Man's Country

Front matter

Man's Country

The story of a great love, of which business was jealous

By Peter Clark MacFarlane Author of "Held to Answer," etc. With illustrations by Charles D. Mitchell

Chapter 1

DID."

"Didn't."

"A wagon without any horse! It rolled right by me—lickety split."

"You're a darn liar!"

Bim! In the thickening dusk of an April night in the middle nineties, on a suburban street of the city of Detroit, two half-grown brothers leaped upon each other and fought, scratching, kicking, pommeling.

"George-e-e-e-ee! . . . Jimmee-e-e--ee! . . . Sup-per-r-r-r."

Borne upon the breath of a mother who was blissfully unaware what emprise engaged her sons at the moment, these words, with affectionate appeal in every syllable, floated out of a small cottage, from the side-door and one front window of which light was streaming.

At the gladsome call the battlers gave off the conflict abruptly and raced each other for the wash-basin which stood on a bench in the lean- to at the back of the house. They were at the age when the call of the stomach claimed precedence over every other demand of lusty nature.

Malachi Judson, head of this house, father of these boys, husband of that slender woman whose tired, proud voice had summoned them to supper, was a hard-working man of stalwart frame, a quick temper, and a slow mind. His face, bearded below the jaw line, was cavernous above, and the responsibilities of life had carved anxious wrinkles deep in his bony brow. With scarce a glimpse at his sons when they sidled, belated and slightly , to the table, Malachi was bowed above his food, eating as a man is entitled to eat who has laid bricks alt day.

When the last morsel of corned beef to which he had served himself so liberally was gone from his plate, Malachi, after an audible and gustatory draught from his tea-cup, straightened himself and gazed about him with an air of renewed interest in the world. For the first time he noticed that the faces of his sons bore fresh scratches, sundry discolorations, and certain swellings of obviously recent origin.

"Fighting again? You two brothers! Hain't you ashamed of yourselves?" demanded Malachi.

"But, Pa!" and Jim, who was the older brother, although but little the larger—a lad with narrow shoulders, thin features, and squirrel teeth—began to make his defense. "George said he saw a wagon out in the road tonight, running along without any horse."

"I did, all right," insisted George, who while younger was the more robust and the more pleasing to look upon had he not just then spoiled the fairness of his countenance by darting daggers of resentment and accusation at his tattling brother. "It nearly run over me."

Malachi Judson's close-set orbs of vision grew stern, and his thin lips tightened. Above all things Malachi hated a liar, and this younger son of his was known to be afflicted with a super-imagination.

"What's that?" he scorned. "A wagon running along without a horse?"

"Yes, sir," replied George, leaning forward, eyes still more aglow, tones frankly excited. "I saw it!"

"You—young—imp!" Malachi denounced, the words catapulting forth with an augmented emphasis on each successive one. "What do you mean—setting there and lying to me?"

"I'm not lying, Papa! Honest, I saw it!" avowed George, eyes literally blazing now, but cheeks blanched and voice manifesting a due and proper sense of alarm at his father's dangerous incredulity.

Malachi's face reddened. "You are, you im- pudent puppy!" he accused and, with a deft swing of his trowel hand, reached across the corner of the table and cuffed young George sharply upon the ear, whereat tears started in the luminous, brown, excited eyes.

"Did, too, see it!" persisted the boy, whimpering. "What you want to hit me for—just because I told you the truth!"

"Oh, Pa!" the mother importuned, eyes full of pain, sitting helpless but lifting appealing hands. "Don't hurt him, Mal!"

"I'm not hurting him, Mary!" protested Malachi, breathing quickly. "I'm learning him not to lie—the darn impudent cub."

Malachi sighed virtuously, took up the evening paper and sank once more into his chair, where he made an honest effort at composing his family and himself once more in peace. But ostentatious sniffings from the lounge made peace not easy to be composed. After enduring for a time, though with irritable twitchings of the shoulders, these unpleasant lachrymose reminders of the scene which had just been enacted, Malachi gave up in disgust. With an angry crackling of his paper he tossed it from him and arose. The charm of a restful evening in his own home, which the day's work had undoubtedly earned him, had been spoiled. With a manner theatrically deliberate and a frown that forbade questioning, he rolled down his sleeves and buttoned them at the wrists; he drew on his coat, picked up his hat, and started for the door.

