"It's across! it's across!" shouted Peter as he reached out his arms and grabbed me in a wild embrace.
"What?" Sam and I both demanded, though, of course, in a way we knew.
"The play!" exclaimed Peter, putting his head down on my shoulder and fairly sobbing out his relief. "Farrington is going to begin rehearsals from the first two acts I've sent him, and I am to go right on to New York with the third that I finished an hour before the wire came over from the cross-roads station. You'll go with me, won't you, Betty? I can't go without you and Sam." And as he hugged me close Peter reached out and grasped Sam's big hand that rested on his arm.
"Of course Betty will go, and I'll come as soon as I get the whole crop in," answered Sam in his deep, kind, strong voice that steadied all our nerves. "I knew you'd make it, Pete. I never doubted that all you needed was a bit of brawn to punch from."
"Peter—Sam!" I gasped, trying to get my balance as I felt as if I were being hurried through space without even being told where to. "I don't know. I—"
"I can't do without you, Betty," Peter said again, as he held me close and Sam withdrew from us for the distance of about two steps.
"Betty is the real thing, Pete, and she'll stand by when you need her. She always does," Sam said, in a quiet voice that sank down into the depths of my soul and made a cold spot.
"I—I—don't know. I—" I was just reiterating when daddy and Julia, with a plate of something, came through the gate and up the walk. They had to be told, and they had to congratulate, and then mother came out to see what it was all about. They were all happy and gloriously excited, and I was dead—dead.
Then Sam took Peter home because he had to pack and get into town for the morning train. I begged for the fledgling to be left with me, and Sam consented without even mentioning the string-beans to be picked or the weeds in the parsnips. He said good night to everybody before he did to me, and then started to go with just the farewell word, hesitated a second, and came back and roughed my hair down over my eyes with the greatest roughness he had ever employed in that action. It would have broken my heart if he hadn't.
"Betty," said the Byrd, as he crouched at my side with his thin, scantily clad little body hovered against my skirts, "you ain't going to no New York with Pete and leave me and Sam and all the poor little ones, is you?"
"Oh, Byrd, I'm afraid I'll have to!" I sobbed, cuddling him close.
"Well, then, damn Pete!" he exploded.
IV
THE BOOK OF LOVE
Most men are only a fraction of the greatness that the world adds them up to be, but Farrington is a whole man and then a fraction over. I enjoy talking to him just as much as I do to Sam or anybody else who is doing interesting things in a perfectly simple way. When we talked about Peter and the play he reminded me in lots of ways of old Dr. Chubb when he gets on the subject of spavined horses or sick cows; of course I don't mean any disrespect to Peter in that comparison. I told Mr. Farrington the same thing, and he didn't laugh at all; his eyes shone out from under his bushy white eyebrows like two wise old stars, and he said he saw exactly what I meant, and that he hoped to meet Dr. Chubb some day. And I continued to feel enthusiasm for him even after half an hour's talk on the subject of his treatment of Peter, which Peter had led me to believe was atrocious.
"Dear, dearest Betty," said Peter, as he met me at the train on the first day of September, "how wonderful to have you come just when I need you most! I am in the depths of despair." And he looked it.
"Oh, Peter, is it about the play?" I gasped as I fairly hung on to his arm while he was languidly giving my traveling-bag to a footman. Peter looked like a literary version of what Sam called "the last of pea-time," which is a very vivid expression to a person who has just seen her poor peas drop away in the August garden. "What has happened?"
"I care nothing more about the play, Betty. It is stolen from me," answered Peter, gloomily, as he led me through the Pennsylvania Station and up the steps toward the limousine, where I knew Mabel would be waiting to eat me up and be in turn devoured.
"Why, Peter, what can you mean?" I gasped.
"I'll tell you all about it when I get you to myself. Don't mention it to Mabel—she doesn't understand," he answered from behind his teeth as he put me into the car and into Mabel's arms, and also into Miss Greenough's.
But for all my joy at seeing both those dear friends again I couldn't help being depressed by every glance at Peter, sitting opposite me, looking white and glum.
"Don't notice him—he's more impossible than ever," said Mabel, once, when Peter leaned out to be reproachful to the chauffeur for doing his duty and keeping us waiting for the traffic signal. "I'll tell you all when I get you alone."
