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THE
ABLE McLAUGHLINS

The
ABLE McLAUGHLINS

BY
MARGARET WILSON

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

THE ABLE McLAUGHLINS

Copyright, 1923
By Harper & Brothers
Printed in the U. S. A.

THE
ABLE McLAUGHLINS

The
ABLE McLAUGHLINS

CHAPTER I

THE prairie lay that afternoon as it had lain for centuries of September afternoons, vast as an ocean; motionless as an ocean coaxed into very little ripples by languid breezes; silent as an ocean where only very little waves slip back into their element. One might have walked for hours without hearing anything louder than high white clouds casting shadows over the distances, or the tall slough grass bending lazily into waves. One might have gone on startled only by the falling of scarlet swamp-lily seeds, by sudden goldfinches, or the scratching of young prairie chickens in the shorter grasses. For years now not even a baby buffalo had called to its mother in those stretches, or an old squaw broken ripening wild grapes from the creek thicket. Fifteen years ago one might have gone west for months without hearing a human voice. Even that day a traveler might easily have missed the house where little David and the fatter little Sarah sat playing, for it was less in the vastnesses about it than one short bubble in a wave’s crest. Ten years ago the children’s father had halted his ox team there, finishing his journey from Ayrshire, and his eight boys and girls alighting upon the summer’s crop of wild strawberries, had harvested it with shrieks of delight which broke forever the immediate part of the centuries’ silence. A solitary man would have left the last source of human noise sixty miles behind him, where the railroad ended. But this farsighted pioneer had brought with him a strong defense against the hush that maddens. He had a real house now. The log cabin in which he and his nine, his brother and his ten, his two sisters and their sixteen had all lived that first summer, was now but a mere woodshed adjoining the kitchen. The house was a fine affair, built from lumber hauled but forty miles—so steadily the railroad crept westward—and finished, the one half in wild cherry cut from the creek, and the other half in walnut from the same one source of wood. Since the day of the first McLaughlin alighting there had arrived, altogether, to settle more or less near him, on land bought from the government, his three brothers and four sisters, his wife’s two brothers and one sister, bringing with them the promising sum of sixty-nine children, all valiant enemies of quietness and the fleeing rattlesnakes. Some of the little homes they had built for themselves could be seen that afternoon, like distant specks on the ocean. But Sarah and David had no eyes just then for distant specks.

They had grown tired of watching the red calf sleep, and Davie was trying to make it get up. Finally in self-defense, it rose, and having found itself refreshed, began gamboling about, trying its length of rope, its tail satisfactorily erect. The two had to retreat suddenly to the doorstep where Hughie sat, so impetuous it grew. Hughie was not, like the others, at home because he was too small to go to school. Indeed, no! Hughie was ten, and at home to-day because he had been chilling, the day before, with the fever that rose from the newly-broken prairie. The three of them sat quiet only a moment.

“Why does he frisk his tail so?” Davie asked.

“He’s praising the Lord,” replied Hughie, wise and wan.

“Is he now!” exclaimed Davie, impressed. “Does God like it?”

“Fine,” said Hughie. That was an easy one. “It’s in the Psalm. Creeping things and all ye cattle.”

Davie sat for some time sharing his Maker’s pleasure in the antics of happy calves. Then bored—perhaps like his Maker—he turned to other things. He rose, and went down the path towards the road, and stood looking down it, in the direction from which the older children must come, surely soon now, from school. Only here and there along that path where they would appear was the grass not higher than the children’s heads; in some places it was higher than a man on horseback. There seemed no children in sight.

But wasn’t that someone coming down there on the other road?

“I see somebody coming on the road, Hughie!” he called.

“You do not!” answered Hughie. It wasn’t at all likely anybody was coming. Yet in case anything so unusual was happening, he would just have a look. Sarah waddled after him.

Ship ahoy!

Was that really something moving down there in the further slough? The three stood still, peering across the prairie, hands sheltering eyes, barefooted, the boys in the most primitive of homemade overalls, Sarah in an apron unadorned, the golden autumn sunshine blowing around them. They stood looking....

Then the home-coming children emerged from the tall grass into which the younger ones were strongly forbidden to go, because children sometimes got fatally lost in it, and at this signal the three ran to meet them, crying out the news. Gaining the little rise of ground again, upon which the house stood, they all paused together to look at whatever it was that drew near, Mary, the oldest of them, the teacher, Jessie and Flora, James and Peter.

Yes! There was no doubt about it now!

“’Tis a team!” cried Peter.

“’Tis a pair of grays!” he added in a moment. They were all perfectly motionless from curiosity now. Who had grays in that neighborhood?

“There’s two men in it,” Mary affirms.

Then Peter yells,

“One is wearing blue!” They can scarcely breathe now.

Blue! Can it be blue! This is too much for Mary.

“Run, Peter!” she cries. “Tell mother! Get father! It has the looks of a soldier!” It is three weeks now since the last battle, since word has come from Wully. The little girls are jumping about in excitement.

The children’s shouts had not at all disturbed the mother in the kitchen, where she sat sewing, until—could she believe her ears?—they were shouting, “’Tis Wully, mother! ’Tis Wully!” She ran out of the house, down the path.

“It never is!” she says, unsteadily. But she can see someone in blue, someone standing up, waving a cap now. She can see his white face. The children bolt down the road. She can see him, her black-bearded first-born. The driver is whipping up the horses. Home from battles, pale to the lips, he is in her arms. But she is paler.

“Run for your father!” she cries, to whoever will heed her. The children are pulling at him boisterously. The strange driver is patting his horses, his back to the family reunited. Hugged, and kissed, and patted and loved, the bearded Wully turns to the stranger.

“This is Mr. Knight, of Tyler, mother. He brought me all the way.”

“’Tis a kind thing you have done!” she exclaims, shaking his hand devoutly.

“Oh, he was a soldier. And he didn’t look able to walk so far.”

“You’re not sick!” she cries to Wully, scanning his face. Certainly he was not sick, now. He could have walked it, but he was glad he didn’t have to, he adds, smiling engagingly at the stranger. They stand together awkwardly, joy-smitten, looking at one another, excited beyond words. Then the mother leads the way to the unpainted house, the children hanging to Wully, dancing about.

The fifteen-year-old Andrew was working in the farther part of the field just below the house that afternoon, when he saw, from a distance, his father, called by Peter, suddenly leave his plow, and run towards the house surely faster than an old man ever runs. His own team was fly-bitten and restless, and he left it just long enough to see that in front of the house there was a team and a light wagon. He unhitched his half-broken young steers, urged them impatiently to the nearest tying place, and hurried to the house.

What he saw there made so great an impression on him, that fifty-seven years later, when that stranger’s grandson was one of the disheartened veterans of the World War who came to his office looking for work, the whole scene rose before him in such poignancy that he had to turn his head away abruptly, remembering....

There in the kitchen, in his mother’s chair sat the stranger in the fine clothes, with a drink of whisky in his hand which his father had just poured out. There on the bed sat his great gaunt brother in blue, one trouser leg rolled up to his hairy knee. There on a strip of carpet in front of the bed knelt his mother with a strange white face, soaking bloody rags away from evil-looking sores on that precious foot. There by the cupboard stood Mary, tearing something white into bandages, with the children huddled around her, awed by the sight of their mother.

Andy saw all that the moment that Wully, taking up one of the children’s old jokes, cried out to him, in a voice that belied his foot, a greeting that the young ones had loved deriding.

“Lang may your lum reek, Andy!” There wasn’t really anything wrong with Wully, it seemed. That wasn’t a wound, he affirmed. It was only a scratch. He really couldn’t say just how it had happened. It wasn’t anything! It might not be anything to a soldier, but to his mother it was the mark of imminent death for her dearest son. She began rubbing it gently with lambs’ fat. Wully, bethinking himself, pulled from a pocket a paper-wrapped bundle of sweeties for the children, who saw such things but seldom. They were intent upon the contents of that, and the stranger was talking to his father, when Andy, still standing awkwardly in the door, saw a thing happen which was a landmark in his understanding. He saw his mother, who had made fast the last bandage, and was carefully pulling down the trouser leg, suddenly bend over and kiss that leg! Such passion he saw in that gesture that he realized vaguely then some great fierce hidden thing in life, escaping secrecy only at times, a terrible thing called love ... which breaks forth upon occasions ... even in old women like his mother. He turned his face away suddenly as from some forbidden nakedness, and fixed his eyes upon Wully.

That hero, quite unabashed, was pulling his mother, who had risen, down to a seat beside him on the bed. She sat there, unconscious of the roomful, just looking at him, looking ... as if she could never see his face enough. She watched him devouringly when presently, with the attention of them all, he began light-heartedly telling about his escape. Half of his regiment had been made prisoners, including his major. They had been marched away towards a train, to be sent south, and he had marched among them until he dropped. He told his captors that they could shoot him if they would, but he couldn’t go a step further. They had left him lying helpless there by the roadside, a guard standing over him. And before the wagon came along, which was to pick them up, the guard had slept, and Wully, stronger to run to freedom than to march to prison, had made his escape. Starved and hiding, he had crept night by night towards the Mississippi, and there he had seen a boat which was bringing Northern wounded men home, tie up at the river bank to bury its dead. Its captain had taken pity on him, chilling and nauseated, and had brought him to Davenport. Then when he had got by train to the nearest Iowa town, this stranger had shown him this kindness.... Oh, his mother needn’t worry about his being shot for a deserter. They knew him too well in his company, if there was any of them left. And hadn’t his chum, Harvey Stow, been home four times to visit, without permission from anyone, and had he ever been punished for it? As soon as he had something to eat, and he could find where to report, he would be going back—yes, certainly—going back, however much his mother caught her breath at the mention of it.

It was so interesting to hear him talk that the men could scarcely leave for their duties. But there were the horses to feed, and the cows to milk, and the kind strange team to reward. Mr. Knight followed the boys to the barn and watched with amusement how reverently they rubbed down and bedded and fed the guests of the stable. And when they came in again, there sat the scrubbed soldier, in a fresh hickory shirt and clean jeans, in his mother’s chair, his swathed foot on a stool—the stool was Hughie’s thought—and the New York Tribune in his hand—the paper was Flora’s contribution. He was talking grinningly to his mother. A white cloth was spread on the table, and the mother, shining, uplifted with joy, was wiping pink-banded cups which Wully remembered to have seen taken from the sacred shelf only when her Scot cousin, who had come to this country to enlighten the darkness of the Yankees by taking the presidency of one of their colleges, had come west to visit this family. Not since then had the Scottish sheets been out of the chest, and now they were airing on the line. ’Twas an occasion magnificent to consider! When they sat down at the table for supper—and they had not long to wait, for the mother was that woman of whom tradition says she could make a pair of jean pants in twenty minutes—they had fried prairie chicken, and potatoes and scons and egg-butter, and stewed wild plums, sweetened with sugar at forty cents a pound. The father instituted the feast by a long prayer. “Of course!” thought the stranger. “They’re Scotch!” He counted the children. There were ten.

