Stockman stories

CHAPTER I. “What’s the matter with the kid?”

Dick Sloan had just come from town and stood lounging against the doorway of the hot kitchen. He looked curiously into the next room, where his little sister was sobbing her heart out on a weather-beaten old double lounge. She had thrown herself there in a passion of tears after watching a young cow led off at the hands of a neighbor.

“Oh, she’s crying because pa sold the red heifer he was going to give her. You know she’s always claimed it,” explained Mrs. Sloan. She was a spiritless woman with stooping shoulders and an apologetic air. People said Mrs. Sloan did not know her soul was her own. If she did she never asserted it — or anything else, in fact.

“Never mind, honey, don’t cry!” coaxed her mother, sympathetic tears filling her own faded eyes — it is the shame of some parents that they never enter into their children’s sorrows; it is the distraction of some others that they enter into them all, but helplessly — “Maybe pa’ll give you another one sometime.”

“I don’t want him to give me another one if he is going to take it back! He’s an Indian giver!” snapped Mamie.

A girl at the ironing-table set down her iron with a thump. Her shoulders were straight enough and her soul undoubtedly her own.

“He’ll take it back all right enough, Marne. You can depend upon that!” There was a bright red spot on her cheek and a scornful curve about her lips. “Giving a calf to a girl on this place means that it is hers till there is a market for it. Then it’s pa’s.”

“Maggie!” remonstrated her mother with feeble, perfunctory loyalty, “ain’t you ashamed to talk so about pa!”

The girl looked up defiantly from the garment she w'as ironing. She had but two irons and each piece had to be pressed long and hard. Her nerves were worn out.

“No,” she said stoutly, “I’m not ashamed. It’s the truth and you all know it. A colt or a calf or a pig given to one of the boys is his. The increase is his if he keeps it, the money is his if he sells it. But who ever heard of a girl in this family getting anything out of her livestock but the privilege of claiming it and naming it and loving it till her heart nearly breaks when she has to give it up? And she always does have to give it up. Poor little Marne is just finding that out. I’ve known it many a long year, ever since my cow was sold — my little Bossy that I thought was my own. I had seen my iamb and my pig and my colt go, but I did think I could keep the cow. Poor Marne!”

* "Is that the reason you wouldn’t have old Blaze’s calf •when pa gave it to you?” asked Dick curiously.

“Yes, it is. Since then I’ve stuck to kittens. They are the safest to put your affections on. Calves and colts and pigs for boys, but rag babies and cats for girls!” There was a bitter recklessness in her tone.

“That ain’t because pa don't think as much of you girls as he does of the boys, honey. It is just because the boys have to get a start.”

There was a sound of a creaking board outside but they did not hear it.

“No,” said her daughter quietly, “it is because girls and their rights and their wants are not worth considering. I don’t suppose pa has ever given the matter a moment’s thought. Girls don’t count on a farm — nor women, either, for that matter. Everything goes the men’s way.”

“Of course they have the living to make — ”

“I suppose we don’t help to make the living! They couldn’t do much without something to eat, I guess. And somebody has to get it — and to wash — and iron — and churn — and sweep and clean — and sew — and darn — ”

“But that doesn’t bring in money, after all.”

“It keeps money from going out, which is about the same thing. And our doing it keeps us from doing something that would bring in money. That’s something to be remembered. Ethel says I could make lots of money in the city.”

“How?” asked Dick with uncomfortable directness.

“Plenty of ways.” Ethel was their summer visitor. She had been explicit as to the great amount of money to be made in Chicago, but vague as to how. Margaret had been discontented ever since her visit.

“Richard, help me off with this ham, please.” Mrs. Sloan hated argument. “My back is pretty bad today. The washing yesterday most finished me.”

Margaret jabbed the iron viciously into the gathers of the skirt she was ironing.

“If we had had that washing-machine that pa thinks we don’t need your back would have been all right,” she said angrily. “He said when I begged him to buy it that he had no money to throw away on such foolishness. His mother raised ten children without a washing-machine and what was good enough for her would do for us! His mother! They always go back to their mothers — never to their fathers! I wanted to tell him that his father probably raised his ten children on a plow and a scythe, but his father’s son has to have cultivators and reapers and mowers and every modern convenience. But when we want a washing-machine or a wringer — my! How poor pa gets.”

“Margaret!” expostulated her mother.

“I don’t care, mother. I’m going to say it! It’s in me and it might as well come out! Everything is done on this place for the convenience of the men and nothing for the women! We work as hard as they do. Why shouldn’t we have something to work with? It’s not fair!”