Judge Vandyne met us at the lodge gate of the great Vandyne home out on the Island. He, too, treated Peter like a sick baby. I never was so puzzled; and dinner would have seemed long but for the fact that they all wanted to hear so much about Sam and The Briers and the whole Harpeth Valley. I never more enjoyed telling anything, and even Peter's gloom lightened when I told him about the fat little duck the Byrd had insisted on sending him—alive in a box. Daddy was secretly expressing it to me, on the sleeping-car porter's kindly advice, when he saw it in my baggage.
"Well, well," said Judge Vandyne, as he came into the drawing-room with us after dinner, "young Crittenden is really getting to goal on that farm question. I'm glad you sent me that report—it set some big things in motion. I'll tell you about it when I get you alone," he added, under his breath. And that was another time that made me feel as if I were a baby that ought to be sliced up to be divided. As it was, Peter got me first, and I don't blame him for being in agony. That is, I didn't blame Peter, but neither do I blame Farrington, now that I have talked to him. This was Peter's tale of woe:
"Stolen, it is absolutely stolen from me, Betty, and I am helpless to protect the child of my brain," he began. The judge and Mabel had at last left us alone, probably because they hesitated to have Peter commit patricide and fratricide, if those are the right terms for sister and father murder.
"How, Peter?" I asked, taking his hand with deep sympathy.
"Betty, since the first three rehearsals I am not allowed even in the theater, and Farrington is a brute. I do not know what he is doing to my play, but I do know that he was at work on a horrible laugh in the first part of the first act that I did not intend at all. The leading woman is coarse, with no soul, and the star is a great hulking ass. I am wild and nobody sympathizes with me. Father has talked to Farrington, and that is why he wired to you. Oh, I know he wired or you wouldn't have come up to this inferno at this time of the year. That is one kindness he did me—it is a comfort to me—oh, Betty." And Peter put his head down on my arm that was next him and sobbed, as the Byrd does when anything happens to one of his "little ones."
I didn't blame Peter at all, for that play was his "little one" and his first. I just took it out in hating and vilifying Farrington, until I got Peter much comforted, even interested in hearing about the splendid price Sam had got for the north-field rye. Then it was time for us to go to bed, and I suppose it was best that it was too late for Mabel to come into my room to tell me her version of Peter's troubles. For that one night I sympathized fully with him. The next morning I was shown another side of the question. And I felt decidedly different about Mr. Farrington when he talked to me for a little while, alone before dinner the next day, and after Judge Vandyne had also had me in solitary conversation.
"You see, my dear young lady," said Mr. Farrington, with that twin-star smile in his eyes I have mentioned, "the very wonderful nature that grows and flowers such an exquisite young first play as this of our young friend's, is the undoing of the work and the producer, unless he is a heartless old brute like the one to whom you are at present talking."
"Oh, I don't think you are that now, not at all. I—I think you are wonderful, and I trust you with the play even though you haven't told me anything about what you are doing to it," I exclaimed in great confidence and enthusiasm.
"You are a wonderful bit lass yourself, and I trust you with my poet, even if you haven't told me just what you are going to do with him," he answered, and looked at me with the real affection, tempered with amusement, that daddy and Judge Vandyne and Dr. Chubb all use toward me.
I blushed and was just going to tell him that—well, I don't know just what I was going to tell him, but I am sure I'd have opened my innermost heart to him, for that is what he invites, when in came Peter and the rest, and we all went in to dinner. I didn't see the great dean of the American stage alone any more, but he whispered to me just as Mabel and Miss Greenough and I were leaving the room:
"Keep my poet easy, and you'll see what you see."
I am glad now when I look back on it that my presence did help Peter through the ordeal of that two weeks. Also Mabel and I had schemes together to take his mind off his dying child, which was being operated on by Farrington to make it a success. The best diversion, however, was Judge Vandyne's. He asked me to make out a list of ten of Peter's Hayesboro friends, for whom he would send a private car over one of his railroads, to bring them up for the first night of the play. That was to be the 20th of September, and even then the bills were up all over New York. I could see, from the way Judge Vandyne was taking it all, that he intended to make the best of having a poet for a son, and to put it through with his usual energetic force.
