The plans cheered them. They would have plenty of real coffee now, instead of tea from parched acorns and corn, and a new coffee grinder that would do away with the labor of pounding the grains in a sack with a hammer. Their old coffee mill was absolutely worn out. They would get sacks of flour and have real flour bread. “You remember how Tim always likes flour gravy,� Mrs. Cude said. She would have enough calico for three new dresses and a sunbonnet, besides a tablecloth; he would have new boots, new hat and breeches, and percale for sewing into shirts. “I’ll get some blue for Tim,� Mrs. Cude said. There would be a new plow for the cornpatch and lumber for a gallery to the frame house, so hot in the summer.
It took them five or six days to get down to Powderhorn, and then two days to buy everything and load the wagon. On the way back Mrs. Cude kept wishing they’d make better time, but the four old tortoise-stepping oxen never moved a foot faster. “Perhaps Tim came home today,� Mrs. Cude would say at the evening camp. “I dreamed last night that he came just after dark,� she’d say over the morning campfire, always burning long before daybreak. In all the dragging months, months adding themselves into years, no day had dawned, no night had fallen, that she had not made some little extra preparation for her boy’s coming home. In all the period of waiting, this was the first time she had not been there to welcome him. As she approached the waiting place now, the hopes of more than fourteen absent days and of more than fourteen absent nights were all accumulated into one hope. Perhaps Tim had come. Mr. Cude shared the hope, too, but it hurt him to see “mama disappointed,� and he never encouraged day-dreams.
At last they were only six miles from home. Christmas was only three days away. Then the oxen stalled in a mudhole at the crossing on La Parra Creek. For an hour Mr. Cude struggled and worried with them, trying to make them make the supreme pull. Mrs. Cude threw all her strength on the spoke of one wheel. Finally Mr. Cude began the weary business of unloading some of the freight and carrying it on his back out of the creek.
Then suddenly they were aware of a man, dismounted from the horse beside him, standing on the bank just ahead. Being down in the creek, they could not have seen his approach. His frame, though lank, was well filled out, his face all bearded, his clothes nondescript. In his posture was something of the soldier. Nearly all Southern men had, in those days, been soldiers. For a second he seemed to be holding something back; then he gave a hearty greeting that was cordially responded to.
“Those look like mighty good oxen,� the young man said, coming down, as any stranger in that country at that time would come to help anybody in a tight.
“They are good oxen, but they won’t pull this wagon out now,� Mr. Cude answered. “I guess they’re getting old like us. We been working them since before the war.�
The stranger had moved around so that he was very near the wheel oxen, which he faced, instead of the driver and his wife. His hand was on Brindle’s head, between the long rough horns, and the old ox, whose countenance was the same whether in a bog hole or a patch of spring tallow weed, licked out his tongue.
“I believe I can make these old boys haul the wagon out,� the man said.
“They wouldn’t do any better for a stranger than for their master,� Mr. Cude answered.
“There’s only one person who could get them to pull,� added Mrs. Cude. “That’s our boy who went to the war.