“Pa does the best he can, honey. Pie was real good to get us that sewing machine. You mustn't forget that.”

“I’m not likely to forget it,” said Margaret, drily, “I’m reminded of it every time we want anything else. And I never have seen why we should be so overcome with gratitude for the machine, anyway. We do all the family sewing. We had to have something to do it with. I never have seen Dick or Cy falling over himself with thankfulness to pa for being so good as to get a plow or a hoe when there’s one needed. It is just taken as a matter of course that if they need farm implements they will get them. But you know how we have to ding and ding at pa to get anything for the house.”

“It is hard,” admitted Mrs. Sloan, stooping to try the cracked oven to see if it had reached the baking point. She had had to get up an hour earlier every morning for ten years on account of that crack.

“We’ve needed a new cook-stove for a good many years — ”

“We’ll never get it as long as this one has a leg. But if it was a piece of machinery they wanted they would find the money some way to buy it. It just makes me hot to see all the things the men have to work with and then look at this kitchen!”

It was bare enough, certainly — a cracked stove, a rickety drawerless table, and a tin “safe” that did duty as a cupboard and a refrigerator — being supplemented in this latter particular by the well, inside of which hung sundry buckets of milk at the imminent risk of the drinking water. Margaret was ironing a dress skirt at one end of the table while her mother made up biscuits on the other. Mr. Sloan had been promising them an ironing board ever since Margaret could remember, but he had never got it.

The girl put down her iron and tried the other.

“Cold!” She rolled up the half-ironed garment and threw It into the basket. “If there’s anything on earth more exasperating than to try to iron with two irons I don’t know what it is! I have tried for six years to get one more iron — just one — but pa never has enough money to get it. If I had three I could have finished by noon, and had time to cool the house off, and change my dress like white folks. But here it is nearly supper time and the ironingstill dragging on, and I hot and tired — ”

“And cross,” suggested Dick, with opportune tact.

“Yes! And glad I can get cross! Anybody that wouldn’t hasn’t got the spirit of a mouse!”

“Did you get anything in town, Richard?” asked Mrs. Sloan, with the manifest intention of changing the subject.

“Got that trunk I’ve been thinking about so long and a suit of clothes.”

“Dick Sloan!” His sister faced him with blazing eyes: “Have you got a new suit?”

“I have that,” he replied, “and it’s a dandy.”

“Did pa give you the money?”

“It came out of what he allowed me for the summer’s work.”

It was the last straw and the camel’s back was very weak.

“And I’ve worked like a dog all summer, and pa said he couldn’t spare me three dollars to get a jacket with.” The angry tears came to her eyes. “It’s a shame! That’s what it is! If I didn’t have to stay here and work in this kitchen I could go where I could earn something for myself. I’ve a great mind to do it anyway! I think it is mean the way pa does about my clothes. I have to beg for every rag I put on!”

“Margaret! Margaret!”

There was no opportunity for a reply. The door was darkened by an angry man. Mr. Sloan had come from the sale of the cow with the agreeable consciousness of having made a good bargain. He told himself that he was a pretty good manager, anyway. He had been arrested on the porch by Margaret’s first words. He had heard them all. For once the glass had been held up squarely before him. But he did not recognize the picture therein revealed as his own. This was a creature of Margaret’s distorted fancy. And it angered him that his own daughter should sit in judgment upon him and his dealings with his family. He considered himself a generous man — “a good provider, a kind father, and an indulgent husband,” as they say in obituaries. As to his being a just one — well, he had not thought much about that.

Mr. Sloan’s temper was a slow fuse, but the explosive was reached with his daughter’s threat of leaving home.

The three looked up at his entrance. Mrs. Sloan cowered behind Margaret, who stood her ground. Mamie forgot her grief in terror of the impending storm.

“So you think you’re put upon, do you? And abused? And don’t get your rights?” He spoke slowly and intensely. “And you think you can do better for yourself than your father has done for you all these years? Well! You can try it! I guess we can get along full as well without you as you can without us. There will be one less mouth to fill anyway.”

Mrs. Sloan caught him by the arm, bold for once in the presence of danger to her offspring.

“Oh, pa! pa! don’t!” she begged.

He shook her off. He was furious at her interference.

“I mean it!” he thundered. “She can go — the sooner the better! I don’t want any whining woman around me!”

CHAPTER II. Out of the Home Nest

Margaret Sloan stood for a moment as one stunned. She had been thrust out! The opportunity she had longed for had come at last, but now that she grasped it, like many another coveted rose, the thorns hurt her.

