Plain Mary Smith

Plain Mary Smith.

by Henry Wallace Phillips.

I

"BUT WASN"T IT A GORGEOUS SMASH!"

Old Foster used to say the reason some women married men they entirely should not was because nature tried to even up all round. Very likely that"s it, but it"s a rocky scheme for the Little Results. When my mother married my father, it was the wonder of the neighborhood. I don"t fully understand it to this day, as many things as I"ve seen.

She was a beautiful, tall, kind, proud woman, who walked as if she owned the world and loved it; from her I get my French blood. Was there a dog got his foot run over? Here he comes for mother, hollering and whimpering, showing her the paw and telling her all about it, sure she"d understand. And she did. "Twixt her and the brutes was some kind of sympathy that did away with need of words. Doggy"d look at her with eyebrows up and wigwag with his tail, "Left hind leg very painful. Fix it, but touch lightly, _if_ you please."

Father was a gaunt, big man, black and pale; stormy night to her sunshine. A good man, estimated by what he didn"t do (which is a queer way to figure goodness), but a powerful discourager on the active side.

He believed in h.e.l.l first, last, and all the time; I think he felt some scornful toward the Almighty for such a weak and frivolous inst.i.tution as Heaven. How much of this was due to his own nature, and how much to the crowd he traveled with, I don"t know. He had to have it in him to go with them; still, I like to think they led him off. Left to mother"s influence, he"d have been a different man--more as I remembered him when I was a little chap. This "church" of his was down on everything that had a touch of color, a pleasant sound, or a laugh in it: all such was wickedness. I remember how I got whaled for kissing Mattie. A boy that wouldn"t kiss Mattie if she"d let him should have been trimmed to a peak. However, I got whaled for anything and everything. In this he was supported by his fellow church-members, most of "em high-cheek-boned men with feverish eyes, like himself. "Take heed to the word, Brother Saunders," they"d say: ""Spare the rod and spoil the child."" So father"d refuse to spare the rod, and he"d spoil me for the time being, anyhow.

They weren"t all men of that stamp, though. You can"t get a crowd of fools to hold together unless there"s a rascal to lead them. Anker was the boss of the business--and a proper coyote he was. A little man, him; long-nosed and slit-eyed; whispered, mostly, from behind his hand. He had it in for me, most particular. First place, I nicknamed him "Canker"

and it stuck; next place, one day me and Tom, Mattie"s brother, being then about sixteen apiece, come up from swimming and stopped at Anker"s patch to pull a turnip. While we sat there, cutting off slices and enjoying it, never thinking of having harmed the man, Anker slides out to us, so quiet we couldn"t hear him till he was right there, and calls us a pair of reprobates and thieves. I never liked the sound of that word "thief." He got the turnip. He"d have got worse, too, but Tom slung the sleeve of his shirt around my neck and choked me down.

The turnip sent him to gra.s.s. As he got up, smiling with half his mouth, and wiping turnip off his manly brow, "You"ll regret this, young man,"

says he; "some day you"ll be sorry for this."

Poor Tom had his hands full holding me. "Well, you"d better run along,"

says he; "for if this shirt gives way, _you"ll_ regret it to-day."

Anker was a man to give advice, generally. When he cast an eye on me, foaming and r"aring, he concluded he"d take the same, for once, and ambled out of that.

He kept his word, though. He made me regret it. You"d hardly believe a man near fifty years old would hold a grudge against a sixteen-year-old boy hard enough to lie about him on every occasion, and poison the boy"s father"s mind, would you? That"s the facts. He stirred the old man up by things he "really didn"t like to tell, you know, but felt it his painful duty"--and so forth. Yes, sir; he made me regret it plenty. You might say he broke our home up. And so, if ever I meet that gentleman in the hereafter, above or below, him and me is going to have some kind of a scuffle--but shucks! There"s no use getting excited over it at my age.

The good Lord"s attended to his case all right, without any help from me.

In all kinds of little things mother and father were separated by miles.

Take the case of old Eli Perkins, the tin-peddler, for instance. Mother used to love to buy things from Eli, to hear him bargain and squirm, trying his best to give you a wrong steer, without lying right out.

"Well, now, Mis" Saunders," he"d say, "I ain"t sayin" _myself_ thet thet pan is solerd tin; I"m on"y repeatin" of what I bin tolt. I du" know es it _be_ solerd tin; mebbe not. In thet case, of course, it ain"t wuth nineteen cents, es I was sayin", but about, about ... well, well, now!

