Читать книгу Quill's Window - George Barr McCutcheon - Страница 7

Table of Contents

"And what has become of Alix the Third?" inquired the young man, squinting at his wristwatch and making out in the semi-darkness that it was nearly half-past nine.

He had listened somewhat indulgently to the story of the three Alixes. The old man, prompted and sometimes disputed by other members of the family, had narrated in his own simple way the foregoing tale, arriving at the end in a far more expeditious and certainly in a less studied manner than the present chronicler employs in putting the facts before his readers. The night was hot. He was occasionally interrupted by various members of the little group on the front porch of the big old farmhouse, the interruption invariably taking the form of a conjecture concerning the significance of certain signs ordinarily infallible in denoting the approach of rain. Heat lightning had been playing for an hour or more in the gloomy west; a tree-toad in a nearby elm was prophesying thunder in unmelodious song: night-birds fluttered restlessly among the lofty branches; widely separated whiffs of a freshening wind came around the corner of the house. All of these had a barometric meaning to the wistful group. There was a thunderstorm on the way. It was sure to come before morning. The prayers inaugurated a month ago were at last to be answered.

As old man Brown drily remarked: "There's one satisfaction about prayin' for rain. If you keep at it long enough, you're bound to get what you're askin' for. Works the same way when you're prayin' for it to stop rainin'. My grandfather once prayed for a solid two months before he got rain, and then, by gosh, he had to pray for nearly three weeks to get it to quit."

Supper over, the young man had reminded his venerable angling companion of his promise to relate the history of Quill's Window. Old Caleb Brown was the father of Mrs. Vick—Lucinda Vick, wife of the farmer in whose house the young man was spending a month as a boarder.

The group on the porch included Amos Vick, anxious, preoccupied, and interested only in the prospect of rain; his daughter Rosabel, aged eighteen, a very pretty and vivacious girl, interested only in the young man from the far-off, mysterious city in the East; his son Caleb, a rugged youth of nineteen; Mrs. Vick, and a neighbour named White, who had come over for the sole purpose of finding out just what Amos Vick thought about the weather. Two dogs lay panting on the dry grass at the foot of the steps.

"Oh, she's living over there in the Windom house," said Mrs. Vick.

"Sort of running the place," explained Mr. Brown, a trace of irony in his voice.

"Well," put in Amos Vick, speaking for the first time in many minutes, "she's got a lot of sense, that girl has. She may be letting on that she's running the farm, but she ain't, you bet. That's where she's smart. She's got sense enough to know she don't know anything about running a farm, and while she puts on a lot of airs and acts kind of important like, the real truth is she leaves everything to old Jim Bagley. I guess you don't know who Jim Bagley is, do you, Courtney?"

"I can't say that I do," replied the young man.

"Well, he's about the slickest citizen you ever saw. From what father here says about your granddad, he must have been a purty hard customer to deal with, but, by ginger, if he was any worse than Jim Bagley in driving a bargain, I'm glad he died as long ago as he did."

"You're just sore, Amos," said his wife, "because Mr. Bagley got the best of you in that hog deal three years ago."

"Oh, Lord, ain't you ever going to get tired of throwin' that up to me?" groaned Mr. Vick. "I never mention Jim Bagley's name but what you up and say something about them hogs. Now, as a matter of fact, them hogs—"

"For goodness sake, Pa, you're not going to tell Mr. Thane about that hog business, are you?" cried Rosabel.

"Well, when your Ma begins to insinuate that I got the worst of—"

"I don't say that you got the worst of it, Amos," interrupted Mrs. Vick good-humouredly. "I only say that he got the best of it."

"Well, if that don't come to the same—"

"Looks to me, Amos, like we'd get her good and plenty before mornin'," broke in Mr. White. He was referring to the weather. "That ain't all heat lightnin' over there. Seems to me I heard a little thunder just now."

"Alix Crown is away a good part of the time, Courtney," said Mrs. Vick, taking up the thread where it had been severed by recrimination. "All through the war—long before we went in—she was up in town working for the Belgiums, and then, when we did go in, she went East some'eres to learn how to be a nurse or drive an ambulance or something—New York, I believe. And as for money, she contributed quite a bit—how much do they say it was, Amos?"