She caught her breath sharply. The humiliation of it stung her to the quick. But the stubbornness that was a part of her father’s nature had come down to her by ordinary inheritance. She was his own child — she had the very traits that he had given her — a thing fathers do not always consider.

She reached for the iron mechanically. She did not notice whether it was hot or cold.

“I will go as soon as possible, father,” she said with a tightening of the throat. “I am sorry I have been a burden to you. I didn’t know before that I was or I should have gone sooner.”

Her lips trembled a little in spite of herself, but she shut them tight and held back her tears.

He might have told her truthfully that she was not a burden to him, that she was a dear good child and had always been. How much trouble it would have saved them all if he had! But the demon of obstinacy possessed him. Should he, her father, give up to a slip of a girl who was so ungrateful for all that had been done for her? He steeled his heart against her. Let her go and find out for herself when she was well off.

He went heavily into the dining-room and shut the door. For a few moments nothing was said. Then Dick got up and muttered something about going for wood, a thing he was not much given to doing, but in this crisis he felt the quickening conscience that comes with the presence of death or some great calamity. Mamie saw Cy coming and sped to tell him the dire news — Margaret was going away!

Mrs. Sloan lifted a distressed face to her daughter’s.

“Honey,” she began —

Margaret put up her hand. “Don’t say anything to me now, mother. I’ve got to wait till after supper.” She knew that in that talk there would be a break-down.

Cy looked curiously at her when he came in, but a look from his mother restrained the words that were on his lips. Even Mamie was under the general constraint.

c

It was a silent meal that they sat down to. They could think of nothing to say. Dick thought of his new suit, but clearly that wouldn't do. Mrs. Sloan’s mind reverted to the recent sale, but that too was thin ice, so the meal was eaten in silence.

Even Mr. Sloan’s satisfaction in his trade was affected by the general depression. He called Mamie to him after supper and took her on his knee. Nothing had been said about the cow but he knew it stood between them. And somehow he wanted to be at peace with Mamie.

“Pa’s going to give you a Jersey calf instead of a heifer — that will be nice, won’t it?”

Mamie’s lips quivered. “I don’t believe I’ll take another calf,” she said with downcast eyes.

Her father looked at her with lowering brow. “Ah! you’ve got it too, have you?” He laughed a little unpleasantly. “All right. You needn’t take the calf if you don’t want to.”

The child waited a moment and then slid gently from his knee. He felt distinctly repelled. Mamie had taken sides with Margaret. He had lost both his daughters.

It was not until Margaret was in bed, with Mamie asleep beside her, that Mrs. Sloan had her talk. She came into the moonlighted room, as the girl knew she would, and sat down on the side of the bed.

“Margaret, child,” she said. Then they wept it out in each other’s arms. The cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches sometimes clog up the way to paternal sympathy, but mothers’ hearts, thank God, are usually where their children can get at them.

They talked it all over. Mrs. Sloan, divided between wifely allegiance and motherly tenderness, tried to make smooth the rough places. It could not be done. A father’s harsh words cannot be taken back by a pitiful mother. Truly “Words are wonderful things;

They are sweet like the bees’ own honey,

Like the bees they have terrible stings.”

With the strange perversity of wounded pride which usually seizes on the one untrue thing that is said — the one thing that could be so easily recalled — Margaret held in her memory that stinging sentence, “There will be one less mouth to fill.” Her father felt her to be a burden! He grudged her the food she ate! And she had never suspected it.

Why will people say things they do not mean, when they are angry? And why, when they know them to be untrue, wi’l they not hasten to take them back? Alas! alas! why?

“But, child, where will you go?”

It was the question that Mrs. Sloan had been asking herself in agonizing fear. The world seems such a confusing place to a woman whose horizon has been bounded by the cornfield, the store and the country church.

Margaret Sloan had much of her father’s resolution. Even in this brief time she had thought out her plan. After what had passed, staying at home was not to be thought of. Perhaps it was a good thing, hard as it was, that this had come. She would never have had the courage or the opportunity to try her wings, otherwise. After that first burst of tears on her mother’s breast and the comfort of her sympathy her spirits began to rise. As she detailed her plan she felt surer of herself and it.

She would go to Ethel’s first. Ethel had often urged her to come to the city to visit them and so had her mother, not quite so insistently, perhaps, but cordially to say the least. Once in the city, with time to look around and a pleasant safe home to stay in till she could find something to do, she felt sure of success. Ethel had said there were so many opportunities in the city.

They would probably want her to board with them after she found work. She would insist upon paying board no matter what they said. Margaret was already beginning to build air castles. It would certainly be pleasant to step right into Ethel’s social circle. What young girl would not think with delight of a winter in the city?