“You’ve a fine family,” he commented.

“Not so bad when they’re all here,” returned the mother complacently. “There’s a boy and a girl away at school.” She paused abruptly.

“Our boy younger than Wully was killed at Fort Donaldson,” explained the father.

“Ah! My son was wounded there. Lost a hand.” There was a moment’s silence. Then Wully said, wanting the subject changed,

“It’s over now, mother. Grant’ll get them now.”

They proceeded to talk of the coming election. Five families of Covenanting Scotch in the neighborhood were deserting the principles of their forefathers and taking out naturalization papers, hoping to vote for Lincoln. The visitor wondered vaguely what kind of Scotch that might be. He had no chance to ask. The mother seemed to have read every word of the last Tribune. He had hardly time for that himself. She seemed a woman of wide information. Apparently she knew the position of every unit of the army.

Supper was over. Flora handed her father The Book, and moved the candle near him. He found the place, and said,

“The twenty-third Psalm.”

To the man’s surprise, the mother began the song in a clear, sure voice, and the children all joined, without hesitation, as if this was a part of a familiar routine. The boys and girls were obviously thinking of the guests of honor. The mother’s face was turned to her son. But the father was looking away in a dream to something he seemed to see through the wall before him. When the singing was over, he began reading from The Book words that clearly had some exalted meaning to him, though what it might be the stranger could not imagine. “Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.” It sounded impressive, read with a subdued ring in the voice. Then he shut the book, in a high silence, and they all moved their chairs back, and knelt down. The stranger knelt, too, somewhat tardily. Not that he objected to prayers, of course. He was a religious man himself in a way. His wife often went to church. He could see the rapt face of the father praying in great, sonorous phrases which sounded vaguely familiar. Of all the children he could see, not one had an eye open. They were thanking the Lord for the boy’s return. “Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name.” They proceeded to pray for everyone in the United States, the President and his cabinet, the generals and the colonels and the captains, all the privates, all the sick and homesick, for those destroyed by war, for the mourning and all small children, for slaves in their freedom, and masters in their poverty, and then for the stranger, that he might hear the Judge say unto him, “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world. For I was sick, and ye ministered unto me”; “that the beauty of the Lord, as now, might be upon him forever.” The stranger had scarcely got over that when they all began saying the Lord’s Prayer together. “Nothing lacking but the collection,” he thought, somewhat resentfully. Not having heard a sermon for some time, he had forgotten that. When they rose from their knees, Sarah and David were found asleep. Andy picked them up and carried them away to bed. And even while Mr. Knight was wondering how many of the children he would have to sleep with, the mother took the sheets from beside the stove, and as she started for the fine parlor, whose bed was to be got ready for the guest, she said,

“Wully is to have the kitchen bed by himself. You all just go upstairs and leave him alone.”

The stranger had the decency to go soon to his bed. It wasn’t a half-bad bed, either. And he was tired. It had been a sudden impulse, this driving the soldier home, with a new team, over no road at all. But he was glad he had come. He had wanted to see this country. The new horses had jogged along very well. Moreover, he had made friends among the Scotch, and he was a politician. He thought of his son with Sherman’s army. He thought of the soldier’s impressive mother. He smiled over the number of children. He slept.

But long after the house was quiet, Wully lay talking to his father and mother, who sat on his kitchen bed. He told them of marches and battles and fevers and skirmishes, none of which had endangered him at all, of course, of the comradeship among the boys from the Yankee settlement down the creek, and of the hope everywhere, now, that the end was near. Then gradually there fell a silence over them, an understanding silence, wherein each knew the other’s thoughts. They were all thinking of that first terrible home-coming of his, of the things that led up to it. He remembered how “the boys” had been eating breakfast in camp, when the orders came that meant their first battle. He had been in an agony of fear lest he might be afraid. The one good thing about it was that Allen, his brother, had been sent away on a detail not an hour before. He would go into battle without having his brother to worry about. That trembling, as he advanced, had not been fear, but only ague so severe he might have stayed behind if he had chosen. But he had advanced with the rest of them, and in the darkness when he tried to sleep after it was over, he knew he need not fear cowardice again. They had won the day, and they exulted as fiercely as they had fought. Had not their regiment been one of three which, not getting their orders to retreat, had stood firmly till fresh troops came to save the day! But the next morning’s task had mocked terrifyingly their victory. He could have pleaded fever to escape from that.... Some on the snow-covered hillside were digging great trenches, some were throwing body after body into them, some were shoveling earth in upon them. He had bent down to tug at a stiff thing half hidden by snow, he had turned it over, a head grotesquely twisted backward, a neck mud-plastered, horrible, bloody. Then he had cried out, and fallen down. That thing, with the lower face shot away, was Allen! His comrades, hunting about, found the bodies of the others of the little squad that had been hurriedly recalled.

That night Wully had planned to desert. He had announced his intention to his lieutenant who came to sit beside him. They might drum him out of camp as a deserter if they would. He was telling them plainly what he intended doing. He would never fight again. But before he was able to walk, his comrades had got him a furlough. They understood only too well his fever and his delirium, and they remembered how he had gone through the battle, vomiting and ague-shaken, firing with a hand too weak to aim, and vomiting again, and shaking and firing. All the way home he had planned how to break the news to his mother. But when he had seen her, his grief which before had had no outlet, suddenly burst forth, so that even as she asked him, he was sobbing it all out to her. He had never told her, of course, how Allen’s sweet singing mouth had been destroyed. For Allen had been a gay lad, playing the fiddle, and singing many songs, sometimes little lovable ones he made as he sang, about pumpkins, or the old red rooster, or anything that might please the little children.

For Wully, no home-coming could ever again be so terrible as that one. But his father and mother who sat beside him there were trying not to know that just such news might come at any time of this one, who must go back to death’s place. Wully lay telling them little things he could recall of those last days. Had he told them of the time that the captain had stood, unbeknown to Allen, behind a bush, listening to him imitate all the company’s officers? There had never been a day that Allen had not been called upon to make fun for his comrades. Laughter had bubbled up within him and gushed out even in stark times. There was no detail of his nonsense not precious to the two who listened. It was late before they left him, and he soon slept. Towards morning, his mother slept.

Soon after daylight the stranger came into the kitchen. The mother was standing half hidden by the steam that rose from the milk pails that she was scalding out. The oldest sister at a table where candlelight and dawn struggled together, was packing a school lunch into a basket. A small girl was buttoning fat Sarah into her dress. Two small boys were struggling with their shoes on the floor. Wully presently hobbled in from out of doors, declaring himself recovered, a giant refreshed. The stranger noticed that when they found their places at the table, there was a larger child beside each smaller one, to look after him. There was one little fellow who looked like the soldier, and a half-grown sister with beautiful regular features like his. But the others were all alike, with deeply set dark blue eyes, long upper lips, and lower faces heavy, keen, determined. He could have appreciated what the mother said sometimes simply, to the neighbors, when they remarked how good her children were: “Yes, they’re never any care when they’re well. If we had one or two, we might let them have tantrums. But who could live in a house with thirteen ill bairns?” Since by that she meant, of course, naughty children, her question seemed indeed unanswerable.

Now they sat eating lustily their cornmeal, and she talked with leisure and understanding. When the meal was finished, Flora handed her father The Book again.

“By Golly!” said the stranger to himself, “they’re going to do it again!” And they did. The mother lifted the Psalm from memory, and then they repeated some part of the Bible. The stranger was the more ill at ease because young Hughie’s eyes were fixed accusingly upon him. Again the father prayed for all the inhabitants of the world, by name or class.

When the boys brought the guest’s wonderful team to the door, all the family gathered to bid him good-by.

“I wish you well, sir, for your kindness,” the father said, and the mother, at a loss to know how to thank him sufficiently, added,

“We’ll never forget this, neither us nor our children!” It was that trembling choked back in her voice that gave the stranger’s grandson his work with the firm of Andrew McLaughlin, in the fall of 1920.

The beautiful grays started impatiently away, the men went to their work, and the children to their school. In the kitchen his mother bandaged Wully’s feet, and put the wee’uns out of door to play while he had a sleep. At half past eleven he woke. His mother was sitting in the doorway, shelling beans. How was he to guess that she was late with her dinner preparations because again and again she had to stop, and look at this child of hers grown a strange man in the midst of horrors unimaginable? He lay very still looking at her. The kettle was singing on the stove. Through the door, he saw the red calf sleeping in the sunshine. A wave of joy, of ecstasy complete passed over him. Oh, the heaven of home, the peace of it, of a good bed, of a mother calmly getting dinner!

“I’m starved, mother!” he sang out suddenly to her. She hurried to the cellar, and brought him cool milk and two cookies. The children, hearing him, came in to watch him. He sat down in the doorway, and began throwing beans up, and catching them skillfully, to win the friendship of the doubtful little Sarah. David watched him eagerly. Presently Hughie said:

“Mother, why did yon strange man not say the Psalm?”

“You mus’na stare so at visitors, Hughie!”

“But why, mother? Why did he not say it?”

“Maybe he did’na ken it.”

“Did’na ken what?”

“The Psalm.”

“Did’na ken the fifteenth Psalm, and him a man grown!” Hughie had never seen anyone before who couldn’t say the fifteenth Psalm.

“Aw, mother!” he exclaimed remonstratingly. “Even Davie knows that!”

Wully chuckled. He knew the world. He had seen cities. He had marched across states. He had eaten ice cream.

