Читать книгу Where Your Treasure Is - Holman Day - Страница 5

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MY mother was a good woman—a thrifty, kindly, helpful woman, a good neighbor, in spite of her poverty.

My short temper, my cheeky disposition, my generally ready impulse to grab in on short notice, all belong to the Sidney side, I guess. All we know of the family has come down by word of mouth, and I suspect that the first rovers who came over in the old days when New England was really new were pretty tough characters who had plenty of original nerve to start with and then developed more as occasion required. Well, some of that sort had to come on ahead and smooth things with the ax and crowbar—yes, and with the musket, so that the country could get a good running start.

My mother was a good neighbor, I repeat. Up in the attic, hanging in dried bunches from the beams, were spearmint, thoroughwort, hardback, mullein, pennyroyal, and other pasture herbs which she sent me forth to gather. Her thoroughwort syrup was guaranteed to cure any case of whooping-cough—and she gave freely to all who came to her.

My father was a helpful sort of a man in his own way. He used to volunteer as boss of all the barn-raising bees in our section—but his enemies, made up of a considerable army of the men whom he had licked in his life, said, behind his back, that the only reason he had for helping at a barn-raising was to show off by running the ridgepole first of all the crew, and then to start the regular free fight. He fell off a ridge-pole one day and my mother was widowed.

I take it that her chief ambition in life was to tame the Sidney disposition in me—that earnest desire explaining my involuntary investment in the catechism. My mother’s axioms and teachings would have made excellent addenda and foot-notes for any catechism. Always did she counsel me to count ten before speaking angry word or performing angry act; I don’t remember that I ever did as she told me, though the Lord Himself knows how much I have suffered in my life on account of that lack of self-restraint. Two days after I bought the catechism my good mother thought it was having its effect on my nature. She saw a boy heave a rock at me in our door-yard and I stood perfectly motionless and speechless.

“That’s right, my own son! Count your ten!” she called to me.

But just at that moment a bumblebee was crawling around over my bare foot and I was in no mind to disturb him. Therefore, my enemy was enabled to collect a full supply of rock ammunition and to defy and rout me when at last I was free from the restraint of the bumblebee. It would have been the same if I had waited to count ten. Somehow, as the world is constituted, I have never taken much stock in this watchful-waiting game while your enemy is hustling to pile up his ammunition and you know he is doing so. I may be wrong. Maybe this story of mine will show that I’m wrong. But I hear you say, let’s get on to the story!

I mean to do so at once; but if I have paused to pull the curtain aside from my family and my character a bit you may be able to understand some parts of the story a mite better, because, in spite of that catechism, in spite of mother-influence, and perhaps mother-goodness deep down in me, I have butted into adventures which you will not find set down in the volumes of any well-conducted Sunday-school library.

I didn’t have my mother long, after my fifteenth birthday.

I was her sole heir; five minutes before she closed her eyes she gave me all her little fortune—to wit, the sweetest smile good mother ever left to bless memory of her, a pat on my hand, a few whispered words in my ear.

And then Uncle Deck took me in hand to make a man of me, so he said.

He wasn’t all bad—don’t understand me as saying that. He would pass a sleepless night if he failed to cheat a man in a horse trade, but he would sell his shirt before he would allow any old folks in our town to go onto the poor-farm. He would sneak around with wood and groceries after dark, that big, red face of his like a harvest moon, and when they would start to thank him he would curse the miserable old creatures so horribly that my blood used to run cold. He prided himself on language which, so he said, “would break up a Sunday-school picnic if a little bird sat overhead and twittered it out of a tree.” He saved his choicest profanity for his comments on Judge Zebulon Kingsley. His hatred went far back. I don’t know what started it. Perhaps it began in the natural antipathy such a man as Uncle Deck would entertain for a cold, proud, punctilious, professedly religious man like the judge. Uncle Deck would have it that the judge was a hypocrite, a thief at heart, and my uncle’s constant boast was that some day he would show the judge up; but all that vaporing seemed to be silly spite, without foundation. Judge Kingsley was our rich man; he had been judge of probate, and after retiring from that office he was trusted with funds as a sort of private banker; folks whose estates he had handled as judge just naturally insisted on his keeping control; and he had been town treasurer of Levant for years.

I hated to hear my uncle rave on about such a man; it was as irritating as the barking of a cur.

I have said that my uncle was a horse-trader. Rather, he was a general country dickerer, if you know the kind. He dealt in everything from a sheet of fly-paper to a clap of thunder. He had car-loads of horses sent to him from the West and peddled those to farmers, taking cash or bills of sale or produce or second-hand furniture or anything else which he could turn in a trade. He set me to peddling and collecting, and it was a mean job. At first I used to believe everything which debtors or sellers would tell me, and the result was that Uncle Deck bawled me out most dreadfully; and thus being abused by both parties, I got so at last that I believed nobody.