“I don’t know about your staying so very long at Mrs. Montressor’s,” said Mrs. Sloan with some hesitation.

“Why, mother, they come here and stay weeks and weeks at a time, and we’ve never been there.”

“I know — but in the city it’s different. It isn’t always convenient to have company.”

“It isn’t always convenient in the country. Sometimes it is very inconvenient. The last time Mrs. Montressor and Ethel were here we were in the midst of harvest and it was very inconvenient to have company. But we never let them know it. Besides, they’ve told me to come at any time that suited me. Of course they wouldn’t say it unless they meant it.”

“N-o, I guess not,” said Mrs. Sloan doubtfully. She was easily overborne.

“I’m more disturbed about money than I am about my welcome,” said Margaret. “I’ve got to have enough to get my ticket and have a little left for car fares even if I don’t get anything new, and my old jacket really — ”

“Of course you’ll have to have money!” Her mother spoke with unwonted spirit. “I’ll speak to pa myself.” She did before she slept — with a plainness of speech and directness of aim that took that good man’s breath away. Just what passed in that conjugal interview will never be known, for the next morning Mrs. Sloan was the same meek little woman as of old, but that night she was a lioness robbed of her young. The result of it was that Mr. Sloan put two ten-dollar bills into Margaret’s hands the morning she was to go.

“I guess this won’t be more than you’ll need,” he said, with the half-formed notion of telling her to send to him for more if she needed it

Margaret took his hesitation for regret at giving up the money.

“If it is I’ll send the rest back,” she said quickly, her color rising.

The two days that followed that night’s talk were busy ones. There was an excursion going to Chicago on Friday, the last of the season. She must be sure to catch that. There was no time to write to Ethel and the Sloans never telegraphed except in case of death.

“I’ll get along all right,” said Margaret. “I have Ethel’s address, and I know they take a Madison street car. I’ll ask the conductor where to get off.”

“You’d better ask some of the passengers,” advised her mother uneasily, with that dread of officials which seems inherent in the non-traveling public, “the conductor most likely w ill take you out of the neighborhood. They say they are always trying to take people wrong. I’d ask some good motherly looking woman!”

It was well for them both that the time was fully occupied. As Margaret gathered together her modest wardrobe she began to have doubts as to whether it would be equal to the demands upon it in Ethel’s home. Ethel always dressed well. Of course she could buy things when she got work — but suppose she couldn’t get work. Her courage, which had been strong as long as her resentment lasted, began to dribble away. Mrs. Sloan’s had never risen. She was full of gloomy forebodings of what might befall Margaret, and it took all the girl’s will-power to keep up a brave front.

v 9j Somehow these common everyday things around her seemed so much dearer to her now that she was giving them up. She took . v qttr^Piti,tious journeys to the pig pen and cow lot to say goodbye to her dumb family.

.j 9Yir 4ftfl ho^Vj would her mother — her dear patient mother — get along iW^tbP^tif^^ ^^lp? Then her father’s words came back to her — “I guqss ^eilJnget alqng full as well without you as you will without us,” and she shut her teeth together. If she didn’t get along with- .aftkithqifl! Rftho^y) (should;, ever know it!

cno'j ’^ew, fle^ for her to go there was an unwonted j#Vpju$W$u$0egg ^j^^iigaffstj’SjjCjOmfort. Never in her life had she had .^jnppy things :<Jqn^.f(qr fcqrt. If.^he had only known all this time tl}fct tt^y ^ecjxs#! jppphj^or Strange how we wait for death

Dick in a spasm of generosity, followed, it must be admitted.

by a sub-spasm of regret, took his new suit from his shining zinc trunk and insisted that Margaret should take that instead of her old one that had been her mother’s. Cy motioned her around the house and when they were safely out of sight took from his pocket three silver dollars and put them into her hand.

“Here, Mag, I want you to get you a jacket with this. And get a good one while you are about it.’’ Three dollars looked large to Cy as it did to Margaret.

“And say, Mag,” Cy tried to look unconscious and failed most signally, “I told Jeff Heminway about your going, and he said that he was going to town tomorrow and he’d drive by and take you in his buggy — said he’d save us the trouble of hitching up the wagon.” Cy grinned. “1 told him we was awful busy and seeing as he was going anyway I guessed we’d take him up.”

Margaret’s color had risen at the mention of Jeff Heminway’s name. She had thought she must go without seeing him.

“Cy,” she said earnestly, “you didn’t tell him about pa and all that — ”

“You bet I didn’t! I told him you was about dead to get a squint at city folks and learn city ways and we’d about made up our minds that we’d have to let you go.”

