The Sherrods

by George Barr McCutcheon

Near the middle of his second year at college the crash came and the half-dazed boy hurried home. His father was dead and the whole country was telling the stories of his great financial losses. Every dollar, every foot of land had been swept away by reverses arising from investments in Arizona mines. Captain James Van went down in the same disaster. When word reached his home of the suicide of John Sherrod, he was on his way to the barn with a pistol hidden over his heart. Horror and the awakening of courage made him cast the pistol aside and turn to face the blow as a brave man should, with his wife and child behind his back.

Jud and Justine could not at first, and did not for many days, realize the force of the blow. One had lost father as well as home; the other had lost home and had sunk to a depth of poverty that grew more and more appalling as her young mind began to understand. The boy, when he finally grasped the situation, bared his arms and set forth to support himself and his mother by hard work. The shock of the suicide was too great for Mrs. Sherrod. Her reason fled soon after her husband was laid in the grave, but it was a year before death took her to him. During that last year of life she lived in the old place, a helpless invalid, mentally and physically, although the property belonged to another. David Strong held a mortgage on the home place, but he did not foreclose it until she was gone.

For a year Jud cared for his mother, and worked in the fields with David Strong's men at wages of twelve dollars a month. Half of the year's crop Strong gave to the widow of John Sherrod, although not a penny's worth of it was hers by right. After her death Strong and his family moved into the big old house, and Jud Sherrod lived in a room in what had been his home.

Justine Van's grandmother, in her will, left to the girl a thirty-acre piece of ground, half timber, half cultivated, about a mile from the white house in which the beneficiary was born and which was swallowed up by the great disaster. Bereft of every penny, James Van took his wife and daughter to the miserable little cottage. The girl shouldered as much of the burden of poverty as her young and tender shoulders could carry. She begged for an appointment as teacher in the humble schoolhouse where her a-b-abs had been learned, and for two years and a half before her marriage she had taught the little flock of boys and girls. Especially necessary did this means of earning a livelihood become when, two years after the failure, her father died. Then Mrs. Van followed him, and Justine, not nineteen, was face to face with the world, a trembling, guileless child.

Her wages at the schoolhouse were twenty-five dollars a month, for six months in a year, and the yield of grain from her poorly tilled farm was barely enough to pay the taxes and the help hire. Old Jim Hardesty farmed the place for her, and he robbed her. For six months after the mother's death she lived alone in the cottage, and then the neighbors finally taking the matter in hand and insisting that she be provided with a companion, her old nurse, Mrs. Crane, came to the place. She was shrewd from years of adversity and persuaded Justine to send Jim Hardesty packing—and that was the hardest duty Justine had ever had to meet.

The discouraged boy, over on David Strong's place, worn thin with hard work and sickness, deprived of every chance, as he thought, to realize his ambitions, found in the girl a sympathetic comrade. Of all the people in his world she was the only one who understood his desires, and could, in a way, share with him the despair that made life as he lived it seem like a narrow cell from which he could look longingly with no hope of escape. Tired and sore from misfortune, these two simple, loving natures turned to each other. His first trembling kiss upon her surprised, parted lips was a treasure that never left her memory. The bloom came to her cheeks, lightness touched her flagging heart, happiness shone through the gloom, and the whole countryside marveled at her growing beauty. This slim, budding maid of the meadow and wood was as fair a bit as nature ever perfected. The sweetness and purity of womanhood undefiled dwelt in her body and soul. No taint of worldliness had blighted her. She was a pure, simple, country girl, ignorant of wile, sinless and trustful.

Justine was like her father, fair faced and straight of form. Her hair was long and reddish-brown, her brow was broad and full, her eyes big and brown and soft with love, her cheeks smooth and clear. A trifle above the medium height, straight and strong, of slender mold, she was as graceful as a gazelle. Health seemed to glow in the atmosphere about her.

With Jud, too, the realization of love and the feeling that there was something to live for, brought a change. His stooping shoulders straightened, his eyes brightened, his steps became springy. He whistled and sang at his work, took an interest in life, and presently even resumed his drawing. The country folk winked knowingly. The two were constantly together when opportunity afforded, so it soon became common report that he was her "feller, fer sure," and she was his "girl."

One evening, as they sat in the dusk down by the creek, which ran through her bit of pasture land, Jud drew his mother's plain gold ring from his little finger and slipped it upon Justine's third. They were betrothed.

Never were such sweethearts as Jud and Justine. They were lovers, friends, comrades. Her sweet, serious face took a new life, new color at his approach, her dreamy eyes grew softer and more wistful, her low voice more musical. Her soul was his, her life belonged to him, her heart beat only for him. Jud's famished hopes of something beyond the farm found fresh encouragement in her simple, wondering praise. She was his critic, his unconscious mentor. Beneath her untrained eye he sketched as he never sketched before. Looking over his shoulder as he lay stretched upon the grass, she marveled at the skill with which his pencil transferred the world about them to the dearly bought drawing pads, and her enthusiastic little cries of delight were tributes that brought confidence to the heart of the artist.