Chapter V A Crisis
Work, Morton could not. After his noonday dinner he lifted his flint-lock gun from the forked sticks upon the wall where it was laid, and set out to seek for deer,—rather to seek forgetfulness of the anxiety that preyed upon him. Excitement was almost a necessity with him, even at ordinary times; now, it seemed the only remedy for his depression. But instead of forgetting Patty, he forgot everything but Patty, and for the first time in his life he found it impossible to absorb himself in hunting. For when a frontierman loves, he loves with his whole nature. The interests of his life are few, and love, having undisputed sway, becomes a consuming passion. After two hours’ walking through the unbroken forest he started a deer, but did not see at in time to shoot. He had tramped through the brush without caution or vigilance. He now saw that it would be of no avail to keep up this mockery of hunting. He was seized with an eager desire to see Patty, and talk with her once more before the door should be closed against him. He might strike the trail, and reach the settlement in an hour, arriving at Lumsden’s while yet the Captain was away from the house. His only chance was to see her in the absence of her father, who would surely contrive some interruption if he were present.
So eagerly did Morton travel, that when his return was about half accomplished he ran headlong into the very midst of a flock of wild turkeys. They ran swiftly away in two or three directions, but not until the two barrels of Morton’s gun had brought down two glossy young gobblers. Tying their legs together with a strip of paw-paw bark, he slung them across his gun, and laid his gun over his shoulder, pleased that he would not have to go home quite empty-handed.
As he steps into Captain Lumsden’s yard that Autumn afternoon, he is such a man as one likes to see: quite six feet high, well made, broad, but not too broad, about the shoulders, with legs whose litheness indicate the reserve force of muscle and nerve coiled away somewhere for an emergency. His walk is direct, elastic, unflagging; he is like his horse, a clean stepper; there is neither slouchiness, timidity, nor craftiness in his gait. The legs are as much a test of character as the face, and in both one can read resolute eagerness. His forehead is high rather than broad, his blue eye and curly hair, and a certain sweetness and dignity in his smile, are from his Scotch-Irish mother. His picturesque coon-skin cap gives him the look of a hunter. The homespun “hunting shirt” hangs outside his buckskin breeches, and these terminate below inside his rawhide boots.
The great yellow dog, Watch, knows him well enough by this time, but, like a policeman on duty, Watch is quite unwilling to seem to neglect his function; and so he bristles up a little, meets Morton at the gate, and snuffs at his cowhide boots with an air of surly vigilance. The young man hails him with a friendly “Hello, Watch!” and the old fellow smooths his back hair a little, and gives his clumsy bobbed tail three solemn little wags of recognition, comical enough if Goodwin were only in a mood to observe.
Morton hears the hum of the spinning-wheel in the old cabin portion of the building, used for a kitchen and loom-room. The monotonous rise and fall of the wheel’s tune, now buzzing gently, then louder and louder till its whirr could be heard a furlong, then slacking, then stopping abruptly, then rising to a new climax—this cadenced hum, as he hears it, is made rhythmical by the tread of feet that run back across the room after each climax of sound. He knows the quick, elastic step; he turns away from the straight-ahead entrance to the house, and passes round to the kitchen door. It is Patty, as he thought, and, as his shadow falls in at the door, she is in the very act of urging the wheel to it highest impetus; she whirls it till it roars, and at the same time nods merrily at Morton over the top of it; then she trips back across the room, drawing the yarn with her left hand, which she holds stretched out; when the impulse is somewhat spent, and the yarn sufficiently twisted, Patty catches the wheel, winds the yarn upon the spindle, and turns to the door. She changes her spinning stick to the left hand, and extends her right with a genial “Howdy, Morton? killed some turkeys, I see.”
“Yes, one for you and one for mother.”
“For me? much obliged! come in and take a chair.”
“No, this’ll do,” and Morton sat upon the doorsill, doffing his coon-skin cap, and wiping his forehead with his red handkerchief. “Go on with your spinning, Patty, I like to see you spin.”
“Well, I will. I mean to spin two dozen cuts to-day. I’ve been at it since five o’clock.”
Morton was glad, indeed, to have her spin. He was, in his present perplexed state, willing to avoid all conversation except such broken talk as might be carried on while Patty wound the spun yarn upon the spindle, or adjusted a new roll of wool.
Nothing shows off the grace of the female figure as did the old spinning-wheel. Patty’s perfect form was disfigured by no stays, or pads, or paniers—her swift tread backwards with her up-raised left hand, her movement of the wheel with the right, all kept her agile figure in lithe action. If plastic art were not an impossibility to us Americans, our stone-cutters might long since have ceased, like school-boys, to send us back from Rome imitation Venuses, and counterfeit Hebes, and lank Lincolns aping Roman senators, and stagey Washingtons on stage-horses;—they would by this time have found out that in our primitive life there are subjects enough, and that in mythology and heroics we must ever be dead copyists. But I do not believe Morton was thinking of art at all, as he sat there in the October evening sun and watched the little feet, yet full of unexhausted energy after traveling to and fro all day. He did not know, or care, that Patty, with her head thrown back and her left arm half outstretched to guide her thread, was a glorious subject for a statue. He had never seen marble, and had never heard of statues except in the talk of the old schoolmaster. How should her think to call her statuesque? Or how should he know that the wide old log-kitchen, with its loom in one corner, its vast fireplace, wherein sit the two huge, black andirons, and wherein swings an iron crane on which hang pot-hooks with iron pots depending—the old kitchen, with its bark-covered joists high overhead, from which are festooned strings of drying pumpkins—how should Morton Goodwin know that this wide old kitchen, with its rare centre-piece of a fine-featured, fresh-hearted young girl straining every nerve to spin two dozen cuts of yarn in a day, would make a genre piece, the subject of which would be good enough for one of the old Dutch masters? He could not know all this, but he did know, as he watched the feet treading swiftly and rhythmically back and forth, and as he saw the fine face, ruddy with the vigorous exercise, looking at him over the top of a whirling wheel whose spokes were invisible—he did know that Patty Lumsden was a little higher than angels, and he shuddered when he remembered that to-morrow, and indefinitely afterward, he might be shut out from her father’s house.