I"ll tell you what I"ll do, ma"am. I"ll say fourteen cents and a few of them Baldwins to take the taste out "n my mouth--can"t do no fairer than thet now, kin I? Ya.s.sam--well, nuthin" more _to_-day? Thankee, ma"am."

And Eli"d drive off, leaving mother and me highly entertained. But father"d scowl when his eye fell on Eli. It seems that the poor old cuss was a child of the devil, because he would take Chief Okochohoggammee"s Celebrated Snaggerroot Indian Bitters for some trouble Eli felt drawing toward him and tried to meet in time. When Eli got an overdose of the chief"s medicine he had one song. Then you heard him warble:

"Retur-n-n-n-i-n" from mar-r-r-ket, Theb.u.t.terneggsallsold, And--will you be so kind, young man, And tie "em up for _ME_?

Yaas I will, yaas I will, w"en we git UPon the hill.

And we joggled erlong tergether singin"

TOORAL-I-YOODLE-I-AAAAAAAAAAAAY!!"

Well, sir, to hear it, and to see Eli, with his head bent back near to break off, his old billy-goat whisker wagging to the tune, was to obtain a pleasant memory. The way that "TOORAL-I-YOODLE-I-AY" come out used to start old Dandy Jim, the horse, on a dead run.

Another offspring of the same split-hoof parent was Bobby Scott, the one-legged sailorman that used to whittle boats for us boys when he was sober, and go home from the tavern Sat.u.r.day nights at the queerest gait you ever saw, playing his accordion and scattering pennies to the kids.

I always liked any kind of music; pennies didn"t come my way so often--how were you going to make me believe Old Bob was a wicked sinner? I didn"t, nor that Eli was neither. I thought a heap of both of "em.

But railroading was what gave me the first wrench from the home tree. It happened one evening I wandered over the hills to the end of the little jerk-line that ran our way, and watched the hostler put the engine in the shed for the night. It was a small tea-pot of an engine that one of our Western "Guls could smear all over the track and never know there"d been an accident, but, man! she looked big to me. And the hostler! Well, I cla.s.sed him with the lad that hooked half-dollars out of the air at the Sunday-school show, and took a rabbit out of Judge Smalley"s hat.

But the hostler was a still more wonderful man. I tried to figure if he"d ever speak to me, and what I should do if he did. Every time I got the ch.o.r.es done early, I skipped it over to the railroad, till finally the hostler he sees a long-legged boy eating him with his eyes, and he says:

"h.e.l.lo, bub!"

I scuffed my feet and said, "Good morning."

The hostler spit careful over the top of the switch and says, with one eye shut, "Like a ride?"

Well!!

Howsomever, it seemed manners to me to refuse all pleasant propositions, so I said "no" and prepared to slide away. But he was a wise man.

"Better come down to the shed," he says. So I climbed aboard with no more talk.

"This is the throttle," says he. "You pull that and she goes: try it."

Notwithstanding I expected that engine to explode and scatter us the minute a strange hand was laid on her, I wrastled my nerve together and moved the lever a tiny bit. "Chow!" says the old engine, "Chow-chow-chow!" and I near had a fit with pride and scaredness. It _is_ a great sensation to hold them big critters under your hand. I never knew an engineer yet that got rid of it entirely.

So there was me, white in the face with grandeur, hogging the engine into the shed. I couldn"t sleep much that night. When I did doze off, it was to travel a great many miles a minute on a road-bed laid flat against the side of a mountain, with an engine that had wash-tubs for drivers, and was run by winding up by a crank, like the old clock in the hall. Lord! how I whizzed around the turns! Grinding away like a lunatic, until the road ended--just ended, that"s all, and off we went into the air. From that on I had business at the railroad every evening I could get off.

I went over to my engine one night. There wasn"t a soul around. My friend was as ingenious a Yank as ever helped make this world a factory.

He"d got up a scheme for a brake, almost the identical thing with the air-brake they use to-day, except Jerry took pressure into his brake-pistons straight from the boiler. He spent every cent he had to get one made and put on his pusher. How he used to explain it to me, and tell me what we"d do when he sold his patent! For he was a great friend of mine, Jerry was, and I knew the workings of that brake as well as he did himself. The reason he wasn"t around was that he"d taken the pusher down the line to show his scheme to some railroad people. So there stood an engine all alone--the one I was used to, I thought--and it occurred to me there"d be no particular harm if I got aboard and moved her up and down the track a foot or two--you see, I"d never had her single-handed.