Margaret drew a relieved breath. Anything was better than that Jeff should know the humiliating truth.

In the tray of the trunk, securely wrapped in many papers, Mrs. Sloan had placed a loaf of soft gingerbread.

“This is for Mrs. Montressor,” she explained. “She always set such store by my hot gingerbread.”

Secretly it was a relief to Mr. Sloan when it was announced that Jeff was coming by for Margaret. He had dreaded that ride with his daughter, and yet he would not allow himself to shirk it by sending one of the boys.

Nobody was very hungry for dinner and Jeff came before it was over.

“We haven’t any too much time,” he called, and the little zinc trunk was hurriedly brought down and put in the back of the buggy. The goodbyes were soon said. Mrs. Sloan retreated into the folds of her cook apron and Mamie into her mother’s gathers.

“Goodbye, pa.” She knew Jeff’s eyes were upon her, she could feel it.

Mr. Sloan stooped and kissed her in his clumsy way. It was in his heart to tell her to come home when her visit was over, her place was always ready for her — but Jeff hurried her into the buggy and the words were unsaid. And what is unsaid may as well be unthought so far as the other person is concerned.

Mamie ran ahead to open the big gate. She had something hidden in her apron. It was a little basket. She thrust it into Margaret’s hands as the horse started. Margaret opened the lid.

There lay a little white kitten with a blue ribbon around its neck. Tied to this was a card on which Mamie had written with labor and tears, “For you to love, Mame.”

And Margaret’s tears could no longer be kept back.

That ride was a disappointment to them both.

There was time to say so much and so little was said. Jeff Heminway was a sensible, thrifty farmer lad, who in his heart hoped that he would some day have Margaret in his own home. He had done well with his crop this year and was planning to put up a modest little house before long and ask her to share it with him. This sudden news about her going to the city to “learn city ways” had put an abrupt stop to his dreams. If she had that in her head it was hardly worth while for him to say anything. He felt disappointed in her too. A girl who would go away and leave her mother when she so needed her was hardly the one he would want to tie to, he told himself. And now he grew taciturn.

Margaret was quick to feel the chill from this shadow. But the lower her spirits sank the gayer grew her laugh. She talked fast and animatedly about the future before her. “He shall never know,” she thought with an inward sob.

And so the barriers were built up by their own hands.

“I can’t take this thing with me,” said Margaret, half laughing, half crying, as she took up the kitten. They had reached the station.

Jeff took the basket and put it under the seat. “I’ll keep it,” he said. A vision rose before him of a cozy kitchen, a purring cat, and a face that looked like Margaret’s. Just a moment and it was gone.

He told her goodbye in the most matter-of-fact way. He had just come to save her father a trip, that was all!

“All aboard!” The bell rang, the familiar features of Polk Summit were slowly receding. Margaret looked back through a mist of tears. She could just see Jeff turning from her. Now he was gone. She gave a sob. She was out in the world! the wide, wide world!

CHAPTER III. Society at Second Hand

It was not a very long distance in miles from Polk Summit to Chicago. Margaret began to have a terrified consciousness that she was in the suburbs long before she wanted to be. She had intended to think things out well on the journey. But it seemed to her that she had barely had time to plan how self-possessed she would be before the ordeal was upon her.

It began with the transfer man.

“Baggage? baggage?” he said, looking from one side to the other. “Baggage delivered to any part of the city. Baggage, lady?”

She watched him with fascinated interest mixed with dread and indecision. She saw women — and men too — give up their checks to him with the utmost unconcern, some of them even with a look of relief. She got hers out. Others — usually men, Margaret noticed — would let him go by with a shake of the head. Then she would think, “Now that man won’t trust him,” and she would put her check back. Jeff had told her not to give it up until she got to the depot. Still the others were doing it — and what would she do with her trunk when she got there?

The man was coming nearer; she must decide. She leaned over and spoke timidly to a woman across the aisle, remembering her mother’s caution.

“Would you dare to give up your check to that man if you were me?” she asked.

“Why certainly! It’s Parmelee’s Transfer Co. It is perfectly reliable. You do just what he tells you.”

Margaret drew a relieved breath, and handed over her check A half dollar seemed a great deal to pay. She thought once of saying it was a small trunk and wouldn’t he take a quarter, but he was so business-like that she concluded not to.

She was at the door with her valise long before the train pulled into the station. There were others there too — women with bird cages and bouquets of garden flowers in their hands, and men with large slick valises, and a perturbed air. The old travelers kept their seats and avoided the rush.