Yet the parting glance bestowed upon his wife was not ill-natured or unkind. She was merely asked by lifted brows and a facial gesture to comprehend that his own house had been made unbearable to him and that he sought peace where peace could be found—at Kelley's. The front door closed upon him with a snap.

"I did, too, see a wagon without a horse!" blustered the blubbering boy, the minute that snap had echoed into the sitting-room. "I did, too. Give me a licking, will you—and then get me another one from Pa, will you?" he snarled and turned ferociously upon his brother.

"There, there, George," soothed the mother with a caressing hand upon the boy's shoulder. "Don't talk about it any more, that's a good boy. It's too unpleasant. Let's not think about it any more even." Fair-haired and gentle-faced, with large, fond eyes and a patient, wistful mouth, the hurt mother threw an arm about each boy and drew them lovingly to her. "You must have thought you saw it, George, of course, or you wouldn't have said so," she comforted tactfully.

"I know I saw it," declared George and stamped impatiently.

"Darn that boy!" soliloquized Malachi, fum- ing as he strode out of the yard. "I've got to learn him not to lie."

The street whereon his modest home was situated was within the city's limits, but unimproved and little better than a country road. The path to Kelley's being better on the other side of this road, Malachi started to cross it diagonally, picking his way over the spongy, oozy surface. As he angled thus, he became aware of a strange, mechanical rattle and an odd, persistent snorting in the darkness, but as the sounds were unaccompanied by hoof-beats, he judged them to be something far away and was busy with his thoughts till suddenly the strange noises were in his ears and he felt himself assailed from behind—violently, abruptly, undignifiedly—assailed and overturned, so that he went rolling, coasting, and skidding clear to a ditch that would some day be a gutter, while the rattle and the snort passed on, attaching itself to something totally invisible in the inky blackness.

But human voices, high-pitched and soaring distantly above the rattle and the snort, came back out of the void.

"I think we struck something!" shouted one voice.

"Only a chuck-hole. This road is rotten!" volleyed another.

"Gosh darn ye!" bellowed Malachi, furious, from his ditch, his hand closing on mud as he clenched his fist and shook it. "Gosh darn ye! What are ye, anyhow?"

Rising painfully, to the accompaniment of language he would not have wished his sons to hear, with mind engulfed in a fog of mist and amazement, Malachi gave up the intended visit to Kelley's and turned back toward his own house.

"Why, Pa! What's happened to you?" exclaimed Mrs. Judson in astonishment and alarm, as she viewed her husband's rueful countenance and mud-plastered body.

"Fell down!" said Malachi grumpily, and did not meet the gaze of his son, George, when that forgiving youth, all sympathy, rushed to his father's assistance and began currying him with that identical newspaper to whose perusal he had succeeded when the former flung it irately from him. A bathroom being an unknown luxury in the homes of such as Malachi in that period, the kitchen and the kitchen sink were given over to his purpose, while the boys quickened the fire in the cookstove to dry his clothes against the morrow.

Eventually the Judson family went to bed in average good humor with itself. But Malachi had a problem on his mind as he laid his stubbled cheek on the pillow.

"I wonder what the devil hit me?" he kept saying to himself throughout the night, but the night brought no answer.

Meagning, however, was more communicative. At the breakfast table he got his answer. It was while he gulped his coffee and glanced the Free Press through. Upon an inside page his eyes encountered that which made him growl and start.

"Well, I be darned," he muttered with incredulous wonder. "I do be darned."

"What is it, pop?" demanded George pertly. But the father's manner became at once confused and forbidding. He vouchsafed no reply, but folding the paper as for further perusal at noontime, pushed it down into his side coat-pocket.

The day was Saturday.