CHAPTER II

WULLY slept the whole afternoon, and that evening the aunts and uncles and cousins began coming to see him. He and Allen, being among the oldest of the clan’s young fry, had been the first to enlist, though since then two of the McNairs, a Stevenson, and a McElhiney had grown old enough to fight. Allen’s death and Wully’s spectacular career had endeared him to the neighbors. They had suffered with him, they thought. Two years before, when they had gathered to offer their consolation to the family because he was reported dead, they had found his mother rejecting sympathy with as much decision as was civil. The United States government might be a powerful organization, but it could never make her believe that Wully had been shot in the back, running away from duty. The Stowes doubtless did well to array themselves in mourning for Harvey, but she knew her son was alive. And sure enough, after three weeks a letter came, no larger than the palm of her hand. She knew it had come when she saw a nephew running towards the house to give it to her. On one side, the little paper had said that Wully was alive and well in a prison in Texas, and on the other, crowded together, were ten names of comrades imprisoned with him, and Harvey Stowe’s name was written first and largest. That minute she had buttoned the bit of paper into Andy’s shirt pocket, and sent him fifteen miles down the creek to tell the Stowes to take off their mourning, and the clan, hearing the news from the mad-riding Andy had gathered to rejoice with her. And now that the exciting Wully was home again, they brought him wild turkeys, and the choice of the wild plums, an apple or two, first fruit of their new orchards, and whatever else their poverty afforded. Mrs. Stowe came to see him, bringing a package of sugar. But the Stowes were well-to-do. The others were exclusively what Allen had dubbed “the ragged lairds of the Waupsipinnikon.”

Not that their creek was really the Waupsipinnikon. Allen had only crossed that chuckling stream on his first journey with his father, but he had delighted in a name so whimsical, so rollicking, and had used it largely. Pigs and chickens of his christening bore it unharmed. And he put it into the song he used to sing sometimes, when the prairie’s youth and beauty were tired of dancing to his fiddle. All the neighbors were mentioned in it:

The McWhees, the McNabs, the McNorkels,

The Gillicuddies, the McElhineys, the McDowells,

The Whannels, the McTaggerts, the Strutheres,

The Stevensons, the McLaughlins, and the Sprouls.

In his pronunciation the meter was perfect, and Sprouls and McDowells rhymed perfectly, both of them, with “holes.” For an encore he would show his appreciative audience how the head of each family mentioned “asked the blessing,” always politely and stubbornly refusing to imitate the master of the house in which the fun was going on—at least until the master had retired.

Between the visits of the ragged lairds and their offspring, Wully got so much sleep that on the fourth day he announced himself able to help with the fall plowing. His mother refused to have such a suggestion considered, and they compromised on his digging carrots in the garden. At that task she found him doggedly working away after an hour, white and trembling. For a week he recovered from the fever that came on, sleeping by day and by night. The twelfth day he was so well that he rode to look over the “eighty” his father had bought for him with the two hundred dollars that had accrued to him during the fourteen months he lay in prison, trying to carve enough wooden combs to earn what would keep him from starving. His father explained that he might have brought land further on at a dollar and a half an acre. But this was the choice bit of land, and, moreover, it joined the home farm. And this bit of ground, rising just here was obviously the place for the house to be built. Wully smiled indulgently at the idea of his building a house. But he wasn’t to smile about it, his father protested. Indeed, they would some way get an acre broken this fall yet in time to plant maple seed, and poplar, for the first windbreak, so that the little trees would be ready for their duty.

The elder McLaughlin sighed with satisfaction as he talked. Even yet he had scarcely recovered from that shock of incredulous delight at his first glimpse of the incredible prairies; acres from which no frontiersman need ever cut a tree; acres in which a man might plow a furrow of rich black earth a mile long without striking a stump or a stone; a state how much larger than all of Scotland in which there was no record of a battle ever having been fought—what a home for a man who in his childhood had walked to school down a path between the graves of his martyred ancestors—whose fathers had farmed a rented sandpile enriched by the blood of battle among the rock of the Bay of Luce. Even yet he could scarcely believe that there existed such an expanse of eager virgin soil waiting for whoever would husband it. Ten years of storm-bound winters, and fever-shaken, marketless summers before the war, had not chilled his passion for it—nor poverty so great that sometimes it took the combined efforts of the clan to buy a twenty-five cent stamp to write to Scotland of the measureless wealth upon which they had fallen. From the time he was ten years old, he had dreamed of America. He had had to wait to realize his dream till his landlord had sold him out for rent overdue. What Wully remembered gallingly about that sale was that his grandmother had been present at it, and her neighbors, thinking she bought the poor household stuff to give back to her son, refused to bid for it against her. Then, having got it all cheap, she sold it at considerable profit, and pocketed the money. That was why, taught by his father, he despised everything that suggested Scottish stinginess. Nor had he wept a tear when the old woman died, soon after, and his father, taking his share of her hoardings, had departed for his Utopia. Some of the immigrants had long since lost their illusions. But not John McLaughlin. He loved his land like a blind and passionate lover. Really there was nothing glorious that one was not justified in imagining about a nation to be born to such an inheritance. And he told Wully that he might at least console himself with the thought that those months in prison had made him possessor of such land, that with the possible exception of the fabled Nile valley, there was probably in the world no richer. And the McLaughlins prided themselves on the fact that they were no American “soil-scratchers,” exhausting debauchers of virgin possibilities. Their rich soil, they promised themselves, was to be richer by far for every crop it yielded.

The next day Wully felt so well that he must have something to do. On the morrow the bi-weekly mail would be in, and if it brought orders for him, he would be returning to his regiment. He stood in the doorway looking toward his father’s very young orchard, and considering the possibilities of the afternoon. Of course, he might ride over and see Stowe’s sweetheart, who had come to see him the other time he was home ill. But he dreaded talking to a strange woman. She was pretty, certainly. That was why he was afraid of her. If he had been Allen, now, with an excuse for going to see a pretty girl, his horse would have been in a lather before he arrived. Wully had envied Stowe, sometimes, his eagerness for just a certain letter. It must, he thought in certain moods, after all be rather pleasant to have someone so dear that a man like Stowe would endanger his honor, and life itself by stealing away to see her. Stowe was to be married as soon as he got home. He was so close a friend that he talked to Wully about that. If Stowe had had a site for a house waiting him, as Wully had, he would have talked his friend deaf. But just the same, Wully wasn’t going to see his sweetheart. He would do anything for Stowe but that. Easing his conscience by that assurance, he heard his mother speaking to him.

If he wanted something to do, would he ride over to Jeannie McNair’s for her? She wanted to know if Jeannie had any news yet from Alex. When would that man be back, she wondered indignantly. Who ever heard of a man harvesting a wheat crop, and starting back to Scotland, leaving his family alone with the snakes—she always added the snakes because the McNair cabin was on low land which those reptiles rather affected—and all to prevent his half brothers from getting a bit more of a poor inheritance than they were entitled to! If Wully went on her errand, he was to take poor Jeannie a few prairie chickens, and those three young ducks she had raised for her, alone there with her bairns!

And if he was going, he must put on his uniform. He demurred. She insisted. Why, Jeannie had never seen him in his uniform! He smiled to hear her imply that not to have seen him so arrayed was the greatest of her deplorable privations. Yet he went and put it on, nevertheless, for it was the most handsome suit he had ever had, always before having been clothed in the handiwork of his mother and sisters. When he was ready to go, the ducks caught and tied, a bit of jelly safely wrapped, as he stood by the horse, in his mother’s sight the most beautiful soldier in the American armies, she said:

“Jeannie’s Jimmie was just your age, you mind, Wully.”

She watched him riding away, the fondness of her face ministering to the joyous sense of well-being that swept over him. How unspeakably lovely the country was! How magnificent its richness! He had never felt it so keenly before. He must be getting like his father. Or perhaps it looked so much more impressive because he had seen so much swampy desolation in the South. The grass he rode through seemed to bend under the sparkling of the golden sunshine. He came to the creek, and as he crossed it he remembered with a pang the time his companions had staggered thankfully and hastily to drink out of a pool covered with green slime. He turned with disgust from the memory. He wouldn’t even think of those things to spoil his few days at home. He gave himself up to the persuasive peace around him. He rode along, completely, unreasonably happy. He began to sing. Singing, he remembered Allen. How was it that he was here singing, and Allen, the singer, was dead! But the afternoon’s glow took away soon even the bitterness of that question.

He came presently in sight of the McNairs’ cabin. Though every other man of the neighborhood had been able, thanks to the wartime price of wheat, to build for his family a more decent shelter than the first one, that Alex McNair, fairly crazy with land-hunger, added acre to acre, regardless of his family’s needs. Such a man Wully scorned with all the arrogance of youth. He had, moreover, understood and shared something of his mother’s pity for her beloved friend, McNair’s wife. He remembered distinctly that when his parents had been leaving the Ayrshire home for America, Jeannie had put into his hand a poke of sweeties to be divided by him among the other children during the journey. That had been a happy farewell, because Jeannie and her five were soon to follow. But when the ten flourishing McLaughlins again saw Jeannie on this side of the water, of her five there remained only her little Chirstie, and a baby boy. The bodies of the other three she had seen thrown out of the smallpox-smitten ship which the feasting sharks were following. Since then she had been a silent woman, though Wully’s mother spoke of her sometimes, sighing, as a girl of high spirits and wit. Now, however much other Ayrshire women might rejoice in a dawning nation, the memory of those bloody mouths stood always between her and hope. She endured the new solitude without comment or complaint. Homesick for a hint of old-country decency, she hung the walls of her cabin with the linen sheets of her dowry, sheets that must have come out of the poisonous ship. Wully’s mother admired that immaculate room without one sigh of envy. White sheets would keep clean a long time in that cabin, with only the two bairns. But she thanked God that in her crowded cabin there was not room for one sheet on the wall. Moreover, in the new land, Jeannie had lost two babies, so that now for her labor and travail, she had only the Scottish two, and a baby girl. With another baby imminent, her husband had “trapassed” away to Scotland! He was too “close” to have taken her with him. But not for the wealth of Iowa would she have exposed her children again to sea. She would stay and save them on dry land. She wouldn’t be left altogether alone. Her brother’s family lived but two miles away.

Wully rode up to the house unperceived, though not one tree, not one kindly bush protected it against the immensity of the solitude around it. He tied his horse, and was at the door before Jeannie saw him. Then she exclaimed:

“If it is’na Isobel’s Wully!” She shook his hand, and patted him on his shoulder, and reached up and kissed him. He didn’t mind that. She was practically an aunt, so intimate were the families. In her silent excitement she brought him into her wretched little cabin.

