Tony s.n.a.t.c.hed up the tea-kettle and began to pour boiling water over the gla.s.ses, laughing excitedly. "Oh, I can take care of myself! I"m a lot stronger than Cutter is. They pay four dollars there, and there"s no children. The work"s nothing; I can have every evening, and be out a lot in the afternoons."
"I thought you liked children. Tony, what"s come over you?"
"I don"t know, something has." Antonia tossed her head and set her jaw. "A girl like me has got to take her good times when she can. Maybe there won"t be any tent next year. I guess I want to have my fling, like the other girls."
Mrs. Harling gave a short, harsh laugh. "If you go to work for the Cutters, you"re likely to have a fling that you won"t get up from in a hurry."
Frances said, when she told grandmother and me about this scene, that every pan and plate and cup on the shelves trembled when her mother walked out of the kitchen. Mrs. Harling declared bitterly that she wished she had never let herself get fond of Antonia.
XI
WICK CUTTER WAS THE money-lender who had fleeced poor Russian Peter. When a farmer once got into the habit of going to Cutter, it was like gambling or the lottery; in an hour of discouragement he went back.
Cutter"s first name was Wycliffe, and he liked to talk about his pious bringing-up. He contributed regularly to the Protestant churches, "for sentiment"s sake," as he said with a flourish of the hand. He came from a town in Iowa where there were a great many Swedes, and could speak a little Swedish, which gave him a great advantage with the early Scandinavian settlers.
In every frontier settlement there are men who have come there to escape restraint. Cutter was one of the "fast set" of Black Hawk business men. He was an inveterate gambler, though a poor loser. When we saw a light burning in his office late at night, we knew that a game of poker was going on. Cutter boasted that he never drank anything stronger than sherry, and he said he got his start in life by saving the money that other young men spent for cigars. He was full of moral maxims for boys. When he came to our house on business, he quoted "Poor Richard"s Almanack"o to me, and told me he was delighted to find a town boy who could milk a cow. He was particularly affable to grandmother, and whenever they met he would begin at once to talk about "the good old times" and simple living. I detested his pink, bald head, and his yellow whiskers, always soft and glistening. It was said he brushed them every night, as a woman does her hair. His white teeth looked factory-made. His skin was red and rough, as if from perpetual sunburn; he often went away to hot springs to take mud baths. He was notoriously dissolute with women. Two Swedish girls who had lived in his house were the worse for the experience. One of them he had taken to Omaha and established in the business for which he had fitted her. He still visited her. to me, and told me he was delighted to find a town boy who could milk a cow. He was particularly affable to grandmother, and whenever they met he would begin at once to talk about "the good old times" and simple living. I detested his pink, bald head, and his yellow whiskers, always soft and glistening. It was said he brushed them every night, as a woman does her hair. His white teeth looked factory-made. His skin was red and rough, as if from perpetual sunburn; he often went away to hot springs to take mud baths. He was notoriously dissolute with women. Two Swedish girls who had lived in his house were the worse for the experience. One of them he had taken to Omaha and established in the business for which he had fitted her. He still visited her.
Cutter lived in a state of perpetual warfare with his wife, and yet, apparently, they never thought of separating. They dwelt in a fussy, scroll-work house, painted white and buried in thick evergreens, with a fussy white fence and barn. Cutter thought he knew a great deal about horses, and usually had a colt which he was training for the track. On Sunday mornings one could see him out at the fair grounds, speeding around the race-course in his trotting-buggy, wearing yellow gloves and a black-and-white-check travelling cap, his whiskers blowing back in the breeze. If there were any boys about, Cutter would offer one of them a quarter to hold the stop-watch,and then drive off, saying he had no change and would "fix it up next time." No one could cut his lawn or wash his buggy to suit him. He was so fastidious and prim about his place that a boy would go to a good deal of trouble to throw a dead cat into his back yard, or to dump a sackful of tin cans in his alley. It was a peculiar combination of old-maidishness and licentiousness that made Cutter seem so despicable.
He had certainly met his match when he married Mrs. Cutter. She was a terrifying-looking person; almost a giantess in height, raw-boned, with iron-grey hair, a face always flushed, and prominent, hysterical eyes. When she meant to be entertaining and agreeable, she nodded her head incessantly and snapped her eyes at one. Her teeth were long and curved, like a horse"s; people said babies always cried if she smiled at them. Her face had a kind of fascination for me: it was the very colour and shape of anger. There was a gleam of something akin to insanity in her full, intense eyes. She was formal in manner, and made calls in rustling, steel-grey brocades and a tall bonnet with bristling aigrettes.