Peter was perfectly delighted at having all his Hayesboro friends come. He wrote them all letters, and Mabel wrote them notes. After that Peter got uneasy and made Judge Vandyne write to everybody, and the next day he insisted that I should write, too.
"Oh, I wish Sam could come, but I know he can't," I said, with a sudden hurt place just where I was about to swallow my mushroomed cutlet.
"Sam not come?" said Peter, growing white about his mouth and throwing down his napkin.
"Oh, Peter, Sam didn't want me to say anything about it, but he doesn't think it is possible for him to get away and—and you know, Peter, Sam has to buy the sheep he wants to put in the woods; and I told you that another mule—"
"I can't, I can't stand it for Samboy not to be here," said Peter as he pushed his cutlet away from him, upset his glass, and turned over a vase that in turn knocked down the center vase of roses, besides upsetting the composure of the butler and one footman. I saw it was going to be a regular poetic outburst, such as Mammy would have called a tantrum in Sam or me, and that Mabel was positively scared and Miss Greenough much pained.
"Crittenden will be here," said Judge Vandyne in a perfectly calm and certain voice. "Don't worry, son!"
I knew he meant that he would lend Sam the money, or I thought I knew that, and I felt perfectly sure that Sam wouldn't come. Nobody knows Samuel Foster Crittenden as I do; and the reason he is so congenial with his mules is that he is so like them in "setness" of disposition. I just raged at him in my heart, for I knew from the way I felt myself how poor Peter wanted him; but I controlled myself and went right on talking about how I knew the others would come and how much they would enjoy it.
"Julia has never been to New York. Won't she be delicious?" I exclaimed as we came to her on the list. Peter had put her first.
"Delicious is the right word," said Peter, and he then launched forth in a description of Julia that I would hardly have recognized, though I had been born across the street from her and have loved her devotedly from our second years. It is such a joy to have two people whom you love appreciative of each other, and I knew that Julia fully reciprocated Peter's interested friendship for her. She had wept on my shoulder at parting from Peter, and had written him long and encouraging letters for me while I was going up to Nashville to have my clothes made for the trip to New York and trying to get a little time in my garden out at The Briers. I have to stop; I never let myself think of that parting with Sam and The Briers. Some things are too deep for words. Then to continue about Julia, I wrote her how to have her dresses made, but told her to get only one little traveling-hat and leave the rest to Mabel and me and Fifth Avenue. I also advised Edith and Sue to do likewise, but I knew Miss Editha would have Miss Sally Pride make her a new bonnet on the frame of the old one, and Peter said she would not be the "wraith of an old rose" in anything else.
It was glorious that Tolly and Pink could both come, though Billy Robertson was not sure. I did so hope that Clyde would get a real chance to open Edith's kitten eyes for her through some heroic accident of travel, and I was glad that Colonel Menefee was coming, because he would engage Miss Editha's attention away from Tolly's attentions to Edith and give them a chance to come forward out of their backwardness. The telephone scheme had failed, Tolly told me, because the wire chief had made a mistake and still left them connected at Central. "Central" is the little Pride girl, the milliner's youngest niece, and very pretty. Just as he was ready to begin firmly with Edith she sweetly said:
"Now your connection is good, Mr. Tolbot."
When I left home poor Tolly was really becoming embittered against the world and was absorbing himself in putting up a new telephone line over to Spring Hill. I told Peter how he ought to appreciate Tolly for leaving business in that state to come up for the first night of the play; and Peter said:
"Dear old chap; we must find the shibboleth that will unleash the hooded falcon of his soul." Isn't Peter wonderful?
If all the invited guests in Hayesboro were busy getting ready to do justice to the first night of "The Emergence," we were in the same state. Judge Vandyne was planning to give a dinner that night to his most distinguished lawyer friends in honor of Farrington, and daddy had promised to try to come. Of course, Peter was going to have a dinner of his own, to which he was inviting a lot of delightful friends to meet his Hayesboro friends, and they were having both dinners at the Ritz, so Peter could go in and make a speech to Judge Vandyne's party. Most of the friends had not come back from the lakes and the shore and their country homes, but were running into town for that one evening. It was all the most delicious excitement, but—oh, a place way down deep in me behind my excited breathing was so sore about Sam! I couldn't even think about his not being there, but I went on and danced and had a good time in sheer desperation. Sam had to plow and hoe and reap and sow for food, while we ate and drank it and made merry!