So I started easy, and reversed her, and played around that way for a while, till naturally I got venturesome. One stunt that Jerry and I loved to try was to check her up short with his patent brake. The poor old pusher never got put to bed without being stood on end a half-dozen times; that suggested to me that I"d slam her down on the shed doors and see how near I could come to them without hitting. I backed "way off, set her on the corner, yanked the throttle, and we boiled for the shed, me as satisfied with myself as could be. I didn"t leave much margin for stopping, so there wasn"t a lot of track left when I reached down for the brake-lever, and found--it wasn"t there! If some day you reach for something and find your right arm"s missing, you"ll know how I felt. In the little bit of time before the smash, there wasn"t a sc.r.a.p of my brain working--and then, Holy Jeeroosalum! How we rammed that shed! The door fell over, cleaning that engine to the boiler; stack, bell, sand-box, and whistle lay in the dust, and all of the cab but where I sat. Quicker"n lightning we bulled through the other end, and the rest of the cab left there. How it come I didn"t get killed, I don"t know--all that remained of the shed was a ruin, and that had a list to port that would have scart a Cape-Horner. I woke up then and threw her over kerbang, but she went into the bunker squirting fire from her drivers. I shut her down, took one despairing look, and says out loud, "I guess I"ll go home."

I felt about as bad as falls to the lot of man at any age. Jerry was sure to get into trouble over it; he"d make a shrewd guess at who did it, whether I told or not, and his confidence in me would be a thing of the past--nothing but black clouds on the sky-line, whilst inside of me some kind of little devil was hollering all the time, "But wasn"t it a gorgeous smash!"

I went home and to bed that night without speaking, resolved to let my misfortunes leak out when they got ready. That"s the kind of resolution I"ve never been able to keep--I"ve got to face a thing, got to get it done with, swallow my medicine, and clean the table for a new deal.

Next morning I told father. You can imagine how easy it was--me stumbling and stuttering while he sat there, still as if he"d been painted for the occasion.

"Have you entirely finished?" says he, when the sound of my words. .h.i.t my ears with such a lonesome feeling that I quit talking.

"Yes, sir," I says, "that"s about all of it."

"Well, William, I see you"re determined to make our name a disgrace through the community," he begins again. That was out of whooping range from the truth. I hadn"t determined to do anything to our name, nor nothing else, when I got aboard that engine. Far from me had it been to determine anything, so I filed a protest.

"Why, father," I says, "it was an accident--it was just as if you"d hopped into a neighbor"s wagon, not noticing the head-stall wasn"t on the horse, and the critter"d run away, and things--" Here again I run down with a buzz. He wasn"t paying the least heed to the sense of what I said. It only interrupted him. He sailed right on, explaining how I was the most undiluted scoundrel of his acquaintance, an all-wool villain of the closest weave, built to hold sin like a Navajo blanket does water.

Now I understand that the old gentleman did think a lot of me, and, of course, wanted me to be as near like him as possible, as representing the highest style of man--it was his disappointment he poured on me, not his judgment. But then, I was sixteen by the clock, and I thought, of all the fool laying-outs I"d heard, that crossed the rope an easy first.

I wanted to respect my father; you can"t guess how much I wanted to, but when he insisted on talking like Eli Perkins"s mule, it simply wasn"t possible. He stood there, black and sullen, and I stood there, red and sullen.

"Get yourself ready to go with me," he says, turns on his heel, and walks to the house, his hands clasped behind his back, and his big head leant forrard,--a fine, powerful chunk of a man, all right. Oh, Lord!

What he could have been if he"d listened to mother instead of Anker!

There wasn"t a man in this county more respected, nor whose word was better thought of on any subject outside of his own family, and that hydrophobia of a doctrine of his. Honest? Why, he was the savings-bank of the place. All the old hayseeds around there turned their surplus in to him to take care of, instead of putting it in a sock,--and I want you to understand that the real old Yankee farmer, with tobacco juice on his whiskers, was a man you"d fool just once in a lifetime, and you"d sit up more"n one night to figure how you got the best of it, then.

Well, down him and me goes to the railroad office, and I have to tell my tale. I begged hard to be allowed to leave Jerry out of it, but no--that wouldn"t do: it would be a lie. I always stood ready to lie to any extent to help a friend. I think that hurt me worse than the rest of it.

After some parleying around the offices, we were shown up into a private room. There sat three men, officers of the company, and Jerry.

My father made few words of his part, simply saying he stood prepared to pay all damages, although he could ill afford it, and that I would tell the story.