Mrs. Cutter painted china so a.s.siduously that even her wash-bowls and pitchers, and her husband"s shaving-mug, were covered with violets and lilies. Once, when Cutter was exhibiting some of his wife"s china to a caller, he dropped a piece. Mrs. Cutter put her handkerchief to her lips as if she were going to faint and said grandly: "Mr. Cutter, you have broken all the Commandments-spare the finger-bowls!"
They quarrelled from the moment Cutter came into the house until they went to bed at night, and their hired girls reported these scenes to the town at large. Mrs. Cutter had several times cut paragraphs about unfaithful husbands out of the newspapers and mailed them to Cutter in a disguised handwriting. Cutter would come home at noon, find the mutilated journal in the paper-rack, and triumphantly fit the clipping into the s.p.a.ce from which it had been cut. Those two could quarrel all morning about whether he ought to put on his heavy or his light underwear, and all evening about whether he had taken cold or not.
The Cutters had major as well as minor subjects for dispute. The chief of these was the question of inheritance: Mrs. Cutter told her husband it was plainly his fault they had no children. He insisted that Mrs. Cutter had purposely remained childless, with the determination to outlive him and to share his property with her "people," whom he detested. To this she would reply that unless he changed his mode of life, she would certainly outlive him. After listening to her insinuations about his physical soundness, Cutter would resume his dumb-bell practice for a month, or rise daily at the hour when his wife most liked to sleep, dress noisily, and drive out to the track with his trotting-horse.
Once when they had quarrelled about household expenses, Mrs. Cutter put on her brocade and went among their friends soliciting orders for painted china, saying that Mr. Cutter had compelled her "to live by her brush." Cutter wasn"t shamed as she had expected; he was delighted!
Cutter often threatened to chop down the cedar trees which half-buried the house. His wife declared she would leave him if she were stripped of the "privacy" which she felt these trees afforded her. That was his opportunity, surely; but he never cut down the trees. The Cutters seemed to find their relations to each other interesting and stimulating, and certainly the rest of us found them so. Wick Cutter was different from any other rascal I have ever known, but I have found Mrs. Cutters all over the world; sometimes founding new religions, sometimes being forcibly fed-easily recognizable, even when superficially tamed.
XII
AFTER ANTONIA WENT TO live with the Cutters, she seemed to care about nothing but picnics and parties and having a good time. When she was not going to a dance, she sewed until midnight. Her new clothes were the subject of caustic comment. Under Lena"s direction she copied Mrs. Gardener"s new party dress and Mrs. Smith"s street costume so ingeniously in cheap materials that those ladies were greatly annoyed, and Mrs. Cutter, who was jealous of them, was secretly pleased.
Tony wore gloves now, and high-heeled shoes and feathered bonnets, and she went downtown nearly every afternoon with Tiny and Lena and the Marshalls" Norwegian Anna. We high-school boys used to linger on the playground at the afternoon recess to watch them as they came tripping down the hill along the board sidewalk, two and two. They were growing prettier every day, but as they pa.s.sed us, I used to think with pride that Antonia, like Snow-White in the fairy tale, was still "fairest of them all."
Being a senior now, I got away from school early. Sometimes I overtook the girls downtown and coaxed them into the ice-cream parlour, where they would sit chattering and laughing, telling me all the news from the country.
I remember how angry Tiny Soderball made me one afternoon. She declared she had heard grandmother was going to make a Baptist preacher of me. "I guess you"ll have to stop dancing and wear a white necktie then. Won"t he look funny, girls?"
Lena laughed. "You"ll have to hurry up, Jim. If you"re going to be a preacher, I want you to marry me. You must promise to marry us all, and then baptize the babies."
Norwegian Anna, always dignified, looked at her reprovingly.
"Baptists don"t believe in christening babies, do they, Jim?"
I told her I didn"t know what they believed, and didn"t care, and that I certainly wasn"t going to be a preacher.
"That"s too bad," Tiny simpered. She was in a teasing mood. "You"d make such a good one. You"re so studious. Maybe you"d like to be a professor. You used to teach Tony, didn"t you?"
Antonia broke in. "I"ve set my heart on Jim being a doctor. You"d be good with sick people, Jim. Your grandmother"s trained you up so nice. My papa always said you were an awful smart boy."
