RALPH AND I GO BLACKBERRYING
“Chillen’s, dere’s lots ob blackberries on de hill above de w’eat fiel’,” Joe stopped to remark, as he was about starting for the blacksmith shop with the reaper, the next morning.
“They’ll have to stay there as far as I’m concerned,” returned Jessie, who was busily engaged in sewing up the gaping rents in Mr. Horton’s coat; “I haven’t time to gather them.”
“Me do det ’em!” exclaimed Ralph, starting up from the floor, where he had been vainly trying to fasten some paper boots on Guard’s paws. Guard did not object, but, when a boot was, after much trouble, partially secured, he took it in his mouth and calmly pulled it off. “Me do dit ’ackburries yite now,” reiterated Ralph.
“No,” said Jessie, “Ralphie can’t go.”
Thus summarily enjoined, Ralph began to roar, as a matter of course. Joe, who had already started to climb into the reaper seat, came back and looked in at the door, the better to look reproachfully at us.
“I doan like dish yer sperrit ob money-gettin’,” he declared, frowning. “Denyin’ a little chile all his innercent pleasures fo’ de sake ob scrapin’ a few censes togedder!” he exclaimed severely.
Jessie laughed, with a suspicious little catch in her voice; it was hard to be misunderstood, if only by blundering, faithful old Joe. “I really must not spare time to go with him, Joe,” she said in self-defense, “but perhaps Leslie had better go. It will do you good, dear,” she added, mindful of my inexplicable paleness on the preceding day.
“I don’t need being done good to, Jessie, but evidently Ralph does, so I’ll take him out,” I said, while old Joe nodded approvingly.
“Dat’s right; dat’s right, honey, chile,” he declared, and again betook himself to the waiting team and reaper. Freed from the danger of being compelled to wear boots, Guard had gone outside and placed himself by the doorstep, where he was, to all appearances, peacefully dozing when Joe started. But, before the team had turned the shoulder of the nearest hill, he arose, stretched himself lazily, and trotted slowly down the road after them.
Soon after Joe’s departure, Ralph and I, baskets in hand, started for the blackberry patch. Ralph’s basket was a little toy candy pail, which he assured Jessie he should bring to her “filled way up on ’e top wiv burries.” The blackberry vines grew along the upper edge of the wheat field. We stopped when fairly above the field to admire the square of yellow grain spread out below us, the bended heads of wheat nodding and swaying in the light breeze, and the tall stalks now and then rippling in soft, undulating waves, as if a gentle wind had moved over a sea of gold. Next to the wheat stood the corn in file after file, the leaves rustling and the tasseled heads held bravely aloft. Green uniformed soldiers of peace and plenty they seemed to me, bidding defiance to want and famine. I might better say that I stopped to admire the grain fields, for Ralph had no æsthetic enthusiasm. His one desire was to reach the “’ackburry” patch and begin stuffing them into that little red mouth of his.
“Tum on, ’Essie,” he said, tugging at my hand impatiently as I lingered. “Me’s so hungry.”
“Yes; it must be half an hour at least since you had breakfast,” I replied unfeelingly, but turning my back on the fields nevertheless and hastening on.
There were, as Joe had said, lots of blackberries, as we found on reaching the spot. I helped Ralph to fill his little bucket and he trudged along at my side, eating steadfastly, but sometimes suspending even that fascinating employment to cling to my skirts and shrink closer to me as we came upon a particularly luxuriant cluster of vines. They were so tall and arched so high above his sunny little head, and the prickly vines extended away and away in vistas that must have seemed so endless to his small stature that it was no wonder if he felt somewhat overawed at times.
We were well up on the hillside, and the fields below us were hidden from our view, when he suddenly announced that it was time to go home.
“Oh, no, Ralph,” I said, “see, sister hasn’t got her basket nearly full yet. Here’s some nice large berries; let me fill your bucket again.”
“No; ’eys sour. Me don’t like ’ackburries any more!”
“I don’t wonder!” I thought, recalling the number of times that I had filled the small bucket, and he had emptied it, but I remained discreetly silent. The little fellow had been humored so much since father’s death—and, perhaps, before—that the moment he was opposed he cried, so now he began to whimper forlornly: “Me ’ants to do home, ’Essie!”
“What for, dear?”
“Me’s s’eepy.”
That appeared very probable, too, but I disliked to return with a half-filled bucket when the berries were so abundant and fairly begging to be picked. Looking around, inquiringly, I saw, under a clump of bushes at some little distance, an inviting carpet of cool green grass. Taking the child in my arms I carried him over and laid him down on the grass, putting my apron under his head for a pillow. “There, Ralph, isn’t that nice? I’ll stay right close by you and you can sleep here in the bushes like the little birds.”