And there stood another woman. By the window—a young woman—turning towards him with sunshine on her white arms—and on the dough she was kneading—sunshine on her white throat—and on the little waves of brown hair about her face—sunshine making her fingertips transparent pink—a woman like a strong angel—beautiful in light!

Wully just stared.

“It’s only Chirstie.” Jeannie was surprised at his surprise.

Only Chirstie!

“She was just a wee’un when I saw her,” he stammered. “I did’na ken she was so bonny!” Fool that he was! Idiot! Yammering away in bits of a forsaken dialect! What would the girl think of him!

“It’s more than four years you’ve been away,” Jeannie reminded him kindly. She began plying him with questions. He answered them realizing that the girl was covering her bread with a white cloth freshly shaken from its folds—that she was washing her hands, and pulling down her sleeves—and seating herself near him composedly enough. His mother was well, he said. They were all well. It was twelve days now since he had come home. Yes, he was tired of the war. The more he saw of the girl, the tireder he got. The other boys from the neighborhood were all alive and well as far as he knew. He looked at that girl as much as he dared. He could think of nothing to say—that is, of nothing he dared yet to say. He was most stupidly embarrassed, trying not to appear foolish. He stammered out that his mother had sent over some things, some squashes—he would go and bring them in. He went out to get them. Oh, it wasn’t squashes! It was ducks! The girl giggled deliciously. Her mother smiled. Wully was more at his ease. Now where should they put the ducks? They were all standing together now in the dooryard, the three ducks, the three humans. There was no place ready for the gifts. Well, Wully would make a coop for them. Just give him a few sticks. But there were no sticks. Then Chirstie thought of some bits of wood behind the barn. They went and got them. She stood, shy because of the ardor of his eyes, by her mother, watching his skill in making duck shelters. He could have gone on making them forever. But the work was done. He grew embarrassed again.

He must be going. Not before he had had tea! He didn’t really care for tea. He would have—just a drink of water. No sooner had he said that word than he regretted it painfully. There was no fresh water. But Chirstie would go get some. He knew that one of the things that annoyed his mother most about the McNair place was that Alex had never even dug a second well. The water was all still carried a quarter of a mile from the old well in the slough. Chirstie was ready to start for his drink at once. Was he not a soldier, and a fine looking one, her eyes inquired demurely, whom she would be honored to serve? No, he would get it himself.

“Go along, the two of you!” said Jeannie. And as they started, she stood in the door looking after them, and on her face there grew a sore and tender smile.

He took the pail. She reached for the big stick. That was to kill rattlesnakes. He took that, too, shocked by the thought of death near her feet. They walked silently together, in a path just wide enough for one. Their hands touched at times. He grew bold to turn and study her beauty. Their eyes met, but she said never a word. On they went, silently. He could hear his heart beating presently. He forgot that his feet had ever been sore. He could have walked on that way with her to Ayrshire. They came to the well. His hand trembled as he let the pail down into it. That may have been the ague. He filled the cup, and gave it to her to drink, looking straight at her. She put it to her lovely lips and drank, looking across the prairie. She handed it back to him, and he took it, and her hand. The grass about the well was very high. Some way—he put out his arms, and she was in them.

“Chirstie!” he whispered. “I didn’t know that you were here! I didn’t know that you were the lassie for me!” He kissed her fearfully. He kissed her without fear, many times. She said only “Oh!” He held her close.

After a time—how long a time it must have been to have worked so mightily!—she sighed and said:

“We must go back.”

Hand in hand they went back, until they came to the edge of the tall grass. They couldn’t miss the last of that opportunity. Out in the short grass she pulled her hand away. No one must see yet, she said. Of course not. Not yet.

No, he said to Jeannie, he couldn’t stay for tea. He had had his drink. He had indeed drunk deep.

He rode out into the loveliness of the distances, unconscious of everything but that girl in the sunlight. He was shaken through with the excitement of her lips. Her name sang itself riotously through his brain. Perhaps in a thousand miles there was not a man so surprised as that one. But he was not thinking of his emotions. He was thinking of what he had found. He was looking through vistas opened suddenly into the meaning of life. He was seeing glimpses of its space and graciousness. He laughed aloud abruptly remembering the site his father had chosen for his house. And yesterday a house had meant nothing to him! He was getting too near home. He had come to the creek. He stopped his horse, and sat still, going over again and again that supreme moment. He had never kissed a girl before in his life. Allen had kissed them whenever he had gotten a good chance—or any chance at all. Now, to-day, with Chirstie, it had been just simply the only thing to do. She was already by the significance of that caress a part of him. Oh, no wonder Stowe had come home four times! And now his holiday was all but over. He vowed rashly he would not go back! Never! If only he had come and found her the first of his twelve days! He wondered why he had left her. He might have stayed for supper. But no, not with her mother there! He was glad he had come away. To think of him, who had marched through states and territories, finding a girl like that, the very queen of beauty, right there on the prairie! He could scarcely remember how she had looked when he had seen her last. Just some kind of a little girl—no stunning queen like this. The song of her name rose and fell in his mind rhythmically. The sun grew low while he sat exulting. A chill came into the air. He couldn’t endure to take his excitement home to the light. He would wait till they would all be at supper. How glad his mother would be when sometime she heard of his love! He knew it was the very thing she would have chosen for him.

When he came into the kitchen she said, with relief:

“You’re a long time away, Wully!”

He replied without a waver:

“I stopped for a swim in the creek.”

She sat looking at him, wondering why he was pale again, and silent. He was far from well, she was thinking. And before the meal was over, he was wondering why the children’s chatter was so strangely tiresome. Wouldn’t they ever get away to bed, and leave him to his memories? Even with that babbling about, he could feel her face against his....

His Uncle Peter’s Davie came in with the mail after supper, bringing a paper with a notice for the scattered men of his regiment, and paroled prisoners. They were to have reported yesterday to headquarters. He tried to appear eager to go. His mother lifted the Psalm, when the visitors were gone, and left the children to quaver through it. And when he was lying in his bed, vowing desperately he would not go back, she came to him.

“I canna’ thole your going, Wully!” she cried to him, and her cry braced him. He remembered with shame how she had made him go back after Allen’s death, how she had signaled fiercely to him to keep the mention of anything else from the children. As if he, her son, could not do whatever he must do, and do it well! She had been ashamed of him before the children, then. He remembered that, and grew brave now. He hated to remember what a baby he had been. As if, however terrible the war might be, it hadn’t to be fought out, some way, by men! As if he must escape from the hell other men must endure! He was glad now he had occasion to strengthen the strengthener.

“It’s almost over now, mother!” he kept saying. Almost over, indeed, and a bullet the death of a second! What was the use of saying that when an hour could kill thousands? She sat stroking his hair, her face turned away from him, so that he suspected tears. She felt like an old broken woman, worn out not by years and childbearing, but by this war. All that night she lay sleepless, praying for her son. He lay sleepless in the room next to her, never giving her a thought. He gave all his thoughts, he gave all he had, to the girl of the slough well.

The dream of the night wore away, and the nightmare of the morning was upon him. His father was calling him long before daybreak. He was starting away, in the darkness, in the cold, away from Chirstie, towards his duty. His feet ached. His back ached. His head ached. His heart ached. He was one new great pain. It didn’t seem possible that life could be so hard. But on his father drove, through the first shivering glimpses of dawn, towards the train.

CHAPTER III

AFTER more than three months spent in hospitals, Wully came home the next March, honorably discharged from the army. His father met him at the end of the railroad, and before dawn they started westward over the all but impassable paths called roads. Rain began falling when the sun should have begun shining. Hour after slow hour of the morning their horses strained and plunged and splashed through deep, black mud. At every slough the men alighted to pull and tug at the sunken wagon, and returned bemired to their wet blankets. From noon till dusk they rode on, pulling grain sacks helmetwise down over their caps to protect the back of their necks from trickles of water, rearranging their soaked garments, hearing, when their voices fell silent, only the splashing of the horses’ feet down into the thawed mud, and the sucking of the water around hoofs reluctantly lifted to take the next step. Darkness set in early, but they made the ford while there was still a soggy twilight. More soaked, more dripping, they went on, peering into the wall of blackness which settled down in front of them. They were hungry. They were tired. They were chilled to the bone. Wully’s teeth chattered in spite of all he could do to prevent them. And they were both immeasurably happy. On they went, caressing the fine joy in their hearts. The father had his son home safe from battles. The son, each shivering step, was nearing the queen of the afternoon light.

At half-past eight they drew near the welcoming lighted window towards which they had strained their eyes so eagerly. If the boy had had a lesser mother, if he had been well, he would have gone on through the four miles of pouring darkness to Chirstie. But here was shelter and rest for his feebleness, a fire, food, light, a mother, and the children, caresses sprung from the warmest places in human hearts—all things, in short, that a man needs, except one. It seemed that the very kitchen breathed in great, deep sighs of thankfulness and content, this great night of its life, the night Wully got home from the army. The younger children sat watching him till they sank down from their chairs asleep, for no one thought to send them away to bed.

He had so many things to tell them that he forgot how weary he was. Now that his danger was over, he had no need of minimizing for his mother’s sake the discomforts he had been suffering. He said feelingly what he thought of a government that couldn’t get letters from a soldier’s home in Iowa to a military hospital in New Orleans. He shouldn’t have minded the fever so much if he could have heard from home, and if he had been stronger he would likely have been more sensible about not getting letters. It seemed to him he had been confined in a madhouse devised for his torture. He would have preferred a battle months long to those endless, helpless, sick-minded days. And now he never wanted to speak of that time or hear of it again as long as he lived.

Young Peter had torn his coat half off his back at play that day, and it must be mended before school time next morning. It was a piece of patching not long or difficult, but his mother laid it down to look at her Wully—she laid it down and took it again a dozen times before it was done. She couldn’t deny her eyes the sight of his white, thin, beautiful face. He ought to go to bed. She could see that. She urged him to again and again, as they sat around the stove. But he had always one more thing to tell as he started to go. He had never written in full about getting back to his regiment after his last visit home, had he? Well, when he got back, there was not an officer left whom he had known. And the one to whom he had to tell his tale of escaping from his guard—oh, he was a new man, most hated by the boys—he had put Wully and two others in prison in the loft of a barn, on bread and water. And every night the guard, who knew them, used to hand up on the end of bayonets all the food they could desire. And the officer heard of it, and was more angry. He was a man who raged. And he changed the guard, and yet the men who hated his being there, in place of the colonel they had liked, Wully’s friends, managed some way to feed the prisoners, so that really in the loft they had nothing to do but to sleep well-fed, and rest. And presently the new colonel waxed more raging and swearing, and sent the three away to another place to be disciplined, sent them—guess where, of all places—to Colonel Ingersoll for punishment!