I said I was going to be whatever I pleased. "Won"t you be surprised, Miss Tiny, if I turn out to be a regular devil of a fellow?"
They laughed until a glance from Norwegian Anna checked them; the high-school princ.i.p.al had just come into the front part of the shop to buy bread for supper. Anna knew the whisper was going about that I was a sly one. People said there must be something queer about a boy who showed no interest in girls of his own age, but who could be lively enough when he was with Tony and Lena or the three Marys.
The enthusiasm for the dance, which the Vannis had kindled, did not at once die out. After the tent left town, the Euchre Club became the Owl Club, and gave dances in the Masonic Hall once a week. I was invited to join, but declined. I was moody and restless that winter, and tired of the people I saw every day. Charley Harling was already at Annapolis, while I was still sitting in Black Hawk, answering to my name at roll-call every morning, rising from my desk at the sound of a bell and marching out like the grammar-school children. Mrs. Harling was a little cool toward me, because I continued to champion Antonia. What was there for me to do after supper? Usually I had learned next day"s lessons by the time I left the school building, and I couldn"t sit still and read forever.
In the evening I used to prowl about, hunting for diversion. There lay the familiar streets, frozen with snow or liquid with mud. They led to the houses of good people who were putting the babies to bed, or simply sitting still before the parlour stove, digesting their supper. Black Hawk had two saloons. One of them was admitted, even by the church people, to be as respectable as a saloon could be. Handsome Anton Jelinek, who had rented his homestead and come to town, was the proprietor. In his saloon there were long tables where the Bohemian and German farmers could eat the lunches they brought from home while they drank their beer. Jelinek kept rye bread on hand and smoked fish and strong imported cheeses to please the foreign palate. I liked to drop into his bar-room and listen to the talk. But one day he overtook me on the street and clapped me on the shoulder.
"Jim," he said, "I am good friends with you and I always like to see you. But you know how the church people think about saloons. Your grandpa has always treated me fine, and I don"t like to have you come into my place, because I know he don"t like it, and it puts me in bad with him."
So I was shut out of that.
One could hang about the drugstore; and listen to the old men who sat there every evening, talking politics and telling raw stories. One could go to the cigar factory and chat with the old German who raised canaries for sale, and look at his stuffed birds. But whatever you began with him, the talk went back to taxidermy. There was the depot, of course; I often went down to see the night train come in, and afterward sat awhile with the disconsolate telegrapher who was always hoping to be transferred to Omaha or Denver, "where there was some life." He was sure to bring out his pictures of actresses and dancers. He got them with cigarette coupons, and nearly smoked himself to death to possess these desired forms and faces. For a change, one could talk to the station agent; but he was another malcontent; spent all his spare time writing letters to officials requesting a transfer. He wanted to get back to Wyoming where he could go trout-fishing on Sundays. He used to say "there was nothing in life for him but trout streams, ever since he"d lost his twins."
These were the distractions I had to choose from. There were no other lights burning downtown after nine o"clock. On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People"s speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appet.i.te, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all. On Tuesday nights the Owl Club danced; then there was a little stir in the streets, and here and there one could see a lighted window until midnight. But the next night all was dark again.
After I refused to join "the Owls," as they were called, I made a bold resolve to go to the Sat.u.r.day night dances at Firemen"s Hall. I knew it would be useless to acquaint my elders with any such plan. Grandfather didn"t approve of dancing, anyway; he would only say that if I wanted to dance I could go to the Masonic Hall, among "the people we knew." It was just my point that I saw altogether too much of the people we knew.
My bedroom was on the ground floor, and as I studied there, I had a stove in it. I used to retire to my room early on Sat.u.r.day night, change my shirt and collar and put on my Sunday coat. I waited until all was quiet and the old people were asleep, then raised my window, climbed out, and went softly through the yard. The first time I deceived my grandparents I felt rather shabby, perhaps even the second time, but I soon ceased to think about it.
The dance at the Firemen"s Hall was the one thing I looked forward to all the week. There I met the same people I used to see at the Vannis" tent. Sometimes there were Bohemians from Wilber, or German boys who came down on the afternoon freight from Bismarck. Tony and Lena and Tiny were always there, and the three Bohemian Marys, and the Danish laundry girls.