Then the first night came, and everybody was there looking in high feather, and some of them wearing very low dress. Judge Vandyne had taken all the boxes in the theater, and they were every one full to overflowing with loving excitement about Peter. I was in the second box on the right-hand side of the stage at the front, and Peter sat in the shadow back of me. Julia and one of Peter's classmates were just behind us. As the curtain went up Peter took a hard hold on my hand under my white chiffon scarf, and I heard him mutter under his breath:
"Oh, Samboy!"
I am not going to try to describe that play of Peter's. The newspapers used all the adjectives and things there are in the English language to express enthusiasm with, and I haven't got any left. I will simply tell about it.
When Peter had gone out and buried himself in the shack on the hillside of The Briers, that looked out over the Harpeth Valley, he had unconsciously buried that frozen hero in "The Emergence" and had gone to work and resurrected him in a kind of Samuel Foster Crittenden. Instead of being a complicated, heroic, erratic genius he was just a big, simple, strong young man who was doing his part in the corner of the world's vineyard where he had been sent to work. To help him Peter had written in a wonderful girl with a great deal of brains for one so young. Just the sort of woman that men like Sam and the hero deserve to have. She was so lovely that I caught my breath and—and suffered. But what made everybody in that theater laugh themselves happy was the essence of Hayesboro that Peter had distilled and poured into his characters. Everybody was so mixed up with everybody else that nobody could feel sensitive or fail to enjoy every character. I couldn't tell whether I was the girl that practised tango steps all the time, even when the minister (who had manners like those of Colonel Menefee and the Mayor of Hayesboro) came to supper, or the girl that always had a plate of hickory-nut candy in her hand and kept saying sharp things while giving everybody something sweet to take away the taste. Julia said she was that girl, but Peter indignantly denied anybody's being anybody, and then we all kept still. Just then the curtain went down on the second act, with the whole house in an uproar; and there was a call for Peter and Farrington.
Peter went and left me sitting there in the shadow alone, while he stepped out on the stage all by himself—the stage of his life. And, oh, I was so glad to be in the shadow all by myself, for I had been as happy as I could and it was beginning to wear off. I wanted Sam—I wanted him even if the wonderful woman in the play was going to have him in real life, too, as I knew would have to happen some day. Also Sam deserved to be there that night if anybody did, and he was way down in the Harpeth Valley working, working, working, it seemed to me, that all the rest of the world might play. I wanted him! I felt as if I couldn't stand it when Peter stepped forward, looking like the most beautiful Keats the world had ever known, and the whole house gasped at his beauty and kept still to hear what a man that looked like that would have to say. I stifled a sob and looked around to see if I could flee somewhere, when suddenly my groping hand was taken in two big, warm, horny ones, and Sam's deep voice said in the same old fish-hook tone:
"Steady, Bettykin, and watch old Pete take his first hurdle."
I took one look at a great big glorious Sam in all sorts of fine linen that was purple in the mist of my eyes, and then I was perfectly quiet, with no fish-hook at all in my arm or in my life. I heard every word of Peter's speech, and laughed and almost cried over the one Farrington made about the young American drama, with his arm across Peter's shoulder. I forgot all about Sam because he was there, and just reveled in being happier than I had been since I had adopted Peter and the play, now that it was successfully out of our systems.
And it was successfully out. Nobody who heard the thunder after the last act could have doubted that. The New Times the next day said it was "The burgeoning of the American poetic drama," and another paper said, "Bubbles fresh from the fount of American youth." We got the papers and read them coming home from Peter's supper-party over at the Astor, which his New York friends gave because they wanted to see more of his Hayesboro friends. Everybody was there and the success of the evening came when Pink Herriford told his mule story. Peter made him do it, and everybody adored it. And just as they were all laughing and exclaiming at the droll way in which he characterized those resurgent mules, I looked down the table and happened to see that Clyde Tolbot was holding Editha Morris Carruthers's hand in a way that anybody who understood these matters knew from the position of their shoulders that such was the case.