"Jim, you come with me today," his father directed. "There's a lot of broken scantlings and waste lumber Mulligan said I could have if I'd haul it away. Some of it will be good for kindling, and some for tomato and bean stakes, and some of it for fencing and chicken coops. It'll take you all day to gather it. George, you stay and help your mother."

George could not repress a grin and a gloating wink at his brother. Helping mother was a snap. Jim, on the contrary, would have to put in a day of grinding toil, get splinters in his hands, perhaps a nail in his sensitive flesh, and generally punish his lazy body.

But when Mr. Judson stepped out of his front door, he noted with surprise that the west wind, blowing all night, had dried the street surface completely, and reasoned that if it had dried the street completely, it would have dried the garden tolerably. To make proof of this he thrust a spading fork into the soil and brought up a huge lump of it. "George," he decided, "you spade up the cabbage patch today, and we'll be getting it in shape for the peas and beans."

He said this quite casually, as if spading up the erstwhile cabbage patch did not represent at least three hours of back-breaking toil to a lad of George's size. It was the elder brother who beamed more happily now and the younger whose smile was sickly.

Now it chanced that as Malachi had lifted that single experimental forkful of earth, the folded newspaper fell unnoticed from his pocket and lay amid the damp weeds unregarded.

George spaded one row across with fine vigor, then paused to reflect upon the hardness of toil in general and the magnitude of this task in particular. He decided to divide it into two parts—one hour's work in the morning and two in the afternoon, when he should have grown more accustomed to such herculean labors and when he would naturally be the stronger with increasing age and another meal inside him. He decided further that it would not hurt the ground to dry a little more, and therefore to the morning's portion of the task should be dedicated the last hour before noon.

So blithely he left the fork standing upright in the damp earth and went indoors to help mother. Helping mother consisted in yawning around, offering to do things he knew he could not do, and dawdling lazily through such tasks of sweeping and kitchen-floor scrubbing as were well within his powers. Casually and openly he visited the cooky jar twice, and secretly some half a dozen times more. Then he lay for one hour flat upon his stomach, reading "Golden Days." As the kitchen clock struck eleven, he regarded it malignantly.

"Coises on you!" he muttered in mock tragic humor and dragged himself out into the garden.

Chapter 2

THE sun was shining clear. Some birds were twittering in the plum tree, white with blossoms. Pigeons drummed and cooed in the Flannigan cote, some hundred yards away. The leaves of the maple had enlarged since George was out here two hours before. Everything was astir and a-rustle. The air was warm. The earth was steaming. Seeds were popping in it. Everything—everything seemed imbued with energy save only George Judson.

Lazily he put his hand to the fork, and listlessly he pried its tines to and fro in the soil. He had placed one foot on it to thrust it downward, when his eyes fell upon the folded newspaper and recognized it. He took it up, not so much that he recalled that something in its pages had made his father start and frown, not so much as that unfolding it with delicious deliberation and gazing at each succeeding page long and curiously offered valid excuse for further postponement of entry upon his distasteful task. An illustration, the picture of a cheap-looking wagon, yet with something unmistakably odd about it, had caught his eye, when a sound from the roadside path just over the garden fence drew his attention. He turned and leaned on the fence, transfixed by a vision that was altogether startling.

A rare and glorified equipage, the like of which he had hitherto beheld only in highlycolored picture-books, was coming down the path. A pair of goats, horns polished, fleeces white and immaculate, were drawing a blue wagon, blue as a bluebird's wing, and proudly perched on the little seat, holding silken rope lines in one hand and a tiny whip in the other, sat a young miss of maybe ten years. She wore a red velvet dress, and a red velvet hat shaped like a lampshade. A cascade of golden curls stole out from under the hat and fell away down the little miss's regally upright back.

The goats advanced in leisurely fashion, putting down their feet like sticks, quite after the manner of goats, but daintily as high-bred animals conscious of their estate. The wheels rolled slowly with an aristocratic crunching as they passed over the uneven surfaces of the dirt path. The lady, like a queen in a circus parade—that was the figure that occurred to the boy—gazed proudly around her from side to side. In the course of those regal circlings it was inevitable that her glance should fall upon young George Judson, standing there in the cabbage patch, newspaper fallen from his fingers, leaning on the fence to look at her.