The four Danish girls lived with the laundryman and his wife in their house behind the laundry, with a big garden where the clothes were hung out to dry. The laundryman was a kind, wise old fellow, who paid his girls well, looked out for them, and gave them a good home. He told me once that his own daughter died just as she was getting old enough to help her mother, and that he had been "trying to make up for it ever since." On summer afternoons he used to sit for hours on the sidewalk in front of his laundry, his newspaper lying on his knee, watching his girls through the big open window while they ironed and talked in Danish. The clouds of white dust that blew up the street, the gusts of hot wind that withered his vegetable garden, never disturbed his calm. His droll expression seemed to say that he had found the secret of contentment. Morning and evening he drove about in his spring wagon, distributing freshly ironed clothes, and collecting bags of linen that cried out for his suds and sunny drying-lines. His girls never looked so pretty at the dances as they did standing by the ironing-board, or over the tubs, washing the fine pieces, their white arms and throats bare, their cheeks bright as the brightest wild roses, their gold hair moist with the steam or the heat and curling in little damp spirals about their ears. They had not learned much English, and were not so ambitious as Tony or Lena; but they were kind, simple girls and they were always happy. When one danced with them, one smelled their clean, freshly ironed clothes that had been put away with rosemary leaves from Mr. Jensen"s garden.
There were never girls enough to go round at those dances, but everyone wanted a turn with Tony and Lena.
Lena moved without exertion, rather indolently, and her hand often accented the rhythm softly on her partner"s shoulder. She smiled if one spoke to her, but seldom answered. The music seemed to put her into a soft, waking dream, and her violet-coloured eyes looked sleepily and confidingly at one from under her long lashes. When she sighed she exhaled a heavy perfume of sachet powder. To dance "Home, Sweet Home," with Lena was like coming in with the tide. She danced every dance like a waltz, and it was always the same waltz-the waltz of coming home to something, of inevitable, fated return. After a while one got restless under it, as one does under the heat of a soft, sultry summer day.
When you spun out into the floor with Tony, you didn"t return to anything. You set out every time upon a new adventure. I liked to schottische with her; she had so much spring and variety, and was always putting in new steps and slides. She taught me to dance against and around the hard-and-fast beat of the music. If, instead of going to the end of the railroad, old Mr. Shimerda had stayed in New York and picked up a living with his fiddle, how different Antonia"s life might have been!
Antonia often went to the dances with Larry Donovan, a pa.s.senger conductor who was a kind of professional ladies" man, as we said. I remember how admiringly all the boys looked at her the night she first wore her velveteen dress, made like Mrs. Gardener"s black velvet. She was lovely to see, with her eyes shining, and her lips always a little parted when she danced. That constant, dark colour in her cheeks never changed.
One evening when Donovan was out on his run, Antonia came to the hall with Norwegian Anna and her young man, and that night I took her home. When we were in the Cutters" yard, sheltered by the evergreens, I told her she must kiss me good night.
"Why, sure, Jim." A moment later she drew her face away and whispered indignantly, "Why, Jim! You know you ain"t right to kiss me like that. I"ll tell your grandmother on you!"
"Lena Lingard lets me kiss her," I retorted, "and I"m not half as fond of her as I am of you."
"Lena does?" Tony gasped. "If she"s up to any of her nonsense with you, I"ll scratch her eyes out!" She took my arm again and we walked out of the gate and up and down the sidewalk. "Now, don"t you go and be a fool like some of these town boys. You"re not going to sit around here and whittle store-boxes and tell stories all your life. You are going away to school and make something of yourself. I"m just awful proud of you. You won"t go and get mixed up with the Swedes, will you?"
"I don"t care anything about any of them but you," I said. "And you"ll always treat me like a kid, I suppose."
She laughed and threw her arms around me. "I expect I will, but you"re a kid I"m awful fond of, anyhow! You can like me all you want to, but if I see you hanging round with Lena much, I"ll go to your grandmother, as sure as your name"s Jim Burden! Lena"s all right, only-well, you know yourself she"s soft that way. She can"t help it. It"s natural to her."
If she was proud of me, I was so proud of her that I carried my head high as I emerged from the dark cedars and shut the Cutters" gate softly behind me. Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in her; she was, oh, she was still my Antonia! I looked with contempt at the dark, silent little houses about me as I walked home, and thought of the stupid young men who were asleep in some of them. I knew where the real women were, though I was only a boy; and I would not be afraid of them, either!
I hated to enter the still house when I went home from the dances, and it was long before I could get to sleep. Toward morning I used to have pleasant dreams: sometimes Tony and I were out in the country, sliding down straw-stacks as we used to do; climbing up the yellow mountains over and over, and slipping down the smooth sides into soft piles of chaff.