"A taxicab lost us on Broadway at ten dollars per second, and I made connection with her wires before found," he whispered to me, as we all rose to go, just as the night was also taking its departure from New York. New York in the daytime is like a huge football game in which a million or two players all fall on the ball of life at the same time and kick and squirm and fight over it; but at night it is a dragon with billions of flaming eyes that only blink out when it is time to crawl away from the rising sun and get in a hole until the dark comes again. It is the most wonderful city in the world to stay in until you are ready to go home.
Sam hadn't been at Peter's supper-party, and neither had Judge Vandyne, but I didn't worry about that. I never worry about Sam. I just like to know he is somewhere near and then forget him—if I am allowed, which I am not if Sam can think up some important work for me to do. At six o'clock in the morning I laid down the papers with Peter's triumph in them and rolled into bed, dead with sleep; and before seven Sam had sent me a note that forced me to open my eyes and stagger up and on. It said:
DEAR BETTY,—Get a maid at the hotel to come with you to the
following address. I need you badly. A reliable taxi is waiting.
SAM.
Horrible thoughts of somebody's having kidnapped Sam flashed across my brain as I threw on my clothes. How had he happened to come to New York, anyway, and then disappear right after the play? What kind of trouble could he be in, and how could I help? I looked in my purse and found only ten dollars, but I felt the roll that I always carry in my stocking and it still felt a respectable size. I never count money when I am spending it, because you don't enjoy it so much; and I had been away from home three weeks. Still, if I had to bribe or buy Sam out of anything, I could get more some place. I must hurry to do as he told me, and then he would direct me how to rescue him.
In less time than it would take most girls, as soggy with sleep as I was, to get dressed and down to a taxi, I was on my way to Sam. I forgot to get the maid to go with me; and, anyway, what was the use, with a nice young white man like that taxi-car driver? He said, looking at me so pleasantly that I was sure he didn't really mean anything, "It's early, isn't it, miss?"
I was so hustled and so dazed, and had such trouble in making the little new kind of hook-buttons on my gloves stay fastened, that before I knew it we drew up at a queer kind of old warehouse down in a part of New York where I had never been, with a line of the ocean or the bay or the river or the harbor, I couldn't tell which, just beyond. Then I was scared, for instead of Sam being in danger, I felt that maybe I was being kidnapped. I hesitated at the curbing as I got out of the taxi.
"Through that warehouse and to your left you'll find the gentleman. Good morning, miss," said the nice taxi-man as he touched his cap and drove off and left me to my fate. If I had had only my own fate to consider I would have taken to my good strong legs and fled, but Sam was also concerned. At the thought of his needing me my courage came back, and I went on into the long shed where queer dirty boxes and bales and barrels and things were piled. At last I came to a turn and stepped into a low room that was almost at the water's edge. It was still very early morning, and a mist from the sea made things dim, but in a crowd of queer people and bundles and voices I saw Sam standing and looking perfectly helpless, while that Commissioner of Agriculture stood over by the window, evidently perfectly furious and growling out expletives to the saddest crowd of pitiful people I had ever seen.
Sam was in his dress-suit with his overcoat off and his hair in a mop; and in a faltering jumble of several languages he was trying to tell something to a gaunt, fierce woman in a wide ragged skirt, a shapeless, torn man's coat, with a faded woolen scarf over her head. In her arms she had a baby, and a woman with a baby in her arms knelt beside her; while a dozen other women with children, ragged, pale, frightened little children in their arms, and at their skirts, hung in a sullen group back of her. A crowd of dejected, hungry, gaunt men stood to one side, and one very old man had his old woolen cap off his white head, which I could see was bowed in prayer. In a moment I knew from their Flemish patois, which I had heard so often out in the fields of beautiful Belgium during that happy month just before the war, that they were refugees, and my heart went out in a rush to them as I went in a rush to Sam and grasped his arm.
"Oh, what is it, Sam, and what do they want?" I asked.
"They are emigrants from Belgium. The Commissioner has had me appointed to settle them in the Harpeth Valley on lands near my own, for which he has options. I came on in response to his telegram to meet them to-morrow, but they were landed here on the dock at one o'clock in the night, because of a fire on the steamer. I came right down from the theater, but they are frightened and the women have lost all confidence in everything. They don't seem to want to go with me to the car that we have ready to take them to Tennessee. I can't understand them, nor they me, and I sent for you. You're a woman, Betty. See what you can do to comfort and hearten them and make them ready to go with me when the train leaves in less than two hours."