“What? Not that infidel!”

Yes, exactly, and that was just how Wully had felt about it! The prisoners made Wully their spokesman in the first hearing. Colonel Ingersoll listened to them kindly till he had finished speaking. He had a boil on the back of his neck and was not able to turn his head, and he sat there, just looking at Wully, a long time, too long, Wully began to fear. And then he said:

“I wouldn’t punish you if you were my man, McLaughlin. And I don’t see why I should because you aren’t.” And he called an orderly and told him to take the men to a mess.

“Ingersoll did that? That infidel?”

“Yes.”

His mother was leaning forward, Peter’s coat forgotten.

“Yon’s a grand man,” she cried with conviction.

“He’s an infidel,” her husband reminded her.

“He’s a grand man for a’ that!” she asserted.

“But he’s an infidel!”

“He’s a grand man, I’m telling you, for a’ that!” After that, every time she sang the antichrist’s praise to her neighbors she had the last word of characterization. (After all, her family had not been Covenanters.) Presently she laid the coat down again—the children were in bed now, and Wully, too, with only his father and mother beside him in the kitchen.

“Your father told you about Jeannie’s death, Wully?” His father had told him briefly about it on the way home. He didn’t say to his mother that the news had thrilled him with the certainty that now his plans could have no opposition, since Chirstie was left quite unprotected, and must be needing him. He was ashamed of the hope he had had from it, when he saw his mother’s face harden with grief and resentment as she went on to relate the details of her friend’s death, a death grim enough to be in keeping with Jeannie’s life. For her part, she hoped to live till Alex McNair got home, till she could get one good chance to tell him what she thought of him! Oh, it had been altogether a terrible winter, almost as bad as that worst early one, just one fierce-driven blizzard after another. Jeannie had known in that darkening afternoon that it was no common illness coming over her. Chirstie, terrified by her isolation, had begged to be allowed at once to go for her aunt. But even then so thick was the storm raging that from the window she could not see the barn, and to venture out into the storm could mean only death. As the night had hurled itself upon the poor little shelter, almost hidden under drifts, and the maniac wind unchecked by a tree, unhindered by a considerable hill for a thousand miles, tore on in its deadly course, inside the cabin where the candle flickered gustily out, Jeannie had whispered to her children that she was dying. One thing they must promise her so that she might die in peace. They must not venture out for help, even in the morning, unless the storm was over. She lay then moaning inarticulately, which was frightful for the children, but not so frightful as the silence that followed, when they could in no way make her answer their cries of agony. All that night Chirstie sat watching beside her, relighting the candle, while the other children slept. In the quieted morning she had helped her brother dig an entrance to the stable, and together they had got the horse out. She had wrapped him as securely as possible, and sent him across the blinding snow to his uncle’s, John Keith’s. And when Aunt Libby finally got there, she found the baby playing on the floor, the dinner cooking on the stove, and Chirstie on her mother’s bed unconscious.

Tears were running down Isobel McLaughlin’s face as she finished. Though she never doubted that God was infinitely kind, she wondered at times why that something else, called life, or nature, should be so cruel. She wondered why it was that while with her all things prospered, with the good Jeannie nothing ever refrained from turning itself into tragedy. And besides all that, now that the spring seemed coming, that stubborn girl Chirstie, refusing longer to stay with her Aunt Libby, had suddenly taken her small brother and sister, and gone back to her empty house, and there she was, living alone, with no company but occasionally a neighboring girl, or her distressed Aunt Libby. Wully’s mother had gone to her, and begged her to come and stay with her. Other faithful friends had invited her to their home, but they had begged and pleaded in vain. Chirstie would listen to no one. It was a most unfitting and dangerous thing, a young girl like that alone there. She kept saying her father would be home any day now, but Isobel McLaughlin would prophesy that he would not be back till he had a new wife to bring with him. They would all see whether she was right about that or not!

Wully, the ardent, jumped instantly to the hope that Chirstie had known he was coming, and had gone back to the cabin to be there alone to receive him. That was the explanation of her “stubbornness” and indeed it was a brave thing for a girl to do for her lover. Alone there she would be this rainy night, grieving for her mother and waiting for him! Of course she would marry him at once! He would put in a crop there for her father. Tomorrow, not later than the next day, at most, they would be married! He slept but excitedly that night....

In the morning it was still raining. Breakfast and worship over, he went to the barn, where the men were setting about those rainy-day tasks which all well-regulated farms have in waiting. In the old thatched barn, three sides of which were stacked slough grass, his father was greasing the wagon’s axles; Andy was repairing the rope ox harness; Peter and Hughie were struggling to lift wee Sarah into their playhouse cave in a haystack side of the barn, and having at length all but upset the wagon on themselves, propped up as it was by only three wheels, they had to be shooed away to play on the cleaner floor of the new barn. Wully took up a hoe that needed sharpening for the weeding of the corn that was to be planted. They talked of the new machine that was being made for the corn planting. Wully answered absent-mindedly that he had seen one in Davenport once. He spoke with one eye on the hoe, and one on the heavens. After an hour’s waiting, the sky still forbade a journey. But his father, presently, looking up from his work, saw him climbing on a horse, wrapping himself in bedraggled blankets as best he might, against the downpour. He naturally asked in surprise:

“Wherever are you going, Wully?”

Wully replied:

“Just down the road!”

Fancy that, now! A McLaughlin answering his father in a tone that implied that what he asked was none of his business! But it was Wully who was answering, just home after four years of absence. His father was amused. The thought came gradually into his slow mind that there would be a lassie in this. A feverish man wasn’t riding out through a rain like that one without some very good reason. What lassie would it be? He must ask his wife about it.

The path which Wully took required caution, but the cause demanded speed. The way seemed to have stretched out incredibly since he had last gone over it. After riding a hundred miles or so, he got to the little shanty of a barn on the McNair place. Chirstie’s twelve-year-old brother Dod was there, and Wully gave his horse to his care. That horse had to be watched carefully, Wully vowed. He had never seen such tricks as it had been doing on the way over. Dod must not take his eyes from it. Wully hurried to the house.

The door of the house opened, and— Oh, damn, and all other oaths!—Scotch and army! Chirstie’s aunt stood there in it, Libby Keith. She was Wully’s aunt, too, that sister of his father’s who had married Jeannie McNair’s brother, John Keith! This was the first time that Wully had wanted really to curse an aunt, though he liked this one but dutifully. She saw him, and her voice fell in dismay.

“Lawsie me!” she bewailed. “I thought it was my Peter!”

Bad enough to be taken for her Peter at any time! And she had to stand there stupidly a moment, to recover from the disappointment, as it were, and then looking straight at him, it was like her to ask:

“Is it you, Wully?” As if she couldn’t see that it was! Standing there filling the door, hiding the room from him! “Whatever is the matter?”

Where was the girl? Was his aunt a permanent blockade? He came vigorously towards her, hurrying her slow cordiality. There she was! There was Chirstie! She had seen him. He went towards her——

And she shrank away from him!

Not only had she not an impulse of welcome, she shrank away from him! She gave him her hand because she couldn’t help herself.

“Chirstie!” he faltered.

“Are you back?” she asked. She pulled her hand away in a panic. “It’s a fine day,” he heard her murmur.

It was the bitterest day of his life! He sat down weakly. Men stagger down helplessly that way when bullets go through them. The damnable aunt began now welcoming him fondly. He didn’t know what he was answering her. It couldn’t be possible, could it, that Chirstie didn’t want to see him? She had taken a seat just as far away from him as the room permitted. She sat about her knitting industriously. Sometimes she raised her eyes to look into the fire, but never once did she raise them to satisfy Wully’s hunger. His eagerness, her refusal, became apparent at length to even the stupid aunt. She understood that Wully had got home only the night before, and in the morning, rain and all, had ridden over to see the girl who didn’t want to see him. He really was looking very ill. Well, well! Isobel McLaughlin would have been mightily “set up” by such a match. If Chirstie had not been Peter’s own cousin, Libby Keith would have liked nothing better than the girl for her son. She had fancied at times her son had thought of it, too. Her sympathy was with the soldier. She rose heavily after really only a few minutes, and said:

“I doubt the setting hens have left the nests, Chirstie.”

She put a shawl over her head, and went to the door, and closed it after her. Wully jumped to his feet, and went to bend down over his sweetheart.

“What’s the matter, Chirstie? What’s the matter? What have I done?”

She shrank back into her chair.

“You haven’t forgotten! You remember that afternoon! I thought now that you are alone here, we needn’t wait!”

“Sit down in your chair!” she commanded. “Don’t!”

He didn’t. He couldn’t.

“You’re in my light!”

He drew back only a little way.

“I didn’t say it all, but you know! Didn’t you get my letters either?”

She moved farther away from him. “Now that I think of it, I guess I did. I got one or two.” She looked as if she was trying to recall something trivial!

He stood absolutely dazed, looking at her hard face. Then she said:

“It’s near dinner time. You’ll be going back.”

“I will not!” he cried, outraged. “I came for you, Chirstie! I thought we could be married right away. That’s what I meant. You knew that!” He bent over her again, and she struggled away angrily. She went to the door, and called:

“Auntie! Wully’s going! Do you want to see him?”

Aunt Libby came heavily in. She urged him to stay for dinner. At least she would make him something hot. Why, he was all wet from the ride!

“Don’t bother about me!” he said angrily, hardly knowing his own voice. “I just rode over to see a calf of Stevenson’s. I’ll be on my way!” Out of the house he rushed, leaving his aunt to meditate upon her theories.