One dream I dreamed a great many times, and it was always the same. I was in a harvest-field full of shocks, and I was lying against one of them. Lena Lingard came across the stubble barefoot, in a short skirt, with a curved reaping-hook in her hand, and she was flushed like the dawn, with a kind of luminous rosiness all about her. She sat down beside me, turned to me with a soft sigh and said, "Now they are all gone, and I can kiss you as much as I like."
I used to wish I could have this flattering dream about Antonia, but I never did.
XIII
I NOTICED ONE AFTERNOON that grandmother had been crying. Her feet seemed to drag as she moved about the house, and I got up from the table where I was studying and went to her, asking if she didn"t feel well, and if I couldn"t help her with her work.
"No, thank you, Jim. I"m troubled, but I guess I"m well enough. Getting a little rusty in the bones, maybe," she added bitterly.
I stood hesitating. "What are you fretting about, grandmother? Has grandfather lost any money?"
"No, it ain"t money. I wish it was. But I"ve heard things. You must"a" known it would come back to me sometime." She dropped into a chair, and, covering her face with her ap.r.o.n, began to cry. "Jim," she said, "I was never one that claimed old folks could bring up their grandchildren. But it came about so; there wasn"t any other way for you, it seemed like."
I put my arms around her. I couldn"t bear to see her cry.
"What is it, grandmother? Is it the Firemen"s dances?"
She nodded.
"I"m sorry I sneaked off like that. But there"s nothing wrong about the dances, and I haven"t done anything wrong. I like all those country girls, and I like to dance with them. That"s all there is to it."
"But it ain"t right to deceive us, son, and it brings blame on us. People say you are growing up to be a bad boy, and that ain"t just to us."
"I don"t care what they say about me, but if it hurts you, that settles it. I won"t go to the Firemen"s Hall again."
I kept my promise, of course, but I found the spring months dull enough. I sat at home with the old people in the evenings now, reading Latin that was not in our high-school course. I had made up my mind to do a lot of college requirement work in the summer, and to enter the freshman cla.s.s at the university without conditions in the fall. I wanted to get away as soon as possible.
Disapprobation hurt me, I found-even that of people whom I did not admire. As the spring came on, I grew more and more lonely, and fell back on the telegrapher and the cigar-maker and his canaries for companionship. I remember I took a melancholy pleasure in hanging a May-basket for Nina Harling that spring. I bought the flowers from an old German woman who always had more window plants than anyone else, and spent an afternoon tr.i.m.m.i.n.g a little workbasket. When dusk came on, and the new moon hung in the sky, I went quietly to the Harlings" front door with my offering, rang the bell, and then ran away as was the custom. Through the willow hedge I could hear Nina"s cries of delight, and I felt comforted.
On those warm, soft spring evenings I often lingered downtown to walk home with Frances, and talked to her about my plans and about the reading I was doing. One evening she said she thought Mrs. Harling was not seriously offended with me.
"Mama is as broad-minded as mothers ever are, I guess. But you know she was hurt about Antonia, and she can"t understand why you like to be with Tiny and Lena better than with the girls of your own set."
"Can you?" I asked bluntly.
Frances laughed. "Yes, I think I can. You knew them in the country, and you like to take sides. In some ways you"re older than boys of your age. It will be all right with mama after you pa.s.s your college examinations and she sees you"re in earnest."
"If you were a boy," I persisted, "you wouldn"t belong to the Owl Club, either. You"d be just like me."
She shook her head. "I would and I wouldn"t. I expect I know the country girls better than you do. You always put a kind of glamour over them. The trouble with you, Jim, is that you"re romantic. Mama"s going to your Commencement. She asked me the other day if I knew what your oration is to be about. She wants you to do well."
I thought my oration very good. It stated with fervour a great many things I had lately discovered. Mrs. Harling came to the Opera House to hear the Commencement exercises, and I looked at her most of the time while I made my speech. Her keen, intelligent eyes never left my face. Afterward she came back to the dressing-room where we stood, with our diplomas in our hands, walked up to me, and said heartily: "You surprised me, Jim. I didn"t believe you could do as well as that. You didn"t get that speech out of books." Among my graduation presents there was a silk umbrella from Mrs. Harling, with my name on the handle.
I walked home from the Opera House alone. As I pa.s.sed the Methodist Church, I saw three white figures ahead of me, pacing up and down under the arching maple trees, where the moonlight filtered through the lush June foliage. They hurried toward me; they were waiting for me-Lena and Tony and Anna Hansen.