"Well, all I know is that Mary Simmons says she gave ten thousand dollars and Josie Fiddler says it was three hundred—so you can choose between 'em."

"She did her share, all right," said young Caleb defensively. "That's more'n a lot of people around here did."

"Gale's in love with her, Mr. Thane," explained Rosabel. "She's five years older than he is, and don't know he's on earth."

"Aw, cut that out," growled Caleb.

"Is she good-looking?" inquired Courtney Thane.

"I don't like 'em quite as tall as she is," said Mr. White.

"She's got a good pair of legs," said old Caleb Brown, shifting his cigar with his tongue.

"We're not talking about horses, father," said Mrs. Vick sharply.

"Who said we was?" demanded old Caleb.

"Most people think she's good-looking," said Rosabel, somewhat grudgingly. "And she isn't any taller than I am, Mr. White."

"Well, you ain't no dwarft, Rosie," exclaimed Farmer White, with a brave laugh. "You must be five foot seven or eight, but you ain't skinny like she is. She'd ought to weigh about a hunderd and sixty, for her height, and I'll bet she don't weigh more'n a hunderd and thirty."

"I wouldn't call that skinny," remarked Courtney.

"She wears these here new-fangled britches when she's on horseback," said old Caleb, justifying his observation. "Rides straddle, like a man. You can't help seeing what kind of—"

"That will do, Pa," broke in his wife. "It's no crime for a woman to wear pants when she's riding, although I must say I don't think it's very modest. I never rode any way except side-saddle—and neither has Rosabel. I've brought her up—"

"Don't you be too sure of that, Ma," interrupted young Caleb maliciously.

"I never did it but once, and you know it, Cale Vick," cried Rosabel, blushing violently.

The subject was abruptly changed by Mr. White.

"Well, I guess I'll be moseyin' along home, Amos. That certainly did sound like thunder, didn't it? And that tree-toad has stopped signallin'—that's a sure sign. Like as not I'll get caught in the rain if I don't—what say, Lucindy?"

"Do you want an umberell, Steve?"

"I should say not! What do you want me to do? Scare the rain off? No, sir! Rain's the funniest thing in the world. If it sees you got an umberell it won't come within a hunderd miles of you. That's why I got my Sunday clothes on, and my new straw hat. Sometimes that'll bring rain out of a clear sky—that an' a Sunday-school picnic. It's a pity we couldn't have got up a Sunday-school picnic—but then, of course, that wouldn't have done any good. You can't fool a rainstorm. So long, Amos. Night, everybody. Night, Courtney. As I was sayin' awhile ago, I used to go to school with your pa when him an' me was little shavers—up yonder at the old Kennedy schoolhouse. Fifty odd years ago. Seems like yesterday. How old did you say you was?"

"Twenty-eight, Mr. White."

"And your pa's been dead—how long did you say?"

"He died when I was twenty-two."

"Funny your ma didn't bring him out here and bury him 'longside his father and all the rest of 'em up in the family burying-ground," was Mr. White's concluding observation as he ambled off down the gravel walk to the front gate.

"I wish you'd brought your croix de guerre along with you, Mr. Thane," said young Caleb, his eyes gleaming in the faint light from the open door. "I guess I don't pronounce it as it ought to be. I'm not much of a hand at French."

"You came pretty close to it," said Thane, with a smile. "You see, Cale, it's the sort of thing one puts away in a safe place. That's why I left it in New York. Mother likes to look at it occasionally. Mothers are queer creatures, you know. They like to be reminded of the good things their sons have done. It helps 'em to forget the bad things, I suppose."

"You're always joking," pouted Rosabel, leaning forward, ardour in her wide, young eyes. "If I was a boy and had been in the war, I'd never stop talking about it."

"And I'd have been in it, too, if pa hadn't up and told 'em I was only a little more than fifteen," said Cale, glowering at his father in the darkness.