Therefore I was in a fair way to be made just the sort of man Uncle Deck desired me to be.

And continually, after I was sufficiently hardened, he impressed on me that I mustn’t be bothering him all the time, asking this and that about running the business. I must act for myself and then report to him when he called for an accounting. You shall see how his trying to make a man of me in this fashion turned me into ways which neither he nor I could have forecast. Don’t tell me that the activities of this life are very much a matter of individual election, after all. To be sure, a man might elect to live a hermit and might get away with the job in good shape; but if a person throws himself into the ruck of the living, into the running of humanity, he’ll be apt to find himself leaping from crag to crag because he has been shooed or jarred.

I ran up against one Juvenal Bird, newly come to town from the rural fastnesses of Vienna plantation—plantation meaning an unorganized township. I had never heard of Mr. Bird, and when he came within range of my vision I rather wondered because I had not; he seemed to be a person of some importance. To be sure, his frock suit was rusty and his plug-hat was fuzzy, but the garb was distinctive.

Mr. Bird was in search of furniture and I showed him our second-hand stock; he ordered liberally and largely—especially largely. He took the biggest stove, the largest bedsteads, the most expansive tables, and bureaus of breadth. That plug-hat impressed me. When he told me to send the goods out to his house on the Tumble-dick Road, and to call for the pay at my convenience, I did not presume to ask for an advance instalment, after our usual custom.

I promptly found out that this was one affair of business with which I should have bothered my busy uncle, who knew all the cheats of the section.

Mr. Bird was one of the most notable cheats. His raiment was garb discarded by an up-country parson, who pitied Mr. Bird after the latter had been evicted from timber-lands as a dangerous squatter, careless of fire. Mr. Bird installed the furniture in a shack which he had hired, then acted as his own carpenter and narrowed all the doors and the windows. I went out after the money and learned that the law provides for the replevin of furniture, but does not allow a house to be mutilated in order to remove the furniture. Mr. Bird grinned at me through a cracked window and thumbed his nose.

When I reported to my uncle he told me to go and get it. I refrain from quoting the words in which he voiced that command.

“But the law says—” I ventured.

Again I suppress details. My uncle Deck’s opinion of the law would lack authority.

However, being a Sidney, and resenting Mr. Bird’s betrayal of my innocence, and needing a home and a job, I accepted my uncle’s opinion of the law for the time being. I collected a gang of my boy intimates. We went in the night and ripped the stuffing out of Mr. Bird’s nest.

There’s a queer kind of senseless and secret gratification in doing a mob job. The human animal has a lot of primeval instincts which need tickling once in a while. I reckon we boys gratified the wolf streak on that occasion, running in a pack in the night-time.

We enjoyed it so much that we held a meeting a night or so later and organized ourselves as the “Skokums.” I can’t remember how we happened to light on that name. I was chosen as leader.

That first sortie was a great success—Mr. Bird was not in a position to prosecute. We had had a wonderful night, had defied the law, and had escaped punishment.

Judge Kingsley was the only man in town who proclaimed indignation loudly and openly. He expressed himself before a crowd in the post-office and declared that hoodlums had disgraced the town of Levant. He looked straight at me and said he would give a reward of ten dollars for evidence on which the ringleader could be convicted.

“And I would give one thousand dollars to pay for law to set him free,” said my uncle.

“Some day the plug-uglies will be rooted out of this place—and good riddance to ’em,” snarled the judge.

“The snout that goes rooting into that business will get twisted off’n the face of the rooter,” retorted my uncle. He was never very choice in his language. How those crimson patches on his face did glow and how his eyes sparkled!

So, it will be seen, I was not getting on at all with my love-affair.

It is pretty presumptuous in me to refer to it as a love-affair. That would intimate—calling it that—a bit of reciprocation on the part of Celene Kingsley. But she never showed any visible interest in me, even to looking my way when she met me on the street. I would have liked to attract her attention, for at last I wore shoes and had clothes without patches on them.

The Skokums flourished under cover of the night.

There was Oramandel Bangs. He was rather simple, and always carried his mouth open, and nobody in Levant ever forgot that once a hornet flew in and stung his tongue and it swelled and stuck out of his mouth for days like the end of a bologna sausage.

Oramandel had a sneaking suspicion that witchcraft had never been wholly stamped out by his forefathers in New England.

We decided to convince him that he was right—there’s nothing like clinching a man’s faith in the good judgment of his ancestors.

We hoisted one of his calves into an apple-tree. He “unwitched” the animal by cutting off its ears and tail before taking it down from the tree.

We tied cords to his ox-chains and hid ourselves and slashed the chains about the dooryard; he ran to the neighbors and reported that the witches had changed his chains into big snakes. We did a lot more things, and then imagination began to do the rest for him. He said the witches wouldn’t allow him to do his farm-work, even though he had sumac-wood splinters in all his tools and stuck shears around his chum to make the butter come. Before we realized what mischief a lively imagination can do to a man, they were obliged to carry the old chap away to the asylum for the insane.

