Читать книгу Plowing On Sunday - Sterling North - Страница 14

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Above the First National Bank of Brailsford Junction with its wooden Doric columns and gilt-lettered windows was the office of Timothy Halleck, attorney at law, justice of the peace, dealer in real estate and farm mortgages, notary, and Protestant father-confessor for half the town.

To him came ranting suffragettes; militant members of the W.C.T.U. bent on destruction of the town's twenty-six easy-going saloon proprietors; the saloon proprietors; fathers of wayward girls; mothers of incorrigible boys; wives who were beaten, and husbands who had been cuckolded. Into Timothy's great hairy ears were poured the despairs and heartbreaks which have been the lot of man these many centuries.

His office was nothing less than amazing. Buffalo skulls and polished buffalo horns from his brother's ranch in Montana elbowed stuffed fish, antlers of deer, and the head of a wild cat upon the walls; five hundred dusty law tomes filled the sagging shelves; in a glass case stood a shock of prize Wisconsin wheat, seed corn, and dirty mason jars filled with every variety of grain known to horticulture. Enormous leaves of Wisconsin tobacco framed and labeled, Indian quivers, and year-old calendars vied for space on the wainscoting.

Half a dozen swivel chairs and as many spittoons gave the spot an air of luxurious informality to visiting farmers, whose well informed nostrils might have quivered distrustfully at the dusty stench of rotting law books had it not been synthesized with the comfortable aroma from the livery stable next door.

Timothy Halleck himself, six feet two, large-boned, gaunt, hawk-nosed, with great brown eyes deep-socketed and thatched above with bristling brows, white-haired and gruff, ruled like a kindly tyrant in his chaotic kingdom. He was the town's one-man organized charity, a poverty-stricken philanthropist who denied himself so that he might help others; a widower, lonesome and fond of children.

He had a few old friends, among them Stanley Brailsford now entering his office.

"Well, Timothy," said Stud, uncomfortable in his serge suit and well-blacked bulldog shoes, "still making a living robbing the widows and orphans?"

"Sit down, you lazy, hog-breeding son-of-a-gun and have a cigar," said the lawyer. "How are those emaciated razor-backs doing on that run-down farm of yours?"

"Getting fatter and sassier every week," said Stud, biting off the tip of the cigar and scratching a match on the seat of his trousers. "What you been up to?"

"Just the usual day. Forging checks and foreclosing on octogenarians. Where've you been keeping yourself?"

"Anywhere the fish are biting. There ain't much work to be done on a farm in the spring time."

"Need a good hand?"

"Maybe you could do my whittling," Stud said. "Anyhow it's a standing invitation."

"Might teach you how to raise hogs instead of razor-backs. Might breed you some beeves you could tell from bags of bones."

"Who'd you find to defraud your clients meanwhile?" Stud asked. "Where would you find a man to run your shell game while you was gone?"

The two old cronies glowered at each other joyfully and let fly at the nearest gobboon simultaneously and accurately, a symphony in expectoration which had taken nearly thirty years to perfect.

Their talk ran on: the spring floods in Ohio and Indiana, the price of hogs, milk, and eggs, the new trailer factory which was to occupy the old wagon-works on the creek bottom, President Wilson and his professorial theories, the German Kaiser and his fight to remove one of his tenant farmers, the ridiculous little Balkan squabbles.

And getting back to their own affairs Stud asked, "Are you going to the church supper this evening?"

"No ..." said Halleck slowly. "Something about church suppers makes me feel ... Martha was always the center of everything, you know."

"I know," Stud said.

"You don't appreciate a woman until you've lost her," Halleck said quietly.

"No," said Stud, "I don't suppose you do."

"You're apt to take her for granted."

"Sarah's happy," Stanley said. "We get along all right."

"It isn't just getting along all right," the lawyer said, gazing down upon the street where small boys jubilant with spring were fighting, roller-skating, and playing marbles; little girls skipping rope, and chalking squares for sky-blue. "It's treating a woman like another human being. Like an individual."

He swung his chair to face his life-long friend.

"You ain't thinking of taking up woman suffrage, are you?" Stud asked with mild sarcasm. "Not Pankhurst and Belle La Follette and that sort of thing?"

"They don't need our help, Stanley. It's we who need theirs. They'll get more than the vote. They'll get rid of corsets, smoke if they want to, go into business, live alone in a room like Early Ann Sherman wanted to...."

"I ... I wanted to ask you about her," Stud said. "I wanted you to tell me more than you could that night you put her in my spring wagon."

Halleck hesitated, looked down at the glowing tip of his cigar, then began slowly. "I don't think I know much more about her than you do, Stanley. She came to Brailsford Junction last winter and got a job stemming tobacco in one of the warehouses. She took a room across the track with Mrs. Marsden,—that front room downstairs with the outside door."

"And then ...?"

"Well, nothing really. She didn't tell anyone where she came from, or who her folks were, or why she wanted to live alone like that. She was pretty and proud and full of spunk, so the gossips got their tongues wagging ... Mrs. Marsden, and old Mrs. Crandall, and that blue jay, Temperance...."

"But what was wrong?"

"Nothing so far as I know. The Hubbards who live next door thought they saw a man around her window one night, and on another occasion Mrs. Marsden heard her scream, but when she reached the girl's room Early Ann was alone...."

"The sluts."

"Temperance Crandall and a delegation came to me—they always do—and said they wanted to swear out a warrant. I told them they couldn't swear out a warrant for a girl just because she was living alone and there was gossip...."

"Dirty-minded old women," Stud said.

"But they insisted it was up to me to do something. They said that if I didn't they would make it so uncomfortable for the girl she would have to leave town. I had to save the kid from that pack of she-bloodhounds."

"And you knew I'd been sort of figuring on getting a hired girl to help Sarah...."

"So I brought her down to your wagon that night. I knew you folks would take care of her. It was a chance to get her away from Temperance Crandall."

"Not so sure you got her away," said Stud. "Temperance turned in at our place the other day. No telling what she dished out to Sarah."

"She went clear out there to start trouble?"

"I reckon she did."

"That bitch," said Timothy Halleck.