Ralph smiled sleepily, nestling his head closer into the impromptu pillow. “’Ess,” he murmured drowsily, “’is nice; now me is a yittle yay bird.” He meant no reflection on himself in the comparison. His acquaintance with jay birds was limited, but he recognized them when he met them, and considered them very good fellows. The cool breeze fanned him; the leaves rustled, their airy shadows playing over his face, and Ralph was sound asleep almost as soon as his drowsy eyes closed. I watched him for a moment and then hastened back to my chosen corner of the blackberry patch and resumed picking.
Unconsciously, as I worked, I pressed in among the tall vines until at length the recumbent little figure on the grass was quite hidden from sight. That did not really matter, for I was easily within call. No sound coming from that quarter I gradually became more and more absorbed in my task. It would be very nice, I thought, to carry a brimming bucket full of berries down to the house on my return. Once or twice I suspended operations to stand still and listen under the startled impression that I had heard some unusual noise. Convinced each time that there was nothing; that I was mistaken, I continued picking, but I remember that I did glance up once at the cloudless sky, wondering, in an idle way, why I should have heard thunder.
The bucket was quite full and I was backing carefully out from a thick cluster of canes, having a respectful regard for their sharp thorns, when, suddenly, the air was rent with a wild shriek, coming from the direction of the grassy plot where I had left Ralph. Shriek after shriek followed. I had heard those high piercing notes too many times to be left in an instant’s doubt; the shrieks were his. Tearing my way out of the bushes, regardless now of thorns and scratches, I bounded into the open. The scene that presented itself, when I could get a view of what was going on, almost took away my breath. The entire hillside, and the fields below, were literally swarming with cattle. Not the tame domestic herds of peaceful Eastern meadows, but the wild, long-horned, compactly built, active, and peculiarly vicious beasts known in Western parlance as “range stock.”
Ralph had been awakened, none too soon, perhaps by the trampling of hoofs, perhaps by the low bellowing that I had absently attributed to unseen thunder clouds. However it was, he had started up, as he afterward sobbingly expressed it, “To make ’e bad tows do away, so ’ey not hurt ’Essie.”
In pursuance of this design he had advanced toward the foremost of them, shouting and waving his big straw hat in one hand, while attempting to wave my apron in the other. The apron was long and he was short, and the effort to wave it in self-defense resulted in his becoming wound up in it, falling, and rolling bodily down the hillside, in the face of some half dozen wild-eyed steers, who were coming up it. It was then that he screamed, and I appeared on the scene at the very instant that one of the steers, awakening from what appeared to be a momentary trance of surprise, advanced toward the screaming little bundle, bellowing and pawing the ground. The immense black head, crowned with a pair of great horns, curving like a Turkish scimiter, and with a point as keen, was lowered; the savage animal was on the very verge of charging on the helpless child, when my screams drew his attention toward me. He paused, lifted his head, stared at me, and, retreating a step or two, began pawing the ground again, at the same time sending forth a hoarse challenge which seemed to proclaim his readiness to engage me and all my race in a hand to horn conflict if need be. His bit of bovine bravado had given me time to reach Ralph. I caught him up and thrust him behind me. Clutching my skirt tightly, he brought his scared little face into view for an instant to exhort me. “Don’t ’e be ’fraid, Essie, me knock ’e pie out o’ ’at bad tow if her touches ’oo!” Then he shrank back, creeping under the friendly shelter of the blackberry canes until he was, as I afterward found, quite lost to view. It all took place so quickly that I had scarcely time to realize the danger before I was called upon to act. If I had turned to run, in the first instance, the great beast would have been upon me, and, in less time than it takes to tell it, I should have been ground and trampled out of human semblance. As I stood my ground he hesitated, challenged again, and, as others of the herd started toward him, charged.
In spite of the signal service that it rendered me, I cannot conscientiously recommend a twelve-quart tin bucket, filled with blackberries, as a reliable weapon of defense. There would be only about one chance in a hundred, I should think, of its proving useful in just the way that mine did. When the steer charged I was, in fact, quite wild with terror; it was instinct alone that prompted me to attempt a defensive use of any article in my hands, and if that article had been a feather duster I should have made the same use of it. The lowered head and sweeping horns were within six feet of me when I threw blackberries, pail and all, full in the creature’s face, at the same time giving frantic voice to the wild, high-pitched, long-drawn cry that the cow-boys use in rounding up their cattle. The blackberries did not trouble him; what did trouble him was that, by one chance in a hundred, the handle or bail of the bucket caught on the tip of one horn, and, as feeling it and, perhaps, bewildered by the rattle of tinware, the steer threw up his head, the bucket slid down the horn, lodging against the skull, and wholly obscuring one eye. Undaunted by this mishap the steer backed off, lifting his head high, shaking it and bellowing; then suddenly he lowered it, grinding head and horns into the ground, with the evident intention of pulverizing the strange contrivance rattling about his forehead. The attempt resulted in his getting his nose into the trap where only a horn had been before. Maddened with fright he took to his heels, careering down the hillside, and through the fields at top speed, followed by all the herd.
I had retreated, of course, the instant that I had discharged the bucket at my foe, and was cowering under the canes beside Ralph when the finale came.