Oh, I know I am young and have been sheltered, and don't know what it is to be shot at and killed, and have my children torn from my arms and to be hungry and cold. But women do understand other suffering women, and when I stretched out my hands to the fierce woman with her starving child at her breast, I knew what to falter out in a mixture of her own patois and mine.
"Il est bon—a good, good man. Alle avec—go with him," I pleaded.
"But it is a fine gentleman! No, we come to a master, to work that we do not starve. A landowner," she said, and regarded Sam in his purple and fine broadcloth with fierce and desperate distrust that the other women also expressed with hissing breaths which brought surly growls of suspicious acquiescence from the men.
"But look, look!" I exclaimed. I turned to Sam and drew one of his big, farm-worn hands forward and held it in mine out to the fierce woman, behind whom the others cowered. There was the broad thumb, off of which the barrel of peas had smashed the nail. There were the deep plow-callouses in the palms, and the plow-ropes' hard gall around the left wrist. The fierce woman's somber eyes lighted; for the first time she looked up past Sam's velvety white shirt-front with its pearl studs, up into the calm eyes that were smoldering their gridiron look down at her and the whimpering women and children.
"And here look encore!" I exclaimed, as I drew from my breast the large silver "peasants' locket" I had bought in Belgium, perhaps in her own village, and which I always wear with my street clothes, and had put on even in the hurry of my summons. I snapped it open and let her see what it contained. Sam saw, also! It was a picture of Sam milking old Buttercup in the shed. Just as he turned to call me to bring an extra bucket to feed the calf, I had snapped it. I don't know just why I had put it in the locket, except that it is safe to have Sam around in time of trouble.
"Eh, le bon Dieu—I see, I see!" she exclaimed, looking first at Sam and then at the locket. Then suddenly she clasped my wrist and looked at the two big, hard, live callouses in my own palm, that some kind of a queer prophetic sentiment had warned me not to let a manicure work on. Also, she saw the pea-thumb that still held a trace of the blister. Intently she looked for a few seconds, first at me and then at Sam. Then with a cry of agonized joy she fell at Sam's feet, and I drew down on my knees beside her, while the other women crowded around, kneeling, too, as their leader bowed her tear-drenched eyes in Sam's big, warm hands. One woman thrust a tiny baby into my arms as she kissed my sleeve and leaned forward to clasp Sam's knees, while the old man who had been praying all the time spread out his hands in a joyful benediction. The men's sullen faces lightened, and they bent to take up their pitiful old bundles and baskets.
For a long minute there was a sobbing silence while the Commissioner blew his nose over by the window. I clasped the little starved baby close and pressed with the other women against Sam's knees, and Sam stood calm over us all. I know, I know he was praying down away from the sea, across half the world, into his own everlasting hills, over Paradise Ridge.
"Good, Bettykin!" he said as he bent and raised me and the fierce woman to our feet. The others began to bustle and hustle the children, and men, brushing tears from faces that had begun to smile uncertainly, as if they had never smiled before. A big tear fell off Sam's own cheek as he roughed my hair with his chin under the edge of my perky little hat, and took the woman's baby from my arms, as well as her bag and bundle, to carry them to the car. He led the way, and we all trailed after him.
It was a strenuous hour that we spent getting them all settled in the emigrant-car the Commissioner and Judge Vandyne had ready to take them right on from the ship to Tennessee. In the midst of packing away boxes and bundles and seating and quieting babies and women, Sam told me in snatches the reason of it all. One of the great Belgian landowners had written to Judge Vandyne, who was his friend, to find some suitable place to colonize twenty of his peasant families in America. The letter had come at about the time my copy of the government's report on Sam's farming had reached him. He hadn't said anything to Sam about it, but had got hold of the Commissioner and secured options on four hundred acres back of Sam's farm in the wilderness of the Harpeth Valley. He had fixed it all up before he offered Sam the commission of settling and farming these people on shares for ten years. It was a little fortune poured into Sam's hands, but he didn't seem to think about that at all. His mind was entirely occupied by the hungry, big-eyed babies and their sadly smiling, clinging mothers. He had a whole bunch of ripe bananas, with other fruit and food in proportion, packed in the train for the long trip to Tennessee.