Turning back, he saw, through tears, that the girl was looking after him. He wouldn’t ride towards the Stevensons. He would ride straight home, and she would know why he had come. He was chilling severely now, from the shock of her denial, from rage and humiliation and sorrow. He hardly knew whether it was tears or rain in his face. “Fool!” he kept saying to himself. Fool that he had been! Why had he ever taken so much for granted? He had had only a little letter from her, a shy letter. But he had never doubted she wrote often to him, letters which, like his mother’s, had never reached him. Of course she had never really said that she would wait for him. She had never promised. But that was what that afternoon meant to him. It must be that some other man had won her. They must all be wanting her. While he had been lying in that hospital, living only on the dreams of their lovemaking, some other man had taken his place against her face. Or could it be that the tragic death of her mother had made her cold? It was no use trying to imagine that, for what ordinary, unkissed girl of the neighborhood would not have given him a decent welcome home? A mere acquaintance would have been more glad to see him back than she had been. Glad! She had not only not been glad. She had shrunk away in fear, and dread, even disgust. If it had been but mourning for her mother, she would have come to him. If he had been disconsolate, he would have known where to go for comfort! He had simply been a fool to suppose he had won her. Still, there was that afternoon to justify his hope. Could it be possible that that had meant nothing to her? Could he believe that that had been to her an accustomed experience? If only her face had blossomed just a little for him, that was all he would have asked. He could have waited, respecting her bereavement. But that shrinking away, that fear—what could he make of that? And he had supposed, fool that he was, that she felt toward him somewhat as he had felt toward her! She wanted nothing of him but his absence. All the family would hear now of his visit from Aunt Libby. Not that he would mind that, if only she had welcomed it! The wound was sickening him.

CHAPTER IV

HIS mother’s curiosity about the lassie disappeared at the first glimpse she got of his face. She put him to bed, with hot drinks and heated stones, with quilt after quilt wrapped about him. But still he chilled and shivered. He was so wretched that she had no heart to reprove him for that rash outing through the rain.

For a long time he remained fever-shaken and low-spirited, the last one certainly she would venture to ask about a girl. Day after day he lay contrasting in his mind those two hours with Chirstie, contrasting his dreams with the reality, while the rain continued to sweep across the prairies in gray and windy majesty. One day Andy returned dripping from the post office with the news of Lee’s surrender. Wully celebrated the event with an unusually hard chill. The tidings of Lincoln’s death sickened him desperately. He got to thinking he was never again to be a strong man. And he could see no reason for wanting to be.

After a few weeks the rains ceased, and the spring flooded her sunshine over the fields with high engendering ecstasy. The McLaughlins, man and boy, from dawn to darkness went over their ground, getting the prodigal soil into the best possible tilth, scattering the chosen seed by hand. Even on the holy Sabbath of the Lord, Wully’s father walked contentedly through his possessions, dreaming of the coming harvest, and of the eventual great harvest of a nation. It was lambing time, and calving time, and time for little pigs and chickens. The very cocks went about crowing out their conquering energy all over the yard, till it seemed to Wully, sitting wearily on the doorstep, that he was the only thing in the world sick and useless and alone.

May passed, and June. Thoughtful men sighed when they spoke of the soldier, and hated war the more. Five years ago he had gone away a strong, high-spirited lad, and now he dragged himself brokenly around the dooryard, the wreck of a man. His mother, trying to tempt his appetite, was at her wits’ end. She sometimes thought if he had been a younger boy she would have given him a thoroughly good spanking. She didn’t know what to make of him. Had he not always been the happiest, most even-tempered of her flock? Had there not been times when he and Allen had made bets about which one would begin chilling first, when malaria, like everything else, had been a joke with them? She had never seen a child as unhappy, as irritable as her Wully was now. There was no way of pleasing him. All he wanted was to be left alone, to lie with his face in his arms on the bed, scarcely speaking civilly when she tried to get him to eat something. But whenever she said to herself that he ought to be spanked, at once her heart reproved her. How could she imagine all that he had been through, all the strain of those years? The poor laddie, so wretched, and his own mother having no patience with him!

In all these weeks Wully had seen the girl only a few times, and none of them an occasion much less painful than the first. Once he had been well enough to go to church. He had waited till she came out of the door, and then, before them all, he had gone over to the wagon where she was seating herself with her brother. She had drawn away from him as if he had been a rattler, he said to himself bitterly. What did she suppose he had done, anyway, that she didn’t want even to look in his direction? He had gone again to her desperately one evening, determined to find out what it all meant. She had indeed been alone when he came within sight, but, seeing him, she had called sharply to Dod to come and sit beside her. As if she were afraid of him! As if he would hurt her! She was even more distant now than she had been when he was in New Orleans, when he could at least think of her with hope. Once he had driven over with his mother to see her, had ridden along in forbidding silence, wondering how much his mother knew of that first visit, dreading lest she might mention Chirstie’s name significantly to him. He had not condescended to go into the house that time, but finding Dod’s hoe, he had weeded their little patch of corn, weeded it fiercely and well, to let her see how he would have worked for her if only she had been willing. His mother had not said a word about the girl as they rode home together, but she sighed deeply, from time to time, so that he guessed Chirstie had not even been cordial to her.

He tried hard enough, as he grew stronger, to shake off his depression. There were plenty of girls in the world whom he might marry, weren’t there? The trouble was, he hated other girls. Still, he couldn’t let merely one woman make him unhappy, could he? Not much! He used to be happy all the time, before he got to thinking about her so much. He would brace up, he vowed, and forget her. But Harvey Stowe came home in July, and came at once to see him, a strong and hilarious Harvey, who wouldn’t take any excuses. Wully must come over to his wedding. Wully would not. Likely he would go to another man’s wedding! He would have fever that day if he hadn’t had it for a week! But he went.

The day after, thinking of his friend’s happiness as he walked through his father’s wheat, he sat down to rest in a path which it shaded, and stretched himself out in it. There suddenly and poignantly, for the first time in his life, he envied Allen and wanted to die. He wanted to die with so keen a despair that never afterwards could he hear the cocksure rail against suicide. He hated living vehemently, and wanted to escape from it. There was no use saying one girl couldn’t make him unhappy. He was meant for Chirstie, and without her life had no meaning. Some way, it had just that combination of demure eyes and white arms to stimulate his desire till it was without mercy. He could not go on without her. He wished there had been a battle that day, which he could have gone into. He would have shot himself dead with his first bullet. That was the climax of his despair, though he was far from knowing it.

The next Sunday he walked with his brothers to the church where the lairds of the Waupsipinnikon, ragged but clean, worshiped the God of their fathers. The little church they had built out of their wartime prosperity stands on a green knoll on Gib McWhee’s farm. Entering it, one saw then, as one sees nowadays, a large unadorned square room, with only one beauty, and that so great that any church in the world might well envy it. Eight high, narrow windows it has, pointedly arched, of clear glass, and whatever one thinks of a style of ecclesiastical architecture which draws one’s attention from the sermon to the prairies, those eight windows frame pictures of billowing, cloud-shadowed, green distances in which surely sensible eyes can never sufficiently luxuriate.

Up the scrubbed aisle, into pews varnished into yellow wave patterns, family after family filed decorously that morning, mothers and infants in arms and strong men—there were as yet no old men in that world. Wully went to the family pew. Before the war he had usually sought out a place where the overflow of big boys sat as far as possible away from the source of blessings. The McLaughlin pew held only twelve, and that uncomfortably. But there had never been more than twelve children at church together, since small Sarah had been born after her brothers had gone to war.

The congregation sang their Psalms out of books now. No more lining-out of numbers in a congregation so well-established and prosperous. The man of God read the Scriptures, and then at last came that welcomed long prayer, good for fifteen minutes at least. Wully, sitting determinedly in a certain well-considered place in the pew, bowing his head devoutly and bending just a bit to one side, could watch Chirstie through his fingers, where she sat on the other side of the church in the pew just behind the McLaughlins. Her eyes were closed, but his did a week’s duty. There was no doubt about it. She was getting thinner and thinner. It wasn’t just his imagination. She was paler. She was unhappy. He had noticed that week by week. Surely she was not happy!

The minister was an indecent man, cutting that prayer short in so unceremonious a fashion. Wully wondered the elders didn’t notice his carelessness. But after the sermon there would be another prayer, just a glimpse long. He had that to look forward to. He made a mental note of the text, which the children would be expected to repeat at the dinner table, and then settled down, to be disturbed no more by sermons. He had long ago acquired a certain immunity to them. A breeze cooled the warm worshiping faces, and from outside came the soothing hum of bees, and the impatient stamping of fly-bitten horses. The minister’s voice was rich and low. The younger children slept first, unashamedly, against the older ones next them, and then, gradually, one God-fearing farmer and another, exhausted by the week’s haying, nodded, struggled, surrendered, and slept.

Wully was wide awake, waiting for the last prayer. There was no time to be lost, when the petitions were so short. He turned his head, and there—oh, Chirstie was looking at him! With head bowed, but eyes wide open, she was looking at him! Hungrily, tenderly, pitifully, just as he wanted her to look! Their eyes met, and her face blossomed red. She turned her head hastily away. Let her turn away! Let her pray! He knew, now! That was enough! For some reason she didn’t mean him to understand. But he had found out! It was all right. He could wait. He could wait any length of time, if only she would look at him again in that way! The congregation had risen, and had begun the Psalm. He would tell her, then and there, how glad he was, how he understood! He lifted up his voice and sang, sang louder than anyone else. That was what Allen used to do, when the service particularly bored him. He would sing the last Psalm louder and clearer than the whole congregation, with the face of an earnest, humble angel, while his elders admired, and his contemporaries hid their amusement as best they might. Chirstie would know Wully was sending her a joyous, patient answer. What did it matter that in going out she never once would turn towards him? Perhaps that was the way of women. They don’t just tell you all that is in their hearts. It was all very well. He knew what she was thinking.

After dinner, he said he was going down to the swimming hole, where the assembly of cousins proved week by week that the heat had prevailed over the shorter catechism. But instead he rushed eagerly and cautiously over to Chirstie. He knew there might be someone with her on Sunday, and he left his horse some distance away, intending, if he saw others there, to come back and wait. There was not a sound to be heard as he crept up, though he stopped, listening. He hesitated, and drew nearer. Then he saw her. She was sitting in the little plot of shade the cabin made, on the doorstep, and her head was bowed on her arms. On a bit of rag carpet on the ground, her little sister was sleeping. Chirstie didn’t hear him. He went cautiously nearer, not wanting to startle her. He stood still, scarcely knowing how to be the least unwelcome. What was this he saw? What was this? She was crying! He stood still, watching her carefully. She was shaken with sobbing.