It was while he sat thus and listened to Patty’s broken patches of sprightly talk and the monotonous symphony of her wheel, that Captain Lumsden came into the yard, snapping his rawhide whip against his boots, and walking, in his eager, jerky fashion, around to the kitchen door.
“Hello, Morton! here, eh? Been hunting? This don’t pay. A young man that is going to get on in the world oughtn’t to set here in the sunshine talking to the girls. Leave that for nights and Sundays. I’m afeard you won’t get on if you don’t work early and late. Eh?” And the captain chuckled his hard little laugh.
Morton felt all the pleasure of the glorious afternoon vanish, as he rose to go. He laid the turkey destined for Patty inside the door, took up the other, and was about to leave. Meantime the captain had lifted the white gourd at the well-curb, to satisfy his thirst.
“I saw Kike just now,” he said, in a fragmentary way, between his sips of water—and Morton felt his face color at the first mention of Kike. “I saw Kike crossing the creek on your mare. You oughtn’t to let him ride her; she’ll break his fool neck yet. Here comes Kike himself. I wonder where he’s been to?”
Morton saw, in the fixed look of Kike’s eyes, as he opened the gate, evidence of deep passion; but Captain Enoch Lumsden was not looking for anything remarkable about Kike, and he was accustomed to treat him with peculiar indignity because he was a relative.
“Hello, Kike!” he said, as his nephew approached, while Watch faithfully sniffed at his heels, “where’ve you been cavorting on that filley to-day? I told Mort he was a fool to let a snipe like you ride that she-devil. She’ll break your blamed neck some day, and then there’ll be one fool less.” And the captain chuckled triumphantly at the wit in his way of putting the thing. “Don’t kick the dog! What an ill-natured ground-hog you air! If I had the training of you, I’d take some of that out.”
“You haven’t got the training of me, and you never will have.”
Kike’s face was livid, and his voice almost inaudible.
“Come, come, don’t be impudent, young man,” chuckled Captain Lumsden.
“I don’t know what you call impudence,” said Kike, stretching his slender frame up to its full height, and shaking as if he had an ague-chill; “but you are a tyrant and a scoundrel!”
“Tut! tut! Kike, you’re crazy, you little brute. What’s up?”
“You know what’s up. You want to cheat me out of that bottom land; you have got it advertised on the back side of a tree in North’s holler, without consulting mother or me. I have been over to Jonesville to-day, and picked out Colonel Wheeler to act as my gardeen.”
“Colonel Wheeler? Why, that’s an insult to me!” And the captain ceased to laugh, and grew red.
“I hope it is. I couldn’t get the judge to take back the order for the sale of the land; he’s afeard of you. But now let me tell you something, Enoch Lumsden! If you sell my land by that order of the court, you’ll lose more’n you’ll make. I ain’t afeard of the devil nor none of his angels; and I recken you’re one of the blackest. It’ll cost you more burnt barns and dead hosses and cows and hogs and sheep than what you make will pay for. You cheated pappy, but you shan’t make nothin’ out of Little Kike. I’ll turn Ingin, and take Ingin law onto you, you old thief and—”
Here Captain Lumsden stepped forward and raised his cowhide. “I’ll teach you some manners, you impudent little brat!”
Kike quivered all over, but did not move hand or foot. “Hit me if you dare, Enoch Lumsden, and they’ll be blood betwixt us then. You hit me wunst, and they’ll be one less Lumsden alive in a year. You or me’ll have to go to the bone-yard.”
Patty had stopped her wheel, had forgotten all about her two dozen a day, and stood frightened in the door, near Morton. Morton advanced and took hold of Kike.
“Come, Kike! Kike! don’t be so wrothy,” said he.
“Keep hands offen me, Mort Goodwin,” said Kike, shaking loose. “I’ve got an account to settle, and ef he tetches a thread of my coat with a cowhide, it’ll be a bad day fer both on us. We’ll settle with blood then.”
“It’s no use for you to interfere, Mort,” snarled the captain. “I know well enough who put Kike up to this. I’ll settle with both of you, some day.” Then, with an oath, the captain went into the house, while the two young men moved away down the road, Morton not daring to look at Patty.
What Morton dreaded most had come upon him. As for Kike, when once they were out of sight of Lumsden’s, the reaction on his feeble frame was terrible. He sat down on a log and cried with grief and anger.
“The worst of it is, I’ve ruined your chances, Mort,” said he.
And Morton did not reply.