"Hullo, boy!" she smiled, unabashed, serene.

George was petrified. "Hullo!" he said.

And she, having greeted him as a human feature on the landscape, regarded him no further, for when her eyes swept next around the circle of her vision, the cart had moved on so far that he was no longer in range.

Once the spectacle was gone by, George affected to scoff. "Where'd that come from now?" he jested. "Runaway, I'll bet, from some of those big houses down on the avenue. Bet she don't know where she is. Bet she don't know where she's going. Bet they're out looking for her right now's what I bet."

But though his utterances affected scorn, in his heart of hearts George Judson was profoundly touched and softened by the vision of a beauty more tender and appealing than any his gaze had ever rested upon. He felt himself all at once a man and knew that in reality he had looked on really satisfying and enthralling female charm for the first time.

Leaving the paper where it had fallen, George leaned over the fence and marked where the horns of the goats jerked rhythmically up and down, with the red velvet dress stirring gently in the breeze. The queenly poise of the head, with its gradual rotation from side to side, was still the same.

George's mouth was open. Speculative awe held him motionless. His eye never shifted its objective till the last wheel of the blue wagon had disappeared around the corner into that open pasture where the city might be said entirely to cease and the country definitely to begin. Slowly, like one recovering consciousness and memory, the boy turned toward his spade and his newspaper, but before he got to either, a piercing scream had reached his ears—from down the road and round the corner.

George leaped the fence and darted toward the cries. On rounding the corner, a truly piteous spectacle met his alarmed but valorous gaze. Flannigan's brindled goat, the monster! a depraved and bewhiskered old patriarch of no graces and no uses that any one could discover, was attacking the white goats of the little red queen, and with consequences the more disastrous to her majesty because, when a goat attacks, he does not, as the comic supplements portray, double up like a ball of springs and launch himself with lowered head. As a fact of biology, your butting goat elevates himself high upon his hind legs, stiffens himself like a ramrod from horn to heel, then falls like a leaning tower toward the object of his attack, forehead set to smite.

So Flannigan's outlawed billy reared and fell upon the goats of the queen, and so her white steeds reared to meet the attack and fell forward against Flannigan's goat. In consequence the blue wagon of the red queen was going through a series of billowing motions, the front wheels now upon the ground and now in the air, to the necessary disturbance of the peace and dignity of her majesty, who, screaming stridently, but commanding loftily and clinging stoutly, lost her balance just after George rounded the corner, and went rolling backward out upon the dried grass of the pasture.

With true maidenly modesty the little queen thought first of inevitably disarranged skirts and composed them quickly over a pair of legs that appeared to George to be mostly knees, and was sitting up and crying: "Stop him! Stop him! Oh, do please stop him! The horrid, smelly thing!" as her rescuer came dashing up. Gallantry and discretion prompted him to assist the little lady to her feet lest she be trampled upon, but embarrassment and his natural passion for a fight led him to leave majesty to help itself up, and to charge between the battling and embattled animals.

"Ouch!" grunted George. "Dad burn you! Plague take you! Butt me, will you?" and he tried to kick in three directions at once, with only two feet to kick with, one of which must necessarily be upon the ground at least a portion of the time.

"Oo! Oo!" screamed the little queen, wringing her hands.

George's squirming hand now came in contact with the goat whip upon which its owner in her excitement had lost her grip. Using the handle for a weapon of offense, the boy fell upon Flannigan's goat, selecting the nose as the principal point of attack, and speedily put the old rascal in retreat. But he retired stubbornly and turned at a distance of a dozen paces, stamping, flaunting his whiskers, and shaking his horns menacingly.

"Oh! Oh! You have saved me!" cried the little queen. "Thank you! Thank you!" And with admirable resumption of composure, she came right up and took him by the hand, just as a grown-up lady might have done.