CHAPTER V

HIS impulse was to run and take her in his arms, but he knew now that he must be careful. You can’t be impetuous, it seems, with women, at least not with that one. He had tried that once, and learned his lesson. He slipped behind the barn, and stood wondering what to do. After a few seconds he peered around cautiously. There she sat, crying shakenly. He tried vainly to imagine a reason. Perhaps her uncle was complaining of having the responsibility of her and the children alone there. Perhaps she was actually in want, perhaps in want of food. Perhaps the other girls had been talking about going away to school, and she was heartbroken because her mother’s plans for her education were not to be carried out. Maybe she had just seen a snake. He remembered his mother saying that after Jeannie McNair had had to kill a snake, she used to sit down and cry. Some women did things like that, he knew, not his mother and sisters, but some. He peered around at her again, most uncomfortable. Her sobbing was terrible to see. He felt like a spy. He refrained from going to her, because something warned him that if she had not welcomed him before, she was less likely to do so now, when her face would be distorted with tears. But he remembered that prayer look with hot longing.

He stood hesitating. Presently he looked again. She was just lifting her head to wipe her nose, and she saw him. She gave a little cry and, jumping up, ran into the cabin, and slammed the door behind her. As if he were a robber! Then she came out, even more insultingly, more afraid, and caught up the sleeping baby, and carried her away to safety. She needn’t barricade the house against him, need she? Wully thought, angrily. Then he remembered her face in church. He would sit down and wait a while. He would wait till Dod came home, and see what he could learn from the lad. But when he looked again towards the house, there she was, sitting inside the door, and in her hands she had her father’s old gun!

How preposterous! How outrageous! If she didn’t want him as a lover, she might at least remember he was Wully McLaughlin, a decent, harmless man! Waiting for him with a gun! Could it be that the girl was losing her mind? Her mother had never recovered from that shock of hers. Could Chirstie have been unbalanced by her mother’s death! He wouldn’t think it! That would be disloyalty. But somebody, his mother, their aunt, somebody ought to go to her by force, and get her away from this lonely place. Who could tell what a girl might do with a gun! One thing he knew, he wasn’t going away and leave her there alone, so madly armed, and weeping.

After a while Dod came home, a red-faced, sweating little lad, and sat down contentedly with the soldier in the shade of the barn. He was, of course, barefooted and clothed in jeans, and his fitful haircut did no great honor to Chirstie’s skill as a barber. Surely he must know what she was crying about. And he would know that Wully would not be one to make light of her grief.

“What’s happened, Dod?” he began at once. “When I came up, Chirstie was sitting on the doorstep crying. What’s the matter? Don’t you mind her?”

Dod was instantly resentful.

“It’s nothing I done.” He was decided and scornful. “She won’t even let me go swimming a minute. She wants me to stay here all the time. She cries all the time, no matter what I do!”

This was worse than Wully had expected.

“Was she crying before now?” he asked.

“She cries all the time, I tell you.” He spoke carelessly. Girls’ tears were nothing to him. “She cries when she’s eating. She gets up in the morning crying. She’s daft!”

“You mustn’t say that, Dod!” said Wully sharply. “Can’t a girl grieve for her mother without being called daft? That’s no way for a man to speak!”

Dod was abashed, but unconvinced.

“She’s not grieving for mother,” he answered, defending himself. “She’s grieving for herself.”

This sounded good to Wully. He hoped she was unhappy for the same reason he was.

“How do you know?” he demanded.

“She says so. I says for her not to cry about mother, and she says she wasn’t. ‘I’m crying for myself,’ she says.”

Wully had no longer any scruples about finding out everything he could from the boy.

“What’s she sitting with that gun in her hands for, Dod? Does she shoot many chickens?”

“Her? She couldn’t hit a barn. She’s afraid. That’s what’s the matter with her.”

“What’s she afraid of?”

“Nothing. What’s there to be afraid of here? I don’t know what’s got into her!”

“Tell me now, Dod!” begged Wully. “My mother would want to know. Does Uncle John see that you have everything you need?”

“That’s not it!” exclaimed the boy, proudly. “We have enough. Some of them would come here and stay all the time, but she don’t want them. She won’t have anybody here. And we’re not going to church again.” This last he undoubtedly considered a decision worthy of the most tearless girl. Wully, who seized upon trifling straws, saw promise in this. She wasn’t going to church again, and she had wanted a good look at him! But what was it—why should she be so silly? Why wouldn’t she let him make her happy? She wouldn’t need to be afraid if he was with her. He saw that Dod knew not much more than he did about the explanation of his difficulties. But Dod at any time might find something enlightening. Wully coveted his help.

“It really beats all the way you run this farm with your father gone,” he affirmed. “When he gets back, I’d like to hire you myself.” He saw the boy relishing his praise. “You must treat Chirstie like a man, Dod. You mustn’t blame her for crying. It’s the way women do, sometimes. You say to her when you go in that my mother is always waiting to do for her. She’s the one that can help her. She don’t need to cry any more. We can fix things right. You say that to her, Dod, and to-morrow I’ll ride over and see what it is. You tell her we’ll fix everything for her.”

He went away in uncertainty and distress. He ought to tell his mother how things were. The idea of that girl sitting there with a gun, as if she didn’t recognize him! Or maybe it would be better to go to his Aunt Libby Keith. She ought to know. He didn’t like going to anybody. It was his affair. He couldn’t think of insinuating to anyone that the girl was—well, not quite right in her mind. He must be very careful.

And then her face came before him, loving him. After all, it was just his affair and hers. There was some reason why she must wait. But she loved him! His mind dwelt on that, rather than on his inexplicable rejecting. He decided that in the morning he would ride over to the Keiths’ and ask in a roundabout way, what the trouble was with Chirstie.

But in the morning he felt so certain that she loved him, in spite of everything, that he announced to his father that he was going over to cut slough grass on his eighty, to use in thatching his new barn, having decided to go to Keiths’, less conspicuously, in the evening. This was the first time he had as much as mentioned his own farm all summer. His father was pleased, but his mother protested. Why should he begin such work on the hottest morning of the summer, when he hadn’t really been able to help in the haying at all? He might easily be overcome with the heat, in his condition. But Wully, it seemed, was at last feeling as well as he had ever felt. He had been loafing too long. He must begin to get something done on his own place.

So down in his slough he worked away with all his might, and now that his heart was light, and his fever broken, it was no contemptible strength he could exert. About the time he was so hot, so soaked through with sweat that he must sit down for a rest, he saw a horseman coming towards him. And upon that meeting there depended the destiny of generations.

He smiled when he saw who it was. Peter Keith was a cousin of both Chirstie’s and his, the only remaining child of their Aunt Libby’s and Uncle John Keith’s, the smallest adult of Wully’s seventy-one cousins, being not more than five feet seven. And he was by far the most worthless of them. Of course Peter would be riding leisurely over after the mail in the middle of the morning, while the haying was to be finished, and the wheat was white and heavy for harvest. His excuse this summer for not working was that he had a disabled foot. He said that he had accidentally discharged his gun into it. Peter Keith was such a man that when he told that story, his hearers’ faces grew shrewd and thoughtful, trying to decide whether or not he really was lazy enough to hurt his own foot in order to get out of work. There was no place for laziness in a world where men existed only by toil. It was like chronic cowardice in the face of the enemy. Peter’s mother, to be sure, said he wasn’t strong. Libby Keith’s way of hanging over him, of listening to his rather ordinary cough, her constant babying of him, was what was spoiling Peter, many said. Wully had always been more tolerant of him than some of the cousins were, because he could never imagine a man feigning so shameful a thing as physical weakness. If Peter didn’t want to farm, why insist, he argued. If he wanted to go west, to get into something else, let him go. He might be good for something somewhere. But his doting mother would never listen to such hard-heartedness.

The two of them made themselves a shade in the grass, and talked away intimately. Wully was more affable than usual, having resolved upon first sight of Peter to learn something from him. Peter was always full of neighborhood news. Tam McWhee had bought ten acres more of timber, and the Sprouls were beginning to break their further forty, and so on, and so on. Wully was screwing up his courage to introduce the subject that was interesting him, in some casual way. Peter was the last man with whom he cared to discuss Chirstie. But he was exactly the one who might know something valuable. He delayed, the question at the tip of his tongue, till even the lazy Peter thought it was time to be riding on, and rose to go. His foot wasn’t really much hurt, but he hadn’t renounced his limp. It was then or never with Wully, so he said, trying to appear uninterested:

“I was riding by McNairs’ yesterday, and I saw Chirstie sitting there crying. What do you suppose she would be crying about, Peter?”

Peter gave him a sharp look, and grew red in one moment.

“How the devil should I know what girls cry about?” he asked angrily. “It’s none of my business! Nor yours, either!”

A cry of frightened anger like that sent an excitement through Wully.

“You know very well what it is!” he cried. “You’ve got to tell me! It’s some of your doings!”

Peter was jumping into his saddle.

“I’ll tell you like hell!” he shouted.

“You’ll tell me before you go!”

“Let go my bridle! Let go, I tell you! It’s none of your business!”

His face told terrible secrets that Wully had never till that moment imagined suspecting. Now he was pulling him down from his horse.

“Let me alone! It’s not my fault! Take your hands off me! I never meant to hurt her!” Peter was fighting desperately for his freedom. Wully was trying to control his insane rage.

“Stand still and tell me what it is! I’m not going to hurt you!” he cried scornfully. “What are you afraid of? Don’t be a baby!” But his grasp never relaxed. The boy was afraid he would be shaken to death.

“Let me alone! Take your hands off me! Let me go, and I’ll tell you! It’s none of your business, anyway!” He was free now, and trembling. “I didn’t mean to get her into trouble. I wish I’d never seen her! I offered to marry her once——”

He dodged Wully’s blinded blow.

“You marry her!” he cried murderously. “You marry her!” The first realization of his meaning had filled Wully with a lust to kill. Peter had sprung away. He gained his horse. Wully ran after him. All the oaths he had ever heard came back to him in his need. He ran furiously after the fleeing seducer. He called after him ragingly.

He threw himself down, too shocked to think plainly. So that was Chirstie’s sickening secret! That was why she was afraid of him! That was why she was defending herself with that poor old gun! This was why she had left her uncle’s house, and avoided others! Chirstie, betrayed and desolate. Oh, it was well he was trained in killing! He would go after Peter Keith, and make short work of him. He would break every bone in his body. There was no death long enough, large enough, bitter enough, for Peter Keith. Wully lay there weak with rage, crying out curses. Anger, what little he knew of it, had always been to him an exhausting disease. He gave himself up to it.

