3
Stud Brailsford and Timothy Halleck had been instrumental in getting Early Ann her small inheritance. Now Stud wondered whether he had been wise. Not that Early Ann had been spoiled by her riches. She was still the same rosy-cheeked, hardworking, saucy spitfire she had always been. She was still devoted to Sarah, Peter, Gus and Stud, and she announced quite passionately that she intended to live with the Brailsfords and do their work until the day she died. But now, added to all the other barriers which kept Stud from the girl, there was the fact that she was independently wealthy.
Three hundred dollars was not to be sneezed at in 1913. True, automobiles and mushroom-brimmed velvet hats smothered in ostrich plumes were rather expensive, but the lisle stockings worn by all the virtuous women of the period were priced at six pairs for a dollar; high buttoned shoes usually described as classy, nobby, or natty sold for two dollars a pair; and no woman dreamed of squandering more than fifty-nine cents on a pair of drawers, a corset cover, or a princess slip.
Free, white, eighteen, full of mustard and vinegar, and with three hundred dollars in the bank, the Brailsfords' hired girl was distinctly a person to be reckoned with. Her new clothes from Sears Roebuck were the talk of the party line.
And now, to increase Stud's worries, Early Ann was insisting on a two weeks' trip to Chicago. It was unheard of that a girl should make such an excursion unchaperoned.
It took less than six hours on the C., M. & St. P. to reach the sinful, brightly lighted metropolis on Lake Michigan; nevertheless Chicago was fifty years and a half a world from the muddy village of Brailsford Junction.
Chicago might rag; make fortunes in wheat, hogs, and steel; discuss atheism, Freud, and the early H. L. Mencken. But Brailsford Junction still attended barn dances and revival meetings. It lived by the laws of Solomon and Moses only slightly conditioned by the paganism of Omar and the invasion of the Ford.
These Junctionites lived by the crude practical joke, the rough and ready generosity of their pioneer grandparents, by gossip and by Jesus. They lived in a world of lamp light and lantern light, of full corn cribs and Sunday School picnics. Chicago was almost as remote as Mars.
Even Stud would have made the journey to Chicago with misgivings; and for an unmarried young woman to make such a trip was unthinkable. They all pleaded with her to be sensible.
"I'd never forgive myself," said Sarah. "It's up to me to keep you safe from harm. I'd worry myself sick every day you were gone."
"Never heard of a girl going off to Chicago alone," said Stud. "It ain't right."
"It's a big, wicked city," said Gus, knowingly. "I went to Chicago once for the Columbian Exposition. And by golly, the way little Egypt shook her ..."
"Sh-h-h," said Sarah.
"Well, I'm going," said Early Ann, "and that's that. But, Mrs. Brailsford, you mustn't worry for a minute. I grew up as wild as a chipmunk and I guess I can take care of myself."
"But why do you want to go?" Stud asked the bright-eyed girl, whose ripe young breasts under her middy rose and fell with her breathing, and whose well-turned ankles under her sailor skirt were a treat to the eye.
"I've been wanting all my life to see Chicago," Early Ann said. "I never seen a tall building, or rich ladies riding in limousines, or the silver dollars in the Palmer House floor. I never seen Irene Castle dance, or heard Grand Opera, or had people wait on me like they do in a hotel."
"Yes, Early Ann, I know, I know," said Sarah, earnestly. "You got a right to have one good time like that in your life. Everybody has got a right to be happy just once."
"But I won't budge out of this house if you ain't well enough yet," said Early Ann. "You've only been up and around for six days, Mrs. Brailsford."
"No, no, Early Ann. You mustn't stay on my account. I'm fit as a fiddle. It's only for your own good I want you to stay."
"Then I'm going tomorrow on the ten o'clock train," said Early Ann. She began to pack in the parlor while the family showered advice and ran errands.
Sarah kissed her goodby tearfully. Gus was suspiciously misty-eyed as he carried her telescope suitcase out to the Ford, and Stud drove her recklessly to the station where he insisted on paying for her round-trip ticket and for a chair on the parlor car—a luxury he had never allowed himself.
"You hang on to your money, young lady," he said. "And don't make up to any city fellows."