"You mustn't blame your pa, Cale," rebuked his mother. "He knows what a soldier's life is better than you do. He was down in that camp at Chattanooga during the Spanish War, and almost died of typhoid, Courtney. And when I think of the way our boys died by the millions of the flu, I—well, I just know you would have died of it, sonny, and I wouldn't have had any cross or medal to look at, and—and—"

"Don't begin cryin', Lucindy," broke in old Caleb hastily. "He didn't die of the flu, so what's the sense of worryin' about it now? He didn't even ketch it, and gosh knows, the whole blamed country was full of it that winter."

"Well," began Mrs. Vick defensively, and then compressed her lips in silence.

"I think it was perfectly wonderful of you, Mr. Thane, to go over to France and fight in the American Ambulance so long before we went into the war." This from the adoring Rosabel. "I wish you'd tell us more about your experiences. They must have been terrible. You never talk about them, though. I think the real heroes were the fellows who went over when you did—when you didn't really have to, because America wasn't in it."

"The American Ambulance wasn't over there to fight, you know," explained Courtney.

"What did you get the cross for if you weren't fighting?" demanded young Cale.

"For doing what a whole lot of other fellows did—simply going out and getting a wounded man or two in No-Man's Land. We didn't think much about it at the time."

"Was it very dangerous?" asked Rosabel.

"I suppose it was—more or less so," replied Thane indifferently. He even yawned. "I'd rather talk about Alix the Third, if it's all the same to you. Is she light or dark?"

"She's a brunette," said Rosabel shortly. "All except her eyes. They're blue. How long were you up at the front, Mr. Thane?"

"Oh, quite a while—several months, in fact. At first we were in a place where there wasn't much fighting. Just before the first big Verdun drive we were transferred to that sector, and then we saw a lot of action."

"Some battle, wasn't it?" exclaimed young Cale, a thrill in his voice.

"Certainly was," said Courtney. "We used to work forty-eight hours at a stretch, taking 'em back by the thousands."

"How near did the shells ever come to you?"

"Oh, sometimes as close as twenty or thirty feet. I remember one that dropped in the road about fifty feet ahead of my car, and before I could stop we ran plunk into the hole it made and upset. I suppose the Windom estate must be a pretty big one, isn't it, Mr. Vick?"

"Taking everything into consideration, it amounts to nearly a million dollars. David Windom had quite a bit of property up in the city, aside from his farm, and he owned a big ranch out in Texas. The grain elevator in Windomville belonged to him—still belongs to Alix Crown—and there's a three mile railroad connecting with the main line over at Smith's Siding. Every foot of it is on his land. He built the railroad about twenty year ago, and the elevator, too—out of spite, they say, for the men that run the elevator at Hawkins a little further up the road. Hawkins is the place where his daughter and Edward Crown got off the train the night of the murder."

"And this young girl owns all of it—farms, ranch, railroad and everything?"

"Every cent's worth of it is her'n. There ain't a sign of a mortgage on any of it, either. It's as clear as a blank sheet of writin' paper."

"When was it you were gassed, Mr. Thane?" inquired young Caleb.

"Oh, that was when I was in the air service—only a few weeks before the armistice."

"You left your wings at home, too, I suppose?"

"Yes. Mother likes to look at the only wings I'll probably ever have—now or hereafter."

"How does it come, Court, that you went into the British air corpse, 'stead of in the U. S. A.?" inquired old Caleb.

"I joined the Royal Flying Corps, Mr. Brown, because the Americans wouldn't have me," replied Thane tersely. "I tried to get in, but they wouldn't pass me. Said I had a weak heart and a whole lot of rubbish like that. It's no wonder the American Air Service was punk. I went over to Toronto and they took me like a shot in the Royal British. They weren't so blamed finicky and old womanish. All they asked for in an applicant was any kind of a heart at all so long as it was with the cause. I don't suppose I ought to say it, but the American Air Service was a joke."

"I hope you ain't turning British in your feelings, Court," remarked Amos Vick. "It's purty difficult to be both, you know—English and Yankee."

"I'm American through and through, Mr. Vick, even though I did serve under the British flag till I was gassed and invalided out."