He was so dazed by this revelation that he never thought how time was passing till he heard the voice of a little brother calling him. It was long after dinner time. Why didn’t he come home? His mother was anxious about him. Was he ill? He rose, and stumbled along home.

The sight of that kitchen was a blow to him, so innocent, so habitual it looked, so remote from violence and revenge. The dishes had been gathered from the table. The girls were beginning to wash them. His mother came forward solicitously. What was the matter, she wanted to know. Wully stood blinking. Murder? Had he thought of murder in a place of peace? Instantly he had come far back on that road to his habitual self, when with a shock he came against the criminal fact of Peter. He was ill, he cried. He wanted to rest. He couldn’t eat.

He shut the door of his room and sat down bewildered on the edge of his bed. Thoughts of the old security and of the new violence clashed in his mind. His gun stood in the corner. He reached out and took it, and sat fingering it, like a man in a baffling dream.

At length from the kitchen there came a burst of happy laughter. That was his sister laughing. His sister Mary. Laughing. Yes, Mary was laughing, and Chirstie sat there sobbing, sobbing and shaking!

In that unbetrayed kitchen one of the children had said something absurd, that had delighted Mary. He knew that outburst. Mary was a girl safe, and Chirstie was undone. A girl people would scoff at! Not while he was alive! He threw himself down on the bed. He began thinking only of the girl. If he killed that snake, who would Chirstie turn to—who, if she no longer had him? She was alone. Defending herself, fighting for herself. That was what she thought of men! She didn’t know any better! He would kill Peter, certainly. But what was to become of her then?

After a while, lying there, he began to see a way out. He saw it dimly at first—it grew persuasive. Peter had been always talking about running away west, had he? Well, he would run away that very night. Either that, or Wully would destroy him. Wully would have that girl, as she was, if he had to fight the whole country for her. His terrible anger still shook him. But there was Chirstie to save, for himself—and for herself. If he killed Peter, what good would that do her? It would make her notorious. The way he saw was better than that. It was an ugly way. But it was safe for her. A situation hideous forced upon them, a thing which had to be faced out, like the war, from which there was no escape but victory. If he got rid of Peter, why should he not have her? Possession of her was worth letting the betrayer go scot free for, wasn’t it? She had no one but himself now. And yesterday, in her straits, in her despair, she had turned her face towards him!

By supper time his mind was perfectly clear about the course he would take. He rose, and ate something, excitedly, reassuring his mother that the sun had not prostrated him. He felt all right. He had only to settle with Peter, and then——!

Peter was sitting securely between his father and mother in front of the house when Wully rode up, that evening, and demanded a word with him in private. Peter hesitated. He did not dare to fear his cousin before them. He went cautiously out through the dusk towards him. Daylight was almost gone, but Wully turned his back deliberately towards those who sat casually watching. He didn’t want them to see the hate he felt mounting over his face. He didn’t want anyone ever to suspect what he was going to do. He spoke to his cousin only a few sentences. Then he turned, and rode swiftly away.

He came to Chirstie’s. She was sitting there in the dusk, her head bowed in that despairing way. He gave his horse to Dod with a command, and strode over to where she sat. She needn’t try to resist him now. It was useless.

“I know the whole thing!” he whispered. “I’ve got it all settled.” He took her in his arms. She needn’t struggle. “It’s all right. He’ll never frighten you again. You can’t get away. I’ve come for you!”

Dawn found them sitting there together. Indeed, Wully had to urge his horse along to get home in time for breakfast.

The McLaughlins were assembled for their unexciting morning cornmeal, all at the table together, when Wully announced, in a fine loud voice, among them:

“I’m going to be married to-day, mother!”

Her spoon was halfway to her mouth. It was some time before it reached its destination.

“Wully!” she gasped.

“Well, you needn’t be so surprised. I am.”

“Is it Chirstie?”

Could they ask that!

“I’m that pleased!” she cried. Oh, she wouldn’t have liked anything else as well! She looked at him narrowly, with delight. “But you canna just be married to-day, and the harvesting coming on!”

“You bet I can!” replied her American.

Indeed, he never could! Not to Chirstie! They must do something for Jeannie’s Chirstie, make her some clothes. Wully scoffed at the idea. She had plenty of clothes, of course. They were going to drive to town and be married, and he would buy her whatever she needed. He refused to listen to them. Chirstie might decide not to have him, if he gave her time.

“Havers!” exclaimed his mother. As if Chirstie didn’t know her own mind! That was no way to talk! Isobel couldn’t imagine, of course, that Wully had any real reason for such misgivings. Was it likely a girl would not have her Wully! If he would just listen to her a moment, and wait even till the morrow, they would call the friends in and have a wedding worthy of Chirstie’s mother. It occurred to him that under the circumstances a plan so respectable might have advantages for Chirstie, if only she would consent. And his father began planning how soon he could spare men and horses to begin hauling lumber for the house.

CHAPTER VI

THE McLaughlin house shone ready for the guests the next evening. The light that glimmered out through the dusk came from as many new kerosene lamps as could be borrowed from the neighbors. Inside the house beds had been removed to make room for dancing, though Isobel McLaughlin sighed to remember that there would be at best an indifferent fiddler, not one with a rhythmic dancing soul—like her Allen. Indoors mosquitoes hummed through the light and odor of the lamps, and out of doors they attacked whoever turned away from the series of smudges the boys had built, and were carefully guarding from flame, between the house and the barn. Wagonloads of well-wishers came driving up as it grew dark, and with each arrival the pile of pieced quilts on the chairs in the bedroom grew higher, and the collection of wedding presents in the dooryard grew noisier, and broke loose, and ran, and was pursued with shouts by the assembled half-grown boys. Some guests brought ducks, and some hens with small chickens. Some gave maudlin geese, and some bewildered and protesting young pigs. The Squire gave a heifer calf. The Keiths, poor distracted Aunt Libby and Uncle John Keith, brought two heavy chairs he had made the winter before from walnut.

The bride was not visible. Wully had guarded her carefully, even from a minute alone with his mother, ever since he had arranged her wedding. He told his mother now that Chirstie had consented, she was worried about what her father would say when he heard about it. And because it was so soon after her mother’s death. Isobel McLaughlin reassured her. The wedding was the best possible solution of the situation. Let them just leave Chirstie’s father to her! She comforted the girl earnestly, being distressed by her face. She hoped in her heart that the marriage would put an end to the girl’s newly developed and stubborn depression. She couldn’t understand why now that the guests were arriving, the bride should still seem just terrified. No less word described her condition. Isobel McLaughlin could do nothing but leave her with Wully. In his room, where he sat holding her close against him, every time she said, “I can’t do this, Wully! I won’t!” he kissed her again, powerfully. She must go through with it now, he whispered to her. Even the minister was waiting for them now.

He led her forth, at last, into the parlor. She was wearing the white dress her mother had made for her the summer before, which Mrs. McLaughlin had ironed that day, and freshened with her daughter Mary’s cherry-colored ribbons. Wully, harassed by the trivial necessity for respectable garments, was wearing the suit his mother had made for his brother John to wear to college in the fall. It didn’t fit Wully altogether, but then, it scarcely fitted John at all. In a space in the midst of their unsuspecting kinsmen they stood, the bride as pale as death, the groom nervously hiding his fear that at the critical minute his bride might altogether reject him.

He kept watching her covertly as the minister tried the patience of man and God by the length of his prayer. He tried to stand near enough her to support her. When the invocations ceased, everyone in the room lifted his head—except the bride. The minister explained interminably the nature of holy matrimony. He exhorted the pair to mutual faithfulness. Wully felt her tremble.

“Will you have this man to be your husband?” he asked at length.

She kept silent. She couldn’t raise her head. Wully felt his heart beginning to beat furiously. She was going to refuse him, in spite of all he had done.

There was an awful moment. The room seemed to be hushed and waiting. It was terrible, the length of that moment of silence. At last he spoke forth simply.

“You wouldn’t think she would. But she will. Won’t you, Chirstie?”

Those standing near heard his words, and as the outraged divine whispered sternly, “Answer!” he bent down and kissed her.

She looked around like one in a nightmare. Her lips moved. The minister accepted the sign. He proceeded with the ceremony. The smile which Wully’s words had occasioned spread from those standing nearest even to those who were looking in at the windows—those who pretended to be leaving room for the rest, but were really thinking of their unsuitable bare feet.

The minister had made them man and wife.

The crowd gathered around them. The squire gave Chirstie a resounding smack on her cheek. Girls were pressing around her, the roomful was gathering near her. But she swayed, and fell against her husband, and fainted quite away.

Of course that fainting was altogether the smartest feature of the hurried wedding. Not many hard-working prairie women had bodies which permitted such gentility. It was a distinguished thing to do. The women who saw it forgot for a while to comment on the strange appearance of the bride, which they understood more fully later. At the time it seemed no more than a proper honor to pay Jeannie McNair’s memory. When she was herself again, Wully found a place for her out of doors. Planks laid on boxes and chairs made seats for supper out there where the smoke defended them, and since there was no back for her to lean against, she having just fainted and all, it was only proper that Wully’s arm do its duty around her. And it was necessary that it give her little strengthening messages, while inside the more zealous young things danced to the fiddle that was not Allen’s. Out in the warm starlight and the smoke, the older guests talked to the bride and groom.

Aunt Libby joined them again, when by chance they were for a moment alone.

“Tell me again what it was Peter said, Wully!” she begged.

He felt Chirstie shrinking against him.

“He told me in the morning that he had decided to go this time for sure. I told him he was foolish. And I rode over again to give him some advice in the evening.”

Chirstie’s hand stirred nervously within his, and he held it more firmly.

“And did he not say where he was going?”

“He only said west.”

“That’s all he said in his note!” She sighed broken-heartedly. “It’s a strange thing he wouldn’t heed you, Wully!”

Wully gritted his teeth. “He certainly heeded me that time!” he thought grimly to himself. He had already told his aunt those nicely dovetailing lies half a dozen times, and each time he had felt them crushing his wife. He wished his aunt would go away and leave them in peace. After all, her cursed Peter hadn’t got a taste of what he deserved!

Finally the wedding was over. Time, however it drags, must eventually pass. They had driven away together, after he had changed John’s good clothes for a fresh hickory shirt and jeans, leaving Dod at the McLaughlins’. They had had twenty-four hours of the unfathomable luxury of unhindered intimacy. The baby sister was asleep. It was bedtime again.