"Why didn't you write me all about it, Sam?" I asked as I patted a sleeping infant over my shoulder while the mother jolted a big-eyed twin of the same variety. Sam was undoing a strap from a large bundle for the fierce woman, whose eyes now followed him like those of a great, faithful dog—or my eyes.
"It was all settled less than a week ago, Bettykin, and I—I wanted to surprise you and Pete at 'The Emergence' first night. This ship wasn't due until to-morrow, and I was to have had a frolic. I asked the judge not to tell you. I wanted to break it to you myself. And I did with a brickbat, didn't I—at daylight to boot?"
"Where are you going to—to house them all, Sam?" I asked, anxiously, thinking of the little house with the Byrd and Mammy and all the baskets and seed and things, especially the one iron pot that only held chicken enough for them and—
"Got a tent village out of the colonel's Menefee Rifles' tents over by the spring. It will be fine for them until I can divide out the land and set each man to log-rolling his shack. Dad Hayes is finishing the camp for me, and Chubb is helping to make things all shipshape, also buying a fine mule for each family. Oh, they'll have a great welcome, or would have if only you were there." Sam didn't look at me, but smiled gently at the fierce woman's thanks and turned to another strap and another bundle. Again I went dead inside, and I turned away and hid my tears in the back of the neck of the tiny Belgian in my arms.
"Just about five minutes before we put you off, Miss Hayes," said the Commissioner as he came bustling up to me, smiling with the same energy he had used in swearing so short a time ago.
Surreptitiously wiping my eyes and swallowing the sobs in my throat, I held out the baby to its mother and began to say a halting "adieu" to all of them.
Then an uproar arose. They had thought I was going with them, and they clung and wept and kissed my hand and begged in broken words for me not to leave them, though in their conduct there was not a trace of a lack of confidence in Sam. Of course, nobody that knew Samuel Foster Crittenden a whole hour, even in his dress clothes in the daytime, could fail to have confidence in him for life. But those women wanted me, too, and they wanted me badly. I had to be torn from their arms and flung off the train. Sam did the tearing and the flinging, and he did it tenderly. Just before the final shove, as I clung to his arm and sobbed, the big hand went to my hair, and he said under his breath against my ear:
"God bless and keep you, darling—and Pete!" Then he swung up on the last step of the train and left me—shoved off into a hard, cold world full of luncheons and sight-seeing and dinner-parties and plays and dances and suppers and lights and music and flowers and like miseries. At the agony of the thought I staggered into the huge waiting-room at the station and sank on one of the benches and closed my eyes to keep the tears from dripping.
At first I just sat dumb and suffering—reviewing all the wonderful and exciting and magnificent things I had been planning to do for and with Peter and all the rest of my dear friends who were then in New York having the times of their aristocratically rustic lives. I reminded myself of the shopping excursion Mabel and I were going to make with Edith and Julia on that very day. The responsibility of Julia's hats was certainly mine, for I had told her to wait to get them in New York, and she would surely need them immediately in the round of gaieties that had been planned for them all. Then, who could help being delighted at the thought of seeing Miss Editha and the colonel introduced to one of the follies at the Whiter Garden? I knew that I would be needed greatly then, and had rather dreaded it; though from Miss Editha's pink cheeks at the supper-party the night before, as she sipped her champagne I had rather hoped that she was making up her mind to a time of it. And then the joy of watching united Tolly and Edith! And Peter, how he would need me to help him to be responsible for all the wonderful things that were going to happen to him right along, now that he was the success of the hour. Even the papers had begun to speculate that first morning on his "next play."
"I'm weaving the laurel wreath rapidly now to bind your tresses, am I not, dear, dearest Betty?" he had whispered, as he told me good night at the hotel only a few short hours ago. Yes, I was needed in life, even if not down in a brier-patch in the Harpeth Valley, Tennessee, and I must bear my honors and responsibilities with as beautiful a spirit as Sam bore his burden of Belgians. I would have all I could do out in the world, and he would have his life full in the wilderness; but we would be a thousand miles apart.
