While eating our lunch that day, a covey of half-grown quail came out from between the rows at the end of a cornfield. Myrtle said they were so cute that it was a shame to kill them. “And if you shoot any more of them,” she declared, “I will not cook them for you.” I said that I guessed I could cook them myself—that I had roasted them suspended on a stick over a fire in the woods.
“Well,” she said, “I’ll cook them, of course—but I promise you that I will never eat any more of them.” I tried her out on six birds. She cooked them, of course—and kept her promise. And then, in due time, I also thought they were too cute to be killed. But I continued carrying feed to the quail, in snowy times.
While Wolfley said I was a good squirrel hunter, quail was really my game. I trapped them in my younger days, and shot them when old enough to be trusted with a gun. I “potted” them. In the old days quail sold for 5-cents each and no one would think of wasting a charge of ammunition on a single bird, especially while on the wing; though I did once shoot a lone quail sitting on top my figure-four cornstalk trap, under which were twenty live birds. We made our traps then with any old thing we could pick up and bind together. The twenty trapped quail had followed a tramped out path in deep snow, baited with a thin scattering of shelled corn, with a more generous supply of kernels under the trap—thus to engage the lead birds while the others were coming up, lest an impatient bird might go after the nubbin on the treadle and spring the trap too soon. I think trapping and “potting” were legal then. I winged them in later years, same as other sportsmen were wont to do.
One time while coming home from the farm on a Sunday morning about eleven o’clock, three teen-age boys caught up with me. They said they were from Fresno, California. I questioned them a little about Fresno, and decided they were telling me the truth. Also, I knew they were not professional tramps—and that they were hungry. I took them to the Wetmore hotel, and told Bill Cordon to give them their dinners, fill them up with double orders. One of the boys had about worn out his shoes—the sole of the left shoe was dragging, making it hard for the boy to keep up with his pals. While they were waiting in the hotel for the dinner call, I went to my home and hunted up a pair of shoes—almost new shoes, which pinched my feet—and took them, with a pair of clean socks, to the little fellow, and started them on their way back to Fresno, walking of course. On parting, the boy wearing my shoes, asked me why had I taken so much interest in them? I told them that I might be tramping myself someday, maybe even get as far away from home as Fresno, and in that event I hoped to meet them all again. This is what I told the boys. For the correct answer—it is enough to know that my people live in Fresno. One of the older boys said, “Never doubt, we’ll be there—if we ever do get back home.” And though I have been in Fresno a number of times since, I never had the pleasure of meeting any of them. I lost their names.
Now—the $64 question!
A real honest-to-goodness professional tramp had hurriedly passed me by before the boys had caught up with me. I had a couple pork sandwiches in my pocket. My first thought was to offer them to this fellow—then thought that maybe he was not a tramp. A tractor had been running on a farm east of my place, and this fellow was just about smeary enough to have been the driver. I let him pass—and later saw him go into the depot. The wife and I were preparing to eat the sandwiches which were on the table still wrapped in oil paper. Then, this professional tramp showed up at our kitchen door, asking for a handout. Taking the two wrapped sandwiches off the table, I said, “Here you are, my man—I’ve been saving them for you.” I told him that had he not passed me by in such hurry on the railroad tracks, that I would have offered them to him then. He said he had been sick, and was hurrying to get in out of the weather. It had been “spitting” snow—which, I imagine, had caused my dinner guests at the hotel to wonder why did they leave their homes in sunny California. My home was two blocks away from the depot—and this was the tramp’s first call. Now—had this fellow “read my number” in passing on the railroad track? Or, did he read the sign at my home? It was said in the old days that tramps had a way of marking the favorable houses. My wife never let an applicant go away without something, little or much, to allay his hunger.
I shall drop back a few years now and expand a bit on the trials and tribulations of my wife’s family—before she was my wife, understand. Married at the age of sixteen, and left a widow at the age of thirty-three, with little more than the home and a houseful of kids—all girls, at that — Kate Mercer found herself in a highly discouraging predicament. Deprived of the bread-winner, the almost new five-room house on an acre of ground down by the creek, on the “wrong side of the tracks,” could now hardly be called a home. It had been ideally situated for the husband and father, who had been section foreman here for eight years.
There was no county welfare aid here then, as there is now. There was, however, in practice at that time the “good neighbor helping hand.” It consisted of raising a temporary fund by the circulation of a subscription paper. But when such a course was proposed by sympathetic neighbors, Mrs. Mercer, strongly backed up by her oldest daughter, declined to permit that. They would try somehow to get along without charity. They would go out and work. Thus, an up-hill drag was in store for them.
Myrtle finished her schooling in May—though she said that with the readjustment problem confronting the family, and consequent worries, she feared she had made a rather poor job of it. Then she went out to work as domestic, or maid—just plain “hired girl” it was termed then. She worked two weeks in the home of the aristocratic Augusta Ann DeForest during the illness of Miss Mary Randall, the regular long-time maid. Myrtle said she could not have wished for a more congenial place to work. She dined with the family, notwithstanding the traditional rumors which said that such breaches of table etiquette were not tolerated in that home. And she said Mr. Henry, whom gossip claimed never even got to see the other cooks, was especially considerate, and told her not to try to overdo. That would be Mr. Henry, all right.
Myrtle worked for the eccentric Mrs. Draper, who was the mother-in-law of Charley DeForest. And she worked for Mrs. R. A. DeForest—and as chambermaid at the Wetmore hotel while her mother was the cook there. Of all her domestic “positions” Myrtle said she felt more at ease, and liked best to work for Linnie (Mrs. R. A.) DeForest. Linnie was the sister of the gracious Alice McVay, mentioned in another article. And Linnie was the mother of Harold DeForest, now living on a farm two miles northeast of Wetmore.