And again Judge Kingsley held forth in the post-office. I guess he did a lot of talking at home, too.

At any rate, Celene Kingsley was mighty well posted, so I discovered.

I met her on Purgatory Hill one day—and never did that name seem to apply so well! I had been out on my uncle’s business, and among other plunder in the beach-wagon were two shotes in a crate, and they certainly were taking on about leaving home and mother.

She was alone in her pony-chaise and the shaggy little brute she drove was frightened—and I didn’t blame him. I pulled as far into the gutter as I could and waited; I poked the butt of my whip into the crate and prodded those shotes, but that only made them screech the louder.

So she came leading her pony past me. I didn’t expect that she would stop and speak to me, but she did. I nearly fell off my seat. And she called me “Mr. Sidney.” It was the first time anybody had ever given me a handle to my name. I had pulled my hat off when I saw her coming; when she spoke to me I put it back on again and then took it off so that I could show her that I knew a little something about manners. However, I wasn’t at all sure just what I was doing; my head was in a whirl, and I was damning those pigs in my heart.

“I thank you, Mr. Sidney,” she said. “Pedro acts like a fool sometimes.”

Two hours afterward, I guess it was, I thought of just the right reply to that remark; as it was, I didn’t say anything to her. I couldn’t.

She started on and then stopped and looked at me.

Perhaps she guessed something—I don’t know. Girls can act as if they never notice anything and still they have an eye out all the time; and what they don’t see they know by instinct. At any rate, there was a lot of kindness in her face, and perhaps there was pity in her thoughts.

“I’m afraid I am very bold, Mr. Sidney. I hope you’ll forgive me for speaking to you.”

She hesitated. Right there was another beautiful chance for me to say the good thing which came to me that night after I was in bed. All I could do at the time was duck my head.

“I’d hate to have any of the boys who went to school with me get into trouble on account of their thoughtlessness. I’m sure it’s only thoughtlessness and skylarking. But older folks, you know, don’t understand and cannot sympathize with young folks. Now you won’t tell anybody that I told you something, will you?”

Just think of it! A secret between Celene Kingsley and myself!

I gulped and shook my head.

“Won’t you tell the boys—you’ll know just how to pass the word—that folks are talking of having a detective to watch the village nights?” She probably saw that I was incapable of uttering a sound and she went on, hurrying her words. “Mr. Sidney, of course you understand that I am not picking you out as the ringleader. That’s not why I am asking you to pass the word. But I know you are popular among the boys. They all speak so well of you! And I was so sorry when I heard that your dear mother had passed on. I wanted to write a bit of a note, but they are very strict at the boarding-school—we are not allowed to write to young gentlemen.”

Think of two shotes, squalling their heads off, furnishing accompaniment to that! But I’ll say this of the shotes, they had spirit enough to use their voices—I was dumb.

“It would be terrible to have anybody arrested here in Levant for boyish pranks—it’s all thoughtlessness, I’m sure. You and I ought to be able to straighten everything out.”

I stood up.

“Enough said!” I shouted.

She flinched. Then I realized just how I must have sounded, for she said, “I didn’t mean to make you angry!”

I couldn’t blame her for mistaking my looks; I was so mad at myself that I wanted to lash my back with my own whip.

“No, no, no! It isn’t the way you seem to think it is! I want to say that after this—after what you have said to me—if there’s any more cutting-up in this village I’ll-strip the pelt off the chap who does the job.” I beat my hand on my breast. “It’s the proudest day of my life when I can take orders from you.”

“But I haven’t given orders, Mr. Sidney.”

“You have. They’re orders to me. The littlest thing you can wish for is orders to me. If you said for me to cut my hand off I’d do it. Oh, you don’t know! I have—I don’t know how to say it—but for years—oh, I’m crazy—” And I was. It was lunacy provoked by the passion of love trying to outvoice those devilish shotes.

By the funny look she gave me she was taking me at my word. She hurried to step into her little chaise.

“All I mean is this,” I quavered. “I’ll make ’em quit. You look to me. I’ll be responsible. Don’t you worry.”

“I’m sure everything will be all right after this,” she told me. “I’ll depend on you, and I thank you.”

She went on her way, and the burden I had assumed seemed lighter than feathers and more precious than golden ingots.

She had given me her confidence—she had asked me for a service!

She had thought of me and my trouble when she was away at school!

A few minutes before I had not dreamed that she was conscious that such a person as Ross Sidney walked the earth.

Now, at all events, my poor self was in a little corner of her thoughts. She was looking to me for help in something which she had made her own concern.

I rode down Purgatory Hill, hugging my joy and cursing those shotes.