And just here a very strange thing happened. From the weak, cowering, sobbing girl on the bench arose a very determined, red-cheeked, executive young woman who walked over to the nearest ticket-office and demanded of the brisk young clerk what time the different trains left for Tennessee. She found that by going at ten o'clock direct through Cincinnati she could reach Hayesboro two hours ahead of that Belgian emigrant-train that was to go around through Atlanta. Then she went into the dressing-room and got her wad of money out of her stocking, bought a ticket and a Pullman berth, six magazines, some oranges, and a little traveling powder-puff for the end of her red nose, and seated herself in the train before she woke up and found she was I.
Then I took a hand and sent Peter a telegram from Philadelphia, though to this day I can't remember what it said; and I settled down to the day and night and part of another day's journey with peace in my heart and the courage to take whatever was coming to me from Sam.
When you are doing a thing you know is wholly wrong it is best to make up your mind beforehand just what kind of a right action you are going to claim it to be. It only took me until Pittsburg to have my course with Sam mapped out. I was just going to ask him fairly what right he had to go to farming with a lot of strange and untried Belgians and refuse to take me in, when I had proved myself a good and faithful comrade and worker for him ever since I could stand on my feet.
"I just want him to answer me that," I said to myself, and went to bed in the berth at six-thirty and didn't wake up any more until I was at Louisville at eleven. I had been in New York two weeks, and I needed sleep. The interval between that time and three o'clock, which was the hour that I stood before mother and her latest rose-crocheted mat, I spent in strengthening and fortifying my position.
"Why, Betty!" said mother, keeping the place open in the magazine she was crocheting from, but kissing me so tenderly that I knew she suspected something had happened to me.
"I came home because I had to, and I'll tell you about it just as soon as I come back from out at Sam's, where I have to go as fast as I can on business," I said, as I hurried out to Eph for Redwheels and up to my room for my corduroys and middy blouse. I knew Sam would get his new family off at the station at the cross-roads. I wanted to be at The Briers all established and at work when he got there. I have heard lots of times that possession is nine points of the law, and I was determined to possess all nine.
In less time than it takes to tell it Redwheels and I were spinning away out Providence Road. I had gone out on that road in early April in search of Sam, when I thought nothing could equal the young loveliness of the valley; I had driven Peter out when it was in its May flowering, and back and forth I had gone through all its midsummering, but it had never looked to me as it did when I came down into it from a far country, in the ripeness of its mid-September. All the leaves were still on the trees and many of them still rich green, but there was frost in the air, and along the edges of the early sweet-gum and sugar-maple branches there were crimson and bronze trimmings. Most of the gorgeous, molten-gold grain was in stacks in the fields, and everywhere for miles and miles were stretched the wigwams of the shocked corn, seeming to offer homes for as many homeless as could come and ask shelter. Goldenrod stood up stiff and glorious in all the fence corners, while gnarled vines, fairly dragged down with wild grapes, festooned themselves from tree to tree, some of which were already heavily loaded with their own big, round, blackening walnuts.
Along the road there was a procession of foodstuffs going to town in heavy old farm wagons with their overalled drivers. Wheat in bales and wheat in sacks was piled on wagon after wagon, and I counted eleven teams hauling in loads of shucked ears of corn that looked almost two feet long. Oh, I was glad to think that those people who had fled from a famine-stricken land would meet that procession as soon as they got off the train, and my eyes misted so, as I thought of the joy that must well up in their hearts, that I came very near running over an old pig mother who was waddling across the road in the lead of nine of the fattest little black-and-white sucklings I have ever seen, each one with his tail curled at exactly the same angle. Giving her a wide run I swung off into Brier Lane. The old cardinal that had been so cross to me all summer, when poor Redwheels's puff had disturbed his family, was trillingly glad to see me, and flew almost across my shoulder as he darted and whirled his welcome. And what should I meet in the middle of the lane, evidently off playing hooky where she should not have been, but Mrs. Buttercup and my young spotted namesake! I immediately climbed out of the car and greeted them both so affectionately that, with my arms around Mrs. Buttercup's neck, I persuaded her to go back the way she had come, while I drove along behind her at a suitable snail's pace. I had to stop every once in a while, when she turned around, to assure her that I knew it was best for her to go home with her full udder, as Sam would soon be there to be welcomed and with company to be fed.