George knew this was very queenly and elegant, yet it embarrassed him. He did not know how to respond in kind. He felt all at once that his own social training must have been highly deficient, since it had not equipped him for an emergency like this. "Your britchin' is busted!" he announced concernedly.

"Is it?" gasped the little queen and clawed at herself in dismay. "Why, no,—no, there's nothing broken, I think."

But George was bending over the traces. "Stand still, will you?" he half-ordered and half-entreated—then, holding the still perturbed steeds with one hand, he produced from pocket after pocket, by various physical contortions, an amazing quantity of material—bits of string, bits of wire, a leather shoelace, a one-bladed knife, and some small nails. With these he managed temporary repairs upon the broken breeching, while the little queen gazed with an absorbed expression and tears drying upon her face. She accepted all this service quite as if she were well accustomed to being waited on.

"You're an awfully nice boy," she decided, climbing into the blue wagon and taking the reins, while her radiant eyes looked up so frankly direct into George's that the youngster blushed.

"I'll keep this old skeezicks away from you," he assured, and menaced the brindled creature which waited vindictively in the offing.

"You came from that way," reminded George. "You want to go home, don't you?"

She turned her glorious equipage about, the team being entirely tractable once more till Flannigan's goat began to follow, uttering malicious bleats, when they showed signs of stampede. Thereat the velvet queen manifested alarm, and George, to reassure her, acted as escort clear past the cabbage patch and away down to Kelley's corner, the Flannigan animal obstinately following.

"Now you can go on," said George. "I'll drive old Bill clear back home and put him in the pen."

But when the little girl gazed down the vast length of Jefferson Avenue and considered its huge open spaces that by and by lost themselves in a distance in which horses and wagons and carriages seemed all scrambled up together, a fearsomeness possessed her small soul, and her blue eyes, full of wistful appeal, wavered a moment, then fixed themselves upon the face of the boy.

"I—I'm afraid to go home, I guess," she confessed, as if disappointed in herself. "I've had such a scare, you know. I probably must be nervous."

As if suddenly bereft and alone in the world, she thrust out one of the milk-white hands and took hold of George's wrist—a grasp that was timid and yet confiding—a touch that was altogether different from that sturdy clasp of gratitude with which she had taken his hand before.

Inwardly, in the boy soul of him, George Judson jumped as if a hot iron had been laid upon him, but in his flesh he did not move nor start. He only felt that warm, soft touch like velvet, and it melted every purpose in his breast to one purpose—the purpose to guard the little queen from harm—to do more, to be henceforth and forever in all things her obedient slave.

"I'll go home with you!" he announced stoutly, disregarding loftily unpleasant memories of an unspaded cabbage patch.

"Oo, that will be lovely—just like a prince in a fairy-tale," cried the little girl, clapping her hands. "You rescue me and then you escort me home."

She looked up at him with the most amazing, sun-like radiance in those jeweled eyes of hers, and somehow all the shyness went out of George. Proud as a knight with his lady, he walked along by her side. Imagination played; possibilities dawned; he was ostentatiously attentive. He must frequently stoop to examine the harness, and he must keep his glance skirting wide horizons for possible massing attacks of enemies—Indians or cannibals or whole herds of goats or lions or elephants or whatever danger it was that might threaten this beauteous young lady who put herself so trustfully under his protection.

From time to time her coquettish glance searched the boy's face from under coy lashes, and at intervals her warmest, most confiding smile was vouchsafed, thrilling him to the depths. But besides being a confiding smile it was a tantalizing, bantering smile. George Judson's was a bold nature. He would not be bantered. And he had made up his mind. Why should he not speak it?

"Some day I'll marry you," he announced frankly.

"You?" The little red queen drew herself up, yet she was flattered at the compliment. She gave him, after the first look of hauteur, an even more confiding smile. "I like you, boy, you're awfully nice," and she reached out and took his hand once more as sympathetically breaking the force of what she had to communicate. "But—the man who marries girls like me must be rich. Vurry—vurry rich—or they must do something wonderful, boy—something that makes everybody talk about them. Then we marry them."

"I'm going to be rich and do something wonderful too," declared George Judson with a set of his sturdy shoulders. He had made up his mind to that at once.

