3
They hadn't more than got there and eaten a solid meal, than Surajah asked me for tools so he could work on a patent mouse-trap he was inventing, and when I came in from work that evening, he was explaining it to Magnus Thorkelson, who had come over to borrow some sugar from me. Magnus was pretending to listen, but he was asking his questions of Rowena, who stood by more than half convinced that Surrager had finally hit upon his great idea--which was a mouse-trap that would always be baited, and with two compartments, one to catch the mice, and one to hold them after they were caught. When they went into the second compartment, they tripped a little lever which opened the door for a new captive, and at the same time baited the trap again.
It seemed as if Magnus could not understand what Surajah said, but that Rowena's speech was quite plain to him. After that, he came over every evening and Rowena taught him to read in McGuffey's Second Reader. I knew that Magnus had read this through time and again; but he said he could learn to speak the words better when Rowena taught him. The fact was, though, that he was teaching her more than she him; but she never had a suspicion of this. That evening Magnus came over and brought his fiddle. Pa Fewkes was quite disappointed when Magnus said he could not play the Money Musk nor Turkey in the Straw, nor the Devil's Dream, but when he went into one of his musical trances and played things with no tune to them but with a great deal of harmony, and some songs that almost made you cry, Rowena sat looking so lost to the world and dreamy that Magnus was moist about the eyes himself. He shook hands with all of us when he went away, so as to get the chance to hold Rowena's hand I guess.
Every day while they were there, Magnus came to see us; but did not act a bit like a boy who came sparking. He did not ask Rowena to sit up with him, though I think she expected him to do so; but he talked with her about Norway, and his folks there, and how lonely it was on his farm, and of his hopes that one day he would be a well-to-do farmer.
After one got used to her poor clothes, and when she got tamed down a little on acquaintance and gave a person a chance to look at her, and especially into her eyes, she was a very pretty girl. She had grown since I had seen her the summer before, and was fuller of figure. Her hair was still of that rich dark brown, just the color of her eyes and eyebrows. She had been a wild girl last summer, but now she was a woman, with spells of dreaming and times when her feelings were easily hurt. She still was ready to flare up and fight at the drop of the hat--because, I suppose, she felt that everybody looked down on her and her family; but to Magnus and me she was always gentle and sometimes I thought she was going to talk confidentially to me.
After she had had one of her lessons one evening she said to me, "I wish I wa'n't so darned infarnal ignorant. I wish I could learn enough to teach school!"
"We're all ignorant here," I said.
"Magnus ain't," said she. "He went to a big school in the old country. He showed me the picture of it, and of his father's house. It's got four stone chimneys."
"I wonder," said I, "if what they learn over there is real learning."
And that ended our confidential talk.
About the time I began wondering how long they were to stay with me, Buck Gowdy came careering over the prairie, driving his own horse, just as I was taking my nooning and was looking at the gun which Rowena had used to drive back the Settlers' Club, and which we had brought along with us. I thought I remembered where I had seen that gun, and when Buck came up I handed it to him.
"Here's your shotgun," I said. "It's the one you shot the geese with back toward the Mississippi."
"Good goose gun," said he. "Thank you for keeping it for me. I see you have caught me out getting acquainted with Iowa customs. If you had needed any help that night, you'd have got it."
"I came pretty near needing it," I said; "and I had help."
"I see you brought your help home with you," he said. "I think I recognize that wagon, don't I?" I nodded. "I wonder if they could come and help me on the farm. I'd like to see them. I need help, inside the house and out."
I left him talking with the whole Fewkes family, except Rowena, who kept herself out of sight somewhere, and went out to the stable to work. Gowdy was talking to them in that low-voiced, smiling way of his, with the little sympathetic tremor in his voice like that in the tone of an organ. He had already told Surajah that his idea for a mouse-trap looked like something the world had been waiting for, and that there might be a fortune in the scheme. Ma Fewkes was looking up at him, as if what he said must be the law and gospel. He had them all hypnotized, or as we called it then, mesmerized--so I thought as I went out of sight of them. After a while, Rowena came around the end of a haystack, and spoke to me.
"Mr. Gowdy wants us all to go to work for him," she said. "He wants pa and the boys to work around the place, and he says he thinks some of Surrager's machines are worth money. He'll give me work in the house."
"It looks like a good chance," said I.
"You know I don't know much about housework," said she; "poor as we've always been."
"You showed me how to make good bread," I replied.
"I could do well for a poor man," said Rowena, looking at me rather sadly. Then she waited quite a while for me to say something.
"Shall I go, Jake?" she asked, looking up into my face.