"Affects the lungs, don't it?" inquired old Caleb.

"I don't like to talk about it, Mr. Brown. I'm trying to forget what hell was like. I was in hospital for four months. It took a lot more nerve to draw a breath then than it did to fly over the German lines with the Boches popping away from all sides. I didn't mind the wounds I sustained—but the gas! Gee, it was horrible."

"Your ma said in her letter to me that you'd had pneumonia twice since you got back," said Mrs. Vick. "Was that due to the gas?"

"I suppose so. They thought I had tuberculosis for awhile, you see. Then, this spring, I had to go and have a bout with typhoid. I ought to be dead, with all I've had—but here I am, alive and happy, and if you keep on feeding me as you have been for the past three days, I'll live forever."

"You mustn't overdo, Courtney," warned the farmer's wife. "Your ma sent you out here to get well, and I feel a kind of responsibility for you. I guess it's about time you was off to bed. Come on, Amos. It isn't going to bring rain any sooner for you to be setting out here watching for it."

Old Caleb had his say. "I suppose it was all right for you to serve with the British, Court, but if you'd waited a little while longer you might have carried a gun over there under the Stars and Stripes. But, as you say, you couldn't bear to wait. I give you credit for it. I'm derned glad to see one member of the Thane family that had the nerve to volunteer. At the time of the Civil War your grandpa was what we call a slacker in these days. He hired a feller to go in his place, and when that feller was killed and a second call for volunteers come up, dogged if he didn't up and hire another one. One of your grandpa's brothers skipped off to Canada so's he wouldn't have to serve, and the other—his name was George Washington Thane, by the way—accidentally shot two of his fingers off while his company was in camp down at Crawfordsville, gettin' ready to go down and meet Morgan's Riders—and that let him out. I admit it takes right smart of courage to accidentally shoot your fingers off, specially when nobody is lookin', but at any rate he had a uniform on when he done it. Course, there wasn't any wars during your pa's day, so I don't know how he would have acted. He wasn't much of a feller for fightin', though—I remember that. I mean fist fightin'. I'm glad to know you don't take after your granddad. I never had any use for a coward, and that's why I'm proud to shake hands with you, my boy. There was a derned bad streak in your family back in your granddad's day, and it certainly is good to see that you have wiped it out. It don't always happen so. Yeller streaks are purty hard to wipe out. Takes more than two generations to do it as a rule. I'm happy to know you ain't gun shy."

The young man laughed. "I don't mind telling you, Mr. Brown, that I never went into action without being scared half out of my boots. But I wasn't alone in that, you see. I never knew a man over there who wasn't scared when he went over the top. He went, just the same—and that's what I call courage."

"So do I," cried Rosabel.

"Did you ever know for sure whether you got a German?" asked the intense young Caleb. "I mean—did you ever KILL one?"

"That's pretty hard to say, Cale. We never knew, you see—we fellows up in the clouds. I was in a bombing machine. I'd hate to think that we WASTED any bombs."

"Come now—all of you—off to bed," interposed Mrs. Vick. "I don't want to hear any more, Courtney. I wouldn't sleep a wink."

"Strikin' ten," said Amos, arising from his rocking-chair and turning it upside down at the back of the porch.

"Don't do that, Amos," protested old Caleb. "It'll NEVER rain if you—Why, dog-gone it, ain't you learned that it's bad luck to turn a chair bottom-side up when rain's needed? Turn it right-side up and put it right out here in front again where the rain can get at it. Nothin' tickles the weather more'n a chance to spoil something. That's right. Now we c'n go to bed. Better leave them cushions on the steps too, Rosie."

Courtney Thane went to his room—the spare-room on the second floor—and prepared to retire. The process was attended by the smoking of three cigarettes. Presently he was stretched out on the bed without even so much as a sheet over him. The heat was stifling. Not a breath of air came in through the wide-open windows. He lay awake for a long time, staring out into the night.

"So my precious granddad had a yellow streak in him, did he? And father wasn't much of a fighter either. Takes more than two generations to wipe out a yellow streak, does it? I wonder what the old boob meant by that rotten slam at my people."