"Oh, Jim, it was splendid!" Tony was breathing hard, as she always did when her feelings outran her language. "There ain"t a lawyer in Black Hawk could make a speech like that. I just stopped your grandpa and said so to him. He won"t tell you, but he told us he was awful surprised himself, didn"t he, girls?"
Lena sidled up to me and said teasingly, "What made you so solemn? I thought you were scared. I was sure you"d forget."
Anna spoke wistfully.
"It must make you very happy, Jim, to have fine thoughts like that in your mind all the time, and to have words to put them in. I always wanted to go to school, you know."
"Oh, I just sat there and wished my papa could hear you! Jim"-Antonia took hold of my coat lapels-"there was something in your speech that made me think so about my papa!"
"I thought about your papa when I wrote my speech, Tony," I said. "I dedicated it to him."
She threw her arms around me, and her dear face was all wet with tears.
I stood watching their white dresses glimmer smaller and smaller down the sidewalk as they went away. I have had no other success that pulled at my heartstrings like that one.
XIV
THE DAY AFTER COMMENCEMENT I moved my books and desk upstairs, to an empty room where I should be undisturbed, and I fell to studying in earnest. I worked off a year"s trigonometry that summer, and began Virgil alone. Morning after morning I used to pace up and down my sunny little room, looking off at the distant river bluffs and the roll of the blond pastures between, scanning the "Aeneid"15 aloud and committing long pa.s.sages to memory. Sometimes in the evening Mrs. Harling called to me as I pa.s.sed her gate, and asked me to come in and let her play for me. She was lonely for Charley, she said, and liked to have a boy about. Whenever my grandparents had misgivings, and began to wonder whether I was not too young to go off to college alone, Mrs. Harling took up my cause vigorously. Grandfather had such respect for her judgment that I knew he would not go against her. aloud and committing long pa.s.sages to memory. Sometimes in the evening Mrs. Harling called to me as I pa.s.sed her gate, and asked me to come in and let her play for me. She was lonely for Charley, she said, and liked to have a boy about. Whenever my grandparents had misgivings, and began to wonder whether I was not too young to go off to college alone, Mrs. Harling took up my cause vigorously. Grandfather had such respect for her judgment that I knew he would not go against her.
I had only one holiday that summer. It was in July. I met Antonia downtown on Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and learned that she and Tiny and Lena were going to the river next day with Anna Hansen-the elder was all in bloom now, and Anna wanted to make elderblow wine.
"Anna"s to drive us down in the Marshalls" delivery wagon, and we"ll take a nice lunch and have a picnic. Just us; n.o.body else. Couldn"t you happen along, Jim? It would be like old times."
I considered a moment. "Maybe I can, if I won"t be in the way."
On Sunday morning I rose early and got out of Black Hawk while the dew was still heavy on the long meadow gra.s.ses. It was the high season for summer flowers. The pink bee-bush stood tall along the sandy roadsides, and the cone-flowers and rose mallow grew everywhere. Across the wire fence, in the long gra.s.s, I saw a clump of flaming orange-coloured milkweed, rare in that part of the state. I left the road and went around through a stretch of pasture that was always cropped short in summer, where the gaillardia came up year after year and matted over the ground with the deep, velvety red that is in Bokhara carpets. The country was empty and solitary except for the larks that Sunday morning, and it seemed to lift itself up to me and to come very close.
The river was running strong for midsummer; heavy rains to the west of us had kept it full. I crossed the bridge and went upstream along the wooded sh.o.r.e to a pleasant dressing-room I knew among the dogwood bushes, all overgrown with wild grapevines. I began to undress for a swim. The girls would not be along yet. For the first time it occurred to me that I should be homesick for that river after I left it. The sandbars, with their clean white beaches and their little groves of willows and cottonwood seedlings, were a sort of No Man"s Land, little newly created worlds that belonged to the Black Hawk boys. Charley Harling and I had hunted through these woods, fished from the fallen logs, until I knew every inch of the river sh.o.r.es and had a friendly feeling for every bar and shallow.
After my swim, while I was playing about indolently in the water, I heard the sound of hoofs and wheels on the bridge. I struck downstream and shouted, as the open spring wagon came into view on the middle span. They stopped the horse, and the two girls in the bottom of the cart stood up, steadying themselves by the shoulders of the two in front, so that they could see me better. They were charming up there, huddled together in the cart and peering down at me like curious deer when they come out of the thicket to drink. I found bottom near the bridge and stood up, waving to them.