2
Virginia Royall came to the door, as I sort of suspected she might. At first she started back as if she hardly knew me. Maybe she didn't; for Magnus Thorkelson had got me to shaving, and with all that gosling's down off my face, I suppose I looked older and more man-like than before. So she took a long look at me, and then ran to me and took both my hands in hers and pressed them--pressed them so that I remembered it always.
"Why, Teunis," she cried, "is it you? I thought I was never going to see you again!"
"Yes," I said, "it's me--it's me. I came--" and then I stopped, bogged down.
"You came to see me," she said, "and I think you've waited long enough. Only three friends in the world, you, and Mrs. Thorndyke, and Mr. Thorndyke--and you off there on the prairie all these weeks and never came to see me--or us! Tell me about the farm, and the cows, and the new house--I've heard of it--and your foreigner friend, and all about it. Have you any little calves?"
I was able to report that Spot, the heifer that we had such a time driving, had a little calf that was going to look just like its mother; and then I described to her the section of land--all but a little of it down in Hell Slew; and how I hoped to buy a piece across the line so as to have a real farm. Pretty soon we were talking just as we used to talk back there east of Waterloo.
"I came to see you and Elder Thorndyke and his wife," I said, "because I'm going back to Dubuque to get a load of freight, and I thought I might bring something for you."
"Oh," said she, "take me with you, Teunis, take me with you!"
"Could you go?" I asked, my heart in my mouth.
"No, oh, no!" she said. "There's nobody in Kentucky for me to go to; and I haven't any money to pay my way with anyhow. I am alone in the world, Teunis, except for you and my new father and mother--and I'm afraid they are pretty poor, Teunis, to feed and clothe a big girl like me!"
"How much money would it take?" I asked. "I guess I could raise it for you, Virginia."
"You're a nice boy, Teunis," she said, with tears in her eyes, "and I know how well you like money, too; but there's nobody left there. I'm very lonely--but I'm as well off here as anywhere. I'd just like to go with you, though, for when I'm with you I feel so--so safe."
"Safe?" said I. "Why aren't you safe here? Is any one threatening you? Has Buckner Gowdy been around here? Just tell me if he bothers you, and I'll--I'll--"
"Well," said she, "he came here and claimed me from Mr. Thorndyke. He said I was an infant--what do you think of that?--an infant--in law; and that he is my guardian. And a lawyer named Creede, came and talked about his right, not he said by consanguinity, but affinity, whatever that is--"
"I know Mr. Creede," said I. "He rode with me for two or three days. I don't believe he'll wrong any one."
"Mrs. Thorndyke told them to try their affinity plan if they dared, and she'd show them that they couldn't drag a poor orphan away from her friends against her will. And I hung to her, and I cried, and said I'd kill myself before I'd go with him; and that man"--meaning Gowdy--"tried to talk sweet and affectionate and brotherly to me, and I hid my face in Mrs. Thorndyke's bosom--and Mr. Creede looked as if he were sick of his case, and told that man that he would like further consultation with him before proceeding further--and they went away. But every time I see that man he acts as if he wanted to talk with me, and smiles at me--but I won't look at him. Oh, why can't they all be good like you, Teunis?"
Then she told me that I looked a lot better when I shaved--at which I blushed like everything, and this seemed to tickle her very much. Then she asked if I wasn't surprised when she called me Teunis. She had thought a good deal over it, she said, and she couldn't, couldn't like the name of Jacob, or Jake; but Teunis was a quality name. Didn't I think I'd like it if I changed my way of writing my name to J. Teunis Vandemark?
"I like to have you call me Teunis," I said; "but I wouldn't like to have any one else do it. I like to have you have a name to call me by that nobody else uses."
"That's a very gallant speech," she said, blushing--and I vow, I didn't know what gallant meant, and was a little flustered for fear her blushes were called out by something shady.
"Besides," I said, "I have always heard that nobody but a dandy ever parts his name or his hair in the middle!"
"Rubbish!" said she. "My father's name was A. Fletcher Royall, and he was a big strong man, every inch of him. I reckon, though, that the customs are different in the North. Then you won't take me with you, and go back by way of our grove, and--"
And just then Elder Thorndyke came in, and we wished that Mrs. Thorndyke would come to tell what I should bring from Dubuque. He told me in the meantime, about his plans for building a church, and how he was teaching Virginia, so that she could be a teacher herself when she was old enough.
"We'll be filling this country with schools, soon," he said, "and they'll want nice teachers like Virginia."
"Won't that be fine?" asked Virginia. "I just love children. I play with dolls now--a little. And then I can do something to repay my new father and mother for all they are doing for me. And you must come to church, Teunis."
"Virginia says," said the elder, "that you have a good voice. I wish you'd come and help out with the singing."
"Oh, I can't sing," I demurred; "but I'd like to come. I will come, when I get back."
"Yes, you can sing," said Virginia. "Here's a song he taught me back on the prairie:
"'Down the river, O down the river, O down the river we go-o-o;
Down the river, O down the river, O down the Ohio-o-o!
"'The river was up, the channel was deep, the wind was steady and strong,
The waves they dashed from shore to shore as we went sailing along--
"'Down the river, O down the river, O down the river we go-o-o;
Down the river, O down the river, O down the Ohio-o-o!'"
"I think you learned a good deal--for one day," said Mrs. Thorndyke, coming in. "How do you do, Jacob? I'm glad to see you."
Thus she again put forth her theory that Virginia and I had been together only one day. It is what N.V. Creede called, when I told him of it years afterward, "a legal fiction which for purposes of pleading was incontrovertible."
The river of immigration was still flowing west over the Ridge Road, quite as strong as earlier in the season, and swollen by the stream of traffic setting to and from the settlements for freight. People I met told me that the railroad was building into Dubuque--or at least to the river at Dunlieth. I met loads of lumber which were going out for Buck Gowdy's big house away out in the middle of his great estate; and other loads for Lithopolis, where Judge Stone was making his struggle to build up a rival to Monterey Centre. I reached Dubuque on the seventeenth of July, and put up at a tavern down near the river, where they had room for my stock; and learned that the next day the first train would arrive at Dunlieth, and there was to be a great celebration.
It was the greatest day Dubuque had ever seen, they told me, with cannon fired from the bluff at sunrise, a long parade, much speech-making, and a lot of wild drunkenness. The boatmen from the river boats started in to lick every railroad man they met, and as far as I could see, did so in ninety per cent. of the cases; but in the midst of a fight in which all my canal experiences were in a fair way to be outdone, a woman came into the crowd leading four little crying children. She asked our attention while she explained that their father had had his hand blown off when the salute was fired in the morning, and asked us if we felt like giving something to him to enable him to keep a roof over these little ones. The fight stopped, and we all threw money on the ground in the ring.
There were bridges connecting the main island with the business part of the city, and lines of hacks and carts running from the main part of the town to deep water. There were from four to six boats a day on the river. Lead was the main item of freight, although the first tricklings of the great flood of Iowa and Illinois wheat were beginning to run the metal a close second. To show what an event it was, I need only say that there were delegates at the celebration from as far east as Cleveland; and folks said that a ferry was to be built to bring the railway trains into Dubuque. And the best of all these dreams was, that they came true; and we were before many years freed of the great burden of coming so far to market.
During the next winter the word came to us that the railroad--another one--had crept as far out into the state as Iowa City, and when the freighting season of 1856 opened up, we swung off to the railhead there. Soon, however, the road was at Manchester, then at Waterloo, then at Cedar Falls, and before many years the Iowa Central came up from the south clear to Mason City, and the days of long-distance freighting were over for most of the state; which is now better provided with railways, I suppose, than any other agricultural region in the world.
I couldn't then foresee any such thing, however. They talk of the far-sighted pioneers; but as far as I was concerned I didn't know B from a bull's foot in this business of the progress of the country. I whoa-hawed and gee-upped my way back to Monterey Centre, thinking how great a disadvantage it would be always to have to wagon it back and forth to the river--with the building of the railway into Dunlieth that year right before my face and eyes.