For some time the houses past which the goat cart trundled had been getting bigger, and now there appeared in the near distance one red stone house which had a whole quarter of a block to itself. It was huge and solid looking, with a white portico in front and wide lawns unfenced and noble trees all around.

"That's where I live—there!" she announced impressively.

"Gosh!" breathed George, deeply awed. "It's a grand home, isn't it?"

But, at the moment, this home showed signs of being much less at ease within itself than its heavy and self-satisfied architecture might suggest. The vast front door was open. A baldish man, wearing a solemn coat and a worried expression, and a young woman with a lace cap on her head stood out under the portico, staring up and down the four streets, while before a palatial stable at one side two men hurriedly backed horses into a surrey. For a full minute the little queen appeared to enjoy with a certain approving complacency all these signs of stir and anxiety. And then:

"I guess you better go back now, boy," she suggested, still gazing forward with an abstracted air. "They may be's turbed about me being gone so long. They might blame you."

"Let 'em!" George challenged, and would have stood forth boldly.

The blue eyes gave him a grateful look, but the queenly head was shaken in a decisive negative. "I couldn't let you," she whispered with a smile of delightful intimacy, "but I like you, and I'll come driving out your way again sometime. Thank you ever and ever so much. You're a real nice boy—really."

The goats, still putting their feet down like sticks, rolled the little blue wagon forward into the purview of the maid and the butler on the porch. There were immediate manifestations. The butler shouted something, and both he and the maid rushed forward. The grooms stood gazing, then turned the horses back toward their stalls. At the same time a woman bounded down the front steps, raced across the lawn, and seized upon the driver of the goats, kissing her frantically. But the little queen, after enduring a moment in the maternal embrace, struggled free, and from the first step leading upward to the grand portico turned loyal eyes back to the land of adventure whence she had come and toward him who had adventured with her. Sighting that face peering from behind the tree, she lifted an arm high, then dipped the four fingers of its hand up and down rapidly in comradely farewell.

Chapter 3

IT did not matter to George that the Goat Girl had not asked his name. It mattered only that he had seen a great vision and by it been lifted at least one whole cubit toward manhood's fullest stature. It was a long two miles back to the cabbage patch, but miles had now no power to weary him. Big and purposeful, he strode along. Tardy though he was, recreant though he had been, he did not sidle guilty-faced into the kitchen, but stalked in boldly and sat down to his belated dinner. When his mother chided him, he bore it silently, containing himself with noble patience.

Only one thing bade speculation pause. The Goat Girl had warned he must be rich. His pride approved of that as well. It demanded that he must be upon the same plane with her before he could offer himself; and he must do something worth while besides. That was again the instinct of his pride—always to heap the measure full and overflowing. But how was he to get rich as quickly almost as manhood should be reached, for his was an ardent love that would brook no long delay?

The spading fork was in his hands once more as he asked himself this question, but there was the paper under foot to remind him of an unfulfilled duty toward the world's news. Turning the pages he came upon that which had caught his eyes before—nothing more, after all, than a cut of a light spring wagon. But the odd look about it. Why, it had neither shafts, nor tongue, nor whiffletrees, and underneath its body, but atop the running gear, was a junk-like collection of coils and goitres, wens and tuberosities, wires and shafts, chains, gears, and cogs, suggesting some kind of engine. Beneath the cut was the legend, "Horseless Carriage."

George got it on the instant. "A wagon without a horse," he cried aloud. "That's what I said. That's what I said. Ma! Ma! A wagon without a horse!"

He went dashing into the house to thrust the picture under his mother's eyes and to read over her shoulder:

"Our fellow citizen, Charles B. King, has been one of the first men in America to build a gasoline-propelled vehicle, and the very first to operate one on the streets of Detroit. In the past two weeks several runs of the new vehicle have been made on suburban roads, mostly in the night-time to escape the eyes of the curious."

"Now, will you believe me?" exulted the boy, capering before his mother.

"Sakes alive!" declared Mrs. Judson. "What won't they do next?"