He stood watching the train until it had passed out of sight around the curve, then leaping into his Ford roared back to the farm where he began two weeks of mad labor. He worked on the fences, set posts, strung shining lines of new barbed wire, pruned several trees and filled a small ravine with boulders. He trapped a weasel that had been getting his chickens, put barrels around his young fruit trees to save them from the rabbits. He sent for a new stump-puller, seductively described in the mail order catalogue, hoping to clean out the brush lot in the slack months which were ahead.
One morning he noticed that the barns needed painting. He called in Mack Curren, who had finally given up hope of being a great portrait painter. Mack and his crew gave the buildings a new red coat visible for miles.
"Might as well be fancy and add white trimmings," Stud told the willing Mr. Curren.
Stud himself was hard at work on the new silo. He drove himself happily these days, and he drove Gus who was not so happy concerning his employer's sudden desire to move the world, to paint the farm from end to end, and to add a wing to the milk house.
Stud remembered to bring in frosty asters and goldenrod to Sarah. He told her that what she needed was a wild duck dinner, and he fixed himself a blind beside the lake and waited, watching his decoys.
The shotgun shells were heavy and cool in his hand. The long, clean barrels of his gun shone like blue fire when he looked through them at the sun. Not a speck of dust! Every part oiled and working like a seventeen-jewel watch. The carved walnut stock was as smooth as satin to his fingers, and the gun balanced perfectly as he threw it to his shoulder.
He had carved the decoys himself from white pine and had painted the intricate markings from memory. He knew the glossy green head and bold coloration of the drake mallard, as well as the more modest hues of his mate. He was familiar to the last tail feather with the tones and patterns which distinguish canvasback, redhead, bluebill, widgeon, goldeneye, and black mallard. He could imitate the quack of a duck or the honk of a Canadian goose almost too well for his own safety.
Bright water bugs skimmed the quietly heaving surface of the lake. A muskrat with reeds in his mouth, his nose barely above the water, his tail trailing for a rudder, swam past the blind. Stud's live decoys anchored in the shallow water, preened, tipped for food, gossiped of the days when they themselves were free to skim southward ahead of the storms, bound for southern bayous.
Stud lay back looking up at the immensity of sky, never more deeply blue, he thought, than above Wisconsin in the autumn. He watched a flight of coots but let them pass; followed a wood duck with his gun but did not shoot. A hell-diver was playing among his decoys, and a couple of green-winged teal went by just out of gunshot, their wings whirring like toy windmills in a cyclone.
"Nothing but a ruddy can outfly them," Stud observed, "and the ruddies fly so darned fast it's a wonder they don't catch fire."
Toward sunset the flight began in earnest, and for about ten minutes Stud banged away like the Federal gunboats before Vicksburg. He shot his bag limit without crippling a bird, waded out in hip boots to bring them ashore, and went singing home, loaded down with rice-fattened mallards.
One morning he crossed the field of wheat stubble stretching yellow and frosty on either hand and went into the brown woods to choose his trees for winter cutting. It would be good to swing an axe again, to take big white chips out of a tree, to hear it crash to the ground and settle with a sigh. It would be good to get on one end of a cross-cut saw again, to make Gus cry out for mercy as they sliced through three feet of oak. His big muscles yearned for the sixteen pound mall he used for driving wedges, a sledge which made the average man pant like a one-cylinder gas engine, but which was a plaything for Stud.
At night he came in tired, soaked with sweat, but almost happy. Sarah noticed and was glad.
Fall, with the red of sumac and of hard maple, the leathery brown of hickory leaves, and the pale yellow of elm was upon the land. The leaves drifted in the brisk winds, and the wind sighed through the pines of the front yard. The marshes turned to brown and almost overnight the muskrat houses sprang up in rough brown piles along the deeper channels through the grass. The orchard was a wilderness of ripening, fragrant fruit, yellow, scarlet and deep red. The house was banked about with shocks of corn. Five cords of wood were already sawed and split, and more would come out of the woods as the days grew colder.
Gus came running in from the mail box one morning with a postcard from Early Ann. It had a picture of a huge hotel where Early Ann was staying and in a large, girlish hand:
"Having a good time. Wish you were here!"