"It looks like a good chance for all of you," I answered.
"I don't want to," said she, "I couldn't stay here, could I? ... No, of course not!"
So away went the Fewkeses with Buck Gowdy. That is, Rowena went away with him in his buggy, and the rest of the family followed in a day or so with the cross old horse--now refreshed by my hay and grain, and the rest we had given him,--in their rickety one-horse wagon. I remember how Rowena looked back at us, her hair blowing about her face which looked, just a thought, pale and big-eyed, as the Gowdy buggy went off like the wind, with Buck's arm behind the girl to keep her from bouncing out.
This day's work was not to cease in its influence on Iowa affairs for half a century, if ever. State politics, the very government of the commonwealth, the history of Monterey County and of Vandemark Township, were all changed when Buck Gowdy went off over the prairie that day, holding Rowena Fewkes in the buggy seat with that big brawny arm of his. Ma Fewkes seemed delighted to see Mr. Gowdy holding her daughter in the buggy.
"Nobody can tell what great things may come of this!" she cried, as they went out of sight over a knoll.
She never said a truer thing. To be sure, it was only the hiring by a very rich man, as rich men went in those days, of three worthless hands and a hired girl; but it tore the state's affairs in pieces. Whenever I think of it I remember some verses in the Fifth Reader that my children used in school:
"Somewhere yet that atom's force
Moves the light-poised universe[11]."
[11] See Gowdy vs. Buckner, et al, Ia. Rep. Also accounts of relations of the so-called Gowdy Estate litigation to "The Inside of Iowa Politics" by the editor of these MSS.--in press.--G.v.d.M.
It was a great deal more important then, though, that on that afternoon I was arrested for a great many things--assault with intent to commit great bodily injury, assault with intent to kill, just simple assault, unlawful assembly, rioting, and I don't know but treason. Dick McGill, I am sure it was, told the first claim-jumper we visited that I was at the head of the mob, and he had me arrested. I was taken to Monterey Centre by Jim Boyd, the blacksmith, who was deputy sheriff; but he did the fair thing and allowed me to get Magnus Thorkelson to attend to my stock while I was gone.
I think that that passage in the Scriptures which tells us to visit those who are in prison as well as the sick, is a thing that shows the Bible to be an inspired work; but, this belief has come to me through my remembrance of my sufferings when I was arrested. Not that I went to prison. In fact, I do not believe there was anything like a jail nearer than Iowa City or Dubuque; but Jim told me that he understood that I was a terrible ruffian and would have to be looked after very closely. He made me help him about the blacksmith shop, and I learned so much about blacksmithing that I finally set up a nice little forge on the farm and did a good deal of my own work. At last Jim said I was stealing his trade, and when Virginia Royall came down to the post-office the day the mail came in, which was a Friday in those days, and came to the shop to see me, he told her what a fearful criminal I was. She laughed and told Jim to stop his fooling, not knowing what a very serious thing it was for me.
When she asked me to come up to see the Elder and Grandma Thorndyke, and I told her I was a prisoner, Jim paroled me to her, and made her give him a receipt for me which he wrote out on the anvil on the leaf of his pass-book, and had her sign it. He said he was glad to get rid of me for two reasons: one was that I was stealing his trade, and the other that I was likely to bu'st forth at any time and kill some one, especially a claim-jumper if there were any left in the county, which he doubted.
So I went with Virginia and spent the night at the elder's. Grandma Thorndyke took my part, though she made a great many inquiries about Rowena Fewkes; but the elder warned me solemnly against lawlessness, though when we were alone together he made me tell him all about the affair, and seemed to enjoy the more violent parts of it as if it had been a novel; but when he asked me who were in the "mob" I refused to tell him, and he said maybe I was right--that my honor might be involved. Grandma Thorndyke seemed to have entirely got over her fear of having me and Virginia together, and let us talk alone as much as we pleased.
I told them about the quantity of wild strawberries I had out in Vandemark's Folly, and when Virginia asked the sheriff if the elder and his wife and herself might go out there with me for a strawberry-and-cream feast, he said his duty made it incumbent upon him to insist that he and his wife go along, and that they would furnish the sugar if I would pony up the cream--of which I had a plenty. So we had quite a banquet out on the farm. Once in a while I would forget about the assaults and the treason and be quite jolly--and then it would all come back upon me, and I would break out in a cold sweat. Out of this grew the first strawberry and cream festival ever held in any church in Monterey Centre, the fruit being furnished, according to the next issue of the Journal "by the malefactors confined in the